The Caryatids (19 page)

"That's very kind of you, Frank. We appreciate your confidence in us as clients."

"You people are such a class act," the architect said. "It was sweet of you to tell me about my latest triumph in reactive engineering. We might try to get the word out about that, a little. Spread that around on the net some."

"We're doing that right now, Frank," Freddy lied calmly. "The eye-witnesses certainly won't soon forget it."

"That is just great. That's tremendous. That is out of this world. You sweet people call me any time you want, all right? Don't mind my secretary."

"We'll do that, Frank. You stay busy." The avatar vanished.

Radmila seized her chance to bolster the Family's mood. "You always handle him so well, Freddy."

"He's just another brilliant, irreplaceable creative genius." Freddy shrugged. "They're all the same."

"I want to say something now, please," Radmila said, standing and triggering a soundtrack. "I felt something so deep in my heart today . . . This terrible loss our Family suffered . . . and this nightmare about this volcano . . . I know that bad things can happen in this world. We've suffered a very great loss. And yes, things are getting worse: so that a great disaster seems likely to happen. But that doesn't scare me. No. That's what I want to tell you—right now. I'm not afraid. Because I believe in us." They were all staring at her. Machines couldn't have stared half as hard.

"So, please listen. The Sixth Great Extinction has happened already. Because the human race has ruined the world. We have a severe climate crisis, and it's terrible. Whenever we look up at the sky, we see danger and ugliness, and we know that's our fault."

She drew a breath, squared her shoulders. "But just suppose . . . That no matter how bad we human beings thought we were, there was something even worse waiting for us. Suppose that the world ruined the human race. Suppose that a giant volcano burst up out of the Earth, and it just
wrecked everything
. For no reason! It turned the sky black. The innocent died in millions, even billions . . . and everything that we loved about the beauty of this world was turned into ashes, right in front of our eyes . . . and we had to survive in the darkness and the ugliness, and life would be that way
for centuries
. . . " Their mouths hung open.

"I can tell you exactly what that would be like. Because I already know. I know that we would
fight that
like hell
! We would fight! We would never, never despair! We would help one another. We would teach our children how good things had been. We would save every precious memory from our heritage. And when we fixed the Earth, and we
would
fix it—we would make it
better
. . . We would make the new Earth a
lot
better."

Radmila stepped into a pool of sunlight from an overhead window. "So: You see what I want to say? If there's a world catastrophe caused by a supervolcano, then it means that our human disaster, our own big crime against the sky, was just too small to count. Maybe we did our worst as human beings, but we were too small to matter. So we can just
forget about that
. We can
forgive ourselves that
! Because the world would have been ruined anyway. We don't have to obsess anymore, or feel so proud about our own evil! All we have to do is survive and plan to prevail! We survive the next catastrophe and we rebuild our world. We can do things like that in this Family. I know that we can do it. We're doing it right now."

The silence was broken by Lily, who hadn't said a word until now. "That was totally the coolest extended set-speech that I ever heard Mila perform. That was just totally wow."

"Me too," said Doug. "That's exactly how I feel, too. Except I couldn't put that into an extemporaneous monologue."

"I was just dying over here!" Elsie complained, jumping from her chair. "I never know why I show up for these stupid Family business meetings! But now I do know. Mila's got all the brains in this Family. So stop wasting your time with that arguing, and let's do what she says."

??????????

THE BIGGEST URBAN FIRESin Los Angeles were crushed within twenty-four hours. That left the delicate political task of destroying the worst-damaged buildings.

