The Caryatids

rehearsed that thoroughly, so it was great. So: I choose to hold it up.”

Glyn brightened. “Really?”

“Yeah. You have just talked me into it, Glyn. Because you talked me into it with my own advice. I can’t be such a hypocrite as to deny what I said to my own Family. Yes. You are right about putting the past behind us. We absolutely have to do that, we both have to do it. We must. We will get over ourselves, we will turn our faces straight to whatever comes next. I love your big bold plan. Your plan makes perfect sense to me. I will make up with my estranged husband. Fine. I will step into the ruby slippers of the dead superstar. Great. Somebody has to do all that: of course I’ll do it.”

Radmila leaned in. “And you, Glyn Montgomery: You think you’re pretty smart, but you’d better work like you’ve never worked before. Be­cause the Firm’s gotten fat and lazy. We need skill and discipline. You think you know what pain and trouble is all about? You are the fair­haired child of fortune, girl! You don’t know half of what it means to suf­fer in this world. Well, I do know that: and you will know it. So you just get-ready.”

Glyn stared at her in astonishment. Glyn was genuinely frightened. But Glyn was frightened in a new and different and much more con­structive way.

This was going to work. This had to work. Radmila would make it work.

* * *

RADMILA’S FAMILY COUP D’ETAT went according to Glyn’s careful plan. If the new Montgomery-Montalban system was not yet a regime, it was at least a provisional government. It was a huge emotional relief to the Family-Firm that someone-anyone-had stepped into the aching gap left by Toddy Montgomery.

So that first bold act would carry Radmila a little ways, but to cement her position, she would need a Dispensation-style juggernaut of rapid and effective action.

So: a major household remodeling project. The Bivouac was well overdue for a remake and remodel, and it was one arena where Radmila would not be challenged.

Toddy Montgomery had placed the gymnasium in the basement of the mansion, for a lady did not show her public that she had to sweat. Obviously, in the modern Los Angeles star system, where stars were physically dominant, swaggering street presences, the gym had to be­come the lady’s power base.

So: Radmila moved the gymnasium into the former Situation Room. Radmila hired—not Frank Osbourne, he was too much the seasoned es­tablishment starchitect—but one of Osbourne’s best disciples, a younger woman freshly gone into her own practice. This young archi­tect was ambitious, modish, and contemporary, and she badly needed a leg-up.

Grateful for her big break, the new decorator didn’t dawdle. Rad­mila’s new gym was transformed. It was no longer a dusty place of clank­ing iron and steroidal machismo. No, it was the “Transformation Spa,” a gleaming balletic wonderland of Zen river pebbles embedded in clear Perspex, reactive areogel yoga mats, sunlight-friendly, semitranslucent, ultra-high-strength oxide ceramic roof panels, with a one-way treatment that repelled passing spyplanes…

Furthermore—lest the Family-Firm feel neglected—the newly emp­tied basement was swiftly transmuted into the new Situation Room, or rather, the Montgomery-Montalban Situation Bunker.

If California was facing a looming supervolcano, then the revived and vigorous Family-Firm would not wring their hands about that challenge. Their new Situation Bunker was entirely mounted on tremor-proof springs, and fully sealable against volcanic, seismic, atomic, biological, and chemical mishaps.

The Situation Bunker was soberly traditional in its design philosophy­—American Superpower traditional. It was a bunker fit for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Planning for D-Day: pragmatic, sleek, no-nonsense, efficient, incorruptible, and continental in scale. Very Bell System, very Westing­house, very General Motors.

There was some mild grumbling about Radmila’s ambitious reforms, but Glyn held up her end, Uncle Jack was with her all the way, Lionel was infallibly enthusiastic, and there were no Family arguments at all about the new nursery.

Furthermore, no one could deny that a young matriarch was much more fun than an elderly matriarch. For all Toddy’s wisdom and street smarts, Toddy’s last years had had a Hapsburg Empire feeling, an over­wrought, enfeebled system tottering toward its grave on a baroquely gilt walker. With Radmila in charge, the Family-Firm had a spring in its step again. There was a clear dynamic visible. There was forward motion.

