The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [104]
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 high-society Beijing as Zeng’s “protégée,” 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 Project—style 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