The Caryatids (28 page)

Most of the microbes here were clones of native Martian microbes. The Chinese taikonauts had found microbial life on Mars: with deep drilling, in the subterranean ice. They had found and retrieved six dif-ferent Martian species of sleepy but persistent microorganisms.

Those Martian bacteria were relatives of certain extremophile mi-crobes also found on Earth. Very likely they were primeval rock-eating bugs—blasted off the fertile Earth in some huge volcanic upheaval, then blown across the solar system in some violent gust of solar spew. Giant volcanoes, huge solar flares . . . they didn't happen often. But they certainly happened.

Microbes cared nothing if they lived on Earth or Mars. Men had found alien Martian life and brought it back alive to the Earth. That was all the same to the microbes.

Maybe—as Montalban had once told her—there was something in-nately Chinese about exploring Mars. Every other nation-state with a major space program had collapsed. Nation-states always collapsed from their attempts to explore outer space. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States—even the Republic of India, China's biggest space rival—they had all ceased to exist politically. Montalban claimed that the reason was obvious. Nation-states were about the land and its strict boundaries, while space was about the cosmos and the globe. So the national urge to annex outer space brought a nation-killing curse.

That curse had not felled the Chinese. No. No curse could fell the Chinese. The Chinese had prevailed over three millennia of river floods, droughts, pestilences, mass starvations. . .and barbarian invasions, civil wars, plagues, uprisings, revolutions. . .China suffered, yes—collapsed, never. When the taikonauts had returned from Mars to land safely in the Gobi Desert, the Chinese nation, what was left of it, had exploded with joy. Hollow-eyed Chinese eating human flesh in the shrouded ruins of their automobile plants had been proud about Mars.

The Chinese were still very proud of their taikonauts, though the aging taikonauts, whom Sonja knew very personally, seemed a little shaken by their ambiguous role in history. The space heroes had left a glittering China in a headlong economic boom; they had returned from their multiyear Mars adventure to a choking, thirsting China whose sky consisted of dust.

Six kinds of dust:

The black dust from the Gobi Desert.

The red loess dust of central China.

The industrially toxic yellow dust that came from the dried riverbeds and the emptied basins of the giant parched dams.

The brown smoking dust of China's burning fields and blazing forests.

The dense, gray, toxic dust of China's combusting cities.

And, last but most globally important, the awesome, sky-tinting, Earth-cooling, stratospheric, radioactive dust from dozens of Chinese hydrogen bombs, digging massive reservoirs for fresh ice in the Hi-malayas. Sonja had worked on the ground in China during the last of those years. Foreign soldiers had flown into China from every corner of the planet, always hoping to reassert order there. China could not be al-lowed to fail, because China was the workshop of the entire world, the world's forge, the world's irreplaceable factory.

The Chinese people had died in a cataclysm beyond numeration, while the Chinese state had prevailed. The bloody mayhem that had once gripped the Celestial Empire was methodically pushed beyond its borders. Pushed onto people like Lucky.

"I know this grass!" cried Lucky, plucking a cruelly barbed seed from the flesh of his ankle. "Camels can eat this!"

"All of these plants are native plants from China's deserts," said Mishin. This was a major techno-nationalist selling point. "When, in the future, mankind brings Mars to life, Mars will be Asian tundra and steppes."

"Who will live there?" Lucky demanded. "People like you?"

"Oh no," Sonja told him. "They will be people like you." Lucky scowled. Lucky knew that he was not in Heaven. He was in an alien world, and he already lived in an alien world. "You told me about the horses? Show me some horses!"

"We do have horses here," Mishin assured him. "Central Asia's Prze-walski's horses. Genetically, these are the oldest horses on Earth." Mishin scratched his close-cropped head. "You, sir—you may have seen these wild mustangs in the new wilds of central Asia, eh? Maybe a few Przewalski's horses? There are large herds thriving around Chernobyl."

"Those little horses are too small to ride." Lucky shrugged. "I can eat them. I can drink their blood." Either the state's translation had failed him, or Mishin simply ig-nored what Lucky had just said. "We plan to remove the horses soon for the sake of our new young star . . . See, here are her tracks! Right here! And this is her dung, as well!"

Broadly spaced pugmarks dented the chilly Martian soil. "That is no camel," Lucky concluded. "That is no horse."

