The caryatids, p.4
The Caryatids, page 4
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 brief lives. 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?”
“I’d call that a ‘thanatosphere.’ ”
“Well! What a name!” Karen deftly tossed the gleaming ball from hand to hand. “Why that big sour face? Your gift from that princess is fit for a queen!” Watery rainbows chased themselves across Vera’s blanket.
“That toy comes from a rich Dispensation banker. He’s a spy, and that’s a bribe. That’s the truth.”
Karen blinked. “Rich bankers are giving you gifts? Well then! You’re coming up in the world! I always said you would.”
“I don’t need that toy. I don’t want it. You can keep it.”
“Truly?” Karen caressed the crystal with her cheek. “Won’t somebody get mad about that?”
“Nobody from the Acquis. Nobody that matters to us.”
“Well, I’m so happy to have this! You’re very generous, Vera! That is one of your finest character traits.”
Now Karen was intrigued, so she really bored in. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about toys like this. Dispensation people are crazy for their fancy gifts and gadgets. They’re big collectors’ items, from high society! I bet this toy is worth a lot of cash.”
Vera methodically ripped the gift box to shreds. It was lined with velvet, with slender walls made of some fine alien substance, like parchment. It smelled like fresh bamboo. “They call their toys ‘hobjects.’ ”
“Oh yeah. I knew that, too.” Karen clutched the ball. “Wow, Vera, I privately own a fancy hobject! I feel so glamorous!”
“Karen, don’t manifest sarcastically. Only little kids take candy from strangers.”
Karen was hurt by this reproof. “But Little Mary is a little kid.”
“That toy is sure to rot soon. It’ll turn dark and ugly.”
Karen rolled the shining ball across the backs of her fingers. Karen’s use of neural gauntlets had made her dexterous—if her boneware was much like a skeleton, her skeleton had become rather like boneware. “Now, Vera: What kind of dark, bleak attitude are you projecting at me here? This is a whole little world! Look at all this wonderful stuff floating around in here! There’s a million pieces of it, and they’re all connected! You know what? I think this little world has a little sensorweb built in!”
“Oh no,” said Vera. “That would be perverse.”
“This is art! It’s an art hobject!”
Vera flinched. “Stop juggling it!”
Karen’s brown eyes shone with glee. “I can see little shrimp! They’re swimming around in there! They’re jumbo shrimp!”
Karen’s eager teasing had defeated her. Vera reached out.
The biosphere held elegant branches of delicate fringed seaweed, bobbing in a vivid, reeling, fertile algae soup. The pea-green water swarmed with a vivid, pinhead-sized menagerie of twitchy rotifers and glassy roundworms.
And, yes, the sphere also held a darting, wriggling family of shrimp. These shrimp were the grandest denizens of their miniature world. Majestic, like dragons.
The crystal of the biosphere was lavishly veined. Some extremely deft machine had laser-engraved a whole Los Angeles of circuits through that crystal ball. The circuits zoomed around the water world like a thousand superhighways.
“Americans will buy anything,” Karen said.
The dragon shrimp swam solemnly above an urban complex of fairy skyscrapers. Glittering extrusions grew like frost from the crystal into the seawater. Complex. Mysterious. Alluring.
It was as if, purely for random amusement, some ship-in-a-bottle fanatic had built himself … what? Factories like fingernail parings. Mini-distilleries. Desalinators, and filters, and water-treatment plants. A pocket city, half greenish ooze and half life-support network.
Squinting in disbelief, Vera lifted the biosphere into a brighter glare. Half the glass darkened as a thousand tiny shutters closed.
This was a lovely gift. Someone had been extremely thoughtful. It was apt. It was rich with hidden meaning. It was a seduction, and meant to win her over. Vera had never seen anything in her harsh and dutiful life that was half so pretty as this.
With a pang, Vera handed the biosphere back to Karen. Karen rolled it carelessly toward her distant cot. “Vera, no wonder bankers are courting you. I think the boss has decided to marry you.”
“I’d do that.” Vera nodded. There was never any use in being coy with Karen.
“Marrying the boss,” said Karen, “is too easy a job for you. Herbert never gives you easy jobs.”
Vera laughed. Karen never seemed to think hard, but somehow Karen always said such true things.
“Did you know that Herbert has filed a succession plan?”
Vera nodded, bored. “Let’s not talk local politics.”
Karen stuck a medical swab in her ear, rolled it around at her leisure, and examined the results. “Let me tell you my emotions about this succession business. It’s time that Herbert moved on. Herbert is a typical start-up guy. A start-up guy has got a million visionary ideas, but he never knows what they’re good for. He doesn’t know what real people in the real world will do with his big ideas.”
Vera scowled at such disloyalty. “You never used to talk that way about Herbert. You told me Herbert saved your life!”
Karen looked cagey. This was a bad sign, for though Karen had deep emotional intelligence, she wasn’t very bright.
