The caryatids, p.6
The Caryatids, page 6
Radical experiments that might be construable as child abuse made the easiest targets of all. So: No children allowed on the construction site … yet the clock never stopped ticking.
John Montgomery Montalban had brought his own child to the island. This was a Dispensation propaganda of the deed. The shrewder Acquis cadres understood this as a deliberate provocation. A good one, since there wasn’t a lot they could do about adorable five-year-olds.
Montalban was simply showing everyone what they had missed, what they had sacrificed. Sentiment about the child was running high. Vera thought that it must take a cold-blooded father to exploit his own flesh and blood as a political asset, in this shrewd way. But John Montgomery Montalban had married Radmila Mihajlovic. He had married Radmila, and given her that child. There had to be something wrong with him, or he would never have done such a thing.
Vera could literally track the child’s path across the island by the peaks of emotional disturbance her presence created. Mary left a wake wherever her polished little shoes touched the Earth.
The local Acquis cadres were unimpressed by Montalban. They considered themselves bold souls, they’d seen much worse than him. They felt some frank resentment for any intruder on their island, yet Montalban was just another newbie, an outsider who could never matter to them on a gut level.
Little Mary Montalban, though, was the walking proof of the cavity in their future.
Vera knew that her own powerful feelings about the child had done much to provoke this problem. In an act of defiance, Vera had chosen to wear her boneware and her neural helmet to meet Montalban—although Herbert had warned her against doing that. It had seemed to her like an act of personal integrity. Personal integrity did not seem to work with Montalban.
So: no more of that. If Vera put her own helmet aside—from now until this crisis blew over—the trouble would end all the sooner.
She had been wrong to trust her intuitions. She needed help. Karen would help her. Karen loved children. Karen had a lot of glory. Karen always understood hurt and trouble.
JOHN MONTGOMERY MONTALBAN—through an accident or through his shrewd, cold-blooded cunning—had chosen a new, more distant site for their next meeting. Without her boneware, Vera had to hike there from her barracks, on foot.
Mljet’s few remaining roads were reduced to weedy foot trails. People in boneware had little need for roads: they simply jumped across the landscape, following logistics maps.
Vera no longer had that advantage, so she had to tramp it. Luckily, she had Karen as counsel and company. Unluckily, Karen’s stilting strides made Vera eat her dust.
Modern life was always like this somehow, Vera concluded as sweat ran down her ribs. Impossible crises, bursting potentials. Rockets and potholes. Anything was possible, yet you were always on sore feet. Always, everywhere, ubiquitously. That was modern reality. Modern reality hurt.
Vera coughed aloud.
“Shall I carry you?” Karen said sweetly.
Vera wearily crested a ragged limestone ridge. Her humble fellow pedestrians crowded the valley below her. They were women from the attention camps, hand-working the island with hatchets and trowels.
The camp women wore their summer gear, with their hair up in kerchiefs. Every one of them wore cheap, general-issue spex.
Karen broke into a stilting run, bounding past the camp women like a whirlwind. The women offered Karen respectful salutes, awed by her cloud of glory.
Vera trudged among the lot of them, panting, sweating, sniffling. The camp women ignored Vera. She had no visible glory. So she meant nothing to them.
Vera took no offense. It was a software-design issue. Proper camp design reflected the dominant camp demographics. Meaning: middle-aged city women. Most modern people lived in cities. Most modern people were middle-aged. So most modern people in refugee camps were necessarily middle-aged city women. As simple as that.
These attention-camp newbies, these middle-aged city women, were diligently laboring in the open fields of an Adriatic island. They’d never planned to meet such a fate. They’d simply known that, as refugees without options, they were being offered a radically different life.
When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun.
The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies.
As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded whatever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening.
The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close attention would become an expert.
The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes.
As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. “Glory” was the primary Acquis virtue.
Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard—not when you simply heard about the concept. But when you saw glory, with your own two eyes, the invisible world made so visible, glory every day, glory a fact as inescapable as sunlight, glory as a glow that grew and waned and loomed in front of your face—then you understood.
Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be.
Camp people badly needed reasons to be. Before being rescued by the Acquis, they’d been desolated. These city women, like many city women, had no children and no surviving parents. They’d been uprooted by massive disasters, fleeing the dark planetary harvest of droughts, fires, floods, epidemics, failed states, and economic collapse.
These women, blown across the Earth as human flotsam, were becoming pioneers here. They did well at adapting to circumstance—because they were women. Refugee women—women anywhere, any place on Earth—had few illusions about what it meant to be flotsam.
Vera herself had been a camp refugee for a while. She knew very well how that felt and what that meant. The most basic lesson of refugee life was that it felt bad. Refugee life was a bad life.
With friends and options and meaningful work, camp life improved. Then camp life somewhat resembled actual life. With time and more structure and some consequential opportunities, refugee life was an actual life. Whenever strangers became neighbors, whenever they found commonalities, communities arose. Where there were communities, there were reasons to live.
