The Caryatids

Part One VERA The Adriatic

POISONS, PUMPED DOWN HERE at enormous pressure, had oozed deep into the water table. The seamy stone was warped and twisted. All around her, toxin miners scuttled like crabs.

The toxin miners pried the poisoned rock apart, slurped up toxins with busy hoses, then deftly reassembled the stifling walls in a jigsaw mess of glue. In their exoskeletons and filter suits, the miners looked like construction cranes wrapped in trash bags.

The miners were used to their work and superbly good at it. They measured their progress in meters per day. They were subterranean brick­layers. Cracking blocks and stacking blocks: that was their very being.

Vera thought longingly of glorious light and air at the island’s sunny surface, which, from the cramped and filthy depths of this mine, seemed as distant as the surface of Mars. Vera had made it a matter of personal principle to know every kind of labor on the island: forestry, reef restoration, the census of species…

These miners had the foulest, vilest redemption work she’d ever seen. The workers were a gang of grimy, knobby ghosts, recycling sewage in­side a locked stone closet.

Her helmeted head rang with a sudden buzz of seismic sensors, as if her graceless filter suit were filled with bees. Tautly braced within their shrouds and boneware, the miners studied the tortured rock through their helmet faceplates. They muttered helpful advice to one another.

Vera loaded the mine’s graphic server. She tapped into the augment that the miners were sharing.

Instantly, the dark wet rock of the mine burst into planes of brilliant color-coding: cherry red, amber yellow, veins of emerald green… A daz­zling graphic front end for this hellhole.

Using their gauntlets, the miners drilled thumb-sized pits into the dirty rock. They plucked color-coded blasting caps from damp-stained satchels at their waists. They tamped in charges. Within a minute came the blast. Vera, sealed within her suit and padded helmet, felt her teeth clack in her head.

With a groan and squeak of their boneware, the miners wrestled out a cracked slab the size of a coffin.

A stew of effluent gushed forth. The bowels of the Earth oozed false-color gushes of scarlet and maroon.

“You can help me now.” Karen beckoned.

Vera chased the software from her faceplate with a shake of her head. Vera’s sensorweb offered sturdy tech support to anyone who might re­deem the island, but the mediation down this mine was in a terrible state. These miners were plumbing the island’s bowels with bombs and picks, but when it came to running their everyware, they never syn­chronized the applications, they never optimized the servers, they never once emptied the caches of the client engines. Why were people like that?

Badly encumbered by her filter shroud, Vera clambered to Karen’s side through a cobweb of safety supports. The carbon-fiber safety webs looked as useless as dirty gossamer. Strain monitors glowed all over them, a spectral host of underground glowworms.

Vera found her voice. “What do you need me to do?”

“Put both your hands up. Here. And over there. Right. Hold all that up.”

Vera stood obediently. Her exoskeleton locked her body tight against the ceiling.

Karen’s boneware creaked as she hefted her power drill. She studied the rock’s warping grain through the mediation of her faceplate, whistling a little through her teeth. Then she probed at a dripping seam. “This part’s nasty,” she warned.

Her drill spewed a tornado of noise. Vera’s guts, lungs, and muscles shook with the racket. It got much worse as Karen dug, jammed, and twisted. Within her boneware, Vera’s flesh turned to jelly.

Karen handled her massive drill with a dainty attention to detail, as if its long whirring bit were a chopstick.

Gouts of flying rock dust pattered off Vera’s helmet. She twisted her neck and felt the helmet’s cranial sensors dig into her scalp.

Two miners slogged past her as she stood there locked in place, haul­ing their hoses and power cables, as if they were trailing spilled guts. They never seemed to tire.

Stuck in her posture of cramped martyrdom to duty, Vera sourly en­joyed a long, dark spell of self-contemplation.

Like an utter idiot, she had allowed herself to be crammed into this black, evil place… No, in a bold gust of crusading passion, she had grabbed her sensor kit and charged headlong down into this mine to tackle the island’s worst depths. Why? To win some glow of deeper pro­fessional glory, or maybe one word of praise from her boss?

How could she have been that stupid, that naive? Herbert was never coming down here into a toxin mine. Herbert was a professional. Her­bert had big plans to fulfill.

Herbert was a career Acquis environmental engineer, with twenty years of service to his credit. Vera also wore the Acquis uniform, but, as a career Acquis officer, Vera was her own worst enemy. When would she learn to stop poking in her beak like a magpie, trying to weave her sensor­webbing over the whole Earth? Any engineer who ran a sensorweb always thought she was the tech support for everything and everybody. “Ubiqui­tous, pervasive, and ambient” —all those fine words just meant that she would never be able to leave anything alone.

No amount of everyware and mediation could disguise the fact that this mine was a madhouse. The ugly darkness here, the grit, the bang­ing, grinding, and blasting, the sullen heat, the seething damp: and the whole place was literally full of poison! She was breathing through mi­cropored plastic, one filmy layer away from tainted suffocation.

Stuck in her rigid posture of support, Vera gazed angrily through the rounded corners of her helmet faceplate. Nobody else down in this mine seemed at all bothered by the deadly hazards surrounding them.

Was she living an entirely private nightmare, was she insane? Maybe she had been crazy since childhood. Anyone who learned about her childhood always thought as much.

Or maybe her perspectives were higher and broader and finer, maybe she simply understood life better than these dirty morons. Stinging sweat dripped over Vera’s eyebrows. Yes, this ugly mayhem was the stuff oflife for the tunnel rats. They had followed their bliss down here. This hell was their homeland. Fresh air, fresh water, golden sunlight, these were alien concepts for them. These cavemen were going to settle down here permanently, burrowing into the poisonous wet and stink like bony salamanders. They would have children, born without eyes…

“Stay alert,” Karen warned her.

Vera tried, without success, to shrug in her locked exoskeleton.

“Work faster, then.”

“Don’t you hustle me,” said Karen merrily. “I’m an artist.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

“This is not the kind of work you can hurry,” said Karen. “Besides, I love my drill, but they built it kinda girly and underpowered.”

“Then let me do the drilling. You can hold this roof up.”

“Vera, I know what I’m doing.” With a toss of her head, Karen lit up her bodyware. A halo of glory appeared around her, a mediated golden glow.

This won her the debate. Karen was the expert, for she was very glo­rious down here. Karen was glorious because she worked so hard and knew so much, and she was so beloved for that. The other miners in this pit, those five grumbling and inarticulate cavemen banging their rocks and trailing their long hoses—they adored Karen’s company. Karen’s presence down here gave their mine a warm emotional sunlight. Karen was their glorious, golden little star.

There was something deeply loathsome about Karen’s cheery affec­tion for her labor and her coworkers. Sagging within her locked boneware, Vera blinked and gaze-tracked her way through a nest of menu options.

Look at that: Karen had abused the mine’s mediation. She had tagged the rocky cave walls with virtual wisecracks and graffiti, plus a tacky host of cute icons and stencils. Could anything be more hateful?

A shuddering moan came from the rock overhead. Black ooze cas­caded out and splashed the shrouds around their legs.

Karen cut the drill. Vera’s stricken ribs and spine finally stopped shaking.

“That happens down here sometimes,” Karen told her, her voice giddy in the limpid trickling of poisoned water. “Don’t be scared.”

Vera was petrified. “Scared of what? What happens down here?” “Just keep your hands braced on that big vein of dolomite,” Karen told her, the lucid voice of good sense and reason. “We’ve got plenty of safety sensors. This whole mine is crawling with smart dust.”

“Are you telling me that this stupid rock is moving’?”

“Yeah. It moves a little. Because we’re draining it. It has to subside.”

“What if it falls right on top of us?”

“You’re holding it up,” Karen pointed out. She wiped her helmet’s ex­terior faceplate with a dainty little sponge on a stick. “I just hit a good nasty wet spot! I can practically smell that!”

“But what if this whole mine falls in on us? That would smash us like bugs!”

Karen sneezed. All cross-eyed, she looked sadly at the spray across the bottom of her faceplate. “Well, that won’t happen.”

“How do you know that?”

“It won’t happen. It’s a judgment call.”

This was not an answer Vera wanted to hear. The whole point of in­stalling and running a sensorweb was to avoid human “judgment calls.” Only idiots used guesswork when a sensorweb was available.

For instance, pumping toxins down here in the first place: That was some idiot’s “judgment call.” Some fool had judged that it was much easier to hide an environmental crime than it was to pay to be clean.

Then the Acquis had arrived with their sensorweb and their media­tion, so everybody knew everything about the woe and horror on this island. The hidden criminality was part of the public record, sud­denly. They were mining the crime. There was crime all around them.

A nasty fit of nerves gathered steam within Vera. She hadn’t had one of these fits of nerves in months. She had thought she was well and truly over her fits of nerves. She’d been sure she would never have a fit of nerves while wearing an Acquis neural helmet.

“Let me use the drill,” Vera pleaded.

“This drill needs a special touch.”

“Let me do it.”

“You volunteered for mine work,” said Karen. “That doesn’t make you good at it. Not yet.”

“‘We learn by doing,’” Vera quoted stiffly, and that was a very cor­rect, Acquis-style thing to say. So Karen shrugged and splashed out of the way. Karen braced herself against the stony roof.

Vera wrapped her arms around the rugged contours of the drill. Her boneware shifted at the hips and knees as she raised the drill’s tip over­head. She pressed the trigger.

The drill whirled wildly in her arms and jammed. All the lights in the mine went out.

Vera’s exoskeleton, instantly, locked tight around her flesh. She was stuck to the drill as if nailed to it.

“I’m stuck,” she announced. “And it’s dark.”

“Yeah, we’re all stuck here now,” said Karen, in the sullen blackness.

Toxic water dripped musically.

“I can’t move! I can’t see my own hands. I can’t even see my media­tion!”

“That’s because you just blew out the power, Vera. Freezing the sys­tem is a safety procedure.”

An angry, muffled shout came from another miner. “Okay, what idiot pulled that stunt?” Vera heard the miner sloshing toward them through the darkness.

“I did that!” Vera shouted. In the Acquis, it was always best to take re­sponsibility at once. “That was my fault! I’ll do better.”

“Oh. So it was you? You, the newbie?”

Karen was indignant. “Gregor, don’t you dare call Vera a ‘newbie.’ This is Vera Mihajlovic! Compared to her, you’re the newbie.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I still have charge left in my capacitors.” Karen sighed aloud in the wet darkness. “Just go and reboot us, Gre­gor. We’ve all got a schedule to meet.”

“Please help me,” Vera begged him. “I’m stuck here, I can’t move!” “You’ll have to wait for a miracle, stupid,” said Gregor, and he left them there, rigid in the darkness.

“You made Gregor angry,” Karen assessed. “Gregor’s our very best rock man, but he’s not exactly a people person.”

Vera heaved uselessly against the silent pads and straps of her dead exoskeleton. Her boneware, which gave her such strength, grace, light­ness, power, had become her intimate prison.

“Who designed all this?” she shrieked. “We should have power back­ups! We should have fuel cells!”

“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 fear­thoughts, 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 it loose, and logged out of the sensorweb.

The helmet released its rubbery grip on her scalp. She pulled it, bent her neck, and her head was freed. She suddenly heard the almighty host of cicadas creaking in the island’s pines, the summer army of insect oc­cupation. The insect screams were shrill and piercing and tireless and erotic.

Vera powered down. Intimate grips and straps released their embrace of her arms and legs. She plucked her hands from the work gloves. She tugged her bare feet from the boots.

Deprived of the presence of her body, the boneware downsized and collapsed.

Vera placed the tender soles of her feet against a brown carpet of pine needles. She sat on a slanting boulder, with furred patches of orange lichen the size of a child’s handprints. The dense sea breeze up the hill­slope smelled of myrtle and wild honey. It seemed to pour straight through her flesh.

Fitfully, Vera worked a comb through her loosened braids. Her eyes ached, her throat was raw from screaming. Her back hurt, her shoulders felt stiff. Her thighbones were like two hollow straws.

She rubbed the seven shaven spots on her scalp. Her mind was clear­ing, the panic had shed its grip. The sensorweb was invisible to her now, gone with the helmet at her naked feet, but she still sensed its permeat­ing presence across her island. Vera knew that the sensorweb was here, processing, operational. She could feel it in the way that a sleeping face felt sunlight.

As an Acquis web engineer, she had labored on the sensorweb for nine years, and its healing power was manifest. Once the web had been an aspect of the island. Now the island was an aspect of the web.

Vera tore at her suspension clips, her webbing belt. She rid herself of her tunic and trousers. Her underclothes, those final skeins of official fabric, shivered and crumpled as they left her flesh.

Vera sniffed and spat, shook herself all over.

Naked, she was a native sliver of this island, one silent patch of flesh and blood. Just a creature, just a breath, just a heartbeat.

VERA’S BOSS WAS AN ACQUIS ENGINEER: Herbert Fotheringay. The climate crisis had dealt harshly with Herbert’s home, his native island-continent. Australia had been a ribbon of green around a desert. Drought had turned Australia into a ribbon of black.

The Acquis was partial to recruiting people like Herbert, ambitious people who had survived the collapse of nation-states. The Acquis, as a political structure, had emerged from the failures of nations. The Ac­quis was a networked global civil society.

From the days of its origins in planetary anguish, the Acquis had never lacked for sturdy recruits. Herbert had been ferociously busy on Mljet for nine years.

Herbert awaited her at his latest construction project: another atten­tion camp.

Attention camps were built to house the planet’s “displaced,” which, in a climate crisis, could mean well nigh any person at almost any time. Attention camps were the cheapest and most effective way that the twenty-first century had yet invented to turn destitute people into agents of a general salvation.

Mljet was an experimental effort by a technical avant-garde, so its camps were small in scope compared with, say, the vast postdisaster slums of the ceaselessly troubled Balkans. So far, the island’s camps held a mere fifteen hundred refugees, most in the little districts of Govedjari and Zabrijeze.

The refugees in Zabrijeze and Govedjari were among the wretched of the Earth, but with better tech support, they would transit through their unspeakable state to a state that was scarcely describable.

Herbert’s newest campsite was a six-hectare patch of scalded, sloping bedrock that had once been an island dump. The dump had leaked tox­ins and methane, so it had been catalogued and obliterated.

Vera walked into the camp’s humming nexus of construction cranes, communication towers, fabricators, heat-pump pipes, and bioactive sewage tanks.

Seen with the naked eye—she wore no helmet today—the camp was scattered around her like the toys of a giant child. Their arrangement looked surreal, nonsensical. It was only through the sensorweb that every object, possession, and mechanism found its proper destination. One might say that the new camp was systematically networked… or one might say, more properly, that the sensorweb was becoming a camp.

Vera stared through the camp’s apparent confusion, out to sea. Morn­ing on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked… Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous “Adriatic blue” was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently “simple and natu­ral” blue emerged from a wild melange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer…

The sea had no “real” blue. And the camp was no “real” camp. There was a melange of potent forces best described as “futurity.” They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.

Feeling meek and frail without her helmet and boneware, Vera qui­etly slid into Herbert’s saffron-colored tent. Herbert was shaving his head with one hand, eating his breakfast with another.

Herbert was ugly, red-faced, and in his early fifties. The dense meat of his stout body was as solid as a truck tire. He ran a buzzing shaver over his skull, which bore seven livid dents from his helmet’s brain scanner.

Herbert’s exoskeleton, bone-white, huge, and crouching in a powered support rack, filled almost half his modest tent. Vera’s personal exo­skeleton was a pride of the Acquis and had cost as much as a bulldozer, but Herbert’s boneware was a local legend: when Herbert climbed within its curved and crooked rack, he wore full-scale siege machinery.

The burdens of administration generally kept Herbert busy, but when Herbert launched himself into direct action, he shook the earth. Her­bert could tear up a brick house like a man breaking open a bread loaf; he could level a dead village like a one-man carnival.

Herbert smiled on her with unfeigned loving-kindness.

“Vera, it was kind of you to come so early. There have been some important developments, a new project. I’ve had to reassign you.”

Vera’s eyes welled up. “I knew you’d pull me out of that mine. I dis­graced myself.”

“Well, yes,” Herbert admitted briskly. Naturally Herbert had read the neural reports from all the personnel on-scene. Everyone felt regret, un­happiness, embarrassment, shame… “Mining work is not your bliss, Vera. A mishap can happen to anyone.”

