The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [97]
Lucky was deeply moved. “Here with you, in this locked bubble, the wind and sky are not free … Everything stinks in here … The future should not stink … Do you love me, Sonja?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you love me?”
“I don’t need reasons. Love just happens to me. I love you the way that any woman loves any man.”
Lucky folded his sinewy arms in a brisk decision. “Then we should marry. Because marriage is proper and holy. A temporary Muslim marriage can be performed in necessity in pagan lands and times of war. So I will marry you, Sonja. Now, here.”
Sonja laughed. “You haven’t known me long.”
“I don’t want to know you better,” Lucky said. “You have given me your woman’s body: the utmost gift a woman gives a man, except for sons. So: I don’t want to go to Hell for doing that. It is my warrior calling to serve Heaven, die for Heaven, and go to Heaven. So: You must certainly agree to marry me. Otherwise, you are oppressing me.”
“Can we discuss this matter after we leave this airlock?”
Lucky sat cross-legged on the rubbery white tiles of the sterilized floor. “We cannot leave! We are prisoners in here! So let us make our pact now and marry at once. I cannot ask your father to give me you, for you never had a father.”
“You know a lot about me, don’t you?”
“On the steppes, far outside China, I meet the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, from the Acquis and the Dispensation. They seek me out for my advice on how to survive, for they die there quickly. They know much about the Angel of Harbin. They know things about you that the state does not say. They say that Red Sonja killed five great generals.”
“That is not true! That’s a lie! I have never killed any uniformed Chinese military personnel! I swear that, I never did that—not even if they were laying down barrage-fire on my positions.”
Sonja puffed on the thin, stale air. “My head hurts so badly. Something’s gone wrong. We’re supposed to dress for that big state banquet. The Martian taikonauts are there, and they’ll want us to drink! Lots of toasts with maotai … Five years, those three flyboys were stuck, without a woman, in their tiny capsule—good God, no wonder they’re like that … Do you drink alcohol, Lucky?”
“I can drink kumiss!”
“You drink kumiss horse milk? Really? That’s so cute.”
“I will introduce you to these heroes as my wife!”
“I’m a soldier’s woman,” Sonja told him, pressing the heels of her hands to her throbbing temples. “That’s what I’m good for. So: fine. Since you need marriage so much, for the sake of your soul and whatever: fine, I’ll do that for you. I will be your concubine. I can do that.”
“Truly?”
“Shut up! Because—I will only be your Earthly wife. Outside of this place—out in your desert—where the green grass grows sometimes, and the sky is sometimes blue, and there are horses and tents and land mines and sniper rifles—sure, out there I am your wife and I accept you as my husband. I do. However! Inside this space center, or in orbit, or on Mars, or inside that biosphere, or inside this airlock, any other area that is not of this Earth, then I am not your wife, Lucky. Instead, I own you. You are my slave.”
“On the Earth, I am your husband, that’s what you just declared to me?”
“Only on the Earth. Everywhere else, to be with Sonja is to be in trouble. I never lie to my men—no matter how much that hurts them.”
“You think that you are getting a smart horse-trading bargain from me, woman, but you are wrong! So: Yes, I am happy now. We are married now, you are my bride. Congratulations.” The Badaulet rose and pressed his nose to the finely scratched plastic of the porthole. “Now, wife of mine: Tell me about that light unmanned aircraft at ten o’clock, which is vectoring our way.”
“What? Where?”
Lucky tapped at the porthole with his newly trimmed, newly cleaned fingernails. He had just spotted one single, tiny, black, distant speck, wafting high above the clotted and polychrome city. It could have been one speck of black Gobi dust on their porthole. He had better eyes than an eagle.