The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [113]
The Badaulet was the picture of satisfaction. “I love you very much.”
“You don’t mind my very ugly, very stupid robot?”
“No,” the Badaulet insisted, “I truly love you now. No man I know has such a clever wife as you. I had expected us to die quickly riding the Silk Road, for the planes drop many land mines there, and the mines have eyes and ears and they are clever. But with this mount, we will cross the desert on a magic carpet. We will surround ourselves with our own land mines to kill anyone who dares to bothers us. Each night I will sleep beneath the stars in your warm and tender arms!”
The scampering pack robot knew no difference between day or night; it could “see” by starlight as well as it “saw” anything at all. Its greatest single drawback, among many, was that it blindly trusted the latest data downloaded into it about the conditions on the ground. This meant that, despite its nasty genius at knuckle-walking the uneven landscape, it had a distressing tendency to pitch into unseen arroyos and ramble off unmapped cliffs.
Worse yet, unlike horses or camels, the robot had no natural rhythm in its gait. So that, when they crouched within the thing’s bucketlike cargo hold, its hurrying tread felt like one endless, sickening set of panic stumbles.
To endure the numbing hours of travel, Sonja wrapped herself in a riding cloak. The heavy cloak grew steadily heavier with the passing hours, for it was an air distillery. Its fibers were sewn through with crystalline salts, which chemically sucked humidity from the desert breezes.
When the Badaulet scolded her for guzzling at his canteen, she stripped off her dark cloak, gave it one expert caressing twist, and clean water gushed down both her wrists in torrents.
A curdled look of astonishment and disbelief and even rage crossed her husband’s face. The Badaulet had always suffered badly for his water. Water had been the cause of bitter discipline to him. The loss of water meant certain death … Yet here in this simple stupid rug, this plain womanly thing from off her back—she had only to twist it, and all his suffering was elided, erased, made senseless and irrelevant.
“My cloak is yours,” she told him quickly.
He grumpily threw her magic cloak across his own back, but he hated her for that.
“You must wear this,” he said at length, “for it grows heavy.”
“No, dear husband, it’s for you. It is sturdy, it will last for years.”
“You wear this,” he commanded. “In those foolish white robes you could easily be shot.”
She obeyed him and put on the cloak, for she knew she had given offense. They were entering hills, unkindly hills like ragged black boulder piles, but the hills caught falling water and where there was water there was grass.
Sonja stopped, gathered some grass, stuffed it into a fabric rumen bag.
Sonja did not worry much about human bandits lurking in the Gobi—bandits were unlikely to survive in any place this barren. Death in the desert came mostly from autonomous machines.
The killer machines of the great Asian dust bowl came in three great families: autonomous rifles, autonomous land mines, and autonomous aircraft. They were all deadly: a few cents’ worth of silicon empowered them to rain death from above, or to punch an unerring hole through a human torso, or to wait for silent years in a puddle of machine surveillance and then tear off a human leg.
The aircraft and the sniper devices were harder to manufacture and maintain, for they were frequently blinded or clogged with clouds of dust. So the land mines were the worst and most numerous of the three. The land mines had all kinds of arcane names and behaviors.
Most land mines