Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

“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, teary­eyed, “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 exper­iment. 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. No­body 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 peo­ple 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 is­land 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 sup­posed 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 righ­teousness, 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 bu­reaucratic quirk, this woman had web-searched ideas… busily explor­ing 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 strat­osphere, 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 peo­ple 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 “in­spired” a man. It was true that she had been a girl in distress, demand­mg 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 to­gether 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 tack­led that place”—Herbert waved off the starboard bow—“and as for tack­ling 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 ma­chines. 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. ”