The Caryatids (26 page)

"So I will kill your Glyn, because Glyn has no big bodyguards. So that's easy. Your Glyn will be out for a buttered bagel in her black turtle-neck and her tummy-flattening girdle, and she will walk by some junker car and one instant, no warning, Glyn is Glynereens. She's Glyndust." Biserka chortled. "A smart car bomb in a world of sensorwebs! That's one afternoon's work!"

Biserka straightened in the hearse's pew. "So. You can do as I tell you, Radmila, which is easy and good. Or you can try to screw me out of what I want, and I will make you die of grief. You heard that, right? You remember my great plan, right? I don't have to beat it into you." Radmila moaned violently and shook her head.

"It seems that you have something important to say about my plans for our future." Radmila nodded.

"It must be really important, with you fussing like that so much." Radmila nodded harder.

"Okay, I tell you what. You turn around, give me your hands. Then I cut off the tip of your left little finger. Just the tip, not all of it! Then I take that tape off your mouth and you tell me about your objections. Your crucial input is at least that important, right?"

Radmila shook her head.

"Oh, so it's not so important! I thought so. So: Now I tape your eyes shut. Before I kick you out of this car. Duct tape! It's wonderful! It holds the whole universe together." Biserka undid the brass buckles on a splendid travel bag. She pawed inside it. Her bag held flat black rubber sandals, a sports bra, cotton pants, athletic socks, panties, an arsenal of fancy toiletries, sunglasses, tampons, chewing gum, a host of pills, and a long black rubber shotgun. Biserka shook the bag upside down and mourned. "Oh, I left my duct

tape back at my blackspot. Because I used it there. What a shame."

There was a loud thump on the roof of the rolling hearse.

"Okay, I didn't like that. Something hit the car. That was bad." Radmila rolled her eyes upward, then crinkled her brows and hunched her shoulders in silent laughter.

"All right, what?" Biserka shouted. "What?" She tucked her nailed fingers into Radmila's cheek and ripped the tape from her face. "Tell me now."

Radmila worked her sore jaws.

"All right, what? What hit the car? Tell me."

"That was nothing. It was a bird."

"That was a lie! You lied to me."

"I'm not afraid of you, Biserka. You don't scare me. You have killed me with the shame of what you've done, I will never face my Family again, I will never work in this town again . . . But you are small and weak.. You have no business here. I never did anything to you."

"You EXISTED!" Biserka shrieked. "Everybody who isn't on a desert island knows I look like 'Mila Montalban'!" She slapped the wrinkled tape back onto Radmila's lips. Being rumpled, the duct tape failed to stick well.

Biserka opened the window of the hearse. Snakelike, she jammed her skinny torso through it, then made a desperate lunge.

She came back with a toy gripped in her hand: a flying toy made of foamed propellers and plastic blocks and nakedly exposed circuits.

"I know what this is. I used to see a lot of these."

Radmila kept her face still. She'd never seen a flying spyplane of quite this type before, but she certainly knew what it was. Some fan had built that.

There were networks of those fans out there, happy little voyeur per-verts who would swap their recipes for making spy toys and then share their spy photographs. The fans were scum. But there were always some of them around. Like mice: If you saw one, it meant a hundred.

"This one doesn't even have a gun," Biserka scoffed. "All it's got is stupid pirate media and big googly eyes!" She opened the hearse, stuck the toy airplane out, and smashed it in the slamming door. Cheap plas-tic parts flew everywhere. A broken wad of them landed in Radmila's lap. They were commodity pieces that had cost a few cents in a hard-ware store, and they'd been stuck together with hot-glue. A sloppy job. Some kid. Some fan kid with a kit-part and a bunch of other fans to egg him on. One blurry picture, one snapshot . . . of a major star tied in bondage in her underwear. With a coffin, in the back of a hearse . . . Some fan spy must have seen that image, for at least a few seconds, a few hundred frames of stolen video.

An image like that would spread from fan to fan like ink on a towel.

So all this would be over. Not yet, but everything had to end. Those little pirate kids on networks—they'd even destroyed the movies.

Radmila stared out the window.

"Okay, princess, just for that, we go back to the safe house! No free-dom for you! I wanted you free to carry my message, but now I keep you!"

