The caryatids, p.14
The Caryatids, page 14
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 fixture 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 Radmila, 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 character. 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 projected 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. Instead, 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 benchmarks 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 complained. “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 interpretative 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 uninsurable. 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 shoreline 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.
“You know what we need here?” said Raph, lightly popping the tortured map with the saffron beam of his wand. “We need to stop swatting flies at this emergent level and get ourselves a big strategic overview.”
Raph always talked like that. He was his father’s son, a Montgomery, and frankly a little dim.
“We’ll handle this quake the way we always handle a quake,” growled Freddy Montalban. “The grown-ups circle the wagons, and we send out the kids to commiserate. Wind up the Family’s charity machine … Big star turns to lift the morale in all the worst-hit regions … Let’s make a quick list of those. Mila, find us that casualty map.”
Mila struggled with the interface.
Raph was agreeable. “We could send little Mary up to Malibu. Mary is great in the derelict properties.”
“Little Mary is in Cyprus,” said Freddy.
“Mljet,” Radmila broke in, forsaking the puck for the joystick. “Mary and John are touring Mljet.”
“I can’t even pronounce that,” Raph lamented. “So, how soon can we ship Mary home for some quake duty? Little Mary is super with the tot demographic.”
“The Adriatic is the other side of the world,” said Guillermo. “That’s about as far away from LA as it is possible to get. In fact, that’s why we wanted to invest over there. Remember that big discussion?”
“Can’t we fly Mary back in?” said Buffy, brightening where she sat. Buffy Montgomery loved to fly. Buffy had been the heart and soul of the Family’s scheme to buy LilyPad. That was entirely typical of Buffy, because LilyPad, for all its spacey gloss, was a big white elephant.
“John would never fly,” Radmila told them. “Jets were a major cause of the climate crisis.”
They knew better than to say anything about John’s principles. John’s father, the Governor, was dead. So John might bow his knee to his grandmother Toddy on occasion, but otherwise, John did his Family duty as John himself construed that duty. Which was to say, John was almost impossible.
Troubled, Radmila had lost her way in the map’s widgets. To improvise, she pulled an old trick that Toddy had once taught her.
“So what was that?” said Freddy at once.
It was an old trick, but often a good one. Most trend-spotters using the net looked for rising news items that were gaining public credibility. But you could learn useful things in a hurry if you searched for precisely the opposite. News that should have public credibility, but didn’t.
Sometimes the public was told things that the public couldn’t bear to know.
Radmila had discovered a different map of Los Angeles: Los Angeles seen from deep within the Earth.
“Get rid of that,” said Raph.
“What is it?” said Sofia, who was sitting there dutifully, but using her two wands as a pair of knitting needles. Sofia had always been like that. Sofia was Family because she had three kids. By three different men, but that was Hollywood.
“That’s a forecast for underground weather,” said Raph. “So-called. Everybody knows that you can’t predict earthquakes.”
The map was a garish space of exotic flows. It was a scientific map: ugly, user-unfriendly, speckled all over with menu bars, to-do lists, threat meters, and behavioral prediction.
Those scratchy-looking color-blobs had to be lava, or magma, or strain tensors in the shifting continental plates. All very complicated. Radmila had never seen this map before, so she was at a loss.
Still, it was obvious at a glance that the heavier action was outside this part of the map. So Radmila scrolled the map sideways.
The map’s edge led her to a nexus: a big maroon knot. It looked like a bloodstain.
Freddy flipped his wand around and painted a circle onto the projection. “That node there looks interesting.”
Guillermo said, “So who is hosting this map?”
“Who made it?” said Freddy.
Radmila had been hastily accessing the tags, so she was a little ahead of the game. “Some kind of Acquis science group. They’re based in Brussels.”
“It’s from Brussels?” scoffed Raph. “Get rid of it!”
“Better let me drive,” Freddy decided. He rose from his seat and set his solid, suited bulk into Glyn’s abandoned chair.
Freddy lacked any grace at net surfing. He simply found every tag that looked big and active and pounded it. He popped up his personal notepad and hauled cogent chunks of data onto it. Freddy was a seasoned Family businessman. He never bored easily.
“Okay,” Freddy summarized, after seven tedious minutes. “We seem to have some kind of major movement of liquid rock … an unprecedented movement … deep under Yosemite Valley.”
“They made all that up,” said Raph. “That’s some Acquis political ploy. Propaganda. They’re always like that.”
Guillermo popped loose the electric snaps of his uniform jacket. “You really think that Acquis scientists would lie about magma?”
