The Caryatids

Either the state's translation had failed him, or Mishin simply ignored what Lucky had just said. "We plan to remove the horses soon for the sake of our new young star...See, here are her tracks! Right here! And this is her dung, as well!"

Broadly spaced pugmarks dented the chilly Martian soil.

"That is no camel," Lucky concluded. "That is no horse."

"She is our 'mammoth,'" said Mishin proudly.

Lucky patted his earpiece. "I never heard that word, 'mammoth.'"

"Do you know what an 'elephant' is?"

Lucky coughed on the cold, dusty air. "No."

"Well, both elephants and mammoths are extinct today. However: with the climate crisis, many mammoths thawed from the permafrost...In a genetically revivable condition! Sometimes people don't marvel properly at our fabulous Martian microbes...but our mammoth! Oh yes! A hairy mammoth revived fresh from the Ice Age...and she's been redesigned for Mars! Everyone adores our Chinese Martian mammoth...She's still our young girl of course..." Mishin held his pale hand out, at shoulder height. "So she's still quite small, but what splendid fur, such a nose and ears! Who can't love a beautiful cloned Martian mammoth?"

"I don't love a mammoth," Lucky said firmly. "Let us leave this place now."

"No, no, let's hurry! Our mammoth will sleep soon. She sleeps each day at regular Martian hours."

"Lucky," Sonja told him, "the state wants to send me to Mars. I volunteered to go. I'm in taikonaut training in Jiuquan Space Launch Center."

Lucky looked her up and down. "Yes, that trip would be good for you."

"Why do you say that?"

Lucky lifted one finger. "Your mother. She's already up there?"

Sonja glared at him in instant, head-splitting rage.

"Sonja, don't!" Mishin yelped. "Don't do that! Remember what happened with Montalban?"

Sonja's head was spinning. The thin Martian air did some nasty things to people. "Our guest wants to leave this place, Leonid. We seem to have tired him."

Mishin hastily escorted them back toward the balky airlock. Mishin himself never left the Martian simulator. There were microbes within him not yet cleared for public distribution.

"Sonja, you don't love your dear mother?" taunted Lucky, as they suffered the tedious hissing and clicking of the airlock's insane security. "Your demon mother, she who dwells in Heaven? You talk so much, Sonja, yet you never talk about her!"

"My mother is a state secret. So: Don't talk about my mother. Especially with this state machine translation."

Lucky was unimpressed. The prospect of the state surveilling him bothered him no more than the omniscience of God. "I, too, never talk about my mother."

Sonja lifted her sour, aching head. "What about your mother, Lucky? Why don't you talk about your mother?"

"My mother sold oil! She committed many crimes against the sky. In Tajikistan, in Kyrgyzstan. Other places. Many pipelines across central Asia. She was rich. Very rich."

"A princess, then?"

"Yes, all my mother's people were rich and beautiful. They had no tribes, they had schools. They had cars and jets and skyscrapers. All of them dead now. All. Dead, and nonpersons. No one speaks of them anymore."

Sonja shifted closer to him on the waffled plastic bench. She was sorry that she had lost her temper with him. He was only probing her, to see what she was made of. He had some right to do that. She did it herself all the time.

When she had been nineteen, twenty, twenty-one-young like him-she had had no discretion, no emotional skin at all. Especially about the always-tender subject of her "mother" and her "sisters."

Those violent passions were distant to her now, relics of the bitter days when she had become "Red Sonja." Nobody called her "Red Sonja" anymore. Not now, not when she was a certified war heroine with a cozy state post here in futuristic Jiuquan. At least, nobody called her "Red Sonja" when she could overhear them and take reprisals.

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."