The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [90]
“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.