The Caryatids

much… “ Radmila waved vaguely at the peach-colored bedroom walls. “She built all of this, and all I can do is to try to hold it up.”

“That won’t be easy,” Jack told her, “but she handpicked you. Every­body knows you’ve been groomed for that role. You’re in a strong posi­tion, if you can stand the pressure.”

“Jack, I can stand it. I can stand anything. Worse things have hap­pened to me than this. You will help me, won’t you?”

“You always called her ‘Toddy,’ “ Jack said. “’Theodora Montgomery.’ Well, I remember another woman—Lila Jane Dickey from Hawkinsville, Georgia. That’s who I remember when I see that thing in the bubble. You meet a creature like Lila Jane maybe once in a generation.”

Jack chased a busy robot from the windowglass, which was already spotless. “You ever heard of a thing called ‘AIDS’? AIDS was another plague.”

“Of course I’ve heard of that one, Jack.”

“Well, Toddy, or rather Lila Jane—she showed up in this town right after we first cured that illness. Curing AIDS was awesome. It was like somebody hit Hollywood with a promiscuity bomb. You could literally see the dust blow right off the sexual revolution.”

Uncle Jack liked to talk in an old-fashioned way. There was some­thing deeply touching and endearing about him. That nostalgic glow in Jack’s fine old face was illuminating her dark mood. The future might be painful, even chaotic, but no one could rob the Montgomery­-Montalbans of their heritage.

“Toddy was the bomb,” said Uncle Jack. “Any star might choose to sleep with some big director, but Toddy liked to sleep with the techni­cians. The ugly, geeky, meta-media guys! Yeah, she cut through those nerds like the scythe of doom! She even married one of them—she mar­ ried Montalban.”

Jack tugged at his tasteful cuff links. “I told her, way back then: ‘Lila, he’s a nouveau riche Spanish-language digital media mogul! And we’re proper Hollywood stars, so he’s just not our kind of people!’ But I was dead wrong, and Toddy knew better. It took a visionary to carry off her strategies. Toddy was so totally clued-in. The Next Web was sure to take over the world. The Next Web had everything, because the Next Web was everything! All it needed was some oomph! It needed some big sexy va-va-va-voom! And Toddy had that stuff by the megaton! All people could do was stare.”

Jack stared into Toddy’s medical bubble. “Not that I like to stare at her just now… but yeah, the people stared, all right. Even the ma­chines stared. Forget TV, movies—the old entertainment vehicles. Toddy could scratch her ass on any public beach and pull down ten mil­lion web-hits from homemade spy videos. She walked through her life in a universal cloud of voyeurs.”

Radmila blinked. “Toddy never told me much about those aspects of her profession.”

“Oh, come on, come on! Your generation never thinks like that at all! That’s all over for you. You young folks are an entirely different breed of star. You crazy superhuman kids, you don’t even have four-letter words for sex! Birth rates, children: That’s what you people fuss about. You. think that sex is all engineering.”

“Gender roles are engineering,” said Radmila.

“Fine, sure, go ahead, be that way… Well… the Toddy you knew was a wise old woman. The girl I knew was young: a hungry, very deter­mined pop idol with a body like a force of nature. And even though I’m as gay as a box of birds, I sure had the better deal out of that one.”

* * *

RADMILA DID A COSTUME CHANGE, snapping herself into her formal Dispensation uniform. To dress in this way: so simple, stern, and functionally ergonomic—it always helped her morale. She was proud of her medals and the hotlinks racing down her lapels: they were the visible evidence of endless fund-raisers, hospital visits, ribbon cut­tings, awards ceremonies. “Community leadership.”

The Family’s Situation Room was a legacy from old Sergio Montal­ban. It was the master geek’s addition to the Bivouac, part of his dogged campaign to stabilize the family finances. When Sergio had been Fam­ily chairman, the Situation Room had been his dashboard for the Fam­ily’s fortunes.

