The Caryatids (8 page)

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 re-demption. By design, it was light, swift, glorious, brilliant. Vera had spent time in attention camps. So had Karen. This initia-tion 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 be-come human power tools.

"The camp people are happier today," judged Karen, consulting her faceplate. Vera shrugged. It was prettier weather. Better weather was always bet-ter for morale. Karen flexed her slender arms within their bony pistons. "I'll knock down that Dig 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 GROUPof Dispensation people were a discreet mi-nority on the island. They'd been living on Mljet since the project's first days.

The Dispensation people were a tolerated presence, an obscure ne-cessity, 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 of-ficial 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 ear-piece. This tactful bit of mediation made their relationship simpler.

Inthe 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 pa-tient 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 al-ways 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 ex-cavation 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 war-riors of the 1330s. As an archaeologist of the modern 2060s, Radic had dutifully cata-logued 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 AIRLOCKand ush-ered 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 in-humation 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 ob-served 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 ultra-sensitive instruments.

Since Vera was not in the business of judgment calls about the his-torical 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 bun-dle of wet, leathery rags.

The corpse was hard to look at, but the stone coffin had always com-pelled 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 tum-ble of what seemed to be horses, or maybe large pigs.

The outside of the faked sarcophagus looked decent, or at least pub-licly 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 mir-rors. 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.

"May I?" asked Montalban. He caressed the cold stone coffin with one fingertip. "Remarkable handiwork!"

"It is derivative," sniffed Dr. Radic. "The local distortion of a decay-ing imperial influence."

"Yes, that's exactly what I like best about it!"

From his tone, Vera knew that this was not what he liked best about it. He was Dispensation, so what he liked best was that someone had taken a horrible mess and boxed it up with an appearance of propriety. So he was lying. Vera could not restrain herself. "Why are you so happy about this?" Montalban aimed a cordial nod at their host. "European Synchronic philosophy is so highly advanced! I have to admit that, as a mere Ange-leno boy, sometimes Synchronic theory is a bit beyond me."

"Oh, no no no, our American friend is too modest!" said Radic, beaming at the compliment. "We Europeans are too often lost in our theoretical practices! We look to California for pragmatic technical de-velopments."

Montalban removed his fancy spex and framed them against the faint light overhead. He removed an imaginary fleck of dust with a writhing square of yellow fabric. "Her body flora," he remarked.

"Yes?" said Radic.

"Are her body flora still viable? Do you think they might grow?"

"There's no further decay within this specimen," said Radic.

"I don't mean the decay organisms. I mean the natural microbes that once lived inside her while she was still alive. Those microbes have commercial value. This woman is medieval, so she never used antibi-otics. There's a big vogue in California for all-natural probiotic body flora." Vera found herself blurting the unspeakable. "Do you mean the germs inside the corpse?" Montalban pursed his lips." 'Germs inside the corpse.' That's not the proper terminology."

''You want to
sell
the germs inside this corpse?"

"This is a public-health issue! It's more than just a market opportu-nity!"

"He's right, you know," Radic piped up. "Archaeo-microbiology is a rapidly expanding field."

"At UC Berkeley," said Montalban, donning his spex again, "they call their new department

'Archaeo-Microbial Human Ecology.' "

"Very apt." Radic nodded.

"A whole lot of hot start-up labs around UC Berkeley now. Venture money just pouring in."

"Oh, yes, yes, it was ever thus in California," said Radic.

"Microbe work is huge in China, too. The Jiuquan center, reviving the Gobi Desert . . . Microbes are the keystone of sustainable ecology."

"I don't understand this," said Vera.

Radic shrugged. "That's because you're Acquis!"

The old man's tactless remark hung in the damp air.It died and began to stink.

"I would never dismiss the microbe technology of the Acquis," said Montalban, demonstrating a tender concern. "Acquis medical troops lead the world at public sanitation." Vera felt her blood begin to simmer.

Despite his lack of accurate neural information about her emotions, Montalban sensed her discontent.

"The skill sets differ within the global civil societies. We should expect that: that's a source of valuable trade."

"So, what do you call this business? 'Frankenstein genetic graverob-bing?" Montalban contemplated this insult. He twirled the earpiece of his spex gently between his fingers. "I suggest that we break for lunch now. I'm sure Little Miss Mary Montalban is hungry." Montalban carefully placed his spex inside his flowered shirt.

"Don't you want to use your fancy spex to scan the corpse here?" said Vera.

"Yes, I do. Still, it might be wiser if we ate first."

"You make quite a fuss about your scanning capabilities."

Montalban lifted one suntanned hand and plucked at his lower lip. "No, I don't 'make fusses,' Vera. I'm a facilitator."

"How could you eat? How could you eat today, now, after staring at this rotten woman and her rotten flesh? And then planning to
sell it?
How can you do that?"

Now even Radic knew that somebody had put a foot wrong. "Please don't get angry at our foreign guest, dear Vera, my
domorodac!
After all, this is your heritage!"

"Are you always like this, John? You invent all kinds of lies, and big fake words, to cover up what you do in secret?"

Montalban was suddenly and deeply wounded. A flush ran up his neck His face was turning both red and white at the same time, like a freshly sliced turnip.