The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [3]
“Be glad that we can still hear each other talking.” Karen’s voice sounded flat and muffled though her helmet and shroud. “It’s too hot down here to run any fuel cells. Gregor will reboot us. He can do it, he’s good. You just wait and see.”
A long, evil moment passed. Panic rose and clutched the dry lining of Vera’s throat.
“This is horrible!”
“Yes,” said Karen mournfully, “I guess it is, pretty much.”
“I can’t stand it!”
“Well, we just have to stand it, Vera. We can’t do anything but stand here.”
Claustrophobic terror washed through Vera’s beating heart.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t bear any more.”
“I’m not scared,” Karen told her. “I used to be very scared every time I came down here. But emotion is a neural state. A neural state can’t touch you. I’m never afraid like I used to be. Sometimes I have fear-thoughts, but my fear-thoughts are not me.”
“I’ll scream!”
Karen’s voice was full of limpid sympathy. “You can scream, then. Do it. I’m here for you.”
SEEN FROM THE AIRY HILLTOP, Mljet was a tattered flag, all bays, peninsulas, and scattered islets. The island’s scalloped shores held stains in their nooks and corners: the algae blooms.
The rising Adriatic, carrying salt, had killed a dry brown skirt-fringe of the island’s trees.
The island’s blanket of pines and oaks was torn by clear-cut logging, scarred black with forest fires.
And if the golden shore of this beautiful place had suffered, the island’s interior was worse. Mljet’s angry creeks had collapsed the island’s bridges as if they’d been kneecapped with pistols. Up in the rocky hills, small, abandoned villages silently flaked their paint.
Year by year, leaning walls and rust-red roofs were torn apart by towering houseplants gone feral. The island’s rotting vineyards were alive with buzzing flies and beetles, clouded with crows.
A host of flowers had always adorned this sunny place. There were far more flowers in these years of the climate crisis. Harsh, neck-high thickets of rotting flowers, feeding scary, billowing clouds of angry bees.
Such was her home. From the peak of the island, where she stood, throat raw, flesh trembling, mind in a whirl, she could see that the island was transforming. She could hear that, smell it, taste it in the wind. She was changing it.
Brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory.
Millions of sensors wrapped Mljet in a tight electronic skin, like a cold wet sheet to swathe a fever victim. Embedding sensors. Mobile sensors. Dust-sized sensors flying like dandelion seeds.
The sensorweb was a single instrument, small pieces loosely joined into one huge environmental telescope. The sensorweb measured and archived changes in the island’s status. Temperature, humidity, sunlight. Flights of pollen, flights of insects, the migrations of birds and fish.
Vera turned her augmented vision to the sky. A distant black speck resolved as a patrolling snake eagle. The Acquis cadres were extremely proud of the island’s surviving eagles. The Acquis had tagged that bird all over with high-level, urgent commentary. The eagle cut the sunlit air in a haze of miscellaneous archives, the glow of immanent everyware.
This hilltop was sacred to her. She could vividly remember the first day she had fled here, reached the summit: terrified, traumatized, ragged, abandoned, and half-starved. For the first time in her young life, Vera had grasped the size and shape of this place of her birth. She had realized that her home was alive and beautiful.
Life would go on. Surely it would. Because, despite every harm, distortion, insult, the island was recovering. Through her helmet’s faceplate, Vera could see that happening in grand detail. She was an agent of that redemption. She had an oath and a uniform, labor and training and tools. She belonged here.
Someday this wrecked and stricken place would bloom, in all tomorrow’s brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory. Someday a happy young girl would stand on the soil of this island and know no dread of anything.
Vera put her gloved hands to her helmet, clicked