The Caryatids (4 page)

Vera lifted her chin. Herbert had been telling her these spirit-lifting things for nine long years. Herbert said them because he truly believed them. He believed them so heartily that sometimes she was almost con-vinced.

After all, the evidence was on his side. Mostly.

Herbert drew a conclusive breath. "So: As a great man once said, in times almost as dark as our own times, 'Withhold no sacrifice, begrudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe: all will be well.' " Maybe someday he would just put his arms around her. Not talk so much, not understand her so loudly and so thoroughly. Just be there for her. Be there like a man for a woman. That wasn't happening. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

??????????

VERA PICKED HER WAY BACKto her barracks, bare-headed and bare-eyed. The broken road was heavily overgrown; the flitting birds had no sensorweb tags, the flowery bushes had no annotations. Without her boneware, her arms and legs felt leaden. She had a heavy heart about the new assignment. She was to "guide" John Montgomery Montalban around the island. Vera knew what that meant-she had just become a spy. She was a spy now, pretending to be a guide. Something dark and horrible was tran-spiring between herself and Radmila.

Why was the Earth so small?

Radmila had sent her child and her husband here, so that her shadow would once again touch Mljet. Why did that woman exist? Radmila had no right to her existence.

Radmila's fool of a husband-how had that man dared come here?

"On vacation," he had said. Montalban had told the island's project manager, told Herbert right to his face, that he was here as a "tourist."

Could Montalban possibly imagine that Herbert, an Acquis officer, would be fooled by that lie? Vera felt shocked and numbed at the sheer audacity of such a falsehood. People who lived without brain scanners thought that they could get away with anything they said. The fetid pri-vacy of their unscanned brains boiled over with deception and cunning.

No wonder the world had come to ruin.

Maybe Montalban imagined that his story sounded plausible, be-cause Mljet had once had tourists—thousands of them. Before its decay, tourism had been the island's economic base. And Montalban was an investment banker, specializing in tourism. He'd even said some-thing fatuous about his child's "cultural heritage."

Montalban was rich, he was from Los Angeles—which was to say, Montalban was from the Dispensation. Montalban was from the
other
global civil society, the other successor to the failed order of nation-states, the other global postdisaster network.

Acquis people struggled for justice. Dispensation people always talked about business. There were other differences between the two world governments, but that was the worst of it, that was the core of it. Everything the Acquis framed as common decency, the Dispensation framed as a profit opportunity. The Dispensation considered the world to be a business: a planetary "sustainable business." Those people were all business to the bone.

Montalban had clearly come here to spy for the Dispensation, al-though global civil societies didn't have any "spying." They weren't na-tions: so they had no "spying" and no "war." They had "verification" and

"coopetition" instead. They were the functional equivalents of spying and war, only much more modern, more in the spirit of the 2060s.

Vera wiped sweat from her aching brow. Maybe she could defy Her-bert, put on her trusty boneware, grab that "coopetitor" by the scruff of his neck, and "verify" him rightback onto his boat. If she did that—in a burst of righteous fury—how much real trouble could that cause? Maybe the cadres would sincerely admire her heartfelt burst of fury.

The Dispensation prized its right to "verify" what the Acquis did.

"Verification" was part of the arrangement between the network superpowers—a political arrangement, a detente, to make sure that no one was secretly building old-fashioned world-smashing super-weapons. In practice, "verification" was just another nervous habit of the new political order. The news was sure to leak over some porous network anyway, so it was better just to let the opposition "verify" . . . It kept them busy. Montalban had already toured an island attention camp . . . He was photographing it, taking many notes . . . Shopping for something, probably . . .

Vera knew that the Dispensation feared Acquis attention camps. The Dispensation had their own camps, of course, but not attention camps—and besides, the Dispensation never called them "refugee camps," but used smoothly lying buzzwords such as "new housing projects," "enter-tainment destinations," and

"sustainable suburbs."

Attention camps were a particularly brilliant Acquis advance in human rehabilitation. So the other global civil society glumly opposed them. That was typical of the struggle. The Dispensation dug in their heels about advanced Acquis projects that couldn't fit their crass, mate-rialist philosophy. They scared up popular scandals, they brought their "soft-power" pressure . . . They were hucksters with all kinds of tricks.

