The Caryatids

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 unimagin­ able. Do you see what I mean here? Instead of being horribly unthink­able, the Earth is becoming radically unimaginable.”

Montalban was so solemn and passionate in this assessment that all Inke could do was blink.

“Inke, I aspire to see a normal world. A normalized world. I have never yet lived in any normal world, but I hope to see one built and standing up, before I die.”

“A ‘normal’ world, John?”

“Yes. ‘Normal.’ Like you, Inke. To be normal is a very conservative business. Your husband is going to become a conservative businessman. That is necessary, and I’m going to help him.”

“You’re not a conservative businessman?”

“No, Inke, alas, I’m a hip California swinger from Hollywood who has multiple wives. But I do need a conservative businessman, rather badly. And since your George is part-and-parcel of a Relinquished ex­periment, he is perfect for that role. I foresee a leadership role for George. He will become a modern captain of industry and a pillar of a new world consensus.”

“My husband admires you very much,” she told him, “and he would like to trust you, but really, John… Biserka. Why Biserka?”

“Yes,” he said wistfully, “I know. ‘Biserka.’”

“Why?”

Montalban looked at the gathered children—they were plunging through the crowd, bobbing like corks. “My little daughter Mary… she lacks for playmates. Mary doesn’t have much of a peer group. Why don’t you and the kids come and visit us this Christmas? We’ll all go to Lily­Pad. Up in orbit. It’s very quiet up there. It’s private. We’ll have a good long chat about certain matters. You and I, especially. We’ll iron some things out.”

“Why do you want to fly into outer space? That is dangerous.”

“The Earth is dangerous. And the sun is also disquieting. If the sun grows seriously turbulent—then Mars wouldn’t be far enough away for us. I commissioned some speculations on that topic. We’ve made some interesting findings. Should the Earth’s sun become unstable, it turns out that, with the Earth’s present level of industrial capacity, we could escape to the Oort Cloud with a biosphere ark of maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty people. Carrying our ubiquitous support machines, of course.”

Montalban seemed to expect an answer to this extraordinary declara­tion. “Of course,” Inke told him.

“The Earth would become a cinder. Mars would be irradiated. Hot gas would be blasting off the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. The only spark of living vitality left in the solar system would be a shiny bubble containing us. Us, a whole lot of our maintenance machinery, and mostly, microbes.”

“‘Us’ John.”

“Yes, I mean us, Inke.” He waved his hand at the funereal crowd.

“You, me, the kids. People. There wouldn’t be much of us left, but we would be what there was.”

“You really think that way.”

“Yes, I have to think that way. It’s necessary.”

“You’re not a conservative businessman, Mr. Montalban.”

“No, I’m what people call a ‘Synchronic realist.’ We choose to look directly at the stark facts of science and history.” Montalban sighed. “Of course, whenever one does that in an honest spirit, everything becomes visionary, abnormal, and extreme.”

There was a bustle at the graveside. Somehow, amazingly, George had assembled his sisters into a public group.

Since they violently loathed one another, Vera, Sonja, Radmila, and Biserka had all been determined to stand out during the funeral. Rather than wear proper dark mourning clothes—as everyone else was doing—they had each, independently, decided to mark themselves out as free spirits by dressing entirely in white. So the sisters were all in white, iden­tical, grim and chilly and marbled, pale as statues.

Making the most of this misstep, George had hastily borrowed a white jacket from an Acquis cadre. He’d ripped off the jacket’s political tags, pips, and braiding. So George was also in white.

Gathered there at the monster’s graveside, two by two with George standing at their head, the women were intensely romantic and pretty. Five siblings holding up the autumn sky.

“This is George’s finest hour!” said Montalban, his dark eyes wide. “Look what he’s achieved! I could never do that! Never! He’s got them publicly holding hands! Like when they were kids!”

Inke knew fear. “This is not going to work.”

“Of course it will work! He’s finally got them burying their primal trauma here! Even though they’re a broken set, they’re violently off-kilter… they’re letting go of their past! Everybody’s watching! The whole world adores them.”

Inke knew that the women could not bear up. Flawed from birth, scorched by murder, their hearts were broken: they had failed compre­hensively. They were strong and resolute and intelligent women, but they could not possibly support the roles that fate had forced upon them. They were broken statues for a broken world.

“They cannot bear it,” she told him.

“Well, I’m not claiming that this is a perfect solution for them­—peace never lasts forever in the Balkans—but come on, Inke, they’re not stupid! Look, he’s giving them the ceremonial shovels!”

It was a local tradition to distribute short-handled shovels at a grave­side, for the convenience of mourners casting dirt.

George was the first to pitch in with his fancy shovel—without another word or gesture, he began heaving damp clods straight into the open grave. He looked thrilled, overjoyed. George meant to finally conceal a lifelong embarrassment. He might have filled that grave all by himself.

George was so gleeful and eager about his work that the women, as if helpless, fell into line.

Soon they were all throwing dirt into the Earth, earnestly, tirelessly. When each saw that the others were sparing no effort, they really set to. Their arms and legs in ominous unison, the clones labored like iden­tical machines.

Inke stared at the uncanny spectacle. Every spectator was silent and astonished.

Vera was the best at the labor. As an engineer, Vera understood dirt and digging. Vera had a pinched, virginal quality—Vera was a fanatic, the kind of woman who had never understood what it meant to be a woman. Vera was efficient and entirely humorless, a robot.

Radmila made it all look so effortless. She handled her shovel like a stage prop. Radmila was the world’s most elegant grave digger. It was as if every woman in the world should aspire to spend her evenings filling graves.

Sonja had filled many graves already. Sonja was the one who best un­derstood what she was doing. It was a moral burden to see Sonja at her deadly work. It made one sweat.