For political work in the climate crisis, this kind of triage was the ultimate urban-management challenge. The intractable problems of LA's seaside urban slums had taught the Family that lesson long ago. The Family had learned that damaged buildings had to be demolished, and that demolition had to be done at breakneck speed, while the original pain of the disaster was still fresh. Otherwise, the cost of prolonged litigation would soar unbearably. Completely new buildings could be built for much less money and effort. The classic Dispensation gambit was to charge in and discreetly smash the damaged buildings while also rescuing their inhabitants. Naturally the legal system had caught on to this sneak-attack technique and put a stop to it. The next refinement was to smash the damaged buildings while leaving the facades apparently intact. The interiors were rebuilt in modern fashion with quick-setting fabricated plastics, so that the old-fashioned building still appeared to stand there, observing all the legal proprieties. Unfortunately this fraud was also too obvious; plus, there was something cheap and vulgar about it. The latest refinement, one pioneered by the modern Los Angeles star system, was to smash the damaged buildings quickly, but in as loud and public and glamorous a way as possible. The buildings would still end up demolished, but they'd be killed in front of huge street crowds, who would watch the effort and heartily approve it as an act of mass entertainment.

The huge street crowds certainly weren't hard to find; they were composed of the refugees and the destitute, packed like sardines in their bunks and cots across a huge expanse of Southern California. Having briefly been a refugee herself, Radmila knew their lives: Angeleno bread and circuses. Crackers, soup, foam mattresses, and immersive illusions.

The city grid of Los Angeles doubled as a giant game board for immersive game players: one would see these game adventurers, mostly young, angry; and unemployed, on foot, on bicycles, clambering walls, jumping fences, bent on their desperate virtual errands. And since the Montgomery-Montalbans, as media aristocrats, owned the means of game production, they could guide those crowds of gamers wherever they liked.

An engineered urban mob had its purposes: to demolish buildings, for instance. This daring act required a planned coalition of LA's poor-est and wealthiest: the poorest, who owned no real property but had the numbers and the overwhelming street presence, and the richest real-estate developers, who could supply cover with the police and who stood to profit handsomely by the eventual reconstruction. Wrecking the damaged fabric of LA had become a massive, daylong popular festival, complete with parades, original music, gorgeous costumes, mass dancing, and the flung distribution of favors and bribes to the roiling crowds of the poor. In the world capital of the entertainment business, this was the fastest and cheapest method yet found to rezone the city.

This practice had never been legalized, but as a classic Dispensation work-around, it was pretty close to an all-around win-win-win. Many learned academic papers had been written about LA's innovative deconstructive rezoning. The practice was spreading rapidly to other cities. Radmila did a celebrity signing, for a crowd-drawing star turn by a local idol was strictly required. She briefly graced an assembly of forty local top game players, who were being feted and petted. These gaming champs were mostly scrawny, scampering male teens: leapers, stunters, backflippers, window climbers . . . They looked and dressed very much like Lionel Montalban, their beloved pop idol. Radmila signed commemorative books, handed out prizes, allowed them a lingering touch of her star-spangled feudal robe. Stars were the linchpin of this effort. No everyday landlord would dare to sue a major star. The costs in bad publicity and lost public goodwill were much bigger costs than simply accepting the fate of dead buildings.

The Montgomery-Montalbans had always been very big on new construction: Toddy had been genially ribbon-cutting for years. The violent smashing of defunct buildings was, by contrast, one of Radmila's personal specialties.

Toddy was no longer there to advise with show production, and her steadying, classic hand was sorely missed. Radmila's carnival would briskly smash three damaged buildings in a mere hour and a half: a ten-story former insurance building in Central City, a twelve-story hotel on Figueroa, and an adjoining mall.

The Family had piled on the effects with a lavish hand, but not a sure one. It was late August, and in the dog-day Greenhouse heat, Radmila's dance costume showed a lot of her skin. "Never forget," Toddy would have said, "that in show business, we women have to show." Radmila did not mind showing her body to her public — that was what she built her body for — but to cut big flesh-baring holes in electronic costuming seriously damaged the integrity of the performance garment. Radmila's signature stagecraft involved split-second performance stunts, a superhuman proof-of-concept best held in upscale venues like Sacramento's California State Legislature. The Family-Firm had gained enormous political capital through being publicly superhuman.

