The Caryatids

Part Three SONJA The Gobi Desert

HE WAS BOWLEGGED, he had lice, internal parasites, and tubercu­lar lesions, and he was nineteen years old. His life was one long epic poem about heat, cold, thirst, hunger, filth, disasters, and bloodshed. His fellow tribesmen called him “the Badaulet,” which meant “Lucky.”

Sonja tuned her clinic lights to a mellow glow and turned up the in­frasound. Lucky’s tough, tireless, scrawny body went as translucent as glass. His sturdy heart jetted blood through the newly cleansed nets of his lungs.

Sonja had killed off Lucky’s parasites, filtered his blood, changed his skin flora, flushed out his dusty lungs and the squalid contents of his guts… She had cut his hair, trimmed his nails… He was a desert war­lord, and every pore, duct, and joint in him required civilizing.

“Lucky dear,” she said, “what would you like more than anything in this whole world?”

“Death in battle,” said Lucky, heavy-lidded with pleasure. Lucky al­ways said things like that.

“How about a trip to Mars?”

Lucky stoutly replied—according to their machine translation: “Yes, the warrior souls are bound for Heaven! But men must be honest with Heaven and rise from the front line of battle! For if we want to go to the garden of Heaven, yet we have not followed in the caravan of jihad, then we are like the boat that wants to sail on the dry desert!”

“Mars is a planet, not Heaven. It’s a planet like Earth.”

“Even a pagan woman with your pitiful ignorance can follow the path of jihad!” said Lucky, grunting a little as her oiled fingers readjusted the bones in his neck. “Women can equip a man for righteous battle with their gold and jewelry!”

“I have no gold or jewelry.”

Lucky reached out deftly and seized a thick hank of her hair. “Then cut and sell these golden tresses! Your beauty will buy me guns to pun­ish all of Heaven’s enemies!”

“What a sweet thing to say.”

There was no use her denying it, especially to herself: she had fallen for him. He was a dismal, bloodstained creature from what was surely one of the worst areas on Earth, yet he radiated confidence and a sure sense of manly grace.

This was not another impulsive fling, though Sonja had never lacked for those. This time was one of those serious times.

Maybe she had fallen, somehow, for their quirky machine transla­tion, for Lucky’s native tongue was an obscure pidgin of Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dialect, a desert lingo created by the roaming few who still survived in the world’s biggest dust bowl. It was the trouble of reaching him, of touching him, that made their pang of communion so precious to her. Talking to Lucky was like shouting through an an­cient crack in the Great Wall of China.

She felt a powerful, deeply spiritual rapport with him, for once she had been so much like him: young, bewildered, foreign, aggressive, and heavily armed. In China, yet not quite of China. For this young war hero to become an honored guest of the Chinese state—he must have waded here through a tide of gore.

Sonja disentangled his callused fingers from her curls. “Lucky, you feel some pain here, don’t you?” She patted him intimately.

“Yes, that is a pain in my ass.”

“I will fix that for you.” He’d fallen—from a horse, most likely—and his cracked fourth lumbar vertebra had a growth on it, a tender, frilly, lig­amentous benign tumor like some Chinese wood-ear mushroom. Peo­ple’s interior organs—and Sonja had spent years studying them—they were subaquatic organisms, basically. They grew in bloody seawater.

“Stop fixing me, Sonja. You fix me too much.”

“Dear Badaulet, that big pain you feel down your leg comes from one small broken bone on your back. It is right… here. Do you feel that? Here it is: that is your pain. Because there is a network of nerves there. The network is pinched, the network has a fault. See how I can touch that network fault? My fingers can feel that.”

“No, no! Stop that! My back is strong! It’s my stupid ass that has the pain.” Lucky twisted his neatly trimmed head, showed her his newly polished teeth and smiled. “Rub me all over, slowly, as you did before. That part is good.”

“Lucky: You are strong and beautiful, but I know your body better than you. I know what you feel.”

“Stop dreaming! You can’t tell me what I feel, woman! Only Heaven knows the secrets hidden in the breasts of men!”

“Oh, I know enough of your secrets to heal you as a man.” She low­ered her eyes. “That will hurt at first.”

“Oh woman, why do you always talk so much? I know what you want from that bold, rude way you look at my face! You can’t hurt me! You and your sweet little hands… “ Lucky grabbed snakelike at her fingers, and missed them as she instantly snatched them back.

He really didn’t think that she could hurt him. Of the many out­landish things that Lucky had said to her, this one was the most absurd.

The Badaulet was an outcast, although he was entirely sure he was a prince. She had once thought she was a princess, and become an outcast… “Badaulet, this evening I will bathe you, and dress you in your fine new uniform. You will meet the greatest heroes in the whole world.” Grappling his arm, she coaxed him over onto his belly, so that his spine was exposed.

“Who is that, what did you say to me?” Lucky touched his translation earpiece and frowned.

“Your banquet hosts in Jiuquan tonight are the taikonauts! The astro­nauts! The cosmonauts! The taikong ren. The yuhangyuan. The hang­tianyuan. Do you understand that? I mean the Chinese heroes who flew to Mars and returned to Earth.”

“Oh yes, the famous Great Pilgrims to Heaven. I understand. They mean to honor the Badaulet for my valor in combat.”

“To meet these heroes brings great good fortune. They are the fu­ture!”

“Did your men of valor fight on Mars?”

“No. They collected rocks there.”

“Though they have returned from Heaven, if they failed to fight the jihad they have earned no merit.”

Sonja planted the point of her elbow into Lucky’s spine, and with one decisive lunge she ripped the tumor loose.

The Badaulet gasped in agony and writhed like a hooked fish. “You felt that pang all down your leg, didn’t you?”

He was angry. “You hurt me now! You cut my hair! You washed my guts! You stole my clothes! You burned me with hot wax! And I’m no better, Sonja! I hurt! You promised you would fix me and I hurt.”

Sonja rolled him over onto his back. For the first time since she had met him, Lucky had gone gratifyingly limp. Normally he was as nervous and tensile as a bundle of barbed wire. His torn spine was bleeding a lit­tle, inside of him. Not too much. She had done it precisely right.

What amazing skin this boy had. There were hen-scratched scars all over him, pits, pocks, frostbite, dimples… “Lie quiet now… Rest and heal… Shall I sing to you while I make you feel better? I’ll sing you a little song. I know many old and beautiful songs. I will sing you ‘The Ballad of the Savage Tiger.’”

As she sang, Sonja suited actions to his needs. The springy, salty vi­tality of the masculine body, how endearing that was. The body was ir­repressible, it wanted to live despite everything. The sexual body, with resources for new life.

Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth—it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen.

Sonja crooned:

Lucky was blissfully quiet now. He had wisely chosen not to argue with her anymore. A host of ducts and long hydraulic chambers and strange stiffening flows of blood… And yet, human beings emerged from these oblong glands and their conduits, men and women were sired by all this gadgetry—well, not herself, of course, but most people had a father… People emerged as single-celled genetic packets out of this complex, densely innervated, profoundly temperamental fluid­-delivery system.

The secret of humanity. Here it was, in her hands.

No matter how many human bodies Sonja encountered, and how well she grasped them and their intimate functions, there was always some new magic in a new one.

Sonja switched filters and gazed straight into Lucky’s brain. His arousal was ferociously devouring a host of tagged radioactive sugars. Sex was like a bonfire in his basement.

Women often knowingly told other women that “men only wanted one thing,” but it took a sensorweb to catalogue and reveal that. To see it was to believe it. To know all was to forgive all. A man wanted that one thing he wanted because there wasn’t room in his head for anything else.

A bonfire of gratified lust was roaring around in Lucky’s skull. Hor­mones washed through him in visible tides. With surgical delicacy, she rubbed him with three oiled fingertips. Instantly, an aurora of utter bliss boiled through him. He teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.

This was the world’s most human “humane intervention.” It was the one consoling act that, during its few sweet minutes, could obliterate loneliness. Obscure horror. Dismantle grief.

The famed rewards of Heaven for the warrior-martyr were seventy­two heavenly maidens doing just this.

THE AIRLOCK INTO THE FABLED MARS DOME was very likely the single most paranoid security space in all of China. The Mar­tian dome was under the strictest official state quarantine, so the disin­fected visitors went in there wearing single-seamed, quilted space gowns, soft little foamy space boots, and nothing else whatsoever. Visi­tors were allowed no tools, no possessions, no equipment of any kind. Not a fleck. Not a speck. Their bare humanity.

Sonja always had trouble with this airlock, for there were old bits of shrapnel inside her: pieces of another human being. A suicide bomber. Lucky and Sonja tenderly held hands on their waffled and comfortless plastic bench while the security scanners whirred overhead. There was nothing much to do except to gaze out the windows.

The Martian airlock featured two oblong portholes. Their shape mimicked the two world-famous portholes in the Martian landing cap­sule. These portholes helped some with the monotony of security scans, for the portholes offered boastful views of downtown Jiuquan.

Certain knowledgeable pundits called Jiuquan “the planet’s most ad­vanced urban habitat,” although, as a supposed “city,” Jiuquan had its drawbacks. Jiuquan, which had sprung up around China’s largest space­launch center, resembled no previous “city” on Earth.

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 launch­pads.

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 twenty­seven.”

“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?”

“The breathable air within this model Martian biosphere,” Mishin recited grudgingly, “was created, and is maintained, entirely by our ex­traterrestrialized organisms. Through the ubiquitous oversight of the state and the heroic efforts of the dedicated scientific workers of the glo­rious Jiuquan Space Launch Center—” Mishin drew a breath. “—this project has become the model, not of Mars today, but of the future Mars! Your translation understands all that, sir? Yes? That’s very good!”

Mishin wheeled in his insulated worker boots, waving his uniformed arms at the glowing Martian sunset and the spare, frozen scrub that dot­ted the rusty soil. “At this moment you are privileged to step within the Mars of Tomorrow! Here, spread all around you, is the living, air­breathing harbinger of Humanity’s Second Home World! The develop­ment of Mars is China’s most ambitious megaproject—and this dome, which is merely a model of that future effort, ranks with the Great Wall of China as the most ambitious construction on the surface of planet Earth!”

It was a pity that they’d lost valuable time while trapped within that balky airlock. With the setting of the pink sun in its tear-proofed plastic sky, the Martian bubble was getting bitterly cold.

The three of them crunched briskly across the rust-red cinders, staring at the Chinese and Latin botanical labels stuck in the tough, humble scrub: harsh tufts of spiky needlegrass (Stipa gobica). Indestructible, color­less saltwort (Salsola passerina). Bone-colored Mongolian sagebrush (Altemisia xerophytic).

Mishin rambled on, but Sonja had heard his lectures. She could not help but remember what John Montgomery Montalban had quipped while he was walking in here. She and Montalban had been lovers at the time, and, to her stunned amazement, Montalban had somehow managed to smuggle a fancy glass ball into the Martian dome. It was a tiny, liquid city that he confidently tossed from hand to hand.

Montalban had whispered to her, endearments mostly, but some­times he would slyly subvert the official discourse with classic poetry from his distant California… The Dispensation, the Acquis, they al­ways tried to mock or ignore Chinese national accomplishments. The global civil societies were afraid of nation-states. Especially the Chinese state, the largest and most powerful state left on Earth.

One hundred years in the past, Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, had chosen the province of Gansu, the city-prefecture of Jiuquan, the Gobi Desert at the edge of Mongolia, as a locus of Communist futu­rity. This was where China’s spacecraft would conquer the sky. Little did Mao know that the sky of the Gobi Desert was the true future of China…

China, its sky reddening with endless smokestack spew, China as its own Red Planet… The world had never seen a technological advance so headlong, so relentless, so ambitious in scope and so careless of Earthly consequence as China’s bid to dominate the global economy…

That was how John Montgomery Montalban perceived things around here… As a lover, she missed Montalban keenly, all the more so in that she had sworn never to meet him again. No one had ever been kinder, sweeter, more considerate, more nearly understanding of her troubles and pains… Of the five men that she had truly loved in her life, John Montalban was the only one who wasn’t yet dead.

A jerboa bounded between her booted feet like a fur-covered tennis ball. Then they scared up a big captive flock of tiny finches, each thumb-sized desert bird with its own unique ID and onboard health­tracking instruments.

One greasy, bean-laden bush had thoroughly mastered Martian sur­vival. It was bursting through the alkaline soil on an eager net of roots and runners. The way it flung itself out like that, all runners, green pods, and rooty crisscrossings… it was rather like a little city of Jiuquan, when you looked at it.

Lucky dodged the orating scientist, slipping around to place her body between himself and the other man.

This Martian extraterrarium, the most ambitious biosphere in the world, had cost as much to build as the damming of a major Chinese river. It surely deserved a much greater world fame—but the topsy-turvy life trapped within here was so frail, so advanced, and so imperiled that the state rarely allowed any human beings inside this place. The Mar­tian biosphere was gardened by sterilized robots, Earthly twins to the state-controlled devices remotely exploring Mars.

Quite likely the state had wisely sensed that human beings had al­ready wrecked one biosphere and would be cruelly thrilled to smash this new one.

The life struggling here had been carefully redesigned for extrater­restrial conditions. Some cloned organisms proved themselves in prac­tice, while most mutants perished young. The extraterrarium was an entire experimental ecology of genetic mutants…

All creatures very much like herself, all of these. All those little birds, those hopping, shivering, tunneling rodents, the half-dozen runty cen­tral Asian ponies whose sixty-six chromosomes firmly distinguished them from domesticated horses… They were all her Martian siblings under the skin.

Every creature in here had been cloned—especially the bacteria. The Martian soil—that unpromising melange of windy silt, crunchy bits of meteoric glass, volcanic ash, and salty pebbles—it was damp and alive.

Most of the microbes here were clones of native Martian microbes. The Chinese taikonauts had found microbial life on Mars: with deep drilling, in the subterranean ice. They had found and retrieved six dif­ferent Martian species of sleepy but persistent microorganisms.

Those Martian bacteria were relatives of certain extremophile mi­crobes also found on Earth. Very likely they were primeval rock-eating bugs—blasted off the fertile Earth in some huge volcanic upheaval, then blown across the solar system in some violent gust of solar spew. Giant volcanoes, huge solar flares… they didn’t happen often. But they certainly happened.

Microbes cared nothing if they lived on Earth or Mars. Men had found alien Martian life and brought it back alive to the Earth. That was all the same to the microbes.

Maybe—as Montalban had once told her—there was something in­nately Chinese about exploring Mars. Every other nation-state with a major space program had collapsed. Nation-states always collapsed from their attempts to explore outer space. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States—even the Republic of India, China’s biggest space rival—they had all ceased to exist politically. Montalban claimed that the reason was obvious. Nation-states were about the land and its strict boundaries, while space was about the cosmos and the globe. So the national urge to annex outer space brought a nation-killing curse.

That curse had not felled the Chinese. No. No curse could fell the Chinese. The Chinese had prevailed over three millennia of river floods, droughts, pestilences, mass starvations…and barbarian invasions, civil wars, plagues, uprisings, revolutions…China suffered, yes—collapsed, never.

When the taikonauts had returned from Mars to land safely in the Gobi Desert, the Chinese nation, what was left of it, had exploded with joy. Hollow-eyed Chinese eating human flesh in the shrouded ruins of their automobile plants had been proud about Mars.

The Chinese were still very proud of their taikonauts, though the aging taikonauts, whom Sonja knew very personally, seemed a little shaken by their ambiguous role in history. The space heroes had left a glittering China in a headlong economic boom; they had returned from their multiyear Mars adventure to a choking, thirsting China whose sky consisted of dust.

Six kinds of dust:

The black dust from the Gobi Desert.

The red loess dust of central China.

The industrially toxic yellow dust that came from the dried riverbeds and the emptied basins of the giant parched dams.

The brown smoking dust of China’s burning fields and blazing forests.

The dense, gray, toxic dust of China’s combusting cities.

And, last but most globally important, the awesome, sky-tinting, Earth-cooling, stratospheric, radioactive dust from dozens of Chinese hydrogen bombs, digging massive reservoirs for fresh ice in the Hi­malayas.

Sonja had worked on the ground in China during the last of those years. Foreign soldiers had flown into China from every corner of the planet, always hoping to reassert order there. China could not be al­lowed to fail, because China was the workshop of the entire world, the world’s forge, the world’s irreplaceable factory.

The Chinese people had died in a cataclysm beyond numeration, while the Chinese state had prevailed. The bloody mayhem that had once gripped the Celestial Empire was methodically pushed beyond its borders. Pushed onto people like Lucky.

“I know this grass!” cried Lucky, plucking a cruelly barbed seed from the flesh of his ankle. “Camels can eat this!”

“All of these plants are native plants from China’s deserts,” said Mishin. This was a major techno-nationalist selling point. “When, in the future, mankind brings Mars to life, Mars will be Asian tundra and steppes.”

“Who will live there?” Lucky demanded. “People like you?”

“Oh no,” Sonja told him. “They will be people like you.”

Lucky scowled. Lucky knew that he was not in Heaven. He was in an alien world, and he already lived in an alien world. “You told me about the horses? Show me some horses!”

“We do have horses here,” Mishin assured him. “Central Asia’s Prze­walski’s horses. Genetically, these are the oldest horses on Earth.” Mishin scratched his close-cropped head. “You, sir—you may have seen these wild mustangs in the new wilds of central Asia, eh? Maybe a few Przewalski’s horses? There are large herds thriving around Chernobyl.”

“Those little horses are too small to ride.” Lucky shrugged. “I can eat them. I can drink their blood.”

Either the state’s translation had failed him, or Mishin simply ig­nored what Lucky had just said. “We plan to remove the horses soon for the sake of our new young star… See, here are her tracks! Right here! And this is her dung, as well!”

Broadly spaced pugmarks dented the chilly Martian soil. “That is no camel,” Lucky concluded. “That is no horse.”

“She is our ‘mammoth,’ “ said Mishin proudly.

Lucky patted his earpiece. “I never heard that word, ‘mammoth.’”

“Do you know what an ‘elephant’ is?”

Lucky coughed on the cold, dusty air. “No.”

“Well, both elephants and mammoths are extinct today. However: with the climate crisis, many mammoths thawed from the permafrost… In a genetically revivable condition! Sometimes people don’t marvel properly at our fabulous Martian microbes… but our mammoth! Oh yes! A hairy mammoth revived fresh from the Ice Age… and she’s been redesigned for Mars! Everyone adores our Chinese Martian mammoth… She’s still our young girl of course… “ Mishin held his pale hand out, at shoulder height. “So she’s still quite small, but what splendid fur, such a nose and ears! Who can’t love a beautiful cloned Martian mammoth?”

“I don’t love a mammoth,” Lucky said firmly. “Let us leave this place now. “

“No, no, let’s hurry! Our mammoth will sleep soon. She sleeps each day at regular Martian hours.”

“Lucky,” Sonja told him, “the state wants to send me to Mars. I vol­unteered to go. I’m in taikonaut training in Jiuquan Space Launch Center.”

Lucky looked her up and down. “Yes, that trip would be good for you.”

“Why do you say that?”

Lucky lifted one finger. “Your mother. She’s already up there?”

Sonja glared at him in instant, head-splitting rage.

“Sonja, don’t!” Mishin yelped. “Don’t do that! Remember what hap­pened with Montalban?”

Sonja’s head was spinning. The thin Martian air did some nasty things to people. “Our guest wants to leave this place, Leonid. We seem to have tired him.”

Mishin hastily escorted them back toward the balky airlock. Mishin himself never left the Martian simulator. There were microbes within him not yet cleared for public distribution.

“Sonja, you don’t love your dear mother?” taunted Lucky, as they suf­fered the tedious hissing and clicking of the airlock’s insane security. “Your demon mother, she who dwells in Heaven? You talk so much, Sonja, yet you never talk about her!”

“My mother is a state secret. So: Don’t talk about my mother. Espe­cially with this state machine translation.”

Lucky was unimpressed. The prospect of the state surveilling him bothered him no more than the omniscience of God. “I, too, never talk about my mother.”

Sonja lifted her sour, aching head. “What about your mother, Lucky? Why don’t you talk about your mother?”

“My mother sold oil! She committed many crimes against the sky. In Tajikistan, in Kyrgyzstan. Other places. Many pipelines across central Asia. She was rich. Very rich.”

“A princess, then?”

“Yes, all my mother’s people were rich and beautiful. They had no tribes, they had schools. They had cars and jets and skyscrapers. All of them dead now. All. Dead, and nonpersons. No one speaks of them any­more.”

Sonja shifted closer to him on the waffled plastic bench. She was sorry that she had lost her temper with him. He was only probing her, to see what she was made of. He had some right to do that. She did it her­self all the time.

When she had been nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—young like him—she had had no discretion, no emotional skin at all. Especially about the always-tender subject of her “mother” and her “sisters.”

Those violent passions were distant to her now, relics of the bitter days when she had become “Red Sonja.” Nobody called her “Red Sonja” anymore. Not now, not when she was a certified war heroine with a cozy state post here in futuristic Jiuquan. At least, nobody called her “Red Sonja” when she could overhear them and take reprisals.

Sonja stared at the thin pox of Martian dust on her white plastic boots. The airlock was methodically blasting the last traces of life from that dust—a sterilization process that humans would never perceive, but a holocaust for bacteria.

“Badaulet, I should spend more time getting properly briefed about the guests that I escort here, but your suave manners, your smooth talk, they overwhelmed my girlish modesty so quickly.”

“That was a joke,” Lucky guessed.

“Yes,that was a joke.”

“Stop making jokes.” He patted his ear. “This machine never under­stands jokes.”

The airlock fell silent. The hissing, incoming air, which had been pressing hard at Sonja’s tender eardrums, went deathly still.

“This airlock does not want to cooperate with us today.”

“This machine wants to kill me,” Lucky said firmly. “It knows that I don’t belong here. I belong on the steppes, under the sky.”

“Maybe it wants to kill me. After all, I’m the fool who escorts so many visitors here.”

“Why would it want to harm you, Sonja? You are the Angel of Harbin.”

“The ‘Angel of Harbin.’” Sonja sat up straighter. “I hate that stupid nickname! Yes, I’m a war heroine. Yes, I’m a pillar of the state and I am proud of my service! But ‘Angel of Harbin’—I never chose that nom de guerre! Harbin was nothing so much.”

Lucky was puzzled by this. He spoke rapidly, seriously and at some length, and the translator spat up one sentence. “They say that Harbin was the very worst of the very bad.”

“Harbin was only typical. We had a good rescue plan in Harbin. We knew what we wanted to do and we knew how to win there. Now, Shenyang—that was bad. And Yinchuan, where they completely lost electrical power? Dead networks, no water, no sewer? For eighteen weeks? There was no body count there—because they ate the bodies.

When we marched out there to dig in—I sent out my surveillance cams—I destroyed all that data. Everybody in that rescue team was on trauma drugs after Yinchuan. Nobody remembers Yinchuan. Nobody wants to remember that place. Itis lost, it’s nonhistory. Even the state conceals Yinchuan, and no human being will ever ask.”

“You were fighting that gloriously?”

“We didn’t think we were fighting at all! We were medical teams, we were there to save innocent lives! But: When there’s no water in a city? Then there’s no innocence: it’s all gone. With no water, there is no city-there’s a horde. ‘Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.’”

That was John Montalban again. Montalban always loved to quote old American poetry.

The Badaulet turned his level gaze upon her. Itwas his keen black eyes, his abstract, fearless, predatory look, that had first attracted and aroused her. He looked so different from other bandits, and now that she knew about his globe-trotting, jet-setting mother, she understood. Lucky was a native of the Disorder.

Sonja knew what Han Chinese people looked like, and also Ti­betans, Manchus, Mongols. To any practiced eye they were easily as physically distinct as French, Germans, Italians, and Danes. Yet Lucky was none of those: he was a global guerrilla, a true modern barbarian. Her lover was one of the new kind.

“Sonja, I have to know: Are there seven of you? Seven sisters?”

“There were seven once—three are dead.” Bratislava, Kosara, Svet­lana: They had been the first people she had ever seen killed. They’d been killed by a pack of young soldiers, panicked kids really, drunken kids half stumbling over their cheap carbines, kids the age of the Badaulet.

That distant episode on that distant Adriatic island: How empty that seemed to her now. Her twisted world of childhood had exploded in a sudden bloody horror, but, in comparison with the vast bloody grandeur of China, it was such a small world and such a minor horror.

In Mljet, though: that was the first time Sonja herself had killed someone. One could never forget the first time.

“Please don’t talk to me about my dead,” she told him, “don’t talk to me about the past, for I can’t bear it. Just talk to me about the future, for I can bear as much of that as anyone…”

Lucky was deeply moved. “Here with you, in this locked bubble, the wind and sky are not free… Everything stinks in here… The future should not stink… Do you love me, Sonja?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you love me?”

“I don’t need reasons. Love just happens to me. I love you the way that any woman loves any man.”

Lucky folded his sinewy arms in a brisk decision. “Then we should marry. Because marriage is proper and holy. A temporary Muslim mar­riage can be performed in necessity in pagan lands and times of war. So I will marry you, Sonja. Now, here.”

Sonja laughed. “You haven’t known me long.”

“I don’t want to know you better,” Lucky said. “You have given me your woman’s body: the utmost gift a woman gives a man, except for sons. So: I don’t want to go to Hell for doing that. It is my warrior call­ing to serve Heaven, die for Heaven, and go to Heaven. So: You must certainly agree to marry me. Otherwise, you are oppressing me.”

“Can we discuss this matter after we leave this airlock?”

Lucky sat cross-legged on the rubbery white tiles of the sterilized floor. “We cannot leave! We are prisoners in here! So let us make our pact now and marry at once. I cannot ask your father to give me you, for you never had a father.”

“You know a lot about me, don’t you?”

“On the steppes, far outside China, I meet the Provincial Recon­struction Teams, from the Acquis and the Dispensation. They seek me out for my advice on how to survive, for they die there quickly. They know much about the Angel of Harbin. They know things about you that the state does not say. They say that Red Sonja killed five great gen­erals.”

“That is not true! That’s a lie! I have never killed any uniformed Chi­nese military personnel! I swear that, I never did that—not even if they were laying down barrage-fire on my positions.”

Sonja puffed on the thin, stale air. “My head hurts so badly. Some­thing’s gone wrong. We’re supposed to dress for that big state banquet. The Martian taikonauts are there, and they’ll want us to drink! Lots of toasts with maotai… Five years, those three flyboys were stuck, without a woman, in their tiny capsule—good God, no wonder they’re like that… Do you drink alcohol, Lucky?”

“I can drink kumiss!”

“You drink kumiss horse milk? Really? That’s so cute.”

“I will introduce you to these heroes as my wife!”

“I’m a soldier’s woman,” Sonja told him, pressing the heels of her hands to her throbbing temples. “That’s what I’m good for. So: fine. Since you need marriage so much, for the sake of your soul and what­ever: fine, I’lldo that for you. I will be your concubine. I can do that.”

“Truly?”

“Shut up! Because—I will only be your Earthly wife. Outside of this place—out in your desert—where the green grass grows sometimes, and the sky is sometimes blue, and there are horses and tents and land mines and sniper rifles—sure, out there I am your wife and I accept you as my husband. I do. However! Inside this space center, or in orbit, or on Mars, or inside that biosphere, or inside this airlock, any other area that is not of this Earth, then I am not your wife, Lucky. Instead, I own you. You are my slave.”

“On the Earth, I am your husband, that’s what you just declared to me?”

“Only on the Earth. Everywhere else, to be with Sonja is to be in trouble. I never lie to my men—no matter how much that hurts them.”

“You think that you are getting a smart horse-trading bargain from me, woman, but you are wrong! So: Yes, I am happy now. We are mar­ried now, you are my bride. Congratulations.” The Badaulet rose and pressed his nose to the finely scratched plastic of the porthole. “Now, wife of mine: Tell me about that light unmanned aircraft at ten o’clock, which is vectoring our way.”

“What? Where?”

Lucky tapped at the porthole with his newly trimmed, newly cleaned fingernails. He had just spotted one single, tiny, black, distant speck, wafting high above the clotted and polychrome city. It could have been one speck of black Gobi dust on their porthole. He had better eyes than an eagle.

“I think that’s a space probe,” she said. “You generally hear, a big thump from the coil gun whenever they launch a probe, but they make them so light these days-they’re like space chickens.”

“That is not a chicken or a satellite, because I eat chickens and I know satellites. That is an unmanned light aircraft. It is a precision anti­personnel bomb.” Lucky turned to face her. “It was God who blessed me to marry you just now, for that aircraft is flying here to kill me.”

Sonja blinked. “Are you entirely sure about that?”

“Yes I am sure. They have trapped me in here without my weapons. I know these aircraft, for I use them to kill. The Badaulet has many en­emies. Soon I will die. And you, the bride of the Badaulet, you will die at my side. Heaven ordains all of this.”

“Okay, maybe Heaven does ordain it. Or maybe you will die at my side, Lucky. Because I am Red Sonja, I am the Angel of Harbin, and I have more enemies than you do. My enemies are more advanced and more cunning enemies than your enemies.”

“No, your enemies are only soft and womanly political enemies who live indoors. You don’t have my fierce, warlike enemies of the steppes.”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, my husband! Once a teenage girl came to see me, she said to me, ‘Are you Sonja Mihajlovic?’ and I said, Yes I am, where does it hurt?’ and she exploded. That girl blew herself up with a belt bomb! Pieces of her body flew into my body. She almost killed me! Just because of some stupid little nowhere village massacre that hap­pened many years ago! And I didn’t even burn those villages—my mother did all that! But I was inside a triage facility, so they slapped me right back together—wonderful work for a field hospital!”

The Badaulet hadn’t understood a single word of this blurted confes­sion, but his black eyes were wet with tender marital sympathy. “Are you afraid to die, my bride?”

“Oh no. Not really. Not anymore.” Sonja had once felt tremendous fear about dying, but all that nonsense had left her years ago.

The airborne bomb took on visible dimensions. It might have been a child’s kite, or a dried leaf, or a bedraggled crow. It was none of these things, for it was death on the wing. It was a small, sneaking, radar­transparent aircraft, so it flew rather clumsily.

“My comrades will avenge me for this,” declared the Badaulet, “be­cause I have faithfully avenged so many friends who perished in similar ways. Also, I have consummated my marriage before my wedding, which seemed a wicked thing to me—but now I know that part was surely divinely ordained. So I die happily!”

Sonja stood and spread her arms. She began to sing verse in Chinese.

“That was poetry,” said the Badaulet.

“Yes, that was my favorite poem in the whole world. It was written in the Tang dynasty, when China ruled the world.”

“This system understands your sad poetry much better than it under­stands your funny jokes.”

The flying bomb slammed into the fabric surface of the airlock, and it bounded off. It flopped and yawed and wobbled and caught itself in midair, and gained height for a second effort.

“I always wanted to die while making love or speaking poetry,” Sonja explained.

“If this air smelled better, I would oblige you.”

The bomb returned for its second pass. Sonja threw herself to the air­lock floor, curled into a fetal position, and clamped her hands over her ears.

Another sullen thump followed and the bomb bounded off again, harmlessly.

“Oh, get up, woman,” the Badaulet scolded. “Meet your death on your feet, for your girlish cowardice is so undignified.”

“Get down here and hit the deck, stupid! This increases our odds of survival!”

“There are no ‘odds for survival’! There is only what Heaven or­dains!”

Having endured many bombs in her past, Sonja ignored him, and doubled up tightly on the spotless airlock floor. “For God’s sake, why are they trying to hit me instead of that huge Mars dome over there? That is China’s greatest prestige construction, it’s got to be a much fatter target than I am!”

“Sonja, my dear wife Sonja: Let us swear to Heaven that if we survive this cowardly attack, we will track down these evildoers and personally kill them ourselves.”

“I love you so much for saying that! That is the greatest thing you have ever said to me! I swear I’ll do it, if you will do it with me.”

The plane smashed into the airlock and shattered. Brittle pieces of airplane plummeted out of their sight.

“Built by amateurs,” Sonja said, craning her neck to stare.

“I am glad that it broke to pieces,” said the Badaulet, still on his feet but panting harder, “but now we will smother to death in this sealed, trapped room.”

Sonja didn’t much mind meeting her own death. Still, to lose him, another husband, right before her eyes…

Sonja never heard the bomb explode.

SONJA’S SUPPORT TENT was scarlet and the moon shone through it.

Any narrow escape from death always made Sonja keenly sentimen­tal. Escaping death had taught her that life had many tags and rags, loose ends, unmet potentials. Sonja rather prided herself on her serene fatalism, but there were always issues she felt unhappy to leave unset­tled.

Escape from death put her in a generous, easygoing, affirmative mood. Because, now, all the days ahead of her were a free gift. Like icing on a pretty cake hit by a grenade.

“That drone bomb blew both my eardrums out,” she told her brother, George. “The overpressure broke both of them. So the state built me brand-new ears. I have new and advanced Chinese cyborg astronaut ears. My ears are officially fantastic.”

George blinked from distant Europe, on his video screen. “Sonja, how many attempts does this make on your life?”

Sonja blinked back. “Do you mean me personally?”

“Of course I mean you personally! Stop acting crazy.”

“Why would I keep count of that? After I went to New York and I saw that New York City had been nuked… Why does anyone ever bother to count the dead? I’m just one person! If you don’t count Radmila. Rad­mila was also there in New York City.”

“Are you talking to me openly about Radmila now?” George was amazed. “Are you on drugs, Sonja?”

“This is Jiuquan, we don’t trifle with stupid narcotics!” Sonja had a raging exfection. An “exfection” was very much like an infection. Ex­cept, instead of causing human flesh to waste away rapidly in a noisome mass of pus, an exfection was a kindly state-designed microbe that caused damaged human flesh to heal at more-than-human speed.

There were yellow, crusty, suppurating masses of exfection thriving all over Sonja’s bomb-scorched shins and forearms. The crude bomb had shocked her and burned her, but since the airlock was made almost entirely of fabric, there had been no killing shrapnel.

The Badaulet had faced his own death boldly standing, so the bomb had broken both his feet. Her lucky husband was in a distant safe house hidden in the inflated bowels of the city, undergoing some much­embarrassed Chinese medical hospitality.

“Sonja,” George told her, “if your brand-new ears are really working, then just for once, I want you to listen to me. I have an important pro­posal for you. I want you to accept it.”

“Do you ever talk to Radmila, George?”

“Do I ‘talk’ to Radmila? I have met Radmila! We were in the same room together in Los Angeles, just last month! Radmila was kind to me!” George was sincerely thrilled.

“Then, Djordje, would you please tell Radmila—that I’m sorry I kicked her ass, that time in New York? That was wrong of me. I’m sorry that I snap-kicked her in the guts and I knocked her senseless. I was so jealous about her boyfriend, I was out of my head about Montalban. I should never have gone to New York no matter how much Montalban coaxed me. Never again, I’m through with him now: I promise.”

“That may be more than Radmila wants to know. Radmila isn’t very well right now. Things went badly in Los Angeles… there were riots. And huge fires.”

“You do talk to Vera, though, don’t you, Djordje?”

“I do sometimes talk to Vera, when Vera lets me—and stop calling me ‘Djordje.’”

“So Djordje: Would you please tell Vera, just for me… “ Sonja stopped, at a loss for words. She had no idea what to say to Vera. She hadn’t said a word to Vera in nine years.

“Vera is not at her best lately either,” said George, and his worried tone rang in her head like a bronze bell. “No one knows where Vera is—she’s alive, but she’s hiding in the woods somewhere in some death zone. Sonja, give up whatever you think you’re doing there. Come stay with me in Vienna.”

“What? Why on Earth would I do that?”

“Because you’ll survive, woman! Like I’m surviving! I’m not like you, and Vera, and Radmila! I don’t want to save the world! I’m just a fixer, I’m a logistics man! But listen: The world is changing. The world is not collapsing—or, at least, not as fast as it was doing before. The world is turning into something we never imagined. My shipping business is great! Global business is heading for a big, long, global boom!”

“I can’t visit you there in Vienna, George. I just got married.”

“You did what? What, again? You married someone? Are you seri­ous?”

“My husbands are always serious.”

“Montalban doesn’t know anything about this new marriage of yours,” said George thoughtfully. “That’s going to be big news to John Montalban.”

“You tell John Montalban that I am his black angel. Tell John I’m your big, long, global boom. Tell John I’m his giant supervolcano.”

“Oh Sonja, poor Sonja. Now I know you’re not yourself. Come on: giant supervolcanoes? We don’t believe in giant volcanoes, do we? That’s talking nonsense.”

“Here in Jiuquan, all the people believe in that nonsense. The Chinese are convinced that a volcano will explode in America and wreck the world’s climate.”

“Why, because the Chinese wrecked the climate the first time?”

“Yes they did. With American help. And because here in Jiuquan, to­morrow’s second climate crisis won’t even slow them down. Not any­more. Not in the glorious future!”

“Sonja, it is definitely time for you to leave those cult compounds in China and rejoin the real world,” said George solemnly. “No volcano will do anything that matters for ten thousand aeons. Exotic Chinese supersti­tions from inside some weird space bubble, that’s what you’re talking about. You’ve had enough of that. That won’t work out for you. Trust me.”

“Weather scientists were right when they said that the Earth’s climate would crash. Why should geologists be wrong when they’re predicting the same thing? Science is the truth. Science is science. Science is the future.”

“Oh, what astronaut crap you’re talking now! How many rich and fa­mous scientists do you know? Did you ever see one lousy scientist get his own way in the real world? They’re all hopeless eggheads full of make­believe theories!”

George drew a breath—she could hear him puffing in the busy cores of her new eardrums. “Sonja, please. When you were out there in the field—crusading to save civilization, or whatever—I cared about that, I helped you! You remember how may times I helped you go save your fa­vorite Chinese civilization? But now they’re trying to kill you right there in their own spaceport! What kind of ‘civilization’ is that to save?”

“This is China. Their system works differently.”

“Look, I manage global logistics, so I learn something new every day,” George boasted. “I can traffic in people like you! I’ll export you from China. I’ll export you right here to Vienna! When Inke heard that you were hurt again, she cried!”

Finally, Sonja was touched. Inke Zweig. Good old Inke. She had once spent a family Christmas together with Inke, when George, thank­fully, wasn’t around.

First, Inke took her to Mass, insisting that she kneel and pray. Then Inke took her home, and Inke got very drunk on dainty, reeking, Ger­man herbal liqueurs. Then Inke, sobbingly, told Sonja all about her life. Inke vomited up her soul right at her kitchen table.

It was a boozy, sisterly, holiday heart-to-heart, all about Inke’s house, and her kitchen, and her kids, and her favorite cabbage and sausage recipes, and the will of God, and her husband, and Inke’s grinding, life­blighting fear of her hostile and terrible world.

Inke was intelligent—she was perceptive enough to know that the world “vas in lethal danger —but Inke was too timid to do anything useful.

So, Inke had married, instead. Inke had forfeited every aspect of human agency to the man in her life. Inke had hidden herself in her thick fog of housework and piety, where she could cook, pray, and have babies.

And this strategy even made sense for the woman, this self-abnegation was Inke’s version of a heroic act. Inke Zweig was a sweet and tender and vulnerable creature. Inke loved her kids dearly. Inke’s kids were even great kids, because they didn’t know one single useful thing about reality. They thought their mom and dad were terrific and all-knowing and proud and prosperous.

Her kids even loved their aunt Sonja, for no particular reason that Sonja understood. They gave their aunt Sonja fancy Christmas presents from prestigious Viennese stores.

“Sonja, you are family: Inke always says that. Inke would love to look after you,” George promised. “You wouldn’t have to see me at all! I’m on the road most days. You could have your own private wing of the man­sion! Or—if my global business keeps booming—you can have your own apartment building!”

“Vienna is pretty,” she told him. “I think you made a good choice, working there.”

“Sonja, you won’t survive. To get killed—like our others were killed? —that was tragic. But to want to be killed, like you so obviously want to be killed? That is sheer foolishness!”

“Djordje, suppose that I go to Europe, and I lose my temper there, and I kill you?”

“Oh, you would never do that!” George lied. “Any more than I would ever kill you.”

Sonja thought about his proposal for all of fifteen seconds. No, his sad, meager, bourgeois little notions wouldn’t do.

“George,” she told him sweetly, “I want you to help me leave Ji­uquan.”

“Great, great! Excellent news! Now you’re talking sense! You name the date!”

“I want you to find some Provincial Reconstruction Team—Acquis, Dispensation, whoever—located in central Asia. Well outside the borders of China, out in the desert, where the wild people are. Get them to put in a formal request for my aid and expertise. It’s always much easier for me to travel outside China when the state has the formal documents.”

“All right, fine, one small moment here,” said George, “let me use my correlation engine! With this amazing new business tool, I can change your life from right here in my chair! My new network engine is Californian! Inten years the whole Earth will have a new economy!”

Sonja’s keen ears heard George busily tapping at keys. “’Scythia’?” George said, almost at once. “Would ‘Scythia’ do for you? Scythia is a poststate disaster region in the middle of Asia. You could go anywhere in Asia and claim you were going to ‘Scythia.’”

“I know about Scythia. I also need special travel gear, George. Some private-militia, hunter-killer, Scorpion-tag-team, covert-penetration gear.” Sonja paused. “That’s not for me. It’s a wedding gift.”

This demand made George unhappy. “You know that I stopped facil­itating that market. Those years were the bad old years. Those years are behind both of us now.”

“I’m sure you didn’t forget how to globally traffic in arms.”

“Sonja, don’t say that sort of thing about me. That hurts my feelings. I am paying to do this for you, and I will not pay to see you get killed in a desert. I want you to not get killed, that is my program. Forget rushing into the wild desert with many big guns. That is not practical.”

“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 nuclear­powered 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?”

Sonja was in Jiuquan, so of course microbes sounded familiar to her. “George, no one wants any ancient, wild microbes. Those microbes are backward and feudal. Those microbes are of academic interest only. You want Jiuquan’s fully advanced internal gut microbes, created in the state’s genetic-recombinatorial labs. Those microbes are state secrets, and very valuable.”

“Oh no, I want those good old-fashioned all-natural microbes,” George said firmly. “Just-don’t scrape any nasty goo out of some Asian corpse. I want the genetic sequences of the microbes. Just the pure data. Could you supply that microbe data to me? Could you do that, Sonja?”

“Probably. I am a public health officer here. Yes, I could do that.”

“Excellent!”

“If I get you those Scythian microbes—will you ship me what I need for my military operations, with no more trifling?”

“Yes.”

SONJA METHODICALLY READIED HERSELF for vengeance: to find out who to kill, why, and how. Vengeance was a rather more thor­ough, thoughtful, and comprehensive effort than it had once been for Sonja.

When Sonja had first arrived in China—fresh off the boat at the age of nineteen—she had known that she was heading for a cataclysm. She had desired that fate, she had sought that out: the bold desperado, with­out a homeland, joining a foreign legion.

She’d instantly fallen in with much bolder desperadoes. All the men Sonja had loved were keen-eyed, domineering, headstrong, fearless men. They were men at home in hell. However, their courage, while al­ways necessary and always in short supply, was not what was needed to make a cataclysm stop.

On the contrary: Raw courage was superb at provoking cataclysms. Any gutsy teenager, boldly careless of his life, could empty his gun into some archduke and create colossal chaos. Stopping cataclysms required imposing order.

Sonja had come to understand the order as the hard part of the work. To end a war meant either restoring an old order, or invoking a new order. Neither work was easy. Order, unlike war, required unglamorous skills such as political savvy, business sense, and rugged logistics.

Restoring order required a crisp, succinct articulation of the big pic­ture and why one’s efforts mattered in that regard. It required a tre­mendous knowledge of details. It needed the patience to build a long-lasting, big-scale enterprise that would not collapse instantly from guerrilla attacks. And it needed a cold-blooded ability to make firm choices among disgusting alternatives.

George was a merchant and a fixer, never the kind of man she liked. Yet George, for all his countless demerits, had a definite rapport for ubiquitous systems. George had a positive genius for handling border delays, security compliances, fuel costs, detours on the planet’s weather-shattered roads and bridges, documentation hurdles, no-fly zones and confiscatory carbon-footprint taxes, port congestion, cargo security, reg­ulations both in-state and offshore, liaisons with manufacturers, out­sized and overweight shipping modules… Boring things, dull things. Yet George could ship things to her, and that mattered.

Bravery mattered much less. A brave woman could be “very brave” in a field hospital. She might hold the hand of a dying child while it coughed up blood. That moral act required a courage that left dents all over one’s soul, while, in the meantime, any tedious holdup in the flow of medical supplies could kill off entire populations, not tender children killed tragically in their ones and twos, but masses killed statistically in their hundreds and thousands.

Privates and sergeants bragged about courage: digging foxholes and kicking in doors. Colonels and generals talked soberly about supply trains and indirect fire. Barbarism, disorder, chaos, and murder were the ground state of mankind, so foxholes and ambushes were in infinite supply. Public order was about leveraging the things that were in short supply: with sturdy supply trains and superior firepower.

It had taken Sonja quite some time to comprehend all this, because, as a nineteen-year-old adventuress, she had been far too busy learning Chinese, sopping up a patchy medical training, and establishing her personality cult. But she had finally learned such things, well enough. She’d had teachers.

The fortunes of war favored the bold, if the bold survived. Sonja was nothing if not bold. Eventually, an important apparatchik had de­scended from the murky heavens of Beijing’s inner circles to manifest a personal interest in her glorious career.

This gentleman was Mr. Zeng, a thoughtful, open-eyed chief of the “Scientific Research Bureau.” Which was to say, Mr. Zeng was a Chi­nese secret policeman.

Having been publicly befriended by the important Mr. Zeng, Sonja had become a de facto member of Zeng’s “clique,” or “power center,” or “faction,” or “guan-xi network,” as those terms were generally phrased by offshore Beijingologists. The twelve weeks Sonja had spent in high­society Beijing as Zeng’s “protegee,” or “client,” or “escort,” or, not to put too fine a point on it, as one of his mistresses, was the closest Sonja had ever come to achieving true power within the Chinese power structure.

Mr. Zeng was a top domestic spy in an authoritarian, cybernetically hyperorganized, ultrawealthy nation-state in a calamitous public emer­gency. So Mr. Zeng had extreme and scary and even lunatic amounts of power. This power did not make Zeng happy. He faced many serious problems.

His beloved country was measled all over with Manhattan Project­style technofixes for his nation’s desperate distress. As state secrets, these bold, wild projects were so opaque that nobody could number them. Furthermore, Beijing’s cliques were so corrupted that they might well have sold these projects to somebody. The Acquis and Dispensation doted on buying China’s crazy projects, and, mostly, shutting them down.

Mr. Zeng clearly derived some benefit from his personal liaison with Sonja. As a woman, Sonja lightened a few of his many cares of office. Sonja would not have called their activity a “love affair,” as she didn’t much care for him personally. Still, for her, it was definitely a transfor­mative encounter.

Mr. Zeng was not merely a top spy, but also a Stanford-educated bio­chemist who spoke four languages. Zeng was a searingly intelligent workaholic. The only trace of whimsy in Zeng’s character was the guilty pleasure he took in the garish and decadent entertainment vehicles of Mila Montalban. Everyone in Zeng’s sophisticated social circle doted on gaudy American pop entertainment. Hollywood was so entirely alien to their deadly crises that it seemed to refresh their spirits as nothing else could,

Mr. Zeng was an icily rational gentleman. It showed in the methodi­cally sacrificial way that he played board games with his cronies.

In their pillow conversations, Zeng gently explained to Sonja that “saving civilization” (her professed goal in life) had very little to do with her brashly tackling emergencies with her own two hands. No, if any civilization was going to be “saved” at all—said Mr. Zeng—the planet’s civilization was in so much trouble that it could only be saved by something new, huge, unexpected, extreme, and indeed almost in­describable.

The planet’s current power structure: the sudden rise of the Acquis and the Dispensation, and the abject collapse of nation-states generally, with the large exception of China—that power structure was predicated on arranging just such a situation. The planet was dotted all over with radically extreme experiments intended to “save civilization.”

The problem was that most of these innovations did not work. They could never work, because they were too far-fetched. It cost a lot to try such experiments. Worse yet, it was much harder to shut down failed ex­periments that it was to invent brand-new ones.

The largest such intervention in the world was, of course, Chinese. It was the Chinese effort to geologically engineer the Himalayas so that China’s rivers would once again flow. China had performed this feat with the twentieth century’s single most radical world-changing tech­nology: massive hydrogen bombs.

Mr. Zeng had been among the people planning and executing that national effort. Chinese geoengineering had not been an easy plan to explain to concerned foreigners. China had gotten its way in the matter by offering to drop hydrogen bombs on anyone who objected.

Glumly recognizing China’s implacable need to survive, the planet’s other power players had bowed to the Chinese ultimatum. There was a gentleman’s agreement to let the Chinese get on with it, and to not dwell too painfully and too publicly on their insane explosions digging monster ice lakes in the Himalayas. Instead, the Acquis and Dispensa­tion turned up their quiet diplomatic pressure, while enjoying the ben­efits of some ancillary planetary cooling.

That was how the serious players worked while literally saving the modern world.

So—Zeng continued gently, playing with her curls—if Sonja truly wanted to “save civilization,” she should not continue to do that by tak­ing small-arms fire in her medical tents at the edges of thirst-crazed cities. Serious-minded statesmen did not bother with such activities, since soldiery was one of the vilest of callings and best reserved for angry and ignorant young men. Instead of behaving in that backward way, Sonja should consider volunteering for duty at the highly prestigious Ji­uquan Space Launch Center, where there were extremely advanced and unexpected medical experiments under way. These antiplague measures involved combining microbes and medical scanners, and the implications of their success were extreme, even more extreme than blasting many large new holes in an Asian mountain range.

Sonja did not, at first, respond to Mr. Zeng’s recruitment proposal. She knew for a fact that Zeng was a secret policeman, and she knew in her heart that he was a mass murderer.

Mr. Zeng was not a small-scale, face-to-face killer in the bold way of the warriors that she knew and loved best. Mr. Zeng was the kind of killer who deployed a nuclear warhead the way he might set a black go­stone on a game board.

So, instead of going to Jiuquan, Sonja boldly volunteered to take some of those newfangled scanners and microbes and test them out in practice in the field. Mr. Zeng remarked that this was characteristic of her. He said that it was endearing, and that he had expected her to say that. He praised her bravery, patted her bottom wistfully, gave her a number of valuable parting gifts, and told her to stay in touch.

So Sonja swiftly fled from Zeng’s embraces and took his spotless state-secret equipment to the filthy mayhem in Harbin, where that equipment more or less worked. It worked against all sane expectations and it worked radically and it sometimes even worked beautifully.

Mostly, it worked because no one in her barefoot-medical team, in­cluding Sonja herself, had ever quite understood what they were sup­posed to do with cheap lightbulbs that made flesh as clear as glass, or black-box devices that combated infections by “fatally confusing” germs. In Harbin, everyone had made a lot of valuable fresh mistakes.

Before the Harbin episode, Red Sonja had been notorious within paramilitary circles, but after Harbin, Sonja had become an official na­tional heroine. Which was to say, she was a kind of sleekly feminine hood ornament for the state’s least-imaginable enterprises.

To refuse such a role was unthinkable. To accept it was unimagin­able. Passionately embracing the unimaginable—that always moved the world more effectively than horribly embracing the unthinkable.

This was the course of action which had directly brought Sonja to her present predicament. And she had had methods by which to deal with such problems. Zeng’s finest gift to her was a word: a simple, quiet word. That word was the password to a clandestine web service, run by Zeng’s intelligence apparatus. Like Zeng himself, this service was in the state, and of the state, and for the state, and yet it was somehow not quite of the state.

Zeng’s gift was best described as a Chinese power-clique I Ching, a political fortune-reader. It read the tangled, subtle Chinese nation as one might read a sacred text.

The Chinese nation consisted of the vast, ubiquitous, state-owned computational infrastructure, plus the fallible human beings suppos­edly controlling that.

The state machine was frankly beyond any human comprehension. While the human beings were human: they were a densely webbed so­cial network of mandarins, moguls, spies, financiers, taipans, ideo­logues, pundits, backstage fixers, social climbers, hostesses, mistresses, cops, generals, clan elders, and gray eminences; not to mention the mid-twenty-first-century equivalents of triad brotherhoods, price-fixing rings, crooked cops, yoga-fanatic martial-arts cults, and other subter­ranean social tribes of intense interest to the likes of Mr. Zeng.

Sonja did not fully trust Zeng’s I Ching because, just five months after entrusting the password to her, Mr. Zeng himself had been killed. Along with thirty-seven high-ranking members of his exalted clique—many people even more senior than Mr. Zeng himself—Mr. Zeng had smothered inside an airtight government basement in a Beijing emer­gency shelter.

This terrorist assassination, or mass suicide, or political liquidation—­it might have even been a simple tragic accident during a heavy dust storm—had come with no visible warning. If Zeng’s gift were truly use­ful, then, presumably, Zeng should have used it to avoid his own death,

So: Maybe Zeng’s ambivalent gift was nothing more than a supersti­tion, a pseudo-scientific magic charm against the pervasive fear so com­mon to people in any authoritarian society. Maybe this service was a manly gesture that Zeng offered to all his women—not because it was helpful, but because it made his women feel better. There were times when Sonja despised herself, and felt sure that this was true.

Still, Sonja used it, because—as Zeng had pointed out—she herself was featured in it.

In Zeng’s weird network of slowly pulsing simulated blobs, she, Sonja Mihajlovic, was a small, fluffy blue cloud.

She was a little fluffy cloud, and, since her role was to legitimate the medical activities inside the Jiuquan Space Launch Center, she was a cloud of political obfuscation. Her purpose was to be the Angel of Harbin, and thereby to allow the Chinese state to quietly inject IDtags into every Chinese citizen, to quietly compile massive DNA databases of every individual, and to thoroughly scan the Chinese body of every Chinese individual, head-to-toe, at a cellular level.

To the extent that her reputation for bravery and integrity would stretch to cover this, Sonja was further to ensure the global credibility of the national blood samples, the microbial stool samples, the lymph sam­ples and brain scans, the exotic probiotic gut organisms of possibly Mar­tian descent… Everything and anything that China did to survive.

Totalitarianism was blatant, old-fashioned, and stupid: it stamped the face of the public with the sole of a boot, for as long as it could do that. A ubiquitarian state was different. Because it flung one, or ten, or a thousand, or a million boots every nanosecond, when no human being could possibly see or feel what a “nanosecond” was.

Sonja understood her role. She knew its consequences and she felt that she knew what she was doing. She chose to do these things, not for her own sake, but for the cause of public health.

Sonja had come to realize, through her own experience, that public health had little to do with any individual conscience. If a million peo­ple were dying, you didn’t heal them by crying over one of them. The issue was not the pain and grief to be found in anyone sickroom, or one house, one street, one neighborhood, city, province—it was all about massive scaling powers, exponential powers-of-ten.

Did people die, or did you save people? People died with statistical regularity, until you found and used some power large and strong enough to avert their woe.

When that power reached a certain level of invasive ubiquity, the power of computation would directly confront and crush the power of disease. Because they were two rival powers. Diseases were everywhere, while surveillance was everyware. Everyware crushed diseases, subtly, comprehensively, remorselessly.

The sensorweb could scan the actions of bacteria invading a human body, and, like a Chinese army general, it could defeat that invading horde in real time.

Even an invading bacterium had a certain military logic: any germ had to observe its environment within the human body, orient itself, “decide” on a course of action, and then execute that strategy.

The state was far better at grasping such strategies than any bacterium could be. Once it had a human body firmly staked out in its scanners, it would wage a computational war-in-detail against internal disorders, baf­fling, frustrating, starving, arresting, and poisoning bacteria.

Wherever the bionational complex spread its pervasion, diseases gasped their last. Diseases simply could not compete. What the state’s nationware could do within the individual human body, it could also do at the level of streets, cities, provinces-everywhere within the Great Firewall of China.

This great feat was real, for she herself had seen it, and had done it in Harbin. It would take the world a while to understand what that ac­complishment meant. It always took the world a while to comprehend such things. But it meant that infectious diseases were doomed. Dis­eases had been technically outclassed, they would not survive. That was a far greater medical breakthrough than older feats like sanitation, or vaccines, or antibiotics.

Bacteria would surely fight back—they always did. But this time, they were done. They could mutate against mere antibiotics, but they could never hide from the scanners. Being single-celled creatures, bacteria could never get any smarter. So epidemics, without exception, were going to be tracked down, outflanked, outperformed, and exterminated.

That was not the end of the grand story, either: that was only its be­ginning. One day soon there would be no hunger in China. People out­side Jiuquan-outside China-they lacked basic understanding of the potential of a human gut with fully advanced, reengineered bacteria. But: Those newly farmed microbes made old-fashioned digestion, that catch-as-catch-can spew of wild internal microbes, seem as backward and primitive as hunting-and-gathering.

The new Chinese microbes turned people’s insides into booming in­ternal factories of energy and protein: so tomorrow there would be no famine. The Chinese state was going to re-line the nation’s guts with the same seeming ease that the Chinese had once covered the planet’s feet with cheap shoes.

Never any more starving children, no more human bodies reduced to sticks of limbs and racks of protruding ribs. Obsolete. Defunct. Over. Nothing left of that vast tragedy. Not one microbial trace.

So: Two mighty Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine and Pestilence—they had already been shot dead in China. They were titans in scale, so it would take them maybe forty years to fall from their thundering black horses and hit the dust for good. But they were over, doomed. And she, Sonja, Angel of Harbin, ranked among the victors.

Plague and Starvation would be history. Their apocalyptic depreda­tions would be forgotten as if such things had never occurred. In the fu­ture, they would have to be explained to people.

That still left Sonja’s two other Apocalyptic enemies, War and Death, still very much in the planetary saddle, but nevertheless, in Jiuquan—­in Jiuquan! —she’d just been scorched by an antipersonnel bomb and yet she was going to be on her feet, healthy, unmarked, clear-eyed, and partially bionic, in a week. In ten days, at the most.

Developments of this scale, the most grandiose scale possible: These were the schemes that kept Sonja standing firm at her duties. Forged in the heat of combat, she was an iron pillar of the state.

Except on Mr. Zeng’s analytical screens, where the Angel of Harbin was not an iron pillar but a vulnerable fluffy blue cloud.

With her bioplastic notebook uneasily poised on her exfected knees in her watery hospital bed, Sonja saw, with a sinking, seasick sensation, that her blue cloud looked distinctly stormy. In Zeng’s world, this was the hexagram sigil and omen signifying that one was (in a colloquial translation) “getting too big for one’s boots,” that “the heat was on,” that “tomorrow’s prospects were dim.”

As she studied these cryptic hints, Sonja realized for the first time that Mr. Zeng’s service had a name in English: it was a “correlation engine.” She had been using a correlation engine all this time, in another lan­guage and another context. Apparently these radical techniques had es­caped Chinese state secrecy, and become so common lately that even Western businesspeople like George saw fit to use them.

Sonja certainly was not in “business.” Sonja was a state heroine. Prof­its were not her concern—but purges were. As a state operative, if you didn’t already know for sure who the chosen victim was and why, then that victim was probably you.

This established, Sonja had to discover who had tried to kill her. There were three basic varieties of killers in China: the people support­ing the state, the traitors against the state, and, worse yet, the people like herself and Mr. Zeng, the people definitely with the state yet not emi-nently of the state, people who were plausibly deniable and eminently disposable.

After some deft string pulling, the local police saw fit to share the re­sults of their investigations with Sonja.

The attack plane had been vaporized by its payload of explosive. However, one of its wings and parts of its landing gear had cracked and fallen off. Those fragments were rich with criminal evidence.

For the Jiuquan police, any grain of stray pollen was a clue that blazed like an asteroid. The police knew the range of the plane, from its wing shape and its fuel capacity. They knew, roughly, what landscapes it must have overflown, because of the pollen lodged in its crude seams. They further knew that the plane had been hand-built, recently, in the desert, from snap-together panels of straw plywood.

It was a toy airplane made in a secret bandit camp—made from pressed Mongolian hay. The plane’s lightweight panels were so care­lessly glued that they might have been assembled by a ten-year-old child.

As a further deliberate insult, the plane had somehow been salted with DNA from several high-ranking officials who had once been major figures of the Chinese state. Fake DNA evidence was no surprise to the local police, of course—even the cheapest street gangs knew how to muddy a DNA trail, these days. Still, given that the police in Jiuquan were absolutely sure to study DNA evidence, this was a nose-thumbing taunt, a knowing terrorist provocation. It showed a mean-spirited cun­ning that could only be the work of true subversives.

So, Sonja had the profile of her enemies: they were not of the Chi­nese state. They were ragtag political diehards, pretending to state con­nections, skulking outside the state’s borders, and trying to liquidate her. They were anti-state bandits who wanted revenge.

It had never been Sonja’s intention to provoke revenge attacks. Sonja had never wanted to kill anyone. Her first jaunt into China had been as a teenage camp follower in a medical relief column. Its poorly armored trucks were piled to bulging with rations, water barrels, tents, cots, band­ages, antibiotics… Not thirty kilometers from port they’d been am­bushed with rockets and small arms, their convoy shot to pieces and everything of value stolen by feral, screeching, dust-caked, rag-clad ban­dits who had scrambled back into the barricaded rubble that had once been their town.

That was Sonja’s introduction to the true situation on the ground, and what followed had been unspeakably worse. As Sonja’s first hus­band had put it: “It is necessary to incinerate the towns in order to save the cities,” and he had incinerated many such before he met the death he’d always courted.

Ernesto had been a brave man from a distant corner of the Earth who had come to offer his hands and his heart and his medical knowledge and his strong, shapely, noble back to a stricken people—and, as many did, Ernesto had swiftly found it necessary to shoot many of them. Specifically, Ernesto had to shoot the gangs of malcontents who inter­fered with his redemption of the masses.

Nobody called Ernesto the “Angel” of anything, because when he sent his convoys tearing through the Chinese landscape he moved like a bloody hacksaw through a broken leg.

Sonja had been his wife, a caress and a whisper of comfort to Ernesto in his darkest hours, yet China didn’t lack for bitter people who re­membered things they had done. Along with many similar things Red Sonja herself had done since, in the same cause.

So: This latest episode of attempted revenge was part of her older story. It was simply a smaller and more personal story, because the scale of the havoc had dwindled. Bandits had once skulked in screaming thousands in the ruins of China’s major cities. Bandits were now skulk­ing in crazy dozens in the dusty wilderness far outside the state’s armed boundaries. They were still bandits.

Bandit warlords came in a thousand factions, but they were all the same. Most were already gone, and the rest had to go.

AN UNMANNED POLICE VEHICLE deposited Sonja and her new husband at the ancient slopes of the Great Wall. Then it turned and fled with an unseemly haste back toward Jiuquan, leaving the two of them abandoned under the dazzling blue tent of central Asian sky.

If they were lucky in their lethal venture, they would never be seen by anyone. Sonja and the Badaulet were now a two-person “Scorpion team.” Their task was to venture across the wilderness, spy out the camp of their enemies, call in a covert strike, and have the bandits an­nihilated.

They had both done such work before, so the chance to do it in tan­dem was a blessing to them as a couple.

The Great Wall of China was a sullenly eroded, ridge-backed dragon on the Earth. The color of dirt—for it was mostly handmade of dirt—it wriggled over an astounding expanse of central Asia. In the state’s recent hours of need, technicians had brusquely drilled fresh holes and topped the Wall with the state’s surveillance wands, transforming an ancient barrier into a modern surveillance network.

The new Wall consisted of the old Wall, plus tall, thin, gently sway­ing observation towers. Each needlelike tower was blankly topped with a mystical black head, a sphere devouring every trace of light that touched its opaque surface.

No merely human being could outguess what the state watched with these towering wands, for, potentially, the state surveilled everything within the Wall’s huge line of sight. Not just passively absorbing light from the landscape, but sorting that light as data, sifting through it, searching it, collimating and triangulating and extrapolating from it… comparing each new nanosecond, pixel by pixel, to the ever­growing records of its previous observations.

The state’s impassive visual ubiquity rambled on for thousands and thousands of closely linked kilometers, rooted in the ancient bricks and dirt of the longest, heaviest human structure ever created, its black tow­ers like a fruiting bread mold in the immemorial substance of the planet’s greatest fortress. There was not a single human guard along the new Wall. Like astronauts on the Martian surface, people were politi­cally glorious yet practically unnecessary.

Hand in hand, Sonja and the Badaulet skulked past the monster ruins of a once-thriving tourist town. A life spent on horseback had made the Badaulet bowlegged, yet now he had an odd, spry, hop-along shuffle, for the Jiuquan clinic had done extraordinary things to the bro­ken bones of his feet.

The medical operatives had also tactfully replaced Lucky’s bomb­blown ears, so that the two of them no longer needed any earplug trans­lation units. Their new language translators were sophisticated onboard devices the size of flecks of steel, and they ran on blood sugar.

These sensory devices in her head—alien impositions—joined the chips of bone shrapnel lodged deep in Sonja’s body. For seven years, she’d been part of a zealot’s personal graveyard. Tiny chips of the dead woman’s bones were melting away in her flesh, year by year. Sonja was metabolizing them.

Sonja was sure she would get used to her ears. As for the presence of another woman’s bones in her own flesh: those had expanded her op­tions. Vera, Radmila, Biserka: they were merely identical clones, while Sonja had become a hybrid chimera. Life always had fresh options for survivors.

This desert town in Gansu Province had once catered to wealthy tourists, gallivanting from around the world to tramp the Great Wall. Like all globalized tourist towns, the place had once been sophisticated. The town was now deader than Nineveh, for an urban water war had broken out here.

Water wars had a classic look all over China. They were small wars, or large deadly riots, fought with small arms: with automatic rifles, shoulder rockets, and improvised bombs.

The weapons were wielded by people who had once been cheerfully peaceable neighbors, but were crazed with hunger, thirst, and despair. It was dreadfully simple for China’s host of workshops and forges to manufacture rifles. Cheap, simple rifles were much easier to make than, for instance, little homemade robot airplanes. Their computerized sights were brutally accurate. They were rifles reborn as digital cameras: point, click, and kill.

Some part of the civilian population here had hurriedly surrounded the last water wells. They had hastily piled up barricades to survive the stinging sniper fire from the excluded.

Thereafter, the besieged held the water, but those outside the walls could run around to make more guns and bombs. The dead city was a visible history of wild sorties, doomed assaults, random acts of arson, mining and countermining.

The stricken town, which had once sold placid postcard views of its Great Wall, was a crazy mass of tiny walls. These small walls had been piled up, in thirst and heat and darkness, by thousands of human hands, using hand tools.

The walled divisions tore through former neighborhoods. They were probably ethnic divisions: between the local Han Chinese, the Hui Chi­nese, Uighurs and Kazakhs and Kyrgiz, as well as a few hundred trapped foreign tourists and businesspeople, unable to believe how suddenly their pleasantly exotic life had gone to the extremely bad.

With every human soul covered head to foot in windy torrents of black Gobi dust, with the air thick with miasma from merciless urban fires, no previous social distinction would have made much difference on the ground. A water war wasn’t a mere civil war but a hell on Earth, where you either seized water or you died.

Breathing through cloth, bricking up the windows, heaving their pos­sessions from their homes and stores to form impromptu barricades, struggling to climb through burnt-out high-rises to dominate the free­fire zones… in a matter of weeks, with hand tools and their own backs, they had churned their urban fabric into this vast, scumbled-up, fatal labyrinth: a graveyard of sandbags, cruel palisades, sharpened stakes of iron reinforcing rod, high-piled, bullet-riddled washing machines, the twisted hulks of bomb-seared cars.

Eventually, the survivors had been led on an organized long march, the weakest of them dropping like flies, to some new locale where the state guaranteed them some water. The people of their city had never come back to their death trap. If they ever returned, they would never again live in this doomed, unsustainable way. They would be living in Jiuquan-style bubbles where every drop of the water was micromanaged by state machines.

The rains had been good this year. The ruined town was rankly over­grown with tall, weedy, sulfur-yellow flowers.

It took them four hours to march outside the line of sight of the Great Wall, with its mystically swaying and Taoistically impartial wands. This effort achieved, they stripped themselves and buried every traceable relic of China in a cairn of anonymous rocks.

Sonja then made a special point of plucking the state’s radio ID tags from the flesh of their arms. That was a simple matter when you knew what you were doing, and, when done correctly, it was only slightly bloody.

They then climbed, barefoot, wincing, cautious, and entirely naked, over the crest of a long hill to the predetermined spot where George had hidden his bounty.

An unmanned cargo helicopter sat there. It was a kind entirely new to Sonja, though she considered herself a connoisseur of helicopters. Crazily lightweight and transparent, all veins and segments, it looked like a sleeping dragonfly.

It bore Indian markings, and if it had really fluttered in from whatever was left of India, it must have traveled a fantastic distance.

The cargo helicopter was lying precisely where its global positioning system had placed it, inside a rugged little declivity, with poor lines of sight but a decent amount of sunshine for its exhausted batteries.

Sonja had a hard-won philosophy when it came to long marches through harsh territory. Sonja believed in traveling light. Her cargo con­sisted mostly of fabrics.

Everything else within the helicopter, she had ordered as a wedding gift for the Badaulet. The Badaulet had no such minimalist philosophy about his own goods. On the contrary: He had a gorgeously barbarian “more is more” aesthetic.

The Badaulet’s gifts were a sniper rifle, a plastic pistol, binoculars, a gleaming titanium multitool, self-heating meals for those of an Islamic persuasion, a canteen, chemical lightsticks, paracord, a radio, a razor­keen ceramic dagger, a global positioning system, ammunition, and a veritable host of horrible little marble-sized land mines.

The Badaulet was painfully shy about his nudity, so he quickly tun­neled into his desert camouflage. He swiftly disappeared. His new uni­form was spotted with colored chromatophores, like the hide of a squid. It had a similar bush hat, with a face net.

Sonja’s signature garment was her blindingly white robe. It was a sim­ple baggy mess of dust-repellent fabric. Any fabric that was “dust­repellent” was also somewhat skin-repellent, so it was a stiff and unforgiving thing.

Sonja lashed the fabric to her wrists and waist and ankles with her signature magic charms, which George had included in the ship­ment. Long, crisscrossed black cords, with hexagrams, yin-yangs, lucky ideograms, crucifixes, Stars of David, tiny Muslim moon-and-­crescents.

Ernesto had once told her that only a madwoman would dress in such fashion. She had made herself a big white target for snipers.

But Sonja, who unlike Ernesto was still alive, had sensed in some oc­cult fashion, she had known, that the war surrounding them was not about their supposed enemies: the real war was about the dust. It was about the black dust, gray dust, red dust, yellow dust, that catastrophic omnipresent filth that penetrated every aspect of human existence. Peace would come—it would only come—when brought by cleanli­ness. Cleanliness brought by something—an angel, a saint, a prophet, a machine, a system, an entity, anyone, anything capable—that was in the dust but never of the dust.

Time and again Sonja had walked into the hellholes where they stored the sick and dying—the dead factories, the empty schoolyards­where, at the first sight of her, a medic without any dust, the moaning, sobbing crowds fell silent…

In the midst of the filthiest inferno, there were people and things and actions and thoughts that were not of that inferno. They were beyond the grip of hell.

The people could never leave hell with bullets. They needed a figure shining and white and clean who would hold out her two compassion­ate hands and pour fresh cleaning water on their split and aching faces. Despair was killing them faster than any physical threat.

It was they, not she, who had begun hanging magic charms on her­—the knickknacks they’d been clutching in their desperate hope of re­demption. She looked different, she was different, and they were hanging meaning on her.

They needed to hope in order to live, and for a dying public, a pub­lic image brought hope. A radiance that might come to them, bearing a handheld lamp: radiance to the bedside of the sufferer at the midnight of the human soul. There to wash the filth from their suffering feet.

Hope would cure when all other methods failed, when other treat­ments weren’t even noticed. True anguish, the killing kind of despair, could only be relieved by ritual… If the sky turned black and the air was brown, an armed general could reason and bluster and bribe and threaten—not a soul would stir, even to save their own lives. An emo­tionally damaged teenage girl could drift by, in spotless white, dangling superstitions and jabbering lines of poetry, and they would rise as one and they would follow.

At this point in her life, Sonja found it hard to believe that she had done those things. But she had done them. Repeatedly. Spontaneously, tirelessly, in inspired trances, drawing strength from the light she saw in others. Extreme times pulled strange qualities from people. There were times when it helped a great deal to know that one was not entirely human.

Some men called her crazy—her second husband, and her third, in particular—but they were merely putting their own madness into better order by piling accusations on her. Because if Red Sonja was the crazy one, why were they all dead?

The Angel of Harbin had the gift of giving. Those who took it in the proper spirit, lived. The others… men, mostly…

From time immemorial, when a soldier left a battlefield, his body racked, his nerves shattered, for “rest and relaxation”… “Rest and re­laxation” were the last things on any man’s mind: any soldier fresh from battle immediately sought out a woman. If she merely opened her legs for him—if she said and she did nothing else whatsoever, if she asked him no questions, if she didn’t even speak his language—all the better for him…

The Badaulet still had no horse. Sonja knew this as a failing on her part. There should have been a horse in George’s shipment. But George, who was no poet, did not care to ship live animals in a helicop­ter, so Sonja could supply only a rough equivalent: a clumsy and grace­less off-road pack robot.

She examined the robot with sorrow. When the crumbling Great Wall had been a vivid, living Chinese enterprise—for in its dynastic heyday, the Great Wall of China was no passive barrier, it had also been a highway, an imperial mail route, and the world’s fastest visual tele­graph—any Chinese bride would have endowed her warlord with a horse.

A world-famous “blood-sweating horse.” Sonja had seen gorgeous Tang dynasty pottery of those horses, and Chinese bronzes as well, with stallions as the emblems of Chinese state power at its most confident, serene, and globally minded. Superior Chinese war ponies, earth­pounding, indomitable, fit to run straight to Persia with wind-streaming manes and dainty hooves like swallows, surely the most beautiful horses that civilization had ever offered to barbarism.

Instead, she had this lousy robot. Hauled from its plastic mounts on the copter wall, the ungainly device mulishly escaped control and scam­pered straight up the harsh slopes of a nearby hillside. Sonja hated the robot instantly. She knew that it was bound to be a grievance.

The pack robot was as ugly as a dented bucket. It featured four eerily independent legs. Each leg swiveled from a corner of its cheap and bru­tally durable chassis.

Since it was not a beautiful male animal like a Chinese Tang dynasty stallion, the robot did not trot with any dark animal grace. Instead, it moved by detailed computer analysis—as if it were playing high-speed chess with the surface of the Earth.

This meant that, on a cracked, eroded, thirty-degree slope of bitterly eroded Gobi Desert rock, a slope that would break the hairy legs of the toughest Mongol ponies and require rope and pitons from any human being, the robot scuttled along like a cockroach. Ever untiring, un­knowing of anything like pain, the robot flicked out its horrid, metalli­cally springy, devilishly hoofed legs, and it flung itself hither and yon, leaping from the minutest little purchases—tiny pebbles, invisible niches in boulders. It shot up and down treacherous hillsides like a thunderbolt.

The Badaulet was the picture of satisfaction. “I love you very much.”

“You don’t mind my very ugly, very stupid robot?”

“No,” the Badaulet insisted, “I truly love you now. No man I know has such a clever wife as you. I had expected us to die quickly riding the Silk Road, for the planes drop many land mines there, and the mines have eyes and ears and they are clever. But with this mount, we will cross the desert on a magic carpet. We will surround ourselves with our own land mines to kill anyone who dares to bothers us. Each night I will sleep beneath the stars in your warm and tender arms!”

The scampering pack robot knew no difference between day or night; it could “see” by starlight as well as it “saw” anything at all. Its greatest single drawback, among many, was that it blindly trusted the latest data downloaded into it about the conditions on the ground. This meant that, despite its nasty genius at knuckle-walking the uneven landscape, it had a distressing tendency to pitch into unseen arroyos and ramble off unmapped cliffs.

Worse yet, unlike horses or camels, the robot had no natural rhythm in its gait. So that, when they crouched within the thing’s bucketlike cargo hold, its hurrying tread felt like one endless, sickening set of panic stumbles.

To endure the numbing hours of travel, Sonja wrapped herself in a riding cloak. The heavy cloak grew steadily heavier with the passing hours, for it was an air distillery. Its fibers were sewn through with crys­talline salts, which chemically sucked humidity from the desert breezes.

When the Badaulet scolded her for guzzling at his canteen, she stripped off her dark cloak, gave it one expert caressing twist, and clean water gushed down both her wrists in torrents.

A curdled look of astonishment and disbelief and even rage crossed her husband’s face. The Badaulet had always suffered badly for his water. Water had been the cause of bitter discipline to him. The loss of water meant certain death… Yet here in this simple stupid rug, this plain womanly thing from off her back—she had only to twist it, and all his suffering was elided, erased, made senseless and irrelevant.

“My cloak is yours,” she told him quickly.

He grumpily threw her magic cloak across his own back, but he hated her for that.

“You must wear this,” he said at length, “for it grows heavy.”

“No, dear husband, it’s for you. It is sturdy, it will last for years.”

“You wear this,” he commanded. “In those foolish white robes you could easily be shot.”

She obeyed him and put on the cloak, for she knew she had given of­fense. They were entering hills, unkindly hills like ragged black boulder piles, but the hills caught falling water and where there was water there was grass.

Sonja stopped, gathered some grass, stuffed it into a fabric rumen bag. Sonja did not worry much about human bandits lurking in the Gobi—bandits were unlikely to survive in any place this barren. Death in the desert came mostly from autonomous machines.

The killer machines of the great Asian dust bowl came in three great families: autonomous rifles, autonomous land mines, and autonomous aircraft. They were all deadly: a few cents’ worth of silicon empowered them to rain death from above, or to punch an unerring hole through a human torso, or to wait for silent years in a puddle of machine surveil­lance and then tear off a human leg.

The aircraft and the sniper devices were harder to manufacture and maintain, for they were frequently blinded or clogged with clouds of dust. So the land mines were the worst and most numerous of the three. The land mines had all kinds of arcane names and behaviors.

Most land mines were scattered where human victims might logically go: roads, trails, highways, bridges, and water holes, any place of any for­mer economic value. The great comfort of a robot pack mule was that it didn’t bother to follow trails. Also, land mines were unlikely to recognize its uneven, highly unnatural tread as a proper trigger to explode.

Knowing this, the Badaulet was eager to exploit their tactical advan­tage and to catch up with their enemies. Lucky was convinced that their would-be assassins had released the killer plane at the limit of its striking range, and then beaten a swift retreat back into the deeper desert. The Badaulet thought in this way, because this was the tactic he himself would have chosen.

His pack robot was tireless. He was also proud of the fact that it could run in pitch darkness. He would have blindly trusted it to carry him off the edge of the Earth.

Being a new bride, Sonja gently persuaded him to stop awhile, de­spite his ambitions. They located a nameless hollow, a shallow foxhole in the wind-etched, dun-colored desert. Utterly barren, their honey­moon hole had all the anonymity of a crater scooped from the surface of Mars.

As the Badaulet scoured the horizon for nonexistent enemies, Sonja climbed stiffly from the robot’s bucketlike chassis, folded the robot flat, kicked dirt over it to disguise it, and opened her blister tent.

This tent had a single mast in the center, a lightweight wand that clicked together like jointed bamboo and socketed into a ring. The power within the wand brought the fabric to life. Inmoments, the tent was as moist and pale inside as the skin of a newly peeled banana.

They would sleep together here.

Against all odds, in the few moments in which she had gathered up grass, a large, evil desert tick had latched on to Sonja. It had inched straight up her dusty legs to her constricting waistband, sunk its fangs into the tender skin near her navel, and died. The first taste of her toxic blood had killed that tick as dead as a brown Gobi pebble. How gratify­ing that was.

Sonja checked the sloshing rumen bag, where fermentation pro­ceeded. She tapped foamy water from the bag, damply inflated a paper­dry foam sponge, and set to work on the Badaulet. Lucky had many babylike patches of hairless new flesh, healed by a rapid exfection. His nerve cells would be slowest to regrow there: he would have some numb spots. It would help him if his bride dutifully made his spots less numb.

Warm air drafted cozily up the domed walls, but her husband seemed unpleased. “This is improper.”

“We are married! Anything must be all right if it pleases you.”

He slapped at the woolly skin of the tent. “I can’t see the stars!”

“Yes… but aircraft can’t see us.” Sonja liked the stars well enough. She liked stars best when they were poised inside a planetarium, mapped, and color-coded.

The real stars of the modern Earth, speckling the fantastic dome of central Asia, these were less emotional1y manageable. The high desert, untouched by the glare of cities, was as black as fossil pitch, and the stars wheeled above it in fierce, demented desert hordes. Those stars twin­kled in the Earth’s dirtied atmosphere—and their tints were all wrong, owing to the fouling, stratospheric haze of all the Himalayan bombs.

The Milky Way had a bloody tinge in its sky-splitting milk… how could anyone like to see that, knowing what that meant?

Was she getting older, to fear the stars? Sonja had often seen that older people were afraid of the sky. Older people could never say pre­cisely what disturbed them about the modern sky’s current nature and character, but they knew that it was wrong. The sky of climate crisis was alien to their being—it scratched at the soul of humanity in the same unconscious, itchy way that an oncoming earthquake would unnerve cats, and panic goats, obscurely motivate serpents to rise from their slumbers…

Redoubling her wifely caresses, she managed to distract the Badaulet, and to soothe herself a little. On the air-inflated mat he turned eager, then energetic, then tender. She felt raw when he was done, but she was also open and emotionally centered and sexually awake.

Sleep claimed him as she thoughtfully licked the scabs on his arms—­those seven puckered little wounds, where she had plucked seven dif­ferent state IDs from his flesh. Infection wanted a foothold in those salty little wounds, but the microbes died under her tongue.

She slithered under his slumbering body like a prayer mat of flesh. Heavenly voices woke Sonja. The voices broke like a revelation into her interior nightmare landscape of thirst, dust, bombs, pain, black suns, cities burning…

Her eyes shocked open. For long, tumbling moments she had no idea who she was or where she was—for she was no one, and she was every­where.

A torrent of sound was falling through the walls of the tent, sound tumbling out of the sky. Deep, Wagnerian wails from a host of Valkyries… Those were starry voices, tremendous, operatic, obliterat­ing, thunderous, haunting the core of her head.

Legs shaking, Sonja unsealed the tent and crept out naked and bare­foot.

The cold zenith overhead was alive with burning ribbons. Clouds of booming, blooming celestial fire. Cosmic curtains of singing flame, sheets of emerald and amethyst. They were pouring out of the sky in cataracts.

Sonja jammed both hands to the sides of her skull. The celestial singing pierced the flesh of her hands.

This had to be some act of nature, she knew that… For it was sim­ply too big for anything that mankind might have done. It was cosmic, too huge for mankind to even imagine. She was seeing a vast heavenly negation of all the worst or best mankind could think or do. It was singing at her, singing to her, singing through her—singing as an entity, singing as a divinity that bore the scale to her that she did to some anx­ious microbe.

The majesty of it emptied her of all illusions. It relieved art anguish that she had never known she had.

How easily she might have died, and never seen this, never heard this, never lived this moment. She had always prided herself on her easy contempt about her own death, but now she knew that she had been a fool. Life was so much larger in scope than the simple existence that she had dismissed so arrogantly. Existence was colossal.

The Baudaulet emerged from their tent. He saw the tilt of her chin and he gazed upward.

“The Mandate of Heaven!” he shouted, and his translated voice sud­denly killed the warbling songs inside her head. All that cosmic music vanished instantly.

The heavenly curtains writhed and plummeted up there, but they did that in an eerie, abstract silence.

She stared at him. It was clear from his stance that the Badaulet heard nothing. Nothing but the wind. There was a wind out here, the wind of the Gobi.

She was shuddering.

“That is the aurora,” she told him, “that is space weather. I have never seen the aurora in my life, but that must be it. I heard it in my head with my new ears!”

“Heaven foretells great changes on Earth,” he told her.

“The aurora comes from the Sun. It is the energy of solar particles. They fall in sheets through a hole in the Earth’s magnetic field. Then they tear into the outer limits of the air, and the air must glow. That is what we see tonight. And I heard it!”

“This is important,” he told her, “so you must stop talking that non­sense.” He pulled the belt from his uniform. Then, without another word, he began to beat her with his belt: not angrily, just rhythmically and thoroughly.

Having been beaten by lovers before, Sonja knew how to react. With a howl of dismay, she fell to the earth, hugging his ankles and begging forgiveness in a gabble of sobs and shrieks.

When she clutched at his knees, his balance was poor, so he couldn’t use the belt effectively. He stopped his attempts to beat her. She contin­ued to shriek, beg, and grovel. This was the core of the performance.

It was never about how hard men beat you, or how many strokes, or what they hit you with. It was always about their need to break your will and impose their own.

After savoring her shrieks and sobs for a while, the Badaulet grew re­luctant. Finally, he belted his pants and pulled her off his legs. “Woman, why do you always carryon so? Put on your clothes! What is wrong with you? I didn’t hit you so hard! It’s just-when Heaven is man­ifesting miracles, you can’t talk nonsense! We could both go to Hell!”

He was a hundred times more frightened than herself. The basis of his universe had been kicked out like a hole though a bucket. “Forgive my stupid chatter, dear husband! Thank you for punishing me!”

This submission stymied him. Of course the Badaulet had no idea on Earth what to do about this tumult in the heavens. Otherwise he would not have beaten her in the first place.

The sky was writhing violently with silent electrical phantoms. The wind died. Inthe absence of her vanished screams there was a vast and awful silence with not so much as a cricket.

“There is a great danger to my soul tonight… “ he muttered. “I know that much, I know that is certain truth… “

“Let’s watch the sky together! Is that all right?”

“It’s cold. You are shivering, your teeth are chattering.”

“I’ll bring the mat! This might be a splendid omen, and not an evil omen! Look how beautiful it is! Maybe heaven is blessing our love, and our lives are changing for the better!” Sonja scurried into the tent and brought out a wadded double armful. “Lie down! I will hide my eyes and hold you tightly. Because I’m afraid.”

She made a nest for them. Grudgingly—for now he felt ashamed of himself—he climbed on the puffy mattress.

He was shivering with cold and fear, so she warmed him. Mollified, he relaxed a little.

Time passed. The Badaulet watched the heavens writhing in silent display. Ghostly colors were leaching out of the sky… with the planet’s nightly twirling and the sun’s axial tilt, some confluence of distant fields was fading. The tongues of fire were in retreat.

At last he spoke up. “Woman, I believe that Heaven has blessed me. The world is changing, and a life as hard as mine must surely change for the better. I cannot always suffer.”

She said nothing. She loved him only slightly less than before he had beaten her. He was a man: angry, vulnerable.

With one pinch she could rip the inner workings of his throat. He would drown in his own blood. Her legs were still smarting, so the temp­tation was there. She could leave him here, dead as mutton. Who would ever find him in a godforsaken place like this, who would ever know?

But why should he die at this one moment among all other potential moments to die? Wouldn’t he die soon enough no matter what she did, or what he did? Her tears would dry on their own.

She turned her face to the flickering, guttering cosmos. He was al­ready asleep.

HE WOKE HER in the chilly predawn, fully dressed and insisting that she start the robot from its bed of dust. The aurora was long gone, van­ished as the Earth wheeled on its axis.

She advised him that the robot would run better if they unrolled its solar panels in daylight and let it crack some grass for fuel. The Badaulet stiffly rejected this counsel. He didn’t much like her for giving it.

The Badaulet had tired of the magic distorting his life. He sensed, correctly that it was somehow her own fault.

So, at his imperious demand, they set off reeling in the predawn cold and dark. She was hungry and thirsty, so she tried to drink from the rumen bag, knowing it wasn’t ready yet. There was protein cracked from the cellulose there, and the taste seemed all right.

The robot conveyed them, in a crazed dance step, up ragged slopes, down black canyons, and across declivities. It ran across ground that would break a human leg like a dry stick. Queasy and low in spirits, Sonja felt unable to speak, and when dawn redly stung the rim of the world, the Badaulet suddenly began to confess to her. He was making up to her: not because he had beaten her during the night, for he con­sidered that act entirely proper; but to revive her morale. So he spoke about the subject that always engrossed him most: his enemies.

The Badaulet was an agent of Chinese order in the midst of the cen­tral Asian disorder. He was always outnumbered, if never outgunned. His allegiance to the distant Chinese state was vague, and superstitious, and deeply confused, and lethally passionate. It was like a Cossack’s love for Russia.

His faith, to the extent that he could describe it to her, was a cargo­cult patchwork of militia training, radical Islam, herbal lore, hunting and herding, and the shattered, scrambled, pitiful remains of Asia’s tra­ditional nomadic life. The Badaulet was not from any historic Asian tribe: he had no ethnic group. He was a native of globalized chaos.

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.

This was not some minor group of fanatics skittering across the desert to launch one bomb their way. These were clear signs of families of peo­ple, a clan, with women, many children… Gathering grass. These Disorder nomads seemed to have an industrial obsession with grass. They had been cutting tufts of grass with hand sickles, and mincing that grass up into a kind of crude silage, and baking water out of the grass somehow, maybe with solar distilleries.

The whole village was methodically grazing on the grass. They even left behind an industrial grass dung, dry, fermented wads of the stuff mashed up like dirty oatmeal or dry beer lees.

“I’m surprised that we lack intelligence about these people,” she said, “for it’s clear they’ve heard of us and what we are doing.”

“These people made the airplanes that attacked us. I thought there would be maybe two men, three bad men, a raiding team, my enemies,” said the Badaulet thoughtfully. “YetI don’t know these people. They are many and well organized. We will have trouble, you and I alone, killing so many.”

“No we won’t. Not really. No.”

“You didn’t even bring a gun, woman.”

“Give me a clear line of sight at them. I will put Red Sonja’s evil eye on these bandit cult sons of bitches, and I have no care for their numbers.

The Badaulet mulled this recitation over. “They gave you the Assassin’s Mace.”

“Yes. No. Not that. Something else like that. There are many things like that in China.”

“So you truly killed the ‘five great generals,’ Sonja? And you killed all their troops as well?”

“It never works the way it gets told in those stories.”

The people of the tent village had no vehicles. They seemed to have knocked their camp down, thrown it on horseback, and instantly thun­dered off in all directions.

Yet their scattered swarm must surely have regrouped somewhere, somehow… With radios, telephones… or maybe with nothing more technical than drums, bugles, and tall flags on sticks. Genghis Khan had never gotten lost, and he’d ridden over the biggest empire on Earth.

The Badaulet removed his face net, pulled his visored cap over his eyes, and stared at the barren soil. He scowled.

“I can see a track,” she offered.

“That thing is not a track, woman. That is a hole in the ground.”

“Well, I saw another hole much like it. Back there.”

The strange holes were violent gouges in the desert soil, spaced ten meters, eleven meters apart. Pierced holes, like the jabbing of javelins.

Some two-legged thing was running across the steppe, bounding with tremendous strides. And not just one of them, either. Suddenly there were many more such holes. A herd of the violent jumping things, a rambling horde of them.

“These are not the grass people of the camp,” he told her, “these are running machines.”

Sonja gazed around the abandoned vacuity of the desert. One single tiny bird chirped, breaking the silence like a brick through glass. “It’s getting crowded out here.”

They followed the jumping machine tracks, for this group had some clear purpose and their tracks were easy to spot.

These new marauders were like giant Gobi jerboas. They bounced their way for kilometers.

Eventually, the javelin-footed things clustered into a gang and scam­pered together up a steep, flat-topped hill.

Closely guiding the pack robot, the Badaulet circled the hill with great caution.

“Do we climb up there?” she asked him at last.

“They might be waiting there in ambush,” he said. “They ran up there, each on his own two legs, and they did not come back down.”

“It’s getting late. I wouldn’t want to meet these things in the dark.”

“Wego up,” he decided.

The top of the hill, barren, chilly, nameless, was scabbed all over with the milling pockmarks, and there were helicopter skids.

“They all flew off,” said Sonja. “It’s some covert insertion team. Not Chinese. These people have robots that jump on two legs.”

As if in sympathy, their own pack robot emitted a loud metallic grunt. Sonja stared at its crude prow, a blunt shelf like an ugly bumper. There was a fresh, new, round hole pierced in the bare metal there.

There was a second mournful bang and a second hole appeared, a palm’s width away from the first.

“Don’t move,” said the Badaulet, standing, “it is trying to shoot us in the head,” and he shouldered his rifle and fired. “I hit it,” he reported, “but I should have sighted-in this target system properly,” and he fired again, again, again, three discreet sniper gunshots not much louder than three clapping hands.

A thing in the twilit sky like a distant child’s kite went tumbling into straw pieces.

“That plane was much bigger than the flying bomb they sent to kill us,” he said. “It had a gun on board, and not a very good gun.”

Sonja looked at the two neat holes piercing the robot’s prow. The air­craft had an excellent gun; it just had poor programming. It didn’t know what to do with their unusual target silhouette.

“I can see others now,” he said, pointing, “over there, that is a cloud of them.”

Her eyes could not match his. “I think I see some black dots in the sky. Are they flying in circles? They look like birds to me.”

“No,” he said, “those are not vultures eating the dead. Someone is standing there and fighting those planes. Someone brave, or stupid. Or else they may have armor.”

“We have to leave this hilltop right away. We’re exposed.”

“My rifle here on the ground has a better control of trajectory than an airborne rifle,” he said crisply. “I will extend my bipod, taking advantage of my clear line of sight, and pick off a few of those planes. The enemy of these evil planes should be our friend. Also, I admire his gallantry.”

“That is gallant. It is also a good way to get killed.”

Lucky stared at her and shrugged. “That is true. So: Get out of this robot. Put on your woman’s black cloak. Run down this hill, find a hole in the ground, get inside it, hide. When I am done here, I will find you.”

That was a speech Sonja had heard from men before. Not in Lucky’s own words, but with the same tone and intent. Men who talked that way died.

Sonja put on the black water cloak, she left the robot, she scrambled down the hill, and she looked for a place to survive.

Given that the sky was full of airborne death, there were only a few hiding places near the hill that made any sense. One miserable little gully here, over there a rugged, stony half overhang… The hanging rocks were a better bet for survival, for she might pile up some loose rub­ble to build a wall.

Sonja picked her way to that wretched excuse for a shelter, and there was a dead man in it.

He had died inside the device that allowed him to run like the wind.

It was a humanoid exoskeleton with long, gazelle-like stilts extending from his shins. The skeletal machine hugged his flesh so intimately that it looked grafted onto him. His skull was socketed into its big white hel­met like the filling in a pitted olive.

Apparently the rest of his party had fled safely to their rendezvous, while Skeleton Man had suffered some malfunction, shown up too late… Likely it was the weight of all the loot he was carrying, for he had a frame pack that latched and snapped with obscene design precision into his exposed skeleton ribs. The pack was bulging like he’d stolen the family silverware. His loot was heavy and jumbled and awkward…

His treasure stank. It smelled to high heaven, a burned-plastic smell. Like a factory fire.

At first she’d imagined that the stench must be coming from his flesh or his peculiar hardware, but no. He was freshly dead, and he had been a professional… Not a soldier exactly, not her kind of soldier, but some global tech-support cadre. He wore charcoal-black civilian utility gear and no shoes at all-for he seemed to live entirely in the skeleton—and he didn’t have one speck of ID on him, not a badge, not a pip, not a shoulder patch.

With that black mustache, with those skin tones, he might have been from the wreckage of India, or the wreckage of Pakistan maybe—but he was Acquis. He was definitely Acquis, for he was exactly the kind of young gung-ho global fool that some Acquis net committee could hus­tle up in fifteen minutes. Speed and lightness, the Acquis. They were al­ways good at speed and lightness.

The pursuing harpy had shot at him repeatedly, because its small­caliber rounds kept bouncing off his exoskeletal ribs, but its efforts had finally put a dispassionately calculated entry hole through the left side of his torso and he’d died almost instantly.

It was hard to hate the machines, with that neat way that they killed. They had no more moral judgment than bear traps.

His exoskeleton was still functional. The robot suit was trying to do something about its human occupant, putting jolts through his dead flesh as if trying to wake him up. It was searching for his departed soul like a lost Martian probe contacting a distant antenna.

Sonja heard faint repeated gunshots. Then the Badaulet appeared, empty-handed. He looked from her, to the dead Acquis cyborg, and back again. “Many more planes are coming.”

“Where’s the pack robot? Where’s your rifle?”

“I gave the rifle to the robot. That robot is a weapons platform. The rifle knows its targets now. It will kill those planes till it runs out of am­munition. More planes are coming, many more.” He flicked his fingers repeatedly. “I think they have hundreds.”

“And you’re still alive? You are lucky.”

Lucky began piling loose cobbles and boulders into a crude barri­cade. “The planes will see our body heat. We must hide behind rocks.”

“Our dead friend here brought treasure with him. He just gave his life for that.”

The Badaulet whipped out his long knife with instant fluid ease and slashed the backpack free from the dead man. Then, with a burst of wiry strength, he hauled the dead cyborg away from the rocky overhang.

Lucky propped the mechanized corpse into plain sight of the sky, half leaning it against a broken boulder.

The corpse was standing there, and it had a human silhouette. That was clever. Maybe luck was mostly a matter of experience.

Sonja hastily emptied the dead man’s pack, hoping to find something useful for a last-ditch defense. The raider was carrying circuitry. A glued-together, broken mess of boards and cards. All of it old technol­ogy, maybe twenty years old. All of it burned, warped, smoke-blackened. This trash had been torn loose from some larger network installation, precisely slotted electronic hardware hastily knocked loose from its ma­trix, maybe with the looter’s skeletal fists.

That was what he had come for, that was his mission: stealing garbage. There was nothing else in his backpack, not a ration, not a bandage, not a paper clip. He’d died for this worthless junk.

She threw the empty pack frame onto the barricade and helped the Badaulet pile rocks.

Sadly, not many rocks were handy. The nearest heap of useful rocks required a dash across open ground. Their crudely piled wall was the length and height of a coffin.

There was a sudden wet thwack as a passing plane shot the dead man. Sonja threw herself on her belly. The Badaulet sprawled beside her, behind the piled rubble.

Sonja told herself that she wanted to live. With his warm, breathing body beside her, the smell of his male flesh, she wanted life, she desired it. Ifshe wanted life enough to get clever about surviving, she would live through this.

There was hope in this situation. There had to be hope. The ma­chines were uncannily accurate, but they lacked even one single spark of human common sense. Their rocky barricade was so low and so hasty that there had to be parts of their bodies exposed to enemy fire. But the stupid planes were strictly programmed to make uniformly fatal shots to the head or the chest. So they would aim at the head or chest every time, and if their bullets hit a rock, they suffered no regret and they learned nothing. That was hope.

They were weak little toy planes made of straw. They had single-shot guns. They couldn’t hover in place. With each shot they would lose al­titude, and with their humble little motors they would struggle to regain that height.

The planes had limited amounts of fuel or ammunition. They were real-world machines, they were not magical flying demons. Machines could be outsmarted. They could be outwaited. There would have to be some algorithm, some tick-off switch, some error-correction loop that would tell them: Try again later. The prospects are cloudy.

“I could have been in Vienna,” she muttered.

“What?”

“I just wanted to tell you: My darling, I am so proud of you! It is an honor to be your wife. We are going to win this battle!”

“Yes!” shouted the Badaulet. “Heaven is on our side.” He suddenly rose, scrambled over their miserable heap of rocks, and hastily shifted the skeletal limbs of the dead man.

Attracted by this motion, the machines began firing at the corpse again. Every bullet struck true; she could hear them banging neatly into the dead man’s chest and helmet.

“I have his canteen,” said the Badaulet.

She squeezed water from the cloak and dribbled it into the container. “You are such a good wife to me,” said the Badaulet. “Can you cook? I have never seen you cook.”

“Do you like Chinese food?”

“It is my duty to like Chinese food.”

Bullets panged into the rock barricade. Once again, something was wrong with her cyborg ears. Her ears were not hurting properly from the violent noises of ricochet. Their volume controls were problematic.

Lying prone, the Badaulet squirmed his way inside the black water cloak. Humped over, lumpy, featureless, he scrambled over the barri­cade and vanished.

When he returned, after an eventful ten minutes of aircraft fire, he had an armful of rocks.

“These rocks are difficult to carry,” he announced, stacking them into place. “Also there are two bullet holes in this cloak and they are leaking cold water.”

“Are you wet now? That’s a shame.”

“A human enemy would ricochet his shots off the rock wall behind us, and kill us. These machines will not think of that tactic.”

“No. Machines never think.”

Lucky sucked a splinter wound on his left hand. “It may be the will of Heaven to kill us.”

“I know that. Do you think you might—carefully—turn your body without getting shot, and give me a kiss?”

This done, it occurred to her that to die while making love, delicious though that sounded, was impractical. Or, rather, it depended on the mode of death involved. Sniper fire from small aircraft was not one of the better modes.

“There is a thing that I can do,” she told him. “It likely won’t affect these aircraft that are shooting at us. But it will avenge us, if they have any human controllers nearby.”

“What is that fine vengeance, my bride?”

“If I do this thing, anyone near us will die. Men, women, children. Alsothe larger animals with longer life spans: the horses, the cattle. They will die in a year and a half. From a great many apparent causes. Cancer, mostly.”

“That is your weapon?”

“I thought I might have to use it. If you didn’t simply shoot them dead. It is my best weapon.”

“Where is this weapon? Give it to me.”

“It is in orbit.” She paused. “I mean to say, it is in Heaven, so you can’t have it.”

“I know what a satellite is, woman,” he told her patiently. “A sharp­eyed man in the desert can see many satellites. Give me the trigger to your satellite weapon, and I will call down the fire. Then you can flee, and you might live.”

“The trigger is inside me,” she told him. “I swallowed it.”

“You swallowed your weapon of vengeance?”

More bullets panged into the rock, for a fresh squadron of airplanes had appeared. Apparently these new planes had failed to share their data with the earlier assailants, for the dead cyborg in his skeleton was riddled with fresh bullets.

“It would be wrong to deploy a massive weapon such as you carry,” he said thoughtfully, “for it would kill those gallant men fighting these air­craft along with us. I saw their truck through the scope of my rifle. I think they are Chinese. Chinese rapid-response, paramilitary. Brave men, hard men. I know such men well.”

“Well,” Sonja said, “then there will be some Dispensation coming here. Because there are Chinese military here… and the Acquis raiders like our skeleton friend, who is dead over there… the grass peo­ple in the tents… There has to be Dispensation. If they’re not here al­ready, Dispensation will be coming here.”

The Badaulet mulled this over. He agreed with her. “How many Dis­pensation, do you think?”

“I can’t tell you that, but they will probably be Americans, they won’t speak Chinese, and they will be trying to make some money from this trouble. That’s the Dispensation, that happens every time.”

“You forgot some important warriors also present here in this great battle, my bride.”

“Who?”

“Us! You and me, my precious one!”

Three broken aircraft plummeted out of the sky. They tumbled like leaves and fell out of sight.

“I see that my rifle is properly grouping its shots,” said the Badaulet, pleased. He then stood up and walked—not ran, he walked, sauntered almost—to the nearest source of handy rubble and brought back a heap­ing armful of new rocks.

“That’s a good rifle, built by German professionals,” he announced, dumping the rocks at her feet. Then he strolled off for more.

“Walk faster!” she yelled at him.

“You stack them,” he said over his shoulder. He lugged back a boul­der. “It’s a pity my fine rifle has so little ammunition.”

One more such fearless venture —Lucky clawed out a few more rocks somewhere, his fingers were bleeding… then he grabbed the dead Ac­quis cyborg, doubled him over with some casual kicks at his humming robot bones, and embedded the body into the wall.

Then he squatted, breathing hard with his labors.

Suddenly—instead of the bare cliff that would have suited a firing squad—they had created a little fort for themselves. They had built a wall. Bullets simply could not reach them. They could even stretch their legs out a little, raise their heads, think.

“Now we are besieged!” he announced cheerfully. “We can stay safe and secluded until we starve here!”

A useless bullet screamed off the dead man’s ceramic bones. “We won’t starve while he’s lying here,” she said. She regretted saying that—referring to cannibalism wasn’t a wifely, romantic, supportive thing to say, and a cruel reward for Lucky’s saving their lives… but the remark didn’t bother him.

They rewarded themselves with lavish sips from the dead man’s can­teen.

Eventually, night fell. The besieging aircraft were not bothered by darkness, since they were firing at human heat. The machines fell into a parsimonious cycle, programmed to save their fuel.

The rifle on the pack robot had run out of ammunition. This failure made the aircraft bolder. They swooped repeatedly by the rocky fortress, silently, scanning for any clear shot. When they failed to find one, their little motors would’ catch with an audible click and hum, and they would struggle for altitude again.

Then the machines returned, again and again, flying out of darkness and seeking human warmth, like mosquitoes with guns. Her new ears could hear them with an insufferable keenness.

The Earth spun on its axis. The stars emerged and strengthened. The Milky Way shone its celestial battle banner, so bright that she could see the dogged silhouette of killer aircraft flit across the bloody host of stars.

Then Sonja heard a low, symphonic rumble. It might have been a classical bass cello: a string and a bow. Taut strings of magnetic fire.

She shook him. “Do you hear that?”

The Badaulet woke from his cozy doze. “Hear what?”

“That voice from the sky. That huge electrical noise. Electronic.”

“Is it a helicopter?”

“No.”

“Is it a bigger plane coming here to kill us with a bomb?”

“No! No, oh my God, the sound is really loud now… “ Suddenly her husband’s voice vanished, she could no longer hear him. She heard nothing but those voices of fire. Those colossal sounds were not touch­ing the, air. They were touching the circuits in her head.

There was no escaping them. She had no way to turn them off. Celestial voices were sheeting through her skull. The voices were be­yond good and evil, out of all human scale. She felt as if they were rip­ping through her, straight through the rocky core of Asia and out of the planet’s other side.

The aurora emerged in the heavens, and the glorious sight of it gave no pleasure, for it was enraged. Its fiery sheets were knotted and angry tonight, visibly breaking into gnarls and whorls and branches and furi­ous particles. The tongues of flame were spitting and frothing, with foams and blobs and disks and rabid whirlpools. Sheets of convulsive energy plunged across the sky, tearing and ripping. An annihilation.

“This isn’t supposed to happen!” she shouted, and she could not hear her own voice. “This is wrong, Badaulet… there’s something wrong with the sky! This could be the end of everything! This could be the end of the world!”

Lucky patted her thigh in a proprietory fashion, and gave her a little elbow jab in the ribs. His head was tilted back and she realized that he was laughing aloud. His black eyes were sparkling as he watched the blazing sky. He was enjoying himself.

A flooding gush of stellar energy hit the atmosphere, hard rain from outer space. The sky was frosted with bloody red sparks, as bits of man­made filth at the limits of the atmosphere lit up and fried.

Sonja’s dry mouth hung open. Her head roared like an express train. Some orgasmic solar gush soaked the Earth’s magnetic field, and utterly absurd things were pouring out of the sky now: rippling lozenges like chil­dren’s toy balloons, fun-house snakes of accordion paper, roiling smoke rings and flaming jellied doughnuts… They had no business on Earth, they were not from the Earth at all. She could hear them, shrieking.

Sonja writhed in a desperate panic attack. The Badaulet reached out, grabbed her, pulled her to him, crushed her in his arms. He squeezed the screaming breath from her lungs. In her terror she sank her teeth into his bare shoulder…

He didn’t mind. He was telling her something warm and kindly, over and over. She could feel his voice vibrating in his chest.

The convulsing aurora was so bright that it left shadows on the rock. Sonja clamped her eyes shut.

Suddenly, in trauma, she was speaking in the language of childhood. The first song, the first poetry, she had memorized. That little song she loved to sing with Vera and Svetlana and Kosara and Radmila and Bis­erka and Bratislava, and even pouting little Djordje, standing in a circle, arms out and palm to palm, with the machines watching their brains and eyes and their bridged and knotted fingers, to see that they were standing perfectly strong, all the same.

Sonja could hear her own voice. Her ears were trying to translate what she was saying to herself. The translation program blocked the noise pouring from the sky.

Sonja sang her song again and again, whimpering.

THE SOUND OF WIND woke Sonja. Her ears were working again. She heard the faint sound of sullen dripping from the bullet-pierced water cloak.

Dawn had come, and Lucky was sleeping. He had been holding her tightly, so that she did not raise her vulnerable head above the parapet during her nightmares.

Sonja sensed that the planes were gone. There was no way to know this as a fact, however. Not without testing that theory.

Tired of having Lucky assuming all the risks, Sonja untied her dust­proof tarpaulin gown, held it high over herself with her arms outspread to blur her target silhouette, and stepped, naked and deliberate, over the rocky wall.

She was not shot, she did not die, there were no sounds of planes. Yawning and grainy-eyed, Sonja clambered to the top of the hill. The dutiful pack robot was standing there, its empty rifle methodically scan­ning the empty skies. The pack robot had been shot an amazing num­ber of times, almost all of the rounds hitting its front prow, which looked like metal cheesecloth. A few holes adorned the thing’s rear bumper, presumably the results of targeting error.

Yet the robot was functional. Its pistoning, crooked, crazy legs were in fine condition. Sonja felt an affection for it now, the unwilling love one felt for a battlefield comrade. Poor thing, it was so dumb and ugly, but it was doing the best it could.

Sonja tore the rifle from its gun-mount and used its target scope to scan the landscape. What of their friends, allies, strangers—the ones pursued by a wheeling column of aircraft? No sign of them. Wait. Yes. A blackened spot on the ground, a ragged asterisk.

Heavy weaponry had hit something there, a truck, a tank, a half-track, whatever that had once been. Heavy weapons had knocked it not just to pieces, but to pieces of pieces. A falling meteor couldn’t have crushed it more thoroughly: it was obliterated.

Sonja reviewed her tactical options. Retreat back to the den, pile up more rocks? Make a break for it, across country, back toward Jiuquan? Leave this hilltop, seek out a better overview? This hilltop’s overview was excellent; the Acquis raiders had clearly chosen it on purpose.

Maintain the hardware. That action always made sense. Sonja searched through the baggage, found a clip, and reloaded the rifle. Then Sonja spread out the solar panels for the pack robot, tissue-thin sheets that stretched an astonishing distance down the hill.

This work done, she sipped some greenish yogurt from the rumen bag, which hung there, whole and unpierced. The ferment tasted all right now; during all the mayhem it had brewed up fine.

With nutrition her head cleared. She had survived and another day was at hand. Sonja took the rifle and carefully scanned the horizon.

Two riders were approaching.

They rode from the north, on two rugged Mongol ponies, ragged, burrolike beasts whose short legs almost seemed to scurry. These riders were men, and armed with rifles slung across their backs. The man in front wore furs—thick, bearlike furs—and a fur hat, and apparently some kind of furry face mask. The rider who followed him—incredibly—wore an American cowboy hat, blue jeans, boots, a checkered shirt, and a vest.

The quick temptation to pick them off with the rifle—for she did have the drop on them, and the rifle was loaded—evaporated. Who on Earth would ride out here, dressed in that fashiori? It was almost worth dying to know.

The cowboy rode up to his friend, stopped him, and handed over his rifle. The cowboy dug into a saddlebag, and took out a white flag­apparently an undershirt. The cowboy then rode straight toward her hill, slowly and with care, waving his snowy white shirt over his head as he stood in his stirrups.

This man was surely one of the worst horseback riders Sonja had ever seen. She walked to the edge of the hilltop and waved back at him with her white sleeves.

Then she climbed downhill.

The cowboy was a young American, a teenager. He was strikingly handsome, and, seen closely, his clothes were vivid and gorgeous. His costume only mimicked the rugged proletarian gear of the American West. He was a cowboy prince: theatrical and dramatic.

He pulled up his snarl-maned, yellow-fanged mare—it appeared he had never ridden a horse in his life, for he drove the beast like a car­—and he half tumbled out of his saddle. His cheeks were windburned. He was short of breath.

“Are you Biserka?” he said.

He spoke English, which did not surprise her. “No,” she said.

“You sure do look like Biserka. I had to make sure. To meet you here, that’s kind of uncanny. You are Sonja, though. You’re Sonja Mihaj­lovic.”

“Yes.”

“What is that strange gown you’re wearing? You’ve got, like, a white tablecloth with all kinds of yin-yangs and rosary beads.”

Sonja stared at him silently. This man was certainly Dispensation. He had to be. No one else would behave like this.

“You look great in that getup, don’t get me wrong,” the cowboy said hastily, “that look is really you! I am Lionel Montalban. John Mont­gomery Montalban—you know him, I’m sure—he’s my brother. You and me, we’re family.”

“John Montalban is here? Where is John?”

“John’s in a camp with some of the locals. John sent me here to fetch you. I’m glad I was able to find you. You’re all right?”

“If airplanes don’t shoot at me, yes, I am all right.”

Lionel Montalban nodded over his shoulder at his riding compan­ion, who sat on his pony like a furred centaur. “The airplanes come from his people. So no, they won’t be shooting you. Not when you are with us. Why are you on foot, Sonja? Where is George’s robot?”

So: George had told John Montalban about the robot. Of course George would do that. George adored John Montalban. George was the man’s factotum. His fixer. His butler. His slave.

Lionel was busy apologizing to her. “We lost track of your robot’s po­sition when those solar flares hit. That solar noise was sudden. Really sudden. And bad. Did you see the sun rise this morning? I saw it!” Li­onel yawned. “There were visible sun spots on the sun’s surface. I could see those spots with my naked eyes.”

“Lionel Montalban,” she said.

“Yes, what?”

“What are you doing here, Lionel Montalban?”

Lionel looked surprised. “You mean, what am I doing here, officially? Oh. Officially, I’m on an ‘Asian wilderness vacation.’ I’m giving up my ‘juvenile delinquent drug habits.’ I’m in rehab. My brother’s gonna clean me all out in the fresh air with some bracing backwoods hikes.”

Lionel turned on the charm: he grinned and winked. “What are you doing here, ‘officially’? May I ask you that?”

Sonja said nothing.

“Never mind, Sonja! Whatever it is, it’s okay by me! After that solar eruption—snarled communications all over the planet!—why sweat the small stuff? After a catastrophe like this one, nobody’s gonna remember what I did, back in Los Angeles. Some riots, some burned-out neigh­borhoods, no problem! It’s all part of the legend of Hollywood.”

Lionel waved his arms gleefully, which spooked his horse. The beast jerked the reins and almost knocked Lionel from his feet.

Lionel recovered his booted footing with a gymnast’s half skip. “Youdon’t care about some derelict neighborhoods burned down in Los An­geles, do you? You don’t care one bit, right? See, I’m almost home free!”

“What is John’s assignment here?”

“Oh, this is John’s usual work. We are shutting down an out-of­-control tech operation. John never took me along for his work before, but, well, I learn fast.” Lionel smiled. “Because I have to learn fast! Bril­liancy, speed, lightness, and glory!”

It was a sinister business that the Acquis and Dispensation used the same slogan. Why had no one condemned them for that?

“Let me quickly brief you about my friend here,” said Lionel. “The rider in the hairy wolf mask. He calls himself ‘Vice Premier Li Rongji.’ He is very serious about his name and his official Chinese title. He’s a fanatic. So please don’t tease him.”

“Li Rongji was a great Chinese statesman.”

“This man is the great Chinese statesman Li Rongji. He’s a clone of a powerful Chinese official from twenty years ago. He’s a clone, like you are. That’s what John has discovered here. We found out that the Chi­nese state backed up its entire human regime. It cloned thirty-five key human politicians—I mean the real people inside the state, the crucial power brokers—and it hid them in a hole in the desert. The state even backed up itself. All of itself. Itbuilt itself a giant secret clone farm, and a giant secret library, and it hid that business underground in the Gobi, really deep underground, like nuclear-bomb-proof, in a kind of First Emperor of China airtight underground tomb.”

Sonja scowled. “Why wasn’t I informed about this matter?”

“Because you were five years old at the time. Sonja, you are this mat­ter. You are informed, because I just informed you. I informed you be­cause you are family.” Lionel waved his arms again, and his horse, even angrier, almost succeeded in escaping him. When Lionel recovered­—he was ominously strong, an athlete, an acrobat—his face was flushed.

“It took the Dispensation a long time to map and track down this rogue project,” he said. “John has found fifteen different cloning proj­ects that were all going on at the time you were born. The Balkans, that little island in the Adriatic: That was just the test bed for bigger projects elsewhere. Your project was small. This Chinese clone project was colossal. This one was the megaproject. And we’re trying to buy it now. We’re trying to buy whatever is left of it.”

“There were sixteen cloning projects? Sixteen like me?”

“Most of those schemes never left the lab. Not one of those projects ever worked out as planned. Yours was a debacle for sure—and this Chi­nese one was the biggest debacle of them all. We’re still dealing with the repercussions of it, right here and now. We got thirty-five extremely tal­ented cloned people, running loose and walking the Earth, who were trained in an underground bunker to take over the world. They escaped from that bunker and they’re still planning to take over the world. They were supposed to emerge after a world apocalypse and restore Chinese civilization. And they still want to take over the world, and they want it on their own terms. You see my friend there, riding the horse, the one with the tattoos and the necklace of human teeth? He’s one of them.”

This was appalling news. Sonja sensed that it should have stunned her, it should have been beyond her comprehension. But it wasn’t. Sonja was used to appalling news. Every juncture in her life that had ever mattered had been appalling.

She gazed at the rogue, apocalypse cultist, as he sat on his Mongol horse. He was young and fully dressed to terrify.

“Your brother should mind his own business, Lionel. Someday John will get hurt.”

“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 no 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 angly, 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.”

“I see that my great rival is indeed a wise man.”

Time passed; earnestly waving his cowboy hat, Lionel made a point of galloping up to catch them. “Lunch break!” he crowed.

Lionel was the only one among them hungry. Sonja and the Badaulet had altered guts, and were drinking fermented grass from their rumen bag. Much the same seemed to be true of the young marauder who called himself “Vice Premier Li Rongji,” and whose scarred, shabby horse calmly dropped an ashy black dung.

Sonja had yet to see this tribal bandit dismount from his horse. A su­perb rider, he and his ugly animal might have shared the same blood­stream.

With a showy gesture, Lionel offered them the roasted flesh of a mar­mot. Marmots existed in great profusion in the region, since they had lost most of their natural predators. Lionel gnawed this chewy ground­hog’s flesh with a deft pretense of enthusiasm.

Then Lionel introduced himself to the Badaulet, though the two had no language in common. Nothing daunted, Lionel pulled out a hand­held translation unit. He managed to spout a few cordial words at the warnor.

The Badaulet’s black eyeballs were rigid with hate. He despised Li­onel. Lionel, sensing this, redoubled his efforts to charm.

Though every human instinct warned her against it, Sonja decided to speak to Vice Premier Li Rongji. She walked empty-handed to the flank of the clone’s horse and looked up into his masked face. He had stiff, taxidermy wolf ears and two mummified eye holes.

He was carrying, besides his long sniper rifle, a blunt combat shotgun that launched 40-millimeter grenades. Those searing, metal-splattering grenades hit almost as hard as artillery shells. One single man with one single such gun could briskly destroy a quarter of a city. He had a city­breaking machine on the rump of his ugly horse.

And his deadly grenade gun was made mostly of straw.

“Sir,” she said, “I have heard that your esteemed name is Li Rongji.”

“I am Vice Premier Li Rongji.” His Chinese was excellent, clearly his first language. He even had the posh Beijing accent of high Chinese state officials.

“I have also heard, sir—although it was before my time—that Vice Premier Li Rongji was the premier architect for relief efforts during the great Xiaolangdi dam catastrophe.”

“Yes, Xiaolangdi was one of my many important burdens of office be­fore my unfortunate demise.”

“Do you know who I am, sir?”

“I know that you are the mistress of this man’s elder brother. You must have a powerful hold on that soft man’s soft heart, for him to take such trouble for you, a mere girl, in the midst of his negotiations with us.”

“I am Sonja, the Angel of Harbin.”

He instantly wanted to kill her. His callused hands tightened on the horse’s reins. He was hungering to kill her.

Yet he was intelligent, and hardship had schooled him not to act on impulse. Furthermore, he was keenly afraid of Lucky. He tugged the muzzle of his wolf mask. “Since you are Red Sonja, then this man who accompanies you must be the world-famous Badaulet.”

It had not occurred to Sonja that the Badaulet was “world-famous.” But if this vast steppe and desert was “the world” to this man, then, yes, Lucky was much more famous than herself. “That indeed is he.”

“Please be so kind as to introduce me to this great man and gallant warrior.”

There was nothing for it but for everyone to trade places. Lionel jumped into the bucketlike robot with her, while the Badaulet mounted Lionel’s balky, snarling horse. With a few brutal whacks and sharp kicks, Lucky showed the horse that he meant business. The horse obeyed him humbly.

The Badaulet and Vice Premier Li Rongji were soon deep in con­versation.

“How many are they?” said Sonja. “How many members of his cult?” “Well,” said Lionel, lounging at his ease—for the robot’s reeling dance steps didn’t bother him at all—“there were originally thirty-five clones, down in their indoctrination bunker. After the clones blew that place up and escaped, each one of them started his own tribal global-guerrilla cell. They were pretty naive and sheltered people at first—basically, they were cave dwellers—but they’re clever. They were trained extensively on guerrilla tactics and statecraft. Their state was training them to emerge from their bunker after the Apocalypse and take over the world.”

A chill shot through Sonja. “That’s what we were trained for. We were also taught that we would take over the world. We would support the world with ubiquitous computing.”

Lionel was unsurprised by this story; it was certainly old news to him. “Every survivalist project has its own vogue. Survival projects are always faddish and fanatical. To ‘take over the world’? That must be the natural killer application for a secret clone army… All those clone projects were survivalist projects. They all failed, all of them. Because they lacked transparency.”

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

When Sonja opened her eyes, wetly streaming tears of joy, she could see from the looks on the grimy faces of the nomads that she still had her old magic. They were awestruck. Ten minutes alone with her as an inspired healer, and they would have done anything that she said.

“You don’t really feel that way,” John told her mildly. That was the worst thing about knowing John Montalban: that he was always telling her about her own true feelings. Worse yet, he was generally right.

“Djordje told the others about your mother’s death,” he said. “They’re all in shock.”

“I’m not shocked! I feel fantastic! I’m so happy. I want to dance!”

“Stop convulsing, Sonja. That first emotional reaction doesn’t last,” he told her. He put his arm on her protectively, and ushered her inside the tent.

The inside of the woolly ger tent was brisk and garish: there were scat­tered carpets, plastic ammunition crates, gleaming aluminum stewpots, and grass-chopping equipment. The place reeked of new-mown hay.

“I felt that I was just getting to know your mother,” said John. “Her twisted motivations were the key to the whole Mihajlovic enterprise, but… no extent of her paranoia could protect her from a fate like that. There wasn’t a cop, spy, general, or lawyer on Earth who could dig Yelisaveta out of her flying bolt-hole-and yet she was dead in ten min­utes. Killed by space weather. I’d call that cosmic retribution, if not for the forty other international crewmen up there. Those poor bastards had maybe six minutes’ warning of that catastrophe, and not one damn thing they could do to save themselves. Not one damn thing except to watch the wave roll in and fry them. I hate to think about a death scene like that.”

Sonja remembered her taikonaut training. “Everyone is dead in the space station? All of them? They had a radiation shelter.”

John shook his head. “For a blast of that size? That flare was ten times bigger than planet Earth!”

“The sun blew up? Truly?” That was a difficult matter to grasp.

“The sun is a star, Sonja. Stars are unstable by nature. Some stars are violently unstable.”

Lionel entered the tent and noticed his brother’s mournful look. His face fell in instant sympathy. “My grandmother was a very fine lady,” Li­onel offered, voice low. “She was the kind of great lady that a woman can become, when she’s been poor, and hungry, and homeless, and a nobody.”

John beamed at his younger brother. He was proud to see his fellow aristocrat commiserating with the little people.

Now the fuller extent of the strategic situation dawned on Sonja. The event that had happened changed everything. “You say that the Chinese space station is empty? Nothing in it but corpses?”

“Corpses,” John agreed. “The Chinese station is one more large, failed, overextended technical megaproject. Although I had nothing to do with stopping this one myself.”

Lionel smirked. “I think you’re selling yourself a little short there, John.”

Montalban shot his brother a warning glance.

“What?” Sonja shouted. “What is it this time, what have you done? What are you doing, John? What, what?”

“Not so loudly, please,” said Montalban.

A busy nomad council of war was convening inside the ger. Outrid­ers from a distant cell had arrived. The terrorists were briefing each other, issuing orders and making contingency plans. They were doing it all with paper. Little slips of grass parchment. Charcoal ink brushes.

“They never use electricity,” said Montalban, “because it makes them too easy to track. That fact is making me, and my big correlation engine here, into the largest electronic-warfare target in a hundred kilo­meters. There are Chinese hunter-killer teams wandering out there, with who knows what kinds of weaponry. They use the local civilian populations for target practice.”

For the first time, Montalban’s bodyguard spoke. He spoke in a stiffly proper Beijing Chinese, and he spoke to Sonja. “This man said, in En­glish, ‘hunter-killer teams.’”

“Yes, he did say that, sir,” Sonja told him.

“Red Sonja, you should tell your friends in Jiuquan not to send any more ‘hunter-killer teams’ into these steppes. Because we hunt them and we kill them.”

“May I ask your name, sir?”

“I am Major General Cao Xilong, director of the army’s General Po­litical Department.”

“You were a very able ideologist and military political thinker. You were a legend in your field.”

“That,” said Cao Xilong, “is why they have assigned me to oversee these fat Californian subversives in their ridiculous hats.”

Montalban looked on, smiling benignly. Foreign languages had never been an American strong suit.

Sonja smiled politely at Cao Xilong. “May I inquire why your col­leagues found it necessary to attempt to liquidate me with a flying bomb?”

“Yes. That matter is simple. We cannot allow the doomed Chinese regime to unilaterally impose their first-strike capacity against us. Politi­cal violence and war must be reinscribed into the geographies and ar­chitectures of cities in ways that—while superficially similar to feudal Chinese walls against roaming Mongols—inevitably reflect contempo­rary political conditions. Important here are these distinctions.”

Major General Cao Xilong paused heavily, mentally searching for something he had memorized from a screen.

“•First, the demonstrated ability of the Jiuquan Space Launch Cen­ter to rival us in flourishing under postapocalyptic conditions.”

The general was actually speaking aloud in bullet points. Sonja had never heard such a thing done before. It was deeply alarming.

“•Second, the seamless, ubiquitous merging between security, cor­rections, surveillance, military, and entertainment industries within China, making conventional urban-guerrilla warfare useless.

“•Third, the proliferating range of postglobalist private, public, and private-public bodies legitimized to act against nation-states, among whom we of the World Provisional Survival Empire must number our­selves.”

The general stopped counting his fingers. “Contemporary cities are particularly vulnerable to focused disruption or appropriation, not merely of the technical systems on which urban life relies, but also to the liquidation of key human nodal figures who serve as the system’s human capital.”

The general then raised a fingertip. “The worst threats among those state running dogs are provocative figures who foment new relation­ships emerging from the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practiced by the state elites against the colonized posturban peoples. Through continually linking sensors, databases, de­fensive and security architectures, and through the scanning of bodies, these running dogs export the state’s architectures of control.”

Sonja nodded. “I see. That’s all very clear.”

The general blinked, once. “You can follow our reasoning?”

“Yes I do. I know what you were doing when you tried to kill me, and the Badaulet. You wanted to kill our love.”

Cao Xilong said nothing.

“You didn’t need to kill me personally. I’m a former holy terror, but I’ve done nothing to you. You didn’t need to kill him, either. He’s just another cannon-fodder hero. But you did need to kill the pair of us, at the same blow, because we are together. You wanted to kill our love for each other, to keep us separate and polarized, because our love is dan­gerous to your plans. That’s why we had to die.”

“Bourgeois sentiment of this sort does not clarify the strategic situa­tion.”

“Maybe it’s a woman’s way to put it, hero, but you knew that we were together. You knew. How did you find that out? You’ve got spies, in­formants in Jiuquan? Oh: I know. You’ve got a correlation engine!”

“Of course we exploit the best intelligence methods available, al­though those must remain confidential.”

“Listen—young genius—I’ve been working around the military for years. You don’t scare me with your homemade grassroots rebellion. I know we’re both clones, you and me—but to Red Sonja, you’re just an­other tribal bandit who climbed out of a hole in the ground. You want to kill the men who love Red Sonja? Why don’t you kill him?”

Sonja shot a sideways glance at John Montalban, who was standing and watching them debate, with his arms politely folded, and a look of intense pretended interest on his face. “He loves me fanatically, and while the Badaulet and I were in peaceful Jiuquan sharing a water bed, he was already here in the midst of your camp and he is buying you. You think you’re a tactical genius? You are finished already! You are done.”

“That would all be true,” said Major General Cao Xilong, “except for one important factor which you have failed to grasp.”

“And what ‘factor’ is that? Please do tell me.”

“The Earth is doomed. The sun is proving unstable. And a giant vol­cano is on the point of eruption. The carrying capacity of this planet’s biosphere under those conditions will fall by ninety-five percent. That means that, in fifty years or fewer, there will be only two kinds of society possible on Earth. The first is nomadic like ours, and runs lightly on the surface of the Earth. That society will survive.

“The second kind lives sealed inside technical bubbles, and they will go insane. Because that kind of life is a traumatic horror and it is an evil lie. So: This choice is not your choice, your weak and sentimental choice between your former lover and your current lover. Tomorrow’s choice is between us and Jiuquan.”

“You believe you can defeat Jiuquan? They are much more advanced than you are.”

“I do not claim that we will defeat them immediately. At this mo­ment, we could merely use our thousands of light aircraft to mine their roads, blow up the single points of failure in the electrical and water sys­tems, and terrorize their population with mass slaughter of random civilians. They do already pay us tribute—to be frank, yes, they pay­—but now you must imagine us attacking them from every point of the compass, around the clock, while the sky is black with volcanic ash. Of course we will win that battle. Because the world of tomorrow is hideous and we will own it. We will own the smoking ruins of the world. No one else. Us, and those we force to become like us. That is our great purpose.”

John Montalban spoke up. “He just said ‘world of tomorrow’! I don’t know much Chinese, but I heard that. I’m very glad to see you and Major General Cao Xilong debating matters so cordially. That sounded like a fruitful exchange of views.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not surprised you would empathize so strongly with these strange and unfortunate people, Sonja. After all, their life experience—their sheltered upbringing, that traumatic exposure to the outer world­—you can understand all that. You’re a healer. I’ve seen you grasp the distress inside people, and change them for the better.”

His fatuous words brought her nothing but pure dread. For all his tireless global meddling, he was from California, a place where people believed that the future was golden. While she was from the Balkans… a broken place, the cockpit of empires where the lost chickens pecked each other’s eyes out…

The world to come was so much worse, so much more direly threat­ened than she had ever let herself believe…

But at least her mother was dead. No matter the city-killing look in the eyes of that nomad general—at least she had that transcendent joy to fully treasure. It was all she could do not to laugh in his masked, car­nivorous face.

She suddenly broke from the general and strode into the middle of the tent, her ribs heaving.

Montalban followed her, touched her shoulder. “These people here… they’re not beyond hope! They’re just another runaway experi­ment.” John rubbed his temples, suddenly weary. “I have so many col­leagues working on ‘Relinquishment’ issues—colleagues in both the Dispensation and the Acquis… ‘Relinquishment,’ that’s what we call it when we cram those techno-genies back into their bottles… ‘Relin­quishment’ is difficult-to-impossible, and this next stunt I hope to pull—­it’s beyond me. It does not walk the Earth, it is literally out of this world.”

Lionel spoke up. “I could make a good case that you’re the best Re­linquishment activist of all time, John. You have no peer in that work.”

“Oh, come now.”

“It’s the truth! How many is this? Seven big projects defeated? Eight? You’re doing the seventh and the eighth Relinquishment at the very same time!”

“Oh, it can’t possibly be eight. I’m only thirty years old.”

Lionel was cheering his older brother through his moment of doubt. “There were the hypervelocity engines. That was the first project you killed off.”

“That wasn’t ‘Relinquishment.’ Those were commercial competitors to our family’s launch sites.”

“There were those German tissue-culture labs.”

“I was only tangentially involved in that scandal. Besides, there’s tissue­-culture practice all over the Acquis nowadays, so I sure wouldn’t call that a victory.”

“You knocked a huge hole in the genetics industry with that intellectual­-property battle over DNA as an interactive network instead of patentable codons.”

“That was all science paperwork! That was just about hiring smart lawyers and printing some letterhead. I didn’t lift a finger.”

“They lost billions, though. Interms of damage to hostile technologies—­that was your best spanner thrown in the works, ever.”

John Montalban was rallying. “Well, maybe. Maybe you’re right about that one.”

“Last summer you chased those neural fanatics out of the Balkans practically single-handed.”

“They’ll be back. Those boneware people are like mice. You chase ‘em out of one spot, they pop up in a hundred other places… How many wild stunts does this make out of me? You’re tiring me.”

“There’s our hosts here. They’ll sure need some taming.”

“’Constructive engagement.’ Simple diplomacy. They just need to be brought around to the world system, taught what side their bread is buttered on. Anyone could do that.”

“But you spotted their hidden tomb, John. Tons and tons of burned machinery. The backup records of the Chinese state. That’s gonna be the biggest archaeological discovery since the First Emperor of China burned all the books.”

“No it won’t. Bandits have been raiding that tomb for years now. There’s probably some idiot raiding it right now. I had my informants, I had researchers, I even had inside help… and, hell, Lionel, the chances are really great that some lethal Chinese Scorpion team walks up to the two of us, now, out of nowhere, and we end up dead. Dead today. I’m gambling our lives, and the Earth’s future, on something crazy that happened forty-eight hours ago. I’m gambling that the Acquis and the Dispensation have faster reflexes, after a catastrophe, than any nation-state. And they might dither. Or quarrel. And forget all about their necessity for speed. And brilliancy. And lightness and glory, and then we are both dead. And then we’re not two rich idiots from Califor­nia who are provisionally dead. We’ll be the ashes of history.”

Lionel pointed at Sonja. “There is her. You know that means hope.” “What, you mean Sonja? What about Sonja?”

“I mean all of them. I mean the Mihajlovic Project. That was your ul­timate feat. That one was your greatest triumph, that was the most hu­mane one, the most decent and loving Relinquishment of all.”

Seeing the look on her face—Montalban always did that—­Montalban was quick to apologize to her. “You have to forgive him, Sonja. Lionel’s just a kid.”

“Oh no,” said Sonja through gritted teeth, “I love to hear him talk about us.”

Lionel was stricken. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Sonja. You are family—just like I said. You know that.”

“What are you doing here, John? What is your great new purpose? You must tell me. I might be able to save you.”

“Well,” Montalban said, “at first, I came out here to the desert to dig up the buried brains of the state. Maybe it’s a useless twenty-year-old backup, but even if its human cloned apparatus rebelled against it and set fire to it, there has to be a great deal of historical evidence buried down there. And I wanted that evidence, of course. We Synchronists al­ways want history. Because history is the ultimate commercial resource. Someday the human race will have to come to terms with the vast genocide in China, and what the state did to the human beings within its grasp. Of course the state itself is never going to reveal that historical truth. So it is up to us, the outside scholars, the researchers, to steal whatever evidence we can.”

“Evidence of what? The state saved Chinese civilization.”

“Well… ‘genocide’ is such an emotionally loaded term… But it’s entirely obvious from consumer demographic studies that the people who hindered the state—the burdens to its technical functions—were eliminated. There were over a billion Chinese people twenty years ago, now there are just under half a billion. No elderly, to speak of. No men­tally ill. The handicapped are entirely gone. Criminals, liquidated. Even the people in the security apparatus, who were performing the liq­uidations, were themselves mostly purged… Even the male-female gender disparity was honed way back. The current China is very safe and peaceful. It’s a hyperefficient machine.”

“The strong survived. The weak died in the troubles. That’s what hap­pened.”

“No, Sonja, that is just the party line. The state killed the weak and unfit. It controlled so many aspects of daily life that it had a million dif­ferent methods to cull its herd.”

“That is a slander and a lie.”

“I know it’s not politically correct of me to say that, but demograph­ics never lie.” Montalban shrugged irritably. “Look… I’ve gotten so used to combating the unthinkable, that I forget how the unthinkable can shock people. Yes, there was a genocide in China, during China’s climate crisis. You look into the walled bubble from outside the walled bubble, and the dirty murk in there is very obvious. I’m not angry about it. I’m not condemnatory. I don’t even want to discuss it right now. We in California could have accepted a hundred million refugee Chinese. We didn’t do that. Nobody let them out. So of course they had to die. The real genius of the solution was programming machines to do the dirty work so that politicians could keep their hands clean.”

John Montalban was rubbing one hand against the other. “My theory is that the architects of the regime’s Final Solution were about thirty-five Chinese statesmen. I surmise that they were the very same thirty-five guys who were cloned, and then trained for war in a godforsaken bomb shelter buried in the middle of nowhere. They did that terrible thing be­cause they were patriots. Then they marched out to die like heroes along with their own victims, leaving one last ace in the hole. They died in their own genocide and they left their clones. That’s my big hypothesis. I haven’t proved that idea yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to prov­ing it. But it’s the sort of thing I have to know for my own satisfaction­so that I know that I’m making real-world decisions.”

“If you libel the state in that fashion, the state will take reprisals against you.”

Montalban sighed. “I am not ‘libeling’ the state. The Chinese state is the world’s most remarkable case study in ubiquitous computing. It’s ‘ubiquity with Chinese national characteristics.’ I don’t consider that machine my enemy. It is not any moral actor, it’s a machine. I don’t condemn it. If the Chinese state committed ‘genocide,’ then the human race has committed ‘geocide.’ The ‘Fossil Fuel Project,’ that was infi­nitely worse. That was the worst and most comprehensive blunder that our species ever committed. Every human being had some share of guilt in that monstrous crime. Am I ‘libeling’ us when I point out that the human race got what it asked for? We blew it with the world’s biggest gamble, and the minor stunt I happen to be pulling right now, that is just another return to the same table with much smaller stakes.”

Lionel offered his brother a canteen. “John’s been running at pretty much full steam for three days straight. I don’t think he’s slept for three hours. Ifhe sounds a little overwrought, you need to cut him some slack.”

Montalban sat down on a patterned carpet; his burst of oratory had drained him. The nomad tent had suddenly grown crowded. While John had passionately ranted, busy tribesmen had carried the pots and kettles from the place and cleared a small arena. A crowd had gathered, sitting cross-legged, chattering and munching snacks. Fried meat of some kind. It smelled like fried rats.

“Hey wow! Entertainment!” said Lionel. At the prospect, he bright­ened so much that he almost seemed to glow.

An overpowering melody came from nowhere, a sourceless wave of powerful, thudding music. A woman strode into the tent, carrying the soundtrack with her.

She wore a spangled golden headdress, a veil, a sequined bra, a span­gled vest, and two thin skirts of overlapping chiffon. Bells chimed around her ankles and golden bangles jingled on both her arms. Her eyes were caked in kohl and her palms were stained red with henna.

She glided into the center of the tent, barefoot on the carpets, bathing in the crowd’s eager, yelping applause.

Her music faded to a steamy, rhythmic clicking. She stamped her slippered feet in time so that her silver anklets jingled, and banged her red palms so that the bracelets clashed.

Then she gazed seductively around her crowd, and saw Sonja. She stopped at once.

“Now we’re in for it,” Lionel groaned.

“I thought I told you to keep Biserka under wraps,” said Montalban. “Where did she get that crazy costume?”

“Downtown Hollywood maybe? She’s so tricky!”

Shivering with rage, the veiled dancer stalked over to confront John Montalban. “You have just completely ruined my best scene.”

“We didn’t know you were having a scene,” said Lionel.

“I especially didn’t know you were stealing Mila Montalban’s best theme music,” said John.

Biserka yanked the veil from her painted lips. “How did she get in here?” Biserka demanded. “You said she’d been killed by airplanes and robots and something.”

“Last night that seemed pretty likely,” John said, “but Sonja’s a trooper.”

Biserka turned to glare at Sonja. She spoke Chinese. “Well: Look around you. I win.”

“Are you speaking to me?”

“What are you, bitch, five years old? I’m telling you that I win! You know that I win. You tried to chase me out of China: well, these are my people here. These are my very special people, the people who love me, the people who are all my good friends.”

“Where did this ragtag find the money to hire you?”

“I did it for love,” Biserka shrieked. “You’re the one that’s the merce­nary! You whore, just look at them, look at their faces, see how much they love me! I taught them everything! I taught them what the real world is really like! Before me, they were like lost children.”

Lionel intervened. “What’s the name of your big victory dance, Bis­erka? Tell me about your cool new routine.”

Biserka shot him a grateful look. “It’s all about victory! And what hap­pened in outer space! And my mother’s death! And it’s my interpretative dance performance about the world’s bravest, noblest people—my peo­ple! They are going to overthrow all the systems, and cover the Earth in free blackspots, and break the walls of surveillance and haul the oppres­sors out of there… and pile their heads up in pyramids!”

Hands on her hips, Biserka drew a breath. “I choreographed it all by myself! I call it ‘The Seven-Veiled Dance of Shiva, the Goddess of De­struction.’”

“Shiva is a male god,” said Lionel.

“Really?”

“Yeah, Shiva is a male dancer, like I am.”

“Never mind that, Lionel,” said Montalban calmly. “Let Biserka dance. She has an eager public waiting here.”

Biserka pouted. “You’ve gone and spoiled it all. How could you let her come in here? I was really, really happy today, for the first time in my whole life! I was happy for maybe one hour! I can dance! You know I can dance. I learned some hot new moves in Los Angeles, and you were going to love those! Now my timing’s all messed up and it’s all ruined.”

“No problem,” said Lionel, beaming supportively. “Just get ready to run your theme again. When I throw out my hand like this”—he gestured— “that’s your cue.”

Without warning, music blasted from Lionel’s flesh: brassy, insistent, heart-thudding. Lionel strode confidently into the empty performance space, drew himself up with a winning smile, and did three backflips with a half gainer. Then he threw out his hand.

The stunned audience, who had never seen such behavior from any human being, howled in awed delight.

Biserka came to with a sudden start. She began to dance.

It was not that Biserka danced shamelessly. It was much worse than that. Biserka knew what shame was, and she was using their shame as a weapon to titillate them. Biserka danced corruptively. One wanted to hide the eyes of children from the spectacle. Though the children were quite enjoying it.

Sonja knew that it was her duty to put a swift end to this. She would kill Biserka. Killing Biserka would be the crown of her lifetime.

Sonja was stopped short by a hand on her elbow. It was the Badaulet. Lucky put his lips next to her ear, so that she could hear him over the howls and the sticky, slinky music. “Our hosts have been telling me about the Chinese state,” he said.

“They’re lying to you.”

“Well, you are my wife, and I want you to tell me the truth.”

Sonja wrenched her arm free from his grip. “I always tell the truth to my men.” No matter how much it hurt them.

“Are these young men really the Chinese state? They’re the former leaders of the Chinese state, only living in the wilderness?”

“Yes, That is true.”

“But they are bold men like me, and brave like me, and they ride and fight like me. And they do not hide behind Chinese walls because they aim to conquer the world.”

“They won’t succeed.” She pointed. “He is going to conquer the world. He’s already conquering the world. He’s doing it right now while he’s watching that slut dancing for him.”

The expression on Montalban’s face could have been canned and poured over cereal. He was transfixed by Biserka’s dancing. He was fas­cinated.

Biserka sensed this and was playing to him. Biserka knew that she had him. She had found some aching hole in him, found a stained chink in the white knight’s armor. It wasn’t, after all, that hard to find. That part of him that belonged to her. She was reeling him in.

The Badaulet watched Biserka’s flurried writhing with unfeigned dis­gust. “Your lord and master there is a decadent weakling.”

“I’m sure he would tell you that he is ‘healthily in touch with his darker side.’”

“I could kill him. He’s not so much of a man. His younger brother, the one who dances like a woman, he’s strong, but he has long hair. They are only two men, they’re not two gods. In the eyes of the one God, I’m as good as them. Only, I have pride and cleanliness, and de­cency, and aspirations to please my Creator. If I put my body next to his body, I can put my knife through him.”

“Don’t do that. To kill a guest is dishonorable. Also, he’s so rich that he might not stay dead.”

“You love him,” he told her. “That’s why you urge me not to kill him. I want you to tell me, as my wife, that you love me better than him. That you will leave him and his life, and live my life.”

“I know that you deserve that from me,” she told him, “but I already swore once by everything I held sacred that I’d never see him, or hear him, or touch him again, and, here he is.” Sonja began to cry. “I swear I can’t help it.”

“Any woman among these noble people would be a better wife to me than you are,” he said. “They all admire me very much, they need my warrior skills. If I join them, I will be high in rank, they will give me twenty women like you. Better women than you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Sonja said between her sobs. “The only thing I ever wanted was to be dutiful and good. I’m just so tired and sick of every­thing. I can’t go on.”

“Look at the way that slave dances for him,” he said. He was revolted. “She’s like a worm. She’s an unclean reptile. I can’t take part in this dis­gusting orgy, this is wrong. Our marriage is over, Sonja. I Divorce You. I Divorce You. I Divorce You!”

Sonja howled in pain and grabbed for him. “Oh please don’t divorce me, please don’t!” He tore himself from her grip and stalked away.

Sonja was trembling from head to foot. She was cracking inside. There was an abyss inside her. She had lived for years in that abyss once. It was a red abyss.

Carried by blazing impulse, Sonja stalked into the middle of the dance floor. She raised both her arms overhead, but this incantatory gesture did nothing. Biserka had seized everyone’s attention. Biserka had stripped off three of her veils and was beaming with malicious delight. She capered around Sonja, waving her chiffon headdress, delicately wriggling.

The crowd rose and surged forward. They formed a tight circle. They were dying to see a fight.

A hand in her back shoved her forward.

For the first time, Biserka was afraid. The taunting look left her face. Biserka looked pretty when she was afraid. She had always been the frightened one, always. When the soldiers had come to’ kill all of them, Biserka had thrown herself on the ground to lick their feet.

Sonja spat into her face, then turned and walked away.

A deadly insult and a feigned retreat. It was the oldest and simplest and most effective of stratagems. In the roar of voices, Sonja counted heartbeats and then lashed out backward.

A rear heel kick was the strongest blow that a woman’s body could de­liver. It hit Biserka straight in the chest as she rushed forward in her rage and hate and panic, and it struck her so hard that she flew backward and stumbled into the arms of two spectators and knocked both of the men down.

Biserka did not move again.

Sonja dusted off her hands. She glared at the men in the tent, who had grown silent and respectful and ashamed. She jerked her head at the open door.

The crowd got up in a body and left the tent.

Montalban and his brother were busy on the carpet.

“Poor Biserka,” mourned Lionel.

“She’s alive,” said Montalban.

Sonja was regretful. “That’s because I missed her heart.”

“Well, you broke three of her ribs and you’ve put her into shock. Oh, for God’s sake stop standing there gloating, Sonja. You’re a woman, you’re not a killer robot. You’ve got medical training, come and help me with her.”

THE SUDDEN END OF THE FESTIVITIES put a damper on the clan’s convocations. Without any apparent orders being taken or given, they were breaking their tents, rolling their carpets, chasing sheep, splitting up, atomizing into the steppes.

Her ex-husband was already long gone. The angry Badaulet had thundered off over the bloody horizon somewhere. She wondered if she would ever hear any news of his death.

Eventually, there were only four of them left. The nomads had evap­orated, leaving four people in a well-trampled and utterly anonymous patch of half desert, half steppe. Herself, the two Montalban brothers, and the unconscious Biserka, lying in a robot full of bullet holes, with her heels propped up and her head set low.

“Hey look!” said Lionel, alertly gazing into the darkening sky. “See that little glint up there? That little spark of moving light? That’s it! That’s the dead Chinese space station. We can actually see it from down here with the naked eye!”

“The satellites must keep spinning,” said Montalban. “Every power player agrees on that. Because without satellites there is no geolocation. Without geolocation, we would be truly lost and abandoned in this des­olate place, instead of merely standing around here in the functional equivalent of Hollywood and Vine.”

“Are we going to get away with stealing a Chinese space station, John? I’ve seen you do big real-estate deals before. But that’s a space sta­tion.”

“We do not plan to ‘steal’ the dead space station, Lionel. That is a derelict property. We are rescuing it. We are redeeming it in the general public interest of planet Earth. It is a fixer-upper. It is a turn-around property. And that station isn’t much bigger than LilyPad when we took that over from the Indians. We are the natural party to take over a lost piece of orbital real estate.”

“You will not get away with that,” Sonja told him. “You will not be al­lowed to do that.”

“Probably not, Sonja dear, but it certainly seems worth a try.”

“It is a direct threat to Chinese national interests if you board that fa­cility. The state will not stand for that foreign intrusion.”

“I can certainly understand that nationalist point of view,” said Mon­talban. “I’m sure that the Chinese are scrambling for new launch ca­pacity in Jiuquan right now. However, China is not the whole Earth. My family and my various political allies, to our great good luck, happen to be planning an international, orbital summit of Acquis and Dispensa­tion political pundits. In fact, we had to postpone that summit when we heard there was bad solar weather. Our private space station, LilyPad—which does not have any mysterious weapons of mass extermination aboard it—happens to be in a rather remote orbit. Whereas the Chinese station—which has long been rumored to carry horrific weapons of mass destruction that can scramble the DNA of people on the ground through God only knows what horrible mechanism—that abandoned hulk, full of corpses and former war criminals, it orbits so close to the Earth that, if we don’t put a new crew aboard it immediately, it’s going to tumble out of orbit and possibly land on a major city.”

“That is completely untrue. That is a pack of lies. There is no danger of that happening. You made all that up. It’s all a snare and a political di­version. You are a pirate, you are stealing it.”

“Ah, but you forget that huge solar flare, Sonja. Solar flares heat the Earth’s outer atmosphere. That has increased the orbital drag on the space station. So of course the space station is a public hazard and it must be rescued at once. We are not pirates, but the responsible parties. The whole world will agree with us.”

“That’s a lie, too.”

“It’s not a lie. It’s the ‘precautionary principle.’ We can’t be sure that isn’t really happening. Maybe there’s a strange interaction with the solar magnetism and the particles of Chinese hydrogen bombs in our upper atmosphere. Maybe that’s what caused all these blackouts and the may-hem around the world. Do you think the world has any time to waste while the Chinese bureaucracy pulls its firecrackers out of mothballs to fly up there and do its sorry cover-up?”

Lionel was laughing wildly. “Just listen to that! Listen to him go! When he gets all wound up, there’s just nobody who can touch him! Wow! He’s had less than forty-eight hours to advance this political line! And he didn’t do it with his friends and his servants handy, either! He did it in the middle of a savage desert. Call me a fanboy, but… well, the stupid cute ones run for public office, and the smart ones manage the campaigns.”

“We’re shooting the works here, Lionel. We have to give it our best,” said Montalban.

Lionel nodded. “Absolutely, brother!”

After Montalban’s raging burst of oratory, nothing whatever hap­pened. There was nothing around them. They were nowhere and in noware. Night was falling. There was utter emptiness.

“I’m thirsty,” Biserka moaned.

Lionel tipped water into her mouth. She sipped it and passed out.

“How will you know if your scheme has worked?” said Sonja.

“I can tell you,” Montalban confessed, “that I haven’t the least idea. There simply wasn’t any time to arrange for that. I threw the gears into motion—in network nodes all over this planet—I don’t even know who is first onto the space station. They’re not exactly two-fisted astronaut hero types, these Relinquishment intellectuals. Plus, there’s some like­lihood that another solar flare will erupt and they all get fried up there. But—some global pundit is absolutely sure to invade that facility, even if it’s just to float around in free fall making snarky comments about the bad industrial design.”

“I would go up there,” said Lionel. “I love orbit.”

“Oh, I’m definitely going up there, if we somehow survive down here. I’m going to retrieve the body of my dear correspondent, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I wouldn’t dream of having that lady jettisoned into outer space… I don’t care how much space junk there is up there already; I swear she won’t become part of it.”

Sonja sat heavily on the comfortless floor of the desert. It had never oc­curred to Sonja that anyone would go to fetch her mother’s body down to Earth. That concept had not crossed her mind for one instant.

She had been blind to that idea. She had always been blind to so many ideas. She was a rigid, staring, damaged creature. There were so many spaces within her own stony heart, places where she could not look.

“Don’t cry,” said Montalban.

“I’m not crying.”

“You’re about to cry,” Montalban predicted, with accuracy. “You’re about to crack up because you can’t bear your burden. Your lifelong burden is finally overwhelming you. It’s too heavy and it’s just too much for you. We know about that, Lionel and I. So we are removing your burden preemptively. Just for once. As a mercy. Your war is all over, Sonja. We are pulling you out of the cold. You are never going back to that place in the world, because you are ours now. We own you. Just let them try to take you back from us.”

“Look there,” said Lionel, pointing.

“What do you see?”

“It’s a contrail, some kind of arch across the sky. Not a satellite. Mov­ing way too slow for that. Some kind of suborbital thing.”

“I do see it! Right! That could be a Chinese ground-to-ground war­head,” said Montalban cheerily.

“That is the west,” said Lionel patiently. “That way over there, that’s the east. China is east.”

“Is that the east?” said Montalban, puzzled. “Really? I should have stepped outside of that tent more often.”

“Sonja, do you have binoculars? A rifle? Anything with a telescope on it?”

Sonja muttered at them from the chilly ground. “All I own is this badly damaged robot, which my ex-husband left to me as an act of con­tempt.”

But they were ignoring her words, for something had suddenly bloomed overhead in the darkening Asian sky. “Holy cow,” said Lionel, “what the heck is that thing? I’ve never seen a thing like that in my life!”

“What is that, a comet? I hate to say this; but that looks like a flying squid.”

“It’s like some zeppelin bullet that opens up just like an umbrella! Who would build a thing like that?” Lionel paused. “Why haven’t they sold us one of those?”

“The world is full of skunk labs, Lionel. We can’t know every tech project in the world. I’d be guessing—well, I’d bet that these were just the first guys to hit the Return key. They must have scrambled whatever they had on the ground.”

The exotic aircraft drew nearer to them. It was floating to Earth rather elegantly, silently, and emission-free. It was like a giant dandelion seed.

“Okay,” said John authoritatively, “I think maybe I’ve heard of these after all. That’s some kind of fibrous suborbital pod. It’s Acquis. It’s Eu­ropean and it’s Acquis.”

Lionel was unimpressed. “Of course it’s Acquis, John. Anybody can tell from the design that it’s Acquis. I think it’s Italian.”

“I think you’re right.”

“That craft is going to land precisely on our stated coordinates. Like, within a five-meter range. I think we’d better move before it lands and crushes us.”

Arm in arm, the brothers took several measured steps away across the desert. The flying device drew nearer. It was stellar and radiant and huge. It was like a flying tinsel chandelier.

“No, it’s going to land nearby us,” Montalban decided, and the two of them strode back to the robot to await their airborne delivery.

“Los Angeles is the capital of the world,” Montalban pronounced. “Say what you will about the Chinese—and I love them dearly, we do business every day—there are a hell of a lot more Chinese in Los Ange­les than there will ever be Angelenos in Beijing.”

“You sure got that right!”

Montalban drew a triumphant breath. “As we stand here in the gath­ering dusk of old Asia, it’s the brilliant dawn of a new West Coast New Age! It’s time to break out the Napa Valley champagne! Tomorrow’s regime is Pax Californiana! As a bright and shining city on a hill, we, the last best hope of mankind, are pulling the planet’s ashes straight out of the stellar fire!”

“That’s the truth!” crowed Lionel.

“Even when we golden Californians were mere American citizens, it was never that great an idea to bet your future against us. I mean, you could bet against us, but—where’s the fun in that? If you try to beat us, even if you win, you have to lose!”

Lionel slapped his brother’s two extended hands. “We rock! We rule! It’s because we’ve got a shine on our shoes and a melody in our heart! We’ve got the rhythm!”

The brothers capered like utter fools as Sonja sat in heartbreak, and they laughed uproariously. It was the most glorious day of their lives.