Twenty minutes passed, in which Radmila said nothing. She had al-ready lost everything. Biserka had no safe house anymore. Her blackspot safe house was on fire. Rocket flares were flying. The glare of flames lit the dark interior of the hearse. The flames backlit capering figures, running, dancing.

"Oh Lionel, Lionel, that gangster bad boy . . . that tasty morsel, Li-onel," mourned Biserka. "I had such plans and hopes for him. Now he's found my hideout and I want to kill myself. I think I will. Right now! I will ignite this hearse and I will blow both of us into little pieces and there won't be anything left here but a cloud of your own DNA."

Radmila rolled her eyes in contempt.

Biserka crawled into the front of the hearse, to mess at length with its interface. Distant sirens were howling, but the fabled rapid-response corps of Los Angeles were slow to fight these fires. Maybe because the fastest and most agile gangs on the street were the arsonists.

"Lionel and his friends are getting out of hand, Radmila! That's a whole lot of pretty fire! I've seen towns on fire in China that were burn-ing less than your town is burning tonight." Biserka was frightened suddenly. "All right, you're always claiming you love them so much. Go stop them from rioting. Go on, I'll untie you. Go be superhuman. You can do that. You're superperfect." She pulled the wadded tape from Radmila's lips.

"Kill us both," Radmila said. "It's easier."

"You stink," Biserka decided. "I think I'll go help them, instead. I'll say that I'm you, and I'll tell them to burn everything. I'll burn every-thing you ever built here! Because I look like you. I look more like you than you do."

Flames lit the horizon. A dense, oily wave of smoke rolled over them. Biserka kicked open the door, left the hearse, slammed it behind her.

Radmila hated her life.

The hearse suddenly started again. It rolled, slow as a minute hand and just as inexorable, into the Pacific surf. Like every form of networked machinery, the car showed a supreme contempt for its own survival.

The hearse wobbled. Pacific surf rolled rhythmically over the win-dows. Seawater seeped under the doors.

Radmila managed to wriggle sideways in her bondage. She got her knees up, her legs up. The foaming tide would not drown her until it reached the coffin. The tide rose steadily. The coffin began to float.

Part THREE

THE GOBI DESERT

HEWASBOWLEGGED,he had lice, internal parasites, and tubercu-lar lesions, and he was nineteen years old. His life was one long epic poem about heat, cold, thirst, hunger, filth, disasters, and bloodshed. His fellow tribesmen called him "the Badaulet," which meant "Lucky." Sonja tuned her clinic lights to a mellow glow and turned up the in-frasound. Lucky's tough, tireless, scrawny body went as translucent as glass. His sturdy heart jetted blood through the newly cleansed nets of his lungs.

Sonja had killed off Lucky's parasites, filtered his blood, changed his skin flora, flushed out his dusty lungs and the squalid contents of his guts . . . She had cut his hair, trimmed his nails . . . He was a desert war-lord, and every pore, duct, and joint in him required civilizing.

"Lucky dear," she said, "what would you like more than anything in this whole world?"

"Death in battle," said Lucky, heavy-lidded with pleasure. Lucky al-ways said things like that.

"How about a trip to Mars?"

Lucky stoutly replied—according to their machine translation: "Yes, the warrior souls are bound for Heaven! But men must be honest with Heaven and rise from the front line of battle! For if we want to go to the garden of Heaven, yet we have not followed in the caravan of jihad, then we are like the boat that wants to sail on the dry desert!"

"Mars is a planet, not Heaven. It's a planet like Earth."

"Even a pagan woman with your pitiful ignorance can follow the path of jihad!" said Lucky, grunting a little as her oiled fingers readjusted the bones in his neck. "Women can equip a man for righteous battle with their gold and jewelry!"

"I have no gold or jewelry."

Lucky reached out deftly and seized a thick hank of her hair. "Then cut and sell these golden tresses!

Your beauty will buy me guns to pun-ish all of Heaven's enemies!"

"What a sweet thing to say."

There was no use her denying it, especially to herself: she had fallen for him. He was a dismal, bloodstained creature from what was surely one of the worst areas on Earth, yet he radiated confidence and a sure sense of manly grace.

This was not another impulsive fling, though Sonja had never lacked for those. This time was one of those serious times.

