The Caryatids (10 page)

''You didn't
explore
the microcosm? You didn't
engage
with its inter-face?"

"How would I 'engage' with a ball of seawater?" She paused. "I re-member it had some little shrimps swimming inside. Were those sup-posed to be valuable?"

Montalban sat up with a look of pain, as if his back ached suddenly. He gazed out to the ruins in the sea. She realized that she had failed him in some deep and surprising way. Montalban was genuinely shocked by what she had done. It was as if he had cooked her a seven--course banquet and she had crassly thrown away the food and smashed all the plates.

He slowly tapped his fingers on his knee. He didn't know what to do next. He was completely at a loss. She spoke up. "I see that I've hurt your feelings. I didn't mean to do that. I'm sorry."

"It's just . . . Well . . . " For the first time, Montalban was unable to speak.

"I'm sorry about it, John. Really."

"I knew this assignment would be difficult." He sighed. "I'm going to say this in the simplest, bluntest way I can. You love this island, right? This place means more to you than anything else in your life. Well, I came here to give it to you. It is my gift to you. That's what I meant to say to you. You will be the duchess, the queen of Mljet. I will put this place at your feet."

"You think you can do that, do you?"

"Yes, I know I can. Because' I've done it before." A flicker of pain crossed Montalban's face. "I said that I am a facilitator. I'm good at my work. I'm one of the best in the world, and the world is a lot bigger than this island. If you want this place that you love so much, if you want this island to be your own island, then you can have it. That prospect is writ-ten in the stars, or rather, it is written in this very fine analytical map in the dirt here."

"What do you ask from a girl, when you give her a gift like that, Mr. Montalban?"

"I don't ask for anything. That's why it's a gift. If you will agree to hold up your part of this deal I want to arrange, then every other element will swing into place. That work will take me a while, but I know that deal can be done: the financing, promotion, production, residuals, a user base, everything. Everything that a modern tourist island needs."

"So you want me to go into business with you, in some way? That's what you want? I'm not interested in business. I already have a business. I'm very busy all the time." Vera stood up. "I think you should go back to California."

"Sit down," he demanded. She sat again.

"Look," he said, "your status quo is just not in the cards for you. You don't understand this yet, but your story here is already over. You and your Acquis people here, you are way past the stage where you can be just a little extreme techno-start-up on some private island where no one important will notice. That story is gone. Because you accomplished something amazing here. So you have been noticed. You had a big suecess. The Dispensation always notices big success. Always. So: If we don't arrange that as a win-win-win outcome for all the stakeholders, there's going to be friction."

"I think I understood that last part," Vera said. "That was a threat."

"That's realism. Things gets ugly when the two global civil societies clash."

"How ugly do things get, John?"

"Unnecessarily ugly. The Acquis is the Acquis, the Dispensation is the Dispensation, and the third alternative is chaos. It can be terrible chaos. Like the chaos on this island before you redeemed it." Montalban looked down the beach, where Karen was cheerfully playing with his daughter. "The Dispensation and the Acquis are a sta-ble, two-party, global system. But the world is in desperate shape—so we have to try extreme solutions. Most of them fail, because they are so ex-treme. But whenever they
work
—that's when the world
has
to take no-tice. The whole point of having our two-party system is to have a system for reality checks against the extremist groups." Montalban spread his hands. "In any place but Europe, they'd teach that in elementary civics classes."

"We're not an 'extremist group' here. We are rescue workers and geo-engineers."

"Of course you're an extremist group.
Of course
you are! You've got mind-reading helmets on your heads! Look at those shaven patches on your scalp! You don't even
walk
like normal people here—you all walk like you could bend over backward like crabs! Plus, this island is cov-ered with weird labor camps that practice sensory totalitarianism! Any-one from the outside world could learn all that in a day." Montalban knotted his hands. "So: The reason the Acquis was al-lowed to work here is that the climate crisis is bipartisan. If the seas rise, then the ark sinks, and we will all drown. We know that. So when it comes to fighting the climate crisis, we are willing to allow
anything.
But when you
succeed
at what you try, that's
different.
Then the conse-quences come."