“Maybe not ‘lie,’ exactly. But the Acquis are always big alarmists. That’s all a simulation. It’s not like they’re actually down there looking at the real lava. You know that’s impossible.”
“But they’re scientists! They don’t know we’re looking at this map of theirs! They’ve got nothing to gain by lying to us!”
“They’re doing this to harm our cultural values,” said Raph.
“Your thesis isn’t quite clear to me, Raph. What are the scientists doing with this map, exactly? They’re launching some huge culture-war conspiracy to fake the data, just to make us feel unhappy about our earthquakes?”
“Fine,” said Raph, losing his temper, “what are you trying to say to us? That there’s some kind of brand-new, giant weird volcano growing under California? What next, Guillermo? Are we supposed to act all happy about that idea? We don’t have enough troubles this morning? Our hometown just got hit by a Richter Six!”
“That is the point,” said Guillermo.
“What’s the point?”
“That’s why we’re getting hit by so many earthquakes. This huge lava movement underground: That might be the root cause of that problem.”
Raph shrugged. “That notion sounds pretty far-out to me.”
“Raph, you’re always saying that you want the big strategic picture. This is a big strategic picture. Boy, is it ever big.”
“Yosemite is a park,” said Raph, straining for politeness. “Yosemite Park doesn’t make earthquakes.”
“Let’s look that up,” Freddy counseled. “I’ll tag our private correlation engine for ‘Yosemite’ and ‘volcano.’ ”
This action took Freddy about fifteen seconds. The results arrived in a blistering deluge of search hits. The results were ugly.
They had hit on a subject that knowledgeable experts had been discussing for a hundred years.
The most heavily trafficked tag was the strange coinage “Supervolcano.” Supervolcanoes had been a topic of mild intellectual interest for many years. Recently, people had talked much less about supervolcanoes, and with more pejoratives in their semantics.
Web-semantic traffic showed that people were actively shunning the subject of supervolcanoes. That scientific news seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way.
“So,” said Guillermo at last, “according to our best sources here, there are some giant … and I mean really giant magma plumes rising up and chewing at the West Coast of North America. Do we have a Family consensus about that issue?”
Raph still wasn’t buying it. “The other sources said that ‘Yellowstone’ was a supervolcano. Not ‘Yosemite.’ Yellowstone is way over in Montana.”
“You do agree that supervolcanoes exist, though. They’re a scientific fact of life on Earth. That’s what I’m asking.”
“They exist. If you insist. But the last supervolcano was seventy-four thousand years ago. Not during this business quarter. Not this year. Not even one thousand years. Seventy-four thousand years, Freddy.”
Freddy looked down and slowly quoted from his notepad. “ ‘The massive eruption of a supervolcano would be a planetary catastrophe. It would create years of freezing temperatures as volcanic dust and ash obscured the warmth of the sun. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.’ ”
Guillermo’s face went sour. “Okay, that is total baloney. ‘Nuclear winter,’ that sounds extremely corny to me.”
“That’s because this source material is eighty years old. Geologists know a whole lot about supervolcanoes. Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes.”
Buffy was losing her temper. “But this is so totally unbelievable! The sky already darkened! The black rain already fell on us! We already have a climate crisis, we have one going on right now! Now we’re supposed to have another crisis, out of nowhere, because California blows up from some supervolcano? What are the odds?”
“Well, that question’s pretty easy,” said Freddy. “A supervolcano under the Earth doesn’t care what we humans did to the sky. If it blows up, then it just blows up! So the odds of a supervolcano are exactly the same as they always were.”
Rishi, who was bright, had gotten all interested. “Well, what exactly are the odds of a supervolcano? How often do supervolcanoes erupt, and turn the sky black, completely wrecking the climate, and so forth?”
It took Freddy a good while to clumsily bang that one out. Maybe a minute and a half. “Sixty thousand years, on the average. That would mean we’re already fourteen thousand years past our due date.”
A contemplative gloom settled over the conclave.
“Look,” said Raph at last, “I’m a Synchronist like the rest of you guys, but let’s not get completely goofy here. We can’t go making our investment decisions on a forty-thousand-year time frame. That’s not due diligence and sustainable business planning. That’s just plain weird.”
“The pace of quakes in LA has been picking up,” said Guillermo. “That trend is clear.”
Raph had a ready answer. “Well, that comes from climate change. All those heavy rains lubricate the local fault lines. And we get rising groundwater, too.”
“Raph, how come climate change can cause earthquakes, but supervolcanoes don’t cause earthquakes?”
“Okay, so you got me there.” Raph shrugged. “I never said I was a scientist.”
Freddy contemplated the geological display map. “Mila, give us that current-situation map again.”
