The Caryatids

Jiuquan bore some atavistic traces of a normal Chinese city: mostly morale-boosting "big-character" banner ads-but it had no streets and no apparent ground level. Jiuquan consisted mostly of froth, foam, and film. It looked as if a fireworks factory had burst and been smothered with liquid plastic. Solar-sheeted domes more garish than Christmas ornaments, linked with pneumatic halls and rhizomelike inflated freeways. Piston elevators, garish capsules, ducts and dimples and depressions, decontamination chambers. Hundreds of state laboratories.

Jiuquan was thirty-eight square kilometers of zero-footprint, a young desert metropolis recycling its air and all its water. Jiuquan was an artificial Xanadu where fiercely dedicated national technocrats lived on their bioplastic carpets with bioplastic furniture, interacting with bio-plastic screens, under skeletal watchtowers and ancient rocket launch-pads.

Oil-slick paddies of bacterial greenhouses, deftly fed by plug-in sewers, created fuel, food, and building materials, all of it manufactured straight from the dust of the Gobi Desert. A city built of dust.

A radical yet highly successful experiment in sustainability, Jiuquan was booming-it was the fastest-growing "city" in China. It was sited in the Gobi Desert with nothing to stop its urban expansion but the dust. And Jiuquan was made of dust. Dust was what the city ate.

Sonja was finally allowed to clear the steely skeins of the Martian airlock. Dr. Mishin, who had been waiting for her, rose to his feet and hastily jammed his dust-grimed laptop into his dust-grimed bag.

Leonid Mishin was a Russian space technician who had wandered the world like Marco Polo and finally moored here in Jiuquan. Mishin dwelt inside the Mars simulator, as one of its few permanent residents.

Everyone else in Jiuquan also resided in an airtight bubble of some kind, but Mishin's bubble, the Martian simulator, was officially considered the most advanced bubble of them all. This made up somewhat for the fact that Dr. Mishin was never allowed to leave.

Dr. Mishin labored in his confinement as a "senior technical consultant," which was to say, he led a career rather similar to her own as a "senior public health consultant." They were both emigre servants of the Chinese state, multipurpose human tools used to fill cracks in the walls of Chinese governance, or to putty over a rip in its seams. The Chinese state had thousands of such foreign agents. The state impartially rewarded any human functionary that it found to be skilled and convenient.

Lucky was still battling with the airlock's fabric. The interfaces there had baffled better men than him.

"You slept with that barbarian," Mishin concluded at once.

Sonja rolled her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair.

"Yes, you did that, you did!" Dr. Mishin mourned. "What is wrong with you? Him, of all people? A creature like him ? Have you finally lost all self-respect?"

"Leonid, do you think our age difference matters? I'm only twenty-seven."

"They cut off people's heads out there! They do it on video!"

"The Badaulet is very loyal to the state. He believes that the Chinese state is divinely sanctioned by the Mandate of Heaven. You should take him seriously, he's an important political development."

"He's a tribal lunatic! There's no reason for you to involve yourself with him! What do you expect to gain from him? There's nothing left but sand and land mines between here and Kazakhstan!"

Why was Mishin so bitterly jealous? His sexual politics were his worst flaw. Yes, true, she had a penchant for taking lovers, but this was China. For every hundred women in China there were a hundred and thirty men. What else should the world expect?

And Jiuquan, a deeply technical city, had an even more destabilizing male-female imbalance. Mishin was from Russia, where the men died young and the women were lonely. He was being a fool.

Lucky kicked through the airlock, snarling and slapping at his earpiece. "What is wrong with that stupid tent, that ugly prison? It trapped me in there and it tried to kill me!"

"Badaulet, this is the wise scientist that I told you about: Dr. Leonid Mishin. No man in this world knows more about the future potential of Mars. Dr. Mishin will be our official state guide today."

Lucky, still angry, stared in raw disbelief at the chilly pink sun crawling the seamless, alien, purplish sky. The Martian extraterrarium, logically, ran on Martian time-it featured 24.6-hour days and 687-day years. The wine-dark plastic firmament displayed accurately Martian stellar constellations, including two racing, tumbling blobs of light that mimicked Phobos and Deimos.

Mishin was usually a polished Martian tour guide, but he was upset with her. Yet he'd been so kind and eager about it when she'd said she was coming to visit him. What a shame.

Lucky rubbed his nose. "Why does Mars stink?"