The Caryatids (12 page)

"What
is
glory?"

"It's celebrity, of course! What else could it be? It only took Mila a few months to find her feet within that scene. After that, her knight in shining armor—meaning me—I was in her way. A little bit. She and I, we don't fight about that reality. No, we never fight. I facilitate. I don't make problems for her. I solve all her problems. Mila works hard for our Family-Firm. We've got the kid. We love our kid,"

"She's bad for you. She made you unhappy."

"Sonja made me unhappy."

"What?"

"Djordje knows. He's the one who introduced us. When things were going very rough with Mila, he found Sonja for me. I helped Sonja, be-cause I had to help Sonja. Sonja is saving the world. In a different way. Because you're all different women.
Very
different women. Yet
you're all the same
entity.
You are caryatids."

Vera felt a rush of bile at the back of the throat. "John, let's take that helmet off now."

"You wanted the truth from me, didn't you? Here it is. You are the best of the lot. You are the best, because, of all of you, you're the one who needs me the least. Mila is a Hollywood girl, she's a star. Sonja is a knight in armor. If a man gets in Sonja's way she will chew him up like a matchstick. I haven't yet met Biserka, but we trade a lot of mail. Be-cause Biserka's on the lam! The law wants her. She's into forgery, human trafficking, and
bank robbery.
You know how hard it is to rob a bank these days?

Biserka, that woman, good God!"

"If you don't stop shouting, I'm going to scream."

"That's what you always tell me! Always, every last one of you! I talk to one of you about the other units, and you always break down and scream at me! Except for your
mother.
Your mother. A female warlord so paranoid she could only trust copies of herself . . . God help us. God help the whole world." Vera put her hands over her ears.

"We're gonna talk your mother down from up there!" Montalban shouted, his face reddening. "That job is not
impossible!
We're going to talk her down from that hostage situation up there! Me and Djordje!

We have some big plans, and we're recruiting a lot of help."

Vera stood up. She walked on wobbling legs. She took ten steps, fell into a thornbush, doubled over, and vomited.

She retched and then wailed in pain.

Karen found her quickly. "What did he say to you? What did he
do
to you?"

"Take me to Herbert," Vera said. She drooled vile acid, sneezed, and spat into the soil. "Just get me away from him! Get me away from here. Take me to my Herbert."

??????????

IT TOOK A LONG TIMEto find Herbert. Stunningly, the sensor-web did not know where Herbert was. Such a thing had never happened before. He had always been locatable for her. Herbert had escaped the sensorweb by boarding a boat. It was a prim-itive wooden yacht, old, simple, with patched sails and peeling white paint. Vera tottered from the dock and onto the dented, fish-smelling deck. A ragged crewman said something to her in Croatian.

She glanced once at the sailor. He meant nothing to her, he was even less than a newbie: some Balkan local in a sleeveless striped sailor's shirt, a floppy canvas hat. He wore sunglasses: not even spex. She saw her own face mirrored twice, on the shining lenses on his unshaven face.

"I came here to be with Herbert," she told the sailor.

The sailor smirked at her. Then he threw her a careless salute and set to work to cast off. Once the sails were up and the sailor was busy at his tiller, Herbert emerged from belowdecks. Herbert wore swimsuit trunks and a bor-rowed shirt much too small for him. She had never seen Herbert out of his Acquis uniform before. There was a forest of hair all over his arms and chest. With a flourish, Herbert unfolded a mildewed canvas deck chair. Vera sat in it. Then Herbert sat at her feet.

"How was your day?" he said.

"He wants me to defect," she told him. "He wants me to leave the Ac-quis and join his civil society. He said that I could have the whole island if I became Dispensation. That was his bribe for me." Herbert didn't seem much surprised by this. "So, what did you say to the gentleman's ambitious proposal?"

"I didn't say much. But I couldn't do it. I can't."

"I
knew
that!" Herbert crowed. "I knew you'd never sell me out! I knew you'd turn that son of a bitch down!" He rolled to his bare feet and fetched a big hand-woven wicker basket. He flapped its wooden lid open and produced a bottle of prosecco. "All the gold in California can't buy Vera Mihajlovic! Damn it, this calls for a celebration."

