The Caryatids (3 page)

Yet every industry had its hazards. Herbert and Vera had been close colleagues for nine years. They were very close now—they were too close. It had taken them years, but now, whenever Herbert and Vera met face-to-face, there were strong bursts of neural activity in the medial in-sula, the anterior cingulate, the striarum, and the prefrontal cortex.

That meant love. An emotion so primal was impossible to mistake. Love was Venus rising from her neural seas, as obvious to a neural scan-ner as a match in a pool of kerosene. Vera was very sorry for the operational burden that her love brought to Herbert and the cadres on the island. In the Acquis neural project, leaders were held to especially high standards. Since he was project manager, Herbert was in some sense officially required to suffer.

To win the trust of the other neural cadres, to coax out their best ef-forts, their boss had to manifest clear signs of deep emotional engage-ment with large, impressive mental burdens. Otherwise he'd be dismissed as a fake, a poseur, a lightweight. He'd be replaced by some-one else, someone more eager, more determined, more committed.

There were people — especially the younger and more radical cadres on Mljet—who whispered that she, Vera Mihajlovic, should become the project manager. After all, she was twenty-six and had grown up within the neural system and the sensorweb, whereas Herbert was fifty--two and had merely engineered such things. Whenever it came to re-deeming Mljet, Vera was burningly committed and utterly sincere. Herbert was older, wiser, and a foreigner, so he was merely interested. Herbert had his flaws. Herbert's largest character flaw was that he was publicly in love with a subordinate half his age. Anyone who wanted to look at Herbert's brain would know this embarrassing fact, and since Herbert was in authority, everyone naturally wanted to look at his brain. Such was their situation, a snarl that was humanly impossible. Yet it was their duty to bear the burden of it. So far, they had both managed to bear it.

Herbert gently drummed his thick red fingers on his folding camp table. Heaven only knew what labyrinth of second-guessing was going on within his naked head. He seemed to expect her to make the next emotional move, to impulsively spit something out.

What was he feeling? Had Herbert finally learned to hate her? Yes! In a single heart-stabbing instant, this suspicion flamed into conviction.

Herbert despised her now. He hated all the trouble she had given him.

He'd just claimed that he was "reassigning" her. He meant to fire her from the project. He would throw her onto a supply boat and kick her -off Mljet. She would be expelled, shipped to some other Acquis recla-mation project: Chernobyl, Cyprus, New Orleans. She would never proudly wear her boneware again, she'd be reduced to a newbie peon. This meant the end of everything. Herbert touched his chin. "Vera, did you sleep at all last night?"

"Not well," she confessed. "My barracks are so full of dirty newbies . . . " Vera had tossed and turned, hating herself for panicking in the mine, and dreading this encounter.

"A good night's sleep is elementary neural hygiene. You need to teach yourself to sleep. That's a discipline."

She gnawed at a fingernail.

"Eat," he commanded. He shoved his soup bowl across the little camp table. She reluctantly unfolded a camp stool and sat.

"Breakfast will stabilize your affect. You've spent too much time in a helmet lately. You need a change of pace." He was coaxing her.

"There's no such thing as 'too much time in a helmet.' "

"Well, there's also no such thing as a proper Acquis officer skipping meals and failing to sleep. Eat." She was dying to eat from the simple bowl that Herbert used. That big warm spoon in her hand had just been inside Herbert's mouth.

Herbert edged past her and zippered the entrance to his tent. This gesture was a pretense, since there was very little sense in fussing about privacy in an attention camp. People made a big fuss anyway, because life otherwise was unbearable.

Neither of them were wearing their helmets: not even neural scan-ning caps. Any emotion coursing through them would stay off the record. How dangerous that felt.

Reaching behind his polished rack of boneware, Herbert found an ancient, itchy hat of Australian yarn. He stretched this signature bonnet over his naked head. Then he scratched under it. "So. Let's discuss your new assignment. An important visitor has arrived here. He's a banker from Los Angeles, and he took a lot of trouble to come bother us. This man says he knows you. Do you know John Montgomery Montalban?"

Vera was shocked. This was the last news she had ever expected to hear from Herbert's lips. She dropped the spoon, leaned forward on her stool, and began to cry.

Herbert contemplated this behavior. He was saddened by the dirty spoon. "You really should eat, Vera."

"Just send me back down into the mine."

"I know that you have a troubled family history," said Herbert. "That's not a big secret, especially on this island. Still, I just met this John Mont-gomery Montalban. I see no need for any panic about him. I have to say I rather liked Mr. Montalban. He's a perfectly pleasant bloke. Very busi-nesslike."

"Montalban is that stupid rich American who married Radmila. Make him go away. Hurry. He's bad trouble."

