The Caryatids (17 page)

"I know I'm talking silly star-hype . . . but I can remember how she made me
work.
Discipline, personal transformation, and thorough re-hearsals. Toddy made me what I am. I've lost so much . . . " Radmila waved vaguely at the peach-colored bedroom walls. "She built all of this, and all I can do is to try to hold it up."

"That won't be easy," Jack told her, "but she handpicked you. Every-body knows you've been groomed for that role. You're in a strong posi-tion, if you can stand the pressure."

"Jack, I can stand it. I can stand anything. Worse things have hap-pened to me than this. You will help me, won't you?"

"You always called her 'Toddy,' " Jack said." 'Theodora Montgomery.' Well, I remember another woman — Lila Jane Dickey from Hawkinsville, Georgia. That's who I remember when I see that thing in the bubble. You meet a creature like Lila Jane maybe once in a generation." Jack chased a busy robot from the windowglass, which was already spotless. "You ever heard of a thing called 'AIDS'? AIDS was another plague."

"Of course I've heard of that one, Jack."

"Well, Toddy, or rather Lila Jane—she showed up in this town right after we first cured that illness. Curing AIDS was awesome. It was like somebody hit Hollywood with a promiscuity bomb. You could literally see the dust blow right off the sexual revolution."

Uncle Jack liked to talk in an old-fashioned way. There was some-thing deeply touching and endearing about him. That nostalgic glow in Jack's fine old face was illuminating her dark mood. The future might be painful, even chaotic, but no one could rob the Montgomery--Montalbans of their heritage.

"Toddy was the bomb," said Uncle Jack. "Any star might choose to sleep with some big director, but Toddy liked to sleep with the
techni-cians.
The ugly, geeky, meta-media guys! Yeah, she cut through those nerds like the scythe of doom! She even
married
one of them—she mar-ried Montalban." Jack tugged at his tasteful cuff links. "I told her, way back then: 'Lila, he's a nouveau riche Spanish-language digital media mogul! And we're proper Hollywood stars, so he's just not our kind of people!' But I was dead wrong, and Toddy knew better. It took a visionary to carry off her strategies. Toddy was so totally clued-in. The Next Web was sure to take over the world. The Next Web had everything, because the Next Web
was
everything! All it needed was some oomph! It needed some big sexy va-va-va-voom! And Toddy had that stuff by the megaton! All people could do was stare." Jack stared into Toddy's medical bubble. "Not that I like to stare at her just now . . . but yeah, the people stared, all right. Even the
ma-chines
stared. Forget TV, movies—the old entertainment vehicles. Toddy could scratch her ass on any public beach and pull down ten mil-lion web-hits from homemade spy videos. She walked through her life in a universal cloud of voyeurs." Radmila blinked. "Toddy never told me much about those aspects of her profession."

"Oh, come on, come on! Your generation never thinks like that at all! That's all over for you. You young folks are an entirely different breed of star. You crazy superhuman kids, you don't even have four-letter words for sex! Birth rates, children: That's what you people fuss about. You. think that sex is all engineering."

"Gender roles
are
engineering," said Radmila.

"Fine, sure, go ahead, be that way . . . Well . . . the Toddy you knew was a wise old woman. The girl I knew was young: a hungry, very deter-mined pop idol with a body like a force of nature. And even though I'm as gay as a box of birds, I sure had the better deal out of that one."

??????????

RADMILA DID A COSTUME CHANGE
,
snapping herself into her formal Dispensation uniform. To dress in this way: so simple, stern, and functionally ergonomic—it always helped her morale. She was proud of her medals and the hotlinks racing down her lapels: they were the visible evidence of endless fund-raisers, hospital visits, ribbon cut-tings, awards ceremonies. "Community leadership." The Family's Situation Room was a legacy from old Sergio Montal-ban. It was the master geek's addition to the Bivouac, part of his dogged campaign to stabilize the family finances. When Sergio had been Fam-ily chairman, the Situation Room had been his dashboard for the Fam-ily's fortunes. The Family's fortunes had prospered mightily, but the pioneer's hard-ware had been badly dated. Today the Family's investments were so in-terwoven with the urban fabric of Los Angeles that maps made more sense than spreadsheets.

So the Family used the plush, hushed Situation Room as an infor-mal romper space. They watched old movies in there. Most modern Angelenos couldn't watch movies — because they couldn't sit still and quiet for two solid hours without taking prompts from the net. But the Montgomery-Montalbans were a disciplined, highly traditional folk.

