The Caryatids

and hand-lettered death-threat signs. Many of the buildings were swathed in tattered plas­tic shrink-wrap against the rising damp.

“Ever since I was born,” said Lionel, “I’ve had to look at that mess. That giant monument to human stupidity. I want that all gone. And no, I don’t mean some nice legal settlement. I don’t mean forty more years of insurance cheats and litigation. These are abandoned, uninhabitable ruins, ruined by the climate crisis. They belong to morons who don’t even live there now and will never live there again. While my people, my viewers, my core audience, the poor people, Glyn, the street kids without shirts and shoes—they are living heaped up in their Little For­eign Ghetto villages. They are piled on top of each other like used tires.”

Lionel clenched his gloved fists dramatically. “So we have two basic moral choices here. Either we do nothing about that, and the poor peo­ple eventually riot and set fire to their own slums. That would be the traditional Los Angeles method. Or else we provide some inspired civic leadership. My people charge out here and they just set fire to all that. Yes. My people just smash it. They blow it to pieces, and burn it to the ground. It’s all abandoned anyway—so that takes my fans maybe a week.”

Glyn was nervously fiddling with the restaurant’s gorgeous silver­ware. The silverware was tagged and interactive and came with a daz­zling panoply of oyster forks, butter knives, and two-tined olive piercers. “You’re really serious about this.”

’Think it through, Glyn. Two years later, we’ve got a bunch of flood-friendly projects built on high pilings. We get a major construc­tion boom in LA. Sure, we get some legal trouble first—of course we get that—but the casualties, very low, and suddenly we are right into a brand-new era. Low-income housing—during a climate crisis—that’s got to be within the shoreline areas. That’s got to happen. It’s the only urban policy that makes any sense. And if we had any guts, we’d just do it.”

Glyn glared at Radmila. ‘’Your political scripter wrote that for him. Lionel never used to talk like this. Never.”

“No, no,” Radmila said. “My scripter’s not that good! I never heard that kind of talk before.”

“Who’s writing your set-speeches, Lionel? Who have you been link­ing to?”

“Admit it,” said Lionel smugly, “my set-speech just now was fantastic. You don’t have, like, one single good word to say against my awesome new set-speech.”

“Your gangster fans are gonna shoot each other with rockets! It’ll be a total bloodbath.”

“Like you care about that!” scoffed Lionel. “All you want to do is write games that send them running the streets like bowling pins. You’ve got them where they can’t tell immersive games from the LA street grid.”

Glyn shook her head. “I know that we can get away with some dem­olition work right after an earthquake. You’re talking about smashing the oldest, biggest real-estate mess in all of California. We’d be held re­ sponsible.”

“Not you, Glyn: me. I’m the responsible party—and I am an underage juvenile. That’s why my plan works. We just give them a very classic set pitch: He’s the troubled rebel star kid burning out on drugs! That’s a hundred-year-old Hollywood story, everybody knows it by heart. Sure, my fans become arsonists. My fans are juvenile delinquents, so they got in over their heads. So what? My fan base has got a lot to be arsonists about!”

Glyn was very troubled. “You actually love your fans, Lionel?”

“What else is a star for? Without them, we’re nothing! Why else do I go through all this? I personify the blighted aspirations of my viewer­ship, that’s why I do it! That’s why my fans pay to watch me work! If I give them an awesome carnival like this—hey, I’d become the Voice of a Generation.”

Radmila leaned in over the table. “That was a very good monologue, Lionel. I feel proud of you. But that’s extremely radical, and you’re re­ally pushing it. You can’t just abrogate the legal process and set fire to large urban areas! Acquis pundits would show up and they’d hit us over the nose with a broomstick. That’s just not how our Family-Firm does business in this town.”

“Yes, I know that I’d be a scandal—but think in the long term. I’d just go into a dry-out clinic. That’s all that would happen to me. Be­cause I’m a kid! So I take a year off… over in… what the hell’s that stupid island… in Mljet! Mljet would be perfect for the story. It’s, like, wall-to-wall Acquis rehabilitation geeks over there. So: I go put on their neural helmet, their exoskeleton, their whole nine meters… That doesn’t scare me! That’s all very newsworthy. We just feed the people my ongoing personal scandal, we blow that spectacle up as big as it needs to get. They get obsessed with me—me, the star—and they just forget about the massive urban fires and the rocket explosions. I personally overshadow all of that. And my adventure costs our Family, what? The fare for my cruise ship? My reputation as a sweet-tempered kid? It costs us nothing! And in return—we’d liberate a huge, booming acreage of real estate in the world’s most dynamic city!”

“Mila, you talk some sense into him.”

“Glyn, he is talking sense. Pure Dispensation sense. That could really be made to pay.”

“He wants to provoke a huge urban riot! He’s going to burn down the slums in Los Angeles with an armed mob!”

“He’s even smarter than his big brother. I didn’t know that. Our Family-Firm has some true depth-of- talent.”

Glyn was furious. “You’re taking his side to annoy me! You know that isn’t a reasonable policy! You’re giving me all kinds of grief just because I’m not a star like you and him!”

Lionel smirked at her. “Glyn, you’re always claiming that you want to produce, and not be a star. Okay, great, fine: Take my proposal to the Family-Firm. Go on, I dare you to put my plan onto their agenda! Those old-school folks have got some guts! You’re a geek and a bean counter.”

Defeated, Glyn turned angrily on Radmila. “You don’t have any more sense than he does! I thought at least I could trust you to stay within your budget.”

Radmila blinked. “What do you mean—you mean my space sum­mit? ‘The Theodora Montgomery Memorial Forum’? I know that’s not some easy weekend in Bohemian Grove, but that’ll pay off for us ten times over in the long run. Didn’t you see how happy Buffy got when I tasked her to plan that? Buffy always wanted to be a political hostess.”

Glyn scowled. “No, Mila, I didn’t mean your Family duties. I meant your extravagances.”

“My what? What extravagances? My hair? My skin? My mitochon­drial upgrades? I’m totally pacing myself! You’re making me have a baby.”

“I mean your shopping sprees, Mila!”

Lionel was immediately interested. “What stuff did you buy? Was it nice?”

“I don’t even know what Glyn’s talking about.”

“I’ve never interfered in your private purchases,” Glyn said primly, “but the budget flagged me when you started going crazy… and with what? A hundred pairs of couture shoes, perfumes, lingerie, whole crates of bad Napa Valley champagne?”

Radmila was appalled. ‘’When did that ever happen?”

“Two weeks. Three weeks. Since you took over the Family. You lost control: what happened to you?”

Lionel was agog. “Wow! John likes perfumes and lingerie?”

“What, is your brother crazy? John’s a political activist, he likes girls who are weird refugees! Look: I don’t have any time to shop for myself! I’m always in the gym or on the set! If I have one spare minute, I sleep!”

“Mila, if you didn’t buy those things, who did?”

“It wasn’t me. The last thing I personally bought was… I think I bought cousin Rishi some garden tools for a birthday present.”

Glyn was intelligent, so it didn’t take her long to defeat her false as­sumptions. “I was really stupid. I should have known that some idiot embezzled all that stuff. Someone is pretending to be Mila Montalban.”

“Wow, that’s identity theft!” said Lionel. “I thought that was impossi­ble! I mean, they’ve got all kinds of secure biometrics and stuff.”

Glyn and Radmila said nothing.

Lionel bulled on. “You know, I mean biometric security for your credit purchases—like, they measure your body so they know it can only be you.”