The Caryatids (2 page)

"Who designed all this?" she shrieked. "We should have power back-ups! We should have fuel cells!"

"Be glad that we can still hear each other talking." Karen's voice sounded flat and muffled though her helmet and shroud. "It's too hot down here to run any fuel cells. Gregor will reboot us. He can do it, he's good. You just wait and see."

A long, evil moment passed. Panic rose and clutched the dry lining of Vera's throat.

"This is horrible!"

"Yes," said Karen mournfully, "I guess it is, pretty much."

"I can't stand it!"

"Well, we just have to stand it, Vera. We can't do anything but stand here." Claustrophobic terror washed through Vera's beating heart. "I can't do it," she said. "I can't bear any more."

"I'm not scared," Karen told her. "I used to be very scared every time I came down here. But emotion is a neural state. A neural state can't touch you. I'm never afraid like I used to be. Sometimes I have fear-thoughts, but my fear-thoughts are not me."

"I'll scream!"

Karen's voice was full of limpid sympathy. "You can scream, then. Do it. I'm here for you."

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SEEN FROM THE AIRY HILLTOP
,
Mljet was a tattered flag, all bays, peninsulas, and scattered islets. The island's scalloped shores held stains in their nooks and corners: the algae blooms. The rising Adriatic, carrying salt, had killed a dry brown skirt-fringe of the island's trees. The island's blanket of pines and oaks was torn by clear-cut logging, scarred black with forest fires. And if the golden shore of this beautiful place had suffered, the is-land's interior was worse. Mljet's angry creeks had collapsed the island's bridges as if they'd been kneecapped with pistols. Up in the rocky hills, small, abandoned villages silently flaked their paint.

Year by year, leaning walls and rust-red roofs were torn apart by tow-ering houseplants gone feral. The island's rotting vineyards were alive with buzzing flies and beetles, clouded with crows. A host of flowers had always adorned this sunny place. There were far more flowers in these years of the climate crisis. Harsh, neck-high thick-ets of rotting flowers, feeding scary, billowing clouds of angry bees.

Such was her home. From the peak of the island, where she stood, throat raw, flesh trembling, mind in a whirl, she could see that the is-land was transforming. She could hear that, smell it, taste it in the wind. She was changing it.

Brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory.

Millions of sensors wrapped Mljet in a tight electronic skin, like a cold wet sheet to swathe a fever victim. Embedding sensors. Mobile sen-sors. Dust-sized sensors flying like dandelion seeds. The sensorweb was a single instrument, small pieces loosely joined into one huge environmental telescope. The sensorweb measured and archived changes in the island's status. Temperature, humidity, sun-light. Flights of pollen, flights of insects, the migrations of birds and fish. Vera turned her augmented vision to the sky. A distant black speck re-solved as a patrolling snake eagle. The Acquis cadres were extremely proud of the island's surviving eagles. The Acquis had tagged that bird all over with high-level, urgent commentary. The eagle cut the sunlit air in a haze of miscellaneous archives, the glow of immanent every-ware.

This hilltop was sacred to her. She could vividly remember the first day she had fled here, reached the summit: terrified, traumatized, ragged, abandoned, and half-starved. For the first time in her young life, Vera had grasped the size and shape of this place of her birth. She had realized that her home was alive and beautiful.

Life would go on. Surely it would. Because, despite every harm, dis-tortion, insult, the island was recovering. Through her helmet's face-plate, Vera could see that happening in grand detail. She was an agent of that redemption. She had an oath and a uniform, labor and training and tools. She belonged here.

Someday this wrecked and stricken place would bloom, in all tomor-row's brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory. Someday a happy young girl would stand on the soil of this island and know no dread of anything.