Since the house was not finished, the Family could not die.

Radmila moved more of the star budget into the coming generation: Lionel and Mary. Let it not be said of her that she was personally hog­ging the limelight and eating the Family’s seed corn. No: she aspired to be steady, dutiful, fully professional, an engine of production.

Radmila still went to her gym, but not with the fanatical intensity of a front-line diva. A woman planning for motherhood needed some body fat. Even if Radrnila didn’t bear the biblical horde of kids that Glyn de­manded, there would have to be one. One or two. Three. There would have to be children, no matter how one felt about one’s husband: any Queen of England knew that. That was a dynast’s reality.

Early October arrived. Soon John would return from his meander­ings in the Adriatic. The Family-Firm would be watching that reunion with care; it was a crucial performance for Radmila. She was deter­mined to ace it.

Radmila performed her gym routine—“the worst thing that would happen all day”—and retired into her new oneiric pod for beauty sleep. This brand-new gym pod—oblate, speckled, seamed, it looked like a giant hemp seed —was said to feature all kinds of exotic benefits to neu­ral well-being. It was like a Zen spa with a hinge.

As far as Radmila could tell, there was little more to this pricey dream machine than Californian hype. The pleasant flashing lights, the dron­ing swoony ambient noises, and the so-called aroma “therapy” had done nothing much for her: or to her. Still, given that she was one of the product’s sponsors and it was quite a handsome little earner, she saw no harm in using it.

Radmila climbed into the pod and clicked it shut. This time, as she fell into a pleasant doze, something about the pod’s routine touched her brain—not with the harshness of an Acquis neural intrusion, but in a civilized, consumer-friendly fashion.

Radmila tumbled into a lucid, prophetic dream.

She dreamed that John had come home. John was not the gloomy, burdened, and apologetic philanderer whose company she dreaded. No, he was the younger John, the daring swain who had discovered her. In Los Angeles, Radmila had tried so hard to be a skulking stateless nameless thing, and yet John had located her, and John knew who she was and where she came from. He even cared about her and what hap­pened to her.

She had little more to offer this prince than sweet surrender, but this seemed to be what the prince most desired from a woman in his life. Her abject emotional and sexual dependence on him steadied his self­image. He was no longer a rich young parlor radical with some rather sinister interests in emergent technologies. John Montgomery Montal­ban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to him­self that he had the power to transform himself and others.

Here he was back again, smiling and full of good cheer, the young John, the tech magician, and he had brought her mysterious gifts, as he always liked so much to do: two of his black hobby-objects. One hob­ject was a fizzing black shoe box, and the other one was even more mysterious, high-technical, and powerful, and it was… in stern dream logic… another fizzing black shoe box…

“Eureka!” cried the young John in his ecstasy: charismatic and sexy. “I have saved the world!”

What could it be? John was so busy with his colored wires and tubes… Never a moment for her, not a smile, not a kiss or hug… The first black shoe box was nothing much, the even more sinister shoe box was nothing much either, but to connect the two shoe boxes… Of course! Networking! A network would change everything!

Now the brilliant John, with all the passionate conviction that had first won her heart, was declaiming something solemn and arcane and yet fantastically convincing about his amazing black boxes… The first was sonoluminescent cold fusion, a host of screaming tiny bubbles hot­ter than the surface of the sun…

Banging on the shoe box, yes, John cried, sonoluminescence, a true miracle technology that had never quite worked yet.

The second fizzing black box was chemosynthetic black bubbling slime straight from the Freudian bottom of the ocean… It was a true biological miracle, it made life from darkness and nothing, it could live on pure volcano goo… John was pulling the black volcano goo out of his black box as he ranted about it to no one in particular, it was stink­ing of primeval sulfur, it was oily, drippy, satanic, it was all over his hands, it was running down his