The Caryatids

stole some things by pretend­ing to be you, but that was just to be funny. That was so easy, yes, it’s bor­ing me. No: I don’t want you as my hostage. I want your people to help me with my project! My very personal project that I have! My project is about a crazy woman in orbit. And not your crazy woman in orbit, stu­pid! Not your old fat actress! No, our mother. Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. The warlord’s black widow, guns and narcotics and software… Mother abandoned us, but she did some things well!”

Biserka stared out the hearse window at a passing high-rise; it had a giant ape climbing on it, but that was only a projection. “But: two crazy women up in orbit? How could you do that, Radmila? Two? That’s too much. It’s annoying me! It’s disgusting me! It’s just not right! That’s too many women who are trying to fit into the same outer space! It reminds me that Yelisaveta is still up there, flying over our heads every day, and I don’t like the way that makes me feel!”

Biserka scraped mud from the edge of her rubber boot. “I knew that you married big money. Fine, I married some money once. A bedful of money is nice! But you married people with orbital launch capacity! Wow! That means we can reach our mother, Radmila! We can put one bucket of sand, or some bolts and nuts, into Mama’s orbit. Bang! Boom! One moment, no warning, Mama’s dead in her flying coffin! And when that happens, then I give you this coffin back.”

Biserka looked out the window of the hearse at the towers along Figueroa, then back at Radmila again. “You’re not happy with my bril­liant, genius plan?”

Radmila shook her head. Her heart was crushed within her. She had never felt such shame.

“You’re not happy? But imagine how much better we both feel when that old woman falls from heaven in small burning pieces! I know some people in China who have space rockets. They could help us.”

Biserka snuffled as lights flashed over her face. “Look at you, feeling so sorry for yourself… A billion people died in Asia from the climate crisis. A billion. And I helped them to die. While you never looked. Be­cause everyone was supposed to look at you, Radmila! Black skies and starving mobs and empty rivers, and the world is supposed to watch you. And worship you! Because you might take your clothes off! Or some­thing. You’re a dress-up doll made from plastic.”

Biserka shook her head in wonderment, then shrugged. “So you de­serve to die, Radmila, but… first things first! First I drop you in a bar in Norwalk—tied up like this, in your underwear. You hop right in there, you call home, tell them you got drunk. You had a bad casting-couch date with your big-shot producer, whatever, I don’t care. You handle that. But if you screw me over—and I know that you want to, because, wow wow wow! I’d certainly do that to you—well, I’m going to kill. Not you. Someone else. Not you—because you’re too necessary to my plans. And not the governor here, because he got shot already.”

Biserka paused to laugh. “But I will kill Glyn, you know, that down­market fat-assed clone of the superstar! That Glyn thing really annoys me. Really. Just thinking about that Glyn makes me crazy! We Mihaj­lovic girls, we don’t have enough trouble that you have to find her? Glyn, another clone, who loves you? She adores you? That stinks, that’s the worst!

“So I will kill your Glyn, because Glyn has no big bodyguards. So that’s easy. Your Glyn will be out for a buttered bagel in her black turtle­neck and her tummy-flattening girdle, and she will walk by some junker car and one instant, no warning, Glyn is Glynereens. She’s Glyndust.” Biserka chortled. “A smart car bomb in a world of sensorwebs! That’s one afternoon’s work!”

Biserka straightened in the hearse’s pew. “So. You can do as I tell you, Radmila, which is easy and good. Or you can try to screw me out of what I want, and I will make you die of grief. You heard that, right? You remember my great plan, right? I don’t have to beat it into you.”

Radmila moaned violently and shook her head.

“It seems that you have something important to say about my plans for our future.”

Radmila nodded.

“It must be really important, with you fussing like that so much.”

Radmila nodded harder.

“Okay, I tell you what. You turn around, give me your hands. Then I cut off the tip of your left little finger. Just the tip, not all of it! Then I take that tape off your mouth and you tell me about your objections. Your crucial input is at least that important, right?”

Radmila shook her head.

“Oh, so it’s not so important! I thought so. So: Now I tape your eyes shut. Before I kick you out of this car. Duct tape! It’s wonderful! It holds the whole universe together.”

Biserka undid the brass buckles on a splendid travel bag. She pawed inside it. Her bag held flat black rubber sandals, a sports bra, cotton pants, athletic socks, panties, an arsenal of fancy toiletries, sunglasses, tampons, chewing gum, a host of pills, and a long black rubber shotgun.

Biserka shook the bag upside down and mourned. “Oh, I left my duct

tape back at my blackspot. Because I used it there. What a shame.”

There was a loud thump on the roof of the rolling hearse.

“Okay, I didn’t like that. Something hit the car. That was bad.”

Radmila rolled her eyes upward, then crinkled her brows and hunched her shoulders in silent laughter.

“All right, what?” Biserka shouted. “What?” She tucked her nailed fingers into Radmila’s cheek and ripped the tape from her face. “Tell me now.”

Radmila worked her sore jaws.

“All right, what? What hit the car? Tell me.”

“That was nothing. It was a bird.”

“That was a lie! You lied to me.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Biserka. You don’t scare me. You have killed me with the shame of what you’ve done, I will never face my Family again, I will never work in this town again… But you are small and weak.. You have no business here. I never did anything to you.”

“You EXISTED!” Biserka shrieked. “Everybody who isn’t on a desert island knows I look like ‘Mila Montalban’!” She slapped the wrinkled tape back onto Radmila’s lips. Being rumpled, the duct tape failed to stick well.

Biserka opened the window of the hearse. Snakelike, she jammed her skinny torso through it, then made a desperate lunge.

She came back with a toy gripped in her hand: a flying toy made of foamed propellers and plastic blocks and nakedly exposed circuits.

“I know what this is. I used to see a lot of these.”

Radmila kept her face still. She’d never seen a flying spyplane of quite this type before, but she certainly knew what it was. Some fan had built that.

There were networks of those fans out there, happy little voyeur per­verts who would swap their recipes for making spy toys and then share their spy photographs. The fans were scum. But there were always some of them around. Like mice: If you saw one, it meant a hundred.

“This one doesn’t even have a gun,” Biserka scoffed. “All it’s got is stupid pirate media and big googly eyes!” She opened the hearse, stuck the toy airplane out, and smashed it in the slamming door. Cheap plas­tic parts flew everywhere. A broken wad of them landed in Radmila’s lap. They were commodity pieces that had cost a few cents in a hard­ware store, and they’d been stuck together with hot-glue. A sloppy job. Some kid. Some fan kid with a kit-part and a bunch of other fans to egg him on.

One blurry picture, one snapshot… of a major star tied in bondage in her underwear. With a coffin, in the back of a hearse… Some fan spy must have seen that image, for at least a few seconds, a few hundred frames of stolen video.

An image like that would spread from fan to fan like ink on a towel.

So all this would be over. Not yet, but everything had to end. Those little pirate kids on networks—they’d even destroyed the movies.

Radmila stared out the window.

“Okay, princess, just for that, we go back to the safe house! No free­dom for you! I wanted you free to carry my message, but now I keep you!”

Twenty minutes passed, in which Radmila said nothing. She had al­ready lost everything.

Biserka had no safe house anymore. Her blackspot safe house was on fire. Rocket flares were flying. The glare of flames lit the dark interior of the hearse. The flames backlit capering figures, running, dancing.