The Caryatids

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 con­sidered themselves bold souls, they’d seen much worse than him. They felt some frank resentment for any intruder on their island, yet Montal­ban 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 pot­holes. 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 ker­chiefs. 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 noth­ing to them.

Vera took no offense. It was a software-design issue. Proper camp de­sign 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 nec­essarily middle-aged city women. As simple as that.

These attention-camp newbies, these middle-aged city women, were diligently laboring in the open fields of an Adriatic island. They’d never planned to meet such a fate. They’d simply known that, as refugees without options, they were being offered a radically different life.

When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their IDtags. As proper high-tech pio­neers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun.

The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies.

As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded what­ever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening.

The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close atten­tion would become an expert.

The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes.

As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. “Glory” was the primary Acquis virtue.

Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard—not when you simply heard about the concept. But when you saw glory, with your own two eyes, the invisible world made so visible, glory every day, glory a fact as inescapable as sunlight, glory as a glow that grew and waned and loomed in front of your face—then you understood.

Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be.

Camp people badly needed reasons to be. Before being rescued by the Acquis, they’d been desolated. These city women, like many city women, had no children and no surviving parents. They’d been uprooted by mas­sive disasters, fleeing the dark planetary harvest of droughts, fires, floods, epidemics, failed states, and economic collapse.

These women, blown across the Earth as human flotsam, were becom­ing pioneers here. They did well at adapting to circumstance-because they were women. Refugee women—women anywhere, any place on Earth—had few illusions about what it meant to be flotsam.

Vera herself had been a camp refugee for a while. She knew very well how that felt and what that meant. The most basic lesson of refugee life was that it felt bad. Refugee life was a bad life.

With friends and options and meaningful work, camp life improved.

Then camp life somewhat resembled actual life. With time and more structure and some consequential opportunities, refugee life was an ac­tual life. Whenever strangers became neighbors, whenever they found commonalities, communities arose. Where there were communities, there were reasons to live.

Camp user statistics proved that women were particularly good at founding social networks inside camps. Women made life more real. Men stuck inside camps had a much harder time fending off their de­spair. Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed.

Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. “Fight or flight.” Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. “Tend and be­friend.”

So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was de­signed to exploit those realities.

First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools.

The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bit­ter competition over power tools. It acted on men like a tonic.

Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an Acquis attention camp improved steadily with human usage. Exploiting the spex, the attention camp tracked every tiny movement of the user’s eye­balls. It nudged its everyware between the users and the world they per­ceived.

Comparing the movements of one user’s eyeballs to the eyeballs of a thousand other users, the system learned individual aptitudes.

A user who was good with an ax would likely be good with a water saw. A user quick to learn about plants could quickly learn about soil chemistry and hydrology. Or toxicity. Or meteorology. Or engineering. Or any set of structured knowledge that the sensorweb flung before the user’s eyes.

The attention camp had already recorded a billion things that had caught the attention of thousands of people. It preserved and displayed the many trails that human beings had cut through its fields of data. The camp was a search engine, a live-in tutoring machine. It was entirely and utterly personal, full of democratically trampled roads to human re­demption. By design, it was light, swift, glorious, brilliant.

Vera had spent time in attention camps. So had Karen. This initia­tion was required of all the Acquis cadres