The Caryatids

"'Friends.' Friends? Hell, woman, I married you!" Montalban waved his hat at his reddening face. "I should never have come here. You don't know what it does to me to see you like this. To come here...and to bring the child, for God's sake...She's going to make me regret this."

"You mean Radmila. She didn't want you to do this."

"You said her name, not me! We don't have to discuss Radmila. Radmila Mihajlovic doesn't exist. My wife will never cross your path, ever. Because she hates your guts. For years, I could never understand why."

"Radmila hates me?"

"Like a passion. Like a curse. She's eaten up with it. Then I met Djordje. Djordje told me some things about what happened here. Terrible things. Then I met Sonja. And oh, my God. Now I do understand it, all of it, and that is much, much worse."

Vera put her head in her hands. She began to cry again, much harder.

"I can almost fix that damage," he told her. "I've come so close to fixing it, so many times. Djordje is almost all right-he's a tough businessman, but he's smart, he's no weakling. Sonja fights for what she thinks is right. Mila has done amazing things-she's truly gifted. And you-you're the good one. You're kind and sweet, you're the one with the best intentions."

Vera made a choice in her heart. "If I could believe you, John, I would do what you say."

"You would do what I say? You mean agree to the deal, go through with it?"

"Yes. But I have to know. I have to know it's the truth."

"All right, if that's what you want from me, then I guess we'll really talk. I guess we have no other choice. So: Fine, let's do it. Go get your lie-detector helmet. It doesn't scare me. I've seen worse. Just pull that crazy thing off your girlfriend's head before she tears my little girl into pieces."

They retreated up the trail and into the pine woods. They found a ragged clearing there. It took Vera half an hour to properly fit the scanner to Montalban's skull. His daughter sobbed in fear.

Karen had to take the child away. Karen hated leaving Vera in this moment of crisis, but when Vera ordered her to leave, Karen did as she was told. The emotional rejection cut Karen to the quick. Tears ran down Karen's face in streams. She and Mary Montalban clung to one another, sobbing as if they'd just seen someone die.

Montalban was entirely new to neural tech. His brain had not been properly calibrated over a long period of use. So, when Vera examined his neural output, his affect showed her nothing much. He had a kind of flatness. Almost an unnatural despair.

"Are you sick, John? You're not very spiky."

"Tranquilizers," he said.

"You take mood medication?"

"I have a very complex personal life," Montalban muttered. The bluff, cheery, American look had vanished from his face. With his head stuffed uncomfortably into Karen's dusty helmet, Montalban looked like a martyr in a crown of thorns.

"So," he demanded. "Do you see everything that I'm thinking now?"

"Well...no, of course not. I do see a lot of slow P300 recognition waves." That meant that Montalban recognized her. He knew her very well. He had been looking at her for years.

His brain lacked the sparkly affect of Acquis male cadres, who saw her, mostly, as a pretty woman. Men did that. At the bottom of any virile psyche, there was always some brisk neural reaction to a pretty woman.

There had never been any man on Mljet who looked at her with so much heartfelt confusion and grief. Montalban was looking at her as if the very sight of her were killing him.

"What do you see inside of me?" Montalban grated. "Do you think I'm crazy? Am I lying to you? Or is it all just as I told you?"

"John, this technology is not like you imagine it. Try to relax."

"These knobs hurt, " he whined. "How can you let big rubber knobs squeeze your skull like that? Can't you crackpots build some more sensitive scanners? Build them into a nice little sun hat, a beret or something."

"That's a safety helmet. It's designed for construction work."

"There's another part I just don't get. Helmets and skeletons! Why don't you just buy a bulldozer ? Bulldozers are cheap! Get a dragline, get an excavator!"

"We tried working that way," Vera told him. "But it feels wrong to us. It means more to our people when they can save the world with their own hands."

"You can't save the world on gusts of emotion!" he shouted. "That idea is for fanatics and losers!"

"You are so bitterly unhappy," Vera told him. "You're depressed! Your affect is very low and bad-that means you've lost heart in what you're doing. You know what? You're working much too hard at something that you don't like. You need a vacation."

Montalban's affect leaped violently. He began to laugh. He was at this quite awhile. "That was a really good joke," he said at last. "Thank you for telling me that one."

"She's made you so miserable," Vera said.