The Caryatids (41 page)

"Don't cry," said Montalban.

"I'm not crying."

"You're about to cry," Montalban predicted, with accuracy. "You're about to crack up because you can't bear your burden. Your lifelong burden is finally overwhelming you. It's too heavy and it's just too much for you. We know about that, Lionel and I. So we are removing your burden preemptively. Just for once. As a mercy. Your war is all over, Sonja. We are pulling you out of the cold. You are never going back to that place in the world, because you are ours now. We
own
you. Just let them
try
to take you back from us."

"Look there," said Lionel, pointing.

"What do you see?"

"It's a contrail, some kind of arch across the sky. Not a satellite. Mov-ing way too slow for that. Some kind of suborbital thing."

"I do see it! Right! That could be a Chinese ground-to-ground war-head," said Montalban cheerily.

"That is the west," said Lionel patiently. "That way over there, that's the east. China is east."

"Is
that
the east?" said Montalban, puzzled. "Really? I should have stepped outside of that tent more often."

"Sonja, do you have binoculars? A rifle? Anything with a telescope on it?" Sonja muttered at them from the chilly ground. "All I own is this badly damaged robot, which my ex-husband left to me as an act of con-tempt."

But they were ignoring her words, for something had suddenly bloomed overhead in the darkening Asian sky. "Holy cow," said Lionel, "what the heck is that thing? I've never seen a thing like that in my life!"

"What is that, a comet? I hate to say this; but that looks like a flying squid."

"It's like some zeppelin bullet that opens up just like an umbrella! Who would
build
a thing like that?" Lionel paused. "Why haven't they sold
us
one of those?"

"The world is full of skunk labs, Lionel. We can't know every tech project in the world. I'd be guessing—well, I'd bet that these were just the first guys to hit the Return key. They must have scrambled whatever they had on the ground."

The exotic aircraft drew nearer to them. It was floating to Earth rather elegantly, silently, and emission-free. It was like a giant dandelion seed.

"Okay," said John authoritatively, "I think maybe I've heard of these after all. That's some kind of fibrous suborbital pod. It's Acquis. It's Eu-ropean and it's Acquis."

Lionel was unimpressed. "Of course it's Acquis, John. Anybody can tell from the design that it's Acquis. I think it's Italian."

"I think you're right."

"That craft is going to land precisely on our stated coordinates. Like, within a five-meter range. I think we'd better move before it lands and crushes us."

Arm in arm, the brothers took several measured steps away across the desert. The flying device drew nearer. It was stellar and radiant and huge. It was like a flying tinsel chandelier.

"No, it's going to land nearby us," Montalban decided, and the two of them strode back to the robot to await their airborne delivery.

"Los Angeles is the capital of the world," Montalban pronounced. "Say what you will about the Chinese—and I love them dearly, we do business every day—there are a hell of a lot more Chinese in Los Ange-les than there will ever be Angelenos in Beijing."

"You sure got that right!"

Montalban drew a triumphant breath. "As we stand here in the gath-ering dusk of old Asia, it's the brilliant dawn of a new West Coast New Age! It's time to break out the Napa Valley champagne!

Tomorrow's regime is Pax Californiana! As a bright and shining city on a hill, we, the last best hope of mankind, are pulling the planet's ashes straight out of the stellar fire!"

"That's the truth!" crowed Lionel.

"Even when we golden Californians were mere American citizens, it was never that great an idea to bet your future against
us.
I mean, you
could
bet against us, but—where's the
fun
in that? If you try to beat us, even if you win, you have to lose!"

Lionel slapped his brother's two extended hands. "We rock! We rule! It's because we've got a shine on our shoes and a melody in our heart! We've got the rhythm!"

The brothers capered like utter fools as Sonja sat in heartbreak, and they laughed uproariously. It was the most glorious day of their lives.

EPILOGUE

WHEN INKE ZWEIG HEARDof the burial plans for her husband's de-ceased mother, she sensed that such arrangements could not possibly end well. Inke had been to a host of funerals. She had hated every one of them. Every celebration of death permanently drained Inke of some spark of her own life force. Inke envied the dead at funerals—since the dead didn't have to en-dure the poorly arranged conclusions to difficult modern lives. The lack of any decent and comforting ceremony was the signature of a world in a near-fatal moral confusion.

