The Caryatids, page 7
“May I?” asked Montalban. He caressed the cold stone coffin with one fingertip. “Remarkable handiwork!”
“It is derivative,” sniffed Dr. Radic. “The local distortion of a decaying imperial influence.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I like best about it!”
From his tone, Vera knew that this was not what he liked best about it. He was Dispensation, so what he liked best was that someone had taken a horrible mess and boxed it up with an appearance of propriety. So he was lying. Vera could not restrain herself. “Why are you so happy about this?”
Montalban aimed a cordial nod at their host. “European Synchronic philosophy is so highly advanced! I have to admit that, as a mere Angeleno boy, sometimes Synchronic theory is a bit beyond me.”
“Oh, no no no, our American friend is too modest!” said Radic, beaming at the compliment. “We Europeans are too often lost in our theoretical practices! We look to California for pragmatic technical developments.”
Montalban removed his fancy spex and framed them against the faint light overhead. He removed an imaginary fleck of dust with a writhing square of yellow fabric. “Her body flora,” he remarked.
“Yes?” said Radic.
“Are her body flora still viable? Do you think they might grow?”
“There’s no further decay within this specimen,” said Radic.
“I don’t mean the decay organisms. I mean the natural microbes that once lived inside her while she was still alive. Those microbes have commercial value. This woman is medieval, so she never used antibiotics. There’s a big vogue in California for all-natural probiotic body flora.”
Vera found herself blurting the unspeakable. “Do you mean the germs inside the corpse?”
Montalban pursed his lips. “ ‘Germs inside the corpse.’ That’s not the proper terminology.”
“You want to sell the germs inside this corpse?”
“This is a public-health issue! It’s more than just a market opportunity!”
“He’s right, you know,” Radic piped up. “Archaeo-microbiology is a rapidly expanding field.”
“At UC Berkeley,” said Montalban, donning his spex again, “they call their new department ‘Archaeo-Microbial Human Ecology.’ ”
“Very apt.” Radic nodded.
“A whole lot of hot start-up labs around UC Berkeley now. Venture money just pouring in.”
“Oh, yes, yes, it was ever thus in California,” said Radic.
“Microbe work is huge in China, too. The Jiuquan center, reviving the Gobi Desert … Microbes are the keystone of sustainable ecology.”
“I don’t understand this,” said Vera.
Radic shrugged. “That’s because you’re Acquis!”
The old man’s tactless remark hung in the damp air. It died and began to stink.
“I would never dismiss the microbe technology of the Acquis,” said Montalban, demonstrating a tender concern. “Acquis medical troops lead the world at public sanitation.”
Vera felt her blood begin to simmer.
Despite his lack of accurate neural information about her emotions, Montalban sensed her discontent. “The skill sets differ within the global civil societies. We should expect that: that’s a source of valuable trade.”
“So, what do you call this business? ‘Frankenstein genetic graverobbing’?”
Montalban contemplated this insult. He twirled the earpiece of his spex gently between his fingers. “I suggest that we break for lunch now. I’m sure Little Miss Mary Montalban is hungry.” Montalban carefully placed his spex inside his flowered shirt.
“Don’t you want to use your fancy spex to scan the corpse here?” said Vera.
“Yes, I do. Still, it might be wiser if we ate first.”
“You make quite a fuss about your scanning capabilities.”
Montalban lifted one suntanned hand and plucked at his lower lip. “No, I don’t ‘make fusses,’ Vera. I’m a facilitator.”
“How could you eat? How could you eat today, now, after staring at this rotten woman and her rotten flesh? And then planning to sell it? How can you do that?”
Now even Radic knew that somebody had put a foot wrong. “Please don’t get angry at our foreign guest, dear Vera, my domorodac! After all, this is your heritage!”
“Are you always like this, John? You invent all kinds of lies, and big fake words, to cover up what you do in secret?”
Montalban was suddenly and deeply wounded. A flush ran up his neck. His face was turning both red and white at the same time, like a freshly sliced turnip.
