The Caryatids

Lionel lifted his elegant brows and spoke with great conviction. "Radical projects need widespread distributed oversight, with peer review and a loyal opposition to test them. They have to be open and testable. Otherwise, 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 narrowed 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 nothing 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 unable 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 generation 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 fingers.

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 out both her arms, and howled. She howled with a heartfelt passion.