The Caryatids

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 other-selves.

Her childhood fortress home...when this town of Polace 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 course-and 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. In a 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 Polace 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 rust-weeping 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.