Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

Karen flexed her multijointed fingers. “But I’m not old like him, I’m young. I don’t want to postpone my life until we bring the past back to the future! I have to live now! For me!”

Clearly Vera’s time had come to absorb a confession. She restrained a sigh. “Karen, tell me all about ‘now’ and ‘me.’”

“When I first got to this island, yes, I was a wreck. I was hurt and scared, I was badly off. Neural tech is wonderful—now that I know what it’s for! Let me have those helmets. I know what to do with them. I’ll stick them on the head of every man in the world.”

Karen scowled in thought. “I have just one question for every man. ‘Do you really love this girl, or are you just playing around?’ That’s what matters. Give me true love, and I’ll give you a planet that’s completely changed! Totally changed. I’ll give you a brand-new world in six months! You wouldn’t even recognize that world!”

“Your soppy romance love story has no glory, Karen!”

“Vera, you are being a geek. All right? You are. Because you live in­side your mediation and your sensorweb. You never listen to the people with real needs! I fell in love here. Okay? A lot. With every guy in this barracks, basically. Okay, not with all of them, but… I give and I give and I emotionally give, and where is my one true love? When do I get happy?”

“Your scheme is irresponsible and it lacks any practical application.”

“No it isn’t. No it doesn’t. Anyway, things are bound to change here. Soon.” Karen folded her arms.

“I don’t see why.”

“I’ll tell you why. Because we will promote our next project manager from among the cadres, using an architecture of participation! That’s the succession plan. And our next leader isn’t going to be like old Her­bert. Our next big leader is bound to be one of us. ”

This scheme was new to Vera, so she was interested despite herself. In Mljet, it was always much more important to do the right thing with gusto than it was to nitpick about boring palace intrigues. And yet… there was politics here, every place had its politics.

“Look,” said Vera, “very clearly, we don’t have enough clout here to pick our own boss. If anything bad happened to Herbert, the Acquis committee would appoint some other project manager.”

“Oh no, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare do that.”

“Yes, they would. The Acquis are daring.”

Karen was adamant. “No they wouldn’t! They can’t send some gross newbie to Mljet to boss our neural elite! The cadres would laugh at him! They’d spit on him! They would kick his ass! He’d have no glory at all!”

Vera stared thoughtfully at Karen, then at the teeming mass of barracks­mates. It occurred to Vera that Karen, as the voice of the local people, was telling her the truth.

Vera was used to her fellow cadres—she could hardly have been more intimate with them, since their innermost feelings were spilled all over her screens.

But to outsiders, they might seem scary. Afer all, the Acquis neural cadres on Mljet were survivors from some of the harshest places in the world. They wore big machines that could lift cars. Even their women were rough, tough construction workers who could crack bricks with their fingers.

And—by the standards of people not on this island—they all lived inside-out. They didn’t “wear their hearts on their sleeves” —they wore their hearts on their skins.

They were such kind people, mostly, so supportive and decent… But—as a group—the cadres had one great object of general contempt. Every Acquis cadre despised newbies. “Newbies” were the fresh re­cruits. Acquis newbies had no glory, since they had not yet done any­thing to make the people around them feel happy, or impressed with them, or more fiercely committed to the common cause. All newbies were, by nature, scum.

So Karen had to be right. Nobody on this island would willingly ac­cept a newbie as an appointed leader. Not now, not after nine years of their neural togetherness. Afer nine years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, they were a tightly bonded pioneer society.

If they ever had a fit about politics, they were all going to have the same fit all at once.

Karen had found a big bag of sunflower seeds. She was loudly chew­ing them and spitting the husks into a cardboard pot. “Herbert’s succes­sion plan is to emotionally poll all the cadres,” Karen told her, rolling salted seed bits on her tongue. “Our people will choose a new leader themselves—the leader who makes them feel best.”

That process seemed intuitively right to Vera. That was how things al­ways worked best around here—because Mljet was an enterprise fueled on passionate conviction. “Well, Novakovic has our best glory rating. He always does.”

“Vera, open your big blue eyes. Novakovic is our chef! Of course we all like the chef Because he feeds us! That’s not what we want from our leader here! We want brilliancy! We want speed! We don’t need some stuffy, overcontrolled engineer! We need an inspiring figure with sex ap­peal and charisma who can take on the whole world! We need a ‘muse figure.’”

Vera squirmed on her taut pink cot. “We need some heavier equip­ment and some proper software maintenance, that’s what we really need around here.”

“Vera, you are the ‘muse figure’ on Mljet. You. Nobody else. Because we all know you. Your everyware touches everything that we do here.” Karen offered her a beaming smile. “So it’s you. You’re our next leader. For sure. And I’d love to have you as my boss. Boy, my life would be great, then. The Vera Mihajlovic Regime, that would be just about per­fect for me.”

“Karen, shut up. You’re my best friend! You can’t plot to make me the project manager! You know I’d become a wreck if that happened to me!”

“You were born a wreck,” said Karen, her eyes frank and guileless. “That’s why you’re my best friend!”

“Well, your judgment is completely clouded on this issue. I’m not a wreck! It’s the island that’s a wreck, and I am a solution. Yes, I had an awful time when I went down in that mine with you, I overdid that, I was stupid, but normally, I’m very emotionally stable. My needs and is­sues are all very clear to everyone. Plus, Herbert taught me a lot about geoengineering. I am very results-oriented.”

“Sure, Vera. Sure you are. You get more done around here than any­one else does. We all love you for that devotion to duty. You’re our golden darling.”

“Okay,” said Vera, growing angry at last. “Your campaign speech is impossible. That is crazy talk, that isn’t even politics.”

Karen backed off. She found a patch of open floor space. Then she stood up, unhinged her shoulders, lifted her left leg and deftly tucked her ankle behind her neck. No one in the barracks took much notice of these antics. Boneware experts always learned such things.

IN THE AZURE EASTERN DISTANCE, Vera saw the remote hills of the Croatian mainland: a troubled region called Peljesac by its survivors. The arid, wrinkled slopes of distant Peljesac had been logged off completely, scraped down to the barren bone by warlord profiteers.

Dense summer clouds were building over there. There would be storms by noon.

Montalban had chosen their rendezvous: a narrow bay, with a long stony bluff at its back. The ghost town of Polace was a briny heap of col­lapsing piers and tilted asphalt streetbeds. Offshore currents stirred the wreckage, sloshing flotsam onto Mljet’s stony shoulders: sunglasses, san­dals, indestructible plastic shopping bags, the obsolete coinage of vari­ous dead nationalities.