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

People who had never worn boneware had such foolish ideas about brain scanners and what they did. Brain scanners could never read thoughts. Telepathy was impossible. That was a fairy tale.

Still, neural scanners were very good at the limited things that real­life scanners could do. Mostly, they read nerve impulses that left the brain and ran the body’s muscles. That was why a neural scanner was part of any modern exoskeleton.

Brain scanners also read emotions. Emotions, unlike thoughts, lin­gered deep within the brain and affected the entire nervous system.

Grand passions were particularly strong, violent, and machine­legible.

Acquis neural scanners could easily read ecstasy and dread. Murderous fury. Pain and injury. Lassitude, grief, hatred, exaltation, bursting pride, bitter guilt, major depression, suicidal despair, instinctive loathing, sly de­ception, abject terror, burning resentment, a mother’s love, and unstop­pable tears of sympathy.

Acquis neural tech was still a young, emergent field, but it was al­ready advanced enough to create a vital core of users and developers. Herbert was one of those people. So was every other Acquis cadre on Mljet. Herbert was an Acquis neural apparatchik, a seasoned captain of the industry.

Vera was his lieutenant.

Heat prickled the back of Vera’s neck. “There’s no big debriefing for me, Herbert? You know as well as I do that I completely lost my wits down there!”

“Yes, you suffered a panic attack,” Herbert said blandly. “It’s one of your character flaws. We all have them. It’s our flaws that give us our character.”

Vera was now certain that there was something dreadful in the works for her. Herbert was much too calm.

Vera analyzed her boss’s ugly face. Why did she love him so?

When she’d first met Herbert, he had badly scared her. Herbert was old, ugly, foreign, and fanatical. Worst of all, Herbert had bluntly in­sisted that she stick her head into an experimental helmet that scanned people’s brains. Vera knew that ubiquitous computing was very powerful: she did not want that technology applied inside her skull. Vera feared that for good reasons. She had seen her loved ones shot down dead, and she had feared that less.

Vera had obeyed Herbert anyway, because Herbert was willing to res­cue Mljet. No one else of consequence seemed even willing to try. The Acquis were global revolutionaries. They got results in the world. They did some strange things, yes—but they never, ever stopped trying.

So Vera had swallowed the panic and let the machine swallow her head.

Vera had swiftly learned that wearing a brain machine was a small price to pay to learn the feelings of others.

Herbert Fotheringay was an ugly man, but he had such a beautiful soul. Herbert had a touching simplicity of character. He brimmed over with kindness and goodness. For those who earned his trust and shared his aims, Herbert was a tireless source of strength and support. Herbert meant every word that he had ever said to her.

She had joined his effort as a bitter, grieving eighteen-year-old, her home demolished and her loved ones shot dead or scattered across the world. Yet Herbert and his scanners had instantly seen beyond her fear and misery. The machines had sensed the depth of her passionate love for her homeland. Herbert had always treated Vera as the heart and soul of his Mljet effort.

Herbert had made himself her mentor. He set her tests, he gave her tasks. She had eagerly seized those chances, and they had done so well. They had accomplished so much, together, side by side. The wounded island was healing before their eyes. Innovation was coming thick and fast, amazing insights, new services, new techniques. Transformations were bursting from her little island that were fit to transform the world.

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 in­sula, 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 scan­ner 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 ef­forts, their boss had to manifest clear signs of deep emotional engage­ment with large, impressive mental burdens. Otherwise he’d be dismissed as a fake, a poseur, a lightweight. He’d be replaced by some­one 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 re­deeming 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 recla­mation 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 scan­ning 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 Mont­gomery 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 busi­nesslike.”

“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 al­ways 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 spe­cial, 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 deca­dent “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 Her­bert 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 no­body 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 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 super­women 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 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 en­ergetic 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.”

Vera lifted her chin. Herbert had been telling her these spirit-lifting things for nine long years. Herbert said them because he truly believed them. He believed them so heartily that sometimes she was almost con­vinced.

After all, the evidence was on his side. Mostly.

Herbert drew a conclusive breath. “So: As a great man once said, in times almost as dark as our own times, ‘Withhold no sacrifice, begrudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe: all will be well.’”

Maybe someday he would just put his arms around her. Not talk so much, not understand her so loudly and so thoroughly. Just be there for her. Be there like a man for a woman.

That wasn’t happening. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

VERA PICKED HER WAY BACK to her barracks, bare-headed and bare-eyed. The broken road was heavily overgrown; the flitting birds had no sensorweb tags, the flowery bushes had no annotations. Without her boneware, her arms and legs felt leaden. She had a heavy heart about the new assignment.

She was to “guide” John Montgomery Montalban around the island.

Vera knew what that meant-she had just become a spy. She was a spy now, pretending to be a guide. Something dark and horrible was tran­spiring between herself and Radmila.

Why was the Earth so small?

Radmila had sent her child and her husband here, so that her shadow would once again touch Mljet. Why did that woman exist? Radmila had no right to her existence.

Radmila’s fool of a husband-how had that man dared come here?

“On vacation,” he had said. Montalban had told the island’s project manager, told Herbert right to his face, that he was here as a “tourist.”

Could Montalban possibly imagine that Herbert, an Acquis officer, would be fooled by that lie? Vera felt shocked and numbed at the sheer audacity of such a falsehood. People who lived without brain scanners thought that they could get away with anything they said. The fetid pri­vacy of their unscanned brains boiled over with deception and cunning.

No wonder the world had come to ruin.

Maybe Montalban imagined that his story sounded plausible, be­cause Mljet had once had tourists—thousands of them. Before its decay, tourism had been the island’s economic base. And Montalban was an investment banker, specializing in tourism. He’d even said some­thing fatuous about his child’s “cultural heritage.”

Montalban was rich, he was from Los Angeles—which was to say, Montalban was from the Dispensation. Montalban was from the other global civil society, the other successor to the failed order of nation­states, the other global postdisaster network.

Acquis people struggled for justice. Dispensation people always talked about business. There were other differences between the two world governments, but that was the worst of it, that was the core of it. Everything the Acquis framed as common decency, the Dispensation framed as a profit opportunity. The Dispensation considered the world to be a business: a planetary “sustainable business.” Those people were all business to the bone.

Montalban had clearly come here to spy for the Dispensation, al­though global civil societies didn’t have any “spying.” They weren’t na­tions: so they had no “spying” and no “war.” They had “verification” and “coopetition” instead. They were the functional equivalents of spying and war, only much more modern, more in the spirit of the 2060s.

Vera wiped sweat from her aching brow. Maybe she could defy Her­bert, put on her trusty boneware, grab that “coopetitor” by the scruff of his neck, and “verify” him rightback onto his boat. If she did that—in a burst of righteous fury—how much real trouble could that cause? Maybe the cadres would sincerely admire her heartfelt burst of fury.

The Dispensation prized its right to “verify” what the Acquis did.

“Verification” was part of the arrangement between the network superpowers—a political arrangement, a detente, to make sure that no one was secretly building old-fashioned world-smashing super­weapons. In practice, “verification” was just another nervous habit of the new political order. The news was sure to leak over some porous network anyway, so it was better just to let the opposition “verify”… It kept them busy. Montalban had already toured an island attention camp… He was photographing it, taking many notes… Shopping for something, probably…

Vera knew that the Dispensation feared Acquis attention camps. The Dispensation had their own camps, of course, but not attention camps—and besides, the Dispensation never called them “refugee camps,” but used smoothly lying buzzwords such as “new housing projects,” “enter­tainment destinations,” and “sustainable suburbs.”

Attention camps were a particularly brilliant Acquis advance in human rehabilitation. So the other global civil society glumly opposed them. That was typical of the struggle. The Dispensation dug in their heels about advanced Acquis projects that couldn’t fit their crass, mate­rialist philosophy. They scared up popular scandals, they brought their “soft-power” pressure… They were hucksters with all kinds of tricks.

A bluebottle fly buzzed Vera’s bare face—the pests were bad in sum­mer. No, she wouldn’t attack Montalban and evict him while wearing her armor. That was a stupid emotional impulse, not coolheaded diplo­macy. Vera had limited experience outside Mljet, but she was an Acquis officer. The word got around inside the corps. There were professional ways to handle bad situations like this. Annoying and slow ways, but pro­fessional ways.

When some Dispensation snoop showed up at an Acquis project to “verify,” the sophisticated tactic was to “counterverify.” Fight fire with fire. The big operators handled it that way. She could watch whatever Montalban did, watch him like a hawk. Stick to him like glue, be very “helpful” to him, help him to death. Get in his way; interfere; quibble, quibble, quibble; work to rules; mire him in boring procedures. Make a passive-aggressive pest of herself.

There was certainly no glory in that behavior. Spying on people was the pit of emotional dishonesty. Itwas likely to make her into the shame of the camp. Vera Mihajlovic: the spy. Everyone would know about it, and how she felt about it.

Yet someone had to take action. Vera resolved to do it.

Through handing her this difficult assignment, Herbert was testing her again. Herbert knew that her troubled family past was her biggest flaw as an officer. He knew that her dark past limited her, that it harmed her career potential in the global Acquis. Herbert had often warned her that her mediated knowledge of the world was deep, yet too narrow. By never leaving Mljet, she had never outgrown her heritage.

Herbert’s tests were hard on her, but never entirely unfair. Whenever she carried the weight of those burdens, she always grew stronger.

VERA SHARED HER BARRACKS with sixty-two other Acquis cadres. Their rose-pink, rectangular barracks was a warm, supportive, comforting environment. It had been designed for epidemic hunters.

These rapid-deployment forces, the shock troops of the global civil societies, pounced on contagious diseases emerging around the world. The medicos were particularly well-equipped global workers, thanks to the dreadful consequences of their failures. This meant they left behind a lot of medical surplus hardware: sturdy, lightweight, and cheap.

So Vera’s barracks was a foamy puff of pink high-performance fabric, perched on struts on a slope above the breezy Adriatic gulf. Out in the golden haze toward distant Italy, minor islets shouldered their way from the ocean like the ghosts of Earth’s long-extinct whales.

Nearby, the derelict village of Pomena had been scraped up and briskly recycled, while its old harbor was rebuilt for modern shipping. A vast, muscular Acquis crane, a white flexing contraption like a giant arm, plucked cargo containers from the ferries at the dock. Then the huge crane would simply fling that big shipping box, with one almighty, unerring, overhand toss, far off into the hills, where nets awaited it and cadres in boneware would unpack and distribute the goods.

Next to the docks sat a squat, ratcheting fabricator, another pride of the Acquis. This multipotent digital factory made tools, shoes, struts, bolts, girders, spare parts for boneware—a host of items, mostly jet­spewed from recycled glass, cellulose, and metal.

Karen suddenly towered over Vera’s cot, an apparition still wearing boneware from the toxin mine, ticking and squeaking. “Are you sad? You look so sad, lying there.”

Vera sat up. “Aren’t you on shift?”

“They’re fabbing new parts for my drill,” Karen said. “Down in that mine, they’re so sorry about the way they treated you. I gave them all such a good talking-to about their insensitivity.”

“I had a hard brainstorm. That was a bad day for me, all my fault, I’m sorry.”

“It’s hard work,” said Karen. “But the way you ran up your favorite hill afterward, to feel your way through your crisis… ? Your rapport with this island was so moving and deep! Your glory is awesome this morning. It’s because you find so much meaning in the work here, Vera. We’re all so inspired by that.”

“Herbert gave me a new assignment.”

Karen made a sympathetic face. “Herbert is always so hard on you. I’ll power down now. You tell me all about it. You can cry if you want.”

“First can you find me a toenail clipper?”

Karen stared through her faceplate at the thousands of tagged items infesting their barracks. Karen found a tiny, well-worn community clip­per in twenty seconds. Karen was a whiz at that. She commenced climb­ing out of her bones.

As Karen recharged her bones, Vera picked at her footsore toes and scowled at the bustling Acquis barracks. New cadres were graduating from the attention camps almost every week. They bounded proudly over the island in their new boneware, each man and woman heaving and digging with the strength of a platoon—but inside their warm pink barracks, their bones and helmets laid aside, they flopped all over each other like soft-shelled crabs.

The cadres shaved scanner patches on their skulls. They greased their sores and blisters. They griped, debriefed, commiserated, joked, wept. It often looked and sounded like a madhouse.

These were people made visible from the inside out, and that visibil­ity was changing them. Vera knew that the sensorweb was melting them inside, just as it was melting the island’s soil, the seas, even the skies…

Karen returned from her locker, swaying in her pink underwear. Karen had a sweet, pleasant, broad-cheeked face under the shaven spots in her black hair. Karen’s sweetness was more in her sunny affect than in the cast of her features. Karen’s ancestors were European, South Asian, African… Karen was genetically globalized.

Karen’s family had been jet-setting sophisticates from upper-class Nairobi, until their city had imploded in the climate crisis. Australia: A very bad story, the world’s most vulnerable continent for climate change. India, China—always so crowded, so close to epic human disasters— catastrophic places. Yet disaster always somehow seemed worse in Africa. There was less attention paid to people like Karen, their plight always fell through the cracks. One would think that African sophisticates didn’t even exist.

Karen had lost everyone she knew. She had escaped the bloody ruin of her city with a single cardboard suitcase.

Some Acquis functionary had steered Karen toward Mljet. That de­cision had suited Karen. Today, Karen was an ideal Acquis neural so­cialite. Because Karen was a tireless chatterer, always deep into everybody else’s business. Yet Karen never breathed a word about her painful past, or anyone else’s past, either. Vera liked and trusted her for that.

Life inside an Acquis brain scanner had liberated Karen. She’d ar­rived on the island so bitterly grieved that she could barely speak, but the reformed Karen was a very outgoing, supportive woman. She was even a brazen flirt.

“The boss never treats you like a woman should be treated around here,” Karen told her. “I have something that will change your mood, though.” Karen handed over a box with a handwritten card and a curly velvet ribbon.

“Karen, what is this about?”

“Your niece came here to our barracks this morning,” said Karen. “While you were being debriefed. She’s the only little girl on this whole island. She walked straight into here, right up that aisle, through that big mess piled there. Like a princess, like she was born in here. The place was full of grown-ups wearing skeletons. Tough guys. Changing shifts. You know. Naked people. She wasn’t one bit scared! She even sang them a little song. Something about her favorite foods: soup and cookies!”

“’Soup and cookies’?” said Vera unbelieving, though Karen never lied.

“The cadres couldn’t believe that either! They never saw anything like that! That kid can really sing, too—you should have heard them cheer! Then she left this beautiful gift just for you.”

Vera kept her face stiff, but she could feel herself gritting her teeth.

Karen, as always, was keen to sympathize. “We couldn’t help but love that ‘Little Mary Montalban.’ I know someday she’ll be a big star.” Karen bounced on the stainless pink fabric of her surplus medical cot. “So, do it! Open this gift from your weird estranged niece! I’m dying to see what she brought for you!”

“Since you’re so excited, you can open that.”

Karen sniffed the scented gift card and ripped into the wrappings. She removed a crystal ball.

The crystal ball held a little world. A captive bubble of water. It was a biosphere. Herbert often mentioned them. They were modeling tools for environmental studies.

Biospheres were clever toys, but unstable, since their tiny ecosystems were so frail.

Biospheres were pretty at first, but they had horribly brieflives. Sooner or later, disaster was sure to strike that little world. Living systems were never as neat and efficient as clockworks. Biology wasn’t machinery. So, as time passed, some aspect of the miniature world would depart from the normal parameters. Some vital salt or mineral might leach out against the glass. Some keystone microbe might die off—or else bloom crazily, killing everything else.

A biosphere was a crystal world that guaranteed doom.

Karen peered through the shining bubble, her freckled cheekbones warping in reflection. “This is so clever and pretty! What do people call this?”

“I’d call that a ‘thanatosphere.’”

“Well! What a name!” Karen deftly tossed the gleaming ball from hand to hand. “Why that big sour face? Your gift from that princess is fit for a queen!” Watery rainbows chased themselves across Vera’s blanket.

“That toy comes from a rich Dispensation banker. He’s a spy, and that’s a bribe. That’s the truth.”

Karen blinked. “Rich bankers are giving you gifts? Well then! You’re coming up in the world! I always said you would.”

“I don’t need that toy. I don’t want it. You can keep it.”

“Truly?” Karen caressed the crystal with her cheek. “Won’t somebody get mad about that?”

