The Caryatids (40 page)

Lionel intervened. "What's the name of your big victory dance, Bis-erka? Tell me about your cool new routine."

Biserka shot him a grateful look. "It's all about victory! And what hap-pened in outer space! And my mother's death! And it's my interpretative dance performance about the world's bravest, noblest people—my peo-ple! They are going to
overthrow all the systems,
and cover the Earth in free blackspots, and break the walls of surveillance and haul the oppres-sors out of there . . . and pile their heads up in pyramids!"

Hands on her hips, Biserka drew a breath. "I choreographed it all by myself! I call it 'The Seven-Veiled Dance of Shiva, the Goddess of De-struction.' "

"Shiva is a male god," said Lionel.

"Really?"

"Yeah, Shiva is a male dancer, like I am."

"Never mind that, Lionel," said Montalban calmly. "Let Biserka dance. She has an eager public waiting here."

Biserka pouted. "You've gone and spoiled it all. How could you let
her
come in here? I was really, really happy today, for the first time in my whole life! I was happy for maybe one hour! I can dance! You know I can dance. I learned some hot new moves in Los Angeles, and you were going to love those! Now my timing's all messed up and it's all ruined."

"No problem," said Lionel, beaming supportively. "Just get ready to run your theme again. When I throw out my hand like this"—he gestured— "that's your cue."

Without warning, music blasted from Lionel's flesh: brassy, insistent, heart-thudding. Lionel strode confidently into the empty performance space, drew himself up with a winning smile, and did three backflips with a half gainer. Then he threw out his hand.

The stunned audience, who had never seen such behavior from any human being, howled in awed delight.

Biserka came to with a sudden start. She began to dance.

It was not that Biserka danced shamelessly. It was much worse than that. Biserka knew what shame was, and she was using their shame as a weapon to titillate them. Biserka danced corruptively. One wanted to hide the
eyes
of children from the spectacle. Though the children were quite enjoying it. Sonja knew that it was her duty to put a swift end to this. She would kill Biserka. Killing Biserka would be the crown of her lifetime.

Sonja was stopped short by a hand on her elbow. It was the Badaulet. Lucky put his lips next to her ear, so that she could hear him over the howls and the sticky, slinky music. "Our hosts have been telling me about the Chinese state," he said.

"They're lying to you."

"Well, you are my wife, and I want you to tell me the truth."

Sonja wrenched her arm free from his grip. "I always tell the truth to my men." No matter how much it hurt them.

"Are these young men really the Chinese state? They're the former leaders of the Chinese state, only living in the wilderness?"

"Yes, That is true."

"But they are bold men like me, and brave like me, and they ride and fight like me. And they do not hide behind Chinese walls because they aim to conquer the world."

"They won't succeed." She pointed."
He
is going to conquer the world. He's already conquering the world. He's doing it right now while he's watching that slut dancing for him." The expression on Montalban's face could have been canned and poured over cereal. He was transfixed by Biserka's dancing. He was fas-cinated.

Biserka sensed this and was playing to him. Biserka knew that she had him. She had found some aching hole in him, found a stained chink in the white knight's armor. It wasn't, after all, that hard to find. That part of him that belonged to her. She was reeling him in.

The Badaulet watched Biserka's flurried writhing with unfeigned dis-gust. "Your lord and master there is a decadent weakling."

"I'm sure he would tell you that he is 'healthily in touch with his darker side.' "

"I could kill him. He's not so much of a man. His younger brother, the one who dances like a woman, he's strong, but he has long hair. They are only two men, they're not two gods. In the eyes of the one God, I'm as good as them. Only, I have pride and cleanliness, and de-cency, and aspirations to please my Creator. If I put my body next to his body, I can put my knife through him."

"Don't do that. To kill a guest is dishonorable. Also, he's so rich that he might not stay dead."

"You love him," he told her. "That's why you urge me not to kill him. I want you to tell me, as my wife, that you love me better than him. That you will leave him and his life, and live my life."

"I know that you deserve that from me," she told him, "but I already swore once by everything I held sacred that I'd never see him, or hear him, or touch him again, and, here he is." Sonja began to cry. "I swear I can't help it."