The Family-Firm didn't exactly "watch" the old movies—not in the traditional sense—but they would crowd together bodily in the Situa-tion Room, slouch on beanbags, cook and eat heaps of popcorn, and crack silly jokes while movies spooled on the walls. The Situation Room had been the scene of Radmila's happiest hours, when she was pregnant and gulping chocolate ice cream. John had been proud of her then, truly happy about her, and Family members always went out of their way to be kind to a pregnant girl. It was the first time in her life that Rad-mila had been part of a human family: accepted, relied upon, taken for granted, just plain there.

Radmila even rather liked to watch the old movies. Especially the very, very old silent movies, which seemed less bizarre and abrasive than the other kinds.

The Situation Room was crowded this morning, but the Family-Firm's games today were grim. The Directors had brusquely abandoned Sergio's screens. A modern autofocus projector painted the wall with a geolocative map.

This disaster map was busily agglomerating the damage reports from the net, which were flooding in by their millions. The map filtered this torrent of noise, so as to produce some actionable intelligence. Southern California was measled all over with color-coded dots: scar-let, tangerine, golden, cerulean, and forest green. The map refreshed once each second, and as it did, all the colored dots denoting their small threats and ongoing horrors would do a little popcorn jump.

Politely, Radmila did a star entrance into the Situation Room. They could tell by her gloomy choice of soundtrack that her news was bad.

Glyn was manning the interactive table near the wall. Glyn had the most experience with the Family's big crisis map, so she was required to drive it. Glyn peered up from her hectic labor. "Mila, how is Toddy?" Radmila killed her soundtrack and silently shook her head. The Fam-ily knew the truth instantly. They'd all feared the worst, but they'd dared to entertain some hope.

Radmila conjured up a chair and had it carry her to Glyn. Glyn groped at her touchscreen, jacked her target cursor around, and stared at the busy projected dots, but Glyn was taking this news harder than anyone. Glyn was twitching all over and on the verge of tears.

Toddy's heirs sat before the disaster map in their ragged, worried half circle, glumly clutching their control wands. Guillermo, Freddy, and Sofia Montalban were the Firm's driving forces these days. Buffy and Raph Montgomery had shown up to make a Family quorum.

Doug and Lily were Buffy's children, while Rishi and Elsie were Raph's. The Family grandchildren clustered in the back of the Situation Room. They were the younger folk, so it was their business to run out into the field and do sit-reps.

Radmila slid her fingers over Glyn's pale knuckles. "Let me drive this, Glyn."

"I can do it," Glyn said tautly.

"Glyn, take off. Some breakfast would do you good."

Nobody else seemed to realize this, but Glyn was coming out of her skin. Glyn was always the quiet, self-sacrificing one in the Family-Firm: the one who was always there for everybody else. Glyn was the normal one, the quiet one. Glyn was no star. She wasn't a Synchronist. Glyn took no interest in Dispensation politics. Glyn never made any big, starry public appearances. Glyn had the lowest public profile in the Family.

Because Glyn was Toddy's clone.

Glyn had been the biggest public scandal that the Family-Firm had ever suffered. Even the tragic assassination of their governor had caused them less turmoil. It had been an epic Hollywood calamity when the public learned that one of Toddy's wealthy geek lovers had cloned Toddy. The legal and political fight to get custody of that little girl-—away from her so-called parents—had brought the Family years of heartache.

But Hollywood scandals faded, since there were always some hotter, fresher scandals. Thirty years had passed, and now Glyn was a sturdy fix-ture of the Family, just as loyal and just as welcome as any other adopted child.

But that was not how Glyn herself had felt about that situation. Glyn had never been at peace about that issue; no, not for one single day.

Glyn half collapsed in her command chair. Radmila had never seen such a strange, desolate, bewildered look. At least, she'd never seen that look on Glyn's face. She'd certainly seen that look on her own. What was this strange, hot feeling that welled up within her? It felt like love, but it was so dense and heavy and there was so much pain in it. That powerful feeling overwhelming her now: It was pity. She felt so much pity for poor Glyn.