“Nobody from the Acquis. Nobody that matters to us.”

“Well, I’m so happy to have this! You’re very generous, Vera! That is one of your finest character traits.”

Now Karen was intrigued, so she really bored in. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about toys like this. Dispensation people are crazy for their fancy gifts and gadgets. They’re big collectors’ items, from high society! I bet this toy is worth a lot of cash.”

Vera methodically ripped the gift box to shreds. It was lined with vel­vet, with slender walls made of some fine alien substance, like parch­ment. It smelled like fresh bamboo. “They call their toys ‘hobjects.’”

“Oh yeah. I knew that, too.” Karen clutched the ball. “Wow, Vera, I privately own a fancy hobject! I feel so glamorous!”

“Karen, don’t manifest sarcastically. Only little kids take candy from strangers.”

Karen was hurt by this reproof. “But Little Mary is a little kid.”

“That toy is sure to rot soon. It’ll turn dark and ugly.”

Karen rolled the shining ball across the backs of her fingers. Karen’s use of neural gauntlets had made her dexterous—if her boneware was much like a skeleton, her skeleton had become rather like boneware. “Now, Vera: What kind of dark, bleak attitude are you projecting at me here? This is a whole little world! Look at all this wonderful stuff float­ing around in here! There’s a million pieces of it, and they’re all con­nected! You know what? I think this little world has a little sensorweb built in!”

“Oh no,” said Vera. “That would be perverse.”

“This is art! It’s an art hobjectl”

Vera flinched. “Stop juggling it!”

Karen’s brown eyes shone with glee. “I can see little shrimp! They’re swimming around in there! They’re jumbo shrimp!”

Karen’s eager teasing had defeated her. Vera reached out.

The biosphere held elegant branches of delicate fringed seaweed, bobbing in a vivid, reeling, fertile algae soup. The pea-green water swarmed with a vivid, pinhead-sized menagerie of twitchy rotifers and glassy roundworms.

And, yes, the sphere also held a darting, wriggling family of shrimp. These shrimp were the grandest denizens of their miniature world. Ma­jestic, like dragons.

The crystal of the biosphere was lavishly veined. Some extremely deft machine had laser-engraved a whole Los Angeles of circuits through that crystal ball. The circuits zoomed around the water world like a thousand superhighways.

“Americans will buy anything,” Karen said.

The dragon shrimp swam solemnly above an urban complex of fairy skyscrapers. Glittering extrusions grew like frost from the crystal into the seawater. Complex. Mysterious. Alluring.

It was as if, purely for random amusement, some ship-in-a-bottle fa­natic had built himself… what? Factories like fingernail parings. Mini­distilleries. Desalinators, and filters, and water-treatment plants. A pocket city, half greenish ooze and half life-support network.

Squinting in disbelief, Vera lifted the biosphere into a brighter glare. Half the glass darkened as a thousand tiny shutters closed.

This was a lovely gift. Someone had been extremely thoughtful. It was apt. It was rich with hidden meaning. It was a seduction, and meant to win her over. Vera had never seen anything in her harsh and dutiful life that was half so pretty as this.

With a pang, Vera handed the biosphere back to Karen. Karen rolled it carelessly toward her distant cot. “Vera, no wonder bankers are court­ing you. I think the boss has decided to marry you.”

“I’d do that.” Vera nodded. There was never any use in being coy with Karen.

“Marrying the boss,” said Karen, “is too easy a job for you. Herbert never gives you easy jobs.”

Vera laughed. Karen never seemed to think hard, but somehow Karen always said such true things.

“Did you know that Herbert has filed a succession plan?”

Vera nodded, bored. “Let’s not talk local politics.”

Karen stuck a medical swab in her ear, rolled it around at her leisure, and examined the results. “Let me tell you my emotions about this suc­cession business. It’s time that Herbert moved on. Herbert is a typical start-up guy. A start-up guy has got a million visionary ideas, but he never knows what they’re good for. He doesn’t know what real people in the real world will do with his big ideas.”

Vera scowled at such disloyalty. “You never used to talk that way about Herbert. You told me Herbert saved your life!”

Karen looked cagey. This was a bad sign, for though Karen had deep emotional intelligence, she wasn’t very bright.

“That was then, and this is now. Our situation here is simple,” said Karen mistakenly. “Herbert found some broken people to work very hard here, repairing this broken island. We heal ourselves with his neu­ral tech, and we heal the land with mediation at the same time. Inside heals outside. That’s great. That’s genius. I’m Acquis, I’m all for that. Sweat equity, fine! We get no pay, fine! We live in a crowded barracks, no privacy at all, no problem for me! Someday it’ll snow on the North Pole again. Men as old as Herbert, they can remember when the North Pole had snow.”

Karen flexed her multijointed fingers. “But I’m not old like him, I’m young. I don’t want to postpone my life until we bring the past back to the future! I have to live now! For me!”

Clearly Vera’s time had come to absorb a confession. She restrained a sigh. “Karen, tell me all about ‘now’ and ‘me.’”

“When I first got to this island, yes, I was a wreck. I was hurt and scared, I was badly off. Neural tech is wonderful—now that I know what it’s for! Let me have those helmets. I know what to do with them. I’ll stick them on the head of every man in the world.”

Karen scowled in thought. “I have just one question for every man. ‘Do you really love this girl, or are you just playing around?’ That’s what matters. Give me true love, and I’ll give you a planet that’s completely changed! Totally changed. I’ll give you a brand-new world in six months! You wouldn’t even recognize that world!”

“Your soppy romance love story has no glory, Karen!”

“Vera, you are being a geek. All right? You are. Because you live in­side your mediation and your sensorweb. You never listen to the people with real needs! I fell in love here. Okay? A lot. With every guy in this barracks, basically. Okay, not with all of them, but… I give and I give and I emotionally give, and where is my one true love? When do I get happy?”

“Your scheme is irresponsible and it lacks any practical application.”

“No it isn’t. No it doesn’t. Anyway, things are bound to change here. Soon.” Karen folded her arms.

“I don’t see why.”

“I’ll tell you why. Because we will promote our next project manager from among the cadres, using an architecture of participation! That’s the succession plan. And our next leader isn’t going to be like old Her­bert. Our next big leader is bound to be one of us.”

This scheme was new to Vera, so she was interested despite herself. In Mljet, it was always much more important to do the right thing with gusto than it was to nitpick about boring palace intrigues. And yet… there was politics here, every place had its politics.

“Look,” said Vera, “very clearly, we don’t have enough clout here to pick our own boss. If anything bad happened to Herbert, the Acquis committee would appoint some other project manager.”

“Oh no, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare do that.”

“Yes, they would. The Acquis are daring.”

Karen was adamant. “No they wouldn’t! They can’t send some gross newbie to Mljet to boss our neural elite! The cadres would laugh at him! They’d spit on him! They would kick his ass! He’d have no glory at all!”

Vera stared thoughtfully at Karen, then at the teeming mass of barracks­mates. It occurred to Vera that Karen, as the voice of the local people, was telling her the truth.

Vera was used to her fellow cadres—she could hardly have been more intimate with them, since their innermost feelings were spilled all over her screens.

But to outsiders, they might seem scary. Afer all, the Acquis neural cadres on Mljet were survivors from some of the harshest places in the world. They wore big machines that could lift cars. Even their women were rough, tough construction workers who could crack bricks with their fingers.

And—by the standards of people not on this island—they all lived inside-out. They didn’t “wear their hearts on their sleeves” —they wore their hearts on their skins.

They were such kind people, mostly, so supportive and decent… But—as a group—the cadres had one great object of general contempt. Every Acquis cadre despised newbies. “Newbies” were the fresh re­cruits. Acquis newbies had no glory, since they had not yet done any­thing to make the people around them feel happy, or impressed with them, or more fiercely committed to the common cause. All newbies were, by nature, scum.

So Karen had to be right. Nobody on this island would willingly ac­cept a newbie as an appointed leader. Not now, not after nine years of their neural togetherness. Afer nine years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, they were a tightly bonded pioneer society.

If they ever had a fit about politics, they were all going to have the same fit all at once.

Karen had found a big bag of sunflower seeds. She was loudly chew­ing them and spitting the husks into a cardboard pot. “Herbert’s succes­sion plan is to emotionally poll all the cadres,” Karen told her, rolling salted seed bits on her tongue. “Our people will choose a new leader themselves—the leader who makes them feel best.”

That process seemed intuitively right to Vera. That was how things al­ways worked best around here—because Mljet was an enterprise fueled on passionate conviction. “Well, Novakovic has our best glory rating. He always does.”

“Vera, open your big blue eyes. Novakovic is our chef! Of course we all like the chef Because he feeds us! That’s not what we want from our leader here! We want brilliancy! We want speed! We don’t need some stuffy, overcontrolled engineer! We need an inspiring figure with sex ap­peal and charisma who can take on the whole world! We need a ‘muse figure.’”

Vera squirmed on her taut pink cot. “We need some heavier equip­ment and some proper software maintenance, that’s what we really need around here.”

“Vera, you are the ‘muse figure’ on Mljet. You. Nobody else. Because we all know you. Your everyware touches everything that we do here.” Karen offered her a beaming smile. “So it’s you. You’re our next leader. For sure. And I’d love to have you as my boss. Boy, my life would be great, then. The Vera Mihajlovic Regime, that would be just about per­fect for me.”

“Karen, shut up. You’re my best friend! You can’t plot to make me the project manager! You know I’d become a wreck if that happened to me!”

“You were born a wreck,” said Karen, her eyes frank and guileless. “That’s why you’re my best friend!”

“Well, your judgment is completely clouded on this issue. I’m not a wreck! It’s the island that’s a wreck, and I am a solution. Yes, I had an awful time when I went down in that mine with you, I overdid that, I was stupid, but normally, I’m very emotionally stable. My needs and is­sues are all very clear to everyone. Plus, Herbert taught me a lot about geoengineering. I am very results-oriented.”

“Sure, Vera. Sure you are. You get more done around here than any­one else does. We all love you for that devotion to duty. You’re our golden darling.”

“Okay,” said Vera, growing angry at last. “Your campaign speech is impossible. That is crazy talk, that isn’t even politics.”

Karen backed off. She found a patch of open floor space. Then she stood up, unhinged her shoulders, lifted her left leg and deftly tucked her ankle behind her neck. No one in the barracks took much notice of these antics. Boneware experts always learned such things.

IN THE AZURE EASTERN DISTANCE, Vera saw the remote hills of the Croatian mainland: a troubled region called Peljesac by its survivors. The arid, wrinkled slopes of distant Peljesac had been logged off completely, scraped down to the barren bone by warlord profiteers.

Dense summer clouds were building over there. There would be storms by noon.

Montalban had chosen their rendezvous: a narrow bay, with a long stony bluff at its back. The ghost town of Polace was a briny heap of col­lapsing piers and tilted asphalt streetbeds. Offshore currents stirred the wreckage, sloshing flotsam onto Mljet’s stony shoulders: sunglasses, san­dals, indestructible plastic shopping bags, the obsolete coinage of vari­ous dead nationalities.

During Vera’s girlhood, Polace had been the most magical place in the world for her. The enchanted world of her caryatid childhood was every bit as dead as this dead town: smashed, invalidated, uncelebrated, unremembered. Reduced to garbage, and less than garbage.

The forgotten tenor of those lost times, her childhood before this is­land’s abject collapse —Vera could never think of that life without a poi­sonous sea change deep within her head.

The past would not stay straight inside her mind. The limpid, flowing simplicity of those days, of seven happy little beings, living in their com­pound all jammed together as a team and psychic unit, the house and grounds bubbling over with magic sensors and mystic computation… Learning, interacting, interfacing, growing, growing…

Then came the horror, the irreparable fracture, the collapse. A smashing into dust and less than dust: transmuted to poison. The toxic loss of herself, of all of her selves—of all her pretty, otherworldly other­selves.

Her childhood fortress home… when this town of Palace had lived, glittering with evil vitality, then her home was a blastproofed villa of an­cient Communist cement, dug deep into a hillside and nestled under camouflage nets. The sighing forest around the children seethed with intrusion sensors.

The children often played in the woods-always together, of course­and sometimes they even glimpsed the blue shorelines. But they were never allowed to visit the island’s towns.

Four times each year, though, they were required to leave the island for inspections on the mainland: inspections by their inventor, their mother, their designer, and their twin, the eighth of their world-saving unit, the oldest, the wisest, their queen. So Vera, and her sullen little brother, and her six howling, dancing, shrieking sisters traveled in an ar­mored bus with blackened windows.

The big bus would rumble up and down Mljet’s narrow, hazardous roads, thump and squeak over the numerous, rickety bridges, park for a while on the grimy, graffiti-spattered dock, and then lurch aboard a diesel-belching Balkan ferry. Locked inside the bus, screaming in feral delight with her pack of sisters, Vera had feasted her eyes on an other­worldly marvel: that marvel was this place, this dead town.

The town had a name: Polace. Its townsfolk were black marketeers. They were brewers of illicit biotech. Ina place of great natural beauty, they were merchants of despair.

Their gaudy pirate labs were guarded by militia soldiers in ferociously silly homemade uniforms. The harbor town was a factory, a pharmacy, a tourist trap, a brothel, and a slum.

Polace was an ancient Balkan fishing village of limestone rock and red-tiled roofs. Old Palace had been built right at the water’s edge, so the rising high tides of the climate crisis were sloshing into the buildings.

Except, of course, for the new piers. These piers had been jerry-built to deal with the swarms of narcotics customers, sailing in from offshore. The black-market piers towered over the sea on spindly pylons of rust­weeping iron and pocked cement. The piers were crusted all over with flashing casino lights, and garish, animated street ads, and interactive billboards featuring starlets in tiny swimsuits.

Multistory brothels loomed on the piers, sealed and windowless, like the drug labs. The alleys ashore were crammed with bars, and drugstore kiosks, and reeling, intoxicated customers, whose polyglot faces were neon-lit masks of feral glee and panic. The little harbor held the sleek, pretty yachts of the doomed, the daring, the crooked, and the planet’s increasingly desperate rich.

National governments were failing like sandcastles in the ominous greenhouse tide. There was nothing to shelter the planet’s populations from their naked despair at the scale of the catastrophes. Without any official oversight, the outlaw biotech on the island grew steadily wilder, ever more extreme. The toxic spills grew worse and worse, while the population, stewing in the effluent, sickened.

Then an earthquake, one of many common to the region, racked Mljet. The outlaw labs on the island, jimmied together in such haste, simply burst. They ruptured, they tumbled, they slid into the sea. The tourists and their hosts died from fizzing clouds of poison. Others were killed in the terrified scramble to flee the island for good. Polace had swiftly succumbed; the island’s other towns died more slowly, from the quake, the fires, the looting. When the last generators failed and the last light winked out there was nothing human on the island, nothing butthe cries of birds.

John Montgomery Montalban clearly knew this dreadful subject very well, since he had made this careful pilgrimage to see the island’s worst ruins firsthand. The California real-estate mogul calmly assessed the drowned wreckage through his tinted spex.

He told her it was “negative equity.”

Montalban, her strange brother-in-law, was a Dispensation policy wonk. He was cram-full of crisp, net-gathered, due-diligence knowledge. He was tall and elegant and persuasively talkative, with wavy black hair, suntanned olive skin, and sharp, polished teeth: big Hollywood film-star teeth like elephant ivory. His floral tourist shirt, his outdoor sandals, his multipocketed tourist pants: they were rugged and yet scarily clean. They seemed to repel dirt with some built-in chemical force.

No Dispensation activist would ever wear an Acquis neural helmet, so Vera could not know how Montalban truly felt about her and this dark meeting. Still, Montalban kept up a steady flow of comforting chatter.

Legend said that the raider ships of Ulysses had once moored in Mljet to encounter the nymph Calypso. Montalban knew about this. He judged the myth “not too unlikely.” He claimed that Homer’s Ulysses had “means, motive, and opportunity to swap his loot from Troy.”

Montalban further knew that Mljet had been a thriving resort island in the days of the Roman Empire. He was aware that “medieval devel­opers” had once built monasteries on the island, and that some of those stone piles were still standing and “a likely revenue source if repur­posed.”

Montalban entertained some firm opinions about the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire and its “autocratic neglect of the Balkan hin­terlands.” He even knew that the “stitched-up nation of Yugoslavia” had preserved Mljet as its stitched-up national park.

