The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [9]
“Sonja is far away. Sonja is on some battlefield in China. Sonja should be dead soon. People who go into China, they never come back out.”
“Where does your other sister ‘walk the Earth’ these days?”
Vera shouted at him. “We are Vera, Sonja, and Radmila! Those are our names. And our brother is Djordje. ‘George.’ ”
“Look, I know for a fact there are four of you girls.”
“Don’t you ever speak one word about Biserka! Biserka is like our mother: we never speak about that woman, ever. Our mother belongs in prison!”
“Isn’t orbit a kind of prison?”
An ugly dizziness seized Vera. She felt like a vivisected dog.
Finally she picked up the idle bowl of cooling breakfast and drank it all.
Moments passed. Herbert turned on a camp situation report, which flashed into its silent life on the luminescent fabric of his tent.
“You’re feeling better now,” he told her. “You’ve been purged of all that, a little, again.”
She was purged of it. Yes, for the moment. But not in any way that mattered. She would never be purged of the past.
Herbert’s breakfast bowl was full of vitamin-packed nutraceuticals. It was impossible to eat such nourishing food and stay sick at heart. And he knew that.
Vera belched aloud.
“Vera, you’re overdoing the neural hardware. That’s clear to me. No more boneware for you till further notice.” Herbert deftly put the emptied bowl away. “I don’t want Mr. Montalban to see you inside your neural helmet. The gentleman has a squeamish streak. We mustn’t alarm him.”
Herbert’s nutraceuticals methodically stole into Vera’s bloodstream. She knew it was wrong to burden Herbert with her troubles. It was her role to support Herbert’s efforts on Mljet, not to add to his many public worries.
“George was stupid to tell you anything about our family. That is dangerous. My mother kills people who know about her. She’s a national criminal. She is worse than her warlord husband, and he was terrible.”
Herbert smiled at this bleak threat, imagining that he was being brave. “Vera, let me make something clear to you. Your fellow cadres and I: We care for you deeply. We always want to spare your feelings. But: Everybody here on Mljet knows all about those criminal cloning labs. We know. Everybody knows what your mother was doing with those stem cells, up in the hills. They know that she was breeding super-women and training them in high technology—the ‘high technology’ of that period, anyway. That foolishness has all been documented. There were biopiracy labs all over this island. You—you and your beautiful sisters—you are the only people in the world who still think that local crime wave is a secret.”
Herbert smacked his fist into his open hand. “A clone is an illegal person. That’s all. This island is manned by refugees from failed states, so we’re all technically ‘illegal,’ like you. You can’t convince us that you’re the big secret monster from the big secret monster lab. Because we know you, and we know how you feel. We’re in solidarity with you, Vera. It’s all a matter of degree.”
Vera chose to say nothing about this vapid pep talk. No one understood the tangled monstrosity that was herself and her sisters, and no outsider ever would. The Gordian knot of pain and horror was beyond any possible unraveling. Justice was so far out of Vera’s reach … and yet there were nights when she did dream of vengeance. Vengeance, at least some nice vengeance. Any war criminal left a big shadow over the world. Many angry people wanted that creature called her “mother” pulled down from the sky. Whatever went up, must surely come down, someday—yes, surely, someday. As sure as rainstorms.
“Vera, your personal past was colorful. All right: Your past was a bloody disaster, so it was extremely colorful. But we all live in a postdisaster world. We have no choice about that reality. All of us live after the disaster, everyone. We can’t eat our hatreds and resentments, because those won’t nourish us. We can only eat what we put on our own tables—today. Am I clear to you?”
Vera nodded sullenly. Having