The Caryatids

socketed into a ring. The power within the wand brought the fabric to life. Inmoments, the tent was as moist and pale inside as the skin of a newly peeled banana.

They would sleep together here.

Against all odds, in the few moments in which she had gathered up grass, a large, evil desert tick had latched on to Sonja. It had inched straight up her dusty legs to her constricting waistband, sunk its fangs into the tender skin near her navel, and died. The first taste of her toxic blood had killed that tick as dead as a brown Gobi pebble. How gratify­ing that was.

Sonja checked the sloshing rumen bag, where fermentation pro­ceeded. She tapped foamy water from the bag, damply inflated a paper­dry foam sponge, and set to work on the Badaulet. Lucky had many babylike patches of hairless new flesh, healed by a rapid exfection. His nerve cells would be slowest to regrow there: he would have some numb spots. It would help him if his bride dutifully made his spots less numb.

Warm air drafted cozily up the domed walls, but her husband seemed unpleased. “This is improper.”

“We are married! Anything must be all right if it pleases you.”

He slapped at the woolly skin of the tent. “I can’t see the stars!”

“Yes… but aircraft can’t see us.” Sonja liked the stars well enough. She liked stars best when they were poised inside a planetarium, mapped, and color-coded.

The real stars of the modern Earth, speckling the fantastic dome of central Asia, these were less emotional1y manageable. The high desert, untouched by the glare of cities, was as black as fossil pitch, and the stars wheeled above it in fierce, demented desert hordes. Those stars twin­kled in the Earth’s dirtied atmosphere—and their tints were all wrong, owing to the fouling, stratospheric haze of all the Himalayan bombs.

The Milky Way had a bloody tinge in its sky-splitting milk… how could anyone like to see that, knowing what that meant?

Was she getting older, to fear the stars? Sonja had often seen that older people were afraid of the sky. Older people could never say pre­cisely what disturbed them about the modern sky’s current nature and character, but they knew that it was wrong. The sky of climate crisis was alien to their being—it scratched at the soul of humanity in the same unconscious, itchy way that an oncoming earthquake would unnerve cats, and panic goats, obscurely motivate serpents to rise from their slumbers…

Redoubling her wifely caresses, she managed to distract the Badaulet, and to soothe herself a little. On the air-inflated mat he turned eager, then energetic, then tender. She felt raw when he was done, but she was also open and emotionally centered and sexually awake.

Sleep claimed him as she thoughtfully licked the scabs on his arms—­those seven puckered little wounds, where she had plucked seven dif­ferent state IDs from his flesh. Infection wanted a foothold in those salty little wounds, but the microbes died under her tongue.

She slithered under his slumbering body like a prayer mat of flesh. Heavenly voices woke Sonja. The voices broke like a revelation into her interior nightmare landscape of thirst, dust, bombs, pain, black suns, cities burning…

Her eyes shocked open. For long, tumbling moments she had no idea who she was or where she was—for she was no one, and she was every­where.

A torrent of sound was falling through the walls of the tent, sound tumbling out of the sky. Deep, Wagnerian wails from a host of Valkyries… Those were starry voices, tremendous, operatic, obliterat­ing, thunderous, haunting the core of her head.

Legs shaking, Sonja unsealed the tent and crept out naked and bare­foot.

The cold zenith overhead was alive with burning ribbons. Clouds of booming, blooming celestial fire. Cosmic curtains of singing flame, sheets of emerald and amethyst. They were pouring out of the sky in cataracts.

Sonja jammed both hands to the sides of her skull. The celestial singing pierced the flesh of her hands.

This had to be some act of nature, she knew that… For it was sim­ply too big for anything that mankind might have done. It was cosmic, too huge for mankind to even imagine. She was seeing a vast heavenly negation of all the worst or best mankind could think or do. It was singing at her, singing to her, singing through her—singing as an entity, singing as a divinity that bore the scale to her that she did to some anx­ious microbe.

The majesty of it emptied her of all illusions. It relieved art anguish that she had never known she had.

How easily she might have died, and never seen this, never heard this, never lived this moment. She had always prided herself on her easy contempt about her own death, but now she knew that she had been a fool. Life was so much larger in scope than the simple existence that she had dismissed so arrogantly. Existence was colossal.

The Baudaulet emerged from their tent. He saw the tilt of her chin and he gazed upward.

“The Mandate of Heaven!” he shouted, and his translated voice sud­denly killed the warbling songs inside her head. All that cosmic music vanished instantly.

The heavenly curtains writhed and plummeted up there, but they did that in an eerie, abstract silence.

She stared at him. It was clear from his stance that the Badaulet heard nothing. Nothing but the wind. There was a wind out here, the wind of the Gobi.

She was shuddering.

“That is the aurora,” she told him, “that is space weather. I have never seen the aurora in my life, but that must be it. I heard it in my head with my new ears!”

“Heaven foretells great changes on Earth,” he told her.

“The aurora comes from the Sun. It is the energy of solar particles. They fall in sheets through a hole in the Earth’s magnetic field. Then they tear into the outer limits of the air, and the air must glow. That is what we see tonight. And I heard it!”

“This is important,” he told her, “so you must stop talking that non­sense.” He pulled the belt from his uniform. Then, without another word, he began to beat her with his belt: not angrily, just rhythmically and thoroughly.

Having been beaten by lovers before, Sonja knew how to react. With a howl of dismay, she fell to the earth, hugging his ankles and begging forgiveness in a gabble of sobs and shrieks.

When she clutched at his knees, his balance was poor, so he couldn’t use the belt effectively. He stopped his attempts to beat her. She contin­ued to shriek, beg, and grovel. This was the core of the performance.

It was never about how hard men beat you, or how many strokes, or what they hit you with. It was always about their need to break your will and impose their own.

After savoring her shrieks and sobs for a while, the Badaulet grew re­luctant. Finally, he belted his pants and pulled her off his legs. “Woman, why do you always carryon so? Put on your clothes! What is wrong with you? I didn’t hit you so hard! It’s just-when Heaven is man­ifesting miracles, you can’t talk nonsense! We could both go to Hell!”

He was a hundred times more frightened than herself. The basis of his universe had been kicked out like a hole though a bucket. “Forgive my stupid chatter, dear husband! Thank you for punishing me!”

This submission stymied him. Of course the Badaulet had no idea on Earth what to do about this tumult in the heavens. Otherwise he would not have beaten her in the first place.

The sky was writhing violently with silent electrical phantoms. The wind died. Inthe absence of her vanished screams there was a vast and awful silence with not so much as a cricket.

“There is a great danger to my soul tonight… “ he muttered. “I know that much, I know that is certain truth… “

“Let’s watch the sky together! Is that all right?”

“It’s cold. You are shivering, your teeth are chattering.”

“I’ll bring the mat! This might be a splendid omen, and not an evil omen! Look how beautiful it is! Maybe heaven is blessing our love, and our lives are changing for the better!” Sonja scurried into the tent and brought out a wadded double armful. “Lie down! I will hide my eyes and hold you tightly. Because I’m afraid.”

She made a nest for them. Grudgingly—for now he felt ashamed of himself—he climbed on the puffy mattress.

He was shivering with cold and fear, so she warmed him. Mollified, he relaxed a little.

Time passed. The Badaulet watched the heavens writhing in silent display. Ghostly colors were leaching out of the sky… with the planet’s nightly twirling and the sun’s axial tilt, some confluence of distant fields was fading.