The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [114]
Knowing this, the Badaulet was eager to exploit their tactical advantage and to catch up with their enemies. Lucky was convinced that their would-be assassins had released the killer plane at the limit of its striking range, and then beaten a swift retreat back into the deeper desert. The Badaulet thought in this way, because this was the tactic he himself would have chosen.
His pack robot was tireless. He was also proud of the fact that it could run in pitch darkness. He would have blindly trusted it to carry him off the edge of the Earth.
Being a new bride, Sonja gently persuaded him to stop awhile, despite his ambitions. They located a nameless hollow, a shallow foxhole in the wind-etched, dun-colored desert. Utterly barren, their honeymoon hole had all the anonymity of a crater scooped from the surface of Mars.
As the Badaulet scoured the horizon for nonexistent enemies, Sonja climbed stiffly from the robot’s bucketlike chassis, folded the robot flat, kicked dirt over it to disguise it, and opened her blister tent.
This tent had a single mast in the center, a lightweight wand that clicked together like jointed bamboo and socketed into a ring. The power within the wand brought the fabric to life. In moments, the tent was as moist and pale inside as the skin of a newly peeled banana.
They would sleep together here.
Against all odds, in the few moments in which she had gathered up grass, a large, evil desert tick had latched on to Sonja. It had inched straight up her dusty legs to her constricting waistband, sunk its fangs into the tender skin near her navel, and died. The first taste of her toxic blood had killed that tick as dead as a brown Gobi pebble. How gratifying that was.
Sonja checked the sloshing rumen bag, where fermentation proceeded. She tapped foamy water from the bag, damply inflated a paper-dry foam sponge, and set to work on the Badaulet. Lucky had many babylike patches of hairless new flesh, healed by a rapid exfection. His nerve cells would be slowest to regrow there: he would have some numb spots. It would help him if his bride dutifully made his spots less numb.
Warm air drafted cozily up the domed walls, but her husband seemed unpleased. “This is improper.”
“We are married! Anything must be all right if it pleases you.”
He slapped at the woolly skin of the tent. “I can’t see the stars!”
“Yes … but aircraft can’t see us.” Sonja liked the stars well enough. She liked stars best when they were poised inside a planetarium, mapped, and color-coded.
The real stars of the modern Earth, speckling the fantastic dome of central Asia, these were less emotionally manageable. The high desert, untouched by the glare of cities, was as black as fossil pitch, and the stars wheeled above it in fierce, demented desert hordes. Those stars twinkled in the Earth’s dirtied atmosphere—and their tints were all wrong, owing to the fouling, stratospheric haze of all the Himalayan bombs.
The Milky Way had a bloody tinge in its sky-splitting milk … how could anyone like to see that, knowing what that meant?
Was she getting older, to fear the stars? Sonja had often seen that older people were afraid of the sky. Older people could never say precisely what disturbed them about the modern sky’s current nature and character, but they knew that it was wrong. The sky of climate crisis was alien to their being—it scratched at the soul of humanity in the same unconscious, itchy way that an oncoming earthquake would unnerve cats, and panic goats, obscurely motivate serpents to rise from their slumbers …
Redoubling her wifely caresses, she managed to distract the Badaulet, and to soothe herself a little. On the air-inflated mat he turned eager, then energetic, then tender. She felt raw when