Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

Karen had to take the child away. Karen hated leaving Vera in this moment of crisis, but when Vera ordered her to leave, Karen did as she was told. The emotional rejection cut Karen to the quick. Tears ran down Karen’s face in streams. She and Mary Montalban clung to one another, sobbing as if they’d just seen someone die.

Montalban was entirely new to neural tech. His brain had not been properly calibrated over a long period of use. So, when Vera examined his neural output, his affect showed her nothing much. He had a kind of flatness. Almost an unnatural despair.

“Are you sick, John? You’re not very spiky.”

“Tranquilizers,” he said.

“You take mood medication?”

“I hav a very complex personal life,” Montalban muttered. The bluff, cheery, American look had vanished from his face. With his head stuffed uncomfortably into Karen’s dusty helmet, Montalban looked like a martyr in a crown of thorns.

“So,” he demanded. “Do you see everything that I’m thinking now?”

“Well… no, of course not. I do see a lot of slow P300 recognition waves.” That meant that Montalban recognized her. He knew her very well He had been looking at her for years.

His brain lacked the sparkly affect of Acquis male cadres, who saw her, mostly, as a pretty woman. Men did that. At the bottom of any vir­ile psyche, there was always some brisk neural reaction to a pretty woman.

There had never been any man on Mljet who looked at her with so much heartfelt confusion and grief. Montalban was looking at her as if the very sight of her were killing him.

“What do you see inside of me?” Montalban grated. “Do you think I’m crazy? Am I lying to you? Or is it all just as I told you?”

“John, this technology is not like you imagine it. Try to relax.”

“These knobs hurt,” he whined. “How can you let big rubber knobs squeeze your skull like that? Can’t you crackpots build some more sen­sitive scanners? Build them into a nice little sun hat, a beret or some­thing.”

“That’s a safety helmet. It’s designed for construction work.”

“There’s another part I just don’t get. Helmets and skeletons! Why don’t you just buy a bulldozer? Bulldozers are cheap! Get a dragline, get an excavator!”

“We tried working that way,” Vera told him. “But it feels wrong to us. It means more to our people when they can save the world with their own hands.”

“You can’t save the world on gusts of emotion!” he shouted. “That idea is for fanatics and losers!”

“You are so bitterly unhappy,” Vera told him. “You’re depressed! Your affect is very low and bad—that means you’ve lost heart in what you’re doing. You know what? You’re working much too hard at something that you don’t like. You need a vacation.”

Montalban’s affect leaped violently. He began to laugh. He was at this quite awhile, “That was a really good joke,” he said at last. “Thank you for telling me that one.”

“She’s made you so miserable,” Vera said,

“No,” said Montalban, “she was great to me. I knew what I was doing. I wanted to rescue Radmila. And I did that, I won. The Dispensation is a great force for good, I found a lost young girl and I turned her into a star. I transformed her. Although Mila was always bound for glory. We really know what glory is, in Hollywood.”

“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, because 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. Be­cause 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 TIME to find Herbert. Stunningly, the sensor­web 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 prim­itive 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 bor­rowed 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 Ac­quis 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?”