The Caryatids

The Badaulet's brief stay in Jiuquan had unsettled his young mind yet further. They had shown their pet barbarian Jiuquan's proudest cultural achievements: chamber music, calligraphy, various sports that one could perform while sealed in a plastic bubble...The Badaulet had found these accomplishments contemptible.

Then his Chinese handlers had shown him something closer to his heart: something unknown to Sonja. He boasted to her about it, obliquely: he claimed that it was far greater than any gift that she had given him.

So it had to be some propaganda enterprise from a local laboratory. Some stereotypical "amazing secret weapon" meant to stiffen the spines of China's barbarian allies. The Badaulet called it the "Assassin's Mace." He didn't say precisely what this weapon was-clearly, that was not for her to know-but the technicians had promised him he could try the Assassin's Mace someday, and wield it against his enemies. If he were loyal and true, that day would come soon.

The Assassin's Mace-there were a host of oddities in the taut suburbs of Jiuquan, where the cream of Chinese techno-intelligentsia labored on their secret productions. Secret weapons labs-Sonja had seen a few, she never liked them or their blinkered inhabitants. Secret weapons labs were obscure and torpid and heavy and loathsome.

The Acquis and the Dispensation hated China's state secrecy, for they were obsessed with rogue technologies spinning out of control. Internal combustion: a rogue technology spun out of control. Electric light: a rogue technology spun out of control. Fossil fuel: the flesh of the necromantic dead, risen from its grave, had wrecked the planet.

Global regulation, transparency, verification...that was the supposed solution of the Acquis and Dispensation, and China despised such things. China had walls and barriers. The good old ways, the trusted ways. The old ways to hide all the new ways.

The robot rambled, reeling, off the broken landscape and into a flatter steppe. This landscape was somewhat easier on Sonja's nerves. Big domelike tussocks of grass appeared. Some storm track had overpassed this area, slopping rain like the spatter from an overloaded paintbrush, and the desert was suddenly beautiful. In some ways the modern desert was better off than any other biome on Earth, for the desert never expected any kindness from the sky.

Here and there were brightly colored bits of human litter, plucked up by violent windstorms, flung from dead towns...plastic bags. Plastic shopping bags were the one artifact in the Gobi more omnipresent than land mines. Plastic bags had been cheap, present in uncounted millions in the daily life of cities. The bags were easily airborne, and although they tore, they never decayed. Over the decades, plastic bags could blow like tumbleweeds over half a continent.

Sheep tracks appeared. The Badaulet grew concerned. He dismounted the robot to study the tracks and to number the sheep, and, if possible, to reveal some trace of the shepherd.

After a quarter hour he returned from his tracking studies and solemnly handed her half a handful of sheep dung. Black manure like a pile of pebbles. It felt dry and light.

"This is the dung of a sheep," she said.

He nodded, and made a smashing motion with his fingers.

She broke one lump of the dung and it instantly turned to the finest black ash, a bacterial charcoal. This sheep had baked every calorie of nutrition out of the grass it was eating. The guts of that sheep were a microbe factory.

Sonja sniffed unhappily at her fingers. "'Why does Mars stink?'"

Lucky brightened to see her making a joke, as if he hadn't given her a beating. "Today I wish I had seen that mammoth, and not just its stinking dung."

"There will be other mammoths to walk the Earth. Something always breaks the walls and stampedes out of the bubbles...I don't like this. The state does not allow this. This should not be happening. This is bad."

"A big herd of sheep, eighty, ninety," he told her, "with a boy on a pony, and the guts of his horse were the same way." Lucky shifted his sniper rifle from one camouflaged shoulder to another. "We ride with greater care now, and we watch the skies always."

It was a comfort to closely follow the sheep tracks. The busy feet of a flock that size would clear the earth of land mines.

Horse tracks appeared, the unshod hooves of Mongolian ponies, and then the signs of tents. These had been big round tents, Mongolian "ger" tents, which were portable yurts of crisscrossed sticks and woolly felt.

There were dead fires in the abandoned camp, with a host of human footprints.