The Caryatids (21 page)

Radmila smiled and wiped her eyes. "Well, thank God for that, at least."

"Mila, you are really close to achieving a huge, lasting, major, public success. Just wise up a little. You are the perfect person to revive this Fam-ily and lead it into futurity. You are a lovable person. Toddy loved you. John loves you. Jack loves you. I love you very much. The other Family people, they all respect you, they've decided you're all right for us. But that kid of yours:
Everybody
loves little Mary.
Everybody.
She is adorable and she is destined to be huge. This is your golden chance to turn your-self into the source of unity in our sad, strange little clan. If you turn down that chance because you'd rather be so hurt and proud and emo-tionally remote from us, you will never get another. Because you won't deserve it. So do you hold it up, or do you kick it down? That is your choice."

"Okay," said Radmila, "I just heard your big, passionate set-speech. That one was pretty good. You obviously rehearsed that thoroughly, so it was great. So: I choose to hold it up." Glyn brightened. "Really?"

"Yeah. You have just talked me into it, Glyn. Because you talked me into it with my own advice. I can't be such a hypocrite as to deny what I said to my own Family. Yes. You are right about putting the past behind us. We absolutely have to do that, we
both
have to do it. We must. We will get over ourselves, we will turn our faces straight to whatever comes next. I love your big bold plan. Your plan makes perfect sense to me. I will make up with my estranged husband. Fine. I will step into the ruby slippers of the dead superstar. Great. Somebody has to do all that: of course I'll do it." Radmila leaned in. "And you, Glyn Montgomery: You think you're pretty smart, but you'd better work like you've never worked before. Be-cause the Firm's gotten fat and lazy. We need skill and discipline. You think you know what pain and trouble is all about? You are the fair-haired child of fortune, girl! You don't know half of what it means to suf-fer in this world. Well, I do know that: and you
will
know it. So
you
just get-ready."

Glyn stared at her in astonishment. Glyn was genuinely frightened. But Glyn was frightened in a new and different and much more con-structive way.

This was going to work. This had to work. Radmila would make it work.

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RADMILA'S FAMILY COUP D'ETATwent according to Glyn's careful plan. If the new Montgomery-Montalban system was not yet a regime, it was at least a provisional government. It was a huge emotional relief to the Family-Firm that someone-anyone-had stepped into the aching gap left by Toddy Montgomery.

So that first bold act would carry Radmila a little ways, but to cement her position, she would need a Dispensation-style juggernaut of rapid and effective action.

So: a major household remodeling project. The Bivouac was well overdue for a remake and remodel, and it was one arena where Radmila would not be challenged.

Toddy Montgomery had placed the gymnasium in the basement of the mansion, for a lady did not show her public that she had to sweat. Obviously, in the modern Los Angeles star system, where stars were physically dominant, swaggering street presences, the gym had to be-come the lady's power base. So: Radmila moved the gymnasium into the former Situation Room. Radmila hired—not Frank Osbourne, he was too much the seasoned es-tablishment starchitect — but one of Osbourne's best disciples, a younger woman freshly gone into her own practice. This young archi-tect was ambitious, modish, and contemporary, and she badly needed a leg-up.

Grateful for her big break, the new decorator didn't dawdle. Rad-mila's new gym was transformed. It was no longer a dusty place of clank-ing iron and steroidal machismo. No, it was the "Transformation Spa," a gleaming balletic wonderland of Zen river pebbles embedded in clear Perspex, reactive areogel yoga mats, sunlight-friendly, semitranslucent, ultra-high-strength oxide ceramic roof panels, with a one-way treatment that repelled passing spyplanes . . .

Furthermore—lest the Family-Firm feel neglected—the newly emp-tied basement was swiftly transmuted into the new Situation Room, or rather, the Montgomery-Montalban Situation Bunker. If California was facing a looming supervolcano, then the revived and vigorous Family-Firm would not wring their hands about that challenge. Their new Situation Bunker was entirely mounted on tremor-proof springs, and fully sealable against volcanic, seismic, atomic, biological, and chemical mishaps. The Situation Bunker was soberly traditional in its design philosophy-—American Superpower traditional. It was a bunker fit for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Planning for D-Day: pragmatic, sleek, no-nonsense, efficient, incorruptible, and continental in scale. Very Bell System, very Westing-house, very General Motors.

