The Caryatids

"I have to leave here. I'm attracting trouble. So I have two choices: space, or the desert. We have no manned launches scheduled in Jiuquan. Oh, there is one third choice: if I'm willing to go to Antarctica. The ice desert. In Antarctica, I would be wearing a giant nuclear-powered robot suit and building glaciers with my fists."

George was interested. "Is it so bad for you in Jiuquan that the state would send you into exile in Antarctica? That's the sister project to that giant Chinese project in the Himalayas."

"How did you know all that?"

"Never mind."

"Antarctica is very like Mars. The Chinese state would reassign me to build fresh ice at the South Pole. There I would be out of reach of any flying bombs. Except for the state's own flying bombs."

"That's a strange tangle," George said thoughtfully. "Your state's plan for preserving your welfare is very ingenious and very not-human. An autonomous bureaucracy makes peculiar, lateral moves."

"The Chinese state loves me," Sonja told him. "I've always had a special rapport for ubiquitous systems."

"You don't want to go to Antarctica?"

"No," she shouted, "I don't want to hide from the bandits in a nuclear robot suit! That useless strategy is for cowards ! You find the bastards, you triangulate their position, and you fry them! Then you seize their computers and phones and arrest everyone that they know. That's my war."

"Are you required to say that sort of thing, Sonja?"

"I don't 'say' that. I do that."

"Let me do another search on my beloved new engine," said George. "It never fails to hit on correlations of major interest."

George tapped away. He was such a soft European idiot. George had no grasp of harsh reality; he was useful but weak. The state needed strong people, like herself and the Badaulet. It needed human agents willing to venture beyond its limits.

Being a nation, the Chinese state had many national limits. It held power: because it commanded the rivers and the national canals. The state commanded anything to do with the nation's precious water resources: the distilleries, dams, the reservoirs, the plumbing, the sewers, the water-treatment recyclers...the streets, the traffic...the national power grid, the urban video system, the telecoms, the archives and every Chinese satellite, of course...

George was postnational, global...but his beloved "global business" had been selling human flesh in public, when, during China's worst crisis, the Chinese state never grieved and it never faltered and it never gave up restoring and extending control.

The state controlled public health. The state destroyed disease. The Chinese state destroyed disease with the ruthless and dispassionate efficiency of a computer defeating human grandmasters at chess. Sonja hated and feared disease more than any other horror she had witnessed. Any enemy of disease was Sonja's friend. She was grateful for what the state had done.

"Scythian ice princess," George announced.

"What did you just call me?"

"This is a beautiful correlation here. Only a very speedy and glorious network could have linked these phenomena. Listen to this: I am looking at a Scythian ice princess. She's not pretty, because she is a dead Bronze Age woman. She was buried in central Asia in a tomb of permafrost. But: That permafrost was melting quickly. So the Chinese used their Martian ice probes to search for frozen tombs in the Asian desert...and the Chinese found this Scythian princess, this tattooed mummy that I am seeing at this moment, and they dug her up with a secret strike-and-retrieval team. That ancient corpse is under scientific study-there in Jiuquan, in the same hospital, with you! She is not one hundred meters away from you! Top that, eh?"

George chuckled gleefully. "She is two floors away from you, locked inside a medical refrigerator! Correlation engines are amazing technology, aren't they? I have used business-to-business networks all my life, but this is supernatural. Can you imagine how much data the net has sorted, to find that out so quickly? And I possess that speed and power, on my desk, here in Vienna! The world will be transformed!"

Sonja ran her fingers gently over the seething, blistering, restorative exfection on her forearms. "George, why should I care about your 'Scythian ice princess'?"

"You don't care-and I don't care that you don't care, because I care. This dead Scythian woman has human gut flora that dates back before antibiotic pollution. She has her original human commensal microorganisms! Does that sound familiar to you?"