The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [22]
Then the toy burst. It fell into the sea in a bright tumble of rags.
THE LOCAL ACQUIS CADRES took a keen interest in Vera’s feelings. With the arrival of her niece on the island, the Acquis cadres were obsessed.
For years, the cadres had accepted the fact that their island society lacked children. That was the condition of their highly advanced work. They didn’t need kids to be an avant-garde society, a vanguard of the future. Surely they had each other.
The Acquis had hard-won experience in managing extreme technologies. Mljet was typical of their policy: a radical technical experiment required an out-of-the-way locale. It had to be compact in scale, limited in personnel. A neutered society. A hamster cage, an island utopia: to break those limits and become any bolder posed political risks. Risks posed by the planet’s “loyal opposition,” the Dispensation.
The Dispensation was vast and its pundits were cunning propagandists with the global net at their fingertips. They were always keen to provoke a panic over any radical Acquis activity—especially if those activities threatened to break into the mainstream.
Radical experiments that might be construable as child abuse made the easiest targets of all. So: No children allowed on the construction site … yet the clock never stopped ticking.
John Montgomery Montalban had brought his own child to the island. This was a Dispensation propaganda of the deed. The shrewder Acquis cadres understood this as a deliberate provocation. A good one, since there wasn’t a lot they could do about adorable five-year-olds.
Montalban was simply showing everyone what they had missed, what they had sacrificed. Sentiment about the child was running high. Vera thought that it must take a cold-blooded father to exploit his own flesh and blood as a political asset, in this shrewd way. But John Montgomery Montalban had married Radmila Mihajlovic. He had married Radmila, and given her that child. There had to be something wrong with him, or he would never have done such a thing.
Vera could literally track the child’s path across the island by the peaks of emotional disturbance her presence created. Mary left a wake wherever her polished little shoes touched the Earth.
The local Acquis cadres were unimpressed by Montalban. They considered themselves bold souls, they’d seen much worse than him. They felt some frank resentment for any intruder on their island, yet Montalban was just another newbie, an outsider who could never matter to them on a gut level.
Little Mary Montalban, though, was the walking proof of the cavity in their future.
Vera knew that her own powerful feelings about the child had done much to provoke this problem. In an act of defiance, Vera had chosen to wear her boneware and her neural helmet to meet Montalban—although Herbert had warned her against doing that. It had seemed to her like an act of personal integrity. Personal integrity did not seem to work with Montalban.
So: no more of that. If Vera put her own helmet aside—from now until this crisis blew over—the trouble would end all the sooner.
She had been wrong to trust her intuitions. She needed help. Karen would help her. Karen loved children. Karen had a lot of glory. Karen always understood hurt and trouble.
JOHN MONTGOMERY MONTALBAN—through an accident or through his shrewd, cold-blooded cunning—had chosen a new, more distant site for their next meeting. Without her boneware, Vera had to hike there from her barracks, on foot.
Mljet’s few remaining roads were reduced to weedy foot trails. People in boneware had little need for roads: they simply jumped across the landscape, following logistics maps.
Vera no longer had that advantage, so she had to tramp it. Luckily, she had Karen as counsel and company. Unluckily, Karen’s stilting strides made Vera eat her dust.
Modern life was always like this somehow, Vera concluded as sweat ran down her ribs. Impossible crises, bursting potentials. Rockets and potholes. Anything