The caryatids, p.13
The Caryatids, page 13
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. Because she had escaped the world. There was no weight in orbit, no hateful 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 impossible time. She would do her duty, she would bear up. Today, tomorrow, 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 breakfast.
But there was nobody around to share her meal. There was one special 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 dining 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 buoyant 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, govjects, 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 gentle 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 decide that she might be okay. “Our Johnny has found himself a pretty foreign girl,” Jack had said, “an illegal alien, no prospects, no capital, bizarre education, unspeakable heritage”—and then Jack made himself her friend.
In the sunlit, louvered spot where Toddy’s big, frilly bed had once stood, a bright-eyed entity was busy inside a medical bubble. The creature 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 rebooted 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 biosphere 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 hopefully. “Surely that has to mean something … I mean, if she can still engage 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 certainly 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 command 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 development.”
“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 Family’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 tangled 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 realized, 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 before. 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 Synchronistic 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?”
“I know I’m talking silly star-hype … but I can remember how she made me work. Discipline, personal transformation, and thorough rehearsals. 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. Everybody knows you’ve been groomed for that role. You’re in a strong position, if you can stand the pressure.”
“Jack, I can stand it. I can stand anything. Worse things have happened 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 something 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 technicians. The ugly, geeky, meta-media guys! Yeah, she cut through those nerds like the scythe of doom! She even married one of them—she married 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 machines stared. Forget TV, movies—the old entertainment vehicles. Toddy could scratch her ass on any public beach and pull down ten million 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 determined 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 cuttings, awards ceremonies. “Community leadership.”
The Family’s Situation Room was a legacy from old Sergio Montalban. It was the master geek’s addition to the Bivouac, part of his dogged campaign to stabilize the family finances. When Sergio had been Family chairman, the Situation Room had been his dashboard for the Family’s fortunes.
The Family’s fortunes had prospered mightily, but the pioneer’s hardware had been badly dated. Today the Family’s investments were so interwoven 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 informal 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 Situation 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 Radmila 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: scarlet, 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 Family knew the truth instantly. They’d all feared the worst, but they’d dared to entertain some hope.