Vera put her gloved hands to her helmet, clicked it loose, and logged out of the sensorweb. The helmet released its rubbery grip on her scalp. She pulled it, bent her neck, and her head was freed. She suddenly heard the almighty host of cicadas creaking in the island's pines, the summer army of insect oc-cupation. The insect screams were shrill and piercing and tireless and erotic. Vera powered down. Intimate grips and straps released their embrace of her arms and legs. She plucked her hands from the work gloves. She tugged her bare feet from the boots. Deprived of the presence of her body, the boneware downsized and collapsed. Vera placed the tender soles of her feet against a brown carpet of pine needles. She sat on a slanting boulder, with furred patches of orange lichen the size of a child's handprints. The dense sea breeze up the hill-slope smelled of myrtle and wild honey. It seemed to pour straight through her flesh. Fitfully, Vera worked a comb through her loosened braids. Her eyes ached, her throat was raw from screaming. Her back hurt, her shoulders felt stiff. Her thighbones were like two hollow straws. She rubbed the seven shaven spots on her scalp. Her mind was clear-ing, the panic had shed its grip. The sensorweb was invisible to her now, gone with the helmet at her naked feet, but she still sensed its permeat-ing presence across her island. Vera knew that the sensorweb was here, processing, operational. She could feel it in the way that a sleeping face felt sunlight. As an Acquis web engineer, she had labored on the sensorweb for nine years, and its healing power was manifest. Once the web had been an aspect of the island. Now the island was an aspect of the web. Vera tore at her suspension clips, her webbing belt. She rid herself of her tunic and trousers. Her underclothes, those final skeins of official fabric, shivered and crumpled as they left her flesh. Vera sniffed and spat, shook herself all over.

Naked, she was a native sliver of this island, one silent patch of flesh and blood. Just a creature, just a breath, just a heartbeat.

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VERA'S BOSS WAS AN ACQUIS ENGINEER
:
Herbert Fotheringay. The climate crisis had dealt harshly with Herbert's home, his native island-continent. Australia had been a ribbon of green around a desert. Drought had turned Australia into a ribbon of black.

The Acquis was partial to recruiting people like Herbert, ambitious people who had survived the collapse of nation-states. The Acquis, as a political structure, had emerged from the failures of nations. The Ac-quis was a networked global civil society.

From the days of its origins in planetary anguish, the Acquis had never lacked for sturdy recruits. Herbert had been ferociously busy on Mljet for nine years.

Herbert awaited her at his latest construction project: another atten-tion camp. Attention camps were built to house the planet's "displaced," which, in a climate crisis, could mean well nigh any person at almost any time. Attention camps were the cheapest and most effective way that the twenty-first century had yet invented to turn destitute people into agents of a general salvation. Mljet was an experimental effort by a technical avant-garde, so its camps were small in scope compared with, say, the vast postdisaster slums of the ceaselessly troubled Balkans. So far, the island's camps held a mere fifteen hundred refugees, most in the little districts of Govedjari and Zabrijeze. The refugees in Zabrijeze and Govedjari were among the wretched of the Earth, but with better tech support, they would transit through their unspeakable state to a state that was scarcely describable. Herbert's newest campsite was a six-hectare patch of scalded, sloping bedrock that had once been an island dump. The dump had leaked tox-ins and methane, so it had been catalogued and obliterated. Vera walked into the camp's humming nexus of construction cranes, communication towers, fabricators, heat-pump pipes, and bioactive sewage tanks.

Seen with the naked eye—she wore no helmet today—the camp was scattered around her like the toys of a giant child. Their arrangement looked surreal, nonsensical. It was only through the sensorweb that every object, possession, and mechanism found its proper destination. One might say that the new camp was systematically networked . . . or one might say, more properly, that the sensorweb was becoming a camp.

Vera stared through the camp's apparent confusion, out to sea. Morn-ing on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked . . . Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous "Adriatic blue" was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently "simple and natu-ral" blue emerged from a wild melange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer . . .

The sea had no "real" blue. And the camp was no "real" camp. There was a melange of potent forces best described as "futurity." They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination. Feeling meek and frail without her helmet and boneware, Vera qui-etly slid into Herbert's saffron-colored tent. Herbert was shaving his head with one hand, eating his breakfast with another. Herbert was ugly, red-faced, and in his early fifties. The dense meat of his stout body was as solid as a truck tire. He ran a buzzing shaver over his skull, which bore seven livid dents from his helmet's brain scanner.

