The Caryatids (16 page)

There were dozens of these wise sayings of hers. To her shame, Rad-mila had forgotten most of them.

"Never forget that behind every woman you ever heard of is a man who let her down," that one was memorable. "Never forget that charm and courtesy cost a woman nothing .. ." Toddy herself had conspicuously forgotten one important thing. Rad-mila Mihajlovic was the cloned creation of a Balkan war criminal. That awful fact preyed on Radmila's mind every time that she saw her own face in a mirror, but Toddy never breathed a single word about the sub-ject. She seemed to have simply forgotten it. Toddy was a major star, and Mila Montalban was her handpicked disciple, and that was how things were.

Like all Synchronists, Toddy was rigorously bodycentric. Her philos-ophy was obsessed about the flow of time through human flesh. It fol-lowed that Toddy's cure for every kind of crisis centered on the body: exercise, sleep, nutrition, and determined primping. "Never forget to go to the gym every morning," Toddy would say, "because that's the worst thing that will happen to you all day, and that's such a comfort to know."

It was particularly important to go to the gym whenever you were be-wildered, feeble, lousy, grieving, and scared half to death. For a woman to go to the gym in such conditions was a show of steely mettle. It proved that you were serenely surpassing the limits of lesser, less committed, lit-tle people. So Radmila rose early from her lonely bed of memory foam, threw on her dancing skeins, and crept silently downstairs to confront the Fam-ily's machines.

The Family gym was walled with display screens. Machines mapped and recorded the transformations within her flesh. Her organs, skin, blood, hair. The screens showed her the six hundred and fifty different muscles in her body. They mapped two hundred and six different bones.

It wasn't very hard to shape a muscle. Fed and properly stressed, a muscle would change shape in a week. A professional actress took more interest in the slow, limestone-like re-formation of the bones. If you watched the bones closely, mapping their glacial movements day by day, you could learn to feel the bones. Toddy claimed that she could act with her bones.

Pain was the sign of ugliness leaving the body.

Radmila had slept briefly and badly, but she kept at her rigorous labors till some Family kids thundered in: Drew, Rishi, Vinod, and Li-onel, of course, who was their ringleader. Whooping, the Family teens literally bounded off the walls: kongs, cat jumps, dismounts, cartwheels, and shoulder rolls. It was thoughtless of them to stunt so much on such a dark day. Radmila aimed a grown-up scowl at them. That calmed them down.

Stupefied with exercise, she nestled into the gym's black support pod. Sleep hit her like a falling wall. Inside the pod's velvety, mind-crushing darkness, an oneiric dream stole over Radmila. She dreamed of weightlessness: a dream of LilyPad. It was John who had taken her up to LilyPad, as a privilege for her, as a sign of his trust for her.

Some quality in weightlessness had soaked into her flesh forever. The body could never forget that experience: it would come back to her on her deathbed. She dreamed of the warm silence of orbit, of the accept-ing and impassive Earth so far below them, with tainted skies, its spread-ing deserts, and its long romantic plumes of burning forests.

In the orbital sanctum of LilyPad, for the first and last time in her life, Radmila Mihajlovic had forgotten herself. She had forgotten to police her inner being within her walls of trauma, fear, and self-contempt. Be-cause she had escaped the world. There was no weight in orbit, no hate-ful burden for a caryatid to support there. Outside the boundaries of Earth, love was deep, viscous, fertile. Love was all-conquering. Radmila woke, and she knew that it had been a good dream. To have a dream so sweet and promising, at a time of such grief and confusion: It meant that she was strong. She would power her way through this im-possible time. She would do her duty, she would bear up. Today, to-morrow, yesterday—the "event heap," as Synchronists called it—the event heap would sort itself out. Radmila was hungry. The body mattered. The Montgomery-Montalbans were early risers and convinced believers in a proper break-fast.

But there was nobody around to share her meal. There was one spe-cial sunlit breakfast nook overlooking the Family's gardens, where she made a point of breakfasting with John and Mary, but John had gone away, and he'd taken the child with him. The breakfast nook, all Perspex and cellulose, was one of the prettiest spots in a beautiful building, but now it felt like a reproach to her. Whenever John was gone on his business, Radmila would eat a more formal breakfast with Toddy, but Toddy Montgomery would not be din-ing this morning. No.

