Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

This was not in the script. So, improvisational theater: Never, ever look surprised. Keep the stage biz flowing; always say “YES, AND.”

“Yes, of course I came here to be with you, Toddy,” Radmila ad-libbed. “Wherever else would I go?”

“We’re evacuating all the children first.”

’’Yes, of course. The children come first. That’s exactly how it should be.”

“The seismic wave is in Catalina. This one is a Big One.”

“Surfs up,” Radmila quipped. There was one moment of anguished silence from the murmuring audience, then a roar of applause.

Radmila sat and smiled serenely. She crossed her legs beneath her gleaming skirt. “I suppose we women will be leaving, too—once they get around to us.”

“I never like to leave a party,” said Toddy. She fought with her badly confused costume, and managed to sit.

An antique sandalwood trolley rolled over with a delicate chime of brass bells.

“Tea?” said Toddy.

Alarm sirens howled. The’ sirens of Los Angeles were terrifying. A scared coyote the size of a ten-story building might have howled like LA’s monster cybernetic sirens. The sirens had been planted all across the city, with intense geolocative care. There were networked packs of them.

Toddy turned her stiff, aged face to the sky. A twirling, linking set of geodesics, thin beams looking delicate as toothpicks, danced across the stars. Los Angeles was famous for the clarity of its skies. “It’s been such a lovely night, too.”

“You’ve never looked prettier,” Radmila lied, and then the earth­quake shock hit the building. The antique couch below them bounded straight into the air.

The entire studio audience went visibly airborne, their arms sponta­neously flopping over their heads like victims in a broken elevator.

The museum floor dipped from rim to rim like a juggler’s airborne plate. It rose up swiftly under the audience.

The floor gently caught thern as they fell.

The silence was cut by startled screams.

Radmila scrambled across the couch and groped for Toddy. The old woman had swooned away, her mouth open, eyes blank. There seemed to be no flesh within her massive, glittering costume. Toddy was a pretty, beaded bag of bones.

A second shock hit the museum. This shock was much bigger than the first, an endless, churning, awesome, geological catastrophe. The museum reacted with a roller coaster’s oily grace and speed, ducking and banking. They were suspended in limbo, an epoch of reeling and twisting, rubbery groans and shrieks for mercy.

Radmila found herself audibly counting the seconds.

The earthquake rushed past them, in its blind, dumb, obliterative fashion.

The sirens ceased to wail. People were gasping and shrieking. Rad­mila twisted in her stubborn costume to look at Toddy. Toddy was un­conscious. Toddy Montgomery had a very famous face, an epic, iconic face, and that face had never looked so bad.

Radmila clambered to her feet. The panicked audience was strug­gling in semidarkness, while she had the stage lights. The audience badly needed her now, and a star on stage could outshout anybody.

Radmila tore the dented hat from her face. “Did you see what this building just did for us? That was completely amazing! ”

Radmila dropped the hat and clapped her hands. The stunned audi­ence caught on. They heartily applauded their own survival.

“The architect’s name is Frank Osbourne,” Radmila told them. “He lives and he works in Los Angeles!”

Those who could stand rose to applaud.

The museum floor beneath their feet was miraculously stable now. Their building was as firm as granite, as if earthquakes were some kind of myth.

Toddy was entirely still.

The sirens began again, different noises: fire alarms. The fire warn­ings had a gentler, less agitated sound design. Los Angeles fires were much commoner than earthquakes.

With tender respect, members of the audience began setting the prized furniture straight. They sat with conspicuous dignity, and simply gazed up at Radmila. They still wanted to be entertained.

A black-clad shadow vaulted from backstage, did a showy, spectacu­lar front flip.

Lionel had made an entrance.

Lionel had thoughtfully brought her some scripting. The two of them hastily conferred. Lionel leaned his black-wrapped head against hers to whisper. “Grandma’s had a power failure.”

“I know that.”

“I’ll get her offstage, you manage this crowd.”

Radmila commanded the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, all the elevators in this structure are working beautifully. So we will have you out of here very quickly. Your limos are coming. We’ll evacuate anyone who is injured. So people, please look to your neighbors now, send out reports, send a prompt… The city’s comprehensive relief effort is al­ready under way… “

The museum’s lights flickered nastily. They came on again, raggedly, and in a dimmer, amber, emergency glow.

The sound system died on stage. Radmila’s software failed, and the full weight of her costume fell on her, across her shoulders, back, thighs. It was like being wrapped in dead meat.

“Help me carry Grandma,” said Lionel, tugging at the inert mass. Slowly, Radmila fell to her knees. “Oh no. I can’t move.” Radmila was able to turn, to look into Toddy’s face. The old woman’s eyes were two rims of white. Her lips were blue. She wasn’t breathing.

“My God, she died! Toddy is dead!”

“Well, she’s not gonna stay dead,” said Lionel. “She’s a Montgomery.”

QUAKE REPORTS WERE POURING IN from the urban sensor­web, popping out of the background noise as their relevance gained weight.

Things were grim in the aging slums of Brentwood, Century City, and Bel Air, with fires, smashed tenements, and rumors of looting.

All over the city, Dispensation flash gangs were throwing on their uni­forms, grabbing rescue equipment, pouring into cars.

The LA skyline was lit by laser torches. Dispensation people never waited for orders during a civic emergency. They took their dispensa­tions and they charged in headlong posses straight for the thickest of the action. They’d all seen enough hell to know that the sooner you stopped the hell, the less hell there was to pay later.

LA’s freeways had ridden out the quake: of course. There were no constructions in the whole world so strong and ductile as the freeways of Los Angeles. LA’s rugged urbanware was like a spiderweb from another planet. During any LA quake, almost by reflex, people would pour into their cars to seek the proven safety of their freeways.

Current traffic was bumper-to-bumper, but it was bumper-to-bumper at a comforting hundred and thirty kilometers per hour.

Radmila flicked off the news projection on the limo’s windshield. A crisis this size would be best confronted from the Bivouac, the Family­Firm’s secure fortress in glamorous Norwalk.

Lionel, gallantly, was escorting her home. He’d helped her to fight her way free from the grip of her costume. Hastily wrapped in a dusty equipment tarp, she’d fled down a Showroom elevator and into a wait­ing Family limo.

Lionel had found her some spare clothes in the limo’s trunk: some unknown relative’s flowery surfer shorts, a big smelly male undershirt, and a sand-caked pair of flip-flops. Radmila was wearing that under her spangled stage jacket, torn loose from its support circuits.

“You look so fantastic just now,” said Lionel.

Radmila glanced up at the big rearview mirror. The Family’s limo was unmanned, but it had all the fine old car traditions: a big knobby steering wheel, human foot controls on its floorboard, everything. “I look like some drunken beach floozy.”