The Caryatids (14 page)

system adjusted its parameters several thousand times a second.

She was superhuman.

"Am I perfect?"

"You are so totally perfect," Glyn agreed.

"Am I superperfect?"

"Get off the damn chair," Glyn grumbled. "You're gonna nail it tonight! You always nail it. Just watch the hat. Now get back up here."

Radmila vaulted off the mock-up chair and skipped, her thudding heart gone easy in her chest. She flung out both arms and gestured at the empty air, her fingers held just so. Invisible wire flexed around her and flung her out of the rehearsal pit.

A folding canvas director's chair hopped over and flopped itself open for her, amid a busy crowd of Montgomery-Montalban stagehands. Radmila sat serenely, spreading her costume and grooming it. What a fuss these stage clothes made about themselves: all that multilayer circuitry, the plas-tic threading, sensor pads, electric embroidery . . . Gleaming lights, con-ductive snaps, antenna yarn, laser-cut dust-repellent golden foil: Stage costumes looked terrific when they were turned on. When you sat still in-side them, awaiting your cue, it was like wearing a hot-dog booth.

Radmila slipped on a pair of stage spex, groped at a midair menu, and touched her earpiece. Toddy was gently lecturing her audience about historical trends in Californian home decor. "Mission Style." "Arroyo Culture." "Tuscan."

Every star had a métier, and Toddy Montgomery was a decades-long sponsor of home-decor products. Californian furniture was of huge, consuming interest to Toddy's core fan base. The Family-Firm was a network: real estate, politics, finance, every-ware, retail, water interests . . . and of course entertainment. A network as strong as the LA freeways. A network whose edges were everywhere and its center . . . well, if the Family-Firm had any center, it was Theodora "Toddy" Montgomery.

Toddy's costume cascaded over her gorgeous chair: she wore her stiff support bodice, lace collar, her signature monster hat, her dainty feet just peeping out from under her big petticoats.

"Miss Mila Montalban will be joining us," said Toddy. There was a happy patter of applause. Miss Mila Montalban was a trouper and a star. Miss Mila Montalban could do anything for her Family-Firm. She owed the Family her whole existence, and she was loyal and true. She would die for them. If a bul-let came for any Montgomery-Montalban, Radmila Mihajlovic would swan-jump in front of that bullet with a deep, secret sense of relief.

Toddy paused for one long, strange moment. Then she caught up her lost thread and rambled on. Old people were so patient and garrulous. They never seemed to switch topics.

Glyn broke in. "Three minutes, Mila . . . Oh Jesus! Now what?" Radmila stood on tiptoe. "Am I on?"

"We just got a tremor alert."

"What? That's the fifth tremor this week!"

"It's the seventh," Glyn corrected. Glyn was always like that.

"Well then," said Radmila, touching the mechanized crispness of a long blond curl, "the show must go on."

"Do you know what kind of hell we'd catch if there was a Big One and we didn't clear this building?"

"I sure know what kind of hell we'd catch if we shut down Toddy's re-tirement show."

"We can reschedule her retirement. Nobody reschedules an earth-quake."

"Oh, just come off all that, Glyn."

"
You
come off it," said Glyn. "We built this place on a fault line! If this building topples over, it'll crush us all like bugs!"

This flat threat gave Radmila a serious pause. How could Glyn fail to trust the ubiquitous programming of the Los Angeles County Furniture Showroom?

"Put me on, Glyn. This building is totally modern."

"It is not 'modern,' " said Glyn, "it is 'state-of-the-art.' There's a big difference."

"What do you want from me? Toddy is on! Put me on, too!"

"Two minutes," Glyn agreed, but in the Showroom crawlspace, the normal chaos of tech support had a sudden hysterical edge.

The Family's security people always lurked backstage, wearing their masked black Kabuki costumes, and frankly doing nothing much, usu-ally. Most of the Family's black-clad stage ninjas weren't even real Se-curity. They were Family members whose faces were painfully famous, so they were happily invisible in masks.

A ninja reached out his sinister black-gloved hand and gently patted her costumed shoulder. "Break a leg," he murmured. The ninja was Li-onel, her brother-in-law. Lionel was all of seventeen, and whenever his big brother John was gone on business, Lionel was always making gal-lant little gestures of support for her. He was a sweet kid, Lionel.

