The Caryatids

Adriatic island resort. Vera blossomed inside a Chi­nese high-tech research camp. The Chinese much preferred her to Sonja. Sometime later Radmila went to China, while Sonja went to the island… Once in rotation, they didn’t simply bear their burdens in suf­fering, they were able to thrive.

EI: It seems so simple that they could trade existences and end happily.

MM: Oh no, no—believe me, nothing ended. And happiness? It’s sheer arrogance for any outsider, any normal person to think that we could solve their problems… Nobody ever imposes a solution on those women. It’s all I can do just to describe them.

EI: As the scriptwriter, you mean.

MM: Well, as a contemporary media creative, I always wanted to do a classic biopic about my mothers. I mean, to make a cinematic artwork with a linear narrative. A story line with no loose ends, where the plot makes sense. I enjoy that impossible creative challenge. It’s impossible because only history can do that for us. Sometimes it takes twenty-five years, even two hundred years to crush real life into a narrative compact enough to understand.

EI: They say that to end with a funeral is the classic sign of a tragedy. Your latest project, The Caryatids, concludes with a funeral.

MM: Well, that’s a mother-daughter issue… Look, can I be frank here? That narrative is supposedly about my mothers, but as a pop­entertainment product, The Caryatids is the ultimate Mary Montalban star vehicle. It’s not about them: it’s all me. Obviously it’s me. I pro­duced it, I directed it, I wrote the script, and I play all of them. I play every major part: I play Radmila, Vera, Sonja, the bit villain part of Bis­erka, I even play the dead grandmother in the glass coffin.

EI: Why did you make that creative choice, Mary?…

MM: Because I’m a guaranteed draw and I can get big financing. But… well, I’m the only actress I could trust to inhabit those roles. Be­cause I’m the only woman on Earth with any hint as to what’s going on in their heads.

EI: “To understand all is to forgive all.”

MM: Iknow that sounds corny, but, well, once you have a child of your own, like I do, you come to realize that the world’s oldest, dumbest nurs­ery maxims are the keys to reality.

EI: Surely somebody else understands the Caryatids. What about their other children?

MM: You mean Erika’s brood? Give me a break!

EI: How about John Montalban? He often said the Caryatids were all one organism. Was he right about that?

MM: He’s a clever guy, my dad. That big scandal that wrecked his career, people need to overlook that. He couldn’t help himself—he was ruling­class in a planet that was ungovernable. If you just leave my old dad alone, he just reads his Synchronic philosophy and collects twentieth­century fine arts.

EI: I never quite got it about that so-called Synchronic philosophy.

MM: Well, that’s the true genius of Synchronism; it’s a futurist’s philoso­phy, so it’s permanently ahead of popular understanding.

EI: Synchronists seem to worry a lot about giant volcanoes. And the sun blowing up.

MM: Okay, look, you’re baiting me here, but… Yes, the Caryatids are passionate about solar instability. That’s why they all live in orbit now. That, and the fact that their own mother lived in orbit… They all have a very strong rapport with ubiquitous systems. They always did. And an or­bital habitat really needs ubiquitous computing. Because a space habitat is a completely defined pocket ecosystem, it’s a little toy world where you have to trace every mineral, every energy flow. They were born inside a scene like that, so they all ended up in flying glass bubbles. You’d think they’d be at peace with that by now, at peace with us down here on the planet’s surface… But no, they’ve got the sun’s troubles on their backs.

EI: Will the sun blow. up, Mary?

MM: Someday? Absolutely it will! All you have to do is look at the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. But personally, I think… if the sun’s misbehavior is serious… well, I’m a performing artist. I need my pub­ lic. I’d prefer to stay here inside this local planetary ecosystem, busted up as that is, and be fried with my fellow bacteria.

EI: And it’s the same with those supervolcanoes?

MM: One of em is bound to blow, that’s inevitable. It’s just the truth.

EI: You recently said that “the structure of space-time is rotting.”

MM: It’s true, but do you really want to get into that issue? We don’t have all the time in the world here.

EI: No. You’re right. I don’t think we need to get into that issue, Mary. But tell us, why do you think actresses are so interested in entropy and physics these days? Some of them even write science papers. You, for in­stance.

MM: I think that was inevitable. One of those “black swan” things. You can never predict a black swan, yet it happens anyway, and then every­body justifies it and rationalizes it after it’s done. That’s very much my own story… I am a black swan, I was born one, and that’s why I have always been both a monster and a major pop star.

Now I’m trying to make sense of the experience of my mothers. His­tory passes. And some important pieces of major evidence are just plain gone.

EI: “Major evidence”?

MM: The part that’s missing is the work they cared most about. Those ubiquitous systems, what they used to call the “mediation,” the “sensor­webs.” The Caryatids were brought up inside a crude and primitive “smart house”—some incredibly invasive surveillance scheme… there is nothing left of that technology nowadays. Those were the technical structures the Caryatids were born to support, but… Those technolo­gies advanced so fast that they vanished. The languages, operating sys­tems, frameworks of interaction, the eyeball- blasting laser-colored neural helmets… all that stuff is more primitive than steam engines now.

I mean, you can tell how a steam engine works by just looking at it, but a complex, distributed, ubiquitous system? There’s no way to main­tain that! That all became ubijunk! Those cutting-edge systems are gone like sandcastles. A rising tide of major transformation threw them up on the shore, and then the whole sea rose and they are beyond retrieval.

EI: That sounds so sad… But there’s very little any of us can do about that.

MM: All I know is that the Caryatids were passionately into that, fanatical about it, yet time passed and now it is gone. It’s the one aspect of their experience almost entirely closed to me as an artist.

Futurism is prediction. We all know that’s impossible. But history is retrodiction, and that’s impossible, too. So we have to paper over those black holes with sheer imagination.

EI: So you tell stories.

MM: Well, yes. That’s what I do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BRUCE STERLING is the author of ten novels, three of which were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Difference Engine, co-written with William Gibson, was a national bestseller. He has also published four short-story collections and three nonfiction books. He has written for many magazines, including Newsweek, For­tune, Time, Whole Earth Review, and Wired, where he was a longtime contributing editor. He has won two Hugo Awards and was a finalist for the 2007 Nebula for Best Novella. He lives in Austin, Texas, with frequent side jaunts to Turin, Italy; Los Angeles; Belgrade; and Amsterdam.