"Any woman among these noble people would be a better wife to me than you are," he said. "They all admire me very much, they need my warrior skills. If I join them, I will be high in rank, they will give me
twenty
women like you.
Better
women than you."

"I don't doubt it," Sonja said between her sobs. "The only thing I ever wanted was to be dutiful and good. I'm just so tired and sick of every-thing. I can't go on."

"Look at the way that slave dances for him," he said. He was revolted. "She's like a
worm.
She's an
unclean reptile.
I can't take part in this dis-gusting orgy, this is
wrong.
Our marriage is over, Sonja. I Divorce You. I Divorce You. I Divorce You!"

Sonja howled in pain and grabbed for him. "Oh please don't divorce me, please don't!" He tore himself from her grip and stalked away.

Sonja was trembling from head to foot. She was cracking inside. There was an abyss inside her. She had lived for years in that abyss once. It was a red abyss.

Carried by blazing impulse, Sonja stalked into the middle of the dance floor. She raised both her arms overhead, but this incantatory gesture did nothing. Biserka had seized everyone's attention. Biserka had stripped off three of her veils and was beaming with malicious delight. She capered around Sonja, waving her chiffon headdress, delicately wriggling.

The crowd rose and surged forward. They formed a tight circle. They were dying to see a fight. A hand in her back shoved her forward.

For the first time, Biserka was afraid. The taunting look left her face. Biserka looked pretty when she was afraid. She had always been the frightened one, always. When the soldiers had come to' kill all of them, Biserka had thrown herself on the ground to lick their feet.

Sonja spat into her face, then turned and walked away.

A deadly insult and a feigned retreat. It was the oldest and simplest and most effective of stratagems. In the roar of voices, Sonja counted heartbeats and then lashed out backward. A rear heel kick was the strongest blow that a woman's body could de-liver. It hit Biserka straight in the chest as she rushed forward in her rage and hate and panic, and it struck her so hard that she flew backward and stumbled into the arms of two spectators and knocked both of the men down. Biserka did not move again.

Sonja dusted off her hands. She glared at the men in the tent, who had grown silent and respectful and ashamed. She jerked her head at the open door.

The crowd got up in a body and left the tent.

Montalban and his brother were busy on the carpet.

"Poor Biserka," mourned Lionel.

"She's alive," said Montalban.

Sonja was regretful. "That's because I missed her heart."

"Well, you broke three of her ribs and you've put her into shock. Oh, for God's sake stop standing there gloating, Sonja. You're a woman, you're not a killer robot. You've got medical training, come and help me with her."

??????????

THE SUDDEN END OF THE FESTIVITIESput a damper on the clan's convocations. Without any apparent orders being taken or given, they were breaking their tents, rolling their carpets, chasing sheep, splitting up, atomizing into the steppes.

Her ex-husband was already long gone. The angry Badaulet had thundered off over the bloody horizon somewhere. She wondered if she would ever hear any news of his death.

Eventually, there were only four of them left. The nomads had evap-orated, leaving four people in a well-trampled and utterly anonymous patch of half desert, half steppe. Herself, the two Montalban brothers, and the unconscious Biserka, lying in a robot full of bullet holes, with her heels propped up and her head set low.

"Hey look!" said Lionel, alertly gazing into the darkening sky. "See that little glint up there? That little spark of moving light? That's it! That's the dead Chinese space station. We can actually see it from down here with the naked eye!"

"The satellites must keep spinning," said Montalban. "Every power player agrees on that. Because without satellites there is no geolocation. Without geolocation, we would be truly lost and abandoned in this des-olate place, instead of merely standing around here in the functional equivalent of Hollywood and Vine."

"Are we going to get away with stealing a Chinese space station, John? I've seen you do big real-estate deals before. But that's a
space sta-tion."

"We do not plan to 'steal' the dead space station, Lionel. That is a derelict property. We are rescuing it. We are redeeming it in the general public interest of planet Earth. It is a fixer-upper. It is a turn-around property. And that station isn't much bigger than LilyPad when we took that over from the Indians. We are the natural party to take over a lost piece of orbital real estate."