Vera accepted the wineglass he offered her. He yanked the cork from his bottle with a pop like a gunshot.

The wineglass was elegant and pretty. It was Austrian crystal. It brimmed with a foaming crest of bubbles.

"You could have ordered me not to see that man," she said, teary-eyed, "You didn't have to test me like that."

"Vera, I can't do that to you. I can't order you to do anything. I would have had to beg you. I would have had to beg you, please, not to break my heart." She had never seen him so happy as he was at this moment.

"I always know what you're feeling, Vera. But I never know what you think. So, yes, I did test you. I have tested you with nine years' hard labor. Well, precious, I promise you: That was your last test from me. The last one. From now on, everything between us is different."

"You really thought that I would leave you?"

"I know that you love me, Vera. But I know you love this place, too. This island is a part of you. You
are
this beautiful place. Could I order you to leave this island with me—for a terrible island, the worst in the world—if you wanted to stay and be that rich man's 'Duchess of Mljet'? I couldn't do that." He tipped his glass against hers, then sat back and drank. Vera sipped at the fizzing wine. She disliked alcohol. Drinking alcohol to alter one's emotions, that was such a strange thing to do. Herbert refilled his glass and gestured with the bottle's neck, at the long silhouette of darkening Mljet. The wind of early evening was brisk, and their crewman was making good speed on the rippled waters.

"I spent nine years of exile on that little rock," Herbert said. "If not for you, I would never have gone there at all. I was an empty man when I first came there. My wife dead. Kids dead. Broken and defeated in my own homeland. Full of horror. The world was in turmoil: half upheaval, half collapse—and it still is!

You see those cliffs, those hills? You know what that island was to me? That was a prototype. A test case. An exper-iment. And now look! We have won!"

She did not know what to tell him. The truth was so far beyond any words that he would understand. She knew very well what had happened, why they had met. She'd been in an evacuation camp on the Croatian mainland, along with a battered host of other weeping, traumatized women from Mljet. No-body had any food, or clothes, or medicine. They had nothing. They had nothing but mediation. The social workers, the Acquis rescue people, were there to get peo-ple to talk. That was postdisaster counseling, they said, and they seemed to believe that talk, bearing witness to what they had suffered, was more important to people's survival than food. Likely it was.

So the women were indeed talking, exchanging their names and some private bits and pieces of their broken lives. And one humble woman said, in her meek yet hopeful little voice, that maybe the lost is-land of Mljet could be redeemed someday. Maybe (said another) woman by "sensorwebs".

"Sensorwebs" were a foreign idea these women knew practically nothing about, but they'd heard that word and knew that webs were sup-posed to be important and powerful. There, in the midst of their loss, hungry and wounded and drowning in woe, that was their straw of hope. Vera knew better. Because she'd grown up in a seething, private bunker full of webs and sensors. Vera knew about event streams, burst rates, delta-change criteria, glitches, and collisions. Ubiquity had been installed in their bunker, as their nanny, and their spy, and their creche, and their test bed for tomorrow's superwomen: a nest of clones, who, just like their mother, would hunger always to put the world to rights. And, inside that wicked fairy tale, that black deception of false righ-teousness, they had grown up, believing that it was manifest destiny. While it was nothing of the kind. It was a snare, a delusion, a monstrosity.

So Vera had lost her senses.

She screamed at the startled women that it made no sense to cover the world with scanners and sensors, unless you also had scanners for the heads of the evil fools who had wrecked the world in the first place. Vera did not know why she had to scream that, except that she felt it, and it was the truth. The truth, of course, caused a big, hateful commotion among all the women, who screamed back at her and scolded her for talking that way . . . but then something strange happened. Some Acquis person, most likely a woman, had been watching the proceedings on the web.

