The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [20]
Then sweet Kosara was killed, and good Bratislava was killed, and Svetlana was also killed, with particular cruelty. Suddenly murdered, all three of them. It had never occurred to these teenage girls to run for their lives, for their compound was their stronghold and all that their mother had allowed them to know of the world. Seventeen-year-old girls who had led lives of utter magic—air that held drawings and spoke poetry, talking kitchenware, thinking trees—they all died in bursts of gunfire, for no reason that they ever understood.
Radmila survived, because Radmila hid herself in the dust, smoke, and rubble. Sonja fought, and Sonja killed those who killed. Biserka, howling for mercy—Biserka had thrown herself at the bandits’ feet.
Vera herself—she had run away at the first shots fired. Just run, vanished into the woods, like the wind. Vera had always loved the open island much better than the compound.
Lost in the island’s forest, truly lost on Earth for the first time in her life, Vera had been entirely alone. The Earth had no words for Vera’s kind of solitude.
Bewildered and grieving, Vera had gone to Earth like an animal. She slept in brown heaps of pine needles. She ate raw berries. She drank rainwater from stony puddles.
Her world had ended. Yet the island was still there.
Vera tramped the stricken island from one narrow end to the distant other, climbed every hill she could climb, and there was not one living soul to be found. She grew dirty, despondent, and thin.
Finally Vera heard voices from the sky. Acquis people had arrived with boats, and those rescuers had a tiny, unmanned plane that soared around the island, a flying thing like a cicada, screeching aloud in a brilliant, penetrating voice. It yelled its canned rescue instructions in five or six global languages.
Vera did as the tiny airplane suggested. She ventured to the appointed rendezvous, she found her surprised rescuers, and she was shipped to a rescue camp on the mainland. From there Vera immediately schemed and plotted to return to Mljet, to save her island as she herself had been saved. At length, she had succeeded.
And now, after all that, here, again on Mljet, at last, was the next generation: in the person of Mary. The idea that Mary Montalban existed had been a torment to Vera—but in person, in reality, as a living individual, someone on the ground within the general disaster zone, Mary was not bad. No: Mary was good.
Mary was what she was: a little girl, a little hard to describe, but … Mary Montalban was the daughter of a rich banker and a cloned actress, sharing a junk-strewn beach with her crazy, bone-rattling aunt. That was Mary Montalban. She had a world, too.
Mary was visibly lonely, pitifully eager to win the approval of her overworked, too-talkative dad. Mary was also afraid of her aunt, although she very much wanted her aunt to love her and to care about her. That knowledge was painful for Vera. Extremely painful. It was a strong, compelling, heart-crushing kind of pain. Pain like that could change a woman’s life.
Remotely chatting in their lively, distant voices, the father and daughter tossed their big handsome beach ball. The girl missed a catch, and the ball skittered off wildly into the flowering bushes. In the silence of the ruins Vera heard the child laughing.
Vera turned up the sensors in her helmet, determined to spy on them. The ruins of Polace were rather poorly instrumented, almost a blackspot in the island’s net. Vera gamely tried a variety of cunning methods, but their voices were warped and pitted by hisses, hums, and drones. The year 2065 was turning out to be one of those “Loud Sun” years: sunspot activity with loud electrical noise. Any everyware technician could groom the signal relays, but there wasn’t a lot to do about Acts of God.
Montalban did not know that Vera was eavesdropping on him with such keen attention. His