“That was then, and this is now. Our situation here is simple,” said Karen mistakenly. “Herbert found some broken people to work very hard here, repairing this broken island. We heal ourselves with his neural tech, and we heal the land with mediation at the same time. Inside heals outside. That’s great. That’s genius. I’m Acquis, I’m all for that. Sweat equity, fine! We get no pay, fine! We live in a crowded barracks, no privacy at all, no problem for me! Someday it’ll snow on the North Pole again. Men as old as Herbert, they can remember when the North Pole had snow.”
Karen flexed her multijointed fingers. “But I’m not old like him, I’m young. I don’t want to postpone my life until we bring the past back to the future! I have to live now! For me!”
Clearly Vera’s time had come to absorb a confession. She restrained a sigh. “Karen, tell me all about ‘now’ and ‘me.’ ”
“When I first got to this island, yes, I was a wreck. I was hurt and scared, I was badly off. Neural tech is wonderful—now that I know what it’s for! Let me have those helmets. I know what to do with them. I’ll stick them on the head of every man in the world.”
Karen scowled in thought. “I have just one question for every man. ‘Do you really love this girl, or are you just playing around?’ That’s what matters. Give me true love, and I’ll give you a planet that’s completely changed! Totally changed. I’ll give you a brand-new world in six months! You wouldn’t even recognize that world!”
“Your soppy romance love story has no glory, Karen!”
“Vera, you are being a geek. All right? You are. Because you live inside your mediation and your sensorweb. You never listen to the people with real needs! I fell in love here. Okay? A lot. With every guy in this barracks, basically. Okay, not with all of them, but … I give and I give and I emotionally give, and where is my one true love? When do I get happy?”
“Your scheme is irresponsible and it lacks any practical application.”
“No it isn’t. No it doesn’t. Anyway, things are bound to change here. Soon.” Karen folded her arms.
“I don’t see why.”
“I’ll tell you why. Because we will promote our next project manager from among the cadres, using an architecture of participation! That’s the succession plan. And our next leader isn’t going to be like old Herbert. Our next big leader is bound to be one of us.”
This scheme was new to Vera, so she was interested despite herself. In Mljet, it was always much more important to do the right thing with gusto than it was to nitpick about boring palace intrigues. And yet … there was politics here, every place had its politics.
“Look,” said Vera, “very clearly, we don’t have enough clout here to pick our own boss. If anything bad happened to Herbert, the Acquis committee would appoint some other project manager.”
“Oh no, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare do that.”
“Yes, they would. The Acquis are daring.”
Karen was adamant. “No they wouldn’t! They can’t send some gross newbie to Mljet to boss our neural elite! The cadres would laugh at him! They’d spit on him! They would kick his ass! He’d have no glory at all!”
Vera stared thoughtfully at Karen, then at the teeming mass of barracks-mates. It occurred to Vera that Karen, as the voice of the local people, was telling her the truth.
Vera was used to her fellow cadres—she could hardly have been more intimate with them, since their innermost feelings were spilled all over her screens.
But to outsiders, they might seem scary. After all, the Acquis neural cadres on Mljet were survivors from some of the harshest places in the world. They wore big machines that could lift cars. Even their women were rough, tough construction workers who could crack bricks with their fingers.
And—by the standards of people not on this island—they all lived inside-out. They didn’t “wear their hearts on their sleeves”—they wore their hearts on their skins.
They were such kind people, mostly, so supportive and decent … But—as a group—the cadres had one great object of general contempt. Every Acquis cadre despised newbies. “Newbies” were the fresh recruits. Acquis newbies had no glory, since they had not yet done anything to make the people around them feel happy, or impressed with them, or more fiercely committed to the common cause. All newbies were, by nature, scum.
So Karen had to be right. Nobody on this island would willingly accept a newbie as an appointed leader. Not now, not after nine years of their neural togetherness. After nine years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, they were a tightly bonded pioneer society.
If they ever had a fit about politics, they were all going to have the same fit all at once.
Karen had found a big bag of sunflower seeds. She was loudly chewing them and spitting the husks into a cardboard pot. “Herbert’s succession plan is to emotionally poll all the cadres,” Karen told her, rolling salted seed bits on her tongue. “Our people will choose a new leader themselves—the leader who makes them feel best.”
That process seemed intuitively right to Vera. That was how things always worked best around here—because Mljet was an enterprise fueled on passionate conviction. “Well, Novakovic has our best glory rating. He always does.”
“Vera, open your big blue eyes. Novakovic is our chef! Of course we all like the chef. Because he feeds us! That’s not what we want from our leader here! We want brilliancy! We want speed! We don’t need some stuffy, overcontrolled engineer! We need an inspiring figure with sex appeal and charisma who can take on the whole world! We need a ‘muse figure.’ ”
Vera squirmed on her taut pink cot. “We need some heavier equipment and some proper software maintenance, that’s what we really need around here.”
“Vera, you are the ‘muse figure’ on Mljet. You. Nobody else. Because we all know you. Your everyware touches everything that we do here.” Karen offered her a beaming smile. “So it’s you. You’re our next leader. For sure. And I’d love to have you as my boss. Boy, my life would be great, then. The Vera Mihajlovic Regime, that would be just about perfect for me.”
