good reasons for that. If you can mollify him, then I will do as you ask. Otherwise, you and I have a quarrel.”
“You’re threatening me.”
“I’m glad that you noticed,” Djordje said cheerily. “If you don’t want my threats, then don’t offend me. Let’s just be reasonable… no, let’s be pretty! You are so pretty, Radmila! What on Earth did they do to you, all those movie-star people?”
“We’re not
“In Vienna, we still love the old cinema. We love many fine, civilized things, in Vienna. It would be pleasant if you Americans would stop degrading them.”
Radmila ached to leap to her feet and slap the smirk off Djordje’s face. It was a luminous, creeping, burning urge.
Toddy would never strike a man in the face. What would Toddy do?
Radmila smiled sweetly and touched one finger to her cheek.
Djordje’s eyes widened.
“Djordje dear, your friend has come a long way to Los Angeles, under some trying circumstances. I apologize to you for your present difficulties. I promise that I did not intend those troubles. Why don’t you check out of this clinic, retrieve your possessions from security, and send your Dr. Feininger in here to see me? I have an offer to make to your Acquis friend and I think he will be pleased to hear it.”
“You mean all that?”
“Yes, I do, and I don’t lack for resources. I plan to put things right, and I’ll trust to your sense of decency not to trouble my Family further.”
“That strange tone of voice, that way you move your lips,” Djordje marveled. “That is
“I’m happy when the people I love are happy.”
“What a wonderful, inspiring thing to say. Those words give me such hope. I watch all your performances! You truly have talent! Don’t believe those bad reviews. You’re improving steadily!”
Radmila said nothing. She assembled a smile.
“Radmila, you are so much closer to escaping our curse than the rest of us. Maybe that has been fated to happen. As children… we were created and raised as an evil plan for this world. But in a world as truly evil as our world truly is—maybe we can act for good. When I look at you, I can almost believe that.”
“I’m glad that we had this heart-to-heart talk, George. It has cleared the air. Let’s not keep your important friend waiting.”
Djordje shuffled from polished foot to foot on the antiseptic clinic floor. He seemed genuinely moved. “Listen, Radmila: Please be careful with him. Dr. Feininger is my friend. That doesn’t make him
“Oh, I may be only a humble star, but I am from a political family. I’ve met Acquis pundits before.”
Muttering, dithering, intolerable, Djordje finally left her alone. At last, Radmila was able to draw one clean, untainted breath. Her heartbeat slowed. That had been very bad.
But it was not so entirely bad as she had feared. She’d managed to play her way through that ordeal. She’d simply acted her way through it without ever breaking character. Stardom was full of suffering.
Radmila even felt a little bit guilty about refusing to glance at the pictures of Djordje’s children. Maybe someday she’d be able to meet Djordje’s children and establish some kind of relationship with them. After Djordje was dead, of course. That was a pleasant thought: especially the part about Djordje dying.
Once, and once only since leaving Mljet, Radmila had met one of her sisters: Sonja. They had simply blundered into each other: of all the people in the unlucky world. The horror had occurred on a peaceful tourist overlook above the glassy ruins of New York.
Radmila had glimpsed a pretty woman in a Chinese military uniform, brandishing a pair of elaborate binoculars, leaning at the railing of the overlook, and carefully studying the blast pattern.
Then that woman, sensing danger somehow, had turned and looked back, and that woman was Sonja.
Before Radmila could decide on anything, to scream or to run, Sonja had stalked straight over, silently, fluidly, and kicked Radmila in the stomach. Sonja’s black-booted foot came blasting forward with blinding, immediate, practiced speed and slammed all the wind out of Radmila. That devastating kick had knocked her cold.
Other tourists had helped her after Sonja had stomped away. When John arrived, deeply worried, Radmila had lied to him. She had claimed that she had fainted, overcome by the shocking sight of the famous ruins of New York. John, who had loved her very much at the time, had known at once that she was lying to him. All kinds of trouble had followed from that.
The trauma of that event had been much worse than confronting Djordje, here in her home stronghold of Los Angeles. Being a man, and the last and the youngest, Djordje was less painful than the others. Djordje had always been different in that way.
At least she knew that Djordje would go away. Djordje was a traitor: he had always excelled at running away.
Now Dr. Feininger entered the hairdressing clinic. The Acquis diplomat seemed discomposed. The hairdressers’ security people were even more ruthless to visitors than they were to the clientele.
“How do you do, Dr. Feininger? Let me persuade the staff to fetch you a chair.”
“Oh no no, please, I don’t want to speak with those people.” Dr. Feininger had an overly perfect, German- accented English. She could hear him carefully machining his verb tenses. “So: Miss Mila Montalban, at last we meet. In person, so much smaller you seem than in your simulations!”
Radmila offered him a tender smile. “You flew here from Europe just to meet me? How exceptional!”
“Yes, I have what they used to call ‘jet lag’!” Feininger pretended to yawn into his manicured hand.
“Please tell me all about your fascinating trip!”
“I logged every minute on my pundit site,” said Feininger, shifting on his feet. “Round and round we spin inside that ring of magnets, many gravities… We were fired into suborbital arc… Free-fall, truly weightless…! You could see all of it! Though I don’t compare my mediation with yours.”
“I’m sure that your pundit site is very popular with your viewers.” Feininger’s enthusiasm for his toys reminded her of John. She had Feininger tagged by now: he was what they called an Acquis “thought leader.”
As a postgovernmental organization, the Acquis was peppered all over with radical, crazy extremists, but pompous, netcentric blowhards like this guy were the organization’s meat and bread.
Nothing ever made pious, politically correct Acquis geeks happier than some dully public “frank exchange of views.” Radmila had met so many of them, at so many tiresome, life-draining political events, that she could literally smell Acquis thought leaders. Dr. Feininger smelled of cologne.
“What city is your own home base, Dr. Feininger?”
“My base is Cologne.”
Radmila laughed musically. “Such a beautiful city!”
“I never expected to meet an American star so simply and modestly dressed,” said Feininger, eyeing her cleavage in her terry-cloth gown. “One expects an American star to… well… billow, if that’s the right word.”
“Oh, we stars do billow. But this is my private life, and I chose to meet you here very privately.”
“I understand that important distinction,” said Feininger. “In political life, one also treads a fine line between public credibility and personal authenticity.”
“It was brave of you to personally fly to Los Angeles,” said Radmila. “I’m so proud that spaceflight is finally returning to vogue! Aerospace once meant a lot to California. We’re so sentimental about our heritage… New attitudes from Europe, that’s encouraging. We have some new American launch methods—those giant slingshots, I forget what you men call those… “
“Those are called ‘tensile accelerators.’”
“Yes, that was it.” Radmila nodded respectfully. “Dr. Feininger, do you suppose, someday, those two methods might be combined? Then we could settle outer space—mankind’s dream come true!”
“I happen to know rather a lot about this topic,” said Feininger unsurprisingly. “Sadly I must inform you that no, the Acquis spaceflight methods, which are very extensively tested and constructed on the strictest precautionary principles, are by no means the same techniques as the aberrant efforts of certain American zealots