When it came to more recent history—years during Vera’s own lifetime—Montalban changed his tone. He became gallant and tact­ful. Her native island had been “abducted,” as he put it: as “an off­shore market for black globalization.” Montalban said nothing about the eighteen dark years that his own wife had spent on Mljet. He said nothing about Radmila whatsoever. Montalban was so entirely silent and discreet about Radmila that Vera felt dazed.

Moving onto firmer ground with a burst of verbal footwork, Montal­ban launched into a complex narrative, full of alarming details, describ­ing how the Acquis had managed to acquire Mljet to perform their neural experiments. Vera herself had never known half of these stories­—they existed at some networked level of global abstraction that she and her fellow cadres rarely encountered. The details of Acquis high-level committees were distant events for them, something like astronomy or Martian exploration, yet Montalban knew a host of astonishing things about the doctrines and tactics of both the global civil societies. Most particularly, Montalban seemed to know where their money went.

Vera felt grateful for the way events were turning out. Vera had no money—because Mljet had no money economy—but if she’d had any money, she’d have cheerfully entrusted it to someone like Montalban. Montalban was so entirely and devotedly obsessed by money that he had to be really good at banking.

Radmila’s husband was nothing like she had imagined and vaguely feared. Met in the suntanned flesh, he exuded wealth like some kind of cologne. Montalban was clearly the kind of man that rich clients could trust to work through huge, intimidating files of complex financial doc­uments. There was something smooth and painless and lubricated about him.

When he sensed that his ceaseless flow of insights was tiring her, Montalban busied himself with his camera. He adjusted its tiny knobs and switches. He deftly framed his shots. He beachcombed through the wild overgrowth of the shore, a dense shady tangle of flowering shrubs thoroughly mixed with tattered urban junk. The summer glare bounced from his fancy spex, and when he removed his busy lenses, he had dart­ing, opaque black eyes.

Busily documenting the wreck of Polace, Montalban urged her to “go right about your normal labors.”

This was his gentle reproach for the way she had chosen to confront him and his little girl: defiantly towering over them in her boneware and helmet.

She’d done that to intimidate him. That effort wasn’t working out well. Vera pretended to turn her attention to local cleanup work, lever­ing up some slabs of cement, casually tossing urban debris into heaps.

Montalban turned his full attention to documenting his child. He moved Little Mary Montalban here and there before the ruined city, as if the child were a chess piece. He was very careful of the backgrounds and the angles of the light.

Miss Mary Montalban posed in a woven sun hat and a perfect little frock, delicately pressed and creased, with a bow in the back. The gar­ment was a stage costume: it had such elegant graphic simplicity that it might have been drawn on the child’s small body.

Mary had carried a beach ball to Palace. That was the child’s gift to this stricken island, carried here from her golden California: Mary Montalban had a beach ball. A big round beach ball. A fancy hobject beach ball.

Mary certainly knew how to pose. She was solemn yet intensely visi­ble. Her hair and clothing defied gravity, or it might be better said that they charmed gravity into doing what their designers pleased.

This small American girl was some brand-new entity in the world. She was so pretty that she was uncanny, as if there were scary reservoirs of undiscovered dainty charm on the far side of humanity. Still—no matter what her ambitious parents might have done to her—this five­-year-old girl was still just a five-year-old girl. She was innocent and she was trying to please.

Mary Montalban had met a twin of her own mother: not Radmila, but Vera herself, a bony apparition, a literal moving skeleton, towering, vibrating, squeaking. Mary did not shriek in terror at the dreadful sight of her own aunt. Probably, Mary had been carefully trained never to do such things. But whenever Vera stilted nearer, the child shuddered un­controllably. She was afraid.

This fancy little girl, with her childish walking shoes, her pretty hat, and her beach ball, sincerely was a tourist. She was trying to play with her dad and have some fun at the seashore. That was Mary’s entire, wholehearted intention. Mary Montalban was the first real tourist that Mljet had seen in ten long years.

Some fun at the seashore didn’t seem too much for a small girl to ask from a stricken world. A pang of unsought emotion surged through Vera. Pity lanced through her heart and tore it, in the way a steel gaff might lance entirely through the body of some large, chilly, unsuspect­ing fish.

Vera worked harder, stacking the debris in the gathering heat of late morning, but her small attempts to order the massive chaos of this dead town could not soothe her. How much that child looked like Radmila, when Radmila had been no bigger, had known no better. How quickly all that had come apart. How sad that it had all come to such a filthy end. Like this. To rubbish, to rubble, to death.

But a child wasn’t rubble, rubbish, and death. Mary Montalban was not the product of some Balkan biopiracy lab. She was just the daugh­ter of one.

That collapse had been waiting for the caryatids; it had been in the wind all along. The collapse started slowly, at first. First, Djordje had run away from the compound, in some angry fit—Djordje’s usual self­ishness. Their latest tutor, Dr. Igoe, had vanished in search of Djordje. Dr. Igoe never came back from that search. Neither did Djordje, for this time his escape was final.

Two days of dark fear and confusion passed. Vera, Bratislava, Kosara, Svetlana, Sonja, Radmila, Biserka—none of them breathed a word of what they all sensed must be coming.

And as for their mother, their creator, their protector, their inspector… there was not a sound, not a signal, not a flicker on a screen.

Then the earthquake happened. The earth broke underfoot, a huge tremor. After the earthquake, there were fires all over the coastlines, filthy, endless columns of rising smoke.

After the fires, men with guns came to the compound. The desperate militia soldiers were scouring the island for loot, or women, or food. The compound’s security system automatically killed two of them. The men were enraged by that attack: they fired rockets from their shoulders and they burst in shooting at everything that moved.

Then sweet Kosara was killed, and good Bratislava was killed, and Svetlana was also killed, with particular cruelty. Suddenly murdered, all three of them. It had never occurred to these teenage girls to run for their lives, for their compound was their stronghold and all that their mother had allowed them to know of the world. Seventeen-year-old girls who had led lives of utter magic—air that held drawings and spoke po­etry, talking kitchenware, thinking trees—they all died in bursts of gun­fire, for no reason that they ever understood.

Radmila survived, because Radmila hid herself in the dust, smoke, and rubble. Sonja fought, and Sonja killed those who killed. Biserka, howling for mercy—Biserka had thrown herself at the bandits’ feet.

Vera herself—she had run away at the first shots fired. Just run, van­ished into the woods, like the wind. Vera had always loved the open is­land much better than the compound.

Lost in the island’s forest, truly lost on Earth for the first time in her life, Vera had been entirely alone. The Earth had no words for Vera’s kind of solitude.

Bewildered and grieving, Vera had gone to Earth like an animal. She slept in brown heaps of pine needles. She ate raw berries. She drank rainwater from stony puddles.

Her world had ended. Yet the island was still there.

Vera tramped the stricken island from one narrow end to the distant other, climbed every hill she could climb, and there was not one living soul to be found. She grew dirty, despondent, and thin.

Finally Vera heard voices from the sky. Acquis people had arrived with boats, and those rescuers had a tiny, unmanned plane that soared around the island, a flying thing like a cicada, screeching aloud in a brilliant, penetrating voice. It yelled its canned rescue instructions in five or six global languages.

Vera did as the tiny airplane suggested. She ventured to the appointed rendezvous, she found her surprised rescuers, and she was shipped to a rescue camp on the mainland. From there Vera immediately schemed and plotted to return to Mljet, to save her island as she herself had been saved. At length, she had succeeded.

And now, after all that, here, again on Mljet, at last, was the next gen­eration: in the person of Mary. The idea that Mary Montalban existed had been a torment to Vera—but in person, in reality, as a living indi­vidual, someone on the ground within the general disaster zone, Mary was not bad. No: Mary was good.

Mary was what she was: a little girl, a little hard to describe, but… Mary Montalban was the daughter of a rich banker and a cloned ac­tress, sharing a junk-strewn beach with her crazy, bone-rattling aunt. That was Mary Montalban. She had a world, too.

Mary was visibly lonely, pitifully eager to win the approval of her over­worked, too-talkative dad. Mary was also afraid of her aunt, although she very much wanted her aunt to love her and to care about her. That knowledge was painful for Vera. Extremely painful. It was a strong, com­pelling, heart-crushing kind of pain. Pain like that could change a woman’s life.

Remotely chatting in their lively, distant voices, the father and daugh­ter tossed their big handsome beach ball. The girl missed a catch, and the ball skittered off wildly into the flowering bushes. In the silence of the ruins Vera heard the child laughing.

Vera turned up the sensors in her helmet, determined to spy on them. The ruins of Polace were rather poorly instrumented, almost a blackspot in the island’s net. Vera gamely tried a variety of cunning methods, but their voices were warped and pitted by hisses, hums, and drones. The year 2065 was turning out to be one of those “Loud Sun” years: sunspot activity with loud electrical noise. Any everyware technician could groom the signal relays, but there wasn’t a lot to do about Acts of God.

Montalban did not know that Vera was eavesdropping on him with such keen attention. His formality melted away. Montalban swung his arms high and low, he capered on the wrecked beach like a little boy.

Now Montalban was telling Mary something about Polace, pointing out some details in the rusting, sour ruins. Montalban was summing it all up for his daughter somehow, in some sober piece of fatherly wis­dom. Montalban respected his daughter, and was intent and serious about teaching her. He was trying to instruct her about how the world worked, about its eerie promises and its carnivorous threats and dangers, phrasing that in some way that a five-year-old might comprehend and never forget. A fairy tale, maybe.

Thrilled to be the focus of her dad’s attention, Mary twisted her feet and chewed at her fingers.

Montalban had brought his daughter here to Mljet, all this way across the aching planet, for some compelling reason. Vera couldn’t quite hear what he was telling his child. Whatever it was, it certainly meant the world to him.

Vera sensed suddenly, and with a terrible conviction, that the two of them had come to Mljet to get far away from Radmila.

Yes, that was it. That was the secret. Montalban had not come here to spy on her, or the Acquis, or the island’s high technology, or anything else. Whatever those other purported motives might be, they were merely his excuses.

Mljet was a precious place for the two of them—because Radmila was not here. The two of them were here alone together, because this is­land was the one place on Earth that Radmila would never, ever go.

Radmila Mihajlovic, “Mila Montalban” in distant Los Angeles: Rad­mila was the vital clue here, Radmila was the missing part of this story. Radmila had renounced Mljet, fleeing the distorted horror of her own being, a refugee washing across the planet’s seas, like bloody driftwood.

Somehow, Radmila had found this man. She must have fallen on him like an anvil.

Remorseless as the rise of day, the world had continued, and now the father and the daughter had ventured here in order to be together.

Montalban flung the child’s beach ball high. He waved his hands at the hobject, gesturing like a wizard.

Suddenly, startlingly, the beach ball tripled in size. It soared above the shoreline, a striped and glittering balloon. The bubble hung there, serene and full of impossible promise, painted on the sullen storm clouds.

The beach ball wafted downward, with all the eerie airiness of a dan­delion seed. It fell as if rescuing them from their misery.

The girl screeched with glee at her father’s cleverness. Montalban, his whole being radiating joy and mastery, waved his hands. The ball plummeted to Earth. It bounded off with rubbery energy.

The two of them gleefully chased down their weird toy in their oddly posh clothing.

Mljet’s newest tourists were thrilled to be here. They were entirely happy to treat the dismal wreck of Polace as their private playground. No ruin less awful, less desolate, could suit them and their love for one another.

Vera turned her helmeted head away. Her eyes stung, her cheeks were burning.

She waded into the cooling waters of the sea.

A dead water heater, poxed with barnacles, lay pillowed in a deathbed of mud. Vera bent and fetched it up. With one comprehensive nervous heave, she threw full power into her boneware.

The wrecked machine tumbled end over end and crashed hard above the tide line.

The child stared at her in joy and awe.

Vera hopped through the sea, splashing. She found a submerged car.

She tore the rusty hood from its hinges. She flung the bent metal to shore, and it sailed like a leaf. She put her boot against a submerged door and tore that free as well. She threw it hard enough to skip it across the water.

Mary ran down the beach, skipping in glee. “Do it, Vera! Do it, Vera! Do that again!”

Montalban hastened after his child, his face the picture of worry. He half dragged Mary away from the wreckage and to a safer distance.

Up went his beach ball again, sudden and bloated and wobbling.

The bubble rose with a wild enthusiasm, its crayon-bright colors daub­ing the troubled sky.

Montalban ran beneath the convulsing toy, pretending to leap and catch it. The child clapped her hands politely.

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 was possible, yet you were always on sore feet. Always, everywhere, ubiquitously. That was modern reality. Modern reality hurt.

Vera coughed aloud.

“Shall I carry you?” Karen said sweetly.

Vera wearily crested a ragged limestone ridge. Her humble fellow pedestrians crowded the valley below her. They were women from the attention camps, hand-working the island with hatchets and trowels.

The camp women wore their summer gear, with their hair up in ker­chiefs. Every one of them wore cheap, general-issue spex.

Karen broke into a stilting run, bounding past the camp women like a whirlwind. The women offered Karen respectful salutes, awed by her cloud of glory.

Vera trudged among the lot of them, panting, sweating, sniffling. The camp women ignored Vera. She had no visible glory. So she meant noth­ing to them.

Vera took no offense. It was a software-design issue. Proper camp de­sign reflected the dominant camp demographics. Meaning: middle-aged city women. Most modern people lived in cities. Most modern people were middle-aged. So most modern people in refugee camps were nec­essarily middle-aged city women. As simple as that.

These attention-camp newbies, these middle-aged city women, were diligently laboring in the open fields of an Adriatic island. They’d never planned to meet such a fate. They’d simply known that, as refugees without options, they were being offered a radically different life.

When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their IDtags. As proper high-tech pio­neers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun.

The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies.

As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded what­ever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening.

The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close atten­tion would become an expert.

The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes.

As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. “Glory” was the primary Acquis virtue.

Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard—not when you simply heard about the concept. But when you saw glory, with your own two eyes, the invisible world made so visible, glory every day, glory a fact as inescapable as sunlight, glory as a glow that grew and waned and loomed in front of your face—then you understood.

Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be.

Camp people badly needed reasons to be. Before being rescued by the Acquis, they’d been desolated. These city women, like many city women, had no children and no surviving parents. They’d been uprooted by mas­sive disasters, fleeing the dark planetary harvest of droughts, fires, floods, epidemics, failed states, and economic collapse.

These women, blown across the Earth as human flotsam, were becom­ing pioneers here. They did well at adapting to circumstance-because they were women. Refugee women—women anywhere, any place on Earth—had few illusions about what it meant to be flotsam.

Vera herself had been a camp refugee for a while. She knew very well how that felt and what that meant. The most basic lesson of refugee life was that it felt bad. Refugee life was a bad life.

With friends and options and meaningful work, camp life improved.

Then camp life somewhat resembled actual life. With time and more structure and some consequential opportunities, refugee life was an ac­tual life. Whenever strangers became neighbors, whenever they found commonalities, communities arose. Where there were communities, there were reasons to live.

Camp user statistics proved that women were particularly good at founding social networks inside camps. Women made life more real. Men stuck inside camps had a much harder time fending off their de­spair. Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed.

Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. “Fight or flight.” Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. “Tend and be­friend.”

So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was de­signed to exploit those realities.

First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools.

The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bit­ter competition over power tools. It acted on men like a tonic.

Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an Acquis attention camp improved steadily with human usage. Exploiting the spex, the attention camp tracked every tiny movement of the user’s eye­balls. It nudged its everyware between the users and the world they per­ceived.

Comparing the movements of one user’s eyeballs to the eyeballs of a thousand other users, the system learned individual aptitudes.

A user who was good with an ax would likely be good with a water saw. A user quick to learn about plants could quickly learn about soil chemistry and hydrology. Or toxicity. Or meteorology. Or engineering. Or any set of structured knowledge that the sensorweb flung before the user’s eyes.

The attention camp had already recorded a billion things that had caught the attention of thousands of people. It preserved and displayed the many trails that human beings had cut through its fields of data. The camp was a search engine, a live-in tutoring machine. It was entirely and utterly personal, full of democratically trampled roads to human re­demption. By design, it was light, swift, glorious, brilliant.

Vera had spent time in attention camps. So had Karen. This initia­tion was required of all the Acquis cadres on Mljet. At first, they’d been bewildered. Soon they had caught on. Within a matter of weeks, they were adepts. Eventually, life became elite.