“Karen, shut up. You’re my best friend! You can’t plot to make me the project manager! You know I’d become a wreck if that happened to me!”
“You were born a wreck,” said Karen, her eyes frank and guileless. “That’s why you’re my best friend!”
“Well, your judgment is completely clouded on this issue. I’m not a wreck! It’s the island that’s a wreck, and I am a solution. Yes, I had an awful time when I went down in that mine with you, I overdid that, I was stupid, but normally, I’m very emotionally stable. My needs and issues are all very clear to everyone. Plus, Herbert taught me a lot about geoengineering. I am very results-oriented.”
“Sure, Vera. Sure you are. You get more done around here than anyone else does. We all love you for that devotion to duty. You’re our golden darling.”
“Okay,” said Vera, growing angry at last. “Your campaign speech is impossible. That is crazy talk, that isn’t even politics.”
Karen backed off. She found a patch of open floor space. Then she stood up, unhinged her shoulders, lifted her left leg and deftly tucked her ankle behind her neck. No one in the barracks took much notice of these antics. Boneware experts always learned such things.
IN THE AZURE EASTERN DISTANCE, Vera saw the remote hills of the Croatian mainland: a troubled region called Peljesac by its survivors. The arid, wrinkled slopes of distant Peljesac had been logged off completely, scraped down to the barren bone by warlord profiteers.
Dense summer clouds were building over there. There would be storms by noon.
Montalban had chosen their rendezvous: a narrow bay, with a long stony bluff at its back. The ghost town of Polace was a briny heap of collapsing piers and tilted asphalt streetbeds. Offshore currents stirred the wreckage, sloshing flotsam onto Mljet’s stony shoulders: sunglasses, sandals, indestructible plastic shopping bags, the obsolete coinage of various dead nationalities.
During Vera’s girlhood, Polace had been the most magical place in the world for her. The enchanted world of her caryatid childhood was every bit as dead as this dead town: smashed, invalidated, uncelebrated, unremembered. Reduced to garbage, and less than garbage.
The forgotten tenor of those lost times, her childhood before this island’s abject collapse—Vera could never think of that life without a poisonous sea change deep within her head.
The past would not stay straight inside her mind. The limpid, flowing simplicity of those days, of seven happy little beings, living in their compound all jammed together as a team and psychic unit, the house and grounds bubbling over with magic sensors and mystic computation … Learning, interacting, interfacing, growing, growing …
Then came the horror, the irreparable fracture, the collapse. A smashing into dust and less than dust: transmuted to poison. The toxic loss of herself, of all of her selves—of all her pretty, otherworldly other-selves.
Her childhood fortress home … when this town of Polace had lived, glittering with evil vitality, then her home was a blastproofed villa of ancient Communist cement, dug deep into a hillside and nestled under camouflage nets. The sighing forest around the children seethed with intrusion sensors.
The children often played in the woods—always together, of course—and sometimes they even glimpsed the blue shorelines. But they were never allowed to visit the island’s towns.
Four times each year, though, they were required to leave the island for inspections on the mainland: inspections by their inventor, their mother, their designer, and their twin, the eighth of their world-saving unit, the oldest, the wisest, their queen. So Vera, and her sullen little brother, and her six howling, dancing, shrieking sisters traveled in an armored bus with blackened windows.
The big bus would rumble up and down Mljet’s narrow, hazardous roads, thump and squeak over the numerous, rickety bridges, park for a while on the grimy, graffiti-spattered dock, and then lurch aboard a diesel-belching Balkan ferry. Locked inside the bus, screaming in feral delight with her pack of sisters, Vera had feasted her eyes on an otherworldly marvel: that marvel was this place, this dead town.
The town had a name: Polace. Its townsfolk were black marketeers. They were brewers of illicit biotech. In a place of great natural beauty, they were merchants of despair.
Their gaudy pirate labs were guarded by militia soldiers in ferociously silly homemade uniforms. The harbor town was a factory, a pharmacy, a tourist trap, a brothel, and a slum.
Polace was an ancient Balkan fishing village of limestone rock and red-tiled roofs. Old Polace had been built right at the water’s edge, so the rising high tides of the climate crisis were sloshing into the buildings.
Except, of course, for the new piers. These piers had been jerry-built to deal with the swarms of narcotics customers, sailing in from offshore. The black-market piers towered over the sea on spindly pylons of rust-weeping iron and pocked cement. The piers were crusted all over with flashing casino lights, and garish, animated street ads, and interactive billboards featuring starlets in tiny swimsuits.
Multistory brothels loomed on the piers, sealed and windowless, like the drug labs. The alleys ashore were crammed with bars, and drugstore kiosks, and reeling, intoxicated customers, whose polyglot faces were neon-lit masks of feral glee and panic. The little harbor held the sleek, pretty yachts of the doomed, the daring, the crooked, and the planet’s increasingly desperate rich.
