The Caryatids

Just look at that weepy old man over there; his blue-veined hands were clenched before his face, he was clearly Dispensation yet sincerely praying as a Catholic. Life wasn't about being perfectly consistent, was it? Mankind were miserable si

Inke rose from the pew to attend to the casket in the mellow candlelight. This was the most expensive, elaborate coffin Inke had ever seen. She'd thought at first that it was a properly open coffin, but no. The casket had a bubble top of thin, nonreflective glass. The dead woman's coffin was hermetically sealed.

And that corpse inside her bubbled sphere of death…what brilliant undertaker had been set loose there? The more one stared at those gaunt, painted, cinematic features, the more she looked like some brilliant toy.

There was just enough graceless authenticity left to the corpse to convince the viewer that the undertaker's art concealed an actual dead woman. Or a dead creature anyway, for the war-criminal fugitive had been living for years up in orbit, where human bone and muscle wasted away from the lack of gravity, where the air was ca

She didn't even have legs!

A shroud covered her lower body. Thin, cream-colored, silky fabric. Enough to veil her abnormalities, but enough to show the ugly truth to those who-somehow-must have known what she was doing to herself, to her body and soul, way up there.

She was sickeningly strange. Yet at least she was truly dead.

A reflective shadow appeared on the glass bubble. It was one of the clones. The clone took a stance at the far side of the coffin. She stared into the bubble, fixated, gloating.

She was dressed in elaborate, lacy white, with a long stiff bodice but a plunging decolletage, like some bulging-eyed bride, drunk at a Catholic wedding and burningly eager to haul the groom to a hotel.

Inke had only met one of the cloned sisters: Sonja, the strongest one. She knew instantly that this one was Biserka. She knew that in her bones.

"I'm Erika Montalban," Biserka told her.

Inke did not entirely trust her own English. "How nice. How do you do?"

"And you're Inke, and those are your kids!"

Lukas and Lena were sitting placidly in their pew, heads together over a silent handheld game. Inke knew instantly that Biserka would cheerfully skin and eat her two children. She would gulp them down the way a cold adder would eat two mice.

"Where's the baby?" Biserka demanded, sca

Inke touched her scarf. "You should wear something…on your head. We are in a church."

"What, I have to wear a hood in here, like a Muslim girl or something?"

"No, like a Catholic."

"Do I get to eat those little round bread things?"

"No, you're not in a state of grace."

"I put the holy water all over myself!"

"You're not a Catholic."

"It is always like that!" Biserka screeched, wringing her hands in anguish. "What is with you people? I did everything right, and you're not having any of it? I'm going to find John. John is going to fix this, you wait and see!"

Biserka stormed out of the church.

"You told her the proper things," said the old gentleman. He had stepped from his pew to the coffin, without Inke hearing his tread. He spoke English. "You were kind and polite to her."

"Thank you, sir."

"My name is Dr. Vladko Radic. You do not know me, Mrs. Zweig, but I know a little of you. I am a friend of Vera Mihajlovic."

"I understand. How do you do?"

"I also knew Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I knew her rather well. Yelisaveta was a great patriot. Of course she committed excesses. God will pardon her that. Those were very excessive times." Radic was drunk. Drunk, and in church.

"If I may ask you a favor," slurred Dr. Radic, "if an old man may ask you one small favor…the dead have to bury the dead, but my dearest domorodac, my dearest Mljecanka, Vera Mihajlovic…A very beautiful, very sincere, very lovable girl…for all the infernal machines that cover this island, it has never been the same without her!"

Radic began sobbing, in an unfeigned, gentlemanly fashion, wiping at his rheumy eyes. "I sit here praying for Vera…praying that she will come here to see this unfortunate woman, and that Vera can return to this place, and that life here can be made right again! Have you seen Vera?"

"No sir, I have not seen her."

"Please tell Vera that all is forgiven if she will come back to the island! Please tell her that…yes, life will be different, life must be different now, but Dr. Radic has not forgotten her, and she has many friends here and she will always have friends."

The poor old man's distress was so deep and immediate and pitiful and contagious that Inke burst into tears. "I know that Vera is here. She must be here."

"She is a very noble, good person."

Overwhelmed, Inke fled to the pew to rejoin her children. Lukas glanced up. "Is that our grandmother dead in that bubble?"

"No."

"Okay!" They returned to their game.

Worshippers were quietly filtering into the church. The liturgy began. It was a small church but an impressive, full-scale performance, which might have suited Zagreb or even Rome. Lectors, musicians, altar boys-the ceremonial staff almost outnumbered the attendees.

Then there were cameras. Not the small cameras everyone carried nowadays. Large, ostentatious, ceremonial cameras with sacred logos.

There was no sign of George at the funeral service, which was entirely typical of him. Yet the young priest-handsome, bearded, deftly in command of the proceedings-was an inspiration.

It seemed impossible that anyone could properly bury a creature like Yelisaveta Mihajlovic: yet she had to be buried somehow, all things had to pass, and this priest was just the man to do it. Each soothing element of the ritual was another wrapping round the creature's airtight coffin: the Introductory Rite, the Liturgy of the Word, the Intercessory Prayer, the Office of the Dead from the Liturgy of the Hours…

This priest was nobody's fool about the goings-on here either, for he chose to speak from Wisdom, Chapter Four:

"But the numerous progeny of the wicked shall be of no avail; their spurious offshoots shall not strike deep root nor take firm hold.

"For even though their branches flourish for a time, they are unsteady and shall be rocked by the wind and, by the violence of the winds, uprooted;

"Their twigs shall be broken off untimely, and their fruit be useless, un-ripe for eating, and fit for nothing."

Those who lacked a firm grounding in Scripture could not follow the priest's allusions, but those who grasped his meaning, grasped it well. Inke took satisfaction in that. She was suddenly glad she had come to the funeral. She always had a terror of preparing for a funeral, but as a funeral itself went on, there was always something right and good about it. When a funeral was over she felt profoundly glad to be alive.

Six pallbearers solemnly carried the creature's glassy casket to a hillside above the reviving city of Palatium. There was a neat hole in the soil there, chopped there as if by lasers. They conveyed the capsule into the Earth.

There was an impressive crowd at the graveside, much larger than the gathering inside the church. George had finally made it his business to appear. He looked solid and dignified.

The glamorous mourners at graveside were not seeking any consolation in the rituals of faith-on the contrary, it was entirely clear to Inke that they were there on business. They were all stakeholders in this process, somehow. They were cu