The Family’s fortunes had prospered mightily, but the pioneer’s hard­ware had been badly dated. Today the Family’s investments were so in­terwoven with the urban fabric of Los Angeles that maps made more sense than spreadsheets.

So the Family used the plush, hushed Situation Room as an infor­mal romper space. They watched old movies in there. Most modern Angelenos couldn’t watch movies—because they couldn’t sit still and quiet for two solid hours without taking prompts from the net. But the Montgomery-Montalbans were a disciplined, highly traditional folk.

The Family-Firm didn’t exactly “watch” the old movies—not in the traditional sense—but they would crowd together bodily in the Situa­tion Room, slouch on beanbags, cook and eat heaps of popcorn, and crack silly jokes while movies spooled on the walls. The Situation Room had been the scene of Radmila’s happiest hours, when she was pregnant and gulping chocolate ice cream. John had been proud of her then, truly happy about her, and Family members always went out of their way to be kind to a pregnant girl. It was the first time in her life that Rad­mila had been part of a human family: accepted, relied upon, taken for granted, just plain there.

Radmila even rather liked to watch the old movies. Especially the very, very old silent movies, which seemed less bizarre and abrasive than the other kinds.

The Situation Room was crowded this morning, but the Family­Firm’s games today were grim. The Directors had brusquely abandoned Sergio’s screens. A modern autofocus projector painted the wall with a geolocative map.

This disaster map was busily agglomerating the damage reports from the net, which were flooding in by their millions. The map filtered this torrent of noise, so as to produce some actionable intelligence.

Southern California was measled all over with color-coded dots: scar­let, tangerine, golden, cerulean, and forest green. The map refreshed once each second, and as it did, all the colored dots denoting their small threats and ongoing horrors would do a little popcorn jump.

Politely, Radmila did a star entrance into the Situation Room. They could tell by her gloomy choice of soundtrack that her news was bad.

Glyn was manning the interactive table near the wall. Glyn had the most experience with the Family’s big crisis map, so she was required to drive it. Glyn peered up from her hectic labor. “Mila, how is Toddy?”

Radmila killed her soundtrack and silently shook her head. The Fam­ily knew the truth instantly. They’d all feared the worst, but they’d dared to entertain some hope.

Radmila conjured up a chair and had it carry her to Glyn. Glyn groped at her touchscreen, jacked her target cursor around, and stared at the busy projected dots, but Glyn was taking this news harder than anyone. Glyn was twitching all over and on the verge of tears.

Toddy’s heirs sat before the disaster map in their ragged, worried half circle, glumly clutching their control wands. Guillermo, Freddy, and Sofia Montalban were the Firm’s driving forces these days. Buffy and Raph Montgomery had shown up to make a Family quorum.

Doug and Lily were Buffy’s children, while Rishi and Elsie were Raph’s. The Family grandchildren clustered in the back of the Situation Room. They were the younger folk, so it was their business to run out into the field and do sit-reps.

Radmila slid her fingers over Glyn’s pale knuckles. “Let me drive this, Glyn.”

“I can do it,” Glyn said tautly.

“Glyn, take off. Some breakfast would do you good.”

Nobody else seemed to realize this, but Glyn was coming out of her skin. Glyn was always the quiet, self- sacrificing one in the Family-Firm: the one who was always there for everybody else. Glyn was the normal one, the quiet one. Glyn was no star. She wasn’t a Synchronist. Glyn took no interest in Dispensation politics. Glyn never made any big, starry public appearances. Glyn had the lowest public profile in the Family.

Because Glyn was Toddy’s clone.

Glyn had been the biggest public scandal that the Family-Firm had ever suffered. Even the tragic assassination of their governor had caused them less turmoil. It had been an epic Hollywood calamity when the public learned that one of Toddy’s wealthy geek lovers had cloned Toddy. The legal and political fight to get custody of that little girl­—away from her so-called parents—had brought the Family years of heartache.

But Hollywood scandals faded, since there were always some hotter, fresher scandals. Thirty years had