The caryatids, p.21
The Caryatids, page 21
Radmila rolled her eyes in contempt.
Biserka crawled into the front of the hearse, to mess at length with its interface. Distant sirens were howling, but the fabled rapid-response corps of Los Angeles were slow to fight these fires. Maybe because the fastest and most agile gangs on the street were the arsonists.
“Lionel and his friends are getting out of hand, Radmila! That’s a whole lot of pretty fire! I’ve seen towns on fire in China that were burning less than your town is burning tonight.”
Biserka was frightened suddenly. “All right, you’re always claiming you love them so much. Go stop them from rioting. Go on, I’ll untie you. Go be superhuman. You can do that. You’re superperfect.” She pulled the wadded tape from Radmila’s lips.
“Kill us both,” Radmila said. “It’s easier.”
“You stink,” Biserka decided. “I think I’ll go help them, instead. I’ll say that I’m you, and I’ll tell them to burn everything. I’ll burn everything you ever built here! Because I look like you. I look more like you than you do.”
Flames lit the horizon. A dense, oily wave of smoke rolled over them. Biserka kicked open the door, left the hearse, slammed it behind her.
Radmila hated her life.
The hearse suddenly started again. It rolled, slow as a minute hand and just as inexorable, into the Pacific surf. Like every form of networked machinery, the car showed a supreme contempt for its own survival.
The hearse wobbled. Pacific surf rolled rhythmically over the windows. Seawater seeped under the doors.
Radmila managed to wriggle sideways in her bondage. She got her knees up, her legs up.
The foaming tide would not drown her until it reached the coffin.
The tide rose steadily. The coffin began to float.
HE WAS BOWLEGGED, he had lice, internal parasites, and tubercular lesions, and he was nineteen years old. His life was one long epic poem about heat, cold, thirst, hunger, filth, disasters, and bloodshed. His fellow tribesmen called him “the Badaulet,” which meant “Lucky.”
Sonja tuned her clinic lights to a mellow glow and turned up the infrasound. Lucky’s tough, tireless, scrawny body went as translucent as glass. His sturdy heart jetted blood through the newly cleansed nets of his lungs.
Sonja had killed off Lucky’s parasites, filtered his blood, changed his skin flora, flushed out his dusty lungs and the squalid contents of his guts … She had cut his hair, trimmed his nails … He was a desert warlord, and every pore, duct, and joint in him required civilizing.
“Lucky dear,” she said, “what would you like more than anything in this whole world?”
“Death in battle,” said Lucky, heavy-lidded with pleasure. Lucky always said things like that.
“How about a trip to Mars?”
Lucky stoutly replied—according to their machine translation: “Yes, the warrior souls are bound for Heaven! But men must be honest with Heaven and rise from the front line of battle! For if we want to go to the garden of Heaven, yet we have not followed in the caravan of jihad, then we are like the boat that wants to sail on the dry desert!”
“Mars is a planet, not Heaven. It’s a planet like Earth.”
“Even a pagan woman with your pitiful ignorance can follow the path of jihad!” said Lucky, grunting a little as her oiled fingers readjusted the bones in his neck. “Women can equip a man for righteous battle with their gold and jewelry!”
“I have no gold or jewelry.”
Lucky reached out deftly and seized a thick hank of her hair. “Then cut and sell these golden tresses! Your beauty will buy me guns to punish all of Heaven’s enemies!”
“What a sweet thing to say.”
There was no use her denying it, especially to herself: she had fallen for him. He was a dismal, bloodstained creature from what was surely one of the worst areas on Earth, yet he radiated confidence and a sure sense of manly grace.
This was not another impulsive fling, though Sonja had never lacked for those. This time was one of those serious times.
Maybe she had fallen, somehow, for their quirky machine translation, for Lucky’s native tongue was an obscure pidgin of Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dialect, a desert lingo created by the roaming few who still survived in the world’s biggest dust bowl. It was the trouble of reaching him, of touching him, that made their pang of communion so precious to her. Talking to Lucky was like shouting through an ancient crack in the Great Wall of China.