"Why don't you run along home and let us finish the job here?"

"That is not a reasonable option. Your little experiment here: It vio-lates civil rights, it violates human rights, it exploits desperate refugees as indentured labor with no access to the free market . . . This place is scary. I can rescue you from all that. I can save you from all those con-sequences. Because I will make you its queen."

"I can't even understand what you're saying! What exactly do you want from me? Use some real words."

"Okay: Here's the elevator pitch. Instead of being a test bed for a weird neural cult, Mljet becomes what it should be: a tourist island. Mljet becomes a normal place. It's decent, it's noncontroversial. This island has been saved, redeemed, reconstructed. That work is over. The cult relocates elsewhere."

"Where do my people go?"

"We give them an assignment that's better suited to their talents and technologies."

"Where are you putting my people?"

"The Lesser Antarctic Ice Shelf."

"You're exiling us to Antarctica." Vera looked at the glimmering edge of her native hills. "All right, that part I finally understand. Thank you for finally telling me."

"They
go, Vera.
You
don't go. You
stay.
You encourage them to leave this place and work on the ice, and you remain here under the new dis-pensation. Because we're not 'exiling' the cult to Antarctica: we're
pro-moting
the cult to Antarctica."

"Why would they go to a place like that? It's horrible there. It's flood-ing and melting, it's like death."

"Because they're very good at redemption work and someone
has
to go there. The Big Ice is the front line of the climate crisis. Now, listen: Your boss, the Acquis commissar here, he's a pretty hard nut to crack. But he can do a budget. He has ambitions. He's an engineer: so he wants new hardware. They always do."

Montalban bent and smoothed his pocket film against the ground. A monstrous apparition emerged on the flimsy screen.

This metal monster brandished a drill on one hand, a backhoe on the other, and its sloping feet were the size of two fishing boats.

"This is a neurally controlled continental reconstruction unit. It's a giant robot exoskeleton that's nuclear-powered and four stories tall. Every one of these psychotic things costs as much as a full-scale Missis-sippi mud dredge. They're airtight, they're fully heated, they've got inte-rior life-support systems, they're basically Martian spacesuits with legs. Building these crazy things for him: That's the price that he demands from us."

Vera stared. "That big robot does looks kind of . . . weird."

"This darling of his has been sitting on his drawing board ever since he was in graduate school. Frankly, no sane capitalist would ever fi-nance such a thing. Because it's got no market pull at all. It's a wild, macho, engineer's power fantasy."

Montalban leaned back on his slab of tarmac and tipped his sun hat. "We have agreed to his terms. A monster machine like this makes no sense to me, but nobody thought his Mljet plan would ever work out, ei-ther. It turns out he was right, and we were wrong. We admit that now. He wins. Mljet is light, and speedy, and brilliant, and glorious. Your boss has proved himself to the smart money and the power players. He has won. So if your boss plays some ball with us, he gets whatever the hell he wants." Vera gazed at the bristling, fantastic monster. The giant robot had no head. She tried to imagine her Herbert sealed inside that giant, stamp-ing coffin, that rock-shattering hulk. She knew that Herbert would do it. Of course he would do it.

"This was just an old dream of his."

"That guy is no dreamer. That guy is a serial entrepreneur. We get it about guys like him. We know how to handle guys like him in Califor-nia. It's no use logjamming him, or sabotaging him, or getting in his way, or 'verifying' him. No, all that kind of crap is counterproductive. The one effective way to deal with a guy like him is to double his ante. Just pony up the money and double his bet." Montalban leaned back and shrugged. "Well, I can do that for him. I can do it, I promise. Because I've done that kind of thing before. My whole family does it. We've been doing it for years."

"What are you doing to Herbert?"

"I'm
financing
Herbert. The world
needs
Herbert. Herbert is a geek technofanatic who's also a serious player, and those are rare people. He's a great man. Really. It's just that, politically speaking, it's not great that he's here in Mljet. We don't really much want a guy like him, with a private army of brainwashed robot cultists, sited in a violently unstable region like the Balkans."

"This is my home," Vera murmured.

