The caryatids, p.23
The Caryatids, page 23
Sonja laughed. “You haven’t known me long.”
“I don’t want to know you better,” Lucky said. “You have given me your woman’s body: the utmost gift a woman gives a man, except for sons. So: I don’t want to go to Hell for doing that. It is my warrior calling to serve Heaven, die for Heaven, and go to Heaven. So: You must certainly agree to marry me. Otherwise, you are oppressing me.”
“Can we discuss this matter after we leave this airlock?”
Lucky sat cross-legged on the rubbery white tiles of the sterilized floor. “We cannot leave! We are prisoners in here! So let us make our pact now and marry at once. I cannot ask your father to give me you, for you never had a father.”
“You know a lot about me, don’t you?”
“On the steppes, far outside China, I meet the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, from the Acquis and the Dispensation. They seek me out for my advice on how to survive, for they die there quickly. They know much about the Angel of Harbin. They know things about you that the state does not say. They say that Red Sonja killed five great generals.”
“That is not true! That’s a lie! I have never killed any uniformed Chinese military personnel! I swear that, I never did that—not even if they were laying down barrage-fire on my positions.”
Sonja puffed on the thin, stale air. “My head hurts so badly. Something’s gone wrong. We’re supposed to dress for that big state banquet. The Martian taikonauts are there, and they’ll want us to drink! Lots of toasts with maotai … Five years, those three flyboys were stuck, without a woman, in their tiny capsule—good God, no wonder they’re like that … Do you drink alcohol, Lucky?”
“I can drink kumiss!”
“You drink kumiss horse milk? Really? That’s so cute.”
“I will introduce you to these heroes as my wife!”
“I’m a soldier’s woman,” Sonja told him, pressing the heels of her hands to her throbbing temples. “That’s what I’m good for. So: fine. Since you need marriage so much, for the sake of your soul and whatever: fine, I’ll do that for you. I will be your concubine. I can do that.”
“Truly?”
“Shut up! Because—I will only be your Earthly wife. Outside of this place—out in your desert—where the green grass grows sometimes, and the sky is sometimes blue, and there are horses and tents and land mines and sniper rifles—sure, out there I am your wife and I accept you as my husband. I do. However! Inside this space center, or in orbit, or on Mars, or inside that biosphere, or inside this airlock, any other area that is not of this Earth, then I am not your wife, Lucky. Instead, I own you. You are my slave.”
“On the Earth, I am your husband, that’s what you just declared to me?”
“Only on the Earth. Everywhere else, to be with Sonja is to be in trouble. I never lie to my men—no matter how much that hurts them.”
“You think that you are getting a smart horse-trading bargain from me, woman, but you are wrong! So: Yes, I am happy now. We are married now, you are my bride. Congratulations.” The Badaulet rose and pressed his nose to the finely scratched plastic of the porthole. “Now, wife of mine: Tell me about that light unmanned aircraft at ten o’clock, which is vectoring our way.”
“What? Where?”
Lucky tapped at the porthole with his newly trimmed, newly cleaned fingernails. He had just spotted one single, tiny, black, distant speck, wafting high above the clotted and polychrome city. It could have been one speck of black Gobi dust on their porthole. He had better eyes than an eagle.
“I think that’s a space probe,” she said. “You generally hear a big thump from the coil gun whenever they launch a probe, but they make them so light these days—they’re like space chickens.”
“That is not a chicken or a satellite, because I eat chickens and I know satellites. That is an unmanned light aircraft. It is a precision antipersonnel bomb.” Lucky turned to face her. “It was God who blessed me to marry you just now, for that aircraft is flying here to kill me.”
Sonja blinked. “Are you entirely sure about that?”
“Yes I am sure. They have trapped me in here without my weapons. I know these aircraft, for I use them to kill. The Badaulet has many enemies. Soon I will die. And you, the bride of the Badaulet, you will die at my side. Heaven ordains all of this.”
