The Caryatids Read Online Free PDF Page B

handing her this difficult assignment, Herbert was testing her again. Herbert knew that her troubled family past was her biggest flaw as an officer. He knew that her dark past limited her, that it harmed her career potential in the global Acquis. Herbert had often warned her that her mediated knowledge of the world was deep, yet too narrow. By never leaving Mljet, she had never outgrown her heritage.
    Herbert's tests were hard on her, but never entirely unfair. Whenever she carried the weight of those burdens, she always grew stronger.

    ??????????

    VERA SHARED HER BARRACKSwith sixty-two other Acquis cadres. Their rose-pink, rectangular barracks was a warm, supportive, comforting environment. It had been designed for epidemic hunters. These rapid-deployment forces, the shock troops of the global civil societies, pounced on contagious diseases emerging around the world. The medicos were particularly well-equipped global workers, thanks to the dreadful consequences of their failures. This meant they left behind a lot of medical surplus hardware: sturdy, lightweight, and cheap.
    So Vera's barracks was a foamy puff of pink high-performance fabric, perched on struts on a slope above the breezy Adriatic gulf. Out in the golden haze toward distant Italy, minor islets shouldered their way from the ocean like the ghosts of Earth's long-extinct whales.
    Nearby, the derelict village of Pomena had been scraped up and briskly recycled, while its old harbor was rebuilt for modern shipping. A vast, muscular Acquis crane, a white flexing contraption like a giant arm, plucked cargo containers from the ferries at the dock. Then the huge crane would simply fling that big shipping box, with one almighty, unerring, overhand toss, far off into the hills, where nets awaited it and cadres in boneware would unpack and distribute the goods.
    Next to the docks sat a squat, ratcheting fabricator, another pride of the Acquis. This multipotent digital factory made tools, shoes, struts, bolts, girders, spare parts for boneware—a host of items, mostly jet-spewed from recycled glass, cellulose, and metal.
    Karen suddenly towered over Vera's cot, an apparition still wearing boneware from the toxin mine, ticking and squeaking. "Are you sad? You look so sad, lying there." Vera sat up. "Aren't you on shift?"
    "They're fabbing new parts for my drill," Karen said. "Down in that mine, they're so sorry about the way they treated you. I gave them all such a good talking-to about their insensitivity."
    "I had a hard brainstorm. That was a bad day for me, all my fault, I'm sorry."
    "It's hard work," said Karen. "But the way you ran up your favorite hill afterward, to feel your way through your crisis . . . ? Your rapport with this island was so moving and deep! Your glory is awesome this morning. It's because you find so much meaning in the work here, Vera. We're all so inspired by that."
    "Herbert gave me a new assignment."
    Karen made a sympathetic face. "Herbert is always so hard on you. I'll power down now. You tell me all about it. You can cry if you want."
    "First can you find me a toenail clipper?"
    Karen stared through her faceplate at the thousands of tagged items infesting their barracks. Karen found a tiny, well-worn community clip-per in twenty seconds. Karen was a whiz at that. She commenced climb-ing out of her bones.
    As Karen recharged her bones, Vera picked at her footsore toes and scowled at the bustling Acquis barracks. New cadres were graduating from the attention camps almost every week. They bounded proudly over the island in their new boneware, each man and woman heaving and digging with the strength of a platoon — but inside their warm pink barracks, their bones and helmets laid aside, they flopped all over each other like soft-shelled crabs.
    The cadres shaved scanner patches on their skulls. They greased their sores and blisters. They griped, debriefed, commiserated, joked, wept. It often looked and sounded like a madhouse. These were