Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

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 other­selves.

Her childhood fortress home… when this town of Palace 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 course­and 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. Ina 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 Palace 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 rust­weeping 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.

National governments were failing like sandcastles in the ominous greenhouse tide. There was nothing to shelter the planet’s populations from their naked despair at the scale of the catastrophes. Without any official oversight, the outlaw biotech on the island grew steadily wilder, ever more extreme. The toxic spills grew worse and worse, while the population, stewing in the effluent, sickened.

Then an earthquake, one of many common to the region, racked Mljet. The outlaw labs on the island, jimmied together in such haste, simply burst. They ruptured, they tumbled, they slid into the sea. The tourists and their hosts died from fizzing clouds of poison. Others were killed in the terrified scramble to flee the island for good. Polace had swiftly succumbed; the island’s other towns died more slowly, from the quake, the fires, the looting. When the last generators failed and the last light winked out there was nothing human on the island, nothing butthe cries of birds.

John Montgomery Montalban clearly knew this dreadful subject very well, since he had made this careful pilgrimage to see the island’s worst ruins firsthand. The California real-estate mogul calmly assessed the drowned wreckage through his tinted spex.

He told her it was “negative equity.”

Montalban, her strange brother-in-law, was a Dispensation policy wonk. He was cram-full of crisp, net-gathered, due-diligence knowledge. He was tall and elegant and persuasively talkative, with wavy black hair, suntanned olive skin, and sharp, polished teeth: big Hollywood film-star teeth like elephant ivory. His floral tourist shirt, his outdoor sandals, his multipocketed tourist pants: they were rugged and yet scarily clean. They seemed to repel dirt with some built-in chemical force.

No Dispensation activist would ever wear an Acquis neural helmet, so Vera could not know how Montalban truly felt about her and this dark meeting. Still, Montalban kept up a steady flow of comforting chatter.

Legend said that the raider ships of Ulysses had once moored in Mljet to encounter the nymph Calypso. Montalban knew about this. He judged the myth “not too unlikely.” He claimed that Homer’s Ulysses had “means, motive, and opportunity to swap his loot from Troy.”

Montalban further knew that Mljet had been a thriving resort island in the days of the Roman Empire. He was aware that “medieval devel­opers” had once built monasteries on the island, and that some of those stone piles were still standing and “a likely revenue source if repur­posed.”

Montalban entertained some firm opinions about the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire and its “autocratic neglect of the Balkan hin­terlands.” He even knew that the “stitched-up nation of Yugoslavia” had preserved Mljet as its stitched-up national park.

When it came to more recent history—years during Vera’s own lifetime—Montalban changed his tone. He became gallant and tact­ful. Her native island had been “abducted,” as he put it: as “an off­shore market for black globalization.” Montalban said nothing about the eighteen dark years that his own wife had spent on Mljet. He said nothing about Radmila whatsoever. Montalban was so entirely silent and discreet about Radmila that Vera felt dazed.

Moving onto firmer ground with a burst of verbal footwork, Montal­ban launched into a complex narrative, full of alarming details, describ­ing how the Acquis had managed to acquire Mljet to perform their neural experiments. Vera herself had never known half of these stories­—they existed at some networked level of global abstraction that she and her fellow cadres rarely encountered. The details of Acquis high-level committees were distant events for them, something like astronomy or Martian exploration, yet Montalban knew a host of astonishing things about the doctrines and tactics of both the global civil societies. Most particularly, Montalban seemed to know where their money went.

Vera felt grateful for the way events were turning out. Vera had no money—because Mljet had no money economy—but if she’d had any money, she’d have cheerfully entrusted it to someone like Montalban. Montalban was so entirely and devotedly obsessed by money that he had to be really good at banking.