Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

Montalban brushed sand from his walking shoes. “I suppose we are lucky, though we live in a world in disaster. Multiparty states never ac­complish anything.”

“You’re still talking nonsense, though, John. You know that, don’t you?”

“All right. Fine. I’m talking nonsense. I apologize. You explain some­thing to me, then. Tell me why your friend there is playing with my daughter, while she’s got her brain inside a kettle and she’s wearing robot construction equipment that could break every single bone in my little girl’s body.”

Vera glanced up the beach at Karen. Karen and the little girl were getting along splendidly. Mary Montalban was scampering along the beach like a wound-up top, while Karen bounded over the child’s head in boneware leaps that could have cleared the tops of trees.

“Have you ever had your brain scanned?” Vera asked him.

“I have regular medical checkups,” said Montalban. “My brain is just fine. My brain is not a peripheral for heavy construction machinery.”

“In other words, you believe we’re monsters. You really hate us.”

“I would never say that!” protested Montalban. “Look at me benignly tolerating all this! Am I denouncing you, or your crazy friend in the robot spacesuit there? Not a bit of it!”

“You hate what we do here. You’re too American to understand us.”

“Oh no, no no! Don’t bring outdated nationalism into this, for heaven’s sake! You’ve never even been to America! You don’t under­stand how America works nowadays! Believe me, there are big patches of America that are extremely Acquis in their sentiments. Seattle is very Acquis. Raleigh; Madison, Wisconsin; Austin in Texas—they’re all Ac­quis. San Francisco is Acquis! And Canada, too! Canada was Acquis be­fore most of Europe was Acquis!”

“Do you think I’m a fanatic?”

“I never use pejorative terms like that, and I despise the evil dema­gogues who do! You’re just—you’re truly a woman of our age, that’s what I think about you.”

“Why are you here? What didn’t you leave me alone here? I never wanted you here. I was happy here.”

“Vera, I know that you think that you are evil. You have no esteem for yourself. But you are not evil. You were created through evil, but you are sweet and good. You’re a very good person. You were born in an un­happy place at a time when that place was evil. That’s the evil part. You—you’ve been part of everything that happened here to make things better. You raised this place from the rubble and you held the whole place up. You almost did it alone.”

Vera burst into tears.

“Your colleagues here think the world of you,” said Montalban. “They trust your judgment. They’re proud of you. That’s why you’re the central figure here. If you move, the whole thing will move. You must sense that. You’re intelligent, you must know that.”

Vera choked on a sob. “I’m having an emotional fit.”

“I’ve seen those fits,” Montalban agreed. “Believe me, I know a lot about those.”

“I’m just not all right without my helmet. I need a scan so I can know what I’m really feeling.”

Montalban looked at her soberly. “You really look a lot prettier with­out that canteen on your head.”

“Scanning helps me. It is a powerful tool.”

“That,” said Montalban, “is why that tool has been restricted to a very small group of users in an otherwise hopeless situation.”

She could see that her tears were affecting him strongly. His face had grown much-softer. He looked thoughtful and handsome, truly sympa­thetic. He looked at her as if he loved her more than anything in the world.

“If you never scan your own brain,” said Vera, wiping at her cheeks, “how do you know what you feel about all this?”

Montalban looked at her slowly. “Vera, that is a truly weird question.”

“I think you should put on a helmet,” said Vera, sitting up. “You could put on Karen’s helmet! You should put on her helmet, and then you and I should have a really good talk, heart to heart.”

Montalban, instantly, went pale. “That’s just not admissable,” he told her. “That is just not a move that you and I should undertake.”

“I was very scared of it too, at first,” said Vera. “But I wear a scanner every day now. It’s not bad for you. It’s brilliant.”

Montalban forced an uneasy smile. “I’ll stay pretty dull, thanks! I know a thing or two about that practice! Shaving patches on my skull? No, we don’t ruin an expensive haircut on impulse, do we?”

“You don’t really need to shave any skin patches,” said Vera. “Because you won’t be running any boneware.”

“I don’t have the proper training for your helmets. You have to have your brain scrubbed first in those concentration camps.”

“They’re attention camps! How can you say such nasty things about us? You’re a fool! You have no heart. You don’t know anything real.”

Montalban jumped to his feet and walked off down the beach. Vera caught up with him and seized his arm. “An attention camp saved my life,” she said. “Can’t you understand that?”

“That’s for helpless refugees who are cornered and have no other choice,” he said. “I’m not helpless and cornered. I don’t care what you call that practice: that is an extreme form of sensory control.”

“It’s sensory analysis. See, you don’t understand it, you’re talking about it all wrong.”

Montalban’s opaque eyes, always rather shifty, began to dart from side to side. “You want to read my mind. You want to pry inside my own brain.”

“John, don’t hate me. I don’t believe that you and I are enemies. We don’t think alike, we can’t, but… I know that I like you. I think we could have been good friends.”

“’Friends.’ Friends? Hell, woman, I married you!” Montalban waved his hat at his reddening face. “I should never have come here. You don’t know what it does to me to see you like this. To come here… and to bring the child, for God’s sake… She’s going to make me regret this.”

“You mean Radmila. She didn’t want you to do this.”

“You said her name, not me! We don’t have to discuss Radmila. Rad­mila Mihajlovic doesn’t exist. My wife will never cross your path, ever. Because she hates your guts. For years, I could never understand why.”

“Radmila hates me?”

“Like a passion. Like a curse. She’s eaten up with it. Then I met Djordje. Djordje told me some things about what happened here. Ter­rible things. Then I met Sonja. And oh, my God. Now I do understand it, all of it, and that is much, much worse.”

Vera put her head in her hands. She began to cry again, much harder. “I can almost fix that damage,” he told her. “I’ve come so close to fix­ing it, so many times. Djordje is almost all right—he’s a tough business­man, but he’s smart, he’s no weakling. Sonja fights for what she thinks is right. Mila has done amazing things—she’s truly gifted. And you­—you’re the good one. You’re kind and sweet, you’re the one with the best intentions.”

Vera made a choice in her heart. “If I could believe you, John, I would do what you say.”

“You would do what I say? You mean agree to the deal, go through with it?”

“Yes. But I have to know. I have to know it’s the truth.”

“All right, if that’s what you want from me, then I guess we’ll really talk. I guess we have no other choice. So: Fine, let’s do it. Go get your lie-detector helmet. It doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen worse. Just pull that crazy thing off your girlfriend’s head before she tears my little girl into pieces.”

They retreated up the trail and into the pine woods. They found a ragged clearing there. It took Vera half an hour to properly fit the scan­ner to Montalban’s skull. His daughter sobbed in fear.