The Caryatids (23 page)

"Oh that!" said Radmila. "You mean our urban-renewal festival."

"That behavior truly baffles us in the Acquis," said Feininger.

"Please try not to worry," said Radmila, wide-eyed. "I'm just an ac-tress. It's all for show."

"Leaving aside the social-justice aspects of preferentially wrecking the neighborhoods of the poor," said Feininger, "are you aware of what happens, technically speaking, within the legs of those tripods?"

"Should I be?"

"I know the sinister genius who constructed that device," said Feininger. "His name is Frank Osbourne, and he
repeatedly
seeks out radical construction methods that are judged unsafe by Acquis central committee. Then Osbourne
deploys
those methods! Not in harmless simulations—in
real life!
He builds structures with dangerous crys-talline iron and unproven nanocarbon piezo-cables, and then he uses those hazardous devices to
demolish historical buildings.
A deliberate provocation! "

"Frank is a very theoretical architect," said Radmila. "I think you're reading too much into his acts of whimsy."

Toddy's tea trolley rolled into the room. Toddy had gone to repeated effort to have tea served as she recovered from her hair-design interven-tions. Toddy would sit, sip tea, and stare into her hobject globes

. . .

Toddy was no longer here, yet her infrastructure had survived her. Fresh tea had just arrived for the insane husk of a woman who'd been quietly fired into orbit.

"Oh, the tea is here!" Radmila chirped. "I do hope you like Indian tea, Dr. Feininger."

"It's Indian tea?"

"Yes of course! They're restoring plantations in Assam!"

With surprising spryness and multicultural fluidity, Feininger sat cross-legged on the floor. Radmila joined him, arranged the cups, and poured. Their ritual took a leisurely six minutes. They scarcely spoke. When they were done, the two of them had reached a certain level of rapport. Radmila fully understood why the Acquis pundit had attacked Frank Osbourne. Osbourne was a Dispensation architect. So naturally Osbourne would push the limits of whatever the Acquis considered acceptable practice. Feininger was not truly upset about Osbourne. Feininger was angry because of Mljet.

Feininger wasn't wearing a neural helmet or attention-camp blinders—Feininger was a professional, he wasn't some crazy Acquis engineer of human souls—but Feininger knew that John had gone to Mljet to interfere with that effort.

The Acquis cadres in Mljet were cranks, radicals, and zealots. Of course some Dispensation agent had arrived there for containment and push-back. John had ventured to Mljet as a Dispensation activist. John would lure the cranks aside with a tasty carrot if he could; if that effort failed, he would slide a stick straight through their spinning wheels.

Because John seemed so polite and refined, people underestimated him. His quietest attacks, always carried out in a low, scholarly voice while wearing a business suit, were brutally effective. Feininger understood modern global realpolitik. His bluster about the architect was his counterploy. Feininger was radiating the obvious: she could sense that in the poised way he held his teacup. Acquis interests had been threatened on a certain part of the global game board. Feininger could try to defend that dodgy Adriatic territory—those weirdos with helmets and skeletons—or he could boldly and swiftly fly over to counterattack within Los Angeles. That was what Feininger had come here to demonstrate.

All in all, his choice of a target—the Family's favorite Los Angeles architect—that was a civilized gambit. Feininger had to know about Vera in Mljet. He could have been nastier with her. Feininger would not get nasty, because Feininger was almost exactly like John. Dr. Feininger was an Acquis counter-John. Dr. Feininger, having learned what John could do, was planning to out-John John. Dropping by to put a scare into Mrs. John—there must be Acquis strate-gists chuckling over that tactic, behind a network screen someplace.

"Dr. Feininger, I'm only a pop star. While you are a moralist. A thought leader. You're a global techno-social philosopher."

Feininger laughed. "If it's any help, we go through vogues just like you do."

"I know about the Acquis. We Americans have a lot of Acquis people. In Boston, San Francisco, Seattle . . . Still, they can't compare to the truly global Acquis thought leaders. The American Acquis don't think as creatively as you do."

"I didn't expect to hear this from you," Feininger allowed. "This might be significant."

"I'm thinking: we need to try something unexpected. Fresh. Con-temporary. Of the moment. Something unexpectable."

"This should be interesting."