For some reason, maybe a deep, tender sympathy, maybe some bu-reaucratic quirk, this woman had web-searched ideas . . . busily explor-ing and linking tags and concepts, correlating things and events,

"refugees," "reconstruction," "sensors," "brain scanners." Somehow, from the tangled glassy depths of global webdom, up popped some Australians, busily losing their own fierce battle to save their island continent. These distant Australians, so painfully familiar with refugee camps, knew a lot about scanners, neural tech, and heavy machinery. World-spanning, instant connectivity was the stuff of being for a global civil society. So, somewhere up in the Acquis administrative strat-osphere, cogwheels turned, galactic and distant. Six weeks later, Vera found herself meeting Herbert Fotheringay, an Australian geoengineer. A small Acquis neural corps was formed to redeem Mljet. Vera thought that Herbert had done that, while Herbert had always said that she had inspired it.

Now, sitting years later in the sagging deck chair in an old boat with the island sinking into darkness, Vera knew that no single person had ever done that. Mljet was a web of emerging technologies, around which people accreted.

Nothing much had been "invented" on Mljet. The brain scanners, the attention tracking, the neural software, the social software inside the camps, the sensors, the everyware, the communal property, even the heavy-duty exoskeletons—they all had years of development behind them, somewhere else. The one innovation was the way they'd been brought to life by peo-ple willing to believe in them, wanting to believe in them.

Herbert had always claimed that she, Vera, had "inspired" his efforts. Maybe. There was no way for any woman to deny that she had "in-spired" a man. It was true that she had been a girl in distress, demand-mg rescue.

What if a man came to the rescue? What if an army came? What if the army launched a thousand ships?

What if they won? What then?

"You're very lost in your own thoughts," he said tenderly.

"I am," she said.

"Well, you've certainly put a pretty spanner into their works today," Herbert said briskly. "That'll complicate matters upstairs. But I'm glad of it. I'm glad that snarky little real-estate hustler can't patch his deal to-gether and use you as his bait and his billboard. To hell with him and all his Yankee funding. I had hell-all for funding when you and I first tack-led that place" — Herbert waved off the starboard bow —

"and as for tack-ling the Big Ice, that is work for grown-ups. Vera: You and I will walk the Earth like Titans. You and me. Wait and see."

"Big machines," she murmured.

"Darling: I'm past that now. It's behind me. That's what these years have finally taught me. Any fool with a big budget can assemble big ma-chines. We're not mechanics, we are two engineers of human souls. We are. It's what we feel in our own bones—that's what matters in this world. The one mistake I made here was letting them set the limits on how we
felt.
"

"Did you make any mistakes here, Herbert?"

"In one sense, yes, I was blind. The children! No society thrives with-out children! When I saw how deeply you felt about that child, that niece of yours—then I knew what I had failed to offer you. Yes. I failed you. That tore me up."

"I'm sorry you were hurt, Herbert."

"Yes, that did hurt me, but the pain has opened my eyes. I once had children. They died in Australia. That ended that part of my world, I never got over that grief. But if we beat the Big Ice, you and me, then it will
rain
in Australia."

" 'Australia Fair,' " said Vera. Herbert had talked about his own home island, sometimes. A place much bigger than Mljet. The biggest island in the world. He spoke of how he had loved his homeland.

"I may never set my foot in a renewed, revived, redeemed Australia. But our children will live there. Vera, our children will laugh and sing. They'll be free. They'll be happy." There was a violent snap as the boat came about. The yachtsman tied off his mainsail, and tramped the little deck in his cheap rubber shoes. He spoke in Croatian.
"Srecnoi mnogo! Muske dece!
" Vera blinked.

"
Dobrodosao, zete!
" The sailor clapped Herbert across the back. Then he reached out his glad hand to Vera, and she realized, with a shock of revulsion, that the sailor was Djordje.

"You have really screwed up," Djordje told her cheerfully, in his German-tinged English. "I told John Montgomery that you would never do it his way—the smart way. All the world for love! Well, you cost me a lot of good business, Vera. But I forgive you. Because I am so happy, very happy, to
see
you settled in this way."

"You should express some sympathy for your sister," Herbert told him. "On the Big Ice, I'll work her harder than ever."

"There is no pleasing you global politicals," said Djordje. He found himself another deck chair, one even shabbier and more mildewed than the one that Vera perched on. "You spent nine years on that god-forsaken island there? That evil hellhole? And you never took one vaca-tion? Truly, you people kill me."

Vera grabbed hard for the shards of her sanity. "How have you been, Djordje? This is such a surprise for me."