Herbert's exoskeleton, bone-white, huge, and crouching in a powered support rack, filled almost half his modest tent. Vera's personal exo-skeleton was a pride of the Acquis and had cost as much as a bulldozer, but Herbert's boneware was a local legend: when Herbert climbed within its curved and crooked rack, he wore full-scale siege machinery.

The burdens of administration generally kept Herbert busy, but when Herbert launched himself into direct action, he shook the earth. Her-bert could tear up a brick house like a man breaking open a bread loaf; he could level a dead village like a one-man carnival.

Herbert smiled on her with unfeigned loving-kindness.

"Vera, it was kind of you to come so early. There have been some important developments, a new project. I've had to reassign you."

Vera's eyes welled up. "I knew you'd pull me out of that mine. I dis-graced myself."

"Well, yes," Herbert admitted briskly. Naturally Herbert had read the neural reports from all the personnel on-scene. Everyone felt regret, un-happiness, embarrassment, shame . . . "Mining work is not your bliss, Vera. A mishap can happen to anyone."

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

People who had never worn boneware had such foolish ideas about brain scanners and what they did. Brain scanners could never read thoughts. Telepathy was impossible. That was a fairy tale. Still, neural scanners were very good at the limited things that real-life scanners could do. Mostly, they read nerve impulses that left the brain and ran the body's muscles. That was why a neural scanner was part of any modern exoskeleton.

Brain scanners also read emotions. Emotions, unlike thoughts, lin-gered deep within the brain and affected the entire nervous system.

Grand passions were particularly strong, violent, and machine-legible.

Acquis neural scanners could easily read ecstasy and dread. Murderous fury. Pain and injury. Lassitude, grief, hatred, exaltation, bursting pride, bitter guilt, major depression, suicidal despair, instinctive loathing, sly de-ception, abject terror, burning resentment, a mother's love, and unstop-pable tears of sympathy. Acquis neural tech was still a young, emergent field, but it was al-ready advanced enough to create a vital core of users and developers. Herbert was one of those people. So was every other Acquis cadre on Mljet. Herbert was an Acquis neural apparatchik, a seasoned captain of the industry. Vera was his lieutenant.

Heat prickled the back of Vera's neck. "There's no big debriefing for me, Herbert? You know as well as I do that I completely lost my wits down there!"

"Yes, you suffered a panic attack," Herbert said blandly. "It's one of your character flaws. We all have them. It's our flaws that give us our character."

Vera was now certain that there was something dreadful in the works for her. Herbert was much too calm.

Vera analyzed her boss's ugly face. Why did she love him so?

When she'd first met Herbert, he had badly scared her. Herbert was old, ugly, foreign, and fanatical. Worst of all, Herbert had bluntly in-sisted that she stick her head into an experimental helmet that scanned people's brains. Vera knew that ubiquitous computing was very power-ful: she did not want that technology applied inside her skull. Vera feared that for good reasons. She had seen her loved ones shot down dead, and she had feared that less.

Vera had obeyed Herbert anyway, because Herbert was willing to res-cue Mljet. No one else of consequence seemed even willing to try. The Acquis were global revolutionaries. They got results in the world. They did some strange things, yes—but they never, ever stopped trying. So Vera had swallowed the panic and let the machine swallow her head.

Vera had swiftly learned that wearing a brain machine was a small price to pay to learn the feelings of others.

Herbert Fotheringay was an ugly man, but he had such a beautiful soul. Herbert had a touching simplicity of character. He brimmed over with kindness and goodness. For those who earned his trust and shared his aims, Herbert was a tireless source of strength and support. Herbert meant every word that he had ever said to her.

She had joined his effort as a bitter, grieving eighteen-year-old, her home demolished and her loved ones shot dead or scattered across the world. Yet Herbert and his scanners had instantly seen beyond her fear and misery. The machines had sensed the depth of her passionate love for her homeland. Herbert had always treated Vera as the heart and soul of his Mljet effort.

Herbert had made himself her mentor. He set her tests, he gave her tasks. She had eagerly seized those chances, and they had done so well. They had accomplished so much, together, side by side. The wounded island was healing before their eyes. Innovation was coming thick and fast, amazing insights, new services, new techniques. Transformations were bursting from her little island that were fit to transform the world.