“Okay, maybe Heaven does ordain it. Or maybe you will die at my side, Lucky. Because I am Red Sonja, I am the Angel of Harbin, and I have more enemies than you do. My enemies are more advanced and more cunning enemies than your enemies.”
“No, your enemies are only soft and womanly political enemies who live indoors. You don’t have my fierce, warlike enemies of the steppes.”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, my husband! Once a teenage girl came to see me, she said to me, ‘Are you Sonja Mihajlovic?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am, where does it hurt?’ and she exploded. That girl blew herself up with a belt bomb! Pieces of her body flew into my body. She almost killed me! Just because of some stupid little nowhere village massacre that happened many years ago! And I didn’t even burn those villages—my mother did all that! But I was inside a triage facility, so they slapped me right back together—wonderful work for a field hospital!”
The Badaulet hadn’t understood a single word of this blurted confession, but his black eyes were wet with tender marital sympathy. “Are you afraid to die, my bride?”
“Oh no. Not really. Not anymore.” Sonja had once felt tremendous fear about dying, but all that nonsense had left her years ago.
The airborne bomb took on visible dimensions. It might have been a child’s kite, or a dried leaf, or a bedraggled crow. It was none of these things, for it was death on the wing. It was a small, sneaking, radar-transparent aircraft, so it flew rather clumsily.
“My comrades will avenge me for this,” declared the Badaulet, “because I have faithfully avenged so many friends who perished in similar ways. Also, I have consummated my marriage before my wedding, which seemed a wicked thing to me—but now I know that part was surely divinely ordained. So I die happily!”
Sonja stood and spread her arms. She began to sing verse in Chinese.
“When will the full moon appear? I ask the sky with my wine cup in my hand
Wondering: What year might it be now, up in the lunar palace?
I meant to be riding high up there, but I feared I could not bear the cold of that beautiful sanctuary
Accompanied with my shadow I dance; don’t you agree that I am in heaven now?
Moonlight sweeps my red pavilion, moonlight floods my decorated windows and shines on my sleepless soul.
Oh Moon, without mortal sentiment: Why reveal your full face only when lovers part?
Happy unions and sad departures are as common as your changing phases
May my lover and I both be safe and well, and may we share the Moon, although we are parted by a thousand miles.”
“That was poetry,” said the Badaulet.
“Yes, that was my favorite poem in the whole world. It was written in the T’ang dynasty, when China ruled the world.”
“This system understands your sad poetry much better than it understands your funny jokes.”
The flying bomb slammed into the fabric surface of the airlock, and it bounded off. It flopped and yawed and wobbled and caught itself in midair, and gained height for a second effort.
“I always wanted to die while making love or speaking poetry,” Sonja explained.
“If this air smelled better, I would oblige you.”
The bomb returned for its second pass. Sonja threw herself to the airlock floor, curled into a fetal position, and clamped her hands over her ears.
Another sullen thump followed and the bomb bounded off again, harmlessly.
“Oh, get up, woman,” the Badaulet scolded. “Meet your death on your feet, for your girlish cowardice is so undignified.”
“Get down here and hit the deck, stupid! This increases our odds of survival!”
“There are no ‘odds for survival’! There is only what Heaven ordains!”
Having endured many bombs in her past, Sonja ignored him, and doubled up tightly on the spotless airlock floor. “For God’s sake, why are they trying to hit me instead of that huge Mars dome over there? That is China’s greatest prestige construction, it’s got to be a much fatter target than I am!”
“Sonja, my dear wife Sonja: Let us swear to Heaven that if we survive this cowardly attack, we will track down these evildoers and personally kill them ourselves.”
“I love you so much for saying that! That is the greatest thing you have ever said to me! I swear I’ll do it, if you will do it with me.”
The plane smashed into the airlock and shattered. Brittle pieces of airplane plummeted out of their sight.
“Built by amateurs,” Sonja said, craning her neck to stare.
“I am glad that it broke to pieces,” said the Badaulet, still on his feet but panting harder, “but now we will smother to death in this sealed, trapped room.”
