The Caryatids (6 page)

Her childhood fortress home . . . when this town of Palace had lived, glittering with evil vitality, then her home was a blastproofed villa of an-cient Communist cement, dug deep into a hillside and nestled under camouflage nets. The sighing forest around the children seethed with intrusion sensors. The children often played in the woods-always together, of course-and sometimes they even glimpsed the blue shorelines. But they were never allowed to visit the island's towns. Four times each year, though, they were required to leave the island for inspections on the mainland: inspections by their inventor, their mother, their designer, and their twin, the eighth of their world-saving unit, the oldest, the wisest, their queen. So Vera, and her sullen little brother, and her six howling, dancing, shrieking sisters traveled in an ar-mored bus with blackened windows. The big bus would rumble up and down Mljet's narrow, hazardous roads, thump and squeak over the numerous, rickety bridges, park for a while on the grimy, graffiti-spattered dock, and then lurch aboard a diesel-belching Balkan ferry. Locked inside the bus, screaming in feral delight with her pack of sisters, Vera had feasted her eyes on an other-worldly marvel: that marvel was this place, this dead town. The town had a name: Polace. Its townsfolk were black marketeers. They were brewers of illicit biotech.In a place of great natural beauty, they were merchants of despair. Their gaudy pirate labs were guarded by militia soldiers in ferociously silly homemade uniforms. The harbor town was a factory, a pharmacy, a tourist trap, a brothel, and a slum. Polace was an ancient Balkan fishing village of limestone rock and red-tiled roofs. Old Palace had been built right at the water's edge, so the rising high tides of the climate crisis were sloshing into the buildings. Except, of course, for the new piers. These piers had been jerry-built to deal with the swarms of narcotics customers, sailing in from offshore. The black-market piers towered over the sea on spindly pylons of rust-weeping iron and pocked cement. The piers were crusted all over with flashing casino lights, and garish, animated street ads, and interactive billboards featuring starlets in tiny swimsuits. Multistory brothels loomed on the piers, sealed and windowless, like the drug labs. The alleys ashore were crammed with bars, and drugstore kiosks, and reeling, intoxicated customers, whose polyglot faces were neon-lit masks of feral glee and panic. The little harbor held the sleek, pretty yachts of the doomed, the daring, the crooked, and the planet's increasingly desperate rich.

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, nothingbut 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 devel-opers" had once built monasteries on the island, and that some of those stone piles were still standing and "a likely revenue source if repur-posed." Montalban entertained some firm opinions about the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire and its

"autocratic neglect of the Balkan hin-terlands." 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 tact-ful. Her native island had been "abducted," as he put it: as "an off-shore 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, Montal-ban launched into a complex narrative, full of alarming details, describ-ing 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 doc-uments. 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 dart-ing, 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, lever-ing 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 gar-ment 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 Palace. 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 visi-ble. 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 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, 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 gen-eration: 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 indi-vidual, 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 ac-tress, sharing a junk-strewn beach with her crazy, bone-rattling aunt. That was Mary Montalban. She had a world, too.