The graduates of Mljet attention camps lived in boneware; they’d be­come human power tools.

“The camp people are happier today,” judged Karen, consulting her faceplate.

Vera shrugged. It was prettier weather. Better weather was always bet­ter for morale.

Karen flexed her slender arms within their bony pistons. “I’ll knock down that Dig patch of casuarina. Watch them worshipping me.”

“Don’t be such a glory hog, Karen.”

“It takes five minutes!” Karen protested.

“Karen, you need to cultivate a more professional perspective. This is not an entertainment. Neural scanning and ubiquitous mediation are our tools. An attention camp is a trade school.”

Karen stared down at her from the towering heights of her boneware.

“Listen to you talking like that,” she said. “You’re so nervous about that rich banker, and his kid is driving you wild.”

MLJET’S TINY GROUP of Dispensation people were a discreet mi­nority on the island. They’d been living on Mljet since the project’s first days.

The Dispensation people were a tolerated presence, an obscure ne­cessity, imposed through arrangements high above. They never made any fuss about themselves or their odd political convictions.

Now, however, those quiet arrangements were visibly changing in character. The local Dispensation activists were highly honored by the visit of Montalban and his daughter. Their leader, and Montalban’s of­ficial host on the island, was Mljet’s archaeologist: good old Dr. Radic.

Archaeologists were always a nuisance on reconstruction sites. They fluttered around the sites of major earthworks like crows before the storm. There was no getting around the need for archaeologists. Their presence was mandated.

Dr. Radic was a Croatian academic. Radic diligently puttered around the island, classifying broken bricks and taking ancient pollen counts. While Vera had labored on the island’s mediation, installing her sensors and upgrading everyware, she had often encountered Dr. Radic. Their mutual love for the island and their wandering work lives made them friends.

A much older man, Dr. Radic had always been ready with some kindly word for Vera, some thoughtful little gift or useful favor. Radic clearly viewed her as an integral part of the island’s precious heritage. Vera was no mere refugee on Mljet—she was a native returnee. Knowing this, Radic had jolly pet names for Vera: the “domorodac,” the “Mljecanka.” The “home-daughter,” the “Mljet girl.”

Radic loved to speak Croatian at Vera, for Radic was an ardent patriot.

When she strained her memory, Vera could manage some “ijekavian,” the local Adriatic dialect. This island lingo had never been much like Radic’s scholarly mainland Serbo-Croatian. Whenever Vera knew that she would encounter Dr. Radic, she took along a live-translation ear­piece. This tactful bit of mediation made their relationship simpler.

Inthe nine years that she had known the archaeologist, it had never quite occurred to Vera that Radic was Dispensation. As a scientist and a scholar, Radic seemed rather beyond that kind of thing. Year after pa­tient year, Radic had come to Mljet from his distant Zagreb academy, shipping scientific instruments, publishing learned dissertations, and exploiting his graduate students. Dr. Radic was a tenured academic, an ardent Catholic, and a Croatian nationalist. Somehow, Radic had al­ways been around Mljet. There was no clear way to be rid of him.

Montalban and his daughter were guests at Radic’s work camp, an ex­cavation site called Ivanje Polje. This meadow was one of the few large flat landscapes on narrow, hilly Mljet. Ivanje Polje was fertile, level, and easy to farm. So, by the standards of the ancient world, the pretty meadow of Ivanje Polje was a place to kill for.

Ivanje Polje, like the island of Mljet, was a place much older than its name. This ancient meadow had been settled for such an extreme length of time that even its archaeology was archaeological. At Ivanje Polje, the fierce warriors of the 1930s had once dug up the fierce war­riors of the 1330s.

As an archaeologist of the modern 2060s, Radic had dutifully cata­logued all the historical traces of the 1930s archaeologists. Dr. Radic had his own software and his own interfaces for the Mljet sensorweb. As a modern scholar, Radic favored axialized radar and sonar, tomographic soil sensors, genetic analyses. Not one lost coin, not one shed horseshoe could evade him.

DR. RADIC UNZIPPED AN AIRTIGHT AIRLOCK and ush­ered his guests inside to see his finest prize.

“We call her the Duchess,” said Radic, in his heavily accented English. “The subject is an aristocrat of the Slavic, Illyrian, Romanized period. The sixth century, Common Era.”

John Montgomery Montalban plucked a pair of spex from a pocket in his flowered tourist shirt. Vera had never seen such a shirt in her life. It flowed and glimmered. It was like a flowered dream.

“We discovered the subject’s tomb through a taint in the water table,” Radic told him. “We found arsenic there. Arsenic was a late-Roman in­humation treatment. In the subject’s early-medieval period, arsenic was still much used.”

Montalban carefully fitted the fancy spex over his eyeballs, nose, and ears. “That’s an interesting methodology.”

“Arsenical inhumation accounts for the remarkable condition of her flesh!”

Karen, looming in her boneware, whispered to Vera. “Why is Radic showing this guy that horrible dead body?”

“They’re Dispensation people,” Vera whispered back. She hadn’t chosen the day’s activities.

“He’s so cute,” Karen said. “But he’s got no soul! He’s creepy.” Karen swiveled her helmeted head. “I want to go outside to play with his little girl. Ifyou have any sense, you’ll come with me.”

Vera knew it was her duty to stay with Montalban. Those who ob­served and verified must be counterobserved and counterverified.

Karen, less politically theoretical, left for daylight in a hurry.

Radic’s instrumented preservation tent was damp and underlit. The dead woman’s chilly stone sarcophagus almost filled the taut fabric space. There was a narrow space for guests to sidle around the sarcophagus, with a distinct risk that the visitor might fall in.

Radic had once informed her, with a lip-smacking scholarly relish, that the Latin word “sarcophagus” meant “flesh-eater.”

Vera had never shared Radic’s keen fascination with ancient bodies.

Her sensitive Acquis sensorweb had detected thousands of people buried on Mljet. Almost any human body ever interred in the island’s soil had left some faint fossil trace there—a trace obvious to modern ultra­sensitive instruments.

Since Vera was not in the business of judgment calls about the his­torical status of corpses, she had to leave such decisions to Dr. Radic ­and this body was the one discovery the historian most valued. Radic’s so-called Duchess was particularly well preserved, thanks to the tight stone casing around her flesh and the arsenic paste in her coffin.

Still, no one but an archaeologist would have thought to boast about her. The “Duchess” was a deeply repulsive, even stomach-turning bun­dle of wet, leathery rags.

The corpse was hard to look at, but the stone coffin had always com­pelled Vera’s interest. Somebody—some hardworking zealot from a thousand years ago—had devoted a lot of time and effort to making sure that this woman stayed well buried.

This Dark Age stonemason had taken amazing care with his hand tools. Somehow, across the gulf and abysm of time, Vera sensed a fellow spirit there.

A proper “sarcophagus,” a genuine imperial Roman tomb, should have been carved from fine Italian marble. The local mason didn’t have any marble, because he was from a lonely, Dark Age Balkan island. So he’d had to fake it. He’d made a stone coffin from the crumbly local white dolomite.

A proper Roman coffin required an elegant carved frieze of Roman heroes and demigods. This Dark Age mason didn’t know much about proper Roman tastes. So his coffin had a lumpy, ill-proportioned tum­ble of what seemed to be horses, or maybe large pigs.

The outside of the faked sarcophagus looked decent, or at least pub­licly presentable, but the inside of it—that dark stone niche where they’d dumped the corpse in her sticky paste of arsenic-that was rough work. That was faked and hurried. That was the work of fear.

The Duchess had been hastily buried right in her dayclothes: sixteen­hundred-year-old rags that had once been linen and silk. They’d drenched her in poisonous paste and then banged down her big stone lid.

Her shriveled leather ears featured two big golden earrings: bull’s heads. Her bony shoulder had a big bronze fibula safety pin that might have served her as a stiletto.

The Duchess had also been buried with three fine bronze hand mir­rors. It was unclear why this dead lady in her poisoned black stone niche had needed so many mirrors. The sacred mirrors might have been the last syncretic gasp of some ecoglobal Greco-Egypto-Roman-Balkan cult of Isis. Dr. Radic never lacked for theories.

“May I?” asked Montalban. He caressed the cold stone coffin with one fingertip. “Remarkable handiwork!”

“It is derivative,” sniffed Dr. Radic. “The local distortion of a decay­ing imperial influence.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I like best about it!”

From his tone, Vera knew that this was not what he liked best about it. He was Dispensation, so what he liked best was that someone had taken a horrible mess and boxed it up with an appearance of propriety. So he was lying. Vera could not restrain herself. “Why are you so happy about this?”

Montalban aimed a cordial nod at their host. “European Synchronic philosophy is so highly advanced! I have to admit that, as a mere Ange­leno boy, sometimes Synchronic theory is a bit beyond me.”

“Oh, no no no, our American friend is too modest!” said Radic, beaming at the compliment. “We Europeans are too often lost in our theoretical practices! We look to California for pragmatic technical de­velopments.”

Montalban removed his fancy spex and framed them against the faint light overhead. He removed an imaginary fleck of dust with a writhing square of yellow fabric. “Her body flora,” he remarked.

“Yes?” said Radic.

“Are her body flora still viable? Do you think they might grow?”

“There’s no further decay within this specimen,” said Radic.

“I don’t mean the decay organisms. I mean the natural microbes that once lived inside her while she was still alive. Those microbes have commercial value. This woman is medieval, so she never used antibi­otics. There’s a big vogue in California for all-natural probiotic body flora.”

Vera found herself blurting the unspeakable. “Do you mean the germs inside the corpse?”

Montalban pursed his lips. “’Germs inside the corpse.’ That’s not the proper terminology.”

’’You want to sell the germs inside this corpse?”

“This is a public-health issue! It’s more than just a market opportu­nity!”

“He’s right, you know,” Radic piped up. “Archaeo-microbiology is a rapidly expanding field.”

“At UC Berkeley,” said Montalban, donning his spex again, “they call their new department ‘Archaeo-Microbial Human Ecology.’”

“Very apt.” Radic nodded.

“A whole lot of hot start-up labs around UC Berkeley now. Venture money just pouring in.”

“Oh, yes, yes, it was ever thus in California,” said Radic.

“Microbe work is huge in China, too. The Jiuquan center, reviving the Gobi Desert… Microbes are the keystone of sustainable ecology.”

“I don’t understand this,” said Vera.

Radic shrugged. “That’s because you’re Acquis!”

The old man’s tactless remark hung in the damp air. Itdied and began to stink.

“I would never dismiss the microbe technology of the Acquis,” said Montalban, demonstrating a tender concern. “Acquis medical troops lead the world at public sanitation.”

Vera felt her blood begin to simmer.

Despite his lack of accurate neural information about her emotions, Montalban sensed her discontent. “The skill sets differ within the global civil societies. We should expect that: that’s a source of valuable trade.”

“So, what do you call this business? ‘Frankenstein genetic graverob­bing?”

Montalban contemplated this insult. He twirled the earpiece of his spex gently between his fingers. “I suggest that we break for lunch now. I’m sure Little Miss Mary Montalban is hungry.” Montalban carefully placed his spex inside his flowered shirt.

“Don’t you want to use your fancy spex to scan the corpse here?” said Vera.

“Yes, I do. Still, it might be wiser if we ate first.”

“You make quite a fuss about your scanning capabilities.”

Montalban lifted one suntanned hand and plucked at his lower lip. “No, I don’t ‘make fusses,’ Vera. I’m a facilitator.”

“How could you eat? How could you eat today, now, after staring at this rotten woman and her rotten flesh? And then planning to sell it? How can you do that?”

Now even Radic knew that somebody had put a foot wrong. “Please don’t get angry at our foreign guest, dear Vera, my domorodac! After all, this is your heritage!”

“Are you always like this, John? You invent all kinds of lies, and big fake words, to cover up what you do in secret?”

Montalban was suddenly and deeply wounded. A flush ran up his neck His face was turning both red and white at the same time, like a freshly sliced turnip.

Vera realized, with a giddy intuition, that yes, John Montalban was always like this. She wasn’t the first woman to tell him that about him­self. Because he was married to Radmila.

Vera had touched him on some sore spot that Radmila had lacerated. Montalban had never yet breathed a word about Radmila, yet Vera could almost smell Radmila now. Radmila was very near to them. It was as if Radmila were lying there in the coffin somehow. Disgustingly undead.

That black intuition—so true, and so immediate—panicked Vera. She felt a strong urge to strike Montalban, to hit him right across his handsome face.

Dr. Radic looked from her, to Montalban, and back again. The old man was completely bewildered and alarmed. “I’ll see to our lunch,” he blurted. Then he hurried through the zipper of the airtight tent and left it flapping.

The two of them were standing alone with the dead thing in its cof­fin. Hair rose all over Vera’s arms. Very soon, she would scream.

“Here,” said Montalban. He gently handed her the spex.

Hastily, Vera jammed the Californian hardware over her eyes. A galaxy of sparkling pixels swarmed across her vision.

The sarcophagus glimmered before her. The coffin went blurry for just a moment, then snapped into sharp focus.

The ancient sarcophagus was shiny, polished, precious, and entirely new.

A stranger lay in state inside of it. A woman who was freshly dead.

Newly laid to rest within her stony casement, the stately Duchess looked as detailed as a celebrity waxwork Her silken robe shimmered. Her linen was white and fine. Gray tendrils threaded her oiled black hair. Her golden earrings, two little bull’s heads, gleamed aggressively. Her death-pale cheeks and eyelids had been brightly smeared with un­dertaker’s colors: lead-white cosmetics, black kohl, rouge, and antimony.

“You have an augment,” Vera said. “You brought an augment here.”

“Indeed I did,” said Montalban. “I brought a tourist application.”

Montalban’s Hollywood spex had two little rubbery blinders that had sealed tight around her eyes. Vera had never seen mediation reach such a peak of graphic artistry.

Montalban’s spex erased the visible world and replaced it with a sim­ulation. The spex were firing a trio of colored lasers deep into her eye­balls. All this seemingly natural light that struck her eyes was artificial.

But she could still see her own hands, and the fabric walls of the tent.

The program was scanning the real world in real time, then generating a visual addition to that world with 3-D modeling, ray-tracing, and re­flection algorithms. It sucked all the real light out of the world, filtered it, augmented it, and blew it into her eyes with a mediated overlay.

It was doing this amazing feat in real time. Brilliantly, speedily. Using just a pair of flimsy-looking spex, instead of an entire heavy Acquis hel­met and faceplate.

“Your augment is really fine-grained.”

“Thank you,” said Montalban. “It’s the state-of-the-art from UCLA’s graphics school. We’re rather proud.”

Vera turned her spex-covered eyes in the direction of his voice. The augment faltered a bit, and then let Montalban pop into her view. Mon­taIban looked particularly pleased with himself, and, if anything, hand­somer than before. “Of course, your Dr. Radic was a lot of help with our little project.”

Vera pressed the spex against the bridge of her nose. She rocked her head from side to side. Everything panned smoothly: no breakups, no freezes, no jitters. The world had turned into a movie. A special effect.

She stared at the dead woman again. Confronted with death, at last, the Hollywood fakery became obvious. Vera had seen plenty of dead people. This was the Hollywood special-effects version of a dead person: much too tasteful, too bright, too crisp and neat.

“She’s so tiny! Why is she so small?”

“That’s the size most people really were, in the Dark Ages. You know our Dr. Radic. That old gent’s a stickler for accurate forensics.”

Arms stretched for balance, with small, careful steps, Vera sidled around the sarcophagus.

The dead woman had a thick waist, and no bust, and short, crooked legs. Her mouth and her jaws had a lemon-sucking look, for she had lost some teeth young and had grown old without dentistry.

Her brow was creased with sullen menace and there was a practiced sneer at the wings of her waxy nose. The Duchess was a vicious, impe­rious, feudal grandmother. She looked like her evil eyes might flick open at any moment.

Vera reached out a hand. She saw her fingers appear within her field of vision.

She reached out to touch the sarcophagus. Her fingers vanished into the thick visual lacquer of the augment. Finally she felt her fingers contact real stone. Not new stone. Cold stone, dead stone, eroded by centuries.

Vera jerked her hand back with a feeling of shame. She was suddenly ashamed of her crude local Acquis sensorweb, with its corny visual tags, its blurs of golden glory, its sadly primitive icons. She’d thought that she understood mediation, but now she knew she was just a hick, a regional peasant. Because this California augment was years ahead of anything she’d ever used or built. It was otherworldly.

