someday—yes, surely, someday. As sure as rainstorms.
“Vera, your personal past was colorful. All right: Your past was a bloody disaster, so it was
Vera nodded sullenly. Having put her through the emotional wringer, Herbert was going to praise her now.
“You have extensive gifts, Vera. You have talent and spirit. You are energetic and pretty, and even if you tend to panic on some rare occasions, you always fulfill your duties and you never give up. The people who know you best: They all love you. That’s the truth about Vera Mihajlovic. Someday you will realize that about yourself. Then you’ll be happy and free.”
Vera lifted her chin. Herbert had been telling her these spirit-lifting things for nine long years. Herbert said them because he truly believed them. He believed them so heartily that sometimes she was almost con vinced.
After all, the evidence was on his side. Mostly.
Herbert drew a conclusive breath. “So: As a great man once said, in times almost as dark as our own times, ‘Withhold no sacrifice, begrudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe: all will be well.’”
Maybe someday he would just put his arms around her. Not talk so much, not understand her so loudly and so thoroughly. Just be there for her. Be there like a man for a woman.
That wasn’t happening. Not yet, and maybe not ever.
VERA PICKED HER WAY BACK to her barracks, bare-headed and bare-eyed. The broken road was heavily overgrown; the flitting birds had no sensorweb tags, the flowery bushes had no annotations. Without her boneware, her arms and legs felt leaden. She had a heavy heart about the new assignment.
She was to “guide” John Montgomery Montalban around the island.
Vera knew what that meant-she had just become a spy. She was a spy now, pretending to be a guide. Something dark and horrible was transpiring between herself and Radmila.
Why was the Earth so small?
Radmila had sent her child and her husband here, so that her shadow would once again touch Mljet. Why did that woman exist? Radmila had no right to her existence.
Radmila’s fool of a husband-how had that man dared come here?
“On vacation,” he had said. Montalban had told the island’s project manager, told Herbert right to his face, that he was here as a “tourist.”
Could Montalban possibly imagine that Herbert, an Acquis officer, would be fooled by that lie? Vera felt shocked and numbed at the sheer audacity of such a falsehood. People who lived without brain scanners thought that they could get away with anything they said. The fetid privacy of their unscanned brains boiled over with deception and cunning.
No wonder the world had come to ruin.
Maybe Montalban imagined that his story sounded plausible, because Mljet had once had tourists— thousands of them. Before its decay, tourism had been the island’s economic base. And Montalban was an investment banker, specializing in tourism. He’d even said something fatuous about his child’s “cultural heritage.”
Montalban was rich, he was from Los Angeles—which was to say, Montalban was from the Dispensation. Montalban was from the
Acquis people struggled for justice. Dispensation people always talked about business. There were other differences between the two world governments, but that was the worst of it, that was the core of it. Everything the Acquis framed as common decency, the Dispensation framed as a profit opportunity. The Dispensation considered the world to be a business: a planetary “sustainable business.” Those people were all business to the bone.
Montalban had clearly come here to spy for the Dispensation, although global civil societies didn’t have any “spying.” They weren’t nations: so they had no “spying” and no “war.” They had “verification” and “coopetition” instead. They were the functional equivalents of spying and war, only much more modern, more in the spirit of the 2060s.
Vera wiped sweat from her aching brow. Maybe she could defy Herbert, put on her trusty boneware, grab that “coopetitor” by the scruff of his neck, and “verify” him rightback onto his boat. If she did that—in a burst of righteous fury—how much real trouble could that cause? Maybe the cadres would sincerely admire her heartfelt burst of fury.
The Dispensation prized its right to “verify” what the Acquis did.
“Verification” was part of the arrangement between the network superpowers—a political arrangement, a detente, to make sure that no one was secretly building old-fashioned world-smashing superweapons. In practice, “verification” was just another nervous habit of the new political order. The news was sure to leak over some porous network anyway, so it was better just to let the opposition “verify”… It kept them busy. Montalban had already toured an island attention camp… He was photographing it, taking many notes… Shopping for something, probably…
Vera knew that the Dispensation feared Acquis attention camps. The Dispensation had their own camps, of course, but not attention camps—and besides, the Dispensation never called them “refugee camps,” but used smoothly lying buzzwords such as “new housing projects,” “entertainment destinations,” and “sustainable suburbs.”
Attention camps were a particularly brilliant Acquis advance in human rehabilitation. So the other global civil society glumly opposed them. That was typical of the struggle. The Dispensation dug in their heels about advanced Acquis projects that couldn’t fit their crass, materialist philosophy. They scared up popular scandals, they brought their “soft-power” pressure… They were hucksters with all kinds of tricks.
A bluebottle fly buzzed Vera’s bare face—the pests were bad in summer. No, she wouldn’t attack Montalban and evict him while wearing her armor. That was a stupid emotional impulse, not coolheaded diplomacy. Vera had limited experience outside Mljet, but she was an Acquis officer. The word got around inside the corps. There were professional ways to handle bad situations like this. Annoying and slow ways, but professional ways.
When some Dispensation snoop showed up at an Acquis project to “verify,” the sophisticated tactic was to “counterverify.” Fight fire with fire. The big operators handled it that way. She could watch whatever Montalban did, watch him like a hawk. Stick to him like glue, be very “helpful” to him, help him to death. Get in his way; interfere; quibble, quibble, quibble; work to rules; mire him in boring procedures. Make a passive-aggressive pest of herself.
There was certainly no glory in that behavior. Spying on people was the pit of emotional dishonesty. Itwas likely to make her into the shame of the camp. Vera Mihajlovic: the spy. Everyone would know about it, and how she felt about it.
Yet someone had to take action. Vera resolved to do it.
Through handing her this difficult assignment, Herbert was testing her again. Herbert knew that her troubled family past was her biggest flaw as an officer. He knew that her dark past limited her, that it harmed her career potential in the global Acquis. Herbert had often warned her that her mediated knowledge of the world was deep, yet too narrow. By never leaving Mljet, she had never outgrown her heritage.
Herbert’s tests were hard on her, but never entirely unfair. Whenever she carried the weight of those burdens, she always grew stronger.
VERA SHARED HER BARRACKS with sixty-two other Acquis cadres. Their rose-pink, rectangular barracks was a warm, supportive, comforting environment. It had been designed for epidemic hunters.
These rapid-deployment forces, the shock troops of the global civil societies, pounced on contagious diseases emerging around the world. The medicos were particularly well-equipped global workers, thanks to the dreadful consequences of their failures. This meant they left behind a lot of medical surplus hardware: sturdy, lightweight, and cheap.
