The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [38]
“There’s another part I just don’t get. Helmets and skeletons! Why don’t you just buy a bulldozer? Bulldozers are cheap! Get a dragline, get an excavator!”
“We tried working that way,” Vera told him. “But it feels wrong to us. It means more to our people when they can save the world with their own hands.”
“You can’t save the world on gusts of emotion!” he shouted. “That idea is for fanatics and losers!”
“You are so bitterly unhappy,” Vera told him. “You’re depressed! Your affect is very low and bad—that means you’ve lost heart in what you’re doing. You know what? You’re working much too hard at something that you don’t like. You need a vacation.”
Montalban’s affect leaped violently. He began to laugh. He was at this quite awhile. “That was a really good joke,” he said at last. “Thank you for telling me that one.”
“She’s made you so miserable,” Vera said.
“No,” said Montalban, “she was great to me. I knew what I was doing. I wanted to rescue Radmila. And I did that, I won. The Dispensation is a great force for good. I found a lost young girl and I turned her into a star. I transformed her. Although Mila was always bound for glory. We really know what glory is, in Hollywood.”
“What is glory?”
“It’s celebrity, of course! What else could it be? It only took Mila a few months to find her feet within that scene. After that, her knight in shining armor—meaning me—I was in her way. A little bit. She and I, we don’t fight about that reality. No, we never fight. I facilitate. I don’t make problems for her. I solve all her problems. Mila works hard for our Family-Firm. We’ve got the kid. We love our kid.”
“She’s bad for you. She made you unhappy.”
“Sonja made me unhappy.”
“What?”
“Djordje knows. He’s the one who introduced us. When things were going very rough with Mila, he found Sonja for me. I helped Sonja, because I had to help Sonja. Sonja is saving the world. In a different way. Because you’re all different women. Very different women. Yet you’re all the same entity. You are caryatids.”
Vera felt a rush of bile at the back of the throat. “John, let’s take that helmet off now.”
“You wanted the truth from me, didn’t you? Here it is. You are the best of the lot. You are the best, because, of all of you, you’re the one who needs me the least. Mila is a Hollywood girl, she’s a star. Sonja is a knight in armor. If a man gets in Sonja’s way she will chew him up like a matchstick. I haven’t yet met Biserka, but we trade a lot of mail. Because Biserka’s on the lam! The law wants her. She’s into forgery, human trafficking, and bank robbery. You know how hard it is to rob a bank these days? Biserka, that woman, good God!”
“If you don’t stop shouting, I’m going to scream.”
“That’s what you always tell me! Always, every last one of you! I talk to one of you about the other units, and you always break down and scream at me! Except for your mother. Your mother. A female warlord so paranoid she could only trust copies of herself … God help us. God help the whole world.”
Vera put her hands over her ears.
“We’re gonna talk your mother down from up there!” Montalban shouted, his face reddening. “That job is not impossible! We’re going to talk her down from that hostage situation up there! Me and Djordje! We have some big plans, and we’re recruiting a lot of help.”
Vera stood up. She walked on wobbling legs. She took ten steps, fell into a thornbush, doubled over, and vomited.
She retched and then wailed in pain.
Karen found her quickly. “What did he say to you? What did he do to you?”
“Take me to Herbert,” Vera said. She drooled vile acid, sneezed, and spat into the soil. “Just get me away from him! Get me away from here. Take me to my Herbert.”
IT TOOK A LONG TIME to find Herbert. Stunningly, the sensorweb did not know where Herbert was. Such a thing had never happened before. He had always been locatable for her.
Herbert had escaped the sensorweb by boarding a boat. It was a primitive wooden yacht, old, simple, with patched sails and peeling white paint. Vera tottered from the dock and onto the