The Caryatids

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 under­stands 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. Itis 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. Itwas 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 Ti­betans, 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, Svet­lana: 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.

In Mljet, 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 mar­riage 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 call­ing 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 Recon­struction 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 gen­erals.”

“That is not true! That’s a lie! I have never killed any uniformed Chi­nese military personnel! I swear that, I never did that—not even if they were laying down barrage-fire on my positions.”

Sonja puffed on the thin, stale air. “My head hurts so badly. Some­thing’s gone wrong. We’re supposed to dress for that big state banquet. The Martian taikonauts are there, and they’ll want us to drink! Lots of toasts with maotai… Five years, those three flyboys were stuck, without a woman, in their tiny capsule—good God, no wonder they’re like that… Do you drink alcohol, Lucky?”

“I can drink kumiss!”

“You drink kumiss horse milk? Really? That’s so cute.”

“I will introduce you to these heroes as my wife!”

“I’m a soldier’s woman,” Sonja told him, pressing the heels of her hands to her throbbing temples. “That’s what I’m good for. So: fine. Since you need marriage so much, for the sake of your soul and what­ever: fine, I’lldo that for you. I will be your concubine. I can do that.”

“Truly?”

“Shut up! Because—I will only be your Earthly wife. Outside of this place—out in your desert—where the green grass grows sometimes, and the sky is sometimes blue, and there are horses and tents and land mines and sniper rifles—sure, out there I am your wife and I accept you as my husband. I do. However! Inside this space center, or in orbit, or on Mars, or inside that biosphere, or inside this airlock, any other area that is not of this Earth, then I am not your wife, Lucky. Instead, I own you. You are my slave.”

“On the Earth, I am your husband, that’s what you just declared to me?”

“Only on the Earth. Everywhere else, to be with Sonja is to be in trouble. I never lie to my men—no matter how much that hurts them.”