The Caryatids (38 page)

A chill shot through Sonja. "That's what
we
were trained for. We were also taught that we would take over the world. We would support the world with ubiquitous computing." Lionel was unsurprised by this story; it was certainly old news to him. "Every survivalist project has its own vogue. Survival projects are always faddish and fanatical. To 'take over the world'? That must be the natural killer application for a secret clone army . . . All those clone projects were survivalist projects. They all failed, all of them. Because they lacked transparency."

Lionel lifted his elegant brows and spoke with great conviction. "Rad-ical projects need
widespread
distributed oversight,
with peer review and a loyal opposition to test them. They have to be open and testable. Oth-erwise, you've just got this desperate little closed bubble. And of course that tends to sour very fast."

"Your brother is preparing you for politics?"

"I'm an actor." Lionel shrugged. "An actor from California. So, yes, of course I'm preparing for politics." Lionel shifted himself in the robot's bucket, so he could study the Badaulet more closely. "Did you really marry that guy, Sonja?"

"Yes."

"I can sure see why! He's a
fantastic character,
isn't he? Look at the way he moves his elbows when he rides. Look at his
feet."
Lionel nar-rowed his eyes, shifted himself, muttered under his breath. He was mimicking the Badaulet. Copying his movements and mannerisms. There was something truly horrible about that.

It was well after noon when they arrived at the nomad camp of the grass people, a place much as she had first imagined it. There was noth-ing to mark this camp as a menacing terrorist base, although this was what it was. To the naked eye, the terror camp was a few shabby felt tents and a modest group of livestock.

From the desert silence came a steady babble of happy voices, for the people gathered within this camp rarely met one another.

The largest tent in the camp was full of rambunctious children. The children were shrieking with glee. They were supposed to be attending a school of some kind, but the excitement of their clan reunion was proving too much for them. Their teachers—young women—were un-able to get the children to concentrate on the classroom work at hand, which was building toy airplanes. Many toy airplanes. The kind of toy airplanes that could be glued together by a ten-year-old child. Sonja's pack robot excited alarm in the camp. People rushed to see it, guns in hand. The locals looked like any group of central Asian refugees, except that they had many more children and they looked much better fed. Their parents had probably been urbanites a genera-tion ago: people who went to Ulaanbaatar to see the beauty contests and drink the Coca-Cola.

The marauders stared at her, for camp people always stared at the Angel of Harbin. Some touched her white robes with wondering fin-gers.

In the hubbub, the Badaulet vanished.

John Montgomery Montalban appeared from the patchworked flap of a tent. Much like his brother, John also had a masked escort . . . his bodyguard, interpreter, tour guide—or the armed spy who was holding him hostage. Another of the clones.

So far, she had seen two clones among thirty-five. Sonja had vague hopes of killing all of the clones, but thirty-five? Thirty-five highly trained zealots, walking the Earth, scattered far across a desert? That was enough to found a civilization.

"I'm glad to see you, Sonja. Welcome."

Sonja climbed out of the robot and ignored his offered hand.

John Montalban pursued her, his dignified face the picture of loving concern. He still loved her. Sonja knew that he still loved her. He really did love her: that was the darkest weapon in his arsenal, and it brought on her a bondage like no other. "Sonja, I have some bad news for you. Please brace yourself for this."

"What now?"

"Your mother is dead."

Sonja looked him in the eye. John Montalban was telling her the truth. He never lied to her.

"She died in orbit two days ago," Montalban told her. "Everyone in the Shanghai Cooperative Orbiting Platform was killed by a solar flare. In my family's space station, my own grandmother was killed. It was a natural disaster."

"I am sorry about your grandmother," Sonja told him, and then her voice rose to a shriek. "This is
the
happiest day of my life!
What
luck!
God loves me! She's dead, John? She's truly dead? She's
dead,
dead, dead?"

"Yes. Your mother is dead."

"You're
sure
she's dead? You saw her body? It's not another trick?"