“I can’t believe my eyes! This is so swift and brilliant! People would queue up to see this, they would make long lines to see!”

“Yes, that would be the basic business plan,” Montalban told her. “Mediation is a key enabler for tomorrow’s heritage economy.”

“What?”

“‘The replacement of national sovereignty and class consciousness by technically sophisticated yet ethically savage private cartels which dissolve social protections and the rule of law while encouraging the ruthless black-marketization of higher technologies…’ That’s what a famous Acquis critic once said about this technology. Augmentation is a little dodgy. I agree it’s not for amateurs.”

Vera couldn’t understand this long rote-quote of his—Montalban was a Dispensation gentleman. Itwas as if he were quoting classical Latin at her. His chatter didn’t seem to matter much. Not when con­fronted with this. “Did you say this is ‘dodgy’? Mr. Montalban—this isn’t even supposed to be possible.”

“I’m pleased that you appreciate our modest efforts,” said Montalban, with just the lightest hint of imperial sarcasm. “Would you care to step outside this tent, and have a look around?”

Vera lurched at once for the flapping tent door.

She stood outside. The excavated soil of old Ivanje Polje had sud­denly become a Slavic Dark Age village. The spex augment showed her writhing plum trees, clumsy vineyards, muddy pigpens, a big stone-fenced villa. The stone longhouse was half surrounded by squalid peas­ant huts, homemade from mingled mud and twigs. It looked insanely real, like drowning in a glossy cartoon.

The sky above medieval Mljet was truly astounding, staggering: a heartaching vista of pure fluffy clouds. That medieval sky was scarily blue and clean. Vera had never stood beneath such a sky in her whole life. Because this sky was not her own deadly Greenhouse sky, the sky of a world in the grip of a global catastrophe. This historical sky had never known one single smokestack. It was the natural sky of the long-vanished natural Earth.

Vera took one reeling, awestruck step and tripped over her own feet. Somehow, Montalban was there for her. He caught her arm.

“Are there people here?” she shouted at him. “Where are all the people?”

“We didn’t yet write any avatars for this Dark Age augment,” Montal­ban told her, his calm voice close to her ear. “Our Dark Age plug-in is still in alpha.”

Vera plucked the clinging spex from her face. Karen appeared in the flowering field, with Mary Montalban. Karen had both her bony arms out, and she was laughing. The child was cheerfully climbing her ex­posed ribs.

“Watch me throw her high in the air!” Karen crowed.

“Oh my God,” moaned Montalban, “please don’t do that.”

VERA FORCED HERSELF to pick at Dr. Radic’s elaborate lunch, for the old man had outdone himself in honor of his guests. This done, they hiked on foot to the ruins of Polace, over a narrow trail that Radic’s people had taken some pains to clear. Montalban carried his daughter on his shoulders. Karen was in a buoyant mood, bounding along comi­cally and making the child crow with glee.

When they descended from the island’s rugged backbone to the northern shore, it was clear why Montalban had been so eager to visit these ruins.

The augment for Polace simulated ancient Roman Palatium. Palatium, an imperial Roman beach resort in the year zero.

The island’s beaches had changed a great deal in the passage of twenty-one centuries. This meant a design conflict between strict geo­locative accuracy and an augment that everyday viewers might willingly pay to see. That controversy hadn’t yet been settled, so much of imperial Roman Palatium appeared to be hovering, uneasily, over the rising Greenhouse waters of the bay.

Ancient Palatium was not ancient yet. Palatium was raw and new, a Roman frontier town. The island village featured sturdy wooden docks, and two wooden Roman galleys with their wooden oars up, and some very authentic-looking sacks of grain. It had one donkey-driven mill, and many careless heaps of scattered amphoras.

The village featured a host of makeshift wooden fishing shacks, and one small but showily elegant upscale limestone palace. Palatium also featured a public bath, a wine bar, a temple, and a brothel.

To Vera’s consternation, Roman Palatium had some avatars installed. These ghosts strolled their simulated Roman town, moving in the semi­random, irrational, traumatized way that ghosts roamed the Earth. The imperial Roman avatars were rather sketchily realized: tidy cartoons with olive skin and bowl-like haircuts.

One particularly horrible ghost, some kind of Roman butcher in a stained apron, seemed to have some dim machine awareness of Vera’s presence as a viewer within the scene. This ghost kept crowding up in the corners of her spex, with a tourist-friendly look, inviting user inter­actions that the system did not yet afford.

Vera handed the spex back to Montalban. She was powerfully shaken. “You’ve turned this dead town into some kind of… dead movie game.”

“That’s not the way I myself would have phrased it,” said Montalban, smiling. “I’d say that we’re browsing the historical event heap in search of future opportunities.” He stooped suddenly. The tide was out, and he’d alertly spotted a coinlike disk by the toe of his beach sandal. He plucked it up, had a closer look, and tossed it into the bay.

“The Palatium project,” he told her, “is a coproduction of the Univer­sity of Southern California’s Advanced Culture Lab and Dr. Radic’s schol­ars in Zagreb. They’ve done pretty well with this demo, given their limited time and resources. Frankly, those USC kids really worked their hearts out for us.” Montalban slid the spex into a velvet-lined case. “If this demo catches on with our stakeholders, we’ll be catering to a top-end tourist demographic here.”

“But you made it… and it’s just a fantasy. It’s not real.”

Montalban rolled his eyes. “Oh, come now—you built that sensor­web that saturates this whole island! Radic gave me a good look at that construction. That’s brutal software. I sure wouldn’t call it viewer­friendly.”

“The sensorweb saved the life of this island! You’re pasting fantasies onto the island.”

“We could waste our time discussing ‘reality’… Or, we could talk real business!” Montalban sat on the sun-warmed, sloping edge of a bro­ken piece of Polace’s tarmac. He scattered salty dust with a handker­chief and offered her a spot. “Vera, I’m here from Hollywood! I’m here to help you!”

Vera sat. She knew from the look on his face that he planned to ex­ploit her now. This was the crux: they had reached the crisis. “So, John, you want to help us? Tell me how you feel about that.”

“I need to make the dynamic of this situation clear to you.”

Vera posed herself attentively. It felt nice to watch his face, even as he lied to her. He really was remarkably good-looking.

“I have come to this island because, at this moment in the event stream, there’s a confluence of interests.” Montalban pulled a shiny wad of film from his pocket. He fluffed the film open and set it down before them. It flashed into life before their feet.

A pattern appeared in it: something like a plate of spaghetti.

“What’s this?”

“That’s a correlation engine running a social-network analysis. Using this has become part of due diligence whenever we’re trying to wire together a merger-and-acquisition deal. When a map of the stakehold­ers is assembled—very commonly—some player pops from the back­ground and turns out to be the sustaining element… “ Montalban leaned down, stretched out a finger, and tapped one of the central meat­balls within the spaghetti. “That would be you. Vera Mihajlovic. You are right here.”

“You drew all this?” Vera said.

“Oh no.” Montalban laughed. “No human being could ever con­struct a map this sophisticated. Investor-analysis correlation engines use distributive intelligence.”

“Your map doesn’t make any sense. It looks like a plate of spilled food.”

“That’s why I’m explaining it to you,” he said patiently. “It’s true that you lack any formal executive power here. Still, you’re clearly central to what happens here, and this map shows it. The cultists here really look up to you: and I can guess why. First, you were born here. You were the last to leave the island, and the first to return to it. You’re a motivating, legitimating factor for them.”

Vera shrugged. “Can’t you talk to me about how you feel? Just tell me what you want.”

“You have star quality. That’s the simplest way I can put it.”

Vera cut him short with a wave of her arm. “All right: This is a beach, am I right? That’s seawater. That’s a rock. Those are the ruins. Do you see any ‘star quality’ here?”

Montalban drew a taut breath. “Of course I know that! Tell me what you saw in that microcosm that I sent you.”

“What?”

“The hobject, the microcosm. That diplomatic gift I conferred to you. You know. The crystal ball.”

“Oh. That bubble thing.” Vera shrugged. “I’m too busy for hobbies. I gave it away.”

His face fell in raw incredulity. ‘’You did what?”

“Well, it was a gift, wasn’t it? I gave it away as a gift.”

’’You didn’t explore the microcosm? You didn’t engage with its inter­face?”

“How would I ‘engage’ with a ball of seawater?” She paused. “I re­member it had some little shrimps swimming inside. Were those sup­posed to be valuable?”

Montalban sat up with a look of pain, as if his back ached suddenly. He gazed out to the ruins in the sea. She realized that she had failed him in some deep and surprising way. Montalban was genuinely shocked by what she had done. It was as if he had cooked her a seven-­course banquet and she had crassly thrown away the food and smashed all the plates.

He slowly tapped his fingers on his knee. He didn’t know what to do next. He was completely at a loss.

She spoke up. “I see that I’ve hurt your feelings. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just… Well… “ For the first time, Montalban was unable to speak.

“I’m sorry about it, John. Really.”

“I knew this assignment would be difficult.” He sighed. “I’m going to say this in the simplest, bluntest way I can. You love this island, right? This place means more to you than anything else in your life. Well, I came here to give it to you. It is my gift to you. That’s what I meant to say to you. You will be the duchess, the queen of Mljet. I will put this place at your feet.”

“You think you can do that, do you?”

“Yes, I know I can. Because’ I’ve done it before.” A flicker of pain crossed Montalban’s face. “I said that I am a facilitator. I’m good at my work. I’m one of the best in the world, and the world is a lot bigger than this island. If you want this place that you love so much, if you want this island to be your own island, then you can have it. That prospect is writ­ten in the stars, or rather, it is written in this very fine analytical map in the dirt here.”

“What do you ask from a girl, when you give her a gift like that, Mr. Montalban?”

“I don’t ask for anything. That’s why it’s a gift. If you will agree to hold up your part of this deal I want to arrange, then every other element will swing into place. That work will take me a while, but I know that deal can be done: the financing, promotion, production, residuals, a user base, everything. Everything that a modern tourist island needs.”

“So you want me to go into business with you, in some way? That’s what you want? I’m not interested in business. I already have a business. I’m very busy all the time.” Vera stood up. “I think you should go back to California.”

“Sit down,” he demanded. She sat again.

“Look,” he said, “your status quo is just not in the cards for you. You don’t understand this yet, but your story here is already over. You and your Acquis people here, you are way past the stage where you can be just a little extreme techno-start-up on some private island where no one important will notice. That story is gone. Because you accomplished something amazing here. So you have been noticed. You had a big suecess. The Dispensation always notices big success. Always. So: If we don’t arrange that as a win-win-win outcome for all the stakeholders, there’s going to be friction.”

“I think I understood that last part,” Vera said. “That was a threat.”

“That’s realism. Things gets ugly when the two global civil societies clash.”

“How ugly do things get, John?”

“Unnecessarily ugly. The Acquis is the Acquis, the Dispensation is the Dispensation, and the third alternative is chaos. It can be terrible chaos. Like the chaos on this island before you redeemed it.”

Montalban looked down the beach, where Karen was cheerfully playing with his daughter. “The Dispensation and the Acquis are a sta­ble, two-party, global system. But the world is in desperate shape—so we have to try extreme solutions. Most of them fail, because they are so ex­treme. But whenever they work—that’s when the world has to take no­tice. The whole point of having our two-party system is to have a system for reality checks against the extremist groups.” Montalban spread his hands. “In any place but Europe, they’d teach that in elementary civics classes.”

“We’re not an ‘extremist group’ here. We are rescue workers and geo­engineers.”

“Of course you’re an extremist group. Of course you are! You’ve got mind-reading helmets on your heads! Look at those shaven patches on your scalp! You don’t even walk like normal people here—you all walk like you could bend over backward like crabs! Plus, this island is cov­ered with weird labor camps that practice sensory totalitarianism! Any­one from the outside world could learn all that in a day.”

Montalban knotted his hands. “So: The reason the Acquis was al­lowed to work here is that the climate crisis is bipartisan. If the seas rise, then the ark sinks, and we will all drown. We know that. So when it comes to fighting the climate crisis, we are willing to allow anything. But when you succeed at what you try, that’s different. Then the conse­quences come.”

“Why don’t you run along home and let us finish the job here?”

“That is not a reasonable option. Your little experiment here: It vio­lates civil rights, it violates human rights, it exploits desperate refugees as indentured labor with no access to the free market… This place is scary. I can rescue you from all that. I can save you from all those con­sequences. Because I will make you its queen.”

“I can’t even understand what you’re saying! What exactly do you want from me? Use some real words.”

“Okay: Here’s the elevator pitch. Instead of being a test bed for a weird neural cult, Mljet becomes what it should be: a tourist island. Mljet becomes a normal place. It’s decent, it’s noncontroversial. This island has been saved, redeemed, reconstructed. That work is over. The cult relocates elsewhere.”

“Where do my people go?”

“We give them an assignment that’s better suited to their talents and technologies.”

“Where are you putting my people?”

“The Lesser Antarctic Ice Shelf.”

“You’re exiling us to Antarctica.” Vera looked at the glimmering edge of her native hills. “All right, that part I finally understand. Thank you for finally telling me.”

“They go, Vera. You don’t go. You stay. You encourage them to leave this place and work on the ice, and you remain here under the new dis­pensation. Because we’re not ‘exiling’ the cult to Antarctica: we’re pro­moting the cult to Antarctica.”

“Why would they go to a place like that? It’s horrible there. It’s flood­ing and melting, it’s like death.”

“Because they’re very good at redemption work and someone has to go there. The Big Ice is the front line of the climate crisis. Now, listen: Your boss, the Acquis commissar here, he’s a pretty hard nut to crack. But he can do a budget. He has ambitions. He’s an engineer: so he wants new hardware. They always do.”

Montalban bent and smoothed his pocket film against the ground. A monstrous apparition emerged on the flimsy screen.

This metal monster brandished a drill on one hand, a backhoe on the other, and its sloping feet were the size of two fishing boats.

“This is a neurally controlled continental reconstruction unit. It’s a giant robot exoskeleton that’s nuclear-powered and four stories tall. Every one of these psychotic things costs as much as a full-scale Missis­sippi mud dredge. They’re airtight, they’re fully heated, they’ve got inte­rior life-support systems, they’re basically Martian spacesuits with legs. Building these crazy things for him: That’s the price that he demands from us.”

Vera stared. “That big robot does looks kind of… weird.”

“This darling of his has been sitting on his drawing board ever since he was in graduate school. Frankly, no sane capitalist would ever fi­nance such a thing. Because it’s got no market pull at all. It’s a wild, macho, engineer’s power fantasy.”

Montalban leaned back on his slab of tarmac and tipped his sun hat. “We have agreed to his terms. A monster machine like this makes no sense to me, but nobody thought his Mljet plan would ever work out, ei­ther. It turns out he was right, and we were wrong. We admit that now. He wins. Mljet is light, and speedy, and brilliant, and glorious. Your boss has proved himself to the smart money and the power players. He has won. So if your boss plays some ball with us, he gets whatever the hell he wants.”

Vera gazed at the bristling, fantastic monster. The giant robot had no head. She tried to imagine her Herbert sealed inside that giant, stamp­ing coffin, that rock-shattering hulk.

She knew that Herbert would do it. Of course he would do it.

“This was just an old dream of his.”

“That guy is no dreamer. That guy is a serial entrepreneur. We get it about guys like him. We know how to handle guys like him in Califor­nia. It’s no use logjamming him, or sabotaging him, or getting in his way, or ‘verifying’ him. No, all that kind of crap is counterproductive. The one effective way to deal with a guy like him is to double his ante. Just pony up the money and double his bet.”

Montalban leaned back and shrugged. “Well, I can do that for him. I can do it, I promise. Because I’ve done that kind of thing before. My whole family does it. We’ve been doing it for years.”

“What are you doing to Herbert?”

“I’m financing Herbert. The world needs Herbert. Herbert is a geek technofanatic who’s also a serious player, and those are rare people. He’s a great man. Really. It’s just that, politically speaking, it’s not great that he’s here in Mljet. We don’t really much want a guy like him, with a private army of brainwashed robot cultists, sited in a violently unstable region like the Balkans.”

“This is my home,” Vera murmured.

“Fine. It’s not his home. If he ventures off to Antarctica, that’s a dif­ferent matter. If he fails there, well, that’s one solution. If he tackles the Big Ice and he wins, well, then we all win. Because we’ve bought our world more time.”