"Did you know that Mr. Montalban was coming here to this island? It was quite an epic journey for him, by his account. He took a slow boat all across the Pacific, he personally sailed through the Suez Canal . .

. Making money all the way, I'd be guessing, by the look of him."

"No. I have never met Montalban. Never. I don't talk to him, I don't know him. He isn't supposed to be here, Herbert. I don't want to know him. Not ever. I hate him. Don't let him stay here." Herbert lowered his voice. "He's brought his little girl with him." Vera raised her head. "He brought a child? To a neural camp?"

"That's not illegal. It's against Acquis policy for people in radical ex-perimental camps to
have and bear
children. After all, clearly, morally—we can't put kids into little boneware jumpers and scan their brains without their adult consent. But it's not against policy to
bring
children here, on a visit. So Little Mary Montalban — who is all of five years old-—came here all the way from California. She's here to see you, Vera. That's what I'm told."

Vera's shock lost its sharpness in her dark, gathering resentment.

"That little girl is Radmila's child. Radmila sent her baby here. I was al-ways afraid it would come to this. This is all some kind of trick!" Vera caught her lower lip between her teeth. "Radmila can never be trusted. Radmila is a cheat!"

" 'Cheat' in what sense? Enlighten me."

''You can tell just by looking at Radmila that she has no morals."

"But Radmila is your own clone. Radmila looks exactly like you do." Vera shifted in her chair in anguish. "That is not true! The fact that we're genetically identical means
nothing.
We are very, very different. She's a cheat, she's evil, she's wrong." There was no more "Radmila." Once there had been a Radmila, and she and Radmila had been the same. They had been the great septet of caryatids: seven young women, superwomen, cherished and entirely spe-cial, designed and created for the single mighty purpose of averting the collapse of the world. They were meant to support and bear its every woe.

The world had collapsed and the caryatids were scattered all over: they were wrecked, shot, exposed, scattered and broken into pieces, their creator hunted and hounded like a monster . . . And in the place of beautiful Radmila, magical Radmila, that noble creature Vera had loved much better than herself, there was only the diseased and deca-dent "Mila Montalban." A rich actress in Los Angeles. Mila Montalban took drugs and dressed like a prostitute.

"Vera, why do you say such cruel things? Your brother George—he suffered like you suffered, but he would never say such demeaning things about his sisters."

Far from calming her, these words spurred instant, uncontrollable fury. "I hate Radmila! Radmila makes me sick! I wish that Radmila was dead! Bratislava died. Svetlana, Kosara, they died, too! I wish Radmila had died with them, she
should
have died! Running away from me, foreverthat was only a foul thing to do . . . "

"I know that you don't really feel that way about your sisters."

"They're not my sisters, and of course I feel that way. They should never have existed, and never walked the Earth. They belong in the grave."

"Your brother George is alive and he's walking the Earth," said Her-bert calmly. "You talk to George sometimes, you're not entirely isolated from your family. You don't hate George in that profound way, do you?"

Vera wiped hot tears from her cheeks. She deeply resented her brother Djordje. Djordje lived in Vienna. Djordje had disowned his past, built his shipping business, found some stupid Austrian girl to put up with him, and had two children. Nowadays, Djordje called himself "George Zweig." She didn't exactly want Djordje dead—he was useful—but whenever Djordje tried to talk to her (which was far too often), Djordje scolded her. Djordje wanted her to leave Mljet, leave the Acquis, get married, and become limited and woodenheaded and stupid and useless to everybody and to the world, just like himself and his fat, ugly wife.

The existence of Djordje was a curse. Still, Djordje never gave her the absolute loathing that she felt in the core of her being at the very thought of her sisters. No one who had failed to know the depth of their union could ever know the rage and pain of their separation. And no-body knew the depth of their shattered union: not their tutors, not their machines, not even "George," not even their so-called mother.

"Herbert, please. Stop debriefing me about my family. That is useless and stupid. I don't have any family. We were never a family. We were a crazy pack of mutant creatures."

"What about that tough girl, the army medic? George seems pretty close to her — they speak."

"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 emp-tied bowl away. "I don't want Mr. Montalban to see you inside your neu-ral 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 dan-gerous. 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 under-stood 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, every-one. We can't eat our hatreds and resentments, because those won't nour-ish us. We can only eat what we put on our own tables — today. Am I clear to you?" Vera nodded sullenly. Having put her through the emotional wringer, Herbert was going to praise her now.

"You have extensive gifts, Vera. You have talent and spirit. You are en-ergetic and pretty, and even if you tend to panic on some rare occasions, you always fulfill your duties and you never give up. The people who know you best: They all love you. That's the truth about Vera Mihajlovic. Someday you will realize that about yourself. Then you'll be happy and free."