The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [92]
Lucky was still battling with the airlock’s fabric. The interfaces there had baffled better men than him.
“You slept with that barbarian,” Mishin concluded at once.
Sonja rolled her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair.
“Yes, you did that, you did!” Dr. Mishin mourned. “What is wrong with you? Him, of all people? A creature like him? Have you finally lost all self-respect?”
“Leonid, do you think our age difference matters? I’m only twenty-seven.”
“They cut off people’s heads out there! They do it on video!”
“The Badaulet is very loyal to the state. He believes that the Chinese state is divinely sanctioned by the Mandate of Heaven. You should take him seriously, he’s an important political development.”
“He’s a tribal lunatic! There’s no reason for you to involve yourself with him! What do you expect to gain from him? There’s nothing left but sand and land mines between here and Kazakhstan!”
Why was Mishin so bitterly jealous? His sexual politics were his worst flaw. Yes, true, she had a penchant for taking lovers, but this was China. For every hundred women in China there were a hundred and thirty men. What else should the world expect?
And Jiuquan, a deeply technical city, had an even more destabilizing male-female imbalance. Mishin was from Russia, where the men died young and the women were lonely. He was being a fool.
Lucky kicked through the airlock, snarling and slapping at his earpiece. “What is wrong with that stupid tent, that ugly prison? It trapped me in there and it tried to kill me!”
“Badaulet, this is the wise scientist that I told you about: Dr. Leonid Mishin. No man in this world knows more about the future potential of Mars. Dr. Mishin will be our official state guide today.”
Lucky, still angry, stared in raw disbelief at the chilly pink sun crawling the seamless, alien, purplish sky. The Martian extraterrarium, logically, ran on Martian time—it featured 24.6-hour days and 687-day years. The wine-dark plastic firmament displayed accurately Martian stellar constellations, including two racing, tumbling blobs of light that mimicked Phobos and Deimos.
Mishin was usually a polished Martian tour guide, but he was upset with her. Yet he’d been so kind and eager about it when she’d said she was coming to visit him. What a shame.
Lucky rubbed his nose. “Why does Mars stink?”
“The breathable air within this model Martian biosphere,” Mishin recited grudgingly, “was created, and is maintained, entirely by our extraterrestrialized organisms. Through the ubiquitous oversight of the state and the heroic efforts of the dedicated scientific workers of the glorious Jiuquan Space Launch Center—” Mishin drew a breath. “—this project has become the model, not of Mars today, but of the future Mars! Your translation understands all that, sir? Yes? That’s very good!”
Mishin wheeled in his insulated worker boots, waving his uniformed arms at the glowing Martian sunset and the spare, frozen scrub that dotted the rusty soil. “At this moment you are privileged to step within the Mars of Tomorrow! Here, spread all around you, is the living, air-breathing harbinger of Humanity’s Second Home World! The development of Mars is China’s most ambitious megaproject—and this dome, which is merely a model of that future effort, ranks with the Great Wall of China as the most ambitious construction on the surface of planet Earth!”
It was a pity that they’d lost valuable time while trapped within that balky airlock. With the setting of the pink sun in its tear-proofed plastic sky, the Martian bubble was getting bitterly cold.
The three of them crunched briskly across the rust-red cinders, staring at the Chinese and Latin botanical labels stuck in the tough, humble scrub: harsh tufts of spiky