The Caryatids

“Karen, don’t manifest sarcastically. Only little kids take candy from strangers.”

Karen was hurt by this reproof. “But Little Mary is a little kid.”

“That toy is sure to rot soon. It’ll turn dark and ugly.”

Karen rolled the shining ball across the backs of her fingers. Karen’s use of neural gauntlets had made her dexterous—if her boneware was much like a skeleton, her skeleton had become rather like boneware. “Now, Vera: What kind of dark, bleak attitude are you projecting at me here? This is a whole little world! Look at all this wonderful stuff float­ing around in here! There’s a million pieces of it, and they’re all con­nected! You know what? I think this little world has a little sensorweb built in!”

“Oh no,” said Vera. “That would be perverse.”

“This is art! It’s an art hobjectl”

Vera flinched. “Stop juggling it!”

Karen’s brown eyes shone with glee. “I can see little shrimp! They’re swimming around in there! They’re jumbo shrimp!”

Karen’s eager teasing had defeated her. Vera reached out.

The biosphere held elegant branches of delicate fringed seaweed, bobbing in a vivid, reeling, fertile algae soup. The pea-green water swarmed with a vivid, pinhead-sized menagerie of twitchy rotifers and glassy roundworms.

And, yes, the sphere also held a darting, wriggling family of shrimp. These shrimp were the grandest denizens of their miniature world. Ma­jestic, like dragons.

The crystal of the biosphere was lavishly veined. Some extremely deft machine had laser-engraved a whole Los Angeles of circuits through that crystal ball. The circuits zoomed around the water world like a thousand superhighways.

“Americans will buy anything,” Karen said.

The dragon shrimp swam solemnly above an urban complex of fairy skyscrapers. Glittering extrusions grew like frost from the crystal into the seawater. Complex. Mysterious. Alluring.

It was as if, purely for random amusement, some ship-in-a-bottle fa­natic had built himself… what? Factories like fingernail parings. Mini­distilleries. Desalinators, and filters, and water-treatment plants. A pocket city, half greenish ooze and half life-support network.

Squinting in disbelief, Vera lifted the biosphere into a brighter glare. Half the glass darkened as a thousand tiny shutters closed.

This was a lovely gift. Someone had been extremely thoughtful. It was apt. It was rich with hidden meaning. It was a seduction, and meant to win her over. Vera had never seen anything in her harsh and dutiful life that was half so pretty as this.

With a pang, Vera handed the biosphere back to Karen. Karen rolled it carelessly toward her distant cot. “Vera, no wonder bankers are court­ing you. I think the boss has decided to marry you.”

“I’d do that.” Vera nodded. There was never any use in being coy with Karen.

“Marrying the boss,” said Karen, “is too easy a job for you. Herbert never gives you easy jobs.”

Vera laughed. Karen never seemed to think hard, but somehow Karen always said such true things.

“Did you know that Herbert has filed a succession plan?”

Vera nodded, bored. “Let’s not talk local politics.”

Karen stuck a medical swab in her ear, rolled it around at her leisure, and examined the results. “Let me tell you my emotions about this suc­cession business. It’s time that Herbert moved on. Herbert is a typical start-up guy. A start-up guy has got a million visionary ideas, but he never knows what they’re good for. He doesn’t know what real people in the real world will do with his big ideas.”

Vera scowled at such disloyalty. “You never used to talk that way about Herbert. You told me Herbert saved your life!”

Karen looked cagey. This was a bad sign, for though Karen had deep emotional intelligence, she wasn’t very bright.

“That was then, and this is now. Our situation here is simple,” said Karen mistakenly. “Herbert found some broken people to work very hard here, repairing this broken island. We heal ourselves with his neu­ral tech, and we heal the land with mediation at the same time. Inside heals outside. That’s great. That’s genius. I’m Acquis, I’m all for that. Sweat equity, fine! We get no pay, fine! We live in a crowded barracks, no privacy at all, no problem for me! Someday it’ll snow on the North Pole again. Men as old as Herbert, they can remember when the North Pole had snow.”

Karen flexed her multijointed fingers. “But I’m not old like him, I’m young. I don’t want to postpone my life until we bring the past back to the future! I have to live now! For me!”

Clearly Vera’s time had come to absorb a confession. She restrained a sigh. “Karen, tell me all about ‘now’ and ‘me.’”

“When I first got to this island, yes, I was a wreck. I was hurt and scared, I was badly off. Neural tech is wonderful—now that I know what it’s for! Let me have those helmets. I know what to do with them. I’ll stick them on the head of every man in the world.”

Karen scowled in thought. “I have just one question for every man. ‘Do you really love this girl, or are you just playing around?’ That’s what matters. Give me true love, and I’ll give you a planet that’s completely changed! Totally changed. I’ll give you a brand-new world in six months! You wouldn’t even recognize that world!”

“Your soppy romance love story has no glory, Karen!”

“Vera, you are being a geek. All right? You are. Because you live in­side your mediation and your sensorweb. You never listen to the people with real needs! I fell in love here. Okay? A lot. With every guy in this barracks, basically. Okay, not with all of them, but… I give and I give and I emotionally give, and where is my one true love? When do I get happy?”

“Your scheme is irresponsible and it lacks any practical application.”

“No it isn’t. No it doesn’t. Anyway, things are bound to change here. Soon.” Karen folded her arms.

“I don’t see why.”

“I’ll tell you why. Because we will promote our next project manager from among the cadres, using an architecture of participation! That’s the succession plan. And our next leader isn’t going to be like old Her­bert. Our next big leader is bound to be one of us.”

This scheme was new to Vera, so she was interested despite herself. In Mljet, it was always much more important to do the right thing with gusto than it was to nitpick about boring palace intrigues. And yet… there was politics here, every place had its politics.

“Look,” said Vera, “very clearly, we don’t have enough clout here to pick our own boss. If anything bad happened to Herbert, the Acquis committee would appoint some other project manager.”

“Oh no, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare do that.”

“Yes, they would. The Acquis are daring.”

Karen was adamant. “No they wouldn’t! They can’t send some gross newbie to Mljet to boss our neural elite! The cadres would laugh at him! They’d spit on him! They would kick his ass! He’d have no glory at all!”

Vera stared thoughtfully at Karen, then at the teeming mass of barracks­mates. It occurred to Vera that Karen, as the voice of the local people, was telling her the truth.

Vera was used to her fellow cadres—she could hardly have been more intimate with them, since their innermost feelings were spilled all over her screens.

But to outsiders, they might seem scary. Afer all, the Acquis neural cadres on Mljet were survivors from some of the harshest places in the world. They wore big machines that could lift cars. Even their women were rough, tough construction workers who could crack bricks with their fingers.

And—by the standards of people not on this island—they all lived inside-out. They didn’t “wear their hearts on their sleeves” —they wore their hearts on their skins.

They were such kind people, mostly, so supportive and decent… But—as a group—the cadres had one great object of general contempt. Every Acquis cadre despised newbies. “Newbies” were the fresh re­cruits. Acquis newbies had no glory, since they had not yet done any­thing to make the people around them feel happy, or impressed with them, or more fiercely committed to the common cause. All newbies were, by nature, scum.