The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [15]
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 barracks-mates. 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. After 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.
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. After nine years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, they were a tightly bonded pioneer society.
If they ever