The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [112]
It was they, not she, who had begun hanging magic charms on her—the knickknacks they’d been clutching in their desperate hope of redemption. She looked different, she was different, and they were hanging meaning on her.
They needed to hope in order to live, and for a dying public, a public image brought hope. A radiance that might come to them, bearing a handheld lamp: radiance to the bedside of the sufferer at the midnight of the human soul. There to wash the filth from their suffering feet.
Hope would cure when all other methods failed, when other treatments weren’t even noticed. True anguish, the killing kind of despair, could only be relieved by ritual … If the sky turned black and the air was brown, an armed general could reason and bluster and bribe and threaten—not a soul would stir, even to save their own lives. An emotionally damaged teenage girl could drift by, in spotless white, dangling superstitions and jabbering lines of poetry, and they would rise as one and they would follow.
At this point in her life, Sonja found it hard to believe that she had done those things. But she had done them. Repeatedly. Spontaneously, tirelessly, in inspired trances, drawing strength from the light she saw in others. Extreme times pulled strange qualities from people. There were times when it helped a great deal to know that one was not entirely human.
Some men called her crazy—her second husband, and her third, in particular—but they were merely putting their own madness into better order by piling accusations on her. Because if Red Sonja was the crazy one, why were they all dead?
The Angel of Harbin had the gift of giving. Those who took it in the proper spirit, lived. The others … men, mostly …
From time immemorial, when a soldier left a battlefield, his body racked, his nerves shattered, for “rest and relaxation” … “Rest and relaxation” were the last things on any man’s mind: any soldier fresh from battle immediately sought out a woman. If she merely opened her legs for him—if she said and she did nothing else whatsoever, if she asked him no questions, if she didn’t even speak his language—all the better for him …
The Badaulet still had no horse. Sonja knew this as a failing on her part. There should have been a horse in George’s shipment. But George, who was no poet, did not care to ship live animals in a helicopter, so Sonja could supply only a rough equivalent: a clumsy and graceless off-road pack robot.
She examined the robot with sorrow. When the crumbling Great Wall had been a vivid, living Chinese enterprise—for in its dynastic heyday, the Great Wall of China was no passive barrier, it had also been a highway, an imperial mail route, and the world’s fastest visual telegraph—any Chinese bride would have endowed her warlord with a horse.
A world-famous “blood-sweating horse.” Sonja had seen gorgeous T’ang dynasty pottery of those horses, and Chinese bronzes as well, with stallions as the emblems of Chinese state power at its most confident, serene, and globally minded. Superior Chinese war ponies, earth-pounding, indomitable, fit to run straight to Persia with wind-streaming manes and dainty hooves like swallows, surely the most beautiful horses that civilization had ever offered to barbarism.
Instead, she had this lousy robot. Hauled from its plastic mounts on the copter wall, the ungainly device mulishly escaped control and scampered straight up the harsh slopes of a nearby hillside. Sonja hated the robot instantly. She knew that it was bound to be a grievance.
The pack robot was as ugly as a dented bucket. It featured four eerily independent legs. Each leg swiveled from a corner of its cheap and brutally durable chassis.
Since it was not a beautiful male animal like a Chinese T’ang dynasty stallion, the robot did not trot with any dark animal grace. Instead, it moved by detailed computer analysis—as if it were playing high-speed chess with the surface of the Earth.
This meant that, on a cracked, eroded, thirty-degree slope of bitterly eroded Gobi Desert rock, a slope that would break the hairy legs of