The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [144]
“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, unripe 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 cunning people. They all had good reasons to be here. They were burying the past so as to get a firm foothold on some ladder into tomorrow.
She was surrounded by handsome, self-assured, polished, gorgeous foreigners.
By the sound of their American English, Inke realized that these people had to be the Montgomery-Montalban clan. This was the famous Family-Firm, with its blood relations, its staffers, servants, investors, and trustees. How strange to think that Europe was so full of conscientious social justice, while America had its ruthless aristocracy.
There was a sudden jostling as a whole shoving crowd of Acquis cadres plowed through the crowd. These Acquis were unruly and ill rehearsed, for they had invited themselves