The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [111]
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 razor-keen 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 “dust-repellent” 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 schoolyards—where, 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.