Sonja didn’t much mind meeting her own death. Still, to lose him, another husband, right before her eyes…
Sonja never heard the bomb explode.
SONJA’S SUPPORT TENT was scarlet and the moon shone through it.
Any narrow escape from death always made Sonja keenly sentimental. Escaping death had taught her that life had many tags and rags, loose ends, unmet potentials. Sonja rather prided herself on her serene fatalism, but there were always issues she felt unhappy to leave unsettled.
Escape from death put her in a generous, easygoing, affirmative mood. Because, now, all the days ahead of her were a free gift. Like icing on a pretty cake hit by a grenade.
“That drone bomb blew both my eardrums out,” she told her brother, George. “The overpressure broke both of them. So the state built me brand-new ears. I have new and advanced Chinese cyborg astronaut ears. My ears are officially fantastic.”
George blinked from distant Europe, on his video screen. “Sonja, how many attempts does this make on your life?”
Sonja blinked back. “Do you mean me personally?”
“Of course I mean you personally! Stop acting crazy.”
“Why would I keep count of that? After I went to New York and I saw that New York City had been nuked … Why does anyone ever bother to count the dead? I’m just one person! If you don’t count Radmila. Radmila was also there in New York City.”
“Are you talking to me openly about Radmila now?” George was amazed. “Are you on drugs, Sonja?”
“This is Jiuquan, we don’t trifle with stupid narcotics!” Sonja had a raging exfection. An “exfection” was very much like an infection. Except, instead of causing human flesh to waste away rapidly in a noisome mass of pus, an exfection was a kindly state-designed microbe that caused damaged human flesh to heal at more-than-human speed.
There were yellow, crusty, suppurating masses of exfection thriving all over Sonja’s bomb-scorched shins and forearms. The crude bomb had shocked her and burned her, but since the airlock was made almost entirely of fabric, there had been no killing shrapnel.
The Badaulet had faced his own death boldly standing, so the bomb had broken both his feet. Her lucky husband was in a distant safe house hidden in the inflated bowels of the city, undergoing some much-embarrassed Chinese medical hospitality.
“Sonja,” George told her, “if your brand-new ears are really working, then just for once, I want you to listen to me. I have an important proposal for you. I want you to accept it.”
“Do you ever talk to Radmila, George?”
“Do I ‘talk’ to Radmila? I have met Radmila! We were in the same room together in Los Angeles, just last month! Radmila was kind to me!” George was sincerely thrilled.
“Then, Djordje, would you please tell Radmila—that I’m sorry I kicked her ass, that time in New York? That was wrong of me. I’m sorry that I snap-kicked her in the guts and I knocked her senseless. I was so jealous about her boyfriend, I was out of my head about Montalban. I should never have gone to New York no matter how much Montalban coaxed me. Never again, I’m through with him now: I promise.”
“That may be more than Radmila wants to know. Radmila isn’t very well right now. Things went badly in Los Angeles … there were riots. And huge fires.”
“You do talk to Vera, though, don’t you, Djordje?”
“I do sometimes talk to Vera, when Vera lets me—and stop calling me ‘Djordje.’ ”
“So Djordje: Would you please tell Vera, just for me …” Sonja stopped, at a loss for words. She had no idea what to say to Vera. She hadn’t said a word to Vera in nine years.
“Vera is not at her best lately either,” said George, and his worried tone rang in her head like a bronze bell. “No one knows where Vera is—she’s alive, but she’s hiding in the woods somewhere in some death zone. Sonja, give up whatever you think you’re doing there. Come stay with me in Vienna.”
“What? Why on Earth would I do that?”
“Because you’ll survive, woman! Like I’m surviving! I’m not like you, and Vera, and Radmila! I don’t want to save the world! I’m just a fixer, I’m a logistics man! But listen: The world is changing. The world is not collapsing—or, at least, not as fast as it was doing before. The world is turning into something we never imagined. My shipping business is great! Global business is heading for a big, long, global boom!”
“I can’t visit you there in Vienna, George. I just got married.”
“You did what? What, again? You married someone? Are you serious?”