Still, the collapsing buildings were the real stars of an effort like this. Collapsing buildings overwhelmed any stunt any mere actress could do. The overblown demolition machinery that smashed the buildings supplied the coup de grace of urban spectacle. Of course they were not mere dynamite or wrecking balls, they had to be obligatory monstrous stage props. The latest mechanism of destruction had been designed for the Family-Firm by Frank Osbourne. Osbourne, like many Angeleno architects, was enamored of set design and sincerely hated all premodern buildings. He loved to see real-estate leveled. Osbourne's writhing and rambling urban destroyer had been first designed within an immersive world as a popular hallucination. Still, the toy physics in a modern sealed immersive play world were almost identical to the genuine stress dynamics of real-world architecture. So Osbourne's game contraption worked: it stepped seamlessly out of the immersive play world, into the real-world streets of Los Angeles, and it smashed things.

Osbourne's walking anti-city burned ethanol and ran on three wiggling accordion legs of crystal-steel rebar and nanocarbon cable. Since he'd built only one of these monster devices, it naturally looked like nothing else on Earth. The gamer crowds were delighted to see Osbourne's monster in action. They were used to playing with monsters. They no longer drew distinctions between immersive games and the city streets. Advances in modern entertainment had erased those notions.

The air still stank of the newly doused urban fires when Radmila's twenty backup dancers filed onto their metal stage—a stage bracketed on top of Osbourne's walking monster. The dancers had slightly puppetlike dance steps, for they were following immersive cues.

The cue arrived for her obligatory labors. Radmila bounded onto the stage, with the urban-scale version of her signature entry track. The racket was audible for blocks around.

A flurry of aerial stage lights followed her as she shimmied through her paces. The city wrecker rose beneath her feet like a thrill ride. Its snaky legs slithered, buckled, wriggled. It clomped the cracked side-walks with the tread of doom.

With its complex, gripping feet and its unstable tentacle legs, Osbourne's city wrecker could walk straight up the sides of buildings. When it did this, the tripod's stage tipped and dropped like a falling elevator. That fluttered the floating veils of the backup dancers.

Of course all this dramatic stunting was entirely safe, since it had been simulated a million times within immersive worlds. Still, a city-crushing metal monster looked very remarkable in daylight, especially if one was ten years old.

As the city breaker cakewalked through the chosen streets, it fired dust-glittering beams into the doomed buildings—lasers of some kind, she'd been told. The lasers were entirely for show, for the buildings had been booby-trapped by busy Dispensation operatives. It was a pleasure to see such professional work. The useless old buildings literally curtsied to the public as they fell. The precisely wrecked structures fell with a soft mock intelligence, as if they were truly tired of standing there and genuinely glad to make way for the Shock of the New.

Radmila dutifully mimed her awed rapture at these catastrophic goings-on. The demolition was conforming to schedule, but her pride was rather hurt. Radmila knew there was something kitschy and cheesy and intensely Californian about surfing over the city on a dance stage. This overbaked and overpriced public spectacle revealed a kind of childishness in the culture. To simply destroy a badly damaged building should not require any dancing bimbos. The Dispensation was a military-entertainment complex, it always had to throw its marked cards into the magician's hat, its disappearing rabbits, its custard pies . . . As an artist, she felt that this was demeaning to her.

And yet, it always pleased Radmila to have a popular hit. Show business did have its native satisfactions for her: shoulders back, chin up, big smile, deep breath, just go . . . Do it:
perform
, be there in public,
be
public
. In certain timeless, gratifying zones of raw sensation, Radmila absorbed showbiz right through her own skin.

Performance was a spiritual act. The unfolding ensemble: that happy roar from the crowds, the rank smell of the smoke, the dust and her own sweat, the physical effort of her dancing, the pervasive rhythms

. . . Los Angeles was a mystical city by nature. It required its sacraments. Radmila felt herself vanish into the ambient substance of the spectacle. She could feel herself just . . . holding it all up. And then letting it fall: with one almighty, dust-hurling thump. With a final bone-blasting flourish of her soundtrack, Radmila wire-walked off the top of the rollicking tripod, capered straight up the side of a building, and "vanished into thin air." Ascending into the heavens was something of a Family cliche. Still, when it came to live street art, the best tricks were the oldest ones.