The Caryatids

The tongues of fire were in retreat.

At last he spoke up. “Woman, I believe that Heaven has blessed me. The world is changing, and a life as hard as mine must surely change for the better. I cannot always suffer.”

She said nothing. She loved him only slightly less than before he had beaten her. He was a man: angry, vulnerable.

With one pinch she could rip the inner workings of his throat. He would drown in his own blood. Her legs were still smarting, so the temp­tation was there. She could leave him here, dead as mutton. Who would ever find him in a godforsaken place like this, who would ever know?

But why should he die at this one moment among all other potential moments to die? Wouldn’t he die soon enough no matter what she did, or what he did? Her tears would dry on their own.

She turned her face to the flickering, guttering cosmos. He was al­ready asleep.

* * *

HE WOKE HER in the chilly predawn, fully dressed and insisting that she start the robot from its bed of dust. The aurora was long gone, van­ished as the Earth wheeled on its axis.

She advised him that the robot would run better if they unrolled its solar panels in daylight and let it crack some grass for fuel. The Badaulet stiffly rejected this counsel. He didn’t much like her for giving it.

The Badaulet had tired of the magic distorting his life. He sensed, correctly that it was somehow her own fault.

So, at his imperious demand, they set off reeling in the predawn cold and dark. She was hungry and thirsty, so she tried to drink from the rumen bag, knowing it wasn’t ready yet. There was protein cracked from the cellulose there, and the taste seemed all right.

The robot conveyed them, in a crazed dance step, up ragged slopes, down black canyons, and across declivities. It ran across ground that would break a human leg like a dry stick. Queasy and low in spirits, Sonja felt unable to speak, and when dawn redly stung the rim of the world, the Badaulet suddenly began to confess to her. He was making up to her: not because he had beaten her during the night, for he con­sidered that act entirely proper; but to revive her morale. So he spoke about the subject that always engrossed him most: his enemies.

The Badaulet was an agent of Chinese order in the midst of the cen­tral Asian disorder. He was always outnumbered, if never outgunned. His allegiance to the distant Chinese state was vague, and superstitious, and deeply confused, and lethally passionate. It was like a Cossack’s love for Russia.

His faith, to the extent that he could describe it to her, was a cargo­cult patchwork of militia training, radical Islam, herbal lore, hunting and herding, and the shattered, scrambled, pitiful remains of Asia’s tra­ditional nomadic life. The Badaulet was not from any historic Asian tribe: he had no ethnic group. He was a native of globalized chaos.

The Badaulet’s brief stay in Jiuquan had unsettled his young mind yet further. They had shown their pet barbarian Jiuquan’s proudest cul­tural achievements: chamber music, calligraphy, various sports that one could perform while sealed in a plastic bubble… The Badaulet had found these accomplishments contemptible.

Then his Chinese handlers had shown him something closer to his heart: something unknown to Sonja. He boasted to her about it, obliquely: he claimed that it was far greater than any gift that she had given him.

So it had to be some propaganda enterprise from a local laboratory. Some stereotypical “amazing secret weapon” meant to stiffen the spines of China’s barbarian allies. The Badaulet called it the “Assassin’s Mace.” He didn’t say precisely what this weapon was—clearly, that was not for her to know—but the technicians had promised him he could try the Assassin’s Mace someday, and wield it against his enemies. If he were loyal and true, that day would come soon.

The Assassin’s Mace—there were a host of oddities in the taut sub­urbs of Jiuquan, where the cream of Chinese techno-intelligentsia la­bored on their secret productions. Secret weapons labs—Sonja had seen a few, she never liked them or their blinkered inhabitants. Secret weapons labs were obscure and torpid and heavy and loathsome.

The Acquis and the Dispensation hated China’s state secrecy, for they were obsessed with rogue technologies spinning out of control. In­ternal combustion: a rogue technology spun out of control. Electric light: a rogue technology spun out of control. Fossil fuel: the flesh of the necromantic dead, risen from its grave, had wrecked the planet.

Global regulation, transparency, verification… that was the sup­posed solution of the Acquis and Dispensation, and China despised such things. China had walls and barriers. The good old ways, the trusted ways. The old ways to hide all the new ways.

The robot rambled, reeling, off the broken landscape and into a flat­ter steppe. This landscape was somewhat easier on Sonja’s nerves. Big domelike tussocks of grass appeared. Some storm track had overpassed this area, slopping rain like the spatter from an overloaded paintbrush, and the desert was suddenly beautiful. In some ways the modern desert was better off than any other biome on Earth, for the desert never ex­pected any kindness from the sky.

Here and there were brightly colored bits of human litter, plucked up by violent windstorms, flung from dead towns… plastic bags. Plastic shopping bags were the one artifact in the Gobi more omnipresent than land mines. Plastic bags had been cheap, present in uncounted millions in the daily life of cities. The bags were easily airborne, and although they tore, they never decayed. Over the decades, plastic bags could blow like tumbleweeds over half a continent.

Sheep tracks appeared. The Badaulet grew concerned. He dis­mounted the robot to study the tracks and to number the sheep, and, if possible, to reveal some trace of the shepherd.

After a quarter hour he returned from his tracking studies and solemnly handed her half a handful of sheep dung. Black manure like a pile of pebbles. It felt dry and light.

“This is the dung of a sheep,” she said.

He nodded, and made a smashing motion with his fingers.

She broke one lump of the dung and it instantly turned to the finest black ash, a bacterial charcoal. This sheep had baked every calorie of nutrition out of the grass it was eating. The guts of that sheep were a mi­crobe factory.

Sonja sniffed unhappily at her fingers. “ ‘Why does Mars stink?’”

Lucky brightened to see her making a joke, as if he hadn’t given her a beating. “Today I wish I had seen that mammoth, and not just its stink­ing dung.”

“There will be other mammoths to walk the Earth. Something always breaks the walls and stampedes out of the bubbles… I don’t like this. The state does not allow this. This should not be happening. This is bad.”

“A big herd of sheep, eighty, ninety,” he told her, “with a boy on a pony, and the guts of his horse were the same way.” Lucky shifted his sniper rifle from one camouflaged shoulder to another. “We ride with greater care now, and we watch the skies always.”

It was a comfort to closely follow the sheep tracks. The busy feet of a flock that size would clear the earth of land mines.

Horse tracks appeared, the unshod hooves of Mongolian ponies, and then the signs of tents. These had been big round tents, Mongolian “ger” tents, which were portable yurts of crisscrossed sticks and woolly felt.

There were dead fires in the abandoned camp, with a host of human footprints.

This was not some minor group of fanatics skittering across the desert to launch one bomb their way. These were clear signs of families of peo­ple, a clan, with women, many children… Gathering grass. These Disorder nomads seemed to have an industrial obsession with grass. They had been cutting tufts of grass with hand sickles, and mincing that grass up into a kind of crude silage, and baking water out of the grass somehow, maybe with solar distilleries.

The whole village was methodically grazing on the grass. They even left behind an industrial grass dung, dry, fermented wads of the stuff mashed up like dirty oatmeal or dry beer lees.

“I’m surprised that we lack intelligence about these people,” she said, “for it’s clear they’ve heard of us and what we are doing.”

“These people made the airplanes that attacked us. I thought there would be maybe two men, three bad men, a raiding team, my enemies,” said the Badaulet thoughtfully. “YetI don’t know these people. They are many and well organized. We will have trouble, you and I alone, killing so many.”

“No we won’t. Not really. No.”