The Caryatids (18 page)

"You know what we need here?" said Raph, lightly popping the tor-tured 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, be-cause 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 al-most impossible. Troubled, Radmila had lost her way in the map's widgets. To impro-vise, 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 pro-jection. "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 super-volcanoes don't cause earthquakes?" .

"Okay, so you got me there." Raph shrugged. "I never said I was a sci-entist." Freddy contemplated the geological display map. "Mila, give us that current-situation map again." Radmila did this. The Family studied the colorful popping disaster dots with a renewed sense of dread. They were clustered on certain lines. Those seismic lines.

"Do we have any Family game plan for the complete destruction of California?" said Freddy.

"John does," Radmila said.

Freddy lifted his brows. "Oh?"

"Yes. John once told me that if the planet Earth became completely unfit for life, there would be two places for our Family to go: up into orbit, or down under the Earth."

"I never heard John say that to me," Buffy complained.

"We were floating up in LilyPad when John told me that. On our honeymoon." They had been floating at a porthole and gazing at the distant Earth. There were certain angles of orbit, in the host of whizzing sunsets, when the sweet old planet had looked thin and meager: like some small, distant town on the skids.

"John's such a romantic," said Freddy, who had never liked John much.

"Our Family would do that!" Radmila shouted. "We would do it, we would cut a deal with that reality!

We'd be floating up in the sky, in some kind of bubble. Or under the ground, in some other kind of bubble. Of course we would do it! What else could we do? This Family thinks in the long term, because the Family has to survive!"

Rishi came forward. "I have Frank Osbourne waiting for you." Freddy was glad for the change of subject. "Let's have a word with the gentleman."

The starchitect's avatar appeared in a corner of the Family's situation map.

"So, Frank," said Freddy, "you're in a simulation at the moment?" "Gotta be in a simulation," grumbled the architect. "All the big construction business happens inside simulations."

"You didn't notice the most recent big earthquake?"

"Was there a tremor?" Osbourne said. "I'm logging in from Vancouver."

"No? Then let us be the first to tell you that your new showroom museum came through a major seismic event with flying colors! Congratulations."

"No kidding?" said Osbourne. "Swell!"

"Except for a power outage," Guillermo put in sourly.

"I told you to let me handle the power!" the starchitect shouted. "I told you I needed full command over the grid! I told you that! I told you all that from day one!"

"We did our best for you on the very difficult power issue, Frank," said Freddy cordially. "Actual architecture differs from virtual architecture. We can't just reconfigure everything on the fly."

"Didn't you read my white paper? You can't make those obsolete distinctions anymore! Bits and atoms: Bits are
bits of atoms
! The sensorweb is Reality 2.0! So it's all exactly the same! Debate over!"

"It's great to see you're the same old Frank Osbourne," said Freddy. "We've really missed working with you. That was always so stimulating."

"Yeah?" said the avatar, its host of tiny polygons brightening a little.

"So, how'd your mossy old mansion come through the latest quake? When are you guys gonna do your major facelift on that place?"

"Do you have something specific in mind for us, Frank?"

"For you? For the Montgomery-Montalbans? Absolutely I do! You know those mobile geodesics in the LACFS?" The architect called his posh structure "Lack-Fuss," an irony that hadn't been lost on Radmila.

"Spontaneous construction!" the avatar declared. "The potential there hasn't begun to be tapped! We could do amazing things with that technique. Incredible things. And fast. I could do that tomorrow! If it weren't for those Neanderthals in the seismic code departments!"

The avatar's face wasn't moving much, but they could hear Osbourne furiously hissing through his teeth.

"That's all political crap! It's got nothing to do with public safety! It's all about the trades and the subcontractors. They're a lousy bunch of featherbedders! They're a vast conspiracy!"

"We've heard that before," said Freddy.

"Yeah, but
you people
could handle a thing like that. Easy! That little zoning war in La Mirada, you people were wizards at that."