Toddy was babbling, and the soundtrack noodled through a gentle. repertoire of medleys. Radmila listened keenly for her cue. Her cue was overdue.

The reactive DJ system drew its repertoire from audience behavior, and Toddy's core fans, her favorite shareholders, were getting anxious. Through any of a thousand possible channels, the tremor alert had jabbed them awake. These fine, dignified old people were not in a panic just yet, but knew they might soon have a good excuse.

Their interactive music had the air of tragedy.

Radmila finally went on. Her hair was okay, the face was more than okay, the costume would do, but her stage hat felt like a big live lobster. As a tribute, she was wearing one of Toddy's signature stage hats, a huge--brimmed feathered apparatus that framed a star's face like a saintly halo, but the old-school hat hadn't synced completely to the costume, and the awkward thing, appallingly,
felt heavy.
It should have wafted through the stage-lit air like a parasail. It felt like a bag of wet cement. Toddy rose from her couch, ignoring Mila's entrance. It was unheard-of for Toddy Montgomery to miss a cue. Radmila was shocked. She man-aged the first half-dozen steps of her planned routine and then simply walked over.

Toddy turned to her: beneath her huge hat was the tremulous face of a scared old woman. "Thank you for joining us at this difficult time, Mila."

This was not in the script. So, improvisational theater: Never, ever look surprised. Keep the stage biz flowing; always say "YES, AND."

"Yes, of course I came here to be with you, Toddy," Radmila ad-libbed. "Wherever else would I go?"

"We're evacuating all the children first."

''Yes, of course. The children come first. That's exactly how it should be."

"The seismic wave is in Catalina. This one is a Big One."

"Surfs up," Radmila quipped. There was one moment of anguished silence from the murmuring audience, then a roar of applause.

Radmila sat and smiled serenely. She crossed her legs beneath her gleaming skirt. "I suppose we women will be leaving, too—once they get around to us."

"I never like to leave a party," said Toddy. She fought with her badly confused costume, and managed to sit.

An antique sandalwood trolley rolled over with a delicate chime of brass bells.

"Tea?" said Toddy.

Alarm sirens howled. The' sirens of Los Angeles were terrifying. A scared coyote the size of a ten-story building might have howled like LA's monster cybernetic sirens. The sirens had been planted all across the city, with intense geolocative care. There were networked packs of them. Toddy turned her stiff, aged face to the sky. A twirling, linking set of geodesics, thin beams looking delicate as toothpicks, danced across the stars. Los Angeles was famous for the clarity of its skies. "It's been such a lovely night, too."

"You've never looked prettier," Radmila lied, and then the earth-quake shock hit the building. The antique couch below them bounded straight into the air.

The entire studio audience went visibly airborne, their arms sponta-neously flopping over their heads like victims in a broken elevator.

The museum floor dipped from rim to rim like a juggler's airborne plate. It rose up swiftly under the audience.

The floor gently caught thern as they fell.

The silence was cut by startled screams.

Radmila scrambled across the couch and groped for Toddy. The old woman had swooned away, her mouth open, eyes blank. There seemed to be no flesh within her massive, glittering costume. Toddy was a pretty, beaded bag of bones.

A second shock hit the museum. This shock was much bigger than the first, an endless, churning, awesome, geological catastrophe. The museum reacted with a roller coaster's oily grace and speed, ducking and banking. They were suspended in limbo, an epoch of reeling and twisting, rubbery groans and shrieks for mercy.

Radmila found herself audibly counting the seconds.

The earthquake rushed past them, in its blind, dumb, obliterative fashion. The sirens ceased to wail. People were gasping and shrieking. Rad-mila twisted in her stubborn costume to look at Toddy. Toddy was un-conscious. Toddy Montgomery had a very famous face, an epic, iconic face, and that face had never looked so bad.

Radmila clambered to her feet. The panicked audience was strug-gling in semidarkness, while she had the stage lights. The audience badly needed her now, and a star on stage could outshout anybody. Radmila tore the dented hat from her face. "Did you see what this building just did for us? That was
completely amazing!
"

Radmila dropped the hat and clapped her hands. The stunned audi-ence caught on. They heartily applauded their own survival.

