The Caryatids (34 page)

Sleep claimed him as she thoughtfully licked the scabs on his arms—-those seven puckered little wounds, where she had plucked seven dif-ferent state IDs from his flesh. Infection wanted a foothold in those salty little wounds, but the microbes died under her tongue.

She slithered under his slumbering body like a prayer mat of flesh. Heavenly voices woke Sonja. The voices broke like a revelation into her interior nightmare landscape of thirst, dust, bombs, pain, black suns, cities burning . . .

Her eyes shocked open. For long, tumbling moments she had no idea who she was or where she was—for she was no one, and she was every-where.

A torrent of sound was falling through the walls of the tent, sound tumbling out of the sky. Deep, Wagnerian wails from a host of Valkyries . . . Those were starry voices, tremendous, operatic, obliterat-ing, thunderous, haunting the core of her head.

Legs shaking, Sonja unsealed the tent and crept out naked and bare-foot.

The cold zenith overhead was alive with burning ribbons. Clouds of booming, blooming celestial fire. Cosmic curtains of singing flame, sheets of emerald and amethyst. They were pouring out of the sky in cataracts.

Sonja jammed both hands to the sides of her skull. The celestial singing pierced the flesh of her hands. This had to be some act of nature, she knew that . . . For it was sim-ply too
big
for anything that mankind might have done. It was cosmic, too huge for mankind to even
imagine.
She was seeing a vast heavenly negation of all the worst or best mankind could think or do. It was singing at her, singing to her, singing
through
her—singing as an entity, singing as a divinity that bore the scale to her that she did to some anx-ious microbe.

The majesty of it emptied her of all illusions. It relieved art anguish that she had never known she had. How easily she might have died, and never seen this, never heard this, never lived this moment. She had always prided herself on her easy contempt about her own death, but now she knew that she had been a fool. Life was so much larger in scope than the simple existence that she had dismissed so arrogantly. Existence was colossal.

The Baudaulet emerged from their tent. He saw the tilt of her chin and he gazed upward.

"The Mandate of Heaven!" he shouted, and his translated voice sud-denly killed the warbling songs inside her head. All that cosmic music vanished instantly.

The heavenly curtains writhed and plummeted up there, but they did that in an eerie, abstract silence. She stared at him. It was clear from his stance that the Badaulet heard nothing. Nothing but the wind. There was a wind out here, the wind of the Gobi.

She was shuddering.

"That is the aurora," she told him, "that is space weather. I have never seen the aurora in my life, but that must be it. I heard it in my head with my new ears!"

"Heaven foretells great changes on Earth," he told her.

"The aurora comes from the Sun. It is the energy of solar particles. They fall in sheets through a hole in the Earth's magnetic field. Then they tear into the outer limits of the air, and the air must glow. That is what we see tonight. And I
heard
it!"

"This is important," he told her, "so you must stop talking that non-sense." He pulled the belt from his uniform. Then, without another word, he began to beat her with his belt: not angrily, just rhythmically and thoroughly.

Having been beaten by lovers before, Sonja knew how to react. With a howl of dismay, she fell to the earth, hugging his ankles and begging forgiveness in a gabble of sobs and shrieks. When she clutched at his knees, his balance was poor, so he couldn't use the belt effectively. He stopped his attempts to beat her. She contin-ued to shriek, beg, and grovel. This was the core of the performance.

It was never about how hard men beat you, or how many strokes, or what they hit you with. It was always about their need to break your will and impose their own.

After savoring her shrieks and sobs for a while, the Badaulet grew re-luctant. Finally, he belted his pants and pulled her off his legs. "Woman, why do you always carryon so? Put on your clothes! What is wrong with you? I didn't hit you so hard! It's just-when Heaven is man-ifesting miracles, you can't talk nonsense!

We could both go to Hell!"

He was a hundred times more frightened than herself. The basis of his universe had been kicked out like a hole though a bucket. "Forgive my stupid chatter, dear husband! Thank you for punishing me!" This submission stymied him. Of course the Badaulet had no idea on Earth what to do about this tumult in the heavens. Otherwise he would not have beaten her in the first place. The sky was writhing violently with silent electrical phantoms. The wind died.In the absence of her vanished screams there was a vast and awful silence with not so much as a cricket.

