The Caryatids

Radmila did this. The Family studied the colorful popping disaster dots with a renewed sense of dread. They were clustered on certain lines. Those seismic lines.

“Do we have any Family game plan for the complete destruction of California?” said Freddy.

“John does,” Radmila said.

Freddy lifted his brows. “Oh?”

“Yes. John once told me that if the planet Earth became completely unfit for life, there would be two places for our Family to go: up into orbit, or down under the Earth.”

“I never heard John say that to me,” Buffy complained.

“We were floating up in LilyPad when John told me that. On our honeymoon.” They had been floating at a porthole and gazing at the distant Earth. There were certain angles of orbit, in the host of whizzing sunsets, when the sweet old planet had looked thin and meager: like some small, distant town on the skids.

“John’s such a romantic,” said Freddy, who had never liked John much.

“Our Family would do that!” Radmila shouted. “We would do it, we would cut a deal with that reality! We’d be floating up in the sky, in some kind of bubble. Or under the ground, in some other kind of bubble. Of course we would do it! What else could we do? This Family thinks in the long term, because the Family has to survive!”

Rishi came forward. “I have Frank Osbourne waiting for you.” Freddy was glad for the change of subject. “Let’s have a word with the gentleman.”

The starchitect’s avatar appeared in a corner of the Family’s situation map.

“So, Frank,” said Freddy, “you’re in a simulation at the moment?” “Gotta be in a simulation,” grumbled the architect. “All the big construction business happens inside simulations.”

“You didn’t notice the most recent big earthquake?”

“Was there a tremor?” Osbourne said. “I’m logging in from Vancouver.”

“No? Then let us be the first to tell you that your new showroom museum came through a major seismic event with flying colors! Congratulations.”

“No kidding?” said Osbourne. “Swell!”

“Except for a power outage,” Guillermo put in sourly.

“I told you to let me handle the power!” the starchitect shouted. “I told you I needed full command over the grid! I told you that! I told you all that from day one!”

“We did our best for you on the very difficult power issue, Frank,” said Freddy cordially. “Actual architecture differs from virtual architecture. We can’t just reconfigure everything on the fly.”

“Didn’t you read my white paper? You can’t make those obsolete distinctions anymore! Bits and atoms: Bits are bits of atoms! The sensorweb is Reality 2.0! So it’s all exactly the same! Debate over!”

“It’s great to see you’re the same old Frank Osbourne,” said Freddy. “We’ve really missed working with you. That was always so stimulating.”

“Yeah?” said the avatar, its host of tiny polygons brightening a little.

“So, how’d your mossy old mansion come through the latest quake? When are you guys gonna do your major facelift on that place?”

“Do you have something specific in mind for us, Frank?”

“For you? For the Montgomery-Montalbans? Absolutely I do! You know those mobile geodesics in the LACFS?” The architect called his posh structure “Lack-Fuss,” an irony that hadn’t been lost on Radmila.

“Spontaneous construction!” the avatar declared. “The potential there hasn’t begun to be tapped! We could do amazing things with that technique. Incredible things. And fast. I could do that tomorrow! If it weren’t for those Neanderthals in the seismic code departments!”

The avatar’s face wasn’t moving much, but they could hear Osbourne furiously hissing through his teeth. “That’s all political crap! It’s got nothing to do with public safety! It’s all about the trades and the subcontractors. They’re a lousy bunch of featherbedders! They’re a vast conspiracy!”

“We’ve heard that before,” said Freddy.

“Yeah, but you people could handle a thing like that. Easy! That little zoning war in La Mirada, you people were wizards at that.”

“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 eye­witnesses 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 FIRES in Los Angeles were crushed within twenty-four hours. That left the delicate political task of destroying the worst-damaged buildings.