The Caryatids

Vera turned her spex-covered eyes in the direction of his voice. The augment faltered a bit, and then let Montalban pop into her view. Montalban looked particularly pleased with himself, and, if anything, handsomer than before. "Of course, your Dr. Radic was a lot of help with our little project."

Vera pressed the spex against the bridge of her nose. She rocked her head from side to side. Everything panned smoothly: no breakups, no freezes, no jitters. The world had turned into a movie. A special effect.

She stared at the dead woman again. Confronted with death, at last, the Hollywood fakery became obvious. Vera had seen plenty of dead people. This was the Hollywood special-effects version of a dead person: much too tasteful, too bright, too crisp and neat.

"She's so tiny! Why is she so small?"

"That's the size most people really were, in the Dark Ages. You know our Dr. Radic. That old gent's a stickler for accurate forensics."

Arms stretched for balance, with small, careful steps, Vera sidled around the sarcophagus.

The dead woman had a thick waist, and no bust, and short, crooked legs. Her mouth and her jaws had a lemon-sucking look, for she had lost some teeth young and had grown old without dentistry.

Her brow was creased with sullen menace and there was a practiced sneer at the wings of her waxy nose. The Duchess was a vicious, imperious, feudal grandmother. She looked like her evil eyes might flick open at any moment.

Vera reached out a hand. She saw her fingers appear within her field of vision.

She reached out to touch the sarcophagus. Her fingers vanished into the thick visual lacquer of the augment. Finally she felt her fingers contact real stone. Not new stone. Cold stone, dead stone, eroded by centuries.

Vera jerked her hand back with a feeling of shame. She was suddenly ashamed of her crude local Acquis sensorweb, with its corny visual tags, its blurs of golden glory, its sadly primitive icons. She'd thought that she understood mediation, but now she knew she was just a hick, a regional peasant. Because this California augment was years ahead of anything she'd ever used or built. It was otherworldly.

"I can't believe my eyes! This is so swift and brilliant! People would queue up to see this, they would make long lines to see!"

"Yes, that would be the basic business plan," Montalban told her. "Mediation is a key enabler for tomorrow's heritage economy."

"What?"

"'The replacement of national sovereignty and class consciousness by technically sophisticated yet ethically savage private cartels which dissolve social protections and the rule of law while encouraging the ruthless black-marketization of higher technologies...' That's what a famous Acquis critic once said about this technology. Augmentation is a little dodgy. I agree it's not for amateurs."

Vera couldn't understand this long rote-quote of his-Montalban was a Dispensation gentleman. It was as if he were quoting classical Latin at her. His chatter didn't seem to matter much. Not when confronted with this. "Did you say this is 'dodgy'? Mr. Montalban-this isn't even supposed to be possible."

"I'm pleased that you appreciate our modest efforts," said Montalban, with just the lightest hint of imperial sarcasm. "Would you care to step outside this tent, and have a look around?"

Vera lurched at once for the flapping tent door.

She stood outside. The excavated soil of old Ivanje Polje had suddenly become a Slavic Dark Age village. The spex augment showed her writhing plum trees, clumsy vineyards, muddy pigpens, a big stone-fenced villa. The stone longhouse was half surrounded by squalid peasant huts, homemade from mingled mud and twigs. It looked insanely real, like drowning in a glossy cartoon.

The sky above medieval Mljet was truly astounding, staggering: a heartaching vista of pure fluffy clouds. That medieval sky was scarily blue and clean. Vera had never stood beneath such a sky in her whole life. Because this sky was not her own deadly Greenhouse sky, the sky of a world in the grip of a global catastrophe. This historical sky had never known one single smokestack. It was the natural sky of the long-vanished natural Earth.

Vera took one reeling, awestruck step and tripped over her own feet. Somehow, Montalban was there for her. He caught her arm.

"Are there people here?" she shouted at him. "Where are all the people?"

"We didn't yet write any avatars for this Dark Age augment," Montalban told her, his calm voice close to her ear. "Our Dark Age plug-in is still in alpha."

Vera plucked the clinging spex from her face. Karen appeared in the flowering field, with Mary Montalban. Karen had both her bony arms out, and she was laughing. The child was cheerfully climbing her exposed ribs.

"Watch me throw her high in the air!" Karen crowed.

"Oh my God," moaned Montalban, "please don't do that."