So Radmila ventured downstairs to the kitchen to eat with the staff. The mansion's gleaming kitchen was weirdly deserted. The staffers were kind and good to her; they knew that the Family's stars were just the graphic front ends for the Firm's commercial interests, but the staff were big fans as well as Family employees, so it always meant a lot to them whenever Radmila dropped by.

The staffers had all left. They were all Dispensation people, so they'd swarmed out of the Bivouac to go fight the emergency.

Radmila sullenly turned on a countertop meatrix and printed out a light breakfast. She nourished herself in ominous silence. Then she went to her boudoir and costumed herself in a morning gown. It was time to go and see about Toddy. Radmila had few illusions about what she would see there, but she knew it was the right Family thing to do.

Uncle Jack was in Toddy's master bedroom. Jack was overseeing the family's robots as they methodically pried Toddy's treasures from their quake-proof sticky-wax.

It seemed that Jack hadn't slept all night. Yet Jack still had his buoy-ant smile and he was beautifully dressed: the role of a Family star was to keep up appearances.

Radmila cued a soundtrack and made her entrance. "It's so good to see you."

"You, too," said Uncle Jack.

Toddy owned a host of pretty knickknacks: fabjects, hobjects, gov-jects, all her awards, of course; her art collectibles, mementos, and her Twentieth-Century Modern-Antiques, for those had always been her particular favorites.

Uncle Jack was methodically stripping the bedroom of every trace of Toddy and her possessions. Every stick of Toddy's famous furniture was already history.

Uncle Jack was in here, rather than out warring with the ongoing urban catastrophe, for Uncle Jack was old and sentimental. Even after retiring from his own stardom, he had devoted himself to running gen-tle simulation games for children. Jack preferred to rusticate in his play worlds rather than duke it out over politics and budgets.

Kindly Uncle Jack had been the first person in the Family-Firm to de-cide that she might be okay. "Our Johnny has found himself a pretty for-eign girl," Jack had said, "an illegal alien, no prospects, no capital, bizarre education, unspeakable heritage" —and then Jack made himself her friend. Inthe sunlit, louvered spot where Toddy's big, frilly bed had once stood, a bright-eyed entity was busy inside a medical bubble. The crea-ture in that bubble was alive, but it was no longer Toddy Montgomery. The creature did not recognize Radmila. Random, empty expressions crossed its waxy face. It scratched at the black bruises on its long, skinny haunches, and it stared into a crystal ball.

"I almost thought that she knew me for a moment, when they re-booted her last night," said Jack. "But I was dreaming. I'd hoped that she might recognize you now. You were always the daughter in this Family that she loved best."

"They revived her body . . . ?"

"Yes, she's pretty much exactly as she looks. I'm really sorry." The old woman had always been particularly obsessed with her bio-sphere hobjects. Those complicated pocket worlds, so safe and protected and serenely distant from reality, always consoled her somehow. The gleaming world in Toddy's distracted grip was comforting her even now.

"She's still interacting with that hobject there," Radmila said hope-fully. "Surely that has to mean something . . . I mean, if she can still en-gage with it."

"She's become part of it," said Uncle Jack remorsefully, "and it is part of her."

"I never understood what people see in those things."

"I understand that matter quite perfectly," said Jack, "but that cer-tainly doesn't make me like this situation any better."

"So—what do we do now, Jack?"

"We have to deal with the legal snarl." Uncle Jack shrugged. "She had her Living Will and all that business, so we plucked her loose from her life support . . . And here she is. Her simpler organs and tissues, those are all juiced-up and hyperactive, but her poor tired old pumpkin up here . . . " Jack patted the fine, silky hair on his own skull. "She can't speak anymore, she can't walk . . . She tore all her clothes off, she won't stay dressed . . . I think she might be able to feed herself. Someday. She's still got her appetite. Those monkey hands and eyes keep right on going, but she's way overdrawn at the brain bank."

Radmila stared through the tender skin of the antiseptic bubble. "I guess something like this has to come to all of us, sooner or later .. ."

"She was medically dead for fifty-seven seconds," Jack said. He turned away from the pod, pulled his wand, and brusquely shot a com-mand at a robot.

