The Caryatids

"No one attacks her with the long lance, No one shoots her with the strong bow. Suckling her progeny, rearing her cubs, She trains them in her own savagery. Her reared head becomes the great wall Her waving tail becomes the war banner. The greatest pirates from the eastern sea Would dread to meet her after dark, The savage tiger, met on the western road, Would terrify the greatest bandits. What good is any sword against her? When she growls like thunder, hang it on the wall! From the secret foothills of Tai mountain Comes the sound of women weeping, But government regulations forbid Any official to dare to listen."

Lucky was blissfully quiet now. He had wisely chosen not to argue with her anymore. A host of ducts and long hydraulic chambers and strange stiffening flows of blood…And yet, human beings emerged from these oblong glands and their conduits, men and women were sired by all this gadgetry-well, not herself, of course, but most people had a father…People emerged as single-celled genetic packets out of this complex, densely innervated, profoundly temperamental fluid-delivery system.

The secret of humanity. Here it was, in her hands.

No matter how many human bodies Sonja encountered, and how well she grasped them and their intimate functions, there was always some new magic in a new one.

Sonja switched filters and gazed straight into Lucky's brain. His arousal was ferociously devouring a host of tagged radioactive sugars. Sex was like a bonfire in his basement.

Women often knowingly told other women that "men only wanted one thing," but it took a sensorweb to catalogue and reveal that. To see it was to believe it. To know all was to forgive all. A man wanted that one thing he wanted because there wasn't room in his head for anything else.

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.