The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [10]
“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 convinced.
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 other global civil society, the other successor to the failed order of nation-states, the other global postdisaster network.
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 right back onto his boat. If she did that—in a burst of righteous fury—how much real trouble could that cause? Maybe the