Vera realized, with a giddy intuition, that yes, John Montalban was always like this. She wasn’t the first woman to tell him that about himself. Because he was married to Radmila.
Vera had touched him on some sore spot that Radmila had lacerated.
Montalban had never yet breathed a word about Radmila, yet Vera could almost smell Radmila now. Radmila was very near to them. It was as if Radmila were lying there in the coffin somehow. Disgustingly undead.
That black intuition—so true, and so immediate—panicked Vera. She felt a strong urge to strike Montalban, to hit him right across his handsome face.
Dr. Radic looked from her, to Montalban, and back again. The old man was completely bewildered and alarmed. “I’ll see to our lunch,” he blurted. Then he hurried through the zipper of the airtight tent and left it flapping.
The two of them were standing alone with the dead thing in its coffin. Hair rose all over Vera’s arms. Very soon, she would scream.
“Here,” said Montalban. He gently handed her the spex.
Hastily, Vera jammed the Californian hardware over her eyes. A galaxy of sparkling pixels swarmed across her vision.
The sarcophagus glimmered before her. The coffin went blurry for just a moment, then snapped into sharp focus.
The ancient sarcophagus was shiny, polished, precious, and entirely new.
A stranger lay in state inside of it. A woman who was freshly dead.
Newly laid to rest within her stony casement, the stately Duchess looked as detailed as a celebrity waxwork. Her silken robe shimmered. Her linen was white and fine. Gray tendrils threaded her oiled black hair. Her golden earrings, two little bull’s heads, gleamed aggressively. Her death-pale cheeks and eyelids had been brightly smeared with undertaker’s colors: lead-white cosmetics, black kohl, rouge, and antimony.
“You have an augment,” Vera said. “You brought an augment here.”
“Indeed I did,” said Montalban. “I brought a tourist application.”
Montalban’s Hollywood spex had two little rubbery blinders that had sealed tight around her eyes. Vera had never seen mediation reach such a peak of graphic artistry.
Montalban’s spex erased the visible world and replaced it with a simulation. The spex were firing a trio of colored lasers deep into her eyeballs. All this seemingly natural light that struck her eyes was artificial.
But she could still see her own hands, and the fabric walls of the tent. The program was scanning the real world in real time, then generating a visual addition to that world with 3-D modeling, ray-tracing, and reflection algorithms. It sucked all the real light out of the world, filtered it, augmented it, and blew it into her eyes with a mediated overlay.
It was doing this amazing feat in real time. Brilliantly, speedily. Using just a pair of flimsy-looking spex, instead of an entire heavy Acquis helmet and faceplate.
“Your augment is really fine-grained.”
“Thank you,” said Montalban. “It’s the state-of-the-art from UCLA’s graphics school. We’re rather proud.”
Vera turned her spex-covered eyes in the direction of his voice. The augment faltered a bit, and then let Montalban pop into her view. Montalban looked particularly pleased with himself, and, if anything, handsomer than before. “Of course, your Dr. Radic was a lot of help with our little project.”
Vera pressed the spex against the bridge of her nose. She rocked her head from side to side. Everything panned smoothly: no breakups, no freezes, no jitters. The world had turned into a movie. A special effect.
She stared at the dead woman again. Confronted with death, at last, the Hollywood fakery became obvious. Vera had seen plenty of dead people. This was the Hollywood special-effects version of a dead person: much too tasteful, too bright, too crisp and neat.
“She’s so tiny! Why is she so small?”
“That’s the size most people really were, in the Dark Ages. You know our Dr. Radic. That old gent’s a stickler for accurate forensics.”
Arms stretched for balance, with small, careful steps, Vera sidled around the sarcophagus.
The dead woman had a thick waist, and no bust, and short, crooked legs. Her mouth and her jaws had a lemon-sucking look, for she had lost some teeth young and had grown old without dentistry.
Her brow was creased with sullen menace and there was a practiced sneer at the wings of her waxy nose. The Duchess was a vicious, imperious, feudal grandmother. She looked like her evil eyes might flick open at any moment.
Vera reached out a hand. She saw her fingers appear within her field of vision.
