The Caryatids

relief effort is al­ready 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 IN from the urban sensor­web, 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 uni­forms, 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 dispensa­tions 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 Family­Firm’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 wait­ing 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 supposed to look in movie 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.

Lionel generally dressed like a kick-ass, paramilitary LA street kid, but he was the kind of superbly eye- catching street kid that only a very rich kid could possibly be. Lionel was a child of advantage: he did hor­monal bloodwork, ate a strict nutraceutical diet, trained in gymnastics, and had three martial-arts coaches.

Radmila suffered in the high-tech Family gym, but Lionel lived in that gym. Lionel could walk on his hands better than most teens could walk on their own feet.

Radmila handed him a tissue from the glove compartment. Lionel took the hint, and wiped his grandmother’s stage makeup from his lips.

Lionel had puffed air into the old woman’s dead lungs. He’d pounded her heart into action with his fists. Lionel was core Dispensa­tion: he knew first aid.

“You did really good tonight, Lionel. You have saved your grand­mother’s life.”

Lionel held his chin high. “You have to use your head when you’re working security.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“I made the right choice,” he said artlessly. “See, that dead costume killed Grandma, right? It smothered her. I wanted to pull my knife and slice it off of her. But I didn’t. I waited for her power to reboot.”

“That was smart. You were thinking like a grown-up. Your brother will be proud.”

“The system crashed—but only for a little while,” Lionel said. “As soon as her underwear came back on, that got her breathing. We can’t panic and wreck the system. Because we are the system.” He nodded, pleased with his insight. “It takes three trained staffers to tuck her into that costume. So I’m sure glad I didn’t improvise.”

“When we get back home safe, I’ll improvise you a nice roast-beef  sandwich.”

“Are you sure that I did the right thing tonight, Mila? I mean… Grandma was dead.”

“You did just fine, Lionel. You’re a wizard, you’re a true star.” Rad­mila propped her flip-flopped feet on the greenly blinking dashboard. “I sure wish John was home tonight. John would mix me a drink. Nobody mixes a nice Greenhouse Tequila like he can.”

Lionel pulled something large and ugly from a Velcro slot on his chest.

“So what’s that thing?” Radmila said.

“Hey, this is my cool street blade, sister!”

“Let me see it?”

He handed it over, hilt-first.

The knife’s awkward handle was wrapped in length after length of multicolored electrical wire. Lionel’s homemade knife was made en­tirely from junked computer parts. A dozen big silicon chips—all black and heat- discolored—had been set into a melted plastic handle. Those chips were like a jagged row of shark’s teeth.

“This stage prop sure is weird,” Radmila said. “It smells awful! Why does it stink so much?”

“Yeah, that’s the blood they put on it!” said Lionel. “When you make a prison shiv, you get, like, every guy in your prison gang to drip some blood on your blade! That screws up the DNA evidence.”

“California doesn’t have any ‘prison gangs.’ California doesn’t even have prisons.”

“Yeah, so this is, like, a modern electronic-parole prison shiv!”

Radmila held the makeshift weapon with one thumb and two fingers. It was more than merely strange and awkward: it looked insane.

The more she looked at this desperate, far-fetched contrivance, the worse it made her feel. It was not a stage prop at all. Some stranger somewhere had put a fanatical, psychopathic effort into making this strange parody of a knife. Its very crudeness was scary. It radiated a de­termined, lethal, sacramental feeling. Evil was pouring off of it, like the peppery dust from a shattered mass of concrete.

Radmila looked into the guileless young eyes of her brother-in-law. “Can I keep this knife for you?”

“Keep it? What, keep it where? Are you gonna tuck it into your bra?”

She wasn’t wearing a bra. “Well, you shouldn’t carry a thing like this.”

’’You can keep my knife if you want it,” Lionel said, putting a brave face on his wounded feelings. “You’re the one who gave that to me.”

“I never gave you this thing. This thing is not my style.”

Now Lionel was was upset. “But you did! You came onto my action set and gave that to me. It was all wrapped up in pink butcher paper.”