The Caryatids

"Is it a bigger plane coming here to kill us with a bomb?"

"No! No, oh my God, the sound is really loud now..." Suddenly her husband's voice vanished, she could no longer hear him. She heard nothing but those voices of fire. Those colossal sounds were not touching the air. They were touching the circuits in her head.

There was no escaping them. She had no way to turn them off.

Celestial voices were sheeting through her skull. The voices were beyond good and evil, out of all human scale. She felt as if they were ripping though her, straight through the rocky core of Asia and out of the planet's other side.

The aurora emerged in the heavens, and the glorious sight of it gave no pleasure, for it was enraged. Its fiery sheets were knotted and angry tonight, visibly breaking into gnarls and whorls and branches and furious particles. The tongues of flame were spitting and frothing, with foams and blobs and disks and rabid whirlpools. Sheets of convulsive energy plunged across the sky, tearing and ripping. An annihilation.

"This isn't supposed to happen!" she shouted, and she could not hear her own voice. "This is wrong, Badaulet...there's something wrong with the sky! This could be the end of everything! This could be the end of the world!"

Lucky patted her thigh in a proprietory fashion, and gave her a little elbow jab in the ribs. His head was tilted back and she realized that he was laughing aloud. His black eyes were sparkling as he watched the blazing sky. He was enjoying himself.

A flooding gush of stellar energy hit the atmosphere, hard rain from outer space. The sky was frosted with bloody red sparks, as bits of man-made filth at the limits of the atmosphere lit up and fried.

Sonja's dry mouth hung open. Her head roared like an express train. Some orgasmic solar gush soaked the Earth's magnetic field, and utterly absurd things were pouring out of the sky now: rippling lozenges like children's toy balloons, fun-house snakes of accordion paper, roiling smoke rings and flaming jellied doughnuts...They had no business on Earth, they were not from the Earth at all. She could hear them, shrieking.

Sonja writhed in a desperate panic attack. The Badaulet reached out, grabbed her, pulled her to him, crushed her in his arms. He squeezed the screaming breath from her lungs. In her terror she sank her teeth into his bare shoulder...

He didn't mind. He was telling her something warm and kindly, over and over. She could feel his voice vibrating in his chest.

The convulsing aurora was so bright that it left shadows on the rock. Sonja clamped her eyes shut.

Suddenly, in trauma, she was speaking in the language of childhood. The first song, the first poetry, she had memorized. That little song she loved to sing with Vera and Svetlana and Kosara and Radmila and Biserka and Bratislava, and even pouting little Djordje, standing in a circle, arms out and palm to palm, with the machines watching their brains and eyes and their bridged and knotted fingers, to see that they were standing perfectly strong, all the same.

Sonja could hear her own voice. Her ears were trying to translate what she was saying to herself. The translation program blocked the noise pouring from the sky.

Sonja sang her song again and again, whimpering.

"We are the young pioneers Children of the real world We grow like trees to the sky We stand and support tomorrow For our strength belongs to the future And the future is our strength."

THE SOUND OF WIND woke Sonja. Her ears were working again. She heard the faint sound of sullen dripping from the bullet-pierced water cloak.

Dawn had come, and Lucky was sleeping. He had been holding her tightly, so that she did not raise her vulnerable head above the parapet during her nightmares.

Sonja sensed that the planes were gone. There was no way to know this as a fact, however. Not without testing that theory.

Tired of having Lucky assuming all the risks, Sonja untied her dust-proof tarpaulin gown, held it high over herself with her arms outspread to blur her target silhouette, and stepped, naked and deliberate, over the rocky wall.

She was not shot, she did not die, there were no sounds of planes.

Yawning and grainy-eyed, Sonja clambered to the top of the hill. The dutiful pack robot was standing there, its empty rifle methodically scanning the empty skies. The pack robot had been shot an amazing number of times, almost all of the rounds hitting its front prow, which looked like metal cheesecloth. A few holes adorned the thing's rear bumper, presumably the results of targeting error.

Yet the robot was functional. Its pistoning, crooked, crazy legs were in fine condition. Sonja felt an affection for it now, the unwilling love one felt for a battlefield comrade. Poor thing, it was so dumb and ugly, but it was doing the best it could.