"There is a great danger to my soul tonight . . . " he muttered. "I know that much, I know that is certain truth . . . "

"Let's watch the sky together! Is that all right?"

"It's cold. You are shivering, your teeth are chattering."

"I'll bring the mat! This might be a splendid omen, and not an evil omen! Look how beautiful it is! Maybe heaven is blessing our love, and our lives are changing for the better!" Sonja scurried into the tent and brought out a wadded double armful. "Lie down! I will hide my eyes and hold you tightly. Because I'm afraid."

She made a nest for them. Grudgingly—for now he felt ashamed of himself—he climbed on the puffy mattress.

He was shivering with cold and fear, so she warmed him. Mollified, he relaxed a little. Time passed. The Badaulet watched the heavens writhing in silent display. Ghostly colors were leaching out of the sky . . . with the planet's nightly twirling and the sun's axial tilt, some confluence of distant fields was fading. The tongues of fire were in retreat.

At last he spoke up. "Woman, I believe that Heaven has blessed me. The world is changing, and a life as hard as mine must surely change for the better. I cannot
always
suffer." She said nothing. She loved him only slightly less than before he had beaten her. He was a man: angry, vulnerable.

With one pinch she could rip the inner workings of his throat. He would drown in his own blood. Her legs were still smarting, so the temp-tation was there. She could leave him here, dead as mutton. Who would ever find him in a godforsaken place like this, who would ever know?

But why should he die at this one moment among all other potential moments to die? Wouldn't he die soon enough no matter what she did, or what he did? Her tears would dry on their own. She turned her face to the flickering, guttering cosmos. He was al-ready asleep.

??????????

HE WOKE HERin the chilly predawn, fully dressed and insisting that she start the robot from its bed of dust. The aurora was long gone, van-ished as the Earth wheeled on its axis. She advised him that the robot would run better if they unrolled its solar panels in daylight and let it crack some grass for fuel. The Badaulet stiffly rejected this counsel. He didn't much like her for giving it. The Badaulet had tired of the magic distorting his life. He sensed, correctly that it was somehow her own fault.

So, at his imperious demand, they set off reeling in the predawn cold and dark. She was hungry and thirsty, so she tried to drink from the rumen bag, knowing it wasn't ready yet. There was protein cracked from the cellulose there, and the taste seemed all right.

The robot conveyed them, in a crazed dance step, up ragged slopes, down black canyons, and across declivities. It ran across ground that would break a human leg like a dry stick. Queasy and low in spirits, Sonja felt unable to speak, and when dawn redly stung the rim of the world, the Badaulet suddenly began to confess to her. He was making up to her: not because he had beaten her during the night, for he con-sidered that act entirely proper; but to revive her morale. So he spoke about the subject that always engrossed him most: his enemies.

The Badaulet was an agent of Chinese order in the midst of the cen-tral Asian disorder. He was always outnumbered, if never outgunned. His allegiance to the distant Chinese state was vague, and superstitious, and deeply confused, and lethally passionate. It was like a Cossack's love for Russia. His faith, to the extent that he could describe it to her, was a cargo-cult patchwork of militia training, radical Islam, herbal lore, hunting and herding, and the shattered, scrambled, pitiful remains of Asia's tra-ditional nomadic life. The Badaulet was not from any historic Asian tribe: he had no ethnic group. He was a native of globalized chaos.

The Badaulet's brief stay in Jiuquan had unsettled his young mind yet further. They had shown their pet barbarian Jiuquan's proudest cul-tural achievements: chamber music, calligraphy, various sports that one could perform while sealed in a plastic bubble . . . The Badaulet had found these accomplishments contemptible.

Then his Chinese handlers had shown him something closer to his heart: something unknown to Sonja. He boasted to her about it, obliquely: he claimed that it was far greater than any gift that she had given him.

So it had to be some propaganda enterprise from a local laboratory. Some stereotypical "amazing secret weapon" meant to stiffen the spines of China's barbarian allies. The Badaulet called it the "Assassin's Mace." He didn't say precisely what this weapon was—clearly, that was not for her to know—but the technicians had promised him he could try the Assassin's Mace someday, and wield it against his enemies. If he were loyal and true, that day would come soon.