There was some mild grumbling about Radmila's ambitious reforms, but Glyn held up her end, Uncle Jack was with her all the way, Lionel was infallibly enthusiastic, and there were no Family arguments at all about the new nursery.

Furthermore, no one could deny that a young matriarch was much more fun than an elderly matriarch. For all Toddy's wisdom and street smarts, Toddy's last years had had a Hapsburg Empire feeling, an over-wrought, enfeebled system tottering toward its grave on a baroquely gilt walker. With Radmila in charge, the Family-Firm had a spring in its step again. There was a clear dynamic visible. There was forward motion.

Since the house was not finished, the Family could not die.

Radmila moved more of the star budget into the coming generation: Lionel and Mary. Let it not be said of her that she was personally hog-ging the limelight and eating the Family's seed corn. No: she aspired to be steady, dutiful, fully professional, an engine of production.

Radmila still went to her gym, but not with the fanatical intensity of a front-line diva. A woman planning for motherhood needed some body fat. Even if Radrnila didn't bear the biblical horde of kids that Glyn de-manded, there would have to be one. One or two. Three. There would have to be children, no matter how one felt about one's husband: any Queen of England knew that. That was a dynast's reality. Early October arrived. Soon John would return from his meander-ings in the Adriatic. The Family-Firm would be watching that reunion with care; it was a crucial performance for Radmila. She was deter-mined to ace it.

Radmila performed her gym routine—"the worst thing that would happen all day"—and retired into her new oneiric pod for beauty sleep. This brand-new gym pod—oblate, speckled, seamed, it looked like a giant hemp seed—was said to feature all kinds of exotic benefits to neu-ral well-being. It was like a Zen spa with a hinge.

As far as Radmila could tell, there was little more to this pricey dream machine than Californian hype. The pleasant flashing lights, the dron-ing swoony ambient noises, and the so-called aroma "therapy" had done nothing much for her: or to her. Still, given that she was one of the product's sponsors and it was quite a handsome little earner, she saw no harm in using it.

Radmila climbed into the pod and clicked it shut. This time, as she fell into a pleasant doze, something about the pod's routine touched her brain—not with the harshness of an Acquis neural intrusion, but in a civilized, consumer-friendly fashion.

Radmila tumbled into a lucid, prophetic dream.

She dreamed that John had come home. John was not the gloomy, burdened, and apologetic philanderer whose company she dreaded. No, he was the younger John, the daring swain who had discovered her. In Los Angeles, Radmila had tried so hard to be a skulking stateless nameless thing, and yet John had located her, and John knew who she was and where she came from. He even cared about her and what hap-pened to her.

She had little more to offer this prince than sweet surrender, but this seemed to be what the prince most desired from a woman in his life. Her abject emotional and sexual dependence on him steadied his self-image. He was no longer a rich young parlor radical with some rather sinister interests in emergent technologies. John Montgomery Montal-ban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to him-self that he had the power to transform himself and others.

Here he was back again, smiling and full of good cheer, the young John, the tech magician, and he had brought her mysterious gifts, as he always liked so much to do: two of his black hobby-objects. One hob-ject was a fizzing black shoe box, and the other one was even more mysterious, high-technical, and powerful, and it was . . . in stern dream logic . . . another fizzing black shoe box . . .

"Eureka!" cried the young John in his ecstasy: charismatic and sexy. "I have saved the world!" What could it be? John was so busy with his colored wires and tubes . . . Never a moment for her, not a smile, not a kiss or hug . . . The first black shoe box was nothing much, the even more sinister shoe box was nothing much either, but to
connect
the two shoe boxes . . . Of course! Networking! A network would change everything!

Now the brilliant John, with all the passionate conviction that had first won her heart, was declaiming something solemn and arcane and yet fantastically convincing about his amazing black boxes . . . The first was sonoluminescent cold fusion, a host of screaming tiny bubbles hot-ter than the surface of the sun . . . Banging on the shoe box, yes, John cried, sonoluminescence, a true miracle technology that had never quite worked yet.