She reached out to touch the sarcophagus. Her fingers vanished into the thick visual lacquer of the augment. Finally she felt her fingers contact real stone. Not new stone. Cold stone, dead stone, eroded by centuries.
Vera jerked her hand back with a feeling of shame. She was suddenly ashamed of her crude local Acquis sensorweb, with its corny visual tags, its blurs of golden glory, its sadly primitive icons. She’d thought that she understood mediation, but now she knew she was just a hick, a regional peasant. Because this California augment was years ahead of anything she’d ever used or built. It was otherworldly.
“I can’t believe my eyes! This is so swift and brilliant! People would queue up to see this, they would make long lines to see!”
“Yes, that would be the basic business plan,” Montalban told her. “Mediation is a key enabler for tomorrow’s heritage economy.”
“What?”
“ ‘The replacement of national sovereignty and class consciousness by technically sophisticated yet ethically savage private cartels which dissolve social protections and the rule of law while encouraging the ruthless black-marketization of higher technologies …’ That’s what a famous Acquis critic once said about this technology. Augmentation is a little dodgy. I agree it’s not for amateurs.”
Vera couldn’t understand this long rote-quote of his—Montalban was a Dispensation gentleman. It was as if he were quoting classical Latin at her. His chatter didn’t seem to matter much. Not when confronted with this. “Did you say this is ‘dodgy’? Mr. Montalban—this isn’t even supposed to be possible.”
“I’m pleased that you appreciate our modest efforts,” said Montalban, with just the lightest hint of imperial sarcasm. “Would you care to step outside this tent, and have a look around?”
Vera lurched at once for the flapping tent door.
She stood outside. The excavated soil of old Ivanje Polje had suddenly become a Slavic Dark Age village. The spex augment showed her writhing plum trees, clumsy vineyards, muddy pigpens, a big stone-fenced villa. The stone longhouse was half surrounded by squalid peasant huts, homemade from mingled mud and twigs. It looked insanely real, like drowning in a glossy cartoon.
The sky above medieval Mljet was truly astounding, staggering: a heartaching vista of pure fluffy clouds. That medieval sky was scarily blue and clean. Vera had never stood beneath such a sky in her whole life. Because this sky was not her own deadly Greenhouse sky, the sky of a world in the grip of a global catastrophe. This historical sky had never known one single smokestack. It was the natural sky of the long-vanished natural Earth.
Vera took one reeling, awestruck step and tripped over her own feet. Somehow, Montalban was there for her. He caught her arm.
“Are there people here?” she shouted at him. “Where are all the people?”
“We didn’t yet write any avatars for this Dark Age augment,” Montalban told her, his calm voice close to her ear. “Our Dark Age plug-in is still in alpha.”
Vera plucked the clinging spex from her face. Karen appeared in the flowering field, with Mary Montalban. Karen had both her bony arms out, and she was laughing. The child was cheerfully climbing her exposed ribs.
“Watch me throw her high in the air!” Karen crowed.
“Oh my God,” moaned Montalban, “please don’t do that.”
VERA FORCED HERSELF to pick at Dr. Radic’s elaborate lunch, for the old man had outdone himself in honor of his guests. This done, they hiked on foot to the ruins of Polace, over a narrow trail that Radic’s people had taken some pains to clear. Montalban carried his daughter on his shoulders. Karen was in a buoyant mood, bounding along comically and making the child crow with glee.
When they descended from the island’s rugged backbone to the northern shore, it was clear why Montalban had been so eager to visit these ruins.
The augment for Polace simulated ancient Roman Palatium. Palatium, an imperial Roman beach resort in the year zero.
The island’s beaches had changed a great deal in the passage of twenty-one centuries. This meant a design conflict between strict geolocative accuracy and an augment that everyday viewers might willingly pay to see. That controversy hadn’t yet been settled, so much of imperial Roman Palatium appeared to be hovering, uneasily, over the rising Greenhouse waters of the bay.
