Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

She was purged of it. Yes, for the moment. But not in any way that mattered. She would never be purged of the past.

Herbert’s breakfast bowl was full of vitamin-packed nutraceuticals. It was impossible to eat such nourishing food and stay sick at heart. And he knew that.

Vera belched aloud.

“Vera, you’re overdoing the neural hardware. That’s clear to me. No more boneware for you till further notice.” Herbert deftly put the emp­tied bowl away. “I don’t want Mr. Montalban to see you inside your neu­ral helmet. The gentleman has a squeamish streak. We mustn’t alarm him.”

Herbert’s nutraceuticals methodically stole into Vera’s bloodstream. She knew it was wrong to burden Herbert with her troubles. It was her role to support Herbert’s efforts on Mljet, not to add to his many public worries.

“George was stupid to tell you anything about our family. That is dan­gerous. My mother kills people who know about her. She’s a national criminal. She is worse than her warlord husband, and he was terrible.”

Herbert smiled at this bleak threat, imagining that he was being brave. “Vera, let me make something clear to you. Your fellow cadres and I: We care for you deeply. We always want to spare your feelings. But: Everybody here on Mljet knows all about those criminal cloning labs. We know. Everybody knows what your mother was doing with those stem cells, up in the hills. They know that she was breeding super­women and training them in high technology—the ‘high technology’ of that period, anyway. That foolishness has all been documented. There were biopiracy labs all over this island. You—you and your beautiful sisters—you are the only people in the world who still think that local crime wave is a secret.”

Herbert smacked his fist into his open hand. “A clone is an illegal person. That’s all. This island is manned by refugees from failed states, so we’re all technically ‘illegal,’ like you. You can’t convince us that you’re the big secret monster from the big secret monster lab. Because we know you, and we know how you feel. We’re in solidarity with you, Vera. It’s all a matter of degree.”

Vera chose to say nothing about this vapid pep talk. No one under­stood the tangled monstrosity that was herself and her sisters, and no outsider ever would. The Gordian knot of pain and horror was beyond any possible unraveling. Justice was so far out of Vera’s reach… and yet there were nights when she did dream of vengeance. Vengeance, at least some nice vengeance. Any war criminal left a big shadow over the world. Many angry people wanted that creature called her “mother” pulled down from the sky. Whatever went up, must surely come down, someday—yes, surely, someday. As sure as rainstorms.

“Vera, your personal past was colorful. All right: Your past was a bloody disaster, so it was extremely colorful. But we all live in a postdisaster world. We have no choice about that reality. All of us live after the disaster, every­one. We can’t eat our hatreds and resentments, because those won’t nour­ish us. We can only eat what we put on our own tables—today. Am I clear to you?”

Vera nodded sullenly. Having put her through the emotional wringer, Herbert was going to praise her now.

“You have extensive gifts, Vera. You have talent and spirit. You are en­ergetic and pretty, and even if you tend to panic on some rare occasions, you always fulfill your duties and you never give up. The people who know you best: They all love you. That’s the truth about Vera Mihajlovic. Someday you will realize that about yourself. Then you’ll be happy and free.”

Vera lifted her chin. Herbert had been telling her these spirit-lifting things for nine long years. Herbert said them because he truly believed them. He believed them so heartily that sometimes she was almost con­vinced.

After all, the evidence was on his side. Mostly.

Herbert drew a conclusive breath. “So: As a great man once said, in times almost as dark as our own times, ‘Withhold no sacrifice, begrudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe: all will be well.’”

Maybe someday he would just put his arms around her. Not talk so much, not understand her so loudly and so thoroughly. Just be there for her. Be there like a man for a woman.

That wasn’t happening. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

VERA PICKED HER WAY BACK to her barracks, bare-headed and bare-eyed. The broken road was heavily overgrown; the flitting birds had no sensorweb tags, the flowery bushes had no annotations. Without her boneware, her arms and legs felt leaden. She had a heavy heart about the new assignment.

She was to “guide” John Montgomery Montalban around the island.

Vera knew what that meant-she had just become a spy. She was a spy now, pretending to be a guide. Something dark and horrible was tran­spiring between herself and Radmila.

Why was the Earth so small?

Radmila had sent her child and her husband here, so that her shadow would once again touch Mljet. Why did that woman exist? Radmila had no right to her existence.

Radmila’s fool of a husband-how had that man dared come here?

“On vacation,” he had said. Montalban had told the island’s project manager, told Herbert right to his face, that he was here as a “tourist.”

Could Montalban possibly imagine that Herbert, an Acquis officer, would be fooled by that lie? Vera felt shocked and numbed at the sheer audacity of such a falsehood. People who lived without brain scanners thought that they could get away with anything they said. The fetid pri­vacy of their unscanned brains boiled over with deception and cunning.

No wonder the world had come to ruin.

Maybe Montalban imagined that his story sounded plausible, be­cause Mljet had once had tourists—thousands of them. Before its decay, tourism had been the island’s economic base. And Montalban was an investment banker, specializing in tourism. He’d even said some­thing fatuous about his child’s “cultural heritage.”

Montalban was rich, he was from Los Angeles—which was to say, Montalban was from the Dispensation. Montalban was from the other global civil society, the other successor to the failed order of nation­states, the other global postdisaster network.

Acquis people struggled for justice. Dispensation people always talked about business. There were other differences between the two world governments, but that was the worst of it, that was the core of it. Everything the Acquis framed as common decency, the Dispensation framed as a profit opportunity. The Dispensation considered the world to be a business: a planetary “sustainable business.” Those people were all business to the bone.

Montalban had clearly come here to spy for the Dispensation, al­though global civil societies didn’t have any “spying.” They weren’t na­tions: so they had no “spying” and no “war.” They had “verification” and “coopetition” instead. They were the functional equivalents of spying and war, only much more modern, more in the spirit of the 2060s.

Vera wiped sweat from her aching brow. Maybe she could defy Her­bert, put on her trusty boneware, grab that “coopetitor” by the scruff of his neck, and “verify” him rightback onto his boat. If she did that—in a burst of righteous fury—how much real trouble could that cause? Maybe the cadres would sincerely admire her heartfelt burst of fury.

The Dispensation prized its right to “verify” what the Acquis did.

“Verification” was part of the arrangement between the network superpowers—a political arrangement, a detente, to make sure that no one was secretly building old-fashioned world-smashing super­weapons. In practice, “verification” was just another nervous habit of the new political order. The news was sure to leak over some porous network anyway, so it was better just to let the opposition “verify”… It kept them busy. Montalban had already toured an island attention camp… He was photographing it, taking many notes… Shopping for something, probably…