The caryatids, p.12
The Caryatids, page 12
Freeway lights flashed rhythmically on Lionel’s eager young face. Lionel was a Family star. He had a strong and growing pull in the male fifteen-to-twenty-two demographic.
Lionel still wore his black Kabuki stage gear, which had certainly come into its own in this dire situation. Lionel’s knightly security gear was scorch-proof, rip-proof, well-nigh bulletproof, and full of handy pockets. Best of all, it was entirely independent of the net and it carried all its own software processing. Radmila felt safe with him.
Lionel generally dressed like a kick-ass, paramilitary LA street kid, but he was the kind of superbly eye-catching street kid that only a very rich kid could possibly be. Lionel was a child of advantage: he did hormonal bloodwork, ate a strict nutraceutical diet, trained in gymnastics, and had three martial-arts coaches.
Radmila suffered in the high-tech Family gym, but Lionel lived in that gym. Lionel could walk on his hands better than most teens could walk on their own feet.
Radmila handed him a tissue from the glove compartment. Lionel took the hint, and wiped his grandmother’s stage makeup from his lips.
Lionel had puffed air into the old woman’s dead lungs. He’d pounded her heart into action with his fists. Lionel was core Dispensation: he knew first aid.
“You did really good tonight, Lionel. You have saved your grandmother’s life.”
Lionel held his chin high. “You have to use your head when you’re working security.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“I made the right choice,” he said artlessly. “See, that dead costume killed Grandma, right? It smothered her. I wanted to pull my knife and slice it off of her. But I didn’t. I waited for her power to reboot.”
“That was smart. You were thinking like a grown-up. Your brother will be proud.”
“The system crashed—but only for a little while,” Lionel said. “As soon as her underwear came back on, that got her breathing. We can’t panic and wreck the system. Because we are the system.” He nodded, pleased with his insight. “It takes three trained staffers to tuck her into that costume. So I’m sure glad I didn’t improvise.”
“When we get back home safe, I’ll improvise you a nice roast-beef sandwich.”
“Are you sure that I did the right thing tonight, Mila? I mean … Grandma was dead.”
“You did just fine, Lionel. You’re a wizard, you’re a true star.” Radmila propped her flip-flopped feet on the greenly blinking dashboard. “I sure wish John was home tonight. John would mix me a drink. Nobody mixes a nice Greenhouse Tequila like he can.”
Lionel pulled something large and ugly from a Velcro slot on his chest.
“So what’s that thing?” Radmila said.
“Hey, this is my cool street blade, sister!”
“Let me see it?”
He handed it over, hilt-first.
The knife’s awkward handle was wrapped in length after length of multicolored electrical wire. Lionel’s homemade knife was made entirely from junked computer parts. A dozen big silicon chips—all black and heat-discolored—had been set into a melted plastic handle. Those chips were like a jagged row of shark’s teeth.
“This stage prop sure is weird,” Radmila said. “It smells awful! Why does it stink so much?”
“Yeah, that’s the blood they put on it!” said Lionel. “When you make a prison shiv, you get, like, every guy in your prison gang to drip some blood on your blade! That screws up the DNA evidence.”
“California doesn’t have any ‘prison gangs.’ California doesn’t even have prisons.”
“Yeah, so this is, like, a modern electronic-parole prison shiv!”
Radmila held the makeshift weapon with one thumb and two fingers. It was more than merely strange and awkward: it looked insane.
The more she looked at this desperate, far-fetched contrivance, the worse it made her feel. It was not a stage prop at all. Some stranger somewhere had put a fanatical, psychopathic effort into making this strange parody of a knife. Its very crudeness was scary. It radiated a determined, lethal, sacramental feeling. Evil was pouring off of it, like the peppery dust from a shattered mass of concrete.
Radmila looked into the guileless young eyes of her brother-in-law. “Can I keep this knife for you?”
“Keep it? What, keep it where? Are you gonna tuck it into your bra?”
She wasn’t wearing a bra. “Well, you shouldn’t carry a thing like this.”
“You can keep my knife if you want it,” Lionel said, putting a brave face on his wounded feelings. “You’re the one who gave that to me.”
“I never gave you this thing. This thing is not my style.”
Now Lionel was was upset. “But you did! You came onto my action set and gave that to me. It was all wrapped up in pink butcher paper.”
“Where would I get a prop like this? I haven’t done an action role in ages! I hate violent action roles. I do ingenue roles and supportive-girlfriend.”
“Okay,” Lionel said, blinking, “Fine, I get it. That’s all right.” He tucked the knife back into the slash in his suit. “See! It’s all gone! End of story, roll credits.”