The second fizzing black box was chemosynthetic black bubbling slime straight from the Freudian bottom of the ocean . . . It was a true biological miracle, it made life from darkness and nothing, it could live on pure volcano goo . . . John was pulling the black volcano goo out of his black box as he ranted about it to no one in particular, it was stink-ing of primeval sulfur, it was oily, drippy, satanic, it was all over his hands, it was running down his perfect sleeves like black blood . . . Bubbling wildly as it dribbled, spewing oxygen in fizzing sheets, it was the stuff of breath and life, this stinky chemo goo bubbling merrily like California champagne . . .

The radiation from the fusion bubbles was
wildly stimulating
the black slime bubbles, somehow it was exactly what the germs needed to do their magic. The radiation was a tonic to the magic germs, it made their metabolism a hundred times more efficient, no, a thousand times, a million times. . . Her husband's black boxes were slurping poison out of the air, just vacuuming carbon dioxide, fizzing like reverse geysers now, all yeasty and industrial . . .

She wanted to laugh wildly in her dread and ecstasy, for the two black bubbling boxes were sucking centuries of industrial poison out of the sky, just gobbling pollution and turning it back into coal and crude oil, literally
tearing the filth right out of the firmament!
The unhealthy sky under which she had passed her whole life was peeling back before her dreaming eyes like a wrinkled skin on badly scalded milk . . . and be-hind that skein of horror and decline and utter hopelessness, the revi-talized sky was blue, blue, bluer-than-bluebird blue . . .

Radmila's eyes shocked open. She tore herself from the gentle grip of the hallucination. She pried herself from the oneiric pod . . . She lay breathing shallowly on the color-coded elastic floor of the new gym . . . Her head was reeling. What on Earth had that machine done to her? It had torn something loose within her, something dark and ugly and yet integral to her being . . .It had oiled and loosened up some an-cient trauma within her . . .It had popped off of her like a rust flake.

She had lost something dark and complicated deep within herself. She was a different person now. Freer, much easier at heart. She felt footloose. Mellowed. Agile and even giggly. Full of honest joy. She stared at a fluffy morning cloud through the tinted panels of the roof. "Oh my God," she told the cloud, "I've finally become a Cali-fornian."

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RADMILA AND TODDY HAD ALWAYSATTENDEDthe same hairdressing lab. This salon lab was an intensely private place, likely the best such lab in the world. Staffed by committed cosmeceutical profes-sionals, it was chilly, hushed, and cheerless. That state-of-the-art estab-lishment was much frequented by the political elite. Generally Toddy and Radmila went there together, arriving in a Family limo with darkly tinted windows, then departing under deep cover.

Sometimes there were clouds of hobject spyplanes whizzing over the place, all run by paparazzi idiots with websites. These toys never got anywhere and never saw a thing, for the hairdressing lab was the single most secure locale that Radmila knew.

Radmila had spent a great deal of the Family's money at the hair de-signers' —for the Family partly owned the lab. This fact didn't make the local hair designers treat Radmila any better. On the contrary. Presented with a fresh surge of Family capital, they had simply and brusquely ripped out all of her hair. The new implants, their roots soaked in fresh stem cells, were state-of-the-art: radiant blond filaments that were genuine human hair, but with a much-enhanced ability to be-have. Radmila's damaged scalp was soaked with hot, wet, antiseptic foam. Her head was locked by a stainless fume hood where robot surgical arms whirred on tracks, took unerring aim, and deftly pierced her scalp. Im-planting fresh hair took forever, like being tattooed. And, of course, it hurt a great deal. Any session at the hair lab was always boring and painful. Today it was extravagantly painful, but it was no longer boring.

Because her brother Djordje had demanded an audience with her. And, so as to show Glyn that she had fully renounced all her troubles-—she had agreed to meet Djordje in person. With a final vindictive burst of needling at the nape of her neck, the hairdressing robot finished stitching her scalp. A somber, white-suited technician arrived, removed the metal hood, rinsed her deftly, and wrapped her head in a hot medicated turban.

The fresh implants twitched in her violated scalp, itching like lice.

Few women in modern Los Angeles knew what lice were like, but Radmila was one of them. Toddy Montgomery had known what lice were like, too. Lila Jane Dickey—the larval, teenage form of Toddy Montgomery—she had known about lice, and she had known much worse things.