"Mind you, this is just my own personal proposal. I'm in no position to dictate terms to my Family-Firm—I hope you understand that."

"I know who Mila Montalban is," said Feininger, smiling at her. "So do half the people in the world."

"Well, I'm thinking: a public event. Nothing too 'global.' Because that word sounds so old-fashioned now. I'm thinking
postglobal.
Super-global. A quiet, elite kind of political summit. Held in orbit."

"A political summit held in orbit?"

"Yes, up in LilyPad. You wouldn't exactly call LilyPad 'the space frontier' . . . because sweet LilyPad is not a primitive place, exactly . . . but it's certainly
remote.
And, Dr. Feininger: We don't want any
boring, tedious
people at our theory summit held in outer space. We should be inviting: the very exceptional, very high-level thinkers visionary, nonpartisan people, the people far outside the global box. . .Not even one hundred people. The truly significant postglobal civil society thinkers. Maybe fifty of you."

Feininger considered this suggestion. He was flattered to be one of the world's fifty most important thinkers. Then it dawned on him that he was being asked to pick and validate the other forty-nine. This was much more important to him than any small Adriatic island. "Seventy people?" he said.

"Sixty, at the very most? We'd be stretching the launch services."

"If you could launch fifty, the magnetic pad in Eastern Germany could launch twenty-five."

"We could
house
seventy people. We could feed them and give them nice fresh air."

"You could do that? You're sure?"

"Not me personally as a society hostess, but the Montgomery-Montalban Family-Firm . . . Our guests rarely complain about our hos-pitality."

A slow smile appeared on Feininger's lips. "And would your space event have cachet, Miss Montalban?"

"Europe does cachet, sir. Here in California, we do glamour. And we do glamour by the metric ton." Feininger set his teacup down with a tender clink. "Glory, lightness, speed, and brilliancy."

??????????

RADMILA WALKED THE ARTIFICIAL BEACH
,
vamped be-fore the floating cameras, and gazed into the sun-glittering Pacific. Six lunatics were surfing out there. For the life of her, Radmila could not understand surfers in Los Angeles. Obviously riding on a wave was a nice stunt performance, but
inside
the ocean?
There were whole chunks and shoals of broken China bobbing around out there, all glass, nails, slime, and toxic jellyfish.

The scanty fabric of Radmila's swimsuit belonged to a sponsor. So did the hairstyle, the watch, the sunglasses, and the hat. This privatized beach, like all modern tourist beaches, was a fake, as elaborate as an im-mersive world.

Radmila was looking sexy today, as contractually required. Looking sexy was a basic theatrical craft. The critical problem came when these
-
vere labor of looking sexy made one forget to actually be sexy. Radmila did not feel at all sexy, in this swimsuit, on this beach. She felt dread. Certain men direly wanted to have sexy sex with professionally beau-tifulwomen: sex with the stars. Those men were delusionary. Sex with a star was an awful idea, like having sex with a rosebush. You were not supposed to get into bed with a rosebush. You were supposed to give it horse manure and sell the blossoms.

Radmila knew that her most loyal fans, her truest devotees, were not men gloating over her gym-toned body and her tawny, sunlit skin: her biggest fans were all women. They were humbled, jittery, self-critical women with an underlying streak of resentful violence. Her fans were women very much like herself, except less lucky and more stupid.

She, Radmila Mihajlovic, had become Miss Mila Montalban. She had done that because she had, almost by miracle, found the technical and financial capacity. There was just no way—no way at all, no way in hell—that the similar fantasies of her fans could ever be fulfilled. The fans could never become like the stars. This body that flaunted its perfect female curves before the camera: she had created this body through an exhausting, comprehensive ordeal. Having seven children was easier, for that was the sort of thing untrained women had once done without anesthetic. So she wasn't walking on a beach, being pretty. She was tormenting her fans with her star glamour.In some strange way, this unity in frus-trated suffering was the true relationship of stars and fans. That was why her fans loved to see her suffer. Fans knew that she de-ployed her charm and beauty as a weapon to tantalize, and they were spiteful about that torment and they wished her the worst. Their hatred and envy of celebrities could be lethal.

It was especially awful to "confide" to one's fans, artlessly discussing one's starry hotness, through some low-life aggregator of planetary eyeballs . . . Pretending to reveal her personal secrets to the fans was the worst and vilest toil in the industry.