The Assassin's Mace—there were a host of oddities in the taut sub-urbs of Jiuquan, where the cream of Chinese techno-intelligentsia la-bored on their secret productions. Secret weapons labs—Sonja had seen a few, she never liked them or their blinkered inhabitants. Secret weapons labs were obscure and torpid and heavy and loathsome.

The Acquis and the Dispensation hated China's state secrecy, for they were obsessed with rogue technologies spinning out of control. In-ternal combustion: a rogue technology spun out of control. Electric light: a rogue technology spun out of control. Fossil fuel: the flesh of the necromantic dead, risen from its grave, had wrecked the planet.

Global regulation, transparency, verification . . . that was the sup-posed solution of the Acquis and Dispensation, and China despised such things. China had walls and barriers. The good old ways, the trusted ways. The old ways to hide all the new ways.

The robot rambled, reeling, off the broken landscape and into a flat-ter steppe. This landscape was somewhat easier on Sonja's nerves. Big domelike tussocks of grass appeared. Some storm track had overpassed this area, slopping rain like the spatter from an overloaded paintbrush, and the desert was suddenly beautiful. In some ways the modern desert was better off than any other biome on Earth, for the desert never ex-pected any kindness from the sky.

Here and there were brightly colored bits of human litter, plucked up by violent windstorms, flung from dead towns . . . plastic bags. Plastic shopping bags were the one artifact in the Gobi more omnipresent than land mines. Plastic bags had been cheap, present in uncounted millions in the daily life of cities. The bags were easily airborne, and although they tore, they never decayed. Over the decades, plastic bags could blow like tumbleweeds over half a continent.

Sheep tracks appeared. The Badaulet grew concerned. He dis-mounted the robot to study the tracks and to number the sheep, and, if possible, to reveal some trace of the shepherd. After a quarter hour he returned from his tracking studies and solemnly handed her half a handful of sheep dung. Black manure like a pile of pebbles. It felt dry and light.

"This is the dung of a sheep," she said.

He nodded, and made a smashing motion with his fingers.

She broke one lump of the dung and it instantly turned to the finest black ash, a bacterial charcoal. This sheep had baked every calorie of nutrition out of the grass it was eating. The guts of that sheep were a mi-crobe factory.

Sonja sniffed unhappily at her fingers. " 'Why does Mars stink?' " Lucky brightened to see her making a joke, as if he hadn't given her a beating. "Today I wish I had seen that mammoth, and not just its stink-ing dung."

"There will be other mammoths to walk the Earth. Something always breaks the walls and stampedes out of the bubbles . . . I don't like this. The state does not allow this. This should not be happening. This is bad."

"A big herd of sheep, eighty, ninety," he told her, "with a boy on a pony, and the guts of his horse were the same way." Lucky shifted his sniper rifle from one camouflaged shoulder to another. "We ride with greater care now, and we watch the skies always."

It was a comfort to closely follow the sheep tracks. The busy feet of a flock that size would clear the earth of land mines.

Horse tracks appeared, the unshod hooves of Mongolian ponies, and then the signs of tents. These had been big round tents, Mongolian "ger" tents, which were portable yurts of crisscrossed sticks and woolly felt.

There were dead fires in the abandoned camp, with a host of human footprints. This was not some minor group of fanatics skittering across the desert to launch one bomb their way. These were clear signs of families of peo-ple, a clan, with women, many children . . . Gathering grass. These Disorder nomads seemed to have an industrial obsession with grass. They had been cutting tufts of grass with hand sickles, and mincing that grass up into a kind of crude silage, and baking water out of the grass somehow, maybe with solar distilleries.

The whole village was methodically grazing on the grass. They even left behind an industrial grass dung, dry, fermented wads of the stuff mashed up like dirty oatmeal or dry beer lees.

"I'm surprised that we lack intelligence about these people," she said, "for it's clear they've heard of us and what we are doing."

"These people made the airplanes that attacked us. I thought there would be maybe two men, three bad men, a raiding team, my enemies," said the Badaulet thoughtfully."Yet I don't know these people. They are many and well organized. We will have trouble, you and I alone, killing so many."