The Caryatids

"This is John's business, sugarplum! I have two secret clones in my own family! One is my niece's mother, and the other is my favorite set director." Lionel shook his handsome head. "My brother makes it his life's work to shut down crazy projects before they get out of hand. You should be grateful for what John's done for this world! John wants to see you, Sonja. He can brief you about this much better than I can."

"I will not meet John Montalban. Not again, never. I promised that I would never meet him again, or touch him, or look at him."

Lionel sighed heavily. "Is that your big personal story? You are so much like Radmila! That is exactly the sort of thing Radmila would say, except not with your weird Sino-Slavic accent. I love Mila very dearly, but would you get over yourself ? Just for once? Because my brother is changing the whole Earth out here! It's not always about you, you, you, and all your clones!"

Sonja regretted that she had not killed Lionel, but there was no help for this. John Montalban was a power player. If Montalban was here, meddling, and in better command of the situation than herself, then she had no choice but to negotiate with him. She had involved herself with Montalban before, and though she had bitter cause to regret it, at least she understood what that entailed. "All right. Take me to see John."

"At last you're talking sense. It'll take us a while to reach him, it's a good distance."

"I have a man with me here. My husband."

Lionel blinked. "That's news."

Slowly and conspicuously, Sonja led Lionel-along with his silent bodyguard, escort, or assassin-around the hill. Mongolian horses were some of the world's toughest ponies, but the horses had a hard time of it-on ground the pack robot would have skimmed in moments.

Sonja returned to the site of the nightlong siege. A sturdier rock wall had appeared there. The dead Acquis cyborg had been hidden behind the wall. There was no sign of the busy and cunning Badaulet.

"You wait," she told Montalban, and she climbed laboriously back to the top of the hill. As she had expected, the Badaulet was lurking in wait on the slope with his rifle trained on the horsemen below.

"That loud fool with the strange hat is Dispensation," Lucky observed, for he was wise beyond his years. "I can kill them both easily."

"Don't kill them. The fool is Dispensation. The other is from the grass people, that tribe that tried to kill us. I am going with them to negotiate a solution. That is a flaw I have: I negotiate peace too often. Will you please come with me to help me? Our alternative is to shoot them both and run away. But that strategy won't work. If we kill these two scouts, there will be more airplanes sent after us."

The Badaulet shouldered his rifle. "You are my wife. We stay together."

"Then we must parley. Don't kill anyone unless I say. If you see me kill someone, or if I am killed-then kill them. Avenge me without pity."

The Badaulet nodded. "Let us go and learn more about our enemies. To learn about enemies makes them easier to kill."

They rode their bullet-riddled pack robot to the base of the hill. Lionel Montalban looked pale and shaken. "There's some dead Acquis guy wearing neural boneware in this little homemade fort."

"Is that so?" said Sonja.

"Yes, and that's bad. The Acquis is supposed to restrict their neural boneware to Antarctica. John made a formal settlement about that. There shouldn't be any Acquis spies with nerve gear walking the Earth in the middle of Asia."

Sonja felt keenly irritated, but she spoke politely. "Does your brother John want this dead Acquis body? John always wants dead bodies."

"That's all right, I geotagged it. We can fetch it later. I took a lot of video."

The little party then rode cross-country. Sonja made a deliberate point of scurrying ahead inside the superior pack robot, so that the primitive horse riders had to catch up.

"You are angry, my bride."

"Badaulet, did you ever have someone in your life who haunted you, and stole your existence, and was always in your dreams, and never let you be alone, no matter what you did, or how hard you tried to forget them?"

"No, my bride. I kill such people, and my enemies stay dead."

"Well, I have such people. I had seven such people. And soon, very soon-I will see someone who is even worse. Because I will meet the man who married us. First he found one of us, then he found all of us. He investigated us. Because he considers himself a wise scholar, this sage, this prince, this technician. He learned more about us than we ever knew about ourselves. That is how he mastered us. And he did master us. He bent us to his will. We cannot rid ourselves of him, although each of us has tried. He is our sultan, and we are his harem."

"Why did this prince come to this place? To take you away from me?"

"No. He doesn't need me. Not anymore. He has had plenty of me, because he possessed me. He came here to fulfill his own jihad."