The Caryatids

He grumpily threw her magic cloak across his own back, but he hated her for that.

"You must wear this," he said at length, "for it grows heavy."

"No, dear husband, it's for you. It is sturdy, it will last for years."

"You wear this," he commanded. "In those foolish white robes you could easily be shot."

She obeyed him and put on the cloak, for she knew she had given offense. They were entering hills, unkindly hills like ragged black boulder piles, but the hills caught falling water and where there was water there was grass.

Sonja stopped, gathered some grass, stuffed it into a fabric rumen bag.

Sonja did not worry much about human bandits lurking in the Gobi-bandits were unlikely to survive in any place this barren. Death in the desert came mostly from autonomous machines.

The killer machines of the great Asian dust bowl came in three great families: autonomous rifles, autonomous land mines, and autonomous aircraft. They were all deadly: a few cents' worth of silicon empowered them to rain death from above, or to punch an unerring hole through a human torso, or to wait for silent years in a puddle of machine surveillance and then tear off a human leg.

The aircraft and the sniper devices were harder to manufacture and maintain, for they were frequently blinded or clogged with clouds of dust. So the land mines were the worst and most numerous of the three. The land mines had all kinds of arcane names and behaviors.

Most land mines were scattered where human victims might logically go: roads, trails, highways, bridges, and water holes, any place of any former economic value. The great comfort of a robot pack mule was that it didn't bother to follow trails. Also, land mines were unlikely to recognize its uneven, highly unnatural tread as a proper trigger to explode.

Knowing this, the Badaulet was eager to exploit their tactical advantage and to catch up with their enemies. Lucky was convinced that their would-be assassins had released the killer plane at the limit of its striking range, and then beaten a swift retreat back into the deeper desert. The Badaulet thought in this way, because this was the tactic he himself would have chosen.

His pack robot was tireless. He was also proud of the fact that it could run in pitch darkness. He would have blindly trusted it to carry him off the edge of the Earth.

Being a new bride, Sonja gently persuaded him to stop awhile, despite his ambitions. They located a nameless hollow, a shallow foxhole in the wind-etched, dun-colored desert. Utterly barren, their honeymoon hole had all the anonymity of a crater scooped from the surface of Mars.

As the Badaulet scoured the horizon for nonexistent enemies, Sonja climbed stiffly from the robot's bucketlike chassis, folded the robot flat, kicked dirt over it to disguise it, and opened her blister tent.

This tent had a single mast in the center, a lightweight wand that clicked together like jointed bamboo and socketed into a ring. The power within the wand brought the fabric to life. In moments, the tent was as moist and pale inside as the skin of a newly peeled banana.

They would sleep together here.

Against all odds, in the few moments in which she had gathered up grass, a large, evil desert tick had latched on to Sonja. It had inched straight up her dusty legs to her constricting waistband, sunk its fangs into the tender skin near her navel, and died. The first taste of her toxic blood had killed that tick as dead as a brown Gobi pebble. How gratifying that was.

Sonja checked the sloshing rumen bag, where fermentation proceeded. She tapped foamy water from the bag, damply inflated a paper-dry foam sponge, and set to work on the Badaulet. Lucky had many babylike patches of hairless new flesh, healed by a rapid exfection. His nerve cells would be slowest to regrow there: he would have some numb spots. It would help him if his bride dutifully made his spots less numb.

Warm air drafted cozily up the domed walls, but her husband seemed unpleased. "This is improper."

"We are married! Anything must be all right if it pleases you."

He slapped at the woolly skin of the tent. "I can't see the stars!"

"Yes...but aircraft can't see us. " Sonja liked the stars well enough. She liked stars best when they were poised inside a planetarium, mapped, and color-coded.

The real stars of the modern Earth, speckling the fantastic dome of central Asia, these were less emotionally manageable. The high desert, untouched by the glare of cities, was as black as fossil pitch, and the stars wheeled above it in fierce, demented desert hordes. Those stars twinkled in the Earth's dirtied atmosphere-and their tints were all wrong, owing to the fouling, stratospheric haze of all the Himalayan bombs.

The Milky Way had a bloody tinge in its sky-splitting milk...how could anyone like to see that, knowing what that meant?