The Caryatids

the ground.”

The exotic aircraft drew nearer to them. It was floating to Earth rather elegantly, silently, and emission-free. It was like a giant dandelion seed.

“Okay,” said John authoritatively, “I think maybe I’ve heard of these after all. That’s some kind of fibrous suborbital pod. It’s Acquis. It’s Eu­ropean and it’s Acquis.”

Lionel was unimpressed. “Of course it’s Acquis, John. Anybody can tell from the design that it’s Acquis. I think it’s Italian.”

“I think you’re right.”

“That craft is going to land precisely on our stated coordinates. Like, within a five-meter range. I think we’d better move before it lands and crushes us.”

Arm in arm, the brothers took several measured steps away across the desert. The flying device drew nearer. It was stellar and radiant and huge. It was like a flying tinsel chandelier.

“No, it’s going to land nearby us,” Montalban decided, and the two of them strode back to the robot to await their airborne delivery.

“Los Angeles is the capital of the world,” Montalban pronounced. “Say what you will about the Chinese—and I love them dearly, we do business every day—there are a hell of a lot more Chinese in Los Ange­les than there will ever be Angelenos in Beijing.”

“You sure got that right!”

Montalban drew a triumphant breath. “As we stand here in the gath­ering dusk of old Asia, it’s the brilliant dawn of a new West Coast New Age! It’s time to break out the Napa Valley champagne! Tomorrow’s regime is Pax Californiana! As a bright and shining city on a hill, we, the last best hope of mankind, are pulling the planet’s ashes straight out of the stellar fire!”

“That’s the truth!” crowed Lionel.

“Even when we golden Californians were mere American citizens, it was never that great an idea to bet your future against us. I mean, you could bet against us, but— where’s the fun in that? If you try to beat us, even if you win, you have to lose!”

Lionel slapped his brother’s two extended hands. “We rock! We rule! It’s because we’ve got a shine on our shoes and a melody in our heart! We’ve got the rhythm!”

The brothers capered like utter fools as Sonja sat in heartbreak, and they laughed uproariously. It was the most glorious day of their lives.

EPILOGUE

WHEN INKE ZWEIG HEARD of the burial plans for her husband’s de­ceased mother, she sensed that such arrangements could not possibly end well. Inke had been to a host of funerals. She had hated every one of them. Every celebration of death permanently drained Inke of some spark of her own life force.

Inke envied the dead at funerals—since the dead didn’t have to en­dure the poorly arranged conclusions to difficult modern lives. The lack of any decent and comforting ceremony was the signature of a world in a near-fatal moral confusion.    

What were the so-called Acquis and the sinister Dispensation? How had they vulgarly elbowed their way to the forefront of modern life? Why were people so anxious nowadays to pile on proofs of the stricken mourning on their electronic networks? As if the modern dead had no parents, no cousins, no children, no parishioners, no friends next door, no ties of citizenship. Instead there would be vulgar gold-wrapped bou­quets from distant Moscow, remote-control acquaintances burning heaps of Chinese paper cash for the departed on live video links above the coffin… A globalized travesty.

Inke begged George to allow her to stay quietly with the children in Vi­enna. But, as was his method now— George began piling on all kinds of poorly linked “reasons” to sway her. George had become the addict of some new game he called a “correlation engine,” and, since it had caused his business to prosper, he had begun to rely on it in his personal life.

She should see Mljet, George argued, for it was his birthplace and also remarkably beautiful. There was money to be made on the island. John Montgomery Montalban, his firm’s biggest business partner, was coordinating the funeral. The great man would certainly take things amiss if Inke did not show up.

All the sisters—Vera, Radmila, Sonja, even Biserka, the crazy one—they had all agreed to come see their mother buried. Inke had always nagged him (as George put it) about meeting all of his sisters. Here, at last, was the golden chance that she should not forgo.

The sisters were asking for her by name. They were also asking to see the three children. It was unthinkable that she not go to the funeral. She had to go.

None of this bullying convinced Inke. It only made her sense of a gath­ering catastrophe more gloomy and keen. These four harsh, implacable women, so tall, statuesque, blond, and icily identical—they all had high brainy foreheads, big beaky noses, and big flat cheekbones, like the fe­male statues supporting Vienna’s Austrian Parliament building—had they really agreed to step from their four separated pedestals? To really meet with one another, in the flesh? To eat at the same funeral wake, to talk together in public, as if they were women instead of demigoddesses?

They would claw each other’s eyes out. There would be nothing left of them.

It had taken Inke years just to learn to manage George. George was the manageable one of the group—and George had a streak of true fe­rocity in his soul. George was cunning and devoid of scruples.

When she’d first met George, he’d been a teenage illegal laboring in her father’s river shipyard, sleeping in there, probably eating the wharf rats. George scared her, yet he had a genius for putting the workshop in order. Her family’s fortunes were collapsing and the world was violently spinning out of control. Inke had sensed that George might be capable of protecting her during the coming Dark Age. At least, he often darkly spoke of such necessities.

It would certainly take someone like George to protect her, in that murky world of slaughter that awaited everyone in the future: the seas ris­ing, the poles melting, coral reefs turning to foul brown ooze, droughts, floods, fires, plagues, storms the size of Mexico: nothing was safe any­more. Nothing was sure, nothing was decent. Her world was horribly transformed, and this man who seemed to want her so much: he was also different, and somehow, in much the same way as the world.

She was just a common Viennese girl, round, brown, small, not the prettiest, no man ever looked twice, no one but George was fiercely de­manding her hand, her heart, her soul. Since anything could happen to a girl whose father was ill, Inke had given in to him.

In the years that followed that fateful choice of hers, people had in­deed died in unparalleled numbers and in awful, tragic circumstances, a terrible business, the whole Earth in disaster, a true calamity, a global crisis, enough to make any normal, decent woman tremble like a dry leaf and tear out her hair in handfuls…

Yet not all that many people had died in Vienna. As George rightly pointed out— George always had an eye out for the main chance—life in Vienna was rather good.

Because—as George said—the world couldn’t possibly fall apart, all over, at the same speed, at the same moment. There simply had to be lags, holes, exceptions, safe spots, and blackspots—even if it was nothing more than a snug attic room where Inke could curl up with a good Jane Austen novel.

Even when the whole Earth was literally bathed in a stellar blast straight from the surface of the sun itself… an insane idea as awful as the black dreams of some of her favorite book authors, Edgar Poe and Howard Lovecraft—even in a natural catastrophe literally ten times big­ger than the whole Earth, there were some people on Earth who hadn’t much noticed it. They couldn’t be bothered.

The passing years had taught Inke to count her blessings, rather than the innumerable threats to her well- being. She had three loving chil­dren, a handsome home, a relatively faithful husband. In the past few months—as his sisters had all collapsed, one by one, into abject puddles of misery—George was becoming a pillar of the global business com­munity. George had been traveling the world, mixing with much better company than usual. He was better dressed, better spoken, suave, and self-contained. George had matured.

The death of his mother had been a particular tonic for George. Sud­denly he was calling her