"You will not get away with that," Sonja told him. "You will not be al-lowed to do that."

"Probably not, Sonja dear, but it certainly seems worth a try."

"It is a direct threat to Chinese national interests if you board that fa-cility. The state will not stand for that foreign intrusion."

"I can certainly understand that nationalist point of view," said Mon-talban. "I'm sure that the Chinese are scrambling for new launch ca-pacity in Jiuquan right now. However, China is not the whole Earth. My family and my various political allies, to our great good luck, happen to be planning an international, orbital summit of Acquis and Dispensa-tion political pundits. In fact, we had to postpone that summit when we heard there was bad solar weather. Our private space station, LilyPad—which does not have any mysterious weapons of mass extermination aboard it—happens to be in a rather remote orbit. Whereas the Chinese station—which has long been rumored to carry horrific weapons of mass destruction that can scramble the DNA of people on the ground through God only knows what horrible mechanism—that abandoned hulk, full of corpses and former war criminals, it orbits so close to the Earth that, if we don't put a new crew aboard it immediately, it's going to tumble out of orbit and possibly land on a major city."

"That is completely untrue. That is a pack of lies. There is no danger of that happening. You made all that up. It's all a snare and a political di-version. You are a pirate, you are stealing it."

"Ah, but you forget that huge solar flare, Sonja. Solar flares heat the Earth's outer atmosphere. That has increased the orbital drag on the space station. So of course the space station is a public hazard and it must be rescued at once. We are not pirates, but the responsible parties. The whole world will agree with us."

"That's a lie, too."

"It's not a lie. It's the 'precautionary principle.' We can't be
sure
that isn't really happening. Maybe there's a strange interaction with the solar magnetism and the particles of Chinese hydrogen bombs in our upper atmosphere. Maybe that's what caused all these blackouts and the may-hem around the world. Do you think the world has any
time
to
waste
while the Chinese bureaucracy pulls its firecrackers out of mothballs to fly up there and do its sorry cover-up?"

Lionel was laughing wildly. "Just listen to
that!
Listen to him go! When he gets all wound up, there's just nobody who can touch him! Wow! He's had
less than forty-eight hours
to advance this political line!

And he didn't do it with his friends and his servants handy, either! He did it
in the middle of a savage
desert.
Call me a fanboy, but . . . well, the stupid cute ones run for public office, and the smart ones manage the campaigns."

"We're shooting the works here, Lionel. We have to give it our best," said Montalban. Lionel nodded. "Absolutely, brother!"

After Montalban's raging burst of oratory, nothing whatever hap-pened. There was nothing around them. They were nowhere and in noware. Night was falling. There was utter emptiness.

"I'm thirsty," Biserka moaned.

Lionel tipped water into her mouth. She sipped it and passed out.

"How will you know if your scheme has worked?" said Sonja.

"I can tell you," Montalban confessed, "that I haven't the least idea. There simply wasn't any time to arrange for that. I threw the gears into motion—in network nodes all over this planet—I don't even know who is first onto the space station. They're not exactly two-fisted astronaut hero types, these Relinquishment intellectuals. Plus, there's some like-lihood that
another
solar flare will erupt and they all get fried up there. But—some global pundit is absolutely sure to invade that facility, even if it's just to float around in free fall making snarky comments about the bad industrial design."

"I would go up there," said Lionel. "I love orbit."

"Oh, I'm definitely going up there, if we somehow survive down here. I'm going to retrieve the body of my dear correspondent, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I wouldn't dream of having that lady jettisoned into outer space . . . I don't care how much space junk there is up there already; I swear she won't become part of it."

Sonja sat heavily on the comfortless floor of the desert. It had never oc-curred to Sonja that anyone would go to fetch her mother's body down to Earth. That concept had not crossed her mind for one instant.

She had been blind to that idea. She had always been blind to so many ideas. She was a rigid, staring, damaged creature. There were so many spaces within her own stony heart, places where she could not look.