The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [105]
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 go-stone 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