The Caryatids

MM: Okay, look, you're baiting me here, but...Yes, the Caryatids are passionate about solar instability. That's why they all live in orbit now. That, and the fact that their own mother lived in orbit...They all have a very strong rapport with ubiquitous systems. They always did. And an orbital habitat really needs ubiquitous computing. Because a space habitat is a completely defined pocket ecosystem, it's a little toy world where you have to trace every mineral, every energy flow. They were born inside a scene like that, so they all ended up in flying glass bubbles. You'd think they'd be at peace with that by now, at peace with us down here on the planet's surface...But no, they've got the sun's troubles on their backs.

EI: Will the sun blow up, Mary?

MM: Someday? Absolutely it will! All you have to do is look at the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. But personally, I think...if the sun's misbehavior is serious...well, I'm a performing artist. I need my public. I'd prefer to stay here inside this local planetary ecosystem, busted up as that is, and be fried with my fellow bacteria.

EI: And it's the same with those supervolcanoes?

MM: One of 'em is bound to blow, that's inevitable. It's just the truth.

EI: You recently said that "the structure of space-time is rotting."

MM: It's true, but do you really want to get into that issue? We don't have all the time in the world here.

EI: No. You're right. I don't think we need to get into that issue, Mary. But tell us, why do you think actresses are so interested in entropy and physics these days? Some of them even write science papers. You, for instance.

MM: I think that was inevitable. One of those "black swan" things. You can never predict a black swan, yet it happens anyway, and then everybody justifies it and rationalizes it after it's done. That's very much my own story...I am a black swan, I was born one, and that's why I have always been both a monster and a major pop star.

Now I'm trying to make sense of the experience of my mothers. History passes. And some important pieces of major evidence are just plain gone.

EI: "Major evidence"?

MM: The part that's missing is the work they cared most about. Those ubiquitous systems, what they used to call the "mediation," the "sensorwebs." The Caryatids were brought up inside a crude and primitive "smart house"-some incredibly invasive surveillance scheme...there is nothing left of that technology nowadays. Those were the technical structures the Caryatids were born to support, but...Those technologies advanced so fast that they vanished. The languages, operating systems, frameworks of interaction, the eyeball-blasting laser-colored neural helmets...all that stuff is more primitive than steam engines now.

I mean, you can tell how a steam engine works by just looking at it, but a complex, distributed, ubiquitous system? There's no way to maintain that! That all became ubijunk! Those cutting-edge systems are gone like sandcastles. A rising tide of major transformation threw them up on the shore, and then the whole sea rose and they are beyond retrieval.

EI: That sounds so sad...But there's very little any of us can do about that.

MM: All I know is that the Caryatids were passionately into that, fanatical about it, yet time passed and now it is gone. It's the one aspect of their experience almost entirely closed to me as an artist.

Futurism is prediction. We all know that's impossible. But history is retrodiction, and that's impossible, too. So we have to paper over those black holes with sheer imagination.

EI: So you tell stories.

MM: Well, yes. That's what I do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BRUCE STERLING is the author of ten novels, three of which were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Difference Engine, co-written with William Gibson, was a national bestseller. He has also published four short-story collections and three nonfiction books. He has written for many magazines, including Newsweek, Fortune, Time, Whole Earth Review, and Wired, where he was a longtime contributing editor. He has won two Hugo Awards and was a finalist for the 2007 Nebula for Best Novella. He lives in Austin, Texas, with frequent side jaunts to Turin, Italy; Los Angeles; Belgrade; and Amsterdam.

The Caryatids is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2009 by Bruce Sterling

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sterling, Bruce.