"She is our 'mammoth,' " said Mishin proudly.

Lucky patted his earpiece. "I never heard that word, 'mammoth.' "

"Do you know what an 'elephant' is?"

Lucky coughed on the cold, dusty air. "No."

"Well, both elephants and mammoths are extinct today. However: with the climate crisis, many mammoths thawed from the permafrost . . . In a genetically revivable condition! Sometimes people don't marvel properly at our fabulous Martian microbes . . . but our mammoth! Oh yes! A hairy mammoth revived fresh from the Ice Age . . . and she's been redesigned for Mars! Everyone adores our Chinese Martian mammoth . . . She's still our young girl of course . . . " Mishin held his pale hand out, at shoulder height. "So she's still quite small, but what splendid fur, such a nose and ears! Who can't love a beautiful cloned Martian mammoth?"

"I don't love a mammoth," Lucky said firmly. "Let us leave this place now. "

"No, no, let's hurry! Our mammoth will sleep soon. She sleeps each day at regular Martian hours."

"Lucky," Sonja told him, "the state wants to send me to Mars. I vol-unteered to go. I'm in taikonaut training in Jiuquan Space Launch Center."

Lucky looked her up and down. "Yes, that trip would be good for you."

"Why do you say that?"

Lucky lifted one finger. "Your mother. She's already up there?" Sonja glared at him in instant, head-splitting rage.

"Sonja, don't!" Mishin yelped. "Don't do that! Remember what hap-pened with Montalban?" Sonja's head was spinning. The thin Martian air did some nasty things to people. "Our guest wants to leave this place, Leonid. We seem to have tired him."

Mishin hastily escorted them back toward the balky airlock. Mishin himself never left the Martian simulator. There were microbes within him not yet cleared for public distribution.

"Sonja, you don't love your dear mother?" taunted Lucky, as they suf-fered the tedious hissing and clicking of the airlock's insane security. "Your demon mother, she who dwells in Heaven? You talk so much, Sonja, yet you never talk about her!"

"My mother is a state secret. So: Don't talk about my mother. Espe-cially with this state machine translation."

Lucky was unimpressed. The prospect of the state surveilling him bothered him no more than the omniscience of God. "I, too, never talk about my mother."

Sonja lifted her sour, aching head. "What about your mother, Lucky? Why don't you talk about your mother?"

"My mother sold oil! She committed many crimes against the sky. In Tajikistan, in Kyrgyzstan. Other places. Many pipelines across central Asia. She was rich. Very rich."

"A princess, then?"

"Yes, all my mother's people were rich and beautiful. They had no tribes, they had schools. They had cars and jets and skyscrapers. All of them dead now. All. Dead, and nonpersons. No one speaks of them any-more."

Sonja shifted closer to him on the waffled plastic bench. She was sorry that she had lost her temper with him. He was only probing her, to see what she was made of. He had some right to do that. She did it her-self all the time.

When she had been nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—young like him—she had had no discretion, no emotional skin at all. Especially about the always-tender subject of her "mother" and her "sisters." Those violent passions were distant to her now, relics of the bitter days when she had become "Red Sonja." Nobody called her "Red Sonja" anymore. Not now, not when she was a certified war heroine with a cozy state post here in futuristic Jiuquan. At least, nobody called her "Red Sonja" when she could overhear them and take reprisals.

Sonja stared at the thin pox of Martian dust on her white plastic boots. The airlock was methodically blasting the last traces of life from that dust—a sterilization process that humans would never perceive, but a holocaust for bacteria.

"Badaulet, I should spend more time getting properly briefed about the guests that I escort here, but your suave manners, your smooth talk, they overwhelmed my girlish modesty so quickly."

"That was a joke," Lucky guessed.

"Yes, that was a joke."

"Stop making jokes." He patted his ear. "This machine never under-stands jokes." The airlock fell silent. The hissing, incoming air, which had been pressing hard at Sonja's tender eardrums, went deathly still.

"This airlock does not want to cooperate with us today."

"This machine wants to kill me," Lucky said firmly. "It knows that I don't belong here. I belong on the steppes, under the sky."

"Maybe it wants to kill
me.
After all, I'm the fool who escorts so many visitors here."