Camp user statistics proved that women were particularly good at founding social networks inside camps. Women made life more real. Men stuck inside camps had a much harder time fending off their despair. Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed.
Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. “Fight or flight.” Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. “Tend and befriend.”
So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was designed to exploit those realities.
First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools.
The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bitter competition over power tools. It acted on men like a tonic.
Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an Acquis attention camp improved steadily with human usage. Exploiting the spex, the attention camp tracked every tiny movement of the user’s eyeballs. It nudged its everyware between the users and the world they perceived.
Comparing the movements of one user’s eyeballs to the eyeballs of a thousand other users, the system learned individual aptitudes.
A user who was good with an ax would likely be good with a water saw. A user quick to learn about plants could quickly learn about soil chemistry and hydrology. Or toxicity. Or meteorology. Or engineering. Or any set of structured knowledge that the sensorweb flung before the user’s eyes.
The attention camp had already recorded a billion things that had caught the attention of thousands of people. It preserved and displayed the many trails that human beings had cut through its fields of data. The camp was a search engine, a live-in tutoring machine. It was entirely and utterly personal, full of democratically trampled roads to human redemption. By design, it was light, swift, glorious, brilliant.
Vera had spent time in attention camps. So had Karen. This initiation was required of all the Acquis cadres on Mljet. At first, they’d been bewildered. Soon they had caught on. Within a matter of weeks, they were adepts. Eventually, life became elite.
The graduates of Mljet attention camps lived in boneware; they’d become human power tools.
“The camp people are happier today,” judged Karen, consulting her faceplate.
Vera shrugged. It was prettier weather. Better weather was always better for morale.
Karen flexed her slender arms within their bony pistons. “I’ll knock down that big patch of casuarina. Watch them worshipping me.”
“Don’t be such a glory hog, Karen.”
“It takes five minutes!” Karen protested.
“Karen, you need to cultivate a more professional perspective. This is not an entertainment. Neural scanning and ubiquitous mediation are our tools. An attention camp is a trade school.”
Karen stared down at her from the towering heights of her boneware. “Listen to you talking like that,” she said. “You’re so nervous about that rich banker, and his kid is driving you wild.”
MLJET’S TINY GROUP of Dispensation people were a discreet minority on the island. They’d been living on Mljet since the project’s first days.
The Dispensation people were a tolerated presence, an obscure necessity, imposed through arrangements high above. They never made any fuss about themselves or their odd political convictions.
Now, however, those quiet arrangements were visibly changing in character. The local Dispensation activists were highly honored by the visit of Montalban and his daughter. Their leader, and Montalban’s official host on the island, was Mljet’s archaeologist: good old Dr. Radic.
Archaeologists were always a nuisance on reconstruction sites. They fluttered around the sites of major earthworks like crows before the storm. There was no getting around the need for archaeologists. Their presence was mandated.
Dr. Radic was a Croatian academic. Radic diligently puttered around the island, classifying broken bricks and taking ancient pollen counts. While Vera had labored on the island’s mediation, installing her sensors and upgrading everyware, she had often encountered Dr. Radic. Their mutual love for the island and their wandering work lives made them friends.
A much older man, Dr. Radic had always been ready with some kindly word for Vera, some thoughtful little gift or useful favor. Radic clearly viewed her as an integral part of the island’s precious heritage. Vera was no mere refugee on Mljet—she was a native returnee. Knowing this, Radic had jolly pet names for Vera: the “domorodac,” the “Mljecanka.” The “home-daughter,” the “Mljet girl.”
Radic loved to speak Croatian at Vera, for Radic was an ardent patriot. When she strained her memory, Vera could manage some “ijekavian,” the local Adriatic dialect. This island lingo had never been much like Radic’s scholarly mainland Serbo-Croatian. Whenever Vera knew that she would encounter Dr. Radic, she took along a live-translation earpiece. This tactful bit of mediation made their relationship simpler.
In the nine years that she had known the archaeologist, it had never quite occurred to Vera that Radic was Dispensation. As a scientist and a scholar, Radic seemed rather beyond that kind of thing. Year after patient year, Radic had come to Mljet from his distant Zagreb academy, shipping scientific instruments, publishing learned dissertations, and exploiting his graduate students. Dr. Radic was a tenured academic, an ardent Catholic, and a Croatian nationalist. Somehow, Radic had always been around Mljet. There was no clear way to be rid of him.
Montalban and his daughter were guests at Radic’s work camp, an excavation site called Ivanje Polje. This meadow was one of the few large flat landscapes on narrow, hilly Mljet. Ivanje Polje was fertile, level, and easy to farm. So, by the standards of the ancient world, the pretty meadow of Ivanje Polje was a place to kill for.