"I saw a video of the body. A few systems on that space station are still operational. Most of it was stripped by that solar blast. That was a world disaster, Sonja. Communications are scrambled across the Earth . . . power outages, blackouts on every continent—that was the worst solar storm in recorded history. It was bad and it came out of nowhere. So this is not your happy day, Sonja. This has been a very grim and ominous couple of days for the human race."

"The human race? Ha ha ha, that counts me out!" said Sonja, and she was unable to restrain the bubble of pure, euphoric joy that rose within her. Happiness lit the core of her being. She began to dance in place. She wanted to scream the glorious news until the sky rang.

Realizing that nobody would stop her, Sonja tilted her head back, threw put both her arms, and howled. She howled with a heartfelt pas-sion.

When Sonja opened her eyes, wetly streaming tears of joy, she could see from the looks on the grimy faces of the nomads that she still had her old magic. They were awestruck. Ten minutes alone with her as an inspired healer, and they would have done anything that she said.

"You don't really feel that way," John told her mildly. That was the worst thing about knowing John Montalban: that he was always telling her about her own true feelings. Worse yet, he was generally right.

"Djordje told the others about your mother's death," he said. "They're all in shock."

"I'm not shocked! I feel fantastic! I'm so happy. I want to dance!"

"Stop convulsing, Sonja. That first emotional reaction doesn't last," he told her. He put his arm on her protectively, and ushered her inside the tent.

The inside of the woolly ger tent was brisk and garish: there were scat-tered carpets, plastic ammunition crates, gleaming aluminum stewpots, and grass-chopping equipment. The place reeked of new-mown hay.

"I felt that I was just getting to know your mother," said John. "Her twisted motivations were the key to the whole Mihajlovic enterprise, but . . . no extent of her paranoia could protect her from a fate like
that.
There wasn't a cop, spy, general, or lawyer on Earth who could dig Yelisaveta out of her flying bolt-hole-and yet she was dead in ten min-utes. Killed by space weather. I'd call that cosmic retribution, if not for the forty other international crewmen up there. Those poor bastards had maybe six minutes'

warning of that catastrophe, and not one damn thing they could do to save themselves. Not one damn thing except to watch the wave roll in and fry them. I hate to think about a death scene like that." Sonja remembered her taikonaut training. "Everyone is dead in the space station? All of them? They had a radiation shelter."

John shook his head. "For a blast of
that size?
That flare was ten times bigger than planet Earth!"

"The sun blew up? Truly?" That was a difficult matter to grasp.

"The sun is a star, Sonja. Stars are unstable by nature. Some stars are violently unstable." Lionel entered the tent and noticed his brother's mournful look. His face fell in instant sympathy. "My grandmother was a very fine lady," Li-onel offered, voice low. "She was the kind of great lady that a woman can become, when she's been poor, and hungry, and homeless, and a nobody." John beamed at his younger brother. He was proud to see his fellow aristocrat commiserating with the little people.

Now the fuller extent of the strategic situation dawned on Sonja. The event that had happened changed everything. "You say that the Chinese space station is
empty?
Nothing in it but corpses?"

"Corpses," John agreed. "The Chinese station is one more large, failed, overextended technical megaproject. Although I had nothing to do with stopping this one myself." Lionel smirked. "I think you're selling yourself a little short there, John." Montalban shot his brother a warning glance.

"What?" Sonja shouted. "What is it this time, what have you done? What are you doing, John? What, what?"

"Not so loudly, please," said Montalban.

A busy nomad council of war was convening inside the ger. Outrid-ers from a distant cell had arrived. The terrorists were briefing each other, issuing orders and making contingency plans. They were doing it all with paper. Little slips of grass parchment. Charcoal ink brushes.

"They never use electricity," said Montalban, "because it makes them too easy to track. That fact is making me, and my big correlation engine here, into the largest electronic-warfare target in a hundred kilo-meters. There are Chinese hunter-killer teams wandering out there, with who knows what kinds of weaponry. They use the local civilian populations for target practice." For the first time, Montalban's bodyguard spoke. He spoke in a stiffly proper Beijing Chinese, and he spoke to Sonja. "This man said, in En-glish, 'hunter-killer teams.' "

"Yes, he did say that, sir," Sonja told him.