"Why would it want to harm you, Sonja? You are the Angel of Harbin."

"The 'Angel of Harbin.' " Sonja sat up straighter. "I hate that stupid nickname! Yes, I'm a war heroine. Yes, I'm a pillar of the state and I am proud of my service! But 'Angel of Harbin' — I never chose that nom de guerre! Harbin was nothing so much."

Lucky was puzzled by this. He spoke rapidly, seriously and at some length, and the translator spat up one sentence. "They say that Harbin was the very worst of the very bad."

"Harbin was only typical. We had a good rescue plan in Harbin. We knew what we wanted to do and we knew how to win there. Now,Shenyang
—that
was bad. And Yinchuan, where they completely lost electrical power? Dead networks, no water, no sewer? For eighteen weeks? There was no body count there — because they
ate
the bodies.

When we marched out there to dig in—I sent out my surveillance cams—I
destroyed all that data.
Everybody in that rescue team was on trauma drugs after Yinchuan. Nobody remembers Yinchuan. Nobody
wants
to remember
that
place.It is lost, it's nonhistory. Even the state conceals Yinchuan, and no human being will ever ask."

"You were fighting that gloriously?"

"We didn't
think
we were fighting at all! We were medical teams, we were there to save innocent lives!

But: When there's no water in a city? Then there's no innocence: it's all gone. With no water, there is no city-there's a horde. 'Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.' " That was John Montalban again. Montalban always loved to quote old American poetry. The Badaulet turned his level gaze upon her.It was his keen black eyes, his abstract, fearless, predatory look, that had first attracted and aroused her. He looked so different from other bandits, and now that she knew about his globe-trotting, jet-setting mother, she understood. Lucky was a native of the Disorder.

Sonja knew what Han Chinese people looked like, and also Ti-betans, Manchus, Mongols. To any practiced eye they were easily as physically distinct as French, Germans, Italians, and Danes. Yet Lucky was none of those: he was a global guerrilla, a true modern barbarian. Her lover was one of the new kind.

"Sonja, I have to know: Are there seven of you? Seven sisters?"

"There were seven once—three are dead." Bratislava, Kosara, Svet-lana: They had been the first people she had ever seen killed. They'd been killed by a pack of young soldiers, panicked kids really, drunken kids half stumbling over their cheap carbines, kids the age of the Badaulet. That distant episode on that distant Adriatic island: How empty that seemed to her now. Her twisted world of childhood had exploded in a sudden bloody horror, but, in comparison with the vast bloody grandeur of China, it was such a small world and such a minor horror.

InMljet, though: that was the first time Sonja herself had killed someone. One could never forget the first time.

"Please don't talk to me about my dead," she told him, "don't talk to me about the past, for I can't bear it. Just talk to me about the future, for I can bear as much of that as anyone . . ." Lucky was deeply moved. "Here with you, in this locked bubble, the wind and sky are not free . . . Everything stinks in here . . . The future should not stink . . . Do you love me, Sonja?"

"Yes."

"Why do you love me?"

"I don't need reasons. Love just happens to me. I love you the way that any woman loves any man." Lucky folded his sinewy arms in a brisk decision. "Then we should marry. Because marriage is proper and holy. A temporary Muslim mar-riage can be performed in necessity in pagan lands and times of war. So I will marry you, Sonja. Now, here."

Sonja laughed. "You haven't known me long."

"I don't want to know you better," Lucky said. "You have given me your woman's body: the utmost gift a woman gives a man, except for sons. So: I don't want to go to Hell for doing that. It is my warrior call-ing to serve Heaven, die for Heaven, and go to Heaven. So: You must certainly agree to marry me. Otherwise, you are oppressing me."

"Can we discuss this matter after we leave this airlock?"

Lucky sat cross-legged on the rubbery white tiles of the sterilized floor. "We cannot leave! We are prisoners in here! So let us make our pact now and marry at once. I cannot ask your father to give me you, for you never had a father."

"You know a lot about me, don't you?"

"On the steppes, far outside China, I meet the Provincial Recon-struction Teams, from the Acquis and the Dispensation. They seek me out for my advice on how to survive, for they die there quickly. They know much about the Angel of Harbin. They know things about you that the state does not say. They say that Red Sonja killed five great gen-erals."