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 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 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 “
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.
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 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. Ifyou 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