Montalban wiped his sweating upper lip. “Personally, I really hope that he can somehow pull that off. Sincerely, I hope that. I do. I know that big Aussie is crazy, but I’m with him all the way. Los Angeles just can’t take many more refugee Australians.”

“I would never do anything against Herbert and what Herbert wants to do.”

“All right, good: now you’re talking sense. So: Let’s talk about you. Mljet and you: the public face of the New Mljet. The consortium needs an attractive young woman with skill and ambition who has some peo­ple smarts. We’ll be facing a big transition here, a complete change in the infrastructure. That would be your role.”

“So I’m the project manager.”

“That’s an Acquis title. Your title with us will be chief hospitality offi­cer. That is not a figurehead post, by the way: don’t get me wrong. You wouldn’t be the workaday prime minister here: you’d be the queen of this place. I’m offering you a crucial post with a lot of situational perquisites. You will be allocating resources over every inch of this is­land. And I mean major resources, world-class, world-scale. Instead of that ragtag of refugees that you reeducated in the camps, you’ll have a top-notch technical-support team! You’ll have your own office of PR girls from the environmental design group at San Jose State… They’re young people, young, like you and me. They’re very forward-thinking.”

“So it’s me here, and it’s not Herbert.”

“Exactly. We need a much calmer, gentler hand with this place. You have a much more sensitive, more feeling approach to Mljet than your robot commissar there.”

“Suppose that I say yes to you.”

Montalban leaned down, plucked up his film, and crumpled it briskly. He pocketed it, and smiled at her. “Then it’s simple. Our next step would be Vienna: a conference of the stakeholders. That’s a sum­mit of typical Acquis higher-circle drones, and some ranking Dispensa­tion activists. Your boss will be there, too, of course. Your brother Djordje will be hosting that event in Vienna. I’ll be there to present you to the money people. They’re some very seasoned investors. They were the trust behind the reconstruction of Catalina Island, after the big fires. They can handle this sort of thing.”

“Why are you doing all this, John?”

“Because I’m a white-knight investor, and I’m saving the world. And, through no coincidence, I’m also saving you.” He gazed at her for a long moment. ‘You don’t believe me. Well, you don’t believe me yet. I’ve done it before, Vera. I’ve already done it twice. I can prove to you that I know what I’m doing, though it will take me a while. A merger-and­acquisition like this can keep a banker happy for years.”

“You’re asking me to betray my comrades here. They’re the cadres who did all the work here.”

“Well, the cult will face a strategic choice,” said Montalban. “They can choose him, or they can choose you. The attention camps here will be shutting down—they’re too controversial. If the cadres are zealots for their great man and his brain intrusions, then they can join him in Antarctica. If they stay here with you—and you’re welcome to them­—then they can enlist in our repatriation program for the natives of Mljet. We’ll be restoring the people who properly belong here. We’ll be recon­secrating Catholic churches, restoring the picturesque rural villages… The national and religious elements in the Balkans, they’re stakeholders here too, you know.”

“So this is quite a big, fancy plan you’ve brought here from your big, fancy city.”

“It’s the way of the big, fancy world.”

Vera narrowed her eyes. “Suppose that I just say no to your way of the world.”

Montalban nodded slowly. “You can say no to the world. People often say that here in the Balkans. But it never makes any sense to do that. Why? Why would you say no to peace, and wealth, and power, and se­curity? This arrangement gives you everything that you wanted! It means that you win, it’s your personal victory! You took a failed, crimi­nal place that was an open sore, and you saved it, you healed it! You made your home island much better than it was in your whole lifetime, and you gave it back to the world! Things are finally as they should be. It’s justice.”

It took Vera three heartbeats to realize, with a pang of truth, that she wanted the island all to herself. She wanted Mljet to remain a quiet place outside the world. Its own place. An authentic place that was no­body’s tool or pawn or property. A wild and natural place, blooming under the sun, beholden to nobody. It had never occurred to her that her homeland might be saved for other people.

“You don’t believe in nature,” she told him. “You don’t believe what I believe. I even believe in reality.”

“Well, I believe in ecotourism and the heritage industry. Because those are two major, wealth-creating industries.”

Vera allowed him a nod.

“It won’t be easy work, Vera. It’s hard work. It’ll take labor and invest­ment to bring a heritage mediation online here. But I know that we can do that, together. I’m sure we can. I can promise you that. In ten years, right here where we’re sitting, the troops of Augustus Caesar will be massing to invade the Balkans.”

Vera’s heart sank a little. “Ten years… What? What did you say?”

“That’s right, ten years. That has to take ten years. Because the Roman Empire has only recently conquered this island. You could see how new and raw that little town of Palatium is. The Pannonian Wars on the mainland, they will be going hot and heavy right through the reign of Tiberius. That will be our major tourist draw here.”

“I don’t understand.”

Montalban chuckled. “I suppose not. Well, just take it from me, then: the theme-park business can be a very steady, long-term earner, as long as it’s got a solid heritage connection and a unique value proposi­tion.”

“I know that you must think that I’m stupid… Can’t you talk to me like a normal person? Please?”

Montalban gazed around the island a long moment, as if seeking some kind of solace from the sunshine, the flowers, and the foaming shore at low tide. “Vera: In the Dispensation, the businesspeople are the normal people.”

“It’s not normal to talk about history as if history was a business.”

“You are absolutely wrong there, Vera. History is a business. History is the only business. It’s abnormal to do business without history as the ab­solute and final business bottom line. That’s why industry wrecked this planet: because people ran the world like a fire sale. They never understood the past, the future, and the proper human relationship to space and time. The only way to think sustainably is to think synchronically!”

Realization dawned. “Wait, now, I do see what you’re saying! You’re a Synchronist. You’re from a Dispensation cult! You’re stealing my island from my cult just so you can sell my island to your own cult!”

Slowly, Montalban shook his head. He was feeling sorry for her.

“Vera, I am not the extremist in this discussion.”

“Yes you are. Synchronists are cultists. You’re crazy.”

“No, I’m Californian. And I came here on behalf of investors, real­estate people, developers—the global mainstream. So that they can co­opt this extreme, experimental situation into a much more conventional, rational, profitable situation. Is that distinction clear to you yet?”

“No! It’s not clear. You’re not explaining anything to me. You’re just letting a lot of big, mystical words fall out of your mouth that make you look good and make me look bad.”

Montalban thoughtfully examined the wavelets lapping. His hands twitched in his trouser pockets. “You know what they call this situation? This is a classic ‘clash of paradigms.’”

Vera set her lips. “You know what they call people from California? They call them ‘flakes.’”

“Acquis people can be pretty stubborn,” Montalban mused. “I’ve met a lot of Acquis people in my business life. They can be really wonderful people, don’t get me wrong there, but somehow it always boils down to a paradigmatic culture war. We have two sets of mental software, and two different operating systems.”

“Maybe we’re lucky that there’s just two sets and not a thousand of them.”

Montalban brushed sand from his walking shoes. “I suppose we are lucky, though we live in a world in disaster. Multiparty states never ac­complish anything.”

“You’re still talking nonsense, though, John. You know that, don’t you?”

“All right. Fine. I’m talking nonsense. I apologize. You explain some­thing to me, then. Tell me why your friend there is playing with my daughter, while she’s got her brain inside a kettle and she’s wearing robot construction equipment that could break every single bone in my little girl’s body.”

Vera glanced up the beach at Karen. Karen and the little girl were getting along splendidly. Mary Montalban was scampering along the beach like a wound-up top, while Karen bounded over the child’s head in boneware leaps that could have cleared the tops of trees.

“Have you ever had your brain scanned?” Vera asked him.

“I have regular medical checkups,” said Montalban. “My brain is just fine. My brain is not a peripheral for heavy construction machinery.”

“In other words, you believe we’re monsters. You really hate us.”

“I would never say that!” protested Montalban. “Look at me benignly tolerating all this! Am I denouncing you, or your crazy friend in the robot spacesuit there? Not a bit of it!”

“You hate what we do here. You’re too American to understand us.”

“Oh no, no no! Don’t bring outdated nationalism into this, for heaven’s sake! You’ve never even been to America! You don’t under­stand how America works nowadays! Believe me, there are big patches of America that are extremely Acquis in their sentiments. Seattle is very Acquis. Raleigh; Madison, Wisconsin; Austin in Texas—they’re all Ac­quis. San Francisco is Acquis! And Canada, too! Canada was Acquis be­fore most of Europe was Acquis!”

“Do you think I’m a fanatic?”

“I never use pejorative terms like that, and I despise the evil dema­gogues who do! You’re just—you’re truly a woman of our age, that’s what I think about you.”

“Why are you here? What didn’t you leave me alone here? I never wanted you here. I was happy here.”

“Vera, I know that you think that you are evil. You have no esteem for yourself. But you are not evil. You were created through evil, but you are sweet and good. You’re a very good person. You were born in an un­happy place at a time when that place was evil. That’s the evil part. You—you’ve been part of everything that happened here to make things better. You raised this place from the rubble and you held the whole place up. You almost did it alone.”

Vera burst into tears.

“Your colleagues here think the world of you,” said Montalban. “They trust your judgment. They’re proud of you. That’s why you’re the central figure here. If you move, the whole thing will move. You must sense that. You’re intelligent, you must know that.”

Vera choked on a sob. “I’m having an emotional fit.”

“I’ve seen those fits,” Montalban agreed. “Believe me, I know a lot about those.”

“I’m just not all right without my helmet. I need a scan so I can know what I’m really feeling.”

Montalban looked at her soberly. “You really look a lot prettier with­out that canteen on your head.”

“Scanning helps me. It is a powerful tool.”

“That,” said Montalban, “is why that tool has been restricted to a very small group of users in an otherwise hopeless situation.”

She could see that her tears were affecting him strongly. His face had grown much-softer. He looked thoughtful and handsome, truly sympa­thetic. He looked at her as if he loved her more than anything in the world.

“If you never scan your own brain,” said Vera, wiping at her cheeks, “how do you know what you feel about all this?”

Montalban looked at her slowly. “Vera, that is a truly weird question.”

“I think you should put on a helmet,” said Vera, sitting up. “You could put on Karen’s helmet! You should put on her helmet, and then you and I should have a really good talk, heart to heart.”

Montalban, instantly, went pale. “That’s just not admissable,” he told her. “That is just not a move that you and I should undertake.”

“I was very scared of it too, at first,” said Vera. “But I wear a scanner every day now. It’s not bad for you. It’s brilliant.”

Montalban forced an uneasy smile. “I’ll stay pretty dull, thanks! I know a thing or two about that practice! Shaving patches on my skull? No, we don’t ruin an expensive haircut on impulse, do we?”

“You don’t really need to shave any skin patches,” said Vera. “Because you won’t be running any boneware.”

“I don’t have the proper training for your helmets. You have to have your brain scrubbed first in those concentration camps.”

“They’re attention camps! How can you say such nasty things about us? You’re a fool! You have no heart. You don’t know anything real.”

Montalban jumped to his feet and walked off down the beach. Vera caught up with him and seized his arm. “An attention camp saved my life,” she said. “Can’t you understand that?”

“That’s for helpless refugees who are cornered and have no other choice,” he said. “I’m not helpless and cornered. I don’t care what you call that practice: that is an extreme form of sensory control.”

“It’s sensory analysis. See, you don’t understand it, you’re talking about it all wrong.”

Montalban’s opaque eyes, always rather shifty, began to dart from side to side. “You want to read my mind. You want to pry inside my own brain.”

“John, don’t hate me. I don’t believe that you and I are enemies. We don’t think alike, we can’t, but… I know that I like you. I think we could have been good friends.”

“’Friends.’ Friends? Hell, woman, I married you!” Montalban waved his hat at his reddening face. “I should never have come here. You don’t know what it does to me to see you like this. To come here… and to bring the child, for God’s sake… She’s going to make me regret this.”

“You mean Radmila. She didn’t want you to do this.”

“You said her name, not me! We don’t have to discuss Radmila. Rad­mila Mihajlovic doesn’t exist. My wife will never cross your path, ever. Because she hates your guts. For years, I could never understand why.”

“Radmila hates me?”

“Like a passion. Like a curse. She’s eaten up with it. Then I met Djordje. Djordje told me some things about what happened here. Ter­rible things. Then I met Sonja. And oh, my God. Now I do understand it, all of it, and that is much, much worse.”

Vera put her head in her hands. She began to cry again, much harder. “I can almost fix that damage,” he told her. “I’ve come so close to fix­ing it, so many times. Djordje is almost all right—he’s a tough business­man, but he’s smart, he’s no weakling. Sonja fights for what she thinks is right. Mila has done amazing things—she’s truly gifted. And you­—you’re the good one. You’re kind and sweet, you’re the one with the best intentions.”

Vera made a choice in her heart. “If I could believe you, John, I would do what you say.”

“You would do what I say? You mean agree to the deal, go through with it?”

“Yes. But I have to know. I have to know it’s the truth.”

“All right, if that’s what you want from me, then I guess we’ll really talk. I guess we have no other choice. So: Fine, let’s do it. Go get your lie-detector helmet. It doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen worse. Just pull that crazy thing off your girlfriend’s head before she tears my little girl into pieces.”

They retreated up the trail and into the pine woods. They found a ragged clearing there. It took Vera half an hour to properly fit the scan­ner to Montalban’s skull. His daughter sobbed in fear.

Karen had to take the child away. Karen hated leaving Vera in this moment of crisis, but when Vera ordered her to leave, Karen did as she was told. The emotional rejection cut Karen to the quick. Tears ran down Karen’s face in streams. She and Mary Montalban clung to one another, sobbing as if they’d just seen someone die.

Montalban was entirely new to neural tech. His brain had not been properly calibrated over a long period of use. So, when Vera examined his neural output, his affect showed her nothing much. He had a kind of flatness. Almost an unnatural despair.

“Are you sick, John? You’re not very spiky.”

“Tranquilizers,” he said.

“You take mood medication?”

“I hav a very complex personal life,” Montalban muttered. The bluff, cheery, American look had vanished from his face. With his head stuffed uncomfortably into Karen’s dusty helmet, Montalban looked like a martyr in a crown of thorns.

“So,” he demanded. “Do you see everything that I’m thinking now?”

“Well… no, of course not. I do see a lot of slow P300 recognition waves.” That meant that Montalban recognized her. He knew her very well He had been looking at her for years.

His brain lacked the sparkly affect of Acquis male cadres, who saw her, mostly, as a pretty woman. Men did that. At the bottom of any vir­ile psyche, there was always some brisk neural reaction to a pretty woman.

There had never been any man on Mljet who looked at her with so much heartfelt confusion and grief. Montalban was looking at her as if the very sight of her were killing him.

“What do you see inside of me?” Montalban grated. “Do you think I’m crazy? Am I lying to you? Or is it all just as I told you?”

“John, this technology is not like you imagine it. Try to relax.”

“These knobs hurt,” he whined. “How can you let big rubber knobs squeeze your skull like that? Can’t you crackpots build some more sen­sitive scanners? Build them into a nice little sun hat, a beret or some­thing.”

“That’s a safety helmet. It’s designed for construction work.”

“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 dented, fish-smelling deck. A ragged crewman said something to her in Croatian.

She glanced once at the sailor. He meant nothing to her, he was even less than a newbie: some Balkan local in a sleeveless striped sailor’s shirt, a floppy canvas hat. He wore sunglasses: not even spex. She saw her own face mirrored twice, on the shining lenses on his unshaven face.

“I came here to be with Herbert,” she told the sailor.

The sailor smirked at her. Then he threw her a careless salute and set to work to cast off.

Once the sails were up and the sailor was busy at his tiller, Herbert emerged from belowdecks. Herbert wore swimsuit trunks and a bor­rowed shirt much too small for him. She had never seen Herbert out of his Acquis uniform before. There was a forest of hair all over his arms and chest.

With a flourish, Herbert unfolded a mildewed canvas deck chair. Vera sat in it. Then Herbert sat at her feet.

“How was your day?” he said.

“He wants me to defect,” she told him. “He wants me to leave the Ac­quis and join his civil society. He said that I could have the whole island if I became Dispensation. That was his bribe for me.”

Herbert didn’t seem much surprised by this. “So, what did you say to the gentleman’s ambitious proposal?”

“I didn’t say much. But I couldn’t do it. I can’t.”

