The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling Page A

squeaking. Mary did not shriek in terror at the dreadful sight of her own aunt. Probably, Mary had been carefully trained never to do such things. But whenever Vera stilted nearer, the child shuddered un-controllably. She was afraid.
    This fancy little girl, with her childish walking shoes, her pretty hat, and her beach ball, sincerely was a tourist. She was trying to play with her dad and have some fun at the seashore. That was Mary's entire, wholehearted intention. Mary Montalban was the first real tourist that Mljet had seen in ten long years. Some fun at the seashore didn't seem too much for a small girl to ask from a stricken world. A pang of unsought emotion surged through Vera. Pity lanced through her heart and tore it, in the way a steel gaff might lance entirely through the body of some large, chilly, unsuspect-ing fish. Vera worked harder, stacking the debris in the gathering heat of late morning, but her small attempts to order the massive chaos of this dead town could not soothe her. How much that child looked like Radmila, when Radmila had been no bigger, had known no better. How quickly all that had come apart. How sad that it had all come to such a filthy end. Like this. To rubbish, to rubble, to death. But a child wasn't rubble, rubbish, and death. Mary Montalban was not the product of some Balkan biopiracy lab. She was just the daugh-ter of one.
    That collapse had been waiting for the caryatids; it had been in the wind all along. The collapse started slowly, at first. First, Djordje had run away from the compound, in some angry fit—Djordje's usual self-ishness. Their latest tutor, Dr. Igoe, had vanished in search of Djordje. Dr. Igoe never came back from that search. Neither did Djordje, for this time his escape was final. Two days of dark fear and confusion passed. Vera, Bratislava, Kosara, Svetlana, Sonja, Radmila, Biserka—none of them breathed a word of what they all sensed must be coming. And as for their mother, their creator, their protector, their inspector . . . there was not a sound, not a signal, not a flicker on a screen.
    Then the earthquake happened. The earth broke underfoot, a huge tremor. After the earthquake, there were fires all over the coastlines, filthy, endless columns of rising smoke. After the fires, men with guns came to the compound. The desperate militia soldiers were scouring the island for loot, or women, or food. The compound's security system automatically killed two of them. The men were enraged by that attack: they fired rockets from their shoulders and they burst in shooting at everything that moved.
    Then sweet Kosara was killed, and good Bratislava was killed, and Svetlana was also killed, with particular cruelty. Suddenly murdered, all three of them. It had never occurred to these teenage girls to run for their lives, for their compound was their stronghold and all that their mother had allowed them to know of the world. Seventeen-year-old girls who had led lives of utter magic — air that held drawings and spoke po-etry, talking kitchenware, thinking trees — they all died in bursts of gun-fire, for no reason that they ever understood.
    Radmila survived, because Radmila hid herself in the dust, smoke, and rubble. Sonja fought, and Sonja killed those who killed. Biserka, howling for mercy—Biserka had thrown herself at the bandits' feet. Vera herself—she had run away at the first shots fired. Just run, van-ished into the woods, like the wind. Vera had always loved the open is-land much better than the compound.
    Lost in the island's forest, truly lost on Earth for the first time in her life, Vera had been entirely alone. The Earth had no words for Vera's kind of solitude.
    Bewildered and grieving, Vera had gone to Earth like an animal. She slept in brown heaps of pine needles. She ate raw berries. She drank rainwater from stony puddles.
    Her world had ended. Yet the island was still there.
    Vera tramped the stricken island from one narrow end to the distant other,