The Caryatids

Acquis neural scanners could easily read ecstasy and dread. Murderous fury. Pain and injury. Lassitude, grief, hatred, exaltation, bursting pride, bitter guilt, major depression, suicidal despair, instinctive loathing, sly de­ception, abject terror, burning resentment, a mother’s love, and unstop­pable tears of sympathy.

Acquis neural tech was still a young, emergent field, but it was al­ready advanced enough to create a vital core of users and developers. Herbert was one of those people. So was every other Acquis cadre on Mljet. Herbert was an Acquis neural apparatchik, a seasoned captain of the industry.

Vera was his lieutenant.

Heat prickled the back of Vera’s neck. “There’s no big debriefing for me, Herbert? You know as well as I do that I completely lost my wits down there!”

“Yes, you suffered a panic attack,” Herbert said blandly. “It’s one of your character flaws. We all have them. It’s our flaws that give us our character.”

Vera was now certain that there was something dreadful in the works for her. Herbert was much too calm.

Vera analyzed her boss’s ugly face. Why did she love him so?

When she’d first met Herbert, he had badly scared her. Herbert was old, ugly, foreign, and fanatical. Worst of all, Herbert had bluntly in­sisted that she stick her head into an experimental helmet that scanned people’s brains. Vera knew that ubiquitous computing was very powerful: she did not want that technology applied inside her skull. Vera feared that for good reasons. She had seen her loved ones shot down dead, and she had feared that less.

Vera had obeyed Herbert anyway, because Herbert was willing to res­cue Mljet. No one else of consequence seemed even willing to try. The Acquis were global revolutionaries. They got results in the world. They did some strange things, yes—but they never, ever stopped trying.

So Vera had swallowed the panic and let the machine swallow her head.

Vera had swiftly learned that wearing a brain machine was a small price to pay to learn the feelings of others.

Herbert Fotheringay was an ugly man, but he had such a beautiful soul. Herbert had a touching simplicity of character. He brimmed over with kindness and goodness. For those who earned his trust and shared his aims, Herbert was a tireless source of strength and support. Herbert meant every word that he had ever said to her.

She had joined his effort as a bitter, grieving eighteen-year-old, her home demolished and her loved ones shot dead or scattered across the world. Yet Herbert and his scanners had instantly seen beyond her fear and misery. The machines had sensed the depth of her passionate love for her homeland. Herbert had always treated Vera as the heart and soul of his Mljet effort.

Herbert had made himself her mentor. He set her tests, he gave her tasks. She had eagerly seized those chances, and they had done so well. They had accomplished so much, together, side by side. The wounded island was healing before their eyes. Innovation was coming thick and fast, amazing insights, new services, new techniques. Transformations were bursting from her little island that were fit to transform the world.

Yet every industry had its hazards. Herbert and Vera had been close colleagues for nine years. They were very close now—they were too close. It had taken them years, but now, whenever Herbert and Vera met face-to- face, there were strong bursts of neural activity in the medial in­sula, the anterior cingulate, the striarum, and the prefrontal cortex.

That meant love. An emotion so primal was impossible to mistake. Love was Venus rising from her neural seas, as obvious to a neural scan­ner as a match in a pool of kerosene.

Vera was very sorry for the operational burden that her love brought to Herbert and the cadres on the island. In the Acquis neural project, leaders were held to especially high standards. Since he was project manager, Herbert was in some sense officially required to suffer.

To win the trust of the other neural cadres, to coax out their best ef­forts, their boss had to manifest clear signs of deep emotional engage­ment with large, impressive mental burdens. Otherwise he’d be dismissed as a fake, a poseur, a lightweight. He’d be replaced by some­one else, someone more eager, more determined, more committed.

There were people—especially the younger and more radical cadres on Mljet—who whispered that she, Vera Mihajlovic, should become the project manager. After all, she was twenty-six and had grown up within the neural system and the sensorweb, whereas Herbert was fifty-­two and had merely engineered such things. Whenever it came to re­deeming Mljet, Vera was burningly committed and utterly sincere. Herbert was older, wiser, and a foreigner, so he was merely interested.

Herbert had his flaws. Herbert’s largest character flaw was that he was publicly in love with a subordinate half his age. Anyone who wanted to look at Herbert’s brain would know this embarrassing fact, and since Herbert was in authority, everyone naturally wanted to look at his brain.

Such was their situation, a snarl that was humanly impossible. Yet it was their duty to bear the burden of it. So far, they had both managed to bear it.

Herbert gently drummed his thick red fingers on his folding camp table. Heaven only knew what labyrinth of second-guessing was going on within his naked head. He seemed to expect her to make the next emotional move, to impulsively spit something out.

What was he feeling? Had Herbert finally learned to hate her? Yes! In a single heart-stabbing instant, this suspicion flamed into conviction.

Herbert despised her now. He hated all the trouble she had given him.

He’d just claimed that he was “reassigning” her. He meant to fire her from the project. He would throw her onto a supply boat and kick her ­off Mljet. She would be expelled, shipped to some other Acquis recla­mation project: Chernobyl, Cyprus, New Orleans. She would never proudly wear her boneware again, she’d be reduced to a newbie peon. This meant the end of everything.

Herbert touched his chin. “Vera, did you sleep at all last night?”

“Not well,” she confessed. “My barracks are so full of dirty newbies…” Vera had tossed and turned, hating herself for panicking in the mine, and dreading this encounter.

“A good night’s sleep is elementary neural hygiene. You need to teach yourself to sleep. That’s a discipline.”

She gnawed at a fingernail.

“Eat,” he commanded. He shoved his soup bowl across the little camp table. She reluctantly unfolded a camp stool and sat.

“Breakfast will stabilize your affect. You’ve spent too much time in a helmet lately. You need a change of pace.” He was coaxing her.

“There’s no such thing as ‘too much time in a helmet.’”

“Well, there’s also no such thing as a proper Acquis officer skipping meals and failing to sleep. Eat.”

She was dying to eat from the simple bowl that Herbert used. That big warm spoon in her hand had just been inside Herbert’s mouth.

Herbert edged past her and zippered the entrance to his tent. This gesture was a pretense, since there was very little sense in fussing about privacy in an attention camp. People made a big fuss anyway, because life otherwise was unbearable.

Neither of them were wearing their helmets: not even neural scan­ning caps. Any emotion coursing through them would stay off the record. How dangerous that felt.

Reaching behind his polished rack of boneware, Herbert found an ancient, itchy hat of Australian yarn. He stretched this signature bonnet over his naked head. Then he scratched under it. “So. Let’s discuss your new assignment. An important visitor has arrived here. He’s a banker from Los Angeles, and he took a lot of trouble to come bother us. This man says he knows you. Do you know John Montgomery Montalban?”

Vera was shocked. This was the last news she had ever expected to hear from Herbert’s lips. She dropped the spoon, leaned forward on her stool, and began to cry.

Herbert contemplated this behavior. He was saddened by the dirty spoon. “You really should eat, Vera.”

“Just send me back down into the mine.”

“I know that you have a troubled family history,” said Herbert. “That’s not a big secret, especially on this island. Still, I just met this John Mont­gomery Montalban. I see no need for any panic about him. I have to say I rather liked Mr. Montalban. He’s a perfectly pleasant bloke. Very busi­nesslike.”

“Montalban is that stupid rich American who married Radmila. Make him go away. Hurry. He’s bad