Vera jerked her hand back with a feeling of shame. She was suddenly ashamed of her crude local Acquis sensorweb, with its corny visual tags, its blurs of golden glory, its sadly primitive icons. She'd thought that she understood mediation, but now she knew she was just a hick, a regional peasant. Because this California augment was years ahead of anything she'd ever used or built. It was otherworldly.

"I can't believe my eyes! This is so swift and brilliant! People would queue up to see this, they would make long lines to see!"

"Yes, that would be the basic business plan," Montalban told her. "Mediation is a key enabler for tomorrow's heritage economy."

"What?"

"'The replacement of national sovereignty and class consciousness by technically sophisticated yet ethically savage private cartels which dissolve social protections and the rule of law while encouraging the ruthless black-marketization of higher technologies… That's what a famous Acquis critic once said about this technology. Augmentation is a little dodgy. I agree it's not for amateurs."

Vera couldn't understand this long rote-quote of his-Montalban was a Dispensation gentleman. It was as if he were quoting classical Latin at her. His chatter didn't seem to matter much. Not when confronted with this. "Did you say this is 'dodgy'? Mr. Montalban-this isn't even supposed to be possible."

"I'm pleased that you appreciate our modest efforts," said Montalban, with just the lightest hint of imperial sarcasm. "Would you care to step outside this tent, and have a look around?"

Vera lurched at once for the flapping tent door.

She stood outside. The excavated soil of old Ivanje Polje had suddenly become a Slavic Dark Age village. The spex augment showed her writhing plum trees, clumsy vineyards, muddy pigpens, a big stone-fenced villa. The stone longhouse was half surrounded by squalid peasant huts, homemade from mingled mud and twigs. It looked insanely real, like drowning in a glossy cartoon.

The sky above medieval Mljet was truly astounding, staggering: a heartaching vista of pure fluffy clouds. That medieval sky was scarily blue and clean. Vera had never stood beneath such a sky in her whole life. Because this sky was not her own deadly Greenhouse sky, the sky of a world in the grip of a global catastrophe. This historical sky had never known one single smokestack. It was the natural sky of the long-vanished natural Earth.

Vera took one reeling, awestruck step and tripped over her own feet. Somehow, Montalban was there for her. He caught her arm.

"Are there people here?" she shouted at him. "Where are all the people?"

"We didn't yet write any avatars for this Dark Age augment," Montalban told her, his calm voice close to her ear. "Our Dark Age plug-in is still in alpha."

Vera plucked the clinging spex from her face. Karen appeared in the flowering field, with Mary Montalban. Karen had both her bony arms out, and she was laughing. The child was cheerfully climbing her exposed ribs.

"Watch me throw her high in the air!" Karen crowed.

"Oh my God," moaned Montalban, "please don't do that."

VERA FORCED HERSELF to pick at Dr. Radic's elaborate lunch, for the old man had outdone himself in honor of his guests. This done, they hiked on foot to the ruins of Polace, over a narrow trail that Radic's people had taken some pains to clear. Montalban carried his daughter on his shoulders. Karen was in a buoyant mood, bounding along comically and making the child crow with glee.

When they descended from the island's rugged backbone to the northern shore, it was clear why Montalban had been so eager to visit these ruins.

The augment for Polace simulated ancient Roman Palatium. Palatium, an imperial Roman beach resort in the year zero.

The island's beaches had changed a great deal in the passage of twenty-one centuries. This meant a design conflict between strict geolocative accuracy and an augment that everyday viewers might willingly pay to see. That controversy hadn't yet been settled, so much of imperial Roman Palatium appeared to be hovering, uneasily, over the rising Greenhouse waters of the bay.

Ancient Palatium was not ancient yet. Palatium was raw and new, a Roman frontier town. The island village featured sturdy wooden docks, and two wooden Roman galleys with their wooden oars up, and some very authentic-looking sacks of grain. It had one donkey-driven mill, and many careless heaps of scattered amphoras.

The village featured a host of makeshift wooden fishing shacks, and one small but showily elegant upscale limestone palace. Palatium also featured a public bath, a wine bar, a temple, and a brothel.

To Vera's consternation, Roman Palatium had some avatars installed. These ghosts strolled their simulated Roman town, moving in the semi-random, irrational, traumatized way that ghosts roamed the Earth. The imperial Roman avatars were rather sketchily realized: tidy cartoons with olive skin and bowl-like haircuts.

One particularly horrible ghost, some kind of Roman butcher in a stained apron, seemed to have some dim machine awareness of Vera's presence as a viewer within the scene. This ghost kept crowding up in the corners of her spex, with a tourist-friendly look, inviting user interactions that the system did not yet afford.

Vera handed the spex back to Montalban. She was powerfully shaken. "You've turned this dead town into some kind of…dead movie game."

"That's not the way I myself would have phrased it," said Montalban, smiling. "I'd say that we're browsing the historical event heap in search of future opportunities." He stooped suddenly. The tide was out, and he'd alertly spotted a coinlike disk by the toe of his beach sandal. He plucked it up, had a closer look, and tossed it into the bay.

"The Palatium project," he told her, "is a coproduction of the University of Southern California's Advanced Culture Lab and Dr. Radic's scholars in Zagreb. They've done pretty well with this demo, given their limited time and resources. Frankly, those USC kids really worked their hearts out for us." Montalban slid the spex into a velvet-lined case. "If this demo catches on with our stakeholders, we'll be catering to a top-end tourist demographic here."

"But you made it…and it's just a fantasy. It's not real."

Montalban rolled his eyes. "Oh, come now-you built that sensorweb that saturates this whole island! Radic gave me a good look at that construction. That's brutal software. I sure wouldn't call it viewer-friendly."

"The sensorweb saved the life of this island! You're pasting fantasies onto the island."

"We could waste our time discussing 'reality'…Or, we could talk real business!" Montalban sat on the sun-warmed, sloping edge of a broken piece of Polace's tarmac. He scattered salty dust with a handkerchief and offered her a spot. "Vera, I'm here from Hollywood! I'm here to help you!"

Vera sat. She knew from the look on his face that he planned to exploit her now. This was the crux: they had reached the crisis. "So, John, you want to help us? Tell me how you feel about that."

"I need to make the dynamic of this situation clear to you."

Vera posed herself attentively. It felt nice to watch his face, even as he lied to her. He really was remarkably good-looking.

"I have come to this island because, at this moment in the event stream, there's a confluence of interests." Montalban pulled a shiny wad of film from his pocket. He fluffed the film open and set it down before them. It flashed into life before their feet.

A pattern appeared in it: something like a plate of spaghetti.

"What's this?"

"That's a correlation engine running a social-network analysis. Using this has become part of due diligence whenever we're trying to wire together a merger-and-acquisition deal. When a map of the stakeholders is assembled-very commonly-some player pops from the background and turns out to be the sustaining element…" Montalban leaned down, stretched out a finger, and tapped one of the central meat-balls within the spaghetti. "That would be you. Vera Mihajlovic. You are right here."