"The architect's name is Frank Osbourne," Radmila told them. "He lives and he works in Los Angeles!" Those who could stand rose to applaud.

The museum floor beneath their feet was miraculously stable now. Their building was as firm as granite, as if earthquakes were some kind of myth.

Toddy was entirely still.

The sirens began again, different noises: fire alarms. The fire warn-ings had a gentler, less agitated sound design. Los Angeles fires were much commoner than earthquakes.

With tender respect, members of the audience began setting the prized furniture straight. They sat with conspicuous dignity, and simply gazed up at Radmila. They still wanted to be entertained. A black-clad shadow vaulted from backstage, did a showy, spectacu-lar front flip. Lionel had made an entrance.

Lionel had thoughtfully brought her some scripting. The two of them hastily conferred. Lionel leaned his black-wrapped head against hers to whisper. "Grandma's had a power failure."

"I know that."

"I'll get her offstage, you manage this crowd."

Radmila commanded the audience. "Ladies and gentlemen, all the elevators in this structure are working beautifully. So we will have you out of here very quickly. Your limos are coming. We'll evacuate anyone who is injured. So people, please look to your neighbors now, send out reports, send a prompt . . . The city's comprehensive relief effort is al-ready under way . . . "

The museum's lights flickered nastily. They came on again, raggedly, and in a dimmer, amber, emergency glow.

The sound system died on stage. Radmila's software failed, and the full weight of her costume fell on her, across her shoulders, back, thighs. It was like being wrapped in dead meat.

"Help me carry Grandma," said Lionel, tugging at the inert mass. Slowly, Radmila fell to her knees. "Oh no. I can't move." Radmila was able to turn, to look into Toddy's face. The old woman's eyes were two rims of white. Her lips were blue. She wasn't breathing.

"My God, she died! Toddy is dead!"

"Well, she's not gonna stay dead," said Lionel. "She's a Montgomery."

??????????

QUAKE REPORTS WERE POURING INfrom the urban sensor-web, popping out of the background noise as their relevance gained weight.

Things were grim in the aging slums of Brentwood, Century City, and Bel Air, with fires, smashed tenements, and rumors of looting.

All over the city, Dispensation flash gangs were throwing on their uni-forms, grabbing rescue equipment, pouring into cars.

The LA skyline was lit by laser torches. Dispensation people never waited for orders during a civic emergency. They took their dispensa-tions and they charged in headlong posses straight for the thickest of the action. They'd all seen enough hell to know that the sooner you stopped the hell, the less hell there was to pay later.

LA's freeways had ridden out the quake: of course. There were no constructions in the whole world so strong and ductile as the freeways of Los Angeles. LA's rugged urbanware was like a spiderweb from another planet. During any LA quake, almost by reflex, people would pour into their cars to seek the proven safety of their freeways.

Current traffic was bumper-to-bumper, but it was bumper-to-bumper at a comforting hundred and thirty kilometers per hour.

Radmila flicked off the news projection on the limo's windshield. A crisis this size would be best confronted from the Bivouac, the Family-Firm's secure fortress in glamorous Norwalk. Lionel, gallantly, was escorting her home. He'd helped her to fight her way free from the grip of her costume. Hastily wrapped in a dusty equipment tarp, she'd fled down a Showroom elevator and into a wait-ing Family limo.

Lionel had found her some spare clothes in the limo's trunk: some unknown relative's flowery surfer shorts, a big smelly male undershirt, and a sand-caked pair of flip-flops. Radmila was wearing that under her spangled stage jacket, torn loose from its support circuits.

"You look so fantastic just now," said Lionel.

Radmila glanced up at the big rearview mirror. The Family's limo was unmanned, but it had all the fine old car traditions: a big knobby steering wheel, human foot controls on its floorboard, everything. "I look like some drunken beach floozy."

"No, no, you look
exactly the way girls were supposedto lookinmovie disasters,"
Lionel marveled.

"Sort of half naked, dirty, and ripped-up, but still intensely glamorous." 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.