Ivanje Polje, like the island of Mljet, was a place much older than its name. This ancient meadow had been settled for such an extreme length of time that even its archaeology was archaeological. At Ivanje Polje, the fierce warriors of the 1930s had once dug up the fierce warriors of the 1330s.
As an archaeologist of the modern 2060s, Radic had dutifully catalogued all the historical traces of the 1930s archaeologists. Dr. Radic had his own software and his own interfaces for the Mljet sensorweb. As a modern scholar, Radic favored axialized radar and sonar, tomographic soil sensors, genetic analyses. Not one lost coin, not one shed horseshoe could evade him.
DR. RADIC UNZIPPED AN AIRTIGHT AIRLOCK and ushered his guests inside to see his finest prize.
“We call her the Duchess,” said Radic, in his heavily accented English. “The subject is an aristocrat of the Slavic, Illyrian, Romanized period. The sixth century, Common Era.”
John Montgomery Montalban plucked a pair of spex from a pocket in his flowered tourist shirt. Vera had never seen such a shirt in her life. It flowed and glimmered. It was like a flowered dream.
“We discovered the subject’s tomb through a taint in the water table,” Radic told him. “We found arsenic there. Arsenic was a late-Roman inhumation treatment. In the subject’s early-medieval period, arsenic was still much used.”
Montalban carefully fitted the fancy spex over his eyeballs, nose, and ears. “That’s an interesting methodology.”
“Arsenical inhumation accounts for the remarkable condition of her flesh!”
Karen, looming in her boneware, whispered to Vera. “Why is Radic showing this guy that horrible dead body?”
“They’re Dispensation people,” Vera whispered back. She hadn’t chosen the day’s activities.
“He’s so cute,” Karen said. “But he’s got no soul! He’s creepy.” Karen swiveled her helmeted head. “I want to go outside to play with his little girl. If you have any sense, you’ll come with me.”
Vera knew it was her duty to stay with Montalban. Those who observed and verified must be counterobserved and counterverified.
Karen, less politically theoretical, left for daylight in a hurry.
Radic’s instrumented preservation tent was damp and underlit. The dead woman’s chilly stone sarcophagus almost filled the taut fabric space. There was a narrow space for guests to sidle around the sarcophagus, with a distinct risk that the visitor might fall in.
Radic had once informed her, with a lip-smacking scholarly relish, that the Latin word “sarcophagus” meant “flesh-eater.”
Vera had never shared Radic’s keen fascination with ancient bodies. Her sensitive Acquis sensorweb had detected thousands of people buried on Mljet. Almost any human body ever interred in the island’s soil had left some faint fossil trace there—a trace obvious to modern ultrasensitive instruments.
Since Vera was not in the business of judgment calls about the historical status of corpses, she had to leave such decisions to Dr. Radic—and this body was the one discovery the historian most valued. Radic’s so-called Duchess was particularly well preserved, thanks to the tight stone casing around her flesh and the arsenic paste in her coffin.
Still, no one but an archaeologist would have thought to boast about her. The “Duchess” was a deeply repulsive, even stomach-turning bundle of wet, leathery rags.
The corpse was hard to look at, but the stone coffin had always compelled Vera’s interest. Somebody—some hardworking zealot from a thousand years ago—had devoted a lot of time and effort to making sure that this woman stayed well buried.
This Dark Age stonemason had taken amazing care with his hand tools. Somehow, across the gulf and abysm of time, Vera sensed a fellow spirit there.
A proper “sarcophagus,” a genuine imperial Roman tomb, should have been carved from fine Italian marble. The local mason didn’t have any marble, because he was from a lonely, Dark Age Balkan island. So he’d had to fake it. He’d made a stone coffin from the crumbly local white dolomite.
A proper Roman coffin required an elegant carved frieze of Roman heroes and demigods. This Dark Age mason didn’t know much about proper Roman tastes. So his coffin had a lumpy, ill-proportioned tumble of what seemed to be horses, or maybe large pigs.
The outside of the faked sarcophagus looked decent, or at least publicly presentable, but the inside of it—that dark stone niche where they’d dumped the corpse in her sticky paste of arsenic—that was rough work. That was faked and hurried. That was the work of fear.
The Duchess had been hastily buried right in her dayclothes: sixteen-hundred-year-old rags that had once been linen and silk. They’d drenched her in poisonous paste and then banged down her big stone lid.
Her shriveled leather ears featured two big golden earrings: bull’s heads. Her bony shoulder had a big bronze fibula safety pin that might have served her as a stiletto.
The Duchess had also been buried with three fine bronze hand mirrors. It was unclear why this dead lady in her poisoned black stone niche had needed so many mirrors. The sacred mirrors might have been the last syncretic gasp of some ecoglobal Greco-Egypto-Roman-Balkan cult of Isis. Dr. Radic never lacked for theories.