She felt a powerful, deeply spiritual rapport with him, for once she had been so much like him: young, bewildered, foreign, aggressive, and heavily armed. In China, yet not quite of China. For this young war hero to become an honored guest of the Chinese state—he must have waded here through a tide of gore.
Sonja disentangled his callused fingers from her curls. “Lucky, you feel some pain here, don’t you?” She patted him intimately.
“Yes, that is a pain in my ass.”
“I will fix that for you.” He’d fallen—from a horse, most likely—and his cracked fourth lumbar vertebra had a growth on it, a tender, frilly, ligamentous benign tumor like some Chinese wood-ear mushroom. People’s interior organs—and Sonja had spent years studying them—they were subaquatic organisms, basically. They grew in bloody seawater.
“Stop fixing me, Sonja. You fix me too much.”
“Dear Badaulet, that big pain you feel down your leg comes from one small broken bone on your back. It is right … here. Do you feel that? Here it is: that is your pain. Because there is a network of nerves there. The network is pinched, the network has a fault. See how I can touch that network fault? My fingers can feel that.”
“No, no! Stop that! My back is strong! It’s my stupid ass that has the pain.” Lucky twisted his neatly trimmed head, showed her his newly polished teeth and smiled. “Rub me all over, slowly, as you did before. That part is good.”
“Lucky: You are strong and beautiful, but I know your body better than you. I know what you feel.”
“Stop dreaming! You can’t tell me what I feel, woman! Only Heaven knows the secrets hidden in the breasts of men!”
“Oh, I know enough of your secrets to heal you as a man.” She lowered her eyes. “That will hurt at first.”
“Oh woman, why do you always talk so much? I know what you want from that bold, rude way you look at my face! You can’t hurt me! You and your sweet little hands…” Lucky grabbed snakelike at her fingers, and missed them as she instantly snatched them back.
He really didn’t think that she could hurt him. Of the many outlandish things that Lucky had said to her, this one was the most absurd.
The Badaulet was an outcast, although he was entirely sure he was a prince. She had once thought she was a princess, and become an outcast… “Badaulet, this evening I will bathe you, and dress you in your fine new uniform. You will meet the greatest heroes in the whole world.” Grappling his arm, she coaxed him over onto his belly, so that his spine was exposed.
“Who is that, what did you say to me?” Lucky touched his translation earpiece and frowned.
“Your banquet hosts in Jiuquan tonight are the taikonauts! The astronauts! The cosmonauts! The taikong ren. The yuhangyuan. The hangtianyuan. Do you understand that? I mean the Chinese heroes who flew to Mars and returned to Earth.”
“Oh yes, the famous Great Pilgrims to Heaven. I understand. They mean to honor the Badaulet for my valor in combat.”
“To meet these heroes brings great good fortune. They are the future!”
“Did your men of valor fight on Mars?”
“No. They collected rocks there.”
“Though they have returned from Heaven, if they failed to fight the jihad they have earned no merit.”
Sonja planted the point of her elbow into Lucky’s spine, and with one decisive lunge she ripped the tumor loose.
The Badaulet gasped in agony and writhed like a hooked fish.
“You felt that pang all down your leg, didn’t you?”
He was angry. “You hurt me now! You cut my hair! You washed my guts! You stole my clothes! You burned me with hot wax! And I’m no better, Sonja! I hurt! You promised you would fix me and I hurt.”
Sonja rolled him over onto his back. For the first time since she had met him, Lucky had gone gratifyingly limp. Normally he was as nervous and tensile as a bundle of barbed wire. His torn spine was bleeding a little, inside of him. Not too much. She had done it precisely right.
What amazing skin this boy had. There were hen-scratched scars all over him, pits, pocks, frostbite, dimples… “Lie quiet now … Rest and heal … Shall I sing to you while I make you feel better? I’ll sing you a little song. I know many old and beautiful songs. I will sing you ‘The Ballad of the Savage Tiger.’ ”
As she sang, Sonja suited actions to his needs. The springy, salty vitality of the masculine body, how endearing that was. The body was irrepressible, it wanted to live despite everything. The sexual body, with resources for new life.
Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth—it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen.
Sonja crooned:
“No one attacks her with the long lance,
No one shoots her with the strong bow.
Suckling her progeny, rearing her cubs,
She trains them in her own savagery.
Her reared head becomes the great wall
Her waving tail becomes the war banner.
The greatest pirates from the eastern sea
Would dread to meet her after dark,
The savage tiger, met on the western road,
Would terrify the greatest bandits.
What good is any sword against her?
When she growls like thunder, hang it on the wall!
From the secret foothills of Tai mountain
Comes the sound of women weeping,
But government regulations forbid
Any official to dare to listen.”
Lucky was blissfully quiet now. He had wisely chosen not to argue with her anymore. A host of ducts and long hydraulic chambers and strange stiffening flows of blood … And yet, human beings emerged from these oblong glands and their conduits, men and women were sired by all this gadgetry—well, not herself, of course, but most people had a father … People emerged as single-celled genetic packets out of this complex, densely innervated, profoundly temperamental fluid-delivery system.
The secret of humanity. Here it was, in her hands.
No matter how many human bodies Sonja encountered, and how well she grasped them and their intimate functions, there was always some new magic in a new one.
Sonja switched filters and gazed straight into Lucky’s brain. His arousal was ferociously devouring a host of tagged radioactive sugars. Sex was like a bonfire in his basement.
Women often knowingly told other women that “men only wanted one thing,” but it took a sensorweb to catalogue and reveal that. To see it was to believe it. To know all was to forgive all. A man wanted that one thing he wanted because there wasn’t room in his head for anything else.
A bonfire of gratified lust was roaring around in Lucky’s skull. Hormones washed through him in visible tides. With surgical delicacy, she rubbed him with three oiled fingertips. Instantly, an aurora of utter bliss boiled through him. He teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.
This was the world’s most human “humane intervention.” It was the one consoling act that, during its few sweet minutes, could obliterate loneliness. Obscure horror. Dismantle grief.
The famed rewards of Heaven for the warrior-martyr were seventy-two heavenly maidens doing just this.
THE AIRLOCK INTO THE FABLED MARS DOME was very likely the single most paranoid security space in all of China. The Martian dome was under the strictest official state quarantine, so the disinfected visitors went in there wearing single-seamed, quilted space gowns, soft little foamy space boots, and nothing else whatsoever. Visitors were allowed no tools, no possessions, no equipment of any kind. Not a fleck. Not a speck. Their bare humanity.
Sonja always had trouble with this airlock, for there were old bits of shrapnel inside her: pieces of another human being. A suicide bomber. Lucky and Sonja tenderly held hands on their waffled and comfortless plastic bench while the security scanners whirred overhead. There was nothing much to do except to gaze out the windows.
The Martian airlock featured two oblong portholes. Their shape mimicked the two world-famous portholes in the Martian landing capsule. These portholes helped some with the monotony of security scans, for the portholes offered boastful views of downtown Jiuquan.
Certain knowledgeable pundits called Jiuquan “the planet’s most advanced urban habitat,” although, as a supposed “city,” Jiuquan had its drawbacks. Jiuquan, which had sprung up around China’s largest space-launch center, resembled no previous “city” on Earth.
Jiuquan bore some atavistic traces of a normal Chinese city: mostly morale-boosting “big-character” banner ads—but it had no streets and no apparent ground level. Jiuquan consisted mostly of froth, foam, and film. It looked as if a fireworks factory had burst and been smothered with liquid plastic. Solar-sheeted domes more garish than Christmas ornaments, linked with pneumatic halls and rhizomelike inflated freeways. Piston elevators, garish capsules, ducts and dimples and depressions, decontamination chambers. Hundreds of state laboratories.
Jiuquan was thirty-eight square kilometers of zero-footprint, a young desert metropolis recycling its air and all its water. Jiuquan was an artificial Xanadu where fiercely dedicated national technocrats lived on their bioplastic carpets with bioplastic furniture, interacting with bioplastic screens, under skeletal watchtowers and ancient rocket launch-pads.
