The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [91]
A bonfire of gratified lust was roaring around in Lucky’s skull. Hormones washed through him in visible tides. With surgical delicacy, she rubbed him with three oiled fingertips. Instantly, an aurora of utter bliss boiled through him. He teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.
This was the world’s most human “humane intervention.” It was the one consoling act that, during its few sweet minutes, could obliterate loneliness. Obscure horror. Dismantle grief.
The famed rewards of Heaven for the warrior-martyr were seventy-two heavenly maidens doing just this.
THE AIRLOCK INTO THE FABLED MARS DOME was very likely the single most paranoid security space in all of China. The Martian dome was under the strictest official state quarantine, so the disinfected visitors went in there wearing single-seamed, quilted space gowns, soft little foamy space boots, and nothing else whatsoever. Visitors were allowed no tools, no possessions, no equipment of any kind. Not a fleck. Not a speck. Their bare humanity.
Sonja always had trouble with this airlock, for there were old bits of shrapnel inside her: pieces of another human being. A suicide bomber. Lucky and Sonja tenderly held hands on their waffled and comfortless plastic bench while the security scanners whirred overhead. There was nothing much to do except to gaze out the windows.
The Martian airlock featured two oblong portholes. Their shape mimicked the two world-famous portholes in the Martian landing capsule. These portholes helped some with the monotony of security scans, for the portholes offered boastful views of downtown Jiuquan.
Certain knowledgeable pundits called Jiuquan “the planet’s most advanced urban habitat,” although, as a supposed “city,” Jiuquan had its drawbacks. Jiuquan, which had sprung up around China’s largest space-launch center, resembled no previous “city” on Earth.
Jiuquan bore some atavistic traces of a normal Chinese city: mostly morale-boosting “big-character” banner ads—but it had no streets and no apparent ground level. Jiuquan consisted mostly of froth, foam, and film. It looked as if a fireworks factory had burst and been smothered with liquid plastic. Solar-sheeted domes more garish than Christmas ornaments, linked with pneumatic halls and rhizomelike inflated freeways. Piston elevators, garish capsules, ducts and dimples and depressions, decontamination chambers. Hundreds of state laboratories.
Jiuquan was thirty-eight square kilometers of zero-footprint, a young desert metropolis recycling its air and all its water. Jiuquan was an artificial Xanadu where fiercely dedicated national technocrats lived on their bioplastic carpets with bioplastic furniture, interacting with bioplastic screens, under skeletal watchtowers and ancient rocket launch-pads.
Oil-slick paddies of bacterial greenhouses, deftly fed by plug-in sewers, created fuel, food, and building materials, all of it manufactured straight from the dust of the Gobi Desert. A city built of dust.
A radical yet highly successful experiment in sustainability, Jiuquan was booming—it was the fastest-growing “city” in China. It was sited in the Gobi Desert with nothing to stop its urban expansion but the dust. And Jiuquan was made of dust. Dust was what the city ate.
Sonja was finally allowed to clear the steely skeins of the Martian airlock. Dr. Mishin, who had been waiting for her, rose to his feet and hastily jammed his dust-grimed laptop into his dust-grimed bag.
Leonid Mishin was a Russian space technician who had wandered the world like Marco Polo and finally moored here in Jiuquan. Mishin dwelt inside the Mars simulator, as one of its few permanent residents.
Everyone else in Jiuquan also resided in an airtight bubble of some kind, but Mishin’s bubble, the Martian simulator, was officially considered the most advanced bubble of them all. This made up somewhat for the fact that Dr. Mishin was never allowed to leave.
Dr. Mishin labored in his confinement as a “senior technical consultant,” which was to say, he led a career rather similar to her own as a “senior public health