His face had paled with her unmeant insult. There was some profound misunderstanding going on here.
Radmila knew that it had to be her own fault somehow. Because it was always her own fault. In nine years of knowing them, in becoming one of them: Every time she’d ever put a foot wrong with the Montgomery-Montalbans, it had been her own fault.
She was always outthinking and outfeeling the Family-Firm. She was always failing to grasp how simple and clear they were.
The Montgomery-Montalbans were California aristocrats. They were rich and powerful and secretive and very civilized. Being aristocrats, they were naturally slightly stupid, and in their utter devotion to their Family values, there was something sunny, airheaded, starry-eyed, and cosmically lucid about them.
That was their charm. They had a lot of charm. Charm was their stock-in-trade.
It was unthinkable that sweet Lionel, who doted on her, would ever lie to her. So, maybe she really had brought him the ugly knife. That was remotely possible. She often carried packages for Lionel whenever he was on his sets. Just as she would faithfully bring snacks and toys to her own daughter, whenever Mary was on. To show up with a gesture of support, to be there physically, breathing the same air, eating lunch on set—that was a steadying, reassuring Family thing. Family stars did that for each other all the time. Just to show that—no matter how weird things might get in Los Angeles—you had someone who understood and cared about you.
Mary. Mary. Mary Montalban. Her baby was so far away from her now. The baby’s father, too. John was so much like his brother Lionel. Except that Lionel was fine, or at least okay, while John was doomed to be her husband.
John was the smartest Montgomery-Montalban, the cleverest one. Nowadays, John understood a lot of things. He understood things much too well.
A pang of guilty love for her nearest and dearest rose within Radmila. Her fit of passion was strong enough to taste, like a taste of bloody iron. Her love for her family was a very blood-and-flesh kind of love. It was large and tragic and liquid and squishy.
Ever since the pain and terror of fleeing that nasty little island in the Adriatic, Radmila had known, with a heart-crushing clarity, that no human being could ever love a monster like herself. Still: The only thing of any value in life was to love and be loved. Knowing she would never find any love, she had despaired of love and tried hard to hide from love.
So love had arrived to find her, instead. The love of her Californian family was like a Californian tidal wave. It was large, and rich, and Pacific, and powerful, and muddy, oily, salty, and slightly polluted. It swept all before it and it surrounded everything it touched.
“This is such an awful night,” she said aloud. “I hope your grandma isn’t so totally dead now that … Oh, I can’t even say it.”
“You know what?” he said. “I need to cry.”
“You can cry. I’m here for you. I’ll listen.”
A child of a disaster-stricken world, Lionel had to work his way up to his tears. He kept at the effort, though, and presently began to sob.
Taillights blossomed redly across the freeway. Radmila realized, through her own watering eyes, that this surge of brakes was the sign of another aftershock. The new little quake hadn’t slowed the traffic much. Nature had convulsed beneath the highway pillars, and the freeways just soaked that right up.
What a beautiful city this was: this huge, dense, endless place. So many cities in the world had been wrecked by the climate crisis. “Extinction 6.0,” the Californians called it. Californians were always making up new words that the rest of the world found themselves forced to use.
The Angelenos were thriving, although a city built like theirs, clearly, should never have survived.
Los Angeles was a crowded, polyglot mess of a place, trapped between a killer desert and a rising ocean. The city of Los Angeles had blown more climate-wrecking fumes out of its tailpipes than most nations. If there were any justice in the global mayhem of “Extinction 6.0,” Los Angeles should have been the first place to die: the first city in the world to drown, convulse, starve, riot, black out, and burn right to the ground.
Yet there was no justice in the climate crisis. Not one bit of justice. The climate crisis was not concerned with justice: it was about poverty, stench, hunger, floods, fires, thirst, plague, and riot. So, although Los Angeles did burn in many places—Los Angeles had always burned, in many places—Los Angeles grew much faster than it burned.
If this tormented world had a world capital, this city was it. Sprawling Los Angeles was checkered across its bulk with “little” regions: Little Chinas, Little Indias, Little Thailands, Little Russias. Clusters of busy refugees from disordered places that were no longer nations.
Los Angeles was a refugee-harnessing machine. Modern refugees thrived in this city as in no other city on Earth. Some of them, like herself, even got rich.
The prospect of catastrophe had never cowed Angelenos. Because Angelenos had never believed in any myth of solid ground. Instead, they survived through selling dreams and illusions. The turmoil beneath their jostling hills had created Tinseltown.
