The Caryatids

who fling giant nanocarbon slingshots up the slopes of the Rocky Mountains.”

“Have you ever seen that kind of space launch performed, Dr. Feininger?”

“What, me? No, certainly not.”

“Would you like to see that done? My Family-Firm has a private launchpad.”

“I see. I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Yes, we need that private launchpad in order to reach our private space station.”

“I did know that the Montgomery-Montalbans had built a space sta­tion.”

“Well, we didn’t exactly build that. The Government of India built LilyPad. We simply took over management when India suffered their difficulties.”

“Terrible business about India.”

“Very terrible. We have so much to learn from Indian spiritual values.” Feininger wasn’t happy about his lack of a chair or the way he’d been treated by the local staff, but he was clearly pleased to meet a Hollywood star so willing to talk his kind of utter crap.

“I like to think,” said Feininger slowly, “that I have rather good in­stincts about people. You are not at all like your public image. I can sense that the private Mila Montalban is a rather fresh, direct, and un­pretentious woman.”

“I hope you won’t tell anybody that,” Radmila twinkled. “My public­relations people get all upset with me when I fail to allure and mystify.”

“May I ask you something, Miss Montalban? Not a personal ques­tion, but a public political issue? Why do you own a giant war machine that destroys the homes of helpless refugees with heat rays?”

“What, you mean in an immersive-world simulation? I can’t remem­ber my roles in immersive worlds— there are just too many.”

“No, I meant last August,” said Feininger politely. “In the streets of Los Angeles. You were lasciviously dancing on the top of a giant walking tripod that fired laser weapons into people’s homes.”

“Oh that!” said Radmila. “You mean our urban-renewal festival.”

“That behavior truly baffles us in the Acquis,” said Feininger.

“Please try not to worry,” said Radmila, wide-eyed. “I’m just an ac­tress. It’s all for show.”

“Leaving aside the social-justice aspects of preferentially wrecking the neighborhoods of the poor,” said Feininger, “are you aware of what happens, technically speaking, within the legs of those tripods?”

“Should I be?”

“I know the sinister genius who constructed that device,” said Feininger. “His name is Frank Osbourne, and he repeatedly seeks out radical construction methods that are judged unsafe by Acquis central committee. Then Osbourne deploys those methods! Not in harmless simulations —in real life! He builds structures with dangerous crys­talline iron and unproven nanocarbon piezo-cables, and then he uses those hazardous devices to demolish historical buildings. A deliberate provocation! “

“Frank is a very theoretical architect,” said Radmila. “I think you’re reading too much into his acts of whimsy.”

Toddy’s tea trolley rolled into the room. Toddy had gone to repeated effort to have tea served as she recovered from her hair-design interven­tions. Toddy would sit, sip tea, and stare into her hobject globes…

Toddy was no longer here, yet her infrastructure had survived her. Fresh tea had just arrived for the insane husk of a woman who’d been quietly fired into orbit.

“Oh, the tea is here!” Radmila chirped. “I do hope you like Indian tea, Dr. Feininger.”

“It’s Indian tea?”

“Yesof course! They’re restoring plantations in Assam!”

With surprising spryness and multicultural fluidity, Feininger sat cross-legged on the floor.

Radmila joined him, arranged the cups, and poured. Their ritual took a leisurely six minutes. They scarcely spoke. When they were done, the two of them had reached a certain level of rapport.

Radmila fully understood why the Acquis pundit had attacked Frank Osbourne. Osbourne was a Dispensation architect. So naturally Osbourne would push the limits of whatever the Acquis considered acceptable practice. Feininger was not truly upset about Osbourne. Feininger was angry because of Mljet.

Feininger wasn’t wearing a neural helmet or attention-camp blinders—Feininger was a professional, he wasn’t some crazy Acquis engineer of human souls—but Feininger knew that John had gone to Mljet to interfere with that effort.

The Acquis cadres in Mljet were cranks, radicals, and zealots. Of course some Dispensation agent had arrived there for containment and push-back. John had ventured to Mljet as a Dispensation activist.

John would lure the cranks aside with a tasty carrot if he could; if that effort failed, he would slide a stick straight through their spinning wheels.

Because John seemed so polite and refined, people underestimated him. His quietest attacks, always carried out in a low, scholarly voice while wearing a business suit, were brutally effective.

Feininger understood modern global realpolitik. His bluster about the architect was his counterploy. Feininger was radiating the obvious: she could sense that in the poised way he held his teacup.

Acquis interests had been threatened on a certain part of the global game board. Feininger could try to defend that dodgy Adriatic territory—those weirdos with helmets and skeletons—or he could boldly and swiftly fly over to counterattack within Los Angeles. That was what Feininger had come here to demonstrate.

All in all, his choice of a target—the Family’s favorite Los Angeles architect—that was a civilized gambit. Feininger had to know about Vera in Mljet. He could have been nastier with her.

Feininger would not get nasty, because Feininger was almost exactly like John. Dr. Feininger was an Acquis counter-John. Dr. Feininger, having learned what John could do, was planning to out-John John. Dropping by to put a scare into Mrs. John—there must be Acquis strate­gists chuckling over that tactic, behind a network screen someplace.

“Dr. Feininger, I’m only a pop star. While you are a moralist. A thought leader. You’re a global techno-social philosopher.”

Feininger laughed. “If it’s any help, we go through vogues just like you do.”

“I know about the Acquis. We Americans have a lot of Acquis people. In Boston, San Francisco, Seattle… Still, they can’t compare to the truly global Acquis thought leaders. The American Acquis don’t think as creatively as you do.”

“I didn’t expect to hear this from you,” Feininger allowed. “This might be significant.”

“I’m thinking: we need to try something unexpected. Fresh. Con­temporary. Of the moment. Something unexpectable.”

“This should be interesting.”

“Mind you, this is just my own personal proposal. I’m in no position to dictate terms to my Family-Firm—I hope you understand that.”

“I know who Mila Montalban is,” said Feininger, smiling at her. “So do half the people in the world.”

“Well, I’m thinking: a public event. Nothing too ‘global.’ Because that word sounds so old-fashioned now. I’m thinking postglobal. Super­global. A quiet, elite kind of political summit. Held in orbit.”

“A political summit held in orbit?”

“Yes, up in LilyPad. You wouldn’t exactly call LilyPad ‘the space frontier’… because sweet LilyPad is not a primitive place, exactly… but it’s certainly remote. And, Dr. Feininger: We don’t want any boring, tedious people at our theory summit held in outer space. We should be inviting: the very exceptional, very high-level thinkers   visionary, nonpartisan people, the people far outside the global box…Not even one hundred people. The truly significant postglobal civil society thinkers. Maybe fifty of you.”

Feininger considered this suggestion. He was flattered to be one of the world’s fifty most important thinkers. Then it dawned on him that he was being asked to pick and validate the other forty-nine.

This was much more important to him than any small Adriatic island. “Seventy people?” he said.

“Sixty, at the very most? We’d be stretching the launch services.”

“If you could launch fifty, the magnetic pad in Eastern Germany could launch twenty-five.”

“We could house seventy people. We could feed them and give them nice fresh