The Caryatids (7 page)

Mary was visibly lonely, pitifully eager to win the approval of her over-worked, too-talkative dad. Mary was also afraid of her aunt, although she very much wanted her aunt to love her and to care about her. That knowledge was painful for Vera. Extremely painful. It was a strong, com-pelling, heart-crushing kind of pain. Pain like that could change a woman's life.

Remotely chatting in their lively, distant voices, the father and daugh-ter tossed their big handsome beach ball. The girl missed a catch, and the ball skittered off wildly into the flowering bushes. In the silence of the ruins Vera heard the child laughing.

Vera turned up the sensors in her helmet, determined to spy on them. The ruins of Polace were rather poorly instrumented, almost a blackspot in the island's net. Vera gamely tried a variety of cunning methods, but their voices were warped and pitted by hisses, hums, and drones. The year 2065 was turning out to be one of those "Loud Sun" years: sunspot activity with loud electrical noise. Any everyware technician could groom the signal relays, but there wasn't a lot to do about Acts of God. Montalban did not know that Vera was eavesdropping on him with such keen attention. His formality melted away. Montalban swung his arms high and low, he capered on the wrecked beach like a little boy.

Now Montalban was telling Mary something about Polace, pointing out some details in the rusting, sour ruins. Montalban was summing it all up for his daughter somehow, in some sober piece of fatherly wis-dom. Montalban respected his daughter, and was intent and serious about teaching her. He was trying to instruct her about how the world worked, about its eerie promises and its carnivorous threats and dangers, phrasing that in some way that a five-year-old might comprehend and never forget. A fairy tale, maybe.

Thrilled to be the focus of her dad's attention, Mary twisted her feet and chewed at her fingers. Montalban had brought his daughter here to Mljet, all this way across the aching planet, for some compelling reason. Vera couldn't quite hear what he was telling his child. Whatever it was, it certainly meant the world to him.

Vera sensed suddenly, and with a terrible conviction, that the two of them had come to Mljet to get far away from Radmila.

Yes, that was it. That was the secret. Montalban had not come here to spy on her, or the Acquis, or the island's high technology, or anything else. Whatever those other purported motives might be, they were merely his excuses.

Mljet was a precious place for the two of them—because Radmila was not here. The two of them were here alone together, because this is-land was the one place on Earth that Radmila would never, ever go. Radmila Mihajlovic, "Mila Montalban" in distant Los Angeles: Rad-mila was the vital clue here, Radmila was the missing part of this story. Radmila had renounced Mljet, fleeing the distorted horror of her own being, a refugee washing across the planet's seas, like bloody driftwood.

Somehow, Radmila had found this man. She must have fallen on him like an anvil. Remorseless as the rise of day, the world had continued, and now the father and the daughter had ventured here in order to be together.

Montalban flung the child's beach ball high. He waved his hands at the hobject, gesturing like a wizard. Suddenly, startlingly, the beach ball tripled in size. It soared above the shoreline, a striped and glittering balloon. The bubble hung there, serene and full of impossible promise, painted on the sullen storm clouds. The beach ball wafted downward, with all the eerie airiness of a dan-delion seed. It fell as if rescuing them from their misery.

The girl screeched with glee at her father's cleverness. Montalban, his whole being radiating joy and mastery, waved his hands. The ball plummeted to Earth. It bounded off with rubbery energy. The two of them gleefully chased down their weird toy in their oddly posh clothing. Mljet's newest tourists were thrilled to be here. They were entirely happy to treat the dismal wreck of Polace as their private playground. No ruin less awful, less desolate, could suit them and their love for one another.

Vera turned her helmeted head away. Her eyes stung, her cheeks were burning. She waded into the cooling waters of the sea.

A dead water heater, poxed with barnacles, lay pillowed in a deathbed of mud. Vera bent and fetched it up. With one comprehensive nervous heave, she threw full power into her boneware. The wrecked machine tumbled end over end and crashed hard above the tide line. The child stared at her in joy and awe.

Vera hopped through the sea, splashing. She found a submerged car.

She tore the rusty hood from its hinges. She flung the bent metal to shore, and it sailed like a leaf. She put her boot against a submerged door and tore that free as well. She threw it hard enough to skip it across the water.

Mary ran down the beach, skipping in glee. "Do it, Vera! Do it, Vera! Do that again!" Montalban hastened after his child, his face the picture of worry. He half dragged Mary away from the wreckage and to a safer distance.

Up went his beach ball again, sudden and bloated and wobbling.

The bubble rose with a wild enthusiasm, its crayon-bright colors daub-ing the troubled sky. Montalban ran beneath the convulsing toy, pretending to leap and catch it. The child clapped her hands politely.

Then the toy burst. It fell into the sea in a bright tumble of rags.

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THE LOCALACQUISCADREStook a keen interest in Vera's feel-ings. With the arrival of her niece on the island, the Acquis cadres were obsessed.

For years, the cadres had accepted the fact that their island society lacked children. That was the condition of their highly advanced work. They didn't need kids to be an avant-garde society, a vanguard of the fu-ture. Surely they had each other.

The Acquis had hard-won experience in managing extreme tech-nologies. Mljet was typical of their policy: a radical technical experi-ment required an out-of-the-way locale. It had to be compact in scale, limited in personnel. A neutered society. A hamster cage, an island utopia: to break those limits and become any bolder posed political risks. Risks posed by the planet's "loyal opposition," the Dispensation. The Dispensation was vast and its pundits were cunning propagan-dists with the global net at their fingertips. They were always keen to provoke a panic over any radical Acquis activity—especially if those ac-tivities threatened to break into the mainstream.

