"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 barracks-mates. 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. After 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. After 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 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 marveclass="underline" 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.