The caryatids, p.17
The Caryatids, page 17
Furthermore—lest the Family-Firm feel neglected—the newly emptied 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 overwrought, 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 hogging 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 Radmila didn’t bear the biblical horde of kids that Glyn demanded, 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 meanderings in the Adriatic. The Family-Firm would be watching that reunion with care; it was a crucial performance for Radmila. She was determined 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 neural 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 droning 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 happened 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 Montalban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to himself 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 hobject 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 hotter 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 stinking 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 behind that skein of horror and decline and utter hopelessness, the revitalized 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 ancient 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 Californian.”
RADMILA AND TODDY HAD ALWAYS ATTENDED the same hairdressing lab. This salon lab was an intensely private place, likely the best such lab in the world. Staffed by committed cosmeceutical professionals, it was chilly, hushed, and cheerless. That state-of-the-art establishment 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 designers’—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 behave.
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. Implanting 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.
“So—you really don’t hate me anymore?” Djordje said, rocking on his heels and watching her as she suffered. It was terrible to have Djordje standing so close to her. He was literally consuming her air.
Djordje—or “George Zweig”—was a tall, hefty, somewhat out-of-shape Viennese businessman in a tasteless European suit. He looked like he was wearing the clothes that his silly wife was buying him. He sported a thick, bristling mustache, and Radmila could swear he was carelessly losing his hair. Why didn’t he take care of all that?
“Djordje, you are one of my husband’s business associates. I don’t enjoy seeing you. But I’ll see you for political reasons, because I know that global politics has to trump my merely personal concerns.”
“That is great news,” said Djordje. “Your cordial attitude is very cheering. You talk much more sense than the other girls do. I am proud of you, Radmila, truly I am. Because you have become ‘Mila Montalban’! Your career is amazing! You’re the only one of us to truly succeed … you’re an American superstar!”
Djordje pinched the bridge of his beefy nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Events went badly in Mljet. I don’t know what John has told you about that. Vera is hostile and ignorant. She is mentally unstable. She has fled into some disaster area in the mainland Balkans and she will not speak to anybody.”
“I don’t care. Do not mention her name to me. Please.”
“Right. Sure! Fine!”
There was a horrid silence between them.
“I have two children,” Djordje told her. “May I show you their pictures? They’re normal children.”
“Shut up.”
“Fine,” said Djordje. “Let me tell you why I flew here, all the way to Los Angeles.” He licked his mustached lip. “Your friend … your husband, Mr. John Montgomery Montalban, has met with a small business setback, as I said to you. A lot of Acquis capital was invested in reviving Mljet, and there was broad hope for a general consensus that—”
“I’m glad that part’s over, at least,” said Radmila.
“What?”
“Those atrocities that the Acquis were committing on that filthy little island. Those attention camps. The brainwashing. My head hurts all over just thinking about that. John may not own that island yet—that scheme was a stretch, even for John—but I’m sure that John has put a swift end to that business.”
“Mr. Montalban still hopes and plans to turn the island into an entertainment destination … I did my best to help him there, but…”
“I don’t want you to talk to John any longer. Or to Glyn, either. Leave Glyn alone. You have no place within my Family-Firm. Do you understand that? You’re an intruder and your presence isn’t welcome.”
Djordje’s face changed. It became much harder. “I do understand that,” he told her, “but I must point out that it was John Montgomery Montalban who came looking for me. I don’t have the vast wealth that you have slyly married into—because I made my own way in this world. I mind my own business. My logistics business. Primarily, interface logistics between the Acquis and the Dispensation. Your husband has meddled in an Acquis project while enlisting my help. He has compromised my relationship with the Acquis.”
“Take your problems up with John.”
“You just told me not to take my problems up with John. I can cut my relations with your John—he’s a very charming fellow, but he’s not entirely faithful to his word. Still, I want to be made whole with the Acquis. I want a return to my status quo ante before your husband interfered with my business affairs. That’s only proper, isn’t it?”
“Suppose that I solve your problems. Do you promise you’ll stay far away from Los Angeles, Djordje? You won’t contact me, or anyone in my Family, anymore?”
“I might agree to those terms, Radmila. If Dr. Feininger also agrees to your terms. Dr. Feininger also flew with me here to Los Angeles. He wants to redress this unfortunate Mljet situation. Dr. Feininger is upset. He has good reasons for that. If you can mollify him, then I will do as you ask. Otherwise, you and I have a quarrel.”
“You’re threatening me.”
“I’m glad that you noticed,” Djordje said cheerily. “If you don’t want my threats, then don’t offend me. Let’s just be reasonable … no, let’s be pretty! You are so pretty, Radmila! What on Earth did they do to you, all those movie-star people?”
“We’re not movie stars, for God’s sake. We’re just ‘stars.’ ”
“In Vienna, we still love the old cinema. We love many fine, civilized things, in Vienna. It would be pleasant if you Americans would stop degrading them.”
Radmila ached to leap to her feet and slap the smirk off Djordje’s face. It was a luminous, creeping, burning urge.
Toddy would never strike a man in the face. What would Toddy do?
Radmila smiled sweetly and touched one finger to her cheek.
Djordje’s eyes widened.
“Djordje dear, your friend has come a long way to Los Angeles, under some trying circumstances. I apologize to you for your present difficulties. I promise that I did not intend those troubles. Why don’t you check out of this clinic, retrieve your possessions from security, and send your Dr. Feininger in here to see me? I have an offer to make to your Acquis friend and I think he will be pleased to hear it.”
“You mean all that?”
“Yes, I do, and I don’t lack for resources. I plan to put things right, and I’ll trust to your sense of decency not to trouble my Family further.”
“That strange tone of voice, that way you move your lips,” Djordje marveled. “That is amazing. You’ve truly changed, Radmila. You’re gorgeous, you’re famous, you’re rich … You’re a complete alien! I hope you’re happy.”
“I’m happy when the people I love are happy.”
“What a wonderful, inspiring thing to say. Those words give me such hope. I watch all your performances! You truly have talent! Don’t believe those bad reviews. You’re improving steadily!”
Radmila said nothing. She assembled a smile.
“Radmila, you are so much closer to escaping our curse than the rest of us. Maybe that has been fated to happen. As children … we were created and raised as an evil plan for this world. But in a world as truly evil as our world truly is—maybe we can act for good. When I look at you, I can almost believe that.”
“I’m glad that we had this heart-to-heart talk, George. It has cleared the air. Let’s not keep your important friend waiting.”
Djordje shuffled from polished foot to foot on the antiseptic clinic floor. He seemed genuinely moved. “Listen, Radmila: Please be careful with him. Dr. Feininger is my friend. That doesn’t make him your friend. He should have taken his issues up with your husband. For him to come here to confront you, instead: That’s not good news for you.”
“Oh, I may be only a humble star, but I am from a political family. I’ve met Acquis pundits before.”
Muttering, dithering, intolerable, Djordje finally left her alone. At last, Radmila was able to draw one clean, untainted breath. Her heartbeat slowed. That had been very bad.
But it was not so entirely bad as she had feared. She’d managed to play her way through that ordeal. She’d simply acted her way through it without ever breaking character. Stardom was full of suffering.
Radmila even felt a little bit guilty about refusing to glance at the pictures of Djordje’s children. Maybe someday she’d be able to meet Djordje’s children and establish some kind of relationship with them. After Djordje was dead, of course. That was a pleasant thought: especially the part about Djordje dying.
Once, and once only since leaving Mljet, Radmila had met one of her sisters: Sonja. They had simply blundered into each other: of all the people in the unlucky world. The horror had occurred on a peaceful tourist overlook above the glassy ruins of New York.