Ancient Palatium was not ancient yet. Palatium was raw and new, a Roman frontier town. The island village featured sturdy wooden docks, and two wooden Roman galleys with their wooden oars up, and some very authentic-looking sacks of grain. It had one donkey-driven mill, and many careless heaps of scattered amphoras.
The village featured a host of makeshift wooden fishing shacks, and one small but showily elegant upscale limestone palace. Palatium also featured a public bath, a wine bar, a temple, and a brothel.
To Vera’s consternation, Roman Palatium had some avatars installed. These ghosts strolled their simulated Roman town, moving in the semi-random, irrational, traumatized way that ghosts roamed the Earth. The imperial Roman avatars were rather sketchily realized: tidy cartoons with olive skin and bowl-like haircuts.
One particularly horrible ghost, some kind of Roman butcher in a stained apron, seemed to have some dim machine awareness of Vera’s presence as a viewer within the scene. This ghost kept crowding up in the corners of her spex, with a tourist-friendly look, inviting user interactions that the system did not yet afford.
Vera handed the spex back to Montalban. She was powerfully shaken. “You’ve turned this dead town into some kind of … dead movie game.”
“That’s not the way I myself would have phrased it,” said Montalban, smiling. “I’d say that we’re browsing the historical event heap in search of future opportunities.” He stooped suddenly. The tide was out, and he’d alertly spotted a coinlike disk by the toe of his beach sandal. He plucked it up, had a closer look, and tossed it into the bay.
“The Palatium project,” he told her, “is a coproduction of the University of Southern California’s Advanced Culture Lab and Dr. Radic’s scholars in Zagreb. They’ve done pretty well with this demo, given their limited time and resources. Frankly, those USC kids really worked their hearts out for us.” Montalban slid the spex into a velvet-lined case. “If this demo catches on with our stakeholders, we’ll be catering to a top-end tourist demographic here.”
“But you made it … and it’s just a fantasy. It’s not real.”
Montalban rolled his eyes. “Oh, come now—you built that sensorweb that saturates this whole island! Radic gave me a good look at that construction. That’s brutal software. I sure wouldn’t call it viewer-friendly.”
“The sensorweb saved the life of this island! You’re pasting fantasies onto the island.”
“We could waste our time discussing ‘reality’ … Or, we could talk real business!” Montalban sat on the sun-warmed, sloping edge of a broken piece of Polace’s tarmac. He scattered salty dust with a handkerchief and offered her a spot. “Vera, I’m here from Hollywood! I’m here to help you!”
Vera sat. She knew from the look on his face that he planned to exploit her now. This was the crux: they had reached the crisis. “So, John, you want to help us? Tell me how you feel about that.”
“I need to make the dynamic of this situation clear to you.”
Vera posed herself attentively. It felt nice to watch his face, even as he lied to her. He really was remarkably good-looking.
“I have come to this island because, at this moment in the event stream, there’s a confluence of interests.” Montalban pulled a shiny wad of film from his pocket. He fluffed the film open and set it down before them. It flashed into life before their feet.
A pattern appeared in it: something like a plate of spaghetti.
“What’s this?”
“That’s a correlation engine running a social-network analysis. Using this has become part of due diligence whenever we’re trying to wire together a merger-and-acquisition deal. When a map of the stakeholders is assembled—very commonly—some player pops from the background and turns out to be the sustaining element…” Montalban leaned down, stretched out a finger, and tapped one of the central meatballs within the spaghetti. “That would be you. Vera Mihajlovic. You are right here.”
“You drew all this?” Vera said.
“Oh no.” Montalban laughed. “No human being could ever construct a map this sophisticated. Investor-analysis correlation engines use distributive intelligence.”
“Your map doesn’t make any sense. It looks like a plate of spilled food.”
“That’s why I’m explaining it to you,” he said patiently. “It’s true that you lack any formal executive power here. Still, you’re clearly central to what happens here, and this map shows it. The cultists here really look up to you: and I can guess why. First, you were born here. You were the last to leave the island, and the first to return to it. You’re a motivating, legitimating factor for them.”
Vera shrugged. “Can’t you talk to me about how you feel? Just tell me what you want.”