What were the so-called Acquis and the sinister Dispensation? How had they vulgarly elbowed their way to the forefront of modern life? Why were people so anxious nowadays to pile on proofs of the stricken mourning on their electronic networks? As if the modern dead had no parents, no cousins, no children, no parishioners, no friends next door, no ties of citizenship. Instead there would be vulgar gold-wrapped bou-quets from distant Moscow, remote-control acquaintances burning heaps of Chinese paper cash for the departed on live video links above the coffin . . . A globalized travesty. Inke begged George to allow her to stay quietly with the children in Vi-enna. But, as was his method now—George began piling on all kinds of poorly linked "reasons" to sway her. George had become the addict of some new game he called a "correlation engine," and, since it had caused his business to prosper, he had begun to rely on it in his personal life.

She should see Mljet, George argued, for it was his birthplace and also remarkably beautiful. There was money to be made on the island. John Montgomery Montalban, his firm's biggest business partner, was coordinating the funeral. The great man would certainly take things amiss if Inke did not show up. All the sisters—Vera, Radmila, Sonja, even Biserka, the crazy one—they had all agreed to come see their mother buried. Inke had always nagged him (as George put it) about meeting all of his sisters. Here, at last, was the golden chance that she should not forgo.

The sisters were asking for her by name. They were also asking to see the three children. It was unthinkable that she not go to the funeral. She had to go.

None of this bullying convinced Inke. It only made her sense of a gath-ering catastrophe more gloomy and keen. These four harsh, implacable women, so tall, statuesque, blond, and icily identical—they all had high brainy foreheads, big beaky noses, and big flat cheekbones, like the fe-male statues supporting Vienna's Austrian Parliament building—had they really agreed to step from their four separated pedestals? To really meet with one another, in the flesh? To eat at the same funeral wake, to talk together in public, as if they were women instead of demigoddesses?

They would claw each other's eyes out. There would be nothing left of them. It had taken Inke years just to learn to manage George. George was the manageable one of the group—and George had a streak of true fe-rocity in his soul. George was cunning and devoid of scruples.

When she'd first met George, he'd been a teenage illegal laboring in her father's river shipyard, sleeping in there, probably eating the wharf rats. George scared her, yet he had a genius for putting the workshop in order. Her family's fortunes were collapsing and the world was violently spinning out of control. Inke had sensed that George might be capable of protecting her during the coming Dark Age. At least, he often darkly spoke of such necessities.

It would certainly take someone like George to protect her, in that murky world of slaughter that awaited everyone in the future: the seas ris-ing, the poles melting, coral reefs turning to foul brown ooze, droughts, floods, fires, plagues, storms the size of Mexico: nothing was safe any-more. Nothing was sure, nothing was decent. Her world was horribly transformed, and this man who seemed to want her so much: he was also different, and somehow, in much the same way as the world.

She was just a common Viennese girl, round, brown, small, not the prettiest, no man ever looked twice, no one but George was fiercely de-manding her hand, her heart, her soul. Since anything could happen to a girl whose father was ill, Inke had given in to him.

In the years that followed that fateful choice of hers, people had in-deed died in unparalleled numbers and in awful, tragic circumstances, a terrible business, the whole Earth in disaster, a true calamity, a global crisis, enough to make any normal, decent woman tremble like a dry leaf and tear out her hair in handfuls . . .

Yet not all that many people had died in Vienna.
As
George rightly pointed out—George always had an eye out for the main chance—life in Vienna was rather good.

Because—as George said—the world couldn't possibly fall apart, all over, at the same speed, at the same moment. There simply had to be lags, holes, exceptions, safe spots, and blackspots—even if it was nothing more than a snug attic room where Inke could curl up with a good Jane Austen novel. Even when the whole Earth was literally bathed in a stellar blast straight from the surface of the sun itself

. . . an insane idea as awful as the black dreams of some of her favorite book authors, Edgar Poe and Howard Lovecraft—even in a natural catastrophe
literally ten times big-ger than the whole Earth,
there were some people on Earth who hadn't much noticed it. They couldn't be bothered. The passing years had taught Inke to count her blessings, rather than the innumerable threats to her well-being. She had three loving chil-dren, a handsome home, a relatively faithful husband. In the past few months—as his sisters had all collapsed, one by one, into abject puddles of misery—George was becoming a pillar of the global business com-munity. George had been traveling the world, mixing with much better company than usual. He was better dressed, better spoken, suave, and self-contained. George had matured.