A bluebottle fly buzzed Vera's bare face—the pests were bad in sum-mer. No, she wouldn't attack Montalban and evict him while wearing her armor. That was a stupid emotional impulse, not coolheaded diplo-macy. Vera had limited experience outside Mljet, but she was an Acquis officer. The word got around inside the corps. There were professional ways to handle bad situations like this. Annoying and slow ways, but pro-fessional ways.

When some Dispensation snoop showed up at an Acquis project to "verify," the sophisticated tactic was to "counterverify." Fight fire with fire. The big operators handled it that way. She could watch whatever Montalban did, watch him like a hawk. Stick to him like glue, be very "helpful" to him, help him to death. Get in his way; interfere; quibble, quibble, quibble; work to rules; mire him in boring procedures. Make a passive-aggressive pest of herself.

There was certainly no glory in that behavior. Spying on people was the pit of emotional dishonesty.It was likely to make her into the shame of the camp. Vera Mihajlovic: the spy. Everyone would know about it, and how she felt about it.

Yet someone had to take action. Vera resolved to do it.

Through handing her this difficult assignment, Herbert was testing her again. Herbert knew that her troubled family past was her biggest flaw as an officer. He knew that her dark past limited her, that it harmed her career potential in the global Acquis. Herbert had often warned her that her mediated knowledge of the world was deep, yet too narrow. By never leaving Mljet, she had never outgrown her heritage.

Herbert's tests were hard on her, but never entirely unfair. Whenever she carried the weight of those burdens, she always grew stronger.

??????????

VERA SHARED HER BARRACKSwith sixty-two other Acquis cadres. Their rose-pink, rectangular barracks was a warm, supportive, comforting environment. It had been designed for epidemic hunters. These rapid-deployment forces, the shock troops of the global civil societies, pounced on contagious diseases emerging around the world. The medicos were particularly well-equipped global workers, thanks to the dreadful consequences of their failures. This meant they left behind a lot of medical surplus hardware: sturdy, lightweight, and cheap.

So Vera's barracks was a foamy puff of pink high-performance fabric, perched on struts on a slope above the breezy Adriatic gulf. Out in the golden haze toward distant Italy, minor islets shouldered their way from the ocean like the ghosts of Earth's long-extinct whales.

Nearby, the derelict village of Pomena had been scraped up and briskly recycled, while its old harbor was rebuilt for modern shipping. A vast, muscular Acquis crane, a white flexing contraption like a giant arm, plucked cargo containers from the ferries at the dock. Then the huge crane would simply fling that big shipping box, with one almighty, unerring, overhand toss, far off into the hills, where nets awaited it and cadres in boneware would unpack and distribute the goods.

Next to the docks sat a squat, ratcheting fabricator, another pride of the Acquis. This multipotent digital factory made tools, shoes, struts, bolts, girders, spare parts for boneware—a host of items, mostly jet-spewed from recycled glass, cellulose, and metal.

Karen suddenly towered over Vera's cot, an apparition still wearing boneware from the toxin mine, ticking and squeaking. "Are you sad? You look so sad, lying there." Vera sat up. "Aren't you on shift?"

"They're fabbing new parts for my drill," Karen said. "Down in that mine, they're so sorry about the way they treated you. I gave them all such a good talking-to about their insensitivity."

"I had a hard brainstorm. That was a bad day for me, all my fault, I'm sorry."

"It's hard work," said Karen. "But the way you ran up your favorite hill afterward, to feel your way through your crisis . . . ? Your rapport with this island was so moving and deep! Your glory is awesome this morning. It's because you find so much meaning in the work here, Vera. We're all so inspired by that."

"Herbert gave me a new assignment."

Karen made a sympathetic face. "Herbert is always so hard on you. I'll power down now. You tell me all about it. You can cry if you want."

"First can you find me a toenail clipper?"

Karen stared through her faceplate at the thousands of tagged items infesting their barracks. Karen found a tiny, well-worn community clip-per in twenty seconds. Karen was a whiz at that. She commenced climb-ing out of her bones.

