Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

“The investors don’t love emo pitches,” Glyn said crisply.

“Think in the long term,” said Radmila, and this was a very Family­Firm thing to say. So Glyn finally had to shut up.

Radmila struggled to compose herself. The last-minute backstage squabble had blown open the gates of her stage fright. Radmila’s fears al­ways attacked her before she went on. Always. She never breathed a word about her fears to anyone, which meant that she felt them more keenly.

What ‘did she have to be so scared about, before a performance? Nothing—but everything. Her stage fright rose within her like a hurri­cane seeking a center. Her fear and trauma had to fixate on something.

Suddenly, it centered on Toddy.

Yes. She was so afraid of losing Toddy. Toddy was her diva, her coach, her mentor. Without Toddy, she was ugly and useless. She had no tal­ent. She had no looks. She was just a lost girl who happened to have a strong rapport with ubiquitous systems.

Tonight the angry public would surely find her out. She was nobody’s star at all, she was a fraud, a fake. Harsh, cold, staring eyes would drain all the blood from her body. The whole world would collapse. The shame would kill her.

Radmila stamped both her feet at the speed of her thudding heart.

“Okay, launch me!”

“Roger that!”

Radmila sashayed through her glowing footsteps, head high, shoul­ders back. Perfect. She leaped two meters and landed like a bird on the back of the skeletal chair. Ten out of ten.

The simulated chair arced back on its two rear legs, FXing with su­pernatural ease. Radmila wheeled in place atop the chair. Light. Bril­liant. Her slippers flexed, the chair teetered, the wire flexed. The FX system adjusted its parameters several thousand times a second.

She was superhuman.

“Am I perfect?”

“You are so totally perfect,” Glyn agreed.

“Am I superperfect?”

“Get off the damn chair,” Glyn grumbled. “You’re gonna nail it tonight! You always nail it. Just watch the hat. Now get back up here.”

Radmila vaulted off the mock-up chair and skipped, her thudding heart gone easy in her chest. She flung out both arms and gestured at the empty air, her fingers held just so. Invisible wire flexed around her and flung her out of the rehearsal pit.

A folding canvas director’s chair hopped over and flopped itself open for her, amid a busy crowd of Montgomery-Montalban stagehands. Radmila sat serenely, spreading her costume and grooming it. What a fuss these stage clothes made about themselves: all that multilayer circuitry, the plas­tic threading, sensor pads, electric embroidery… Gleaming lights, con­ductive snaps, antenna yarn, laser-cut dust-repellent golden foil: Stage costumes looked terrific when they were turned on. When you sat still in­side them, awaiting your cue, it was like wearing a hot-dog booth.

Radmila slipped on a pair of stage spex, groped at a midair menu, and touched her earpiece. Toddy was gently lecturing her audience about historical trends in Californian home decor. “Mission Style.” “Arroyo Culture.” “Tuscan.”

Every star had a métier, and Toddy Montgomery was a decades-long sponsor of home-decor products. Californian furniture was of huge, consuming interest to Toddy’s core fan base.

The Family-Firm was a network: real estate, politics, finance, every­ware, retail, water interests… and of course entertainment. A network as strong as the LA freeways. A network whose edges were everywhere and its center… well, if the Family-Firm had any center, it was Theodora “Toddy” Montgomery.

Toddy’s costume cascaded over her gorgeous chair: she wore her stiff support bodice, lace collar, her signature monster hat, her dainty feet just peeping out from under her big petticoats.

“Miss Mila Montalban will be joining us,” said Toddy. There was a happy patter of applause.

Miss Mila Montalban was a trouper and a star. Miss Mila Montalban could do anything for her Family-Firm. She owed the Family her whole existence, and she was loyal and true. She would die for them. If a bul­let came for any Montgomery-Montalban, Radmila Mihajlovic would swan-jump in front of that bullet with a deep, secret sense of relief.

Toddy paused for one long, strange moment. Then she caught up her lost thread and rambled on. Old people were so patient and garrulous. They never seemed to switch topics.

Glyn broke in. “Three minutes, Mila… Oh Jesus! Now what?” Radmila stood on tiptoe. “Am I on?”

“We just got a tremor alert.”

“What? That’s the fifth tremor this week!”

“It’s the seventh,” Glyn corrected. Glyn was always like that.

“Well then,” said Radmila, touching the mechanized crispness of a long blond curl, “the show must go on.”

“Do you know what kind of hell we’d catch if there was a Big One and we didn’t clear this building?”

“I sure know what kind of hell we’d catch if we shut down Toddy’s re­tirement show.”

“We can reschedule her retirement. Nobody reschedules an earth­quake.”

“Oh, just come off all that, Glyn.”

“ You come off it,” said Glyn. “We built this place on a fault line! If this building topples over, it’ll crush us all like bugs!”

This flat threat gave Radmila a serious pause. How could Glyn fail to trust the ubiquitous programming of the Los Angeles County Furniture Showroom?

“Put me on, Glyn. This building is totally modern.”

“It is not ‘modern,’ “ said Glyn, “it is ‘state-of-the-art.’ There’s a big difference.”

“What do you want from me? Toddy is on! Put me on, too!”

“Two minutes,” Glyn agreed, but in the Showroom crawlspace, the normal chaos of tech support had a sudden hysterical edge.

The Family’s security people always lurked backstage, wearing their masked black Kabuki costumes, and frankly doing nothing much, usually. Most of the Family’s black-clad stage ninjas weren’t even real Se­curity. They were Family members whose faces were painfully famous, so they were happily invisible in masks.

A ninja reached out his sinister black-gloved hand and gently patted her costumed shoulder. “Break a leg,” he murmured. The ninja was Li­onel, her brother-in-law. Lionel was all of seventeen, and whenever his big brother John was gone on business, Lionel was always making gal­lant little gestures of support for her. He was a sweet kid, Lionel.

Toddy was babbling, and the soundtrack noodled through a gentle. repertoire of medleys. Radmila listened keenly for her cue. Her cue was overdue.

The reactive DJ system drew its repertoire from audience behavior, and Toddy’s core fans, her favorite shareholders, were getting anxious. Through any of a thousand possible channels, the tremor alert had jabbed them awake. These fine, dignified old people were not in a panic just yet, but knew they might soon have a good excuse.

Their interactive music had the air of tragedy.

Radmila finally went on. Her hair was okay, the face was more than okay, the costume would do, but her stage hat felt like a big live lobster. As a tribute, she was wearing one of Toddy’s signature stage hats, a huge­-brimmed feathered apparatus that framed a star’s face like a saintly halo, but the old-school hat hadn’t synced completely to the costume, and the awkward thing, appallingly, felt heavy. It should have wafted through the stage-lit air like a parasail. It felt like a bag of wet cement.

Toddy rose from her couch, ignoring Mila’s entrance. It was unheard­of for Toddy Montgomery to miss a cue. Radmila was shocked. She man­aged the first half-dozen steps of her planned routine and then simply walked over.

Toddy turned to her: beneath her huge hat was the tremulous face of a scared old woman. “Thank you for joining us at this difficult time, Mila.”