Radical experiments that might be construable as child abuse made the easiest targets of all. So: No children allowed on the construction site . . . yet the clock never stopped ticking. John Montgomery Montalban had brought his own child to the is-land. This was a Dispensation propaganda of the deed. The shrewder Acquis cadres understood this as a deliberate provocation. A good one, since there wasn't a lot they could do about adorable five-year-olds. Montalban was simply showing everyone what they had missed, what they had sacrificed. Sentiment about the child was running high. Vera thought that it must take a cold-blooded father to exploit his own flesh and blood as a political asset, in this shrewd way. But John Montgomery Montalban had married Radmila Mihajlovic. He had married Radmila, and given her that child. There had to be something wrong with him, or he would never have done such a thing.

Vera could literally track the child's path across the island by the peaks of emotional disturbance her presence created. Mary left a wake wherever her polished little shoes touched the Earth. The local Acquis cadres were unimpressed by Montalban. They con-sidered themselves bold souls, they'd seen much worse than him. They felt some frank resentment for any intruder on their island, yet Montal-ban was just another newbie, an outsider who could never matter to them on a gut level. Little Mary Montalban, though, was the walking proof of the cavity in their future. Vera knew that her own powerful feelings about the child had done much to provoke this problem. In an act of defiance, Vera had chosen to wear her boneware and her neural helmet to meet Montalban-—although Herbert had warned her against doing that. It had seemed to her like an act of personal integrity. Personal integrity did not seem to work with Montalban. So: no more of that. If Vera put her own helmet aside—from now until this crisis blew over—the trouble would end all the sooner.

She had been wrong to trust her intuitions. She needed help. Karen would help her. Karen loved children. Karen had a lot of glory. Karen always understood hurt and trouble .

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JOHN MONTGOMERY MONTALBAN—through an accident or through his shrewd, cold-blooded cunning-had chosen a new, more distant site for their next meeting. Without her boneware, Vera had to hike there from her barracks, on foot.

Mljet's few remaining roads were reduced to weedy foot trails. People in boneware had little need for roads: they simply jumped across the landscape, following logistics maps.

Vera no longer had that advantage, so she had to tramp it. Luckily, she had Karen as counsel and company. Unluckily, Karen's stilting strides made Vera eat her dust.

Modern life was always like this somehow, Vera concluded as sweat ran down her ribs. Impossible crises, bursting potentials. Rockets and pot-holes. Anything was possible, yet you were always on sore feet. Always, everywhere, ubiquitously. That was modern reality. Modern reality hurt. Vera coughed aloud.

"Shall I carry you?" Karen said sweetly.

Vera wearily crested a ragged limestone ridge. Her humble fellow pedestrians crowded the valley below her. They were women from the attention camps, hand-working the island with hatchets and trowels. The camp women wore their summer gear, with their hair up in ker-chiefs. Every one of them wore cheap, general-issue spex.

Karen broke into a stilting run, bounding past the camp women like a whirlwind. The women offered Karen respectful salutes, awed by her cloud of glory.

Vera trudged among the lot of them, panting, sweating, sniffling. The camp women ignored Vera. She had no visible glory. So she meant noth-ing to them.

Vera took no offense. It was a software-design issue. Proper camp de-sign reflected the dominant camp demographics. Meaning: middle-aged city women. Most modern people lived in cities. Most modern people were middle-aged. So most modern people in refugee camps were nec-essarily middle-aged city women. As simple as that.

These attention-camp newbies, these middle-aged city women, were diligently laboring in the open fields of an Adriatic island. They'd never planned to meet such a fate. They'd simply known that, as refugees without options, they were being offered a radically different life.

When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they'd been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pio-neers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun.

The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies. As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded what-ever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening.

The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close atten-tion would become an expert.

The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes. As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. "Glory" was the primary Acquis virtue. Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard—not when you simply heard about the concept. But when you
saw
glory, with your own two eyes, the invisible world made so visible, glory every day, glory a fact as inescapable as sunlight, glory as a glow that grew and waned and loomed in front of your face—then you understood.

Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be. Camp people badly needed reasons to be. Before being rescued by the Acquis, they'd been desolated. These city women, like many city women, had no children and no surviving parents. They'd been uprooted by mas-sive disasters, fleeing the dark planetary harvest of droughts, fires, floods, epidemics, failed states, and economic collapse.

These women, blown across the Earth as human flotsam, were becom-ing pioneers here. They did well at adapting to circumstance-because they were women. Refugee women — women anywhere, any place on Earth—had few illusions about what it meant to be flotsam.

Vera herself had been a camp refugee for a while. She knew very well how that felt and what that meant. The most basic lesson of refugee life was that it felt bad. Refugee life was a bad life. With friends and options and meaningful work, camp life improved.

Then camp life somewhat resembled actual life. With time and more structure and some consequential opportunities, refugee life
was
an ac-tual life. Whenever strangers became neighbors, whenever they found commonalities, communities arose. Where there were communities, there were reasons to live. Camp user statistics proved that women were particularly good at founding social networks inside camps. Women made life more real. Men stuck inside camps had a much harder time fending off their de-spair. Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed. Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. "Fight or flight." Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. "Tend and be-friend."

So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was de-signed to exploit those realities. First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools.

The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bit-ter competition over power tools. It acted on men like a tonic. Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an Acquis attention camp improved steadily with human usage. Exploiting the spex, the attention camp tracked every tiny movement of the user's eye-balls. It nudged its everyware between the users and the world they per-ceived. Comparing the movements of one user's eyeballs to the eyeballs of a thousand other users, the system learned individual aptitudes.