The Caryatids, page 5
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, nothing but 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 developers” had once built monasteries on the island, and that some of those stone piles were still standing and “a likely revenue source if repurposed.”
Montalban entertained some firm opinions about the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire and its “autocratic neglect of the Balkan hinterlands.” 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 tactful. Her native island had been “abducted,” as he put it: as “an offshore market for black globalization.” Montalban said nothing about the eighteen dark years that his own wife had spent on Mljet. He said nothing about Radmila whatsoever. Montalban was so entirely silent and discreet about Radmila that Vera felt dazed.
Moving onto firmer ground with a burst of verbal footwork, Montalban launched into a complex narrative, full of alarming details, describing how the Acquis had managed to acquire Mljet to perform their neural experiments. Vera herself had never known half of these stories—they existed at some networked level of global abstraction that she and her fellow cadres rarely encountered. The details of Acquis high-level committees were distant events for them, something like astronomy or Martian exploration, yet Montalban knew a host of astonishing things about the doctrines and tactics of both the global civil societies. Most particularly, Montalban seemed to know where their money went.
Vera felt grateful for the way events were turning out. Vera had no money—because Mljet had no money economy—but if she’d had any money, she’d have cheerfully entrusted it to someone like Montalban. Montalban was so entirely and devotedly obsessed by money that he had to be really good at banking.
Radmila’s husband was nothing like she had imagined and vaguely feared. Met in the suntanned flesh, he exuded wealth like some kind of cologne. Montalban was clearly the kind of man that rich clients could trust to work through huge, intimidating files of complex financial documents. There was something smooth and painless and lubricated about him.
When he sensed that his ceaseless flow of insights was tiring her, Montalban busied himself with his camera. He adjusted its tiny knobs and switches. He deftly framed his shots. He beachcombed through the wild overgrowth of the shore, a dense shady tangle of flowering shrubs thoroughly mixed with tattered urban junk. The summer glare bounced from his fancy spex, and when he removed his busy lenses, he had darting, opaque black eyes.
Busily documenting the wreck of Polace, Montalban urged her to “go right about your normal labors.”
This was his gentle reproach for the way she had chosen to confront him and his little girl: defiantly towering over them in her boneware and helmet.
She’d done that to intimidate him. That effort wasn’t working out well. Vera pretended to turn her attention to local cleanup work, levering up some slabs of cement, casually tossing urban debris into heaps.
Montalban turned his full attention to documenting his child. He moved Little Mary Montalban here and there before the ruined city, as if the child were a chess piece. He was very careful of the backgrounds and the angles of the light.
Miss Mary Montalban posed in a woven sun hat and a perfect little frock, delicately pressed and creased, with a bow in the back. The garment was a stage costume: it had such elegant graphic simplicity that it might have been drawn on the child’s small body.
Mary had carried a beach ball to Polace. That was the child’s gift to this stricken island, carried here from her golden California: Mary Montalban had a beach ball. A big round beach ball. A fancy hobject beach ball.
Mary certainly knew how to pose. She was solemn yet intensely visible. Her hair and clothing defied gravity, or it might be better said that they charmed gravity into doing what their designers pleased.
This small American girl was some brand-new entity in the world. She was so pretty that she was uncanny, as if there were scary reservoirs of undiscovered dainty charm on the far side of humanity. Still—no matter what her ambitious parents might have done to her—this five-year-old girl was still just a five-year-old girl. She was innocent and she was trying to please.
Mary Montalban had met a twin of her own mother: not Radmila, but Vera herself, a bony apparition, a literal moving skeleton, towering, vibrating, 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 uncontrollably. 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, unsuspecting 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 daughter 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 selfishness. 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 poetry, talking kitchenware, thinking trees—they all died in bursts of gunfire, 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, vanished into the woods, like the wind. Vera had always loved the open island 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, climbed every hill she could climb, and there was not one living soul to be found. She grew dirty, despondent, and thin.
Finally Vera heard voices from the sky. Acquis people had arrived with boats, and those rescuers had a tiny, unmanned plane that soared around the island, a flying thing like a cicada, screeching aloud in a brilliant, penetrating voice. It yelled its canned rescue instructions in five or six global languages.
Vera did as the tiny airplane suggested. She ventured to the appointed rendezvous, she found her surprised rescuers, and she was shipped to a rescue camp on the mainland. From there Vera immediately schemed and plotted to return to Mljet, to save her island as she herself had been saved. At length, she had succeeded.
And now, after all that, here, again on Mljet, at last, was the next generation: in the person of Mary. The idea that Mary Montalban existed had been a torment to Vera—but in person, in reality, as a living individual, someone on the ground within the general disaster zone, Mary was not bad. No: Mary was good.
Mary was what she was: a little girl, a little hard to describe, but … Mary Montalban was the daughter of a rich banker and a cloned actress, sharing a junk-strewn beach with her crazy, bone-rattling aunt. That was Mary Montalban. She had a world, too.
Mary was visibly lonely, pitifully eager to win the approval of her overworked, too-talkative dad. Mary was also afraid of her aunt, although she very much wanted her aunt to love her and to care about her. That knowledge was painful for Vera. Extremely painful. It was a strong, compelling, heart-crushing kind of pain. Pain like that could change a woman’s life.
