The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [11]
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 détente, to make sure that no one was secretly building old-fashioned world-smashing super-weapons. 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. It was 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.
So Vera’s barracks was a foamy puff of pink high-performance fabric, perched on struts on a slope above the breezy Adriatic gulf. Out in the golden haze toward distant Italy, minor islets shouldered their way from the ocean like the ghosts of Earth’s long-extinct whales.
Nearby, the derelict village of Pomena had been scraped up and briskly recycled, while its old harbor was rebuilt