The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

been "abducted," as he put it: as "an off-shore market for black globalization." Montalban said nothing about the eighteen dark years that his own wife had spent on Mljet. He said nothing about Radmila whatsoever. Montalban was so entirely silent and discreet about Radmila that Vera felt dazed.
    Moving onto firmer ground with a burst of verbal footwork, Montal-ban launched into a complex narrative, full of alarming details, describ-ing how the Acquis had managed to acquire Mljet to perform their neural experiments. Vera herself had never known half of these stories-—they existed at some networked level of global abstraction that she and her fellow cadres rarely encountered. The details of Acquis high-level committees were distant events for them, something like astronomy or Martian exploration, yet Montalban knew a host of astonishing things about the doctrines and tactics of both the global civil societies. Most particularly, Montalban seemed to know where their money went. Vera felt grateful for the way events were turning out. Vera had no money—because Mljet had no money economy—but if she'd had any money, she'd have cheerfully entrusted it to someone like Montalban. Montalban was so entirely and devotedly obsessed by money that he had to be really good at banking.
    Radmila's husband was nothing like she had imagined and vaguely feared. Met in the suntanned flesh, he exuded wealth like some kind of cologne. Montalban was clearly the kind of man that rich clients could trust to work through huge, intimidating files of complex financial doc-uments. There was something smooth and painless and lubricated about him.
    When he sensed that his ceaseless flow of insights was tiring her, Montalban busied himself with his camera. He adjusted its tiny knobs and switches. He deftly framed his shots. He beachcombed through the wild overgrowth of the shore, a dense shady tangle of flowering shrubs thoroughly mixed with tattered urban junk. The summer glare bounced from his fancy spex, and when he removed his busy lenses, he had dart-ing, opaque black eyes.
    Busily documenting the wreck of Polace, Montalban urged her to "go right about your normal labors." This was his gentle reproach for the way she had chosen to confront him and his little girl: defiantly towering over them in her boneware and helmet.
    She'd done that to intimidate him. That effort wasn't working out well. Vera pretended to turn her attention to local cleanup work, lever-ing up some slabs of cement, casually tossing urban debris into heaps.
    Montalban turned his full attention to documenting his child. He moved Little Mary Montalban here and there before the ruined city, as if the child were a chess piece. He was very careful of the backgrounds and the angles of the light.
    Miss Mary Montalban posed in a woven sun hat and a perfect little frock, delicately pressed and creased, with a bow in the back. The gar-ment was a stage costume: it had such elegant graphic simplicity that it might have been drawn on the child's small body.
    Mary had carried a beach ball to Palace. That was the child's gift to this stricken island, carried here from her golden California: Mary Montalban had a beach ball. A big round beach ball. A fancy hobject beach ball.
    Mary certainly knew how to pose. She was solemn yet intensely visi-ble. Her hair and clothing defied gravity, or it might be better said that they charmed gravity into doing what their designers pleased. This small American girl was some brand-new entity in the world. She was so pretty that she was uncanny, as if there were scary reservoirs of undiscovered dainty charm on the far side of humanity. Still—no matter what her ambitious parents might have done to her—this five--year-old girl was still just a five-year-old girl. She was innocent and she was trying to please.
    Mary Montalban had met a twin of her own mother: not Radmila, but Vera herself, a bony apparition, a literal moving skeleton, towering, vibrating,