Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

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.”