The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

neurally controlled continental reconstruction unit. It's a giant robot exoskeleton that's nuclear-powered and four stories tall. Every one of these psychotic things costs as much as a full-scale Missis-sippi mud dredge. They're airtight, they're fully heated, they've got inte-rior life-support systems, they're basically Martian spacesuits with legs. Building these crazy things for him: That's the price that he demands from us."
    Vera stared. "That big robot does looks kind of . . . weird."
    "This darling of his has been sitting on his drawing board ever since he was in graduate school. Frankly, no sane capitalist would ever fi-nance such a thing. Because it's got no market pull at all. It's a wild, macho, engineer's power fantasy."
    Montalban leaned back on his slab of tarmac and tipped his sun hat. "We have agreed to his terms. A monster machine like this makes no sense to me, but nobody thought his Mljet plan would ever work out, ei-ther. It turns out he was right, and we were wrong. We admit that now. He wins. Mljet is light, and speedy, and brilliant, and glorious. Your boss has proved himself to the smart money and the power players. He has won. So if your boss plays some ball with us, he gets whatever the hell he wants." Vera gazed at the bristling, fantastic monster. The giant robot had no head. She tried to imagine her Herbert sealed inside that giant, stamp-ing coffin, that rock-shattering hulk. She knew that Herbert would do it. Of course he would do it.
    "This was just an old dream of his."
    "That guy is no dreamer. That guy is a serial entrepreneur. We get it about guys like him. We know how to handle guys like him in Califor-nia. It's no use logjamming him, or sabotaging him, or getting in his way, or 'verifying' him. No, all that kind of crap is counterproductive. The one effective way to deal with a guy like him is to double his ante. Just pony up the money and double his bet." Montalban leaned back and shrugged. "Well, I can do that for him. I can do it, I promise. Because I've done that kind of thing before. My whole family does it. We've been doing it for years."
    "What are you doing to Herbert?"
    "I'm financing Herbert. The world needs Herbert. Herbert is a geek technofanatic who's also a serious player, and those are rare people. He's a great man. Really. It's just that, politically speaking, it's not great that he's here in Mljet. We don't really much want a guy like him, with a private army of brainwashed robot cultists, sited in a violently unstable region like the Balkans."
    "This is my home," Vera murmured.
    "Fine. It's not his home. If he ventures off to Antarctica, that's a dif-ferent matter. If he fails there, well, that's one solution. If he tackles the Big Ice and he wins, well, then we all win. Because we've bought our world more time."
    Montalban wiped his sweating upper lip. "Personally, I really hope that he can somehow pull that off. Sincerely, I hope that. I do. I know that big Aussie is crazy, but I'm with him all the way. Los Angeles just can't take many more refugee Australians."
    "I would never do anything against Herbert and what Herbert wants to do."
    "All right, good: now you're talking sense. So: Let's talk about you. Mljet and you: the public face of the New Mljet. The consortium needs an attractive young woman with skill and ambition who has some peo-ple smarts. We'll be facing a big transition here, a complete change in the infrastructure. That would be your role."
    "So I'm the project manager."
    "That's an Acquis title. Your title with us will be chief hospitality offi-cer. That is not a figurehead post, by the way: don't get me wrong. You wouldn't be the workaday prime minister here: you'd be the queen of this place. I'm offering you a crucial post with a lot of situational perquisites. You will be allocating resources over every inch of this is-land. And I mean major resources, world-class, world-scale. Instead of that ragtag of refugees that you reeducated in the camps,