Remotely chatting in their lively, distant voices, the father and daughter tossed their big handsome beach ball. The girl missed a catch, and the ball skittered off wildly into the flowering bushes. In the silence of the ruins Vera heard the child laughing.
Vera turned up the sensors in her helmet, determined to spy on them. The ruins of Polace were rather poorly instrumented, almost a blackspot in the island’s net. Vera gamely tried a variety of cunning methods, but their voices were warped and pitted by hisses, hums, and drones. The year 2065 was turning out to be one of those “Loud Sun” years: sunspot activity with loud electrical noise. Any everyware technician could groom the signal relays, but there wasn’t a lot to do about Acts of God.
Montalban did not know that Vera was eavesdropping on him with such keen attention. His formality melted away. Montalban swung his arms high and low, he capered on the wrecked beach like a little boy.
Now Montalban was telling Mary something about Polace, pointing out some details in the rusting, sour ruins. Montalban was summing it all up for his daughter somehow, in some sober piece of fatherly wisdom. Montalban respected his daughter, and was intent and serious about teaching her. He was trying to instruct her about how the world worked, about its eerie promises and its carnivorous threats and dangers, phrasing that in some way that a five-year-old might comprehend and never forget. A fairy tale, maybe.
Thrilled to be the focus of her dad’s attention, Mary twisted her feet and chewed at her fingers.
Montalban had brought his daughter here to Mljet, all this way across the aching planet, for some compelling reason. Vera couldn’t quite hear what he was telling his child. Whatever it was, it certainly meant the world to him.
Vera sensed suddenly, and with a terrible conviction, that the two of them had come to Mljet to get far away from Radmila.
Yes, that was it. That was the secret. Montalban had not come here to spy on her, or the Acquis, or the island’s high technology, or anything else. Whatever those other purported motives might be, they were merely his excuses.
Mljet was a precious place for the two of them—because Radmila was not here. The two of them were here alone together, because this island was the one place on Earth that Radmila would never, ever go.
Radmila Mihajlovic, “Mila Montalban” in distant Los Angeles: Radmila was the vital clue here, Radmila was the missing part of this story. Radmila had renounced Mljet, fleeing the distorted horror of her own being, a refugee washing across the planet’s seas, like bloody driftwood.
Somehow, Radmila had found this man. She must have fallen on him like an anvil.
Remorseless as the rise of day, the world had continued, and now the father and the daughter had ventured here in order to be together.
Montalban flung the child’s beach ball high. He waved his hands at the hobject, gesturing like a wizard.
Suddenly, startlingly, the beach ball tripled in size. It soared above the shoreline, a striped and glittering balloon. The bubble hung there, serene and full of impossible promise, painted on the sullen storm clouds.
The beach ball wafted downward, with all the eerie airiness of a dandelion seed. It fell as if rescuing them from their misery.
The girl screeched with glee at her father’s cleverness. Montalban, his whole being radiating joy and mastery, waved his hands. The ball plummeted to Earth. It bounded off with rubbery energy.
The two of them gleefully chased down their weird toy in their oddly posh clothing.
Mljet’s newest tourists were thrilled to be here. They were entirely happy to treat the dismal wreck of Polace as their private playground. No ruin less awful, less desolate, could suit them and their love for one another.
Vera turned her helmeted head away. Her eyes stung, her cheeks were burning.
She waded into the cooling waters of the sea.
A dead water heater, poxed with barnacles, lay pillowed in a deathbed of mud. Vera bent and fetched it up. With one comprehensive nervous heave, she threw full power into her boneware.
The wrecked machine tumbled end over end and crashed hard above the tide line.
The child stared at her in joy and awe.
Vera hopped through the sea, splashing. She found a submerged car. She tore the rusty hood from its hinges. She flung the bent metal to shore, and it sailed like a leaf. She put her boot against a submerged door and tore that free as well. She threw it hard enough to skip it across the water.
Mary ran down the beach, skipping in glee. “Do it, Vera! Do it, Vera! Do that again!”
Montalban hastened after his child, his face the picture of worry. He half dragged Mary away from the wreckage and to a safer distance.
Up went his beach ball again, sudden and bloated and wobbling. The bubble rose with a wild enthusiasm, its crayon-bright colors daubing the troubled sky.
Montalban ran beneath the convulsing toy, pretending to leap and catch it. The child clapped her hands politely.
Then the toy burst. It fell into the sea in a bright tumble of rags.
THE LOCAL ACQUIS CADRES took a keen interest in Vera’s feelings. With the arrival of her niece on the island, the Acquis cadres were obsessed.
For years, the cadres had accepted the fact that their island society lacked children. That was the condition of their highly advanced work. They didn’t need kids to be an avant-garde society, a vanguard of the future. Surely they had each other.
The Acquis had hard-won experience in managing extreme technologies. Mljet was typical of their policy: a radical technical experiment required an out-of-the-way locale. It had to be compact in scale, limited in personnel. A neutered society. A hamster cage, an island utopia: to break those limits and become any bolder posed political risks. Risks posed by the planet’s “loyal opposition,” the Dispensation.
The Dispensation was vast and its pundits were cunning propagandists with the global net at their fingertips. They were always keen to provoke a panic over any radical Acquis activity—especially if those activities threatened to break into the mainstream.
