The Caryatids

save their own lives. An emo­tionally damaged teenage girl could drift by, in spotless white, dangling superstitions and jabbering lines of poetry, and they would rise as one and they would follow.

At this point in her life, Sonja found it hard to believe that she had done those things. But she had done them. Repeatedly. Spontaneously, tirelessly, in inspired trances, drawing strength from the light she saw in others. Extreme times pulled strange qualities from people. There were times when it helped a great deal to know that one was not entirely human.

Some men called her crazy—her second husband, and her third, in particular—but they were merely putting their own madness into better order by piling accusations on her. Because if Red Sonja was the crazy one, why were they all dead?

The Angel of Harbin had the gift of giving. Those who took it in the proper spirit, lived. The others… men, mostly…

From time immemorial, when a soldier left a battlefield, his body racked, his nerves shattered, for “rest and relaxation”… “Rest and re­laxation” were the last things on any man’s mind: any soldier fresh from battle immediately sought out a woman. If she merely opened her legs for him—if she said and she did nothing else whatsoever, if she asked him no questions, if she didn’t even speak his language—all the better for him…

The Badaulet still had no horse. Sonja knew this as a failing on her part. There should have been a horse in George’s shipment. But George, who was no poet, did not care to ship live animals in a helicop­ter, so Sonja could supply only a rough equivalent: a clumsy and grace­less off-road pack robot.

She examined the robot with sorrow. When the crumbling Great Wall had been a vivid, living Chinese enterprise—for in its dynastic heyday, the Great Wall of China was no passive barrier, it had also been a highway, an imperial mail route, and the world’s fastest visual tele­graph—any Chinese bride would have endowed her warlord with a horse.

A world-famous “blood-sweating horse.” Sonja had seen gorgeous Tang dynasty pottery of those horses, and Chinese bronzes as well, with stallions as the emblems of Chinese state power at its most confident, serene, and globally minded. Superior Chinese war ponies, earth­pounding, indomitable, fit to run straight to Persia with wind- streaming manes and dainty hooves like swallows, surely the most beautiful horses that civilization had ever offered to barbarism.

Instead, she had this lousy robot. Hauled from its plastic mounts on the copter wall, the ungainly device mulishly escaped control and scam­pered straight up the harsh slopes of a nearby hillside. Sonja hated the robot instantly. She knew that it was bound to be a grievance.

The pack robot was as ugly as a dented bucket. It featured four eerily independent legs. Each leg swiveled from a corner of its cheap and bru­tally durable chassis.

Since it was not a beautiful male animal like a Chinese Tang dynasty stallion, the robot did not trot with any dark animal grace. Instead, it moved by detailed computer analysis—as if it were playing high-speed chess with the surface of the Earth.

This meant that, on a cracked, eroded, thirty-degree slope of bitterly eroded Gobi Desert rock, a slope that would break the hairy legs of the toughest Mongol ponies and require rope and pitons from any human being, the robot scuttled along like a cockroach. Ever untiring, un­knowing of anything like pain, the robot flicked out its horrid, metalli­cally springy, devilishly hoofed legs, and it flung itself hither and yon, leaping from the minutest little purchases—tiny pebbles, invisible niches in boulders. It shot up and down treacherous hillsides like a thunderbolt.

The Badaulet was the picture of satisfaction. “I love you very much.”

“You don’t mind my very ugly, very stupid robot?”

“No,” the Badaulet insisted, “I truly love you now. No man I know has such a clever wife as you. I had expected us to die quickly riding the Silk Road, for the planes drop many land mines there, and the mines have eyes and ears and they are clever. But with this mount, we will cross the desert on a magic carpet. We will surround ourselves with our own land mines to kill anyone who dares to bothers us. Each night I will sleep beneath the stars in your warm and tender arms!”

The scampering pack robot knew no difference between day or night; it could “see” by starlight as well as it “saw” anything at all. Its greatest single drawback, among many, was that it blindly trusted the latest data downloaded into it about the conditions on the ground. This meant that, despite its nasty genius at knuckle-walking the uneven landscape, it had a distressing tendency to pitch into unseen arroyos and ramble off unmapped cliffs.

Worse yet, unlike horses or camels, the robot had no natural rhythm in its gait. So that, when they crouched within the thing’s bucketlike cargo hold, its hurrying tread felt like one endless, sickening set of panic stumbles.

To endure the numbing hours of travel, Sonja wrapped herself in a riding cloak. The heavy cloak grew steadily heavier with the passing hours, for it was an air distillery. Its fibers were sewn through with crys­talline salts, which chemically sucked humidity from the desert breezes.

When the Badaulet scolded her for guzzling at his canteen, she stripped off her dark cloak, gave it one expert caressing twist, and clean water gushed down both her wrists in torrents.

A curdled look of astonishment and disbelief and even rage crossed her husband’s face. The Badaulet had always suffered badly for his water. Water had been the cause of bitter discipline to him. The loss of water meant certain death… Yet here in this simple stupid rug, this plain womanly thing from off her back—she had only to twist it, and all his suffering was elided, erased, made senseless and irrelevant.

“My cloak is yours,” she told him quickly.

He grumpily threw her magic cloak across his own back, but he hated her for that.

“You must wear this,” he said at length, “for it grows heavy.”

“No, dear husband, it’s for you. It is sturdy, it will last for years.”

“You wear this,” he commanded. “In those foolish white robes you could easily be shot.”

She obeyed him and put on the cloak, for she knew she had given of­fense. They were entering hills, unkindly hills like ragged black boulder piles, but the hills caught falling water and where there was water there was grass.

Sonja stopped, gathered some grass, stuffed it into a fabric rumen bag. Sonja did not worry much about human bandits lurking in the Gobi—bandits were unlikely to survive in any place this barren. Death in the desert came mostly from autonomous machines.

The killer machines of the great Asian dust bowl came in three great families: autonomous rifles, autonomous land mines, and autonomous aircraft. They were all deadly: a few cents’ worth of silicon empowered them to rain death from above, or to punch an unerring hole through a human torso, or to wait for silent years in a puddle of machine surveil­lance and then tear off a human leg.

The aircraft and the sniper devices were harder to manufacture and maintain, for they were frequently blinded or clogged with clouds of dust. So the land mines were the worst and most numerous of the three. The land mines had all kinds of arcane names and behaviors.

Most land mines were scattered where human victims might logically go: roads, trails, highways, bridges, and water holes, any place of any for­mer economic value. The great comfort of a robot pack mule was that it didn’t bother to follow trails. Also, land mines were unlikely to recognize its uneven, highly unnatural tread as a proper trigger to explode.

Knowing this, the Badaulet was eager to exploit their tactical advan­tage and to catch up with their enemies. Lucky was convinced that their would-be assassins had released the killer plane at the limit of its striking range, and then beaten a swift retreat back into the deeper desert. The Badaulet thought in this way, because this was the tactic he himself would have chosen.

His pack robot was tireless. He was also proud of the fact that it could run in pitch darkness. He would have blindly trusted it to carry him off the edge of the Earth.

Being a new bride, Sonja gently persuaded him to stop awhile, de­spite his ambitions. They located a nameless hollow, a shallow foxhole in the wind-etched, dun-colored desert. Utterly barren, their honey­moon hole had all the anonymity of a crater scooped from the surface of Mars.

As the Badaulet scoured the horizon for nonexistent enemies, Sonja climbed stiffly from the robot’s bucketlike chassis, folded the robot flat, kicked dirt over it to disguise it, and opened her blister tent.

This tent had a single mast in the center, a lightweight wand that clicked together like jointed bamboo and