The Caryatids

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. "Yet I 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."

"You didn't even bring a gun, woman."

"Give me a clear line of sight at them. I will put Red Sonja's evil eye on these bandit cult sons of bitches, and I have no care for their numbers.

"They swore to sweep the foe away with no care for their own lives; Five thousand rode out in their sables and brocades. Their piteous bones litter the banks of dry ravines, Five thousand ghosts dreamt of in ladies' bedchambers."

The Badaulet mulled this recitation over. "They gave you the Assassin's Mace."

"Yes. No. Not that. Something else like that. There are many things like that in China."

"So you truly killed the 'five great generals, Sonja? And you killed all their troops as well?"

"It never works the way it gets told in those stories."

The people of the tent village had no vehicles. They seemed to have knocked their camp down, thrown it on horseback, and instantly thundered off in all directions.

Yet their scattered swarm must surely have regrouped somewhere, somehow…With radios, telephones…or maybe with nothing more technical than drums, bugles, and tall flags on sticks. Genghis Khan had never gotten lost, and he'd ridden over the biggest empire on Earth.

The Badaulet removed his face net, pulled his visored cap over his eyes, and stared at the barren soil. He scowled.

"I can see a track," she offered.

"That thing is not a track, woman. That is a hole in the ground."

"Well, I saw another hole much like it. Back there."

The strange holes were violent gouges in the desert soil, spaced ten meters, eleven meters apart. Pierced holes, like the jabbing of javelins.

Some two-legged thing was ru

"These are not the grass people of the camp," he told her, "these are ru

Sonja gazed around the abandoned vacuity of the desert. One single tiny bird chirped, breaking the silence like a brick through glass. "It's getting crowded out here."

They followed the jumping machine tracks, for this group had some clear purpose and their tracks were easy to spot.

These new marauders were like giant Gobi jerboas. They bounced their way for kilometers.

Eventually, the javelin-footed things clustered into a gang and scampered together up a steep, flat-topped hill.

Closely guiding the pack robot, the Badaulet circled the hill with great caution.

"Do we climb up there?" she asked him at last.

"They might be waiting there in ambush," he said. "They ran up there, each on his own two legs, and they did not come back down."

"It's getting late. I wouldn't want to meet these things in the dark."

"We go up," he decided.

The top of the hill, barren, chilly, nameless, was scabbed all over with the milling pockmarks, and there were helicopter skids.

"They all flew off," said Sonja. "It's some covert insertion team. Not Chinese. These people have robots that jump on two legs."

As if in sympathy, their own pack robot emitted a loud metallic grunt. Sonja stared at its crude prow, a blunt shelf like an ugly bumper. There was a fresh, new, round hole pierced in the bare metal there.

There was a second mournful bang and a second hole appeared, a palm's width away from the first.

"Don't move," said the Badaulet, standing, "it is trying to shoot us in the head," and he shouldered his rifle and fired. "I hit it," he reported, "but I should have sighted-in this target system properly," and he fired again, again, again, three discreet sniper gunshots not much louder than three clapping hands.

A thing in the twilit sky like a distant child's kite went tumbling into straw pieces.

"That plane was much bigger than the flying bomb they sent to kill us," he said. "It had a gun on board, and not a very good gun."

Sonja looked at the two neat holes piercing the robot's prow. The aircraft had an excellent gun; it just had poor programming. It didn't know what to do with their unusual target silhouette.