Maybe she had fallen, somehow, for their quirky machine transla-tion, for Lucky's native tongue was an obscure pidgin of Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dialect, a desert lingo created by the roaming few who still survived in the world's biggest dust bowl. It was the trouble of reaching him, of touching him, that made their pang of communion so precious to her. Talking to Lucky was like shouting through an an-cient crack in the Great Wall of China.

She felt a powerful, deeply spiritual rapport with him, for once she had been so much like him: young, bewildered, foreign, aggressive, and heavily armed. In China, yet not quite of China. For this young war hero to become an honored guest of the Chinese state—he must have waded here through a tide of gore. Sonja disentangled his callused fingers from her curls. "Lucky, you feel some pain here, don't you?" She patted him intimately.

"Yes, that is a pain in my ass."

"I will fix that for you." He'd fallen—from a horse, most likely—and his cracked fourth lumbar vertebra had a growth on it, a tender, frilly, lig-amentous benign tumor like some Chinese wood-ear mushroom. Peo-ple's interior organs—and Sonja had spent years studying them—they were subaquatic organisms, basically. They grew in bloody seawater.

"Stop fixing me, Sonja. You fix me too much."

"Dear Badaulet, that big pain you feel down your leg comes from one small broken bone on your back. It is right . . . here. Do you feel that? Here it is: that is your pain. Because there is a network of nerves there. The network is pinched, the network has a fault. See how I can touch that network fault? My fingers can feel that."

"No, no! Stop that! My back is strong! It's my stupid ass that has the pain." Lucky twisted his neatly trimmed head, showed her his newly polished teeth and smiled. "Rub me all over, slowly, as you did before. That part is good."

"Lucky: You are strong and beautiful, but I know your body better than you. I know what you feel."

"Stop dreaming! You can't tell me what I feel, woman! Only Heaven knows the secrets hidden in the breasts of men!"

"Oh, I know enough of your secrets to heal you as a man." She low-ered her eyes. "That will hurt at first."

"Oh woman, why do you always talk so much? I know what you want from that bold, rude way you look at my face! You can't hurt me! You and your sweet little hands . . . " Lucky grabbed snakelike at her fingers, and missed them as she instantly snatched them back.

He really didn't think that she could hurt him. Of the many out-landish things that Lucky had said to her, this one was the most absurd.

The Badaulet was an outcast, although he was entirely sure he was a prince. She had once thought she was a princess, and become an outcast . . . "Badaulet, this evening I will bathe you, and dress you in your fine new uniform. You will meet the greatest heroes in the whole world." Grappling his arm, she coaxed him over onto his belly, so that his spine was exposed.

"Who is that, what did you say to me?" Lucky touched his translation earpiece and frowned.

"Your banquet hosts in Jiuquan tonight are the taikonauts! The astro-nauts! The cosmonauts! The
taikong ren.
The
yuhangyuan.
The
hang-tianyuan.
Do you understand that? I mean the Chinese heroes who flew to Mars and returned to Earth."

"Oh yes, the famous Great Pilgrims to Heaven. I understand. They mean to honor the Badaulet for my valor in combat."

"To meet these heroes brings great good fortune. They are the fu-ture!"

"Did your men of valor fight on Mars?"

"No. They collected rocks there."

"Though they have returned from Heaven, if they failed to fight the jihad they have earned no merit." Sonja planted the point of her elbow into Lucky's spine, and with one decisive lunge she ripped the tumor loose.

The Badaulet gasped in agony and writhed like a hooked fish. "You felt that pang all down your leg, didn't you?"

He was angry. "You hurt me now! You cut my hair! You washed my guts! You stole my clothes! You burned me with hot wax! And I'm no better, Sonja! I hurt! You promised you would fix me and I hurt." Sonja rolled him over onto his back. For the first time since she had met him, Lucky had gone gratifyingly limp. Normally he was as nervous and tensile as a bundle of barbed wire. His torn spine was bleeding a lit-tle, inside of him. Not too much. She had done it precisely right. What amazing skin this boy had. There were hen-scratched scars all over him, pits, pocks, frostbite, dimples . . . "Lie quiet now . . . Rest and heal . . . Shall I sing to you while I make you feel better? I'll sing you a little song. I know many old and beautiful songs. I will sing you 'The Ballad of the Savage Tiger.' " As she sang, Sonja suited actions to his needs. The springy, salty vi-tality of the masculine body, how endearing that was. The body was ir-repressible, it wanted to live despite everything. The sexual body, with resources for new life.