The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [140]
“You sure got that right!”
Montalban drew a triumphant breath. “As we stand here in the gathering dusk of old Asia, it’s the brilliant dawn of a new West Coast New Age! It’s time to break out the Napa Valley champagne! Tomorrow’s regime is Pax Californiana! As a bright and shining city on a hill, we, the last best hope of mankind, are pulling the planet’s ashes straight out of the stellar fire!”
“That’s the truth!” crowed Lionel.
“Even when we golden Californians were mere American citizens, it was never that great an idea to bet your future against us. I mean, you could bet against us, but—where’s the fun in that? If you try to beat us, even if you win, you have to lose!”
Lionel slapped his brother’s two extended hands. “We rock! We rule! It’s because we’ve got a shine on our shoes and a melody in our heart! We’ve got the rhythm!”
The brothers capered like utter fools as Sonja sat in heartbreak, and they laughed uproariously. It was the most glorious day of their lives.
EPILOGUE
WHEN INKE ZWEIG HEARD of the burial plans for her husband’s deceased mother, she sensed that such arrangements could not possibly end well. Inke had been to a host of funerals. She had hated every one of them. Every celebration of death permanently drained Inke of some spark of her own life force.
Inke envied the dead at funerals—since the dead didn’t have to endure the poorly arranged conclusions to difficult modern lives. The lack of any decent and comforting ceremony was the signature of a world in a near-fatal moral confusion.
What were the so-called Acquis and the sinister Dispensation? How had they vulgarly elbowed their way to the forefront of modern life? Why were people so anxious nowadays to pile on proofs of the stricken mourning on their electronic networks? As if the modern dead had no parents, no cousins, no children, no parishioners, no friends next door, no ties of citizenship. Instead there would be vulgar gold-wrapped bouquets from distant Moscow, remote-control acquaintances burning heaps of Chinese paper cash for the departed on live video links above the coffin … A globalized travesty.
Inke begged George to allow her to stay quietly with the children in Vienna. But, as was his method now—George began piling on all kinds of poorly linked “reasons” to sway her. George had become the addict of some new game he called a “correlation engine,” and, since it had caused his business to prosper, he had begun to rely on it in his personal life.
She should see Mljet, George argued, for it was his birthplace and also remarkably beautiful. There was money to be made on the island. John Montgomery Montalban, his firm’s biggest business partner, was coordinating the funeral. The great man would certainly take things amiss if Inke did not show up.
All the sisters—Vera, Radmila, Sonja, even Biserka, the crazy one—they had all agreed to come see their mother buried. Inke had always nagged him (as George put it) about meeting all of his sisters. Here, at last, was the golden chance that she should not forgo.
The sisters were asking for her by name. They were also asking to see the three children. It was unthinkable that she not go to the funeral. She had to go.
None of this bullying convinced Inke. It only made her sense of a gathering catastrophe more gloomy and keen. These four harsh, implacable women, so tall, statuesque, blond, and icily identical—they all had high brainy foreheads, big beaky noses, and big flat cheekbones, like the female statues supporting Vienna’s Austrian Parliament building—had they really agreed to step from their four separated pedestals? To really meet with one another, in the flesh? To eat at the same funeral wake, to talk together in public, as if they were women instead of demigoddesses?
They would claw each other’s eyes out. There would be nothing left of them.
It had taken Inke years just to learn to manage George. George was the manageable one of the group—and George had a streak of true ferocity in his soul. George was cunning and devoid of scruples.
When she’d first met George, he