The Caryatids

So Karen had to be right. Nobody on this island would willingly ac­cept a newbie as an appointed leader. Not now, not after nine years of their neural togetherness. Afer nine years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, they were a tightly bonded pioneer society.

If they ever had a fit about politics, they were all going to have the same fit all at once.

Karen had found a big bag of sunflower seeds. She was loudly chew­ing them and spitting the husks into a cardboard pot. “Herbert’s succes­sion plan is to emotionally poll all the cadres,” Karen told her, rolling salted seed bits on her tongue. “Our people will choose a new leader themselves—the leader who makes them feel best.”

That process seemed intuitively right to Vera. That was how things al­ways worked best around here— because Mljet was an enterprise fueled on passionate conviction. “Well, Novakovic has our best glory rating. He always does.”

“Vera, open your big blue eyes. Novakovic is our chef! Of course we all like the chef Because he feeds us! That’s not what we want from our leader here! We want brilliancy! We want speed! We don’t need some stuffy, overcontrolled engineer! We need an inspiring figure with sex ap­peal and charisma who can take on the whole world! We need a ‘muse figure.’”

Vera squirmed on her taut pink cot. “We need some heavier equip­ment and some proper software maintenance, that’s what we really need around here.”

“Vera, you are the ‘muse figure’ on Mljet. You. Nobody else. Because we all know you. Your everyware touches everything that we do here.” Karen offered her a beaming smile. “So it’s you. You’re our next leader. For sure. And I’d love to have you as my boss. Boy, my life would be great, then. The Vera Mihajlovic Regime, that would be just about per­fect for me.”

“Karen, shut up. You’re my best friend! You can’t plot to make me the project manager! You know I’d become a wreck if that happened to me!”

“You were born a wreck,” said Karen, her eyes frank and guileless. “That’s why you’re my best friend!”

“Well, your judgment is completely clouded on this issue. I’m not a wreck! It’s the island that’s a wreck, and I am a solution. Yes, I had an awful time when I went down in that mine with you, I overdid that, I was stupid, but normally, I’m very emotionally stable. My needs and is­sues are all very clear to everyone. Plus, Herbert taught me a lot about geoengineering. I am very results-oriented.”

“Sure, Vera. Sure you are. You get more done around here than any­one else does. We all love you for that devotion to duty. You’re our golden darling.”

“Okay,” said Vera, growing angry at last. “Your campaign speech is impossible. That is crazy talk, that isn’t even politics.”

Karen backed off. She found a patch of open floor space. Then she stood up, unhinged her shoulders, lifted her left leg and deftly tucked her ankle behind her neck. No one in the barracks took much notice of these antics. Boneware experts always learned such things.

* * *

IN THE AZURE EASTERN DISTANCE, Vera saw the remote hills of the Croatian mainland: a troubled region called Peljesac by its survivors. The arid, wrinkled slopes of distant Peljesac had been logged off completely, scraped down to the barren bone by warlord profiteers.

Dense summer clouds were building over there. There would be storms by noon.

Montalban had chosen their rendezvous: a narrow bay, with a long stony bluff at its back. The ghost town of Polace was a briny heap of col­lapsing piers and tilted asphalt streetbeds. Offshore currents stirred the wreckage, sloshing flotsam onto Mljet’s stony shoulders: sunglasses, san­dals, indestructible plastic shopping bags, the obsolete coinage of vari­ous dead nationalities.

During Vera’s girlhood, Polace had been the most magical place in the world for her. The enchanted world of her caryatid childhood was every bit as dead as this dead town: smashed, invalidated, uncelebrated, unremembered. Reduced to garbage, and less than garbage.

The forgotten tenor of those lost times, her childhood before this is­land’s abject collapse —Vera could never think of that life without a poi­sonous sea change deep within her head.

