The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling Read Free Book Online Page B

pharmacy, a tourist trap, a brothel, and a slum. Polace was an ancient Balkan fishing village of limestone rock and red-tiled roofs. Old Palace 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.
    National governments were failing like sandcastles in the ominous greenhouse tide. There was nothing to shelter the planet's populations from their naked despair at the scale of the catastrophes. Without any official oversight, the outlaw biotech on the island grew steadily wilder, ever more extreme. The toxic spills grew worse and worse, while the population, stewing in the effluent, sickened. Then an earthquake, one of many common to the region, racked Mljet. The outlaw labs on the island, jimmied together in such haste, simply burst. They ruptured, they tumbled, they slid into the sea. The tourists and their hosts died from fizzing clouds of poison. Others were killed in the terrified scramble to flee the island for good. Polace had swiftly succumbed; the island's other towns died more slowly, from the quake, the fires, the looting. When the last generators failed and the last light winked out there was nothing human on the island, nothingbut the cries of birds.
    John Montgomery Montalban clearly knew this dreadful subject very well, since he had made this careful pilgrimage to see the island's worst ruins firsthand. The California real-estate mogul calmly assessed the drowned wreckage through his tinted spex.
    He told her it was "negative equity."
    Montalban, her strange brother-in-law, was a Dispensation policy wonk. He was cram-full of crisp, net-gathered, due-diligence knowledge. He was tall and elegant and persuasively talkative, with wavy black hair, suntanned olive skin, and sharp, polished teeth: big Hollywood film-star teeth like elephant ivory. His floral tourist shirt, his outdoor sandals, his multipocketed tourist pants: they were rugged and yet scarily clean. They seemed to repel dirt with some built-in chemical force. No Dispensation activist would ever wear an Acquis neural helmet, so Vera could not know how Montalban truly felt about her and this dark meeting. Still, Montalban kept up a steady flow of comforting chatter.
    Legend said that the raider ships of Ulysses had once moored in Mljet to encounter the nymph Calypso. Montalban knew about this. He judged the myth "not too unlikely." He claimed that Homer's Ulysses had
    "means, motive, and opportunity to swap his loot from Troy."
    Montalban further knew that Mljet had been a thriving resort island in the days of the Roman Empire. He was aware that "medieval devel-opers" had once built monasteries on the island, and that some of those stone piles were still standing and "a likely revenue source if repur-posed." Montalban entertained some firm opinions about the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire and its
    "autocratic neglect of the Balkan hin-terlands." He even knew that the "stitched-up nation of Yugoslavia" had preserved Mljet as its stitched-up national park.
    When it came to more recent history—years during Vera's own lifetime—Montalban changed his tone. He became gallant and tact-ful. Her native island had