“My husbands are always serious.”
“Montalban doesn’t know anything about this new marriage of yours,” said George thoughtfully. “That’s going to be big news to John Montalban.”
“You tell John Montalban that I am his black angel. Tell John I’m your big, long, global boom. Tell John I’m his giant supervolcano.”
“Oh Sonja, poor Sonja. Now I know you’re not yourself. Come on: giant supervolcanoes? We don’t believe in giant volcanoes, do we? That’s talking nonsense.”
“Here in Jiuquan, all the people believe in that nonsense. The Chinese are convinced that a volcano will explode in America and wreck the world’s climate.”
“Why, because the Chinese wrecked the climate the first time?”
“Yes they did. With American help. And because here in Jiuquan, tomorrow’s second climate crisis won’t even slow them down. Not anymore. Not in the glorious future!”
“Sonja, it is definitely time for you to leave those cult compounds in China and rejoin the real world,” said George solemnly. “No volcano will do anything that matters for ten thousand aeons. Exotic Chinese superstitions from inside some weird space bubble, that’s what you’re talking about. You’ve had enough of that. That won’t work out for you. Trust me.”
“Weather scientists were right when they said that the Earth’s climate would crash. Why should geologists be wrong when they’re predicting the same thing? Science is the truth. Science is science. Science is the future.”
“Oh, what astronaut crap you’re talking now! How many rich and famous scientists do you know? Did you ever see one lousy scientist get his own way in the real world? They’re all hopeless eggheads full of make-believe theories!”
George drew a breath—she could hear him puffing in the busy cores of her new eardrums. “Sonja, please. When you were out there in the field—crusading to save civilization, or whatever—I cared about that, I helped you! You remember how may times I helped you go save your favorite Chinese civilization? But now they’re trying to kill you right there in their own spaceport! What kind of ‘civilization’ is that to save?”
“This is China. Their system works differently.”
“Look, I manage global logistics, so I learn something new every day,” George boasted. “I can traffic in people like you! I’ll export you from China. I’ll export you right here to Vienna! When Inke heard that you were hurt again, she cried!”
Finally, Sonja was touched. Inke Zweig. Good old Inke. She had once spent a family Christmas together with Inke, when George, thankfully, wasn’t around.
First, Inke took her to Mass, insisting that she kneel and pray. Then Inke took her home, and Inke got very drunk on dainty, reeking, German herbal liqueurs. Then Inke, sobbingly, told Sonja all about her life. Inke vomited up her soul right at her kitchen table.
It was a boozy, sisterly, holiday heart-to-heart, all about Inke’s house, and her kitchen, and her kids, and her favorite cabbage and sausage recipes, and the will of God, and her husband, and Inke’s grinding, life-blighting fear of her hostile and terrible world.
Inke was intelligent—she was perceptive enough to know that the world was in lethal danger—but Inke was too timid to do anything useful.
So, Inke had married, instead. Inke had forfeited every aspect of human agency to the man in her life. Inke had hidden herself in her thick fog of housework and piety, where she could cook, pray, and have babies.
And this strategy even made sense for the woman, this self-abnegation was Inke’s version of a heroic act. Inke Zweig was a sweet and tender and vulnerable creature. Inke loved her kids dearly. Inke’s kids were even great kids, because they didn’t know one single useful thing about reality. They thought their mom and dad were terrific and all-knowing and proud and prosperous.
Her kids even loved their aunt Sonja, for no particular reason that Sonja understood. They gave their aunt Sonja fancy Christmas presents from prestigious Viennese stores.
“Sonja, you are family: Inke always says that. Inke would love to look after you,” George promised. “You wouldn’t have to see me at all! I’m on the road most days. You could have your own private wing of the mansion! Or—if my global business keeps booming—you can have your own apartment building!”
“Vienna is pretty,” she told him. “I think you made a good choice, working there.”
“Sonja, you won’t survive. To get killed—like our others were killed?—that was tragic. But to want to be killed, like you so obviously want to be killed? That is sheer foolishness!”