"Red Sonja, you should tell your friends in Jiuquan not to send any more 'hunter-killer teams' into these steppes. Because we hunt them and we kill them."

"May I ask your name, sir?"

"I am Major General Cao Xilong, director of the army's General Po-litical Department."

"You were a very able ideologist and military political thinker. You were a legend in your field."

"That," said Cao Xilong, "is why they have assigned me to oversee these fat Californian subversives in their ridiculous hats."

Montalban looked on, smiling benignly. Foreign languages had never been an American strong suit. Sonja smiled politely at Cao Xilong. "May I inquire why your col-leagues found it necessary to attempt to liquidate me with a flying bomb?"

"Yes. That matter is simple. We cannot allow the doomed Chinese regime to unilaterally impose their first-strike capacity against us. Politi-cal violence and war must be reinscribed into the geographies and ar-chitectures of cities in ways that—while superficially similar to feudal Chinese walls against roaming Mongols—inevitably reflect contempo-rary political conditions. Important here are these distinctions." Major General Cao Xilong paused heavily, mentally searching for something he had memorized from a screen.

"•First, the demonstrated ability of the Jiuquan Space Launch Cen-ter to rival us in flourishing under postapocalyptic conditions."

The general was actually speaking aloud in bullet points. Sonja had never heard such a thing done before. It was deeply alarming.

"•Second, the seamless, ubiquitous merging between security, cor-rections, surveillance, military, and entertainment industries within China, making conventional urban-guerrilla warfare useless.

"•Third, the proliferating range of postglobalist private, public, and private-public bodies legitimized to act against nation-states, among whom we of the World Provisional Survival Empire must number our-selves."

The general stopped counting his fingers. "Contemporary cities are particularly vulnerable to focused disruption or appropriation, not merely of the technical systems on which urban life relies, but also to the liquidation of key human nodal figures who serve as the system's human capital." The general then raised a fingertip. "The worst threats among those state running dogs are provocative figures who foment new relation-ships emerging from the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practiced by the state elites against the colonized posturban peoples. Through continually linking sensors, databases, de-fensive and security architectures, and through the scanning of bodies, these running dogs export the state's architectures of control." Sonja nodded. "I see. That's all very clear."

The general blinked, once. "You can follow our reasoning?"

"Yes I do. I know what you were doing when you tried to kill me, and the Badaulet. You wanted to kill our love."

Cao Xilong said nothing.

"You didn't need to kill me personally. I'm a former holy terror, but I've done nothing to you. You didn't need to kill him, either. He's just another cannon-fodder hero. But you did need to kill
the pair of us,
at the same blow, because we are together. You wanted to
kill our love for each other,
to keep us separate and polarized, because our love is dan-gerous to your plans. That's why we had to die."

"Bourgeois sentiment of this sort does not clarify the strategic situa-tion."

"Maybe it's a woman's way to put it, hero, but
you knew that we were together.
You knew. How did you find that out? You've got spies, in-formants in Jiuquan? Oh: I know. You've got a correlation engine!"

"Of course we exploit the best intelligence methods available, al-though those must remain confidential."

"Listen—young genius—I've been working around the military for years. You don't scare me with your homemade grassroots rebellion. I know we're both clones, you and me—but to Red Sonja, you're just an-other tribal bandit who climbed out of a hole in the ground. You want to kill the men who love Red Sonja? Why don't you kill
him?
"

Sonja shot a sideways glance at John Montalban, who was standing and watching them debate, with his arms politely folded, and a look of intense pretended interest on his face.
"He
loves me fanatically, and while the Badaulet and I were in peaceful Jiuquan sharing a water bed, he was
already here in the midst
of
your camp
and he is
buying
you. You think you're a tactical genius? You are finished already! You are done."

"That would all be true," said Major General Cao Xilong, "except for one important factor which you have failed to grasp."