Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

So love had arrived to find her, instead. The love of her Californian family was like a Californian tidal wave. It was large, and rich, and Pa­cific, and powerful, and muddy, oily, salty, and slightly polluted. It swept all before it and it surrounded everything it touched.

“This is such an awful night,” she said aloud. “I hope your grandma isn’t so totally dead now that… Oh, I can’t even say it.”

“You know what?” he said. “I need to cry.”

“You can cry. I’m here for you. I’ll listen.”

A child of a disaster-stricken world, Lionel had to work his way up to his tears. He kept at the effort, though, and presently began to sob.

Taillights blossomed redly across the freeway. Radmila realized, through her own watering eyes, that this surge of brakes was the sign of another aftershock. The new little quake hadn’t slowed the traffic much. Nature had convulsed beneath the highway pillars, and the freeways just soaked that right up.

What a beautiful city this was: this huge, dense, endless place. So many cities in the world had been wrecked by the climate crisis. “Ex­tinction 6.0,” the Californians called it. Californians were always making up new words that the rest of the world found themselves forced to use.

The Angelenos were thriving, although a city built like theirs, clearly, should never have survived.

Los Angeles was a crowded, polyglot mess of a place, trapped be­tween a killer desert and a rising ocean. The city of Los Angeles had blown more climate-wrecking fumes out of its tailpipes than most na­tions. If there were any justice in the global mayhem of “Extinction 6.0,” Los Angeles should have been the first place to die: the first city in the world to drown, convulse, starve, riot, black out, and burn right to the ground.

Yet there was no justice in the climate crisis. Not one bit of justice. The climate crisis was not concerned with justice: it was about poverty, stench, hunger, floods, fires, thirst, plague, and riot. So, although Los Angeles did burn in many places—Los Angeles had always burned, in many places—Los Angeles grew much faster than it burned.

If this tormented world had a world capital, this city was it. Sprawling Los Angeles was checkered across its bulk with “little” regions: Little Chinas, Little Indias, Little Thailands, Little Russias. Clusters of busy refugees from disordered places that were no longer nations.

Los Angeles was a refugee-harnessing machine. Modern refugees thrived in this city as in no other city on Earth. Some of them, like her­self, even got rich.

The prospect of catastrophe had never cowed Angelenos. Because Angelenos had never believed in any myth of solid ground. Instead, they survived through selling dreams and illusions. The turmoil beneath their jostling hills had created Tinseltown.

Los Angeles existed to be almost chaotic and yet to survive chaos, to thrive on chaos. The endless weave and roll of LA’s automated traffic. The pixelated windows in the scalloped walls of a thousand skyscrapers. The night sky was alive with mighty beams of light: police searchlights. leaping down from helicopters, signal lasers up from dense knots of street trouble. This city had the fastest, most efficient emergency re­sponses in the world.

When the earth heaved under your feet, you had to run so fast, just to stand firm.

Lionel’s sobs faded quickly. Teens were like that. Teens were strange people, even stranger in some ways than the very old. In their delicacy and temporariness, teens had an ageless quality. Teens were kids, and yet teenage kids were fearless and brave: they didn’t much mind dying. Teens were both Peter Pan and Dracula.

“Mila?”

“Que pasa, hermano?”

“Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light, or just another Lost Angel?”

“Lionel, classic poetry won’t help us right now. We had a really bad night, but we’re gonna plant our feet, get very steady, and hold all this up. All right? We can do that. I promise you. We’ll dead-lift the whole world straight up over our heads. If guys like you and I don’t do that, who will?”

“I had to breathe my own breath right into her dead old mouth,” said Lionel.

“You did the right thing. Really.”

“Am I too stupid to live?”

It meant a lot to her that Lionel would ask her such a thing. His need­iness immediately made her strong. “Okay, so listen to me now. We could have all been killed tonight. The software in the whole building might have blown out, like your grandmother’s costume. If everyone had died in there, and I had died, and you had died, and your grand­mother, the support staff, her audience, everybody—that would have been, like, an amazing, perfect exit for the wonderful Toddy Mont­gomery. An amazing superstar exit from this world.”

Radmila drew a deep breath. “Well, no diva gets a clean exit like that. Nobody. Not me, not you, not even your superstar grandma. So our situ­ation right now is, like: We’re completely screwed up. Our town is bro­ken by a quake and parts of it are on fire. People are dying out there tonight. Toddy died. We’re crying inside our limo. But the Family-Firm is going to deal.” Radmila pushed hair back from her sweating forehead. “You get me? We shuffle all the cards and we deal. First thing tomorrow.”

Lionel contemplated this fierce declaration. “You know what?” he said. “I understand why he married you.”

Radrnila’s eyes gushed tears. “What a sweet thing to say.”

“No, he’s really a smart guy, my big brother. Smarter than me.”

“I tried so hard to please him and this Family,” Radmila sniffed. “That beautiful old woman… I went to political meetings. I even read Syn­chronist philosophy. Do you understand that stuff? I don’t think any­body does.”

“My brother does.”

“You think John is truly a Synchronist? He doesn’t talk that way just to sound cool?”

“What’s small, dark, and knocking at the door?” quoted Lionel. “The future of humanity.”

Radmila began to sob aloud .

“You should have another baby, Mila. The Family future needs that.”

Radmila howled.

“I know you can’t stand John around you anymore,” said Lionel, “but in a world as messed up as this world, a guy like my big brother: he is a force for good. It’s like he’s a plastic surgeon… It’s like… one tiny in­jection, that won’t even hurt, and whoa, I can bench-press the whole world… I went for that pitch of his totally, and oh my God, one of these days I swear I’m gonna kill somebody!”

The car made its methodical way toward their home.

“Killing people is too easy a job for you, Lionