Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

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.”