Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

The poor old man’s distress was so deep and immediate and pitiful and contagious that Inke burst into tears. “I know that Vera is here. She must be here.”

“She is a very noble, good person.”

Overwhelmed, Inke fled to the pew to rejoin her children. Lukas glanced up. “Is that our grandmother dead in that bubble?”

“No.”

“Okay!” They returned to their game.

Worshippers were quietly filtering into the church. The liturgy began. It was a small church but an impressive, full-scale performance, which might have suited Zagreb or even Rome. Lectors, musicians, altar boys—the ceremonial staff almost outnumbered the attendees.

Then there were cameras. Not the small cameras everyone carried nowadays. Large, ostentatious, ceremonial cameras with sacred logos.

There was no sign of George at the funeral service, which was en­tirely typical of him. Yet the young priest—handsome, bearded, deftly in command of the proceedings—was an inspiration.

It seemed impossible that anyone could properly bury a creature like Yelisaveta Mihajlovic: yet she had to be buried somehow, all things had to pass, and this priest was just the man to do it. Each soothing element of the ritual was another wrapping round the creature’s airtight coffin: the Introductory Rite, the Liturgy of the Word, the Intercessory Prayer, the Office of the Dead from the Liturgy of the Hours…

This priest was nobody’s fool about the goings-on here either, for he chose to speak from Wisdom, Chapter Four:

“But the numerous progeny of the wicked shall be of no avail; their spu­rious offshoots shall not strike deep root nor take firm hold.

“For even though their branches flourish for a time, they are unsteady and shall be rocked by the wind and, by the violence of the winds, up­rooted;

“Their twigs shall be broken off untimely, and their fruit be useless, unripe for eating, and fit for nothing.”

Those who lacked a firm grounding in Scripture could not follow the priest’s allusions, but those who grasped his meaning, grasped it well. Inke took satisfaction in that. She was suddenly glad she had come to the funeral. She always had a terror of preparing for a funeral, but as a funeral itself went on, there was always something right and good about it. When a funeral was over she felt profoundly glad to be alive.

Six pallbearers solemnly carried the creature’s glassy casket to a hill­side above the reviving city of Palatium. There was a neat hole in the soil there, chopped there as if by lasers. They conveyed the capsule into the Earth.

There was an impressive crowd at the graveside, much larger than the gathering inside the church. George had finally made it his business to appear. He looked solid and dignified.

The glamorous mourners at graveside were not seeking any consola­tion in the rituals of faith—on the contrary, it was entirely clear to Inke that they were there on business. They were all stakeholders in this process, somehow. They were cunning people. They all had good rea­sons to be here. They were burying the past so as to get a firm foothold on some ladder into tomorrow.

She was surrounded by handsome, self-assured, polished, gorgeous foreigners.

By the sound of their American English, Inke realized that these peo­ple had to be the Montgomery-Montalban clan. This was the famous Family-Firm, with its blood relations, its staffers, servants, investors, and trustees. How strange to think that Europe was so full of conscientious social justice, while America had its ruthless aristocracy.

There was a sudden jostling as a whole shoving crowd of Acquis cadres plowed through the crowd. These Acquis were unruly and ill re­hearsed, for they had invited themselves to the proceedings. They had some right to investigate the proceedings, it seemed. Unwelcome yet in­evitable, the Acquis were here like the police at a mafia wedding.

George was talking rapidly to one of the Acquis spies; for some reason, George was abandoning the decent suit she’d bought him and bor­rowing the man’s white jacket.

There was another trampling surge past the grave—how had the crowd grown so large and unruly, so suddenly? A host of bodyguards and paparazzI.

Little Mary Montalban had appeared upon the scene.

The child actress, whose skyrocketing fame had the world in such a tizzy—she seemed just another child to Inke, rather neatly and soberly dressed in gorgeous mourning clothes. The child walked serenely through the crowd, breaking a wake through them, as if she parted adult crowds every day.

The little girl drew nearer.

Suddenly, she turned her face up to Inke. The girl’s beauty was as­tounding. It burned and dazzled, like being hit in the face with a search­light.

The child recited two lines, loudly, in a well-rehearsed German. “ How do you do, Tante Inke? I’m so glad to see you here with us.”

Inke found herself bending to kiss the child’s delicate cheek. It was an irrevocable act, something like swearing allegiance.

Her children were thunderstruck to meet their famous cousin. It was as if someone had given them a toy angel.

Inke realized that the male stranger at her side was John Mont­gomery Montalban. She had met him once. John Montalban looked older now. And shorter, too—somehow, world-famous people were al­ways much shorter in real life.

“George has asked me to say a few words after the interment,” Mon­taIban said. “My little Synchronist eulogy… I hope you won’t mind that, Inke.”

It was as if he were pouring warm oil over her head.

“Are you nervous?” she asked him, the first remark that fluttered onto her tongue.

“Yes, I’m worried,” Montalban lied briskly, “I always hate these for­mal presentations… Inke, you married George. So you’re our expert on the subject at hand here. What on Earth can I properly say about Yelisaveta? At the end of the day, it seems that I knew Yelisaveta best. Yet she was—of course—a monster. What can I say about her that isn’t completely shocking to propriety? The world is listening.”

Inke considered the world—the poor, imperiled world. “Did the old woman ever tell you that she would come back to the world, down from orbit?”

“She did. Sometimes. She was stringing us on, from her lack of any­thing else to do with herself. It was like a long hostage negotiation. Please give me some good advice here, Inke, help me out. Tell me what I should say about this situation. The world needs closure on the issue. She was our relative, you know.”

Why was he talking to her in this confiding way? In the past, he’d al­ways talked to her with the hearty exaggeration of an English lordship treating one of the little people as his equal.

“I think,” she said haltingly, “I think Yelisaveta was just… a dark story made by her own dark times.”

“That makes some sense.”

“She tried to build something and it broke into pieces. The pieces could not hold. So she lied, cheated, and killed for nothing… but the truth is… she believed in every last horrible thing that she did. She fully believed in all of it. She was sincere, that was her secret. It was all her sacrifice and her grand passion.”

Montalban was truly interested. “That is fabulous. How well put! And George is one of the remaining pieces, too! Yet George is the piece that is least like the rest of the broken pieces. He’s not much like them, they really hate him for that… Why is that, can you tell me that?”

“George is a man. Men take longer to mature.”

“I see. That may indeed be the case… in which case, may I tell you something important now about your George? George has always led a dodgy, improvised life… between the Dispensation and our good friends the Acquis… he was cutting corners, making connections… After this funeral George will have a changed life. Because those two great parties are finding a bipartisan consensus. We have found the pow­ers necessary to defeat the climate crisis… And in doing that, we have let so many genies out of bottles that our Earth is becoming unimagin­able. Do you see what I mean here? Instead of being horribly unthink­able, the Earth is becoming radically unimaginable.”