The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [96]
Sonja stared at the thin pox of Martian dust on her white plastic boots. The airlock was methodically blasting the last traces of life from that dust—a sterilization process that humans would never perceive, but a holocaust for bacteria.
“Badaulet, I should spend more time getting properly briefed about the guests that I escort here, but your suave manners, your smooth talk, they overwhelmed my girlish modesty so quickly.”
“That was a joke,” Lucky guessed.
“Yes, that was a joke.”
“Stop making jokes.” He patted his ear. “This machine never understands jokes.”
The airlock fell silent. The hissing, incoming air, which had been pressing hard at Sonja’s tender eardrums, went deathly still.
“This airlock does not want to cooperate with us today.”
“This machine wants to kill me,” Lucky said firmly. “It knows that I don’t belong here. I belong on the steppes, under the sky.”
“Maybe it wants to kill me. After all, I’m the fool who escorts so many visitors here.”
“Why would it want to harm you, Sonja? You are the Angel of Harbin.”
“The ‘Angel of Harbin.’ ” Sonja sat up straighter. “I hate that stupid nickname! Yes, I’m a war heroine. Yes, I’m a pillar of the state and I am proud of my service! But ‘Angel of Harbin’—I never chose that nom de guerre! Harbin was nothing so much.”
Lucky was puzzled by this. He spoke rapidly, seriously and at some length, and the translator spat up one sentence. “They say that Harbin was the very worst of the very bad.”
“Harbin was only typical. We had a good rescue plan in Harbin. We knew what we wanted to do and we knew how to win there. Now, Shenyang—that was bad. And Yinchuan, where they completely lost electrical power? Dead networks, no water, no sewer? For eighteen weeks? There was no body count there—because they ate the bodies. When we marched out there to dig in—I sent out my surveillance cams—I destroyed all that data. Everybody in that rescue team was on trauma drugs after Yinchuan. Nobody remembers Yinchuan. Nobody wants to remember that place. It is lost, it’s nonhistory. Even the state conceals Yinchuan, and no human being will ever ask.”
“You were fighting that gloriously?”
“We didn’t think we were fighting at all! We were medical teams, we were there to save innocent lives! But: When there’s no water in a city? Then there’s no innocence: it’s all gone. With no water, there is no city—there’s a horde. ‘Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.’ ”
That was John Montalban again. Montalban always loved to quote old American poetry.
The Badaulet turned his level gaze upon her. It was his keen black eyes, his abstract, fearless, predatory look, that had first attracted and aroused her. He looked so different from other bandits, and now that she knew about his globe-trotting, jet-setting mother, she understood. Lucky was a native of the Disorder.
Sonja knew what Han Chinese people looked like, and also Tibetans, Manchus, Mongols. To any practiced eye they were easily as physically distinct as French, Germans, Italians, and Danes. Yet Lucky was none of those: he was a global guerrilla, a true modern barbarian. Her lover was one of the new kind.
“Sonja, I have to know: Are there seven of you? Seven sisters?”
“There were seven once—three are dead.” Bratislava, Kosara, Svetlana: They had been the first people she had ever seen killed. They’d been killed by a pack of young soldiers, panicked kids really, drunken kids half stumbling over their cheap carbines, kids the age of the Badaulet.
That distant episode on that distant Adriatic island: How empty that seemed to her now. Her twisted world of childhood had exploded in a sudden bloody horror, but, in comparison with the vast bloody grandeur of China, it was such a small world and such a minor horror.
In Mljet, though: that was the first time Sonja herself had killed someone. One could never forget the first time.
“Please don’t talk to me about my dead,” she told him, “don’t talk to me about the past, for I can’t bear it. Just