"Fine. It's not
his
home. If he ventures off to Antarctica, that's a dif-ferent matter. If he fails there, well, that's one solution. If he tackles the Big Ice and he wins, well, then we
all
win. Because we've bought our world more time."

Montalban wiped his sweating upper lip. "Personally, I really hope that he can somehow pull that off. Sincerely, I hope that. I do. I know that big Aussie is crazy, but I'm with him all the way. Los Angeles just can't take many more refugee Australians."

"I would never do anything against Herbert and what Herbert wants to do."

"All right, good: now you're talking sense. So: Let's talk about you. Mljet and you: the public face of the New Mljet. The consortium needs an attractive young woman with skill and ambition who has some peo-ple smarts. We'll be facing a big transition here, a complete change in the infrastructure. That would be your role."

"So I'm the project manager."

"That's an Acquis title. Your title with us will be chief hospitality offi-cer. That is not a figurehead post, by the way: don't get me wrong. You wouldn't be the workaday prime minister here: you'd be the queen of this place. I'm offering you a crucial post with a lot of situational perquisites. You will be allocating resources over every inch of this is-land. And I mean major resources, world-class, world-scale. Instead of that ragtag of refugees that you reeducated in the camps, you'll have a top-notch technical-support team! You'll have your own office of PR girls from the environmental design group at San Jose State . . . They're young people, young, like you and me. They're very forward-thinking."

"So it's me here, and it's not Herbert."

"Exactly. We need a much calmer, gentler hand with this place. You have a much more sensitive, more feeling approach to Mljet than your robot commissar there."

"Suppose that I say yes to you."

Montalban leaned down, plucked up his film, and crumpled it briskly. He pocketed it, and smiled at her.

"Then it's simple. Our next step would be Vienna: a conference of the stakeholders. That's a sum-mit of typical Acquis higher-circle drones, and some ranking Dispensa-tion activists. Your boss will be there, too, of course. Your brother Djordje will be hosting that event in Vienna. I'll be there to present you to the money people. They're some very seasoned investors. They were the trust behind the reconstruction of Catalina Island, after the big fires. They can handle this sort of thing."

"Why are you doing all this, John?"

"Because I'm a white-knight investor, and I'm saving the world. And, through no coincidence, I'm also saving you." He gazed at her for a long moment. 'You don't believe me. Well, you don't believe me
yet.
I've done it before, Vera. I've already done it
twice.
I can prove to you that I know what I'm doing, though it will take me a while. A merger-and-acquisition like this can keep a banker happy for years."

"You're asking me to betray my comrades here. They're the cadres who did all the work here."

"Well, the cult will face a strategic choice," said Montalban. "They can choose him, or they can choose you. The attention camps here will be shutting down — they're too controversial. If the cadres are zealots for their great man and his brain intrusions, then they can join him in Antarctica. If they stay here with you—and you're welcome to them-—then they can enlist in our repatriation program for the natives of Mljet. We'll be restoring the people who properly belong here. We'll be recon-secrating Catholic churches, restoring the picturesque rural villages . . . The national and religious elements in the Balkans, they're stakeholders here too, you know."

"So this is quite a big, fancy plan you've brought here from your big, fancy city."

"It's the way of the big, fancy world."

Vera narrowed her eyes. "Suppose that I just say no to your way of the world." Montalban nodded slowly. "You can say no to the world. People often say that here in the Balkans. But it never makes any sense to do that. Why? Why would you say no to peace, and wealth, and power, and se-curity? This arrangement gives you everything that you wanted! It means that you win, it's your personal victory! You took a failed, crimi-nal place that was an open sore, and you saved it, you healed it! You made your home island much better than it was in your whole lifetime, and you gave it back to the world! Things are finally as they should be. It's justice."

It took Vera three heartbeats to realize, with a pang of truth, that she wanted the island all to herself. She wanted Mljet to remain a quiet place outside the world. Its own place. An authentic place that was no-body's tool or pawn or property. A wild and natural place, blooming under the sun, beholden to nobody. It had never occurred to her that her homeland might be saved for other people.