Radic loved to speak Croatian at Vera, for Radic was an ardent patriot. When she strained her memory, Vera could manage some "ijekavian," the local Adriatic dialect. This island lingo had never been much like Radic's scholarly mainland Serbo-Croatian. Whenever Vera knew that she would encounter Dr. Radic, she took along a live-translation earpiece. This tactful bit of mediation made their relationship simpler.

In the nine years that she had known the archaeologist, it had never quite occurred to Vera that Radic was Dispensation. As a scientist and a scholar, Radic seemed rather beyond that kind of thing. Year after patient year, Radic had come to Mljet from his distant Zagreb academy, shipping scientific instruments, publishing learned dissertations, and exploiting his graduate students. Dr. Radic was a tenured academic, an ardent Catholic, and a Croatian nationalist. Somehow, Radic had always been around Mljet. There was no clear way to be rid of him.

Montalban and his daughter were guests at Radic's work camp, an excavation site called Ivanje Polje. This meadow was one of the few large flat landscapes on narrow, hilly Mljet. Ivanje Polje was fertile, level, and easy to farm. So, by the standards of the ancient world, the pretty meadow of Ivanje Polje was a place to kill for.

Ivanje Polje, like the island of Mljet, was a place much older than its name. This ancient meadow had been settled for such an extreme length of time that even its archaeology was archaeological. At Ivanje Polje, the fierce warriors of the 1930s had once dug up the fierce warriors of the 1330s.

As an archaeologist of the modern 2060s, Radic had dutifully catalogued all the historical traces of the 1930s archaeologists. Dr. Radic had his own software and his own interfaces for the Mljet sensorweb. As a modern scholar, Radic favored axialized radar and sonar, tomographic soil sensors, genetic analyses. Not one lost coin, not one shed horseshoe could evade him.

DR. RADIC UNZIPPED AN AIRTIGHT AIRLOCK and ushered his guests inside to see his finest prize.

"We call her the Duchess," said Radic, in his heavily accented English. "The subject is an aristocrat of the Slavic, Illyrian, Romanized period. The sixth century, Common Era."

John Montgomery Montalban plucked a pair of spex from a pocket in his flowered tourist shirt. Vera had never seen such a shirt in her life. It flowed and glimmered. It was like a flowered dream.

"We discovered the subject's tomb through a taint in the water table," Radic told him. "We found arsenic there. Arsenic was a late-Roman inhumation treatment. In the subject's early-medieval period, arsenic was still much used."

Montalban carefully fitted the fancy spex over his eyeballs, nose, and ears. "That's an interesting methodology."

"Arsenical inhumation accounts for the remarkable condition of her flesh!"

Karen, looming in her boneware, whispered to Vera. "Why is Radic showing this guy that horrible dead body?"

"They're Dispensation people," Vera whispered back. She hadn't chosen the day's activities.

"He's so cute," Karen said. "But he's got no soul! He's creepy." Karen swiveled her helmeted head. "I want to go outside to play with his little girl. If you have any sense, you'll come with me."

Vera knew it was her duty to stay with Montalban. Those who observed and verified must be counterobserved and counterverified.

Karen, less politically theoretical, left for daylight in a hurry.

Radic's instrumented preservation tent was damp and underlit. The dead woman's chilly stone sarcophagus almost filled the taut fabric space. There was a narrow space for guests to sidle around the sarcophagus, with a distinct risk that the visitor might fall in.

Radic had once informed her, with a lip-smacking scholarly relish, that the Latin word «sarcophagus» meant "flesh-eater."

Vera had never shared Radic's keen fascination with ancient bodies. Her sensitive Acquis sensorweb had detected thousands of people buried on Mljet. Almost any human body ever interred in the island's soil had left some faint fossil trace there-a trace obvious to modern ultra-sensitive instruments.

Since Vera was not in the business of judgment calls about the historical status of corpses, she had to leave such decisions to Dr. Radic-and this body was the one discovery the historian most valued. Radic's so-called Duchess was particularly well preserved, thanks to the tight stone casing around her flesh and the arsenic paste in her coffin.

Still, no one but an archaeologist would have thought to boast about her. The «Duchess» was a deeply repulsive, even stomach-turning bundle of wet, leathery rags.

The corpse was hard to look at, but the stone coffin had always compelled Vera's interest. Somebody-some hardworking zealot from a thousand years ago-had devoted a lot of time and effort to making sure that this woman stayed well buried.

This Dark Age stonemason had taken amazing care with his hand tools. Somehow, across the gulf and abysm of time, Vera sensed a fellow spirit there.

A proper "sarcophagus," a genuine imperial Roman tomb, should have been carved from fine Italian marble. The local mason didn't have any marble, because he was from a lonely, Dark Age Balkan island. So he'd had to fake it. He'd made a stone coffin from the crumbly local white dolomite.

A proper Roman coffin required an elegant carved frieze of Roman heroes and demigods. This Dark Age mason didn't know much about proper Roman tastes. So his coffin had a lumpy, ill-proportioned tumble of what seemed to be horses, or maybe large pigs.

The outside of the faked sarcophagus looked decent, or at least publicly presentable, but the inside of it-that dark stone niche where they'd dumped the corpse in her sticky paste of arsenic-that was rough work. That was faked and hurried. That was the work of fear.

The Duchess had been hastily buried right in her dayclothes: sixteen-hundred-year-old rags that had once been linen and silk. They'd drenched her in poisonous paste and then banged down her big stone lid.

Her shriveled leather ears featured two big golden earrings: bull's heads. Her bony shoulder had a big bronze fibula safety pin that might have served her as a stiletto.

The Duchess had also been buried with three fine bronze hand mirrors. It was unclear why this dead lady in her poisoned black stone niche had needed so many mirrors. The sacred mirrors might have been the last syncretic gasp of some ecoglobal Greco-Egypto-Roman-Balkan cult of Isis. Dr. Radic never lacked for theories.

"May I?" asked Montalban. He caressed the cold stone coffin with one fingertip. "Remarkable handiwork!"

"It is derivative," sniffed Dr. Radic. "The local distortion of a decaying imperial influence."

"Yes, that's exactly what I like best about it!"

From his tone, Vera knew that this was not what he liked best about it. He was Dispensation, so what he liked best was that someone had taken a horrible mess and boxed it up with an appearance of propriety. So he was lying. Vera could not restrain herself. "Why are you so happy about this?"

Montalban aimed a cordial nod at their host. "European Synchronic philosophy is so highly advanced! I have to admit that, as a mere Angeleno boy, sometimes Synchronic theory is a bit beyond me."

"Oh, no no no, our American friend is too modest!" said Radic, beaming at the compliment. "We Europeans are too often lost in our theoretical practices! We look to California for pragmatic technical developments."

Montalban removed his fancy spex and framed them against the faint light overhead. He removed an imaginary fleck of dust with a writhing square of yellow fabric. "Her body flora," he remarked.

"Yes?" said Radic.

"Are her body flora still viable? Do you think they might grow?"

"There's no further decay within this specimen," said Radic.