“Iknew that!” Herbert crowed. “I knew you’d never sell me out! I knew you’d turn that son of a bitch down!” He rolled to his bare feet and fetched a big hand-woven wicker basket. He flapped its wooden lid open and produced a bottle of prosecco. “All the gold in California can’t buy Vera Mihajlovic! Damn it, this calls for a celebration.”

Vera accepted the wineglass he offered her. He yanked the cork from his bottle with a pop like a gunshot.

The wineglass was elegant and pretty. It was Austrian crystal. It brimmed with a foaming crest of bubbles.

“You could have ordered me not to see that man,” she said, teary­eyed, “You didn’t have to test me like that.”

“Vera, I can’t do that to you. I can’t order you to do anything. I would have had to beg you. I would have had to beg you, please, not to break my heart.” She had never seen him so happy as he was at this moment.

“I always know what you’re feeling, Vera. But I never know what you think. So, yes, I did test you. I have tested you with nine years’ hard labor. Well, precious, I promise you: That was your last test from me. The last one. From now on, everything between us is different.”

“You really thought that I would leave you?”

“I know that you love me, Vera. But I know you love this place, too. This island is a part of you. You are this beautiful place. Could I order you to leave this island with me—for a terrible island, the worst in the world—if you wanted to stay and be that rich man’s ‘Duchess of Mljet’? I couldn’t do that.”

He tipped his glass against hers, then sat back and drank. Vera sipped at the fizzing wine. She disliked alcohol. Drinking alcohol to alter one’s emotions, that was such a strange thing to do.

Herbert refilled his glass and gestured with the bottle’s neck, at the long silhouette of darkening Mljet. The wind of early evening was brisk, and their crewman was making good speed on the rippled waters.

“I spent nine years of exile on that little rock,” Herbert said. “If not for you, I would never have gone there at all. I was an empty man when I first came there. My wife dead. Kids dead. Broken and defeated in my own homeland. Full of horror. The world was in turmoil: half upheaval, half collapse—and it still is! You see those cliffs, those hills? You know what that island was to me? That was a prototype. A test case. An exper­iment. And now look! We have won!”

She did not know what to tell him. The truth was so far beyond any words that he would understand.

She knew very well what had happened, why they had met. She’d been in an evacuation camp on the Croatian mainland, along with a battered host of other weeping, traumatized women from Mljet. No­body had any food, or clothes, or medicine. They had nothing. They had nothing but mediation.

The social workers, the Acquis rescue people, were there to get peo­ple to talk. That was postdisaster counseling, they said, and they seemed to believe that talk, bearing witness to what they had suffered, was more important to people’s survival than food. Likely it was.

So the women were indeed talking, exchanging their names and some private bits and pieces of their broken lives. And one humble woman said, in her meek yet hopeful little voice, that maybe the lost is­land of Mljet could be redeemed someday. Maybe (said another) woman by “sensorwebs”.

“Sensorwebs” were a foreign idea these women knew practically nothing about, but they’d heard that word and knew that webs were sup­posed to be important and powerful. There, in the midst of their loss, hungry and wounded and drowning in woe, that was their straw of hope.

Vera knew better. Because she’d grown up in a seething, private bunker full of webs and sensors. Vera knew about event streams, burst rates, delta-change criteria, glitches, and collisions. Ubiquity had been installed in their bunker, as their nanny, and their spy, and their creche, and their test bed for tomorrow’s superwomen: a nest of clones, who, just like their mother, would hunger always to put the world to rights.

And, inside that wicked fairy tale, that black deception of false righ­teousness, they had grown up, believing that it was manifest destiny. While it was nothing of the kind. It was a snare, a delusion, a monstrosity.

So Vera had lost her senses.

She screamed at the startled women that it made no sense to cover the world with scanners and sensors, unless you also had scanners for the heads of the evil fools who had wrecked the world in the first place. Vera did not know why she had to scream that, except that she felt it, and it was the truth.

The truth, of course, caused a big, hateful commotion among all the women, who screamed back at her and scolded her for talking that way… but then something strange happened. Some Acquis person, most likely a woman, had been watching the proceedings on the web.

For some reason, maybe a deep, tender sympathy, maybe some bu­reaucratic quirk, this woman had web-searched ideas… busily explor­ing and linking tags and concepts, correlating things and events, “refugees,” “reconstruction,” “sensors,” “brain scanners.”

Somehow, from the tangled glassy depths of global webdom, up popped some Australians, busily losing their own fierce battle to save their island continent. These distant Australians, so painfully familiar with refugee camps, knew a lot about scanners, neural tech, and heavy machinery.

World-spanning, instant connectivity was the stuff of being for a global civil society. So, somewhere up in the Acquis administrative strat­osphere, cogwheels turned, galactic and distant.

Six weeks later, Vera found herself meeting Herbert Fotheringay, an Australian geoengineer.

A small Acquis neural corps was formed to redeem Mljet. Vera thought that Herbert had done that, while Herbert had always said that she had inspired it.

Now, sitting years later in the sagging deck chair in an old boat with the island sinking into darkness, Vera knew that no single person had ever done that. Mljet was a web of emerging technologies, around which people accreted.

Nothing much had been “invented” on Mljet. The brain scanners, the attention tracking, the neural software, the social software inside the camps, the sensors, the everyware, the communal property, even the heavy-duty exoskeletons—they all had years of development behind them, somewhere else.

The one innovation was the way they’d been brought to life by peo­ple willing to believe in them, wanting to believe in them.

Herbert had always claimed that she, Vera, had “inspired” his efforts. Maybe. There was no way for any woman to deny that she had “in­spired” a man. It was true that she had been a girl in distress, demand­mg rescue.

What if a man came to the rescue? What if an army came? What if the army launched a thousand ships? What if they won? What then?

“You’re very lost in your own thoughts,” he said tenderly.

“I am,” she said.

“Well, you’ve certainly put a pretty spanner into their works today,” Herbert said briskly. “That’ll complicate matters upstairs. But I’m glad of it. I’m glad that snarky little real-estate hustler can’t patch his deal to­gether and use you as his bait and his billboard. To hell with him and all his Yankee funding. I had hell-all for funding when you and I first tack­led that place”—Herbert waved off the starboard bow—“and as for tack­ling the Big Ice, that is work for grown-ups. Vera: You and I will walk the Earth like Titans. You and me. Wait and see.”

“Big machines,” she murmured.

“Darling: I’m past that now. It’s behind me. That’s what these years have finally taught me. Any fool with a big budget can assemble big ma­chines. We’re not mechanics, we are two engineers of human souls. We are. It’s what we feel in our own bones—that’s what matters in this world. The one mistake I made here was letting them set the limits on how we felt.”

“Did you make any mistakes here, Herbert?”

“In one sense, yes, I was blind. The children! No society thrives with­out children! When I saw how deeply you felt about that child, that niece of yours—then I knew what I had failed to offer you. Yes. I failed you. That tore me up.”

“I’m sorry you were hurt, Herbert.”

“Yes, that did hurt me, but the pain has opened my eyes. I once had children. They died in Australia. That ended that part of my world, I never got over that grief. But if we beat the Big Ice, you and me, then it will rain in Australia.”

“‘Australia Fair,’” said Vera. Herbert had talked about his own home island, sometimes. A place much bigger than Mljet. The biggest island in the world. He spoke of how he had loved his homeland.

“I may never set my foot in a renewed, revived, redeemed Australia. But our children will live there. Vera, our children will laugh and sing. They’ll be free. They’ll be happy.”

There was a violent snap as the boat came about. The yachtsman tied off his mainsail, and tramped the little deck in his cheap rubber shoes. He spoke in Croatian. “Srecno i mnogo! Muske dece!”

Vera blinked.

“Dobrodosao, zete!” The sailor clapped Herbert across the back. Then he reached out his glad hand to Vera, and she realized, with a shock of revulsion, that the sailor was Djordje.

“You have really screwed up,” Djordje told her cheerfully, in his German-tinged English. “I told John Montgomery that you would never do it his way—the smart way. All the world for love! Well, you cost me a lot of good business, Vera. But I forgive you. Because I am so happy, very happy, to see you settled in this way.”

“You should express some sympathy for your sister,” Herbert told him. “On the Big Ice, I’ll work her harder than ever.”

“There is no pleasing you global politicals,” said Djordje. He found himself another deck chair, one even shabbier and more mildewed than the one that Vera perched on. “You spent nine years on that god­forsaken island there? That evil hellhole? And you never took one vaca­tion? Truly, you people kill me.”

Vera grabbed hard for the shards of her sanity. “How have you been, Djordje? This is such a surprise for me.”

“Call me ‘George,’ “ he corrected. “My life is good. I have another baby on the way. That would be number three.”

“Oh my.”

Djordje helped himself to a fizzing glass of prosecco. “That’s not what you say to wonderful news like mine, Vera. You say: ‘Mnogo muske dece!’ ‘Hope it’s a son!’”

Vera had not seen Djordje face-to-face in ten years. He’d been a scrawny seventeen-year-old kid on the night he’d sabotaged the sensor­web, jumped the bunker wall, and fled their compound forever. The agony of having their little brother rebel, defect, and vanish was the first irrefutable sign that all was not well in caryatid fairyland.

The seven world-princesses, Vera, Biserka, Sonja, Bratislava, Svetlana, Kosara, and Radmila: they all had joined hands, eyes, and minds in their mystic circle, and sworn to eradicate every memory of their traitor-to-­futurity. Yet he had left their ranks incomplete, and the tremendous en­ergies that unified them were turning to chaos.

Toward chaos, hatred, and an explosion of violence, and yet here was Djordje, their traitor, not vanished, not eradicated, as he so deserved to be: no, he was prosperous, pleased with himself, and as big as life. Bigger. Because Djordje was all grown-up. Grown-up, Djordje was very big.

He was half a head taller than she was. His face was her face, but big and broad and male. Djordje had a bull’s forehead, a bristling blond mustache, and a forest of blond bristles on his chin and cheeks and neck. His chest was flat and his gut was like a barrel and his big male legs were like tree trunks.

She was horribly afraid of him. He was here and smiling at her, yet he should not be. His existence was wrong.

“Your brother has lent us this boat,” said Herbert. “So that we could be alone—just for once! Out of surveillance. So I could ask you to marry me.”

“It was my honor to lend you my old boat,” said Djordje nobly. “And I approve of your aims.”

“Nine years under a sensorweb,” mourned Herbert. “Nine years in at­tention camps where the system watches your eyeballs! My God, it was Acquis-officer this, boss-and-subordinate that; no wonder we both were so stifled! You know what the next step is—after we marry? We need to work together to widen the emotional register of the neural society! No more of that hothouse atmosphere: half barracks, half brothel… something grand, something decent!”

“How?” said Vera.

“In Antarctica! It’s a huge frontier.”

“There’s grass in Antarctica,” said Djordje. “There’s grain growing there. They’re brewing beer off the melting glaciers. Truly!”

Herbert burst into deep, rumbling laughter. “I love this guy. He is such a funny guy.”

Vera sipped her bubbling wine.

“You’ll do all right, Vera,” said Djordje. “You never had a father fig­ure. Life with an older man suits you.”

“Oh my God,” said Herbert, “please don’t tell her that!”

“Herbert, you are a genius,” Djordje told him. “Every one of those girls has got a genius on the hook, someplace! The caryatids pick men up like carpet tacks. They are like a magnetic field.”

Djordje emptied his glass. “Do you know what makes me so happy, tonight? I have both of you here, on my old boat. At last, I am saving you. It’s like I dug you two out of a coffin. No skull helmets on you, no skeleton bones on you! We’re all free! I took you offshore! We are far outside the limits of the Mljet everyware!”

Djordje wildly waved his arms at the cloud-streaked twilight. “So: Go ahead! Access your mediation! Boot an augment! There’s nothing out here! We’re free and out at sea! I haven’t been this happy since I stole this boat ten years ago.”

“Can I have more of that wine?” said Vera. The two men clashed as they grabbed for the bottle. Herbert hastily topped up her glass.

“My children love this boat,” said Djordje.

“I would imagine,” said Herbert.

“They love life aboard here, nothing but wind and sea,” said Djordje. “Because kids are kids! Kids are the ultimate check on reality! You can’t have a posthuman, brain-mapped toddler.”

“There’s a lot to what this man says,” Herbert offered. He found a wheel of soft cheese inside the picnic basket. “When I was a kid, my granddad had a sheep station. We didn’t even have television out there. Life was life.”

The sun was fading over distant Italy, and the evening breeze grew sharper. The little yacht held its course across the Adriatic, leaning, jumping the chop.

“I stole this boat because it is a simple boat,” said Djordje. “I could have stolen a fancy boat. The harbor was so full of them. The boats of rich idiots. All hooked up to their maps and global satellites.” He laughed. “I cut that chip out of my arm—they never found me. This boat was just wood and water. Nothing else! The web ran out of ways to spy.”

Vera found her voice. It was raw, but it was her own. “Do you spy on me with your web, Djordje?”

“A little, Vera. I have to look after you a little. You’re a danger to yourself and others.”

“How is your wife, Djordje?”

“Call me George,” he said. “My dear wife, Inke, is just fine.”

“Inke doesn’t get a little bored with you? With her church, and her kids, and her kitchen?”

“That’s right, Your Highness,” said Djordje, with a level stare. “My Inke is a boring woman. She is nothing like you. My Inke believes in God, she’s a mother, she’s a housewife. She’s a real human being, and she’s worth about a thousand of you.”

Vera shrank back in her deck chair, hissing through her teeth.

“Don’t hurt Vera’s feelings,” said Herbert.

Djordje shrugged. “As long as we have the facts confirmed.”

“The fact is that Vera is a very fine Acquis officer.”

Djordje wasn’t having any of this. “Look, we’re all family now, so spare me your politics. Me, the wife, the kids: We are not political peo­ple. We’re the real people in the real world. Okay? You fanatics and po­liticals and geeks and crusading communists… You say you want to save the world? Well, we are the world you’re trying to save. We’re the normal people.”

Herbert emptied his glass. “I can sympathize.”

“I am normal, I live decently. I have shareholders and eighteen hun­dred employees in Vienna. I’m into import-export and arbitrage, logistics, shipping-and-packaging. Industrial everyware: That’s me, George Zweig.”

“I do understand that, George. Please calm down.”

A ghastly moment passed. Djordje was not getting calmer. “I’m okay, Herbert. I’m fine with life, I’m fine with all of it. It’s a family thing, you understand? It’s not too easy for me to be with your little bride here. I’m the rational one among our group. Really.”

“This world is so full of trouble,” said Herbert.

“Just keep Vera out of jails and camps,” said Djordje. “Vera is the sweet one. Sonja is a soldier. Sonja is killing people. They should arrest Sonja. They should arrest Biserka. They should try to arrest my mother.”

“I hate you,” said Vera. She spat over the side of the boat.

“Shut up,” Djordje explained.

“I want you to die, Djordje. To hell with you and your precious chil­dren and your stinking little wife. If I had my boneware on, I’d break you into bloody pieces.”

“Well, you can’t break me, you little whore! You never could, you never can, and you never will.”

She lashed out. “I’m not going to marry him!”

Djordje was stunned. “You love him. You said you would marry him.”

“I never said yes to him. You didn’t hear me say yes.”

Djordje looked at Herbert. He offered a sickening smile. “Women.”

“I’m not marrying anybody. Never.”

“You’re a virgin,” said Djordje, like a curse. “You’re not human. You’re a robot. You’re a walking corpse.”

“Look, don’t do this to each other,” Herbert told them. “This is really bad.”

“No, this is good,” said Djordje. “I want to hear this little bitch spit out what she wants! You want to sell this guy out? You want to go for the big money! At the end of the day, our home belongs to you, doesn’t it? It’s all about you, Vera, you, you, you!”

Vera jumped to her feet. “I’m going to kill you now.”

Djordje was out of his chair in an instant. With a roundhouse swing. of his right hand, he knocked her to the deck. With a roar, Herbert rose. He threw his brawny arms around Djordje. His bear hug lifted Djordje from his feet.

“You little slut!” Djordje howled, kicking his legs in a frenzy. “I owe you a lot more than that!”

Vera watched the two men struggle. She touched her flaming, bat­tered cheek, and lifted her gaze. Overhead, uncaring stars dotted the troubled skies.

She took one deep sobbing breath, and flung herself into the sea.