"Exclusive star interviews." They were ancient rituals. They always made her long for death. Yet the fans had to be fed. For the fans were forever hungry.

"Yes, my John brings truth and justice to some of the most desperate people in the world . . . I miss John every day. I want John to fly home to me. He promised he would break his own rules and he'll fly here in a rocket. Yes, those rumors are true. No, not that we're breaking up. That'll never happen! The rumors are true that the fire is back in our re-lationship! John and I had our rough spots, we had our trouble and grief, but you just can't keep us down! Just you wait and see, you're going to see some very good, very happy news from both of us . . . "

When the interview at last expired in its puddle of flaccid lies, she fled in a Family limo, then went to join Lionel. Lionel was kind to her, because Lionel understood these things.

Lionel was having a late lunch at a posh restaurant. The restaurant was noted for its excellent seafood, because it marched on gleaming centipede legs deep into the restive ocean and it grew all its seafood by itself. The "swordfish," for instance . . . that gleaming white flesh on Li-onel's platter was very far from a wild, sea-native swordfish, but a DNA scan would never tell.

Lionel had matured a great deal since Toddy had (as the Family pri-vately phrased it) "passed up." His personal upgrades had cost much more than Radmila's makeover, and since Lionel was so young and duc-tile, the effects on him were drastic.

Lionel had put on kilos of male muscle in his back, legs, and shoul-ders. His eyebrows were thicker, and blue stubble haunted his lips and chin.

Most critically, Lionel had changed his signature look. The new per-sonal dresser had swiftly ditched his Peter Pan delinquent street-kid cos-tumes, and made Lionel sexier, more transgressive. He looked like a bad boy in power now. He looked slicker, like the upscale version of an un-dercover cop. Radmila arrived at the table, hidden in stage-ninja gear. None of the diners took much notice of her: Lionel always had his bodyguards in this restaurant. Lately he'd had a whole posse of them. The Angeleno street gangs loved Lionel. They were his biggest fans.

Glyn silently passed her a menu and a half-empty shaker of tequila. Radmila poured and drank. Alcohol was blue ruin, but she wouldn't have to look so painfully sexy again for quite a while. She was going to put on weight. John was going to get her pregnant. That was all arranged.

The older Family folks—Guillermo, Freddy, Buffy, Raph—they'd been surprisingly calm and accepting about the new Family order. In the sudden power vacuum of Toddy's absence, it was Lionel, Toddy's grandchild, who was proving the hardest to handle.

Lionel was starting to have adult ideas. His generation's take on real-ity was unique.

"What does that mean, 'grasp the nettle'?" Lionel demanded.

"A nettle is a weed," Glyn told him. "It stings you when you touch it."

"But why would people let plants sting them? Plants don't even have brains."

"Our Family budget is like a nettle," Glyn told him patiently. "When you stick to that budget, that hurts, but you just have to accept that."

"We're rich."

"We're not infinitely rich, and a Family star is supposed to spend his star allowance on enhancing his star potential."

"That's what I did," said Lionel. "I know that I spent money, but I'm almost eighteen."

"Lionel: You bought weapons."

"Glyn: Just listen to me for once, okay? I'm not Little Mary Montal-ban, the world's most adorable child star! I'm a tough guy! I'm a ghetto, barrio, Los Angeles dirty-pop, kick-your-ass, street-credibility star!

We do agree on that, don't we? I'm the Family's gangster star."

"You're Dispensation. You're a spontaneous-reaction, volunteer grass-roots star of our street militias. Those people aren't 'gangsters.' "

Lionel sighed and looked to Radmila. "Mila, just tell her. Please."

"Lionel does have a certain point," Radmila said. "His core demo-graphic is rebellious male teens. Especially, lower-income."

"That is where the Family placed me as an idol," Lionel said. "I am playing the role I was given. I'm playing straight to my fan base."

"Weapons,
Lionel?"

"Sure, technically, shoulder-launched rockets are 'weapons.' But practically speaking, they're rapid urban-demolition equipment. You wouldn't know this, being a girl—but
very few people
ever get killed by shoulder-launched rockets. It's the
buildings
that get killed by shoulder-launched rockets. It's all about 'warchitecture.' "