The Caryatids

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 of life 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.