The Caryatids

Sonja stopped, gathered some grass, stuffed it into a fabric rumen bag.

Sonja did not worry much about human bandits lurking in the Gobi-bandits were unlikely to survive in any place this barren. Death in the desert came mostly from autonomous machines.

The killer machines of the great Asian dust bowl came in three great families: autonomous rifles, autonomous land mines, and autonomous aircraft. They were all deadly: a few cents' worth of silicon empowered them to rain death from above, or to punch an unerring hole through a human torso, or to wait for silent years in a puddle of machine surveillance and then tear off a human leg.

The aircraft and the sniper devices were harder to manufacture and maintain, for they were frequently blinded or clogged with clouds of dust. So the land mines were the worst and most numerous of the three. The land mines had all kinds of arcane names and behaviors.

Most land mines were scattered where human victims might logically go: roads, trails, highways, bridges, and water holes, any place of any former economic value. The great comfort of a robot pack mule was that it didn't bother to follow trails. Also, land mines were unlikely to recognize its uneven, highly u

Knowing this, the Badaulet was eager to exploit their tactical advantage and to catch up with their enemies. Lucky was convinced that their would-be assassins had released the killer plane at the limit of its striking range, and then beaten a swift retreat back into the deeper desert. The Badaulet thought in this way, because this was the tactic he himself would have chosen.

His pack robot was tireless. He was also proud of the fact that it could run in pitch darkness. He would have blindly trusted it to carry him off the edge of the Earth.

Being a new bride, Sonja gently persuaded him to stop awhile, despite his ambitions. They located a nameless hollow, a shallow foxhole in the wind-etched, dun-colored desert. Utterly barren, their honeymoon hole had all the anonymity of a crater scooped from the surface of Mars.

As the Badaulet scoured the horizon for nonexistent enemies, Sonja climbed stiffly from the robot's bucketlike chassis, folded the robot flat, kicked dirt over it to disguise it, and opened her blister tent.

This tent had a single mast in the center, a lightweight wand that clicked together like jointed bamboo and socketed into a ring. The power within the wand brought the fabric to life. In moments, 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 paper-dry 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 emotionally 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 u

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 an 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!"