The Caryatids

are Chinese. Chinese rapid-response, paramilitary. Brave men, hard men. I know such men well.”

“Well,” Sonja said, “then there will be some Dispensation coming here. Because there are Chinese military here… and the Acquis raiders like our skeleton friend, who is dead over there… the grass peo­ple in the tents… There has to be Dispensation. If they’re not here al­ready, Dispensation will be coming here.”

The Badaulet mulled this over. He agreed with her. “How many Dis­pensation, do you think?”

“I can’t tell you that, but they will probably be Americans, they won’t speak Chinese, and they will be trying to make some money from this trouble. That’s the Dispensation, that happens every time.”

“You forgot some important warriors also present here in this great battle, my bride.”

“Who?”

“Us! You and me, my precious one!”

Three broken aircraft plummeted out of the sky. They tumbled like leaves and fell out of sight.

“I see that my rifle is properly grouping its shots,” said the Badaulet, pleased. He then stood up and walked —not ran, he walked, sauntered almost—to the nearest source of handy rubble and brought back a heap­ing armful of new rocks.

“That’s a good rifle, built by German professionals,” he announced, dumping the rocks at her feet. Then he strolled off for more.

“Walk faster!” she yelled at him.

“You stack them,” he said over his shoulder. He lugged back a boul­der. “It’s a pity my fine rifle has so little ammunition.”

One more such fearless venture —Lucky clawed out a few more rocks somewhere, his fingers were bleeding… then he grabbed the dead Ac­quis cyborg, doubled him over with some casual kicks at his humming robot bones, and embedded the body into the wall.

Then he squatted, breathing hard with his labors.

Suddenly—instead of the bare cliff that would have suited a firing squad—they had created a little fort for themselves. They had built a wall. Bullets simply could not reach them. They could even stretch their legs out a little, raise their heads, think.

“Now we are besieged!” he announced cheerfully. “We can stay safe and secluded until we starve here!”

A useless bullet screamed off the dead man’s ceramic bones. “We won’t starve while he’s lying here,” she said. She regretted saying that—referring to cannibalism wasn’t a wifely, romantic, supportive thing to say, and a cruel reward for Lucky’s saving their lives… but the remark didn’t bother him.

They rewarded themselves with lavish sips from the dead man’s can­teen.

Eventually, night fell. The besieging aircraft were not bothered by darkness, since they were firing at human heat. The machines fell into a parsimonious cycle, programmed to save their fuel.

The rifle on the pack robot had run out of ammunition. This failure made the aircraft bolder. They swooped repeatedly by the rocky fortress, silently, scanning for any clear shot. When they failed to find one, their little motors would’ catch with an audible click and hum, and they would struggle for altitude again.

Then the machines returned, again and again, flying out of darkness and seeking human warmth, like mosquitoes with guns. Her new ears could hear them with an insufferable keenness.

The Earth spun on its axis. The stars emerged and strengthened. The Milky Way shone its celestial battle banner, so bright that she could see the dogged silhouette of killer aircraft flit across the bloody host of stars.

Then Sonja heard a low, symphonic rumble. It might have been a classical bass cello: a string and a bow. Taut strings of magnetic fire.

She shook him. “Do you hear that?”

The Badaulet woke from his cozy doze. “Hear what?”

“That voice from the sky. That huge electrical noise. Electronic.”

“Is it a helicopter?”

“No.”

“Is it a bigger plane coming here to kill us with a bomb?”

“No! No, oh my God, the sound is really loud now… “ Suddenly her husband’s voice vanished, she could no longer hear him. She heard nothing but those voices of fire. Those colossal sounds were not touch­ing the, air. They were touching the circuits in her head.

There was no escaping them. She had no way to turn them off. Celestial voices were sheeting through her skull. The voices were be­yond good and evil, out of all human scale. She felt as if they were rip­ping through her, straight through the rocky core of Asia and out of the planet’s other side.

The aurora emerged in the heavens, and the glorious sight of it gave no pleasure, for it was enraged. Its fiery sheets were knotted and angry tonight, visibly breaking into gnarls and whorls and branches and furi­ous particles. The tongues of flame were spitting and frothing, with foams and blobs and disks and rabid whirlpools. Sheets of convulsive energy plunged across the sky, tearing and ripping. An annihilation.

“This isn’t supposed to happen!” she shouted, and she could not hear her own voice. “This is wrong, Badaulet… there’s something wrong with the sky! This could be the end of everything! This could be the end of the world!”

Lucky patted her thigh in a proprietory fashion, and gave her a little elbow jab in the ribs. His head was tilted back and she realized that he was laughing aloud. His black eyes were sparkling as he watched the blazing sky. He was enjoying himself.

A flooding gush of stellar energy hit the atmosphere, hard rain from outer space. The sky was frosted with bloody red sparks, as bits of man­made filth at the limits of the atmosphere lit up and fried.

Sonja’s dry mouth hung open. Her head roared like an express train. Some orgasmic solar gush soaked the Earth’s magnetic field, and utterly absurd things were pouring out of the sky now: rippling lozenges like chil­dren’s toy balloons, fun-house snakes of accordion paper, roiling smoke rings and flaming jellied doughnuts… They had no business on Earth, they were not from the Earth at all. She could hear them, shrieking.

Sonja writhed in a desperate panic attack. The Badaulet reached out, grabbed her, pulled her to him, crushed her in his arms. He squeezed the screaming breath from her lungs. In her terror she sank her teeth into his bare shoulder…

He didn’t mind. He was telling her something warm and kindly, over and over. She could feel his voice vibrating in his chest.

The convulsing aurora was so bright that it left shadows on the rock. Sonja clamped her eyes shut.

Suddenly, in trauma, she was speaking in the language of childhood. The first song, the first poetry, she had memorized. That little song she loved to sing with Vera and Svetlana and Kosara and Radmila and Bis­erka and Bratislava, and even pouting little Djordje, standing in a circle, arms out and palm to palm, with the machines watching their brains and eyes and their bridged and knotted fingers, to see that they were standing perfectly strong, all the same.

Sonja could hear her own voice. Her ears were trying to translate what she was saying to herself. The translation program blocked the noise pouring from the sky.

Sonja sang her song again and again, whimpering.

“We are the young pioneers
Children of the real world
We grow like trees to the sky
We stand and support tomorrow
For our strength belongs to the future
And the future is our strength.”

* * *

THE SOUND OF WIND woke Sonja. Her ears were working again. She heard the faint sound of sullen dripping from the bullet-pierced water cloak.