Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

“Karen, what is this about?”

“Your niece came here to our barracks this morning,” said Karen. “While you were being debriefed. She’s the only little girl on this whole island. She walked straight into here, right up that aisle, through that big mess piled there. Like a princess, like she was born in here. The place was full of grown-ups wearing skeletons. Tough guys. Changing shifts. You know. Naked people. She wasn’t one bit scared! She even sang them a little song. Something about her favorite foods: soup and cookies!”

“’Soup and cookies’?” said Vera unbelieving, though Karen never lied.

“The cadres couldn’t believe that either! They never saw anything like that! That kid can really sing, too—you should have heard them cheer! Then she left this beautiful gift just for you.”

Vera kept her face stiff, but she could feel herself gritting her teeth.

Karen, as always, was keen to sympathize. “We couldn’t help but love that ‘Little Mary Montalban.’ I know someday she’ll be a big star.” Karen bounced on the stainless pink fabric of her surplus medical cot. “So, do it! Open this gift from your weird estranged niece! I’m dying to see what she brought for you!”

“Since you’re so excited, you can open that.”

Karen sniffed the scented gift card and ripped into the wrappings. She removed a crystal ball.

The crystal ball held a little world. A captive bubble of water. It was a biosphere. Herbert often mentioned them. They were modeling tools for environmental studies.

Biospheres were clever toys, but unstable, since their tiny ecosystems were so frail.

Biospheres were pretty at first, but they had horribly brieflives. Sooner or later, disaster was sure to strike that little world. Living systems were never as neat and efficient as clockworks. Biology wasn’t machinery. So, as time passed, some aspect of the miniature world would depart from the normal parameters. Some vital salt or mineral might leach out against the glass. Some keystone microbe might die off—or else bloom crazily, killing everything else.

A biosphere was a crystal world that guaranteed doom.

Karen peered through the shining bubble, her freckled cheekbones warping in reflection. “This is so clever and pretty! What do people call this?”

“I’d call that a ‘thanatosphere.’”

“Well! What a name!” Karen deftly tossed the gleaming ball from hand to hand. “Why that big sour face? Your gift from that princess is fit for a queen!” Watery rainbows chased themselves across Vera’s blanket.

“That toy comes from a rich Dispensation banker. He’s a spy, and that’s a bribe. That’s the truth.”

Karen blinked. “Rich bankers are giving you gifts? Well then! You’re coming up in the world! I always said you would.”

“I don’t need that toy. I don’t want it. You can keep it.”

“Truly?” Karen caressed the crystal with her cheek. “Won’t somebody get mad about that?”

“Nobody from the Acquis. Nobody that matters to us.”

“Well, I’m so happy to have this! You’re very generous, Vera! That is one of your finest character traits.”

Now Karen was intrigued, so she really bored in. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about toys like this. Dispensation people are crazy for their fancy gifts and gadgets. They’re big collectors’ items, from high society! I bet this toy is worth a lot of cash.”

Vera methodically ripped the gift box to shreds. It was lined with vel­vet, with slender walls made of some fine alien substance, like parch­ment. It smelled like fresh bamboo. “They call their toys ‘hobjects.’”

“Oh yeah. I knew that, too.” Karen clutched the ball. “Wow, Vera, I privately own a fancy hobject! I feel so glamorous!”

“Karen, don’t manifest sarcastically. Only little kids take candy from strangers.”

Karen was hurt by this reproof. “But Little Mary is a little kid.”

“That toy is sure to rot soon. It’ll turn dark and ugly.”

Karen rolled the shining ball across the backs of her fingers. Karen’s use of neural gauntlets had made her dexterous—if her boneware was much like a skeleton, her skeleton had become rather like boneware. “Now, Vera: What kind of dark, bleak attitude are you projecting at me here? This is a whole little world! Look at all this wonderful stuff float­ing around in here! There’s a million pieces of it, and they’re all con­nected! You know what? I think this little world has a little sensorweb built in!”

“Oh no,” said Vera. “That would be perverse.”

“This is art! It’s an art hobjectl”

Vera flinched. “Stop juggling it!”

Karen’s brown eyes shone with glee. “I can see little shrimp! They’re swimming around in there! They’re jumbo shrimp!”

Karen’s eager teasing had defeated her. Vera reached out.

The biosphere held elegant branches of delicate fringed seaweed, bobbing in a vivid, reeling, fertile algae soup. The pea-green water swarmed with a vivid, pinhead-sized menagerie of twitchy rotifers and glassy roundworms.

And, yes, the sphere also held a darting, wriggling family of shrimp. These shrimp were the grandest denizens of their miniature world. Ma­jestic, like dragons.

The crystal of the biosphere was lavishly veined. Some extremely deft machine had laser-engraved a whole Los Angeles of circuits through that crystal ball. The circuits zoomed around the water world like a thousand superhighways.

“Americans will buy anything,” Karen said.

The dragon shrimp swam solemnly above an urban complex of fairy skyscrapers. Glittering extrusions grew like frost from the crystal into the seawater. Complex. Mysterious. Alluring.

It was as if, purely for random amusement, some ship-in-a-bottle fa­natic had built himself… what? Factories like fingernail parings. Mini­distilleries. Desalinators, and filters, and water-treatment plants. A pocket city, half greenish ooze and half life-support network.

Squinting in disbelief, Vera lifted the biosphere into a brighter glare. Half the glass darkened as a thousand tiny shutters closed.

This was a lovely gift. Someone had been extremely thoughtful. It was apt. It was rich with hidden meaning. It was a seduction, and meant to win her over. Vera had never seen anything in her harsh and dutiful life that was half so pretty as this.

With a pang, Vera handed the biosphere back to Karen. Karen rolled it carelessly toward her distant cot. “Vera, no wonder bankers are court­ing you. I think the boss has decided to marry you.”

“I’d do that.” Vera nodded. There was never any use in being coy with Karen.

“Marrying the boss,” said Karen, “is too easy a job for you. Herbert never gives you easy jobs.”

Vera laughed. Karen never seemed to think hard, but somehow Karen always said such true things.

“Did you know that Herbert has filed a succession plan?”

Vera nodded, bored. “Let’s not talk local politics.”

Karen stuck a medical swab in her ear, rolled it around at her leisure, and examined the results. “Let me tell you my emotions about this suc­cession business. It’s time that Herbert moved on. Herbert is a typical start-up guy. A start-up guy has got a million visionary ideas, but he never knows what they’re good for. He doesn’t know what real people in the real world will do with his big ideas.”

Vera scowled at such disloyalty. “You never used to talk that way about Herbert. You told me Herbert saved your life!”

Karen looked cagey. This was a bad sign, for though Karen had deep emotional intelligence, she wasn’t very bright.

“That was then, and this is now. Our situation here is simple,” said Karen mistakenly. “Herbert found some broken people to work very hard here, repairing this broken island. We heal ourselves with his neu­ral tech, and we heal the land with mediation at the same time. Inside heals outside. That’s great. That’s genius. I’m Acquis, I’m all for that. Sweat equity, fine! We get no pay, fine! We live in a crowded barracks, no privacy at all, no problem for me! Someday it’ll snow on the North Pole again. Men as old as Herbert, they can remember when the North Pole had snow.”