The past would not stay straight inside her mind. The limpid, flowing simplicity of those days, of seven happy little beings, living in their com­pound all jammed together as a team and psychic unit, the house and grounds bubbling over with magic sensors and mystic computation… Learning, interacting, interfacing, growing, growing…

Then came the horror, the irreparable fracture, the collapse. A smashing into dust and less than dust: transmuted to poison. The toxic loss of herself, of all of her selves—of all her pretty, otherworldly other­selves.

Her childhood fortress home… when this town of Palace had lived, glittering with evil vitality, then her home was a blastproofed villa of an­cient Communist cement, dug deep into a hillside and nestled under camouflage nets. The sighing forest around the children seethed with intrusion sensors.

The children often played in the woods-always together, of course­and sometimes they even glimpsed the blue shorelines. But they were never allowed to visit the island’s towns.

Four times each year, though, they were required to leave the island for inspections on the mainland: inspections by their inventor, their mother, their designer, and their twin, the eighth of their world-saving unit, the oldest, the wisest, their queen. So Vera, and her sullen little brother, and her six howling, dancing, shrieking sisters traveled in an ar­mored bus with blackened windows.

The big bus would rumble up and down Mljet’s narrow, hazardous roads, thump and squeak over the numerous, rickety bridges, park for a while on the grimy, graffiti-spattered dock, and then lurch aboard a diesel- belching Balkan ferry. Locked inside the bus, screaming in feral delight with her pack of sisters, Vera had feasted her eyes on an other­worldly marvel: that marvel was this place, this dead town.

The town had a name: Polace. Its townsfolk were black marketeers. They were brewers of illicit biotech. Ina place of great natural beauty, they were merchants of despair.

Their gaudy pirate labs were guarded by militia soldiers in ferociously silly homemade uniforms. The harbor town was a factory, a pharmacy, a tourist trap, a brothel, and a slum.

Polace was an ancient Balkan fishing village of limestone rock and red-tiled roofs. Old Palace had been built right at the water’s edge, so the rising high tides of the climate crisis were sloshing into the buildings.

Except, of course, for the new piers. These piers had been jerry-built to deal with the swarms of narcotics customers, sailing in from offshore. The black-market piers towered over the sea on spindly pylons of rust­weeping iron and pocked cement. The piers were crusted all over with flashing casino lights, and garish, animated street ads, and interactive billboards featuring starlets in tiny swimsuits.

Multistory brothels loomed on the piers, sealed and windowless, like the drug labs. The alleys ashore were crammed with bars, and drugstore kiosks, and reeling, intoxicated customers, whose polyglot faces were neon-lit masks of feral glee and panic. The little harbor held the sleek, pretty yachts of the doomed, the daring, the crooked, and the planet’s increasingly desperate rich.

National governments were failing like sandcastles in the ominous greenhouse tide. There was nothing to shelter the planet’s populations from their naked despair at the scale of the catastrophes. Without any official oversight, the outlaw biotech on the island grew steadily wilder, ever more extreme. The toxic spills grew worse and worse, while the population, stewing in the effluent, sickened.

Then an earthquake, one of many common to the region, racked Mljet. The outlaw labs on the island, jimmied together in such haste, simply burst. They ruptured, they tumbled, they slid into the sea. The tourists and their hosts died from fizzing clouds of poison. Others were killed in the terrified scramble to flee the island for good. Polace had swiftly succumbed; the island’s other towns died more slowly, from the quake, the fires, the looting. When the last generators failed and the last light winked out there was nothing human on the island, nothing butthe cries of birds.

John Montgomery Montalban clearly knew this dreadful subject very well, since he had made this careful pilgrimage to see the island’s worst ruins firsthand. The California real-estate mogul calmly assessed the drowned wreckage through his tinted spex.

He told her it was “negative equity.”

Montalban, her strange brother-in-law, was a Dispensation policy wonk. He was cram-full of crisp, net- gathered, due-diligence knowledge. He was tall and elegant and persuasively talkative, with wavy black hair, suntanned olive skin, and sharp, polished teeth: big Hollywood film-star teeth like elephant ivory. His floral tourist