The Caryatids

"I don't doubt it," Sonja said between her sobs. "The only thing I ever wanted was to be dutiful and good. I'm just so tired and sick of everything. I can't go on."

"Look at the way that slave dances for him," he said. He was revolted. "She's like a worm. She's an unclean reptile. I can't take part in this disgusting orgy, this is wrong. Our marriage is over, Sonja. I Divorce You. I Divorce You. I Divorce You!"

Sonja howled in pain and grabbed for him. "Oh please don't divorce me, please don't!" He tore himself from her grip and stalked away.

Sonja was trembling from head to foot. She was cracking inside. There was an abyss inside her. She had lived for years in that abyss once. It was a red abyss.

Carried by blazing impulse, Sonja stalked into the middle of the dance floor. She raised both her arms overhead, but this incantatory gesture did nothing. Biserka had seized everyone's attention. Biserka had stripped off three of her veils and was beaming with malicious delight. She capered around Sonja, waving her chiffon headdress, delicately wriggling.

The crowd rose and surged forward. They formed a tight circle. They were dying to see a fight.

A hand in her back shoved her forward.

For the first time, Biserka was afraid. The taunting look left her face. Biserka looked pretty when she was afraid. She had always been the frightened one, always. When the soldiers had come to kill all of them, Biserka had thrown herself on the ground to lick their feet.

Sonja spat into her face, then turned and walked away.

A deadly insult and a feigned retreat. It was the oldest and simplest and most effective of stratagems. In the roar of voices, Sonja counted heartbeats and then lashed out backward.

A rear heel kick was the strongest blow that a woman's body could deliver. It hit Biserka straight in the chest as she rushed forward in her rage and hate and panic, and it struck her so hard that she flew backward and stumbled into the arms of two spectators and knocked both of the men down.

Biserka did not move again.

Sonja dusted off her hands. She glared at the men in the tent, who had grown silent and respectful and ashamed. She jerked her head at the open door.

The crowd got up in a body and left the tent.

Montalban and his brother were busy on the carpet.

"Poor Biserka," mourned Lionel.

"She's alive," said Montalban.

Sonja was regretful. "That's because I missed her heart."

"Well, you broke three of her ribs and you've put her into shock. Oh, for God's sake stop standing there gloating, Sonja. You're a woman, you're not a killer robot. You've got medical training, come and help me with her."

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 spi

"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 pla

"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."