The Caryatids

Golden footmarks glowed on the floor. Radmila braced herself for performance.

“Whoa,” said Glyn, “I’ve got a bad stress readout from your left ankle.”

“My ankle is fine now!”

“The everyware knows you better than you do,” said Glyn.

Radmila rucked up the hem of her costume. The stage gear protested scrunchily. Kinetic textiles never liked departing from their script.

Radmila flexed her left knee and extended her foot. “Okay, so let me see it. Show me now.”

Narrowly focused beams sprang from the walls and ceiling. They bril­liantly painted her leg with projected data. Her bones and ligaments ap­peared, neatly coded and labeled: “Navicular.” “Cuboid.” “Anterior Talofibular.” The working pieces of the human ankle. What ugly names they had.

Radmila bent at the waist, gripped her extended toes, and rotated the joint. The simulated meat and bones writhed in a lively fashion, very glossy and painterly. Yes, she felt one leftover pang deep in there. One ugly, ankle- sprain pang. “Damn.”

“You’ve overdone it. Let’s cancel your stunt tonight.”

“I can’t cancel my chair stunt!”

“You’re booked for that big hotel opening Monday. They want your full set: your precision jumps, your vaults, all your backup dancers… If you wreck your ankle here tonight, your investors will kill me.”

Radrnila’s temper, always sharp before she went on stage, sharpened further. “Am I supposed to publicly appear tonight in the Los Angeles County Furniture Showroom, and deny the public my signature stunting­with-furniture?”

“Oh, is the diva losing her composure?” mocked Glyn.

“We can tape my ankle. That won’t take a minute.”

“Look: Tonight should be simple. You catwalk over to Toddy. You sit on Toddy’s fancy couch. Toddy lectures her public all about historical furniture, and you just listen nicely and be all ingenue about it.”

“I hear your concept,” said Radmila. “Your concept stinks.”

“We’re in a furniture museum! Toddy’s fans are a million years old! They won’t care if you don’t fly around the room like a fairy princess!”

Radmila seethed silently. What a pain Glyn was. No one could pull the rug out from under you like a member of your own family. Glyn un­derstood Montgomery-Montalban family values, nobody knew them better-but Glyn had never taken those values to heart. Because Glyn was a stage technician, not a star. Glyn had no magic.

“Toddy specifically asked me to stunt tonight. At dinner, Toddy asked me in front of everybody. I know that you heard Toddy ask me to stunt.”

“If you’re finally asking me about that idea, well, I think your cheap stunt upstages Toddy at her retirement show.”

“That’s why Toddy wants me to stunt,” said Radmila. “She’s handing it over to me in public tonight, don’t you get that? Toddy is the old school. Toddy’s retiring! Her public’s very sentimental, they love an emo pitch like that!”

“The investors don’t love emo pitches,” Glyn said crisply.

“Think in the long term,” said Radmila, and this was a very Family­Firm thing to say. So Glyn finally had to shut up.

Radmila struggled to compose herself. The last-minute backstage squabble had blown open the gates of her stage fright. Radmila’s fears al­ways attacked her before she went on. Always. She never breathed a word about her fears to anyone, which meant that she felt them more keenly.

What ‘did she have to be so scared about, before a performance? Nothing—but everything. Her stage fright rose within her like a hurri­cane seeking a center. Her fear and trauma had to fixate on something.

Suddenly, it centered on Toddy.

Yes. She was so afraid of losing Toddy. Toddy was her diva, her coach, her mentor. Without Toddy, she was ugly and useless. She had no tal­ent. She had no looks. She was just a lost girl who happened to have a strong rapport with ubiquitous systems.

Tonight the angry public would surely find her out. She was nobody’s star at all, she was a fraud, a fake. Harsh, cold, staring eyes would drain all the blood from her body. The whole world would collapse. The shame would kill her.

Radmila stamped both her feet at the speed of her thudding heart.

“Okay, launch me!”

“Roger that!”

Radmila sashayed through her glowing footsteps, head high, shoul­ders back. Perfect. She leaped two meters and landed like a bird on the back of the skeletal chair. Ten out of ten.

The simulated chair arced back on its two rear legs, FXing with su­pernatural ease. Radmila wheeled in place atop the chair. Light. Bril­liant. Her slippers flexed, the chair teetered, the wire flexed. The FX 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 plas­tic threading, sensor pads, electric embroidery… Gleaming lights, con­ductive snaps, antenna yarn, laser-cut dust-repellent golden foil: Stage costumes looked terrific when they were turned on. When you sat still in­side 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 metier, 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, every­ware, 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 bul­let 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?”