The Caryatids

The Chinese were still very proud of their taikonauts, though the aging taikonauts, whom Sonja knew very personally, seemed a little shaken by their ambiguous role in history. The space heroes had left a glittering China in a headlong economic boom; they had returned from their multiyear Mars adventure to a choking, thirsting China whose sky consisted of dust.

Six kinds of dust:

The black dust from the Gobi Desert.

The red loess dust of central China.

The industrially toxic yellow dust that came from the dried riverbeds and the emptied basins of the giant parched dams.

The brown smoking dust of China's burning fields and blazing forests.

The dense, gray, toxic dust of China's combusting cities.

And, last but most globally important, the awesome, sky-tinting, Earth-cooling, stratospheric, radioactive dust from dozens of Chinese hydrogen bombs, digging massive reservoirs for fresh ice in the Himalayas.

Sonja had worked on the ground in China during the last of those years. Foreign soldiers had flown into China from every corner of the planet, always hoping to reassert order there. China could not be allowed to fail, because China was the workshop of the entire world, the world's forge, the world's irreplaceable factory.

The Chinese people had died in a cataclysm beyond numeration, while the Chinese state had prevailed. The bloody mayhem that had once gripped the Celestial Empire was methodically pushed beyond its borders. Pushed onto people like Lucky.

"I know this grass!" cried Lucky, plucking a cruelly barbed seed from the flesh of his ankle. "Camels can eat this!"

"All of these plants are native plants from China's deserts," said Mishin. This was a major techno-nationalist selling point. "When, in the future, mankind brings Mars to life, Mars will be Asian tundra and steppes."

"Who will live there?" Lucky demanded. "People like you?"

"Oh no," Sonja told him. "They will be people like you."

Lucky scowled. Lucky knew that he was not in Heaven. He was in an alien world, and he already lived in an alien world. "You told me about the horses? Show me some horses!"

"We do have horses here," Mishin assured him. "Central Asia's Przewalski's horses. Genetically, these are the oldest horses on Earth." Mishin scratched his close-cropped head. "You, sir-you may have seen these wild mustangs in the new wilds of central Asia, eh? Maybe a few Przewalski's horses? There are large herds thriving around Chernobyl."

"Those little horses are too small to ride." Lucky shrugged. "I can eat them. I can drink their blood."

Either the state's translation had failed him, or Mishin simply ignored what Lucky had just said. "We plan to remove the horses soon for the sake of our new young star…See, here are her tracks! Right here! And this is her dung, as well!"

Broadly spaced pugmarks dented the chilly Martian soil.

"That is no camel," Lucky concluded. "That is no horse."

"She is our 'mammoth, " said Mishin proudly.

Lucky patted his earpiece. "I never heard that word, 'mammoth. "

"Do you know what an 'elephant' is?"

Lucky coughed on the cold, dusty air. "No."

"Well, both elephants and mammoths are extinct today. However: with the climate crisis, many mammoths thawed from the permafrost…In a genetically revivable condition! Sometimes people don't marvel properly at our fabulous Martian microbes…but our mammoth! Oh yes! A hairy mammoth revived fresh from the Ice Age…and she's been redesigned for Mars! Everyone adores our Chinese Martian mammoth…She's still our young girl of course…" Mishin held his pale hand out, at shoulder height. "So she's still quite small, but what splendid fur, such a nose and ears! Who can't love a beautiful cloned Martian mammoth?"

"I don't love a mammoth," Lucky said firmly. "Let us leave this place now."

"No, no, let's hurry! Our mammoth will sleep soon. She sleeps each day at regular Martian hours."

"Lucky," Sonja told him, "the state wants to send me to Mars. I volunteered to go. I'm in taikonaut training in Jiuquan Space Launch Center."

Lucky looked her up and down. "Yes, that trip would be good for you."

"Why do you say that?"

Lucky lifted one finger. "Your mother. She's already up there?"

Sonja glared at him in instant, head-splitting rage.

"Sonja, don't!" Mishin yelped. "Don't do that! Remember what happened with Montalban?"

Sonja's head was spi

Mishin hastily escorted them back toward the balky airlock. Mishin himself never left the Martian simulator. There were microbes within him not yet cleared for public distribution.

"Sonja, you don't love your dear mother?" taunted Lucky, as they suffered the tedious hissing and clicking of the airlock's insane security. "Your demon mother, she who dwells in Heaven? You talk so much, Sonja, yet you never talk about her!"

"My mother is a state secret. So: Don't talk about my mother. Especially with this state machine translation."

Lucky was unimpressed. The prospect of the state surveilling him bothered him no more than the omniscience of God. "I, too, never talk about my mother."

Sonja lifted her sour, aching head. "What about your mother, Lucky? Why don't you talk about your mother?"

"My mother sold oil! She committed many crimes against the sky. In Tajikistan, in Kyrgyzstan. Other places. Many pipelines across central Asia. She was rich. Very rich."

"A princess, then?"

"Yes, all my mother's people were rich and beautiful. They had no tribes, they had schools. They had cars and jets and skyscrapers. All of them dead now. All. Dead, and nonpersons. No one speaks of them anymore."

Sonja shifted closer to him on the waffled plastic bench. She was sorry that she had lost her temper with him. He was only probing her, to see what she was made of. He had some right to do that. She did it herself all the time.

When she had been nineteen, twenty, twenty-one-young like him-she had had no discretion, no emotional skin at all. Especially about the always-tender subject of her «mother» and her "sisters."

Those violent passions were distant to her now, relics of the bitter days when she had become "Red Sonja." Nobody called her "Red Sonja" anymore. Not now, not when she was a certified war heroine with a cozy state post here in futuristic Jiuquan. At least, nobody called her "Red Sonja" when she could overhear them and take reprisals.

Sonja stared at the thin pox of Martian dust on her white plastic boots. The airlock was methodically blasting the last traces of life from that dust-a sterilization process that humans would never perceive, but a holocaust for bacteria.

"Badaulet, I should spend more time getting properly briefed about the guests that I escort here, but your suave ma

"That was a joke," Lucky guessed.

"Yes, that was a joke."

"Stop making jokes." He patted his ear. "This machine never understands jokes."

The airlock fell silent. The hissing, incoming air, which had been pressing hard at Sonja's tender eardrums, went deathly still.

"This airlock does not want to cooperate with us today."

"This machine wants to kill me," Lucky said firmly. "It knows that I don't belong here. I belong on the steppes, under the sky."

"Maybe it wants to kill me. After all, I'm the fool who escorts so many visitors here."

"Why would it want to harm you, Sonja? You are the Angel of Harbin."

"The 'Angel of Harbin. " Sonja sat up straighter. "I hate that stupid nickname! Yes, I'm a war heroine. Yes, I'm a pillar of the state and I am proud of my service! But 'Angel of Harbin'-I never chose that nom de guerre! Harbin was nothing so much."