The Caryatids

searched ideas… busily explor­ing and linking tags and concepts, correlating things and events, “refugees,” “reconstruction,” “sensors,” “brain scanners.”

Somehow, from the tangled glassy depths of global webdom, up popped some Australians, busily losing their own fierce battle to save their island continent. These distant Australians, so painfully familiar with refugee camps, knew a lot about scanners, neural tech, and heavy machinery.

 World-spanning, instant connectivity was the stuff of being for a global civil society. So, somewhere up in the Acquis administrative strat­osphere, cogwheels turned, galactic and distant.

Six weeks later, Vera found herself meeting Herbert Fotheringay, an Australian geoengineer.

A small Acquis neural corps was formed to redeem Mljet. Vera thought that Herbert had done that, while Herbert had always said that she had inspired it.

Now, sitting years later in the sagging deck chair in an old boat with the island sinking into darkness, Vera knew that no single person had ever done that. Mljet was a web of emerging technologies, around which people accreted.

Nothing much had been “invented” on Mljet. The brain scanners, the attention tracking, the neural software, the social software inside the camps, the sensors, the everyware, the communal property, even the heavy-duty exoskeletons—they all had years of development behind them, somewhere else.

The one innovation was the way they’d been brought to life by peo­ple willing to believe in them, wanting to believe in them.

Herbert had always claimed that she, Vera, had “inspired” his efforts. Maybe. There was no way for any woman to deny that she had “in­spired” a man. It was true that she had been a girl in distress, demand­mg rescue.

What if a man came to the rescue? What if an army came? What if the army launched a thousand ships? What if they won? What then?

“You’re very lost in your own thoughts,” he said tenderly.

“I am,” she said.

“Well, you’ve certainly put a pretty spanner into their works today,” Herbert said briskly. “That’ll complicate matters upstairs. But I’m glad of it. I’m glad that snarky little real-estate hustler can’t patch his deal to­gether and use you as his bait and his billboard. To hell with him and all his Yankee funding. I had hell-all for funding when you and I first tack­led that place”—Herbert waved off the starboard bow—“and as for tack­ling the Big Ice, that is work for grown-ups. Vera: You and I will walk the Earth like Titans. You and me. Wait and see.”

“Big machines,” she murmured.

“Darling: I’m past that now. It’s behind me. That’s what these years have finally taught me. Any fool with a big budget can assemble big ma­chines. We’re not mechanics, we are two engineers of human souls. We are. It’s what we feel in our own bones—that’s what matters in this world. The one mistake I made here was letting them set the limits on how we felt.”

“Did you make any mistakes here, Herbert?”

“In one sense, yes, I was blind. The children! No society thrives with­out children! When I saw how deeply you felt about that child, that niece of yours—then I knew what I had failed to offer you. Yes. I failed you. That tore me up.”

“I’m sorry you were hurt, Herbert.”

“Yes, that did hurt me, but the pain has opened my eyes. I once had children. They died in Australia. That ended that part of my world, I never got over that grief. But if we beat the Big Ice, you and me, then it will rain in Australia.”

“‘Australia Fair,’” said Vera. Herbert had talked about his own home island, sometimes. A place much bigger than Mljet. The biggest island in the world. He spoke of how he had loved his homeland.

“I may never set my foot in a renewed, revived, redeemed Australia. But our children will live there. Vera, our children will laugh and sing. They’ll be free. They’ll be happy.”

There was a violent snap as the boat came about. The yachtsman tied off his mainsail, and tramped the little deck in his cheap rubber shoes. He spoke in Croatian. “Srecno i mnogo! Muske dece! ”

Vera blinked.

“Dobrodosao, zete!” The sailor clapped Herbert across the back. Then he reached out his glad hand to Vera, and she realized, with a shock of revulsion, that the sailor was Djordje.

“You have really screwed up,” Djordje told her cheerfully, in his German-tinged English. “I told John Montgomery that you would never do it his way—the smart way. All the world for love! Well, you cost me a lot of good business, Vera. But I forgive you. Because I am so happy, very happy, to see you settled in this way.”

“You should express some sympathy for your sister,” Herbert told him. “On the Big Ice, I’ll work her harder than ever.”

“There is no pleasing you global politicals,” said Djordje. He found himself another deck chair, one even shabbier and more mildewed than the one that Vera perched on. “You spent nine years on that god­forsaken island there? That evil hellhole? And you never took one vaca­tion? Truly, you people kill me.”

Vera grabbed hard for the shards of her sanity. “How have you been, Djordje? This is such a surprise for me.”

“Call me ‘George,’ “ he corrected. “My life is good. I have another baby on the way. That would be number three.”

“Oh my.”

Djordje helped himself to a fizzing glass of prosecco. “That’s not what you say to wonderful news like mine, Vera. You say: ‘Mnogo muske dece!’ ‘Hope it’s a son!’”

Vera had not seen Djordje face-to-face in ten years. He’d been a scrawny seventeen-year-old kid on the night he’d sabotaged the sensor­web, jumped the bunker wall, and fled their compound forever. The agony of having their little brother rebel, defect, and vanish was the first irrefutable sign that all was not well in caryatid fairyland.

The seven world-princesses, Vera, Biserka, Sonja, Bratislava, Svetlana, Kosara, and Radmila: they all had joined hands, eyes, and minds in their mystic circle, and sworn to eradicate every memory of their traitor-to-­ futurity. Yet he had left their ranks incomplete, and the tremendous en­ergies that unified them were turning to chaos.

Toward chaos, hatred, and an explosion of violence, and yet here was Djordje, their traitor, not vanished, not eradicated, as he so deserved to be: no, he was prosperous, pleased with himself, and as big as life. Bigger. Because Djordje was all grown-up. Grown-up, Djordje was very big.

He was half a head taller than she was. His face was her face, but big and broad and male. Djordje had a bull’s forehead, a bristling blond mustache, and a forest of blond bristles on his chin and cheeks and neck. His chest was flat and his gut was like a barrel and his big male legs were like tree trunks.

She was horribly afraid of him. He was here and smiling at her, yet he should not be. His existence was wrong.

“Your brother has lent us this boat,” said Herbert. “So that we could be alone—just for once! Out of surveillance. So I could ask you to marry me.”

“It was my honor to lend you my old boat,” said Djordje nobly. “And I approve of your aims.”

“Nine years under a sensorweb,” mourned Herbert. “Nine years in at­tention camps where the system watches your eyeballs! My God, it was Acquis-officer this, boss-and-subordinate that; no wonder we both were so stifled! You know what the next step is—after we marry? We need to work together to widen the emotional register of the neural society! No more of that hothouse atmosphere: half barracks, half brothel… something grand, something decent!”

“How?” said Vera.

“In Antarctica! It’s a huge frontier.”

“There’s grass in Antarctica,” said Djordje. “There’s grain growing there. They’re brewing beer off the melting glaciers. Truly!”

Herbert burst into deep, rumbling laughter. “I love this guy. He is such a funny guy.”

Vera sipped her bubbling wine.

“You’ll do all right, Vera,” said Djordje. “You never had a father fig­ure. Life with an older man suits