As Karen recharged her bones, Vera picked at her footsore toes and scowled at the bustling Acquis barracks. New cadres were graduating from the attention camps almost every week. They bounded proudly over the island in their new boneware, each man and woman heaving and digging with the strength of a platoon — but inside their warm pink barracks, their bones and helmets laid aside, they flopped all over each other like soft-shelled crabs.

The cadres shaved scanner patches on their skulls. They greased their sores and blisters. They griped, debriefed, commiserated, joked, wept. It often looked and sounded like a madhouse. These were people made visible from the inside out, and that visibil-ity was changing them. Vera knew that the sensorweb was melting them inside, just as it was melting the island's soil, the seas, even the skies

. . .

Karen returned from her locker, swaying in her pink underwear. Karen had a sweet, pleasant, broad-cheeked face under the shaven spots in her black hair. Karen's sweetness was more in her sunny affect than in the cast of her features. Karen's ancestors were European, South Asian, African . . . Karen was genetically globalized.

Karen's family had been jet-setting sophisticates from upper-class Nairobi, until their city had imploded in the climate crisis. Australia: A very bad story, the world's most vulnerable continent for climate change. India, China—always so crowded, so close to epic human disasters— catastrophic places. Yet disaster always somehow seemed worse in Africa. There was less attention paid to people like Karen, their plight always fell through the cracks. One would think that African sophisticates didn't even exist. Karen had lost everyone she knew. She had escaped the bloody ruin of her city with a single cardboard suitcase.

Some Acquis functionary had steered Karen toward Mljet. That de-cision had suited Karen. Today, Karen was an ideal Acquis neural so-cialite. Because Karen was a tireless chatterer, always deep into everybody else's business. Yet Karen never breathed a word about her painful past, or anyone else's past, either. Vera liked and trusted her for that.

Life inside an Acquis brain scanner had liberated Karen. She'd ar-rived on the island so bitterly grieved that she could barely speak, but the reformed Karen was a very outgoing, supportive woman. She was even a brazen flirt.

"The boss never treats you like a woman should be treated around here," Karen told her. "I have something that will change your mood, though." Karen handed over a box with a handwritten card and a curly velvet ribbon.

"Karen, what is this about?"

"Your niece came here to our barracks this morning," said Karen. "While you were being debriefed. She's the only little girl on this whole island. She walked straight into here, right up that aisle, through that big mess piled there. Like a princess, like she was born in here. The place was full of grown-ups wearing skeletons. Tough guys. Changing shifts. You know. Naked people. She wasn't one bit scared! She even sang them a little song. Something about her favorite foods: soup and cookies!"

" 'Soup and cookies'?" said Vera unbelieving, though Karen never lied.

"The cadres couldn't believe that either! They never saw anything like that! That kid can
really sing,
too—you should have heard them cheer! Then she left this beautiful gift just for you." Vera kept her face stiff, but she could feel herself gritting her teeth.

Karen, as always, was keen to sympathize. "We couldn't help but love that 'Little Mary Montalban.' I know someday she'll be a big star." Karen bounced on the stainless pink fabric of her surplus medical cot. "So, do it! Open this gift from your weird estranged niece! I'm dying to see what she brought for you!"

"Since you're so excited, you can open that."

Karen sniffed the scented gift card and ripped into the wrappings. She removed a crystal ball. The crystal ball held a little world. A captive bubble of water. It was a biosphere. Herbert often mentioned them. They were modeling tools for environmental studies.

Biospheres were clever toys, but unstable, since their tiny ecosystems were so frail. Biospheres were pretty at first, but they had horribly brieflives. Sooner or later, disaster was sure to strike that little world. Living systems were never as neat and efficient as clockworks. Biology wasn't machinery. So, as time passed, some aspect of the miniature world would depart from the normal parameters. Some vital salt or mineral might leach out against the glass. Some keystone microbe might die off—or else bloom crazily, killing everything else.

A biosphere was a crystal world that guaranteed doom.

Karen peered through the shining bubble, her freckled cheekbones warping in reflection. "This is so clever and pretty! What do people call this?"