The Caryatids

* * *

THE SUDDEN END OF THE FESTIVITIES put a damper on the clan’s convocations. Without any apparent orders being taken or given, they were breaking their tents, rolling their carpets, chasing sheep, splitting up, atomizing into the steppes.

Her ex-husband was already long gone. The angry Badaulet had thundered off over the bloody horizon somewhere. She wondered if she would ever hear any news of his death.

Eventually, there were only four of them left. The nomads had evap­orated, leaving four people in a well- trampled and utterly anonymous patch of half desert, half steppe. Herself, the two Montalban brothers, and the unconscious Biserka, lying in a robot full of bullet holes, with her heels propped up and her head set low.

“Hey look!” said Lionel, alertly gazing into the darkening sky. “See that little glint up there? That little spark of moving light? That’s it! That’s the dead Chinese space station. We can actually see it from down here with the naked eye!”

“The satellites must keep spinning,” said Montalban. “Every power player agrees on that. Because without satellites there is no geolocation. Without geolocation, we would be truly lost and abandoned in this des­olate place, instead of merely standing around here in the functional equivalent of Hollywood and Vine.”

“Are we going to get away with stealing a Chinese space station, John? I’ve seen you do big real-estate deals before. But that’s a space sta­tion.”

“We do not plan to ‘steal’ the dead space station, Lionel. That is a derelict property. We are rescuing it. We are redeeming it in the general public interest of planet Earth. It is a fixer-upper. It is a turn-around property. And that station isn’t much bigger than LilyPad when we took that over from the Indians. We are the natural party to take over a lost piece of orbital real estate.”

“You will not get away with that,” Sonja told him. “You will not be al­lowed to do that.”

“Probably not, Sonja dear, but it certainly seems worth a try.”

“It is a direct threat to Chinese national interests if you board that fa­cility. The state will not stand for that foreign intrusion.”

“I can certainly understand that nationalist point of view,” said Mon­talban. “I’m sure that the Chinese are scrambling for new launch ca­pacity in Jiuquan right now. However, China is not the whole Earth. My family and my various political allies, to our great good luck, happen to be planning an international, orbital summit of Acquis and Dispensa­tion political pundits. In fact, we had to postpone that summit when we heard there was bad solar weather. Our private space station, LilyPad—which does not have any mysterious weapons of mass extermination aboard it—happens to be in a rather remote orbit. Whereas the Chinese station—which has long been rumored to carry horrific weapons of mass destruction that can scramble the DNA of people on the ground through God only knows what horrible mechanism—that abandoned hulk, full of corpses and former war criminals, it orbits so close to the Earth that, if we don’t put a new crew aboard it immediately, it’s going to tumble out of orbit and possibly land on a major city.”

“That is completely untrue. That is a pack of lies. There is no danger of that happening. You made all that up. It’s all a snare and a political di­version. You are a pirate, you are stealing it.”

“Ah, but you forget that huge solar flare, Sonja. Solar flares heat the Earth’s outer atmosphere. That has increased the orbital drag on the space station. So of course the space station is a public hazard and it must be rescued at once. We are not pirates, but the responsible parties. The whole world will agree with us.”

“That’s a lie, too.”

“It’s not a lie. It’s the ‘precautionary principle.’ We can’t be sure that isn’t really happening. Maybe there’s a strange interaction with the solar magnetism and the particles of Chinese hydrogen bombs in our upper atmosphere. Maybe that’s what caused all these blackouts and the may-hem around the world. Do you think the world has any time to waste while the Chinese bureaucracy pulls its firecrackers out of mothballs to fly up there and do its sorry cover-up?”

Lionel was laughing wildly. “Just listen to that! Listen to him go! When he gets all wound up, there’s just nobody who can touch him! Wow! He’s had less than forty-eight hours to advance this political line! And he didn’t do it with his friends and his servants handy, either! He did it in the middle of a savage desert. Call me a fanboy, but… well, the stupid cute ones run for public office, and the smart ones manage the campaigns.”

“We’re shooting the works here, Lionel. We have to give it our best,” said Montalban.

Lionel nodded. “Absolutely, brother!”

After Montalban’s raging burst of oratory, nothing whatever hap­pened. There was nothing around them. They were nowhere and in noware. Night was falling. There was utter emptiness.

“I’m thirsty,” Biserka moaned.

Lionel tipped water into her mouth. She sipped it and passed out.

“How will you know if your scheme has worked?” said Sonja.

“I can tell you,” Montalban confessed, “that I haven’t the least idea. There simply wasn’t any time to arrange for that. I threw the gears into motion—in network nodes all over this planet—I don’t even know who is first onto the space station. They’re not exactly two-fisted astronaut hero types, these Relinquishment intellectuals. Plus, there’s some like­lihood that another solar flare will erupt and they all get fried up there. But—some global pundit is absolutely sure to invade that facility, even if it’s just to float around in free fall making snarky comments about the bad industrial design.”

“I would go up there,” said Lionel. “I love orbit.”

“Oh, I’m definitely going up there, if we somehow survive down here. I’m going to retrieve the body of my dear correspondent, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I wouldn’t dream of having that lady jettisoned into outer space… I don’t care how much space junk there is up there already; I swear she won’t become part of it.”

Sonja sat heavily on the comfortless floor of the desert. It had never oc­curred to Sonja that anyone would go to fetch her mother’s body down to Earth. That concept had not crossed her mind for one instant.

She had been blind to that idea. She had always been blind to so many ideas. She was a rigid, staring, damaged creature. There were so many spaces within her own stony heart, places where she could not look.

“Don’t cry,” said Montalban.

“I’m not crying.”

“You’re about to cry,” Montalban predicted, with accuracy. “You’re about to crack up because you can’t bear your burden. Your lifelong burden is finally overwhelming you. It’s too heavy and it’s just too much for you. We know about that, Lionel and I. So we are removing your burden preemptively. Just for once. As a mercy. Your war is all over, Sonja. We are pulling you out of the cold. You are never going back to that place in the world, because you are ours now. We own you. Just let them try to take you back from us.”

“Look there,” said Lionel, pointing.

“What do you see?”

“It’s a contrail, some kind of arch across the sky. Not a satellite. Mov­ing way too slow for that. Some kind of suborbital thing.”

“I do see it! Right! That could be a Chinese ground-to-ground war­head,” said Montalban cheerily.

“That is the west,” said Lionel patiently. “That way over there, that’s the east. China is east.”

“Is that the east?” said Montalban, puzzled. “Really? I should have stepped outside of that tent more often.”

“Sonja, do you have binoculars? A rifle? Anything with a telescope on it?”

Sonja muttered at them from the chilly ground. “All I own is this badly damaged robot, which my ex-husband left to me as an act of con­tempt.”

But they were ignoring her words, for something had suddenly bloomed overhead in the darkening Asian sky. “Holy cow,” said Lionel, “what the heck is that thing? I’ve never seen a thing like that in my life!”

“What is that, a comet? I hate to say this; but that looks like a flying squid.”

“It’s like some zeppelin bullet that opens up just like an umbrella! Who would build a thing like that?” Lionel paused. “Why haven’t they sold us one of those?”

“The world is full of skunk labs, Lionel. We can’t know every tech project in the world. I’d be guessing—well, I’d bet that these were just the first guys to hit the Return key. They must have scrambled whatever they had on