The Caryatids

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 hill-slope 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 sca

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 perso

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

People who had never worn boneware had such foolish ideas about brain sca

Still, neural sca