Los Angeles existed to be almost chaotic and yet to survive chaos, to thrive on chaos. The endless weave and roll of LA’s automated traffic. The pixelated windows in the scalloped walls of a thousand skyscrapers. The night sky was alive with mighty beams of light: police searchlights leaping down from helicopters, signal lasers up from dense knots of street trouble. This city had the fastest, most efficient emergency responses in the world.
When the earth heaved under your feet, you had to run so fast, just to stand firm.
Lionel’s sobs faded quickly. Teens were like that. Teens were strange people, even stranger in some ways than the very old. In their delicacy and temporariness, teens had an ageless quality. Teens were kids, and yet teenage kids were fearless and brave: they didn’t much mind dying. Teens were both Peter Pan and Dracula.
“Mila?”
“Qué pasa, hermano?”
“Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light, or just another Lost Angel?”
“Lionel, classic poetry won’t help us right now. We had a really bad night, but we’re gonna plant our feet, get very steady, and hold all this up. All right? We can do that. I promise you. We’ll dead-lift the whole world straight up over our heads. If guys like you and I don’t do that, who will?”
“I had to breathe my own breath right into her dead old mouth,” said Lionel.
“You did the right thing. Really.”
“Am I too stupid to live?”
It meant a lot to her that Lionel would ask her such a thing. His neediness immediately made her strong. “Okay, so listen to me now. We could have all been killed tonight. The software in the whole building might have blown out, like your grandmother’s costume. If everyone had died in there, and I had died, and you had died, and your grandmother, the support staff, her audience, everybody—that would have been, like, an amazing, perfect exit for the wonderful Toddy Montgomery. An amazing superstar exit from this world.”
Radmila drew a deep breath. “Well, no diva gets a clean exit like that. Nobody. Not me, not you, not even your superstar grandma. So our situation right now is, like: We’re completely screwed up. Our town is broken by a quake and parts of it are on fire. People are dying out there tonight. Toddy died. We’re crying inside our limo. But the Family-Firm is going to deal.” Radmila pushed hair back from her sweating forehead. “You get me? We shuffle all the cards and we deal. First thing tomorrow.”
Lionel contemplated this fierce declaration. “You know what?” he said. “I understand why he married you.”
Radmila’s eyes gushed tears. “What a sweet thing to say.”
“No, he’s really a smart guy, my big brother. Smarter than me.”
“I tried so hard to please him and this Family,” Radmila sniffed. “That beautiful old woman … I went to political meetings. I even read Synchronist philosophy. Do you understand that stuff? I don’t think anybody does.”
“My brother does.”
“You think John is truly a Synchronist? He doesn’t talk that way just to sound cool?”
“What’s small, dark, and knocking at the door?” quoted Lionel. “The future of humanity.”
Radmila began to sob aloud.
“You should have another baby, Mila. The Family future needs that.”
Radmila howled.
“I know you can’t stand John around you anymore,” said Lionel, “but in a world as messed up as this world, a guy like my big brother: he is a force for good. It’s like he’s a plastic surgeon … It’s like … one tiny injection, that won’t even hurt, and whoa, I can bench-press the whole world … I went for that pitch of his totally, and oh my God, one of these days I swear I’m gonna kill somebody!”
The car made its methodical way toward their home.
“Killing people is too easy a job for you, Lionel,” Radmila told him. “Killing people is for suckers. If we take good care of our own Family and we wait awhile, the bad people die all by themselves.” She took a measured breath. “ ‘He was just seventeen, you know what I mean, but the way he looked …’ ”
“That was so beautiful,” said Lionel, leaning back at last. “That’s what’s so great about the classics. They give you that terrific sense of roots.”
TODDY MONTGOMERY HAD TAUGHT Radmila many useful things about life. Especially about life as an idol and star. Almost every single thing that Toddy taught about wealth and fame and glamour was grim and dull and dutiful. In the long run, those things always turned out to be the only things that worked.
“Never forget” was Toddy’s usual preface: “Never forget that just because you get it doesn’t mean you get to keep it.” “Never forget that the world expects something from a somebody.” “Never forget that Hollywood was built on the backs of us women.”
There were dozens of these wise sayings of hers. To her shame, Radmila 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. Radmila 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 subject. 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 philosophy was obsessed about the flow of time through human flesh. It followed 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 bewildered, 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, little people.
So Radmila rose early from her lonely bed of memory foam, threw on her dancing skeins, and crept silently downstairs to confront the Family’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 Lionel, 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 accepting and impassive Earth so far below them, with tainted skies, its spreading deserts, and its long romantic plumes of burning forests.
