The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [16]
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