Oil-slick paddies of bacterial greenhouses, deftly fed by plug-in sewers, created fuel, food, and building materials, all of it manufactured straight from the dust of the Gobi Desert. A city built of dust.
A radical yet highly successful experiment in sustainability, Jiuquan was booming—it was the fastest-growing “city” in China. It was sited in the Gobi Desert with nothing to stop its urban expansion but the dust. And Jiuquan was made of dust. Dust was what the city ate.
Sonja was finally allowed to clear the steely skeins of the Martian airlock. Dr. Mishin, who had been waiting for her, rose to his feet and hastily jammed his dust-grimed laptop into his dust-grimed bag.
Leonid Mishin was a Russian space technician who had wandered the world like Marco Polo and finally moored here in Jiuquan. Mishin dwelt inside the Mars simulator, as one of its few permanent residents.
Everyone else in Jiuquan also resided in an airtight bubble of some kind, but Mishin’s bubble, the Martian simulator, was officially considered the most advanced bubble of them all. This made up somewhat for the fact that Dr. Mishin was never allowed to leave.
Dr. Mishin labored in his confinement as a “senior technical consultant,” which was to say, he led a career rather similar to her own as a “senior public health consultant.” They were both émigré servants of the Chinese state, multipurpose human tools used to fill cracks in the walls of Chinese governance, or to putty over a rip in its seams. The Chinese state had thousands of such foreign agents. The state impartially rewarded any human functionary that it found to be skilled and convenient.
Lucky was still battling with the airlock’s fabric. The interfaces there had baffled better men than him.
“You slept with that barbarian,” Mishin concluded at once.
Sonja rolled her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair.
“Yes, you did that, you did!” Dr. Mishin mourned. “What is wrong with you? Him, of all people? A creature like him? Have you finally lost all self-respect?”
“Leonid, do you think our age difference matters? I’m only twenty-seven.”
“They cut off people’s heads out there! They do it on video!”
“The Badaulet is very loyal to the state. He believes that the Chinese state is divinely sanctioned by the Mandate of Heaven. You should take him seriously, he’s an important political development.”
“He’s a tribal lunatic! There’s no reason for you to involve yourself with him! What do you expect to gain from him? There’s nothing left but sand and land mines between here and Kazakhstan!”
Why was Mishin so bitterly jealous? His sexual politics were his worst flaw. Yes, true, she had a penchant for taking lovers, but this was China. For every hundred women in China there were a hundred and thirty men. What else should the world expect?
And Jiuquan, a deeply technical city, had an even more destabilizing male-female imbalance. Mishin was from Russia, where the men died young and the women were lonely. He was being a fool.
Lucky kicked through the airlock, snarling and slapping at his earpiece. “What is wrong with that stupid tent, that ugly prison? It trapped me in there and it tried to kill me!”
“Badaulet, this is the wise scientist that I told you about: Dr. Leonid Mishin. No man in this world knows more about the future potential of Mars. Dr. Mishin will be our official state guide today.”
Lucky, still angry, stared in raw disbelief at the chilly pink sun crawling the seamless, alien, purplish sky. The Martian extraterrarium, logically, ran on Martian time—it featured 24.6-hour days and 687-day years. The wine-dark plastic firmament displayed accurately Martian stellar constellations, including two racing, tumbling blobs of light that mimicked Phobos and Deimos.
Mishin was usually a polished Martian tour guide, but he was upset with her. Yet he’d been so kind and eager about it when she’d said she was coming to visit him. What a shame.
Lucky rubbed his nose. “Why does Mars stink?”
“The breathable air within this model Martian biosphere,” Mishin recited grudgingly, “was created, and is maintained, entirely by our extraterrestrialized organisms. Through the ubiquitous oversight of the state and the heroic efforts of the dedicated scientific workers of the glorious Jiuquan Space Launch Center—” Mishin drew a breath. “—this project has become the model, not of Mars today, but of the future Mars! Your translation understands all that, sir? Yes? That’s very good!”