Radmila had nothing to say to that. Being Hollywood stars with strong political interests, the Family-Firm had suffered many scandals, intrusions, voyeuristic interventions, vile rumors, sometimes even armed assaults . . . Yet this was the single worst, most heart-sickening calamity she had ever seen the Family suffer.

Jack spoke again. "When I was a kid your age . . . there was this curse called 'Alzheimer's disease.'

Have you ever heard of that syndrome?"

"No."

"Well, it's gone now. That syndrome was even worse than this. In some ways."

"Oh wow." Radmila drew a breath. "So, let's take some action. What can I do to help right now, this minute?"

Jack was pleased by this, for it was a very with-it, Family-Firm thing to say. "Well," he said, "you can help me make the Family's Directors see some sense about the situation . . . Her investors will truly hate this de-velopment."

"Okay. I'll do that. What's our game plan?"

Uncle Jack pointed skyward with his elegant ivory wand.

Radmila was incredulous. "We launch her into outer space?"

"Plenty of room up in LilyPad." Uncle Jack nodded. "That's the Fam-ily's attic. At least it's way, way out of Californian legal jurisdiction. That was always the best thing about outer space, if you ask me." Radmila had no counsel to offer about hiding a crazy old woman in orbit. Such events had certainly been known to happen. Jack knew about that, and she knew about that; adults didn't have to linger over the details. It was a dispensation. A way to duck the consequences of a tan-gled legal, ethical, social system that couldn't deal with catastrophe.

That was the true genius of the Dispensation. They weren't exactly revolutionaries, but they always had some brand-new way to shuffle from the bottom of the deck.

Radmila dodged a robot with a socketed tray of stray hobjects. "What will the investors make of her prognosis?"

"Stars don't die easy, but the woman did die."

"She doesn't look very dead this morning. The brain is just another organ, isn't it? There must be some kind of investment path for us there."

"Of course there's an investment path," said Uncle Jack. "We could waste an incredible amount of our Family capital trying to revive our oldest star . . . Or we could invest that same amount of money into you. Or into Lionel. Or best of all, into little Mary . . . What course of action has the best long-term return for our Family? You can do the math."

"I hate math," Radmila lied.

"We have to think in the long term. That is our core Family value. So we stick by our core values now, eh? We've got to cut and run on Toddy. She's become a sinkhole. We've got to get those knotheads to reroute her investment stream. As soon as we can."

"I would never ask the Family to do that for me."

"Well, it's time for you to ask for that. No, more than that. You're a big, grown-up girl now, Mila. It's time for you to bite off a chunk and just
tell
those sons of bitches who the star is. You have to do that for us. You're the Family's biggest star now. Nobody else will be able to ask for that, and make that stick with our investors."

"That sounds so selfish of me."

"It is not selfish. It's practical. Toddy always did practical things. Toddy did a hundred things like that, and worse things, harder things. Being beautiful, that is not a pretty business. You can see where that leads. Because: Look at her. That's your own future, girl. That is what you will be asking for. In the long term, inside there, that's you."

Inside the puckered plastic bubble, the naked creature sucked at her wizened fingers and glared madly into her fine glass toy. Radmila real-ized, fatally and finally, that she would never get another kind word from Toddy. Not another smile, not another knowing nod of approval. Grief rolled through her like thunder.

Radmila wanted to die. She'd never wanted to die in this keen way be-fore. She'd never realized that dying could be such an aspiration.

She drew a breath. "No, that is
not
me! Not my future! Never! By the time I'm her age, this world will be
transformed
! That future world will be
nothing like
this world! The brilliancy, the lightness . . . we don't even
have words
for that world."

Her outburst surprised Uncle Jack. "Mila, I never realized you were quite so Synchronistic."

"My husband insists on all that."

"Are we entirely on the same page here?" asked Jack. "By Synchronis-tic standards, I rather let the Family down . . . God knows I tried to buy into that modern highbrow stuff, but, well, my heart was never in it."

Jack's embarrassment was painful. "Well," she said haltingly, "I do know, for sure, that Toddy would want me to remain a star . . . So I'll do that. For her. She gave us all that, because she had so much to give to her audience . . . She brought so much grace and elegance and beauty into people's lives . . . Toddy Montgomery never forgot her public! Toddy always wanted to give them beautiful dreams." Jack's nose wrinkled a bit. "That's how you remember her?"