Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

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 chil­dren in the catechism, instead of stuffing their cloned heads like cab­bage 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.

Still, there had to be some redeeming qualities to any woman lying dead in church. After all was said and done, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic had created George. Inke knew well that George wasn’t quite human, but she considered that a distinct advantage in a husband.

Just look at that weepy old man over there; his blue-veined hands were clenched before his face, he was clearly Dispensation yet sincerely praying as a Catholic. Life wasn’t about being perfectly consistent, was it? Mankind were miserable sinners. If they didn’t know they were sinners before their whole Earth caught fire, they certainly ought to know that by now.

Inke rose from the pew to attend to the casket in the mellow candle­light. This was the most expensive, elaborate coffin Inke had ever seen. She’d thought at first that it was a properly open coffin, but no. The cas­ket had a bubble top of thin, nonreflective glass. The dead woman’s cof­fin was hermetically sealed.

And that corpse inside her bubbled sphere of death… what brilliant undertaker had been set loose there? The more one stared at those gaunt, painted, cinematic features, the more she looked like some bril­liant toy.

There was just enough graceless authenticity left to the corpse to con­vince the viewer that the undertaker’s art concealed an actual dead woman. Or a dead creature anyway, for the war-criminal fugitive had been living for years up in orbit, where human bone and muscle wasted away from the lack of gravity, where the air was canned and the skin never felt healthy sunlight… How many “days” had this waxwork crea­ture seen, with her dead silent-actress eyes, those orbital sunrises, sun­sets, as she bounded off the walls of her tin home like a fairy shrimp…

She didn’t even have legs!

A shroud covered her lower body. Thin, cream-colored, silky fabric.

Enough to veil her abnormalities, but enough to show the ugly truth to those who—somehow—must have known what she was doing to her­self, to her body and soul, way up there.

She was sickeningly strange. Yet at least she was truly dead.

A reflective shadow appeared on the glass bubble. It was one of the clones. The clone took a stance at the far side of the coffin. She stared into the bubble, fixated, gloating.

She was dressed in elaborate, lacy white, with a long stiff bodice but a plunging decolletage, like some bulging-eyed bride, drunk at a Catholic wedding and burningly eager to haul the groom to a hotel.

Inke had only met one of the cloned sisters: Sonja, the strongest one. She knew instantly that this one was Biserka. She knew that in her bones.

“I’m Erika Montalban,” Biserka told her.

Inke did not entirely trust her own English. “How nice. How do you do?”

“And you’re Inke, and those are your kids!”

Lukas and Lena were sitting placidly in their pew, heads together over a silent handheld game. Inke knew instantly that Biserka would cheerfully skin and eat her two children. She would gulp them down the way a cold adder would eat two mice.

“Where’s the baby?” Biserka demanded, scanning the church as if it sold babies on racks. “I love babies! I want to have lots of them.”

Inke touched her scarf. “You should wear something… on your head. We are in a church.”

“What, I have to wear a hood in here, like a Muslim girl or something?”

“No, like a Catholic.”

“Do I get to eat those little round bread things?”

“No, you’re not in a state of grace.”

“I put the holy water all over myself!”

“You’re not a Catholic.”

“It is always like that!” Biserka screeched, wringing her hands in an­guish. “What is with you people? I did everything right, and you’re not having any of it? I’m going to find John. John is going to fix this, you wait and see!”

Biserka stormed out of the church.

“You told her the proper things,” said the old gentleman. He had stepped from his pew to the coffin, without Inke hearing his tread. He spoke English. “You were kind and polite to her.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“My name is Dr. Vladko Radic. You do not know me, Mrs. Zweig, but I know a little of you. I am a friend of Vera Mihajlovic.”

“I understand. How do you do?”

“I also knew Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I knew her rather well; Yelisaveta was a great patriot. Of course she committed excesses. God will pardon her that. Those were very excessive times.” Radic was drunk. Drunk, and in church.

“If I may ask you a favor,” slurred Dr. Radic, “if an old man may ask you one small favor… the dead have to bury the dead, but my dearest domorodac, my dearest Mljecanka, Vera Mihajlovic… A very beauti­ful, very sincere, very lovable girl… for all the infernal machines that cover this island, it has never been the same without her!”

Radic began sobbing, in an unfeigned, gentlemanly fashion, wiping at his rheumy eyes. “I sit here praying for Vera… praying that she will come here to see this unfortunate woman, and that Vera can return to this place, and that life here can be made right again! Have you seen Vera?”

“No sir, I have not seen her.”

“Please tell Vera that all is forgiven if she will come back to the island! Please tell her that… yes, life will be different, life must be different now, but Dr. Radic has not forgotten her, and she has many friends here and she will always have friends.”