The Directors went about the Family's dire business, highlighting the stricken map with their wands and murmuring together. It struck Rad-mila, with a revelatory force, that Glyn had never been the clone of Theodora Montgomery. No, never. Glyn had always been the clone of a stranger: Lila Jane Dickey. That was a sudden, boiling insight into her best friend's basic charac-ter. Suddenly, Radmila held the golden key to Glyn's role in the world. As an actress, she had captured Glyn's character; she held Glyn right in the palm of her hand. Radmila felt a little stunned.

"Glyn," she said tenderly, "I know that you'll be all right." Glyn's lips trembled. Glyn was anxious that no one else in the Family should know this, but Glyn was secretly overjoyed by the loss of Toddy. Glyn was grieving, her eyes were wet with hot tears, but the destruction of Toddy Montgomery was the happiest day of her whole life.

How many people in the world were like this? Radmila wondered. How many people had to conceal the shame and horror of their secret lives?

All of them, maybe. Everybody in the stricken world.

Glyn was muttering aloud. "I think, maybe . . . yes, maybe I'll go lie down a little."

"Eat, Glyn," Radmila told her. "Sleep is good hygiene, too."

"You can run this map now. You can do all this for us."

"Sure I can, Glyn. You can depend on me."

Glyn pulled herself slouching from her chair and trudged from the Situation Room. Glyn never made any poised entrances and exits, like a star would do. The Family had tried to make Glyn a star, they had sunk some money into improving her, but the treatments had just never taken on Glyn. Nobody knew why. Radmila settled herself into running the disaster map. The Directors were cautiously projecting little chips of the Family's resources into the ongoing swirl of relief. They did this interface work with long pointer wands. They looked soberly elegant yet slightly awkward, like socialites with badminton rackets. Rishi chose to walk in front of the map, covering his suit with pro-jected cityware. The map swiftly re-formed itself behind his body. Rishi was a younger member of the Family, so he lacked a Director's wand. In-stead, he held a fat black plastic brick in his hand, a gooey interface all dented with his fingers.

"What are the stakeholder specs on Grandma's celebrity endorsements?"

"They've still got her immersive-world endorsements," Guillermo said. "Those endorsements don't need any real Toddy."

"Her investors say they need a guideline concept right away," Rishi insisted.

"We tell them that my mother is 'stable,' " said Freddy.

"Meaning?"

"Our guideline concept is 'stable,'" said Freddy stoutly. "'We are closely tracking developments as Toddy's condition evolves. Her bench-marks now are consistent with her benchmarks yesterday.' "

"That'll work." Guillermo nodded. "Go feed' em that, Rishi." Rishi stepped out of the projection, and clamped the gooey brick to his ear.

"Look at all that damage around the Showroom!" Freddy com-plained. "Why did we build that palace right on a fault line?"

"Because the land was cheap there," said Guillermo. "Zoom that zone, Glyn. I mean, Mila." Radmila obediently zoomed.

"See, look there! Everything that
we
built there came through the quake like aces. That is so beautiful!

Rishi, I want you to get through to that architect's people — Frank Osbourne. We need to congratulate him! As a Family courtesy."

"I'll do that," said Rishi.

"Let's check housing values," said Freddy.

Radmila stroked the touchscreen and peeled an onion of interpreta-tive overlays. Real-estate values were the X-ray of the Angeleno soul. The real-estate map was already spattered with high-volume blobs of rapidly moving money.

As might be expected, a strong postquake surge of investment was already hitting the blue-ribbon districts of Watts, Crenshaw, La Mirada, Lakewood, and Paramount. And Norwalk, of course, that fortress of glamour and privilege where the Bivouac stood firm: there were some scattered blue and yellow trouble-dots in Norwalk, but nothing dreadful.

It was the poorer, dodgier neighborhoods that were always stricken hard in times of crisis: grim, crime-ridden Beverly Hills, the fire-tormented canyons of Mulholland, the stricken shores of Malibu . . . There the dots clustered into complicated, hopeless wads of bleak pastels. The slums along the tortured Pacific shoreline were the worst parts of the city. Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Santa Monica . . . Racked by the rising seas, these had been the first real-estate zones to become unin-surable. Money was stuck there, nailed there. You could almost smell the money burning. The cooling Pacific had retreated slightly during the past ten years of the climate crisis, but that good news, paradoxically, made real-estate matters much worse. The uninsured had been feuding over their shore-line slums for decades, in tooth-gritting, desperate, crusading, save-my-backyard urban politics. The prospect that salt water might leave their basements made them crazy.