Read Online The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling - Free Book Online Page A

construction site . . . yet the clock never stopped ticking. John Montgomery Montalban had brought his own child to the is-land. This was a Dispensation propaganda of the deed. The shrewder Acquis cadres understood this as a deliberate provocation. A good one, since there wasn't a lot they could do about adorable five-year-olds. Montalban was simply showing everyone what they had missed, what they had sacrificed. Sentiment about the child was running high. Vera thought that it must take a cold-blooded father to exploit his own flesh and blood as a political asset, in this shrewd way. But John Montgomery Montalban had married Radmila Mihajlovic. He had married Radmila, and given her that child. There had to be something wrong with him, or he would never have done such a thing.
    Vera could literally track the child's path across the island by the peaks of emotional disturbance her presence created. Mary left a wake wherever her polished little shoes touched the Earth. The local Acquis cadres were unimpressed by Montalban. They con-sidered themselves bold souls, they'd seen much worse than him. They felt some frank resentment for any intruder on their island, yet Montal-ban was just another newbie, an outsider who could never matter to them on a gut level. Little Mary Montalban, though, was the walking proof of the cavity in their future. Vera knew that her own powerful feelings about the child had done much to provoke this problem. In an act of defiance, Vera had chosen to wear her boneware and her neural helmet to meet Montalban-—although Herbert had warned her against doing that. It had seemed to her like an act of personal integrity. Personal integrity did not seem to work with Montalban. So: no more of that. If Vera put her own helmet aside—from now until this crisis blew over—the trouble would end all the sooner.
    She had been wrong to trust her intuitions. She needed help. Karen would help her. Karen loved children. Karen had a lot of glory. Karen always understood hurt and trouble .

    ??????????

    JOHN MONTGOMERY MONTALBAN—through an accident or through his shrewd, cold-blooded cunning-had chosen a new, more distant site for their next meeting. Without her boneware, Vera had to hike there from her barracks, on foot.
    Mljet's few remaining roads were reduced to weedy foot trails. People in boneware had little need for roads: they simply jumped across the landscape, following logistics maps.
    Vera no longer had that advantage, so she had to tramp it. Luckily, she had Karen as counsel and company. Unluckily, Karen's stilting strides made Vera eat her dust.
    Modern life was always like this somehow, Vera concluded as sweat ran down her ribs. Impossible crises, bursting potentials. Rockets and pot-holes. Anything was possible, yet you were always on sore feet. Always, everywhere, ubiquitously. That was modern reality. Modern reality hurt. Vera coughed aloud.
    "Shall I carry you?" Karen said sweetly.
    Vera wearily crested a ragged limestone ridge. Her humble fellow pedestrians crowded the valley below her. They were women from the attention camps, hand-working the island with hatchets and trowels. The camp women wore their summer gear, with their hair up in ker-chiefs. Every one of them wore cheap, general-issue spex.
    Karen broke into a stilting run, bounding past the camp women like a whirlwind. The women offered Karen respectful salutes, awed by her cloud of glory.
    Vera trudged among the lot of them, panting, sweating, sniffling. The camp women ignored Vera. She had no visible glory. So she meant noth-ing to them.
    Vera took no offense. It was a software-design issue. Proper camp de-sign reflected the dominant camp demographics. Meaning: middle-aged city women. Most modern people lived in cities. Most modern people were middle-aged. So most modern people in refugee camps were nec-essarily middle-aged city women. As simple as that.
    These attention-camp newbies, these middle-aged city women, were diligently laboring