The death of his mother had been a particular tonic for George. Sud-denly he was calling
her
"Mother." There were handsome new gifts for Inke, and, when George was at home, he was markedly kind and atten-tive. Even the children noticed George's improved behavior. The chil-dren had always adored George, especially when he was at his worst.

"You only have to bury a mother once," George coaxed, "it's not like I'm asking you to bury my damnable sisters." This was a typical fib on his part because, in all truth, his mother and his sisters were cloned bananas from the same stem. Inke held her tongue about that, though. Everybody knew the truth, of course: the Mihajlovic brood were the worst-kept "se-cret" scandal in history. Everyone who loved them learned not to say any-thing in earshot.

Then George further announced that his mother's burial was to be a traditional Catholic ceremony. Not the kind of ceremony George pre-ferred: those newfangled Dispensational Catholic ceremonies, with ubiq-uitous computing inside the church. No: George was firmly resolved on proper committal rites, with a vigil, a Mass, and a wake. Conducted in Latin. The Latin was the final straw . At this overwhelming gesture, Inke had to give in. Her surrender meant the tiresome chore of shopping for proper funeral clothes for her-self, George, and the children. For George wanted no expense spared. Inke soon found, from the unctuous behavior of the tailors, that this was no ordinary funeral. It was to be a famous funeral. A world-changing funeral, a glamorous climacteric. In particular, everyone asked if George's children were going to meet "Little Mary Montalban."

There seemed no use in Inke's obscuring the fact that her children were the cousins of Little Mary Montalban. Lukas, Lena, and even baby Ivan would personally meet the simpering, capering Little Mary Mon-talban, the "girl with the world at her feet" . . .

Mljet proved a keen disappointment. The island looked so mystical and lovely from the deck of a ferry, yet the landscape was a fetid, reek-ing wilderness, swarming with insects even in November, a rank place like an overgrown parking lot, and with scarcely any civilized amenities. Inke's little German guidebook made a great deal of pious green fuss about the returning fish and the swarming bugs and the glorious birds of prey and so forth, but—just like the "Treasure Island" of her older son's favorite book author, Robert Louis Stevenson—Mljet must have been an excellent place to be marooned and go totally mad.

Inke remarked on this to the older boy but, although Lukas was not yet eight, and huge-headed, with missing teeth and spindly schoolboy limbs, Lukas already had his father's wild look in his eyes.

"Marooned and going mad!" Lukas thought that was wonderful. He would maroon his little sister Lena and make her go mad, by stealing all her dolls and leaving her without any playmates. Construction work was booming at the island's new tourist port, which was named Palatium. Someone highly competent was sinking a great deal of investment money here. Given that George was so deeply involved in those logistics, this was a heartening sight to Inke. It almost made up for the fact that the sea trip had badly upset the baby.

Palatium's newly consecrated Catholic church seemed to be the first building formally completed. It was certainly the first decent place of worship consecrated in Mljet since who knew when. The church had a proper crying room with a trained nursemaid in it, a quiet American girl. This girl was Dispensation—it was annoying how many of them dressed themselves to show their politics—but she loved babies. Nerves jangled, Inke dipped at the holy water, led the older children up the aisle, genuflected, and slipped into a front pew. Peace at last. Peace, and safety. Thank God. Thank God for the mercies of God.

The coffin was candlelit with its feet toward the holy-of-holies. Inke and the children shared the shining new pew with an old man sitting alone. Some threadbare Balkan scholar, by the look of him. The poor old man seemed genuinely shaken and grieved by the death of Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. Inke could not believe that Yelisaveta Mihajlovic had been any kind of decent Catholic. If she had been, she would have trained her chil-dren in the catechism, instead of stuffing their cloned heads like cab-bage rolls with insane notions about how computers were going to take over the world. Yelisaveta Mihajlovic was nobody's saint, that was for certain. That dead creature in the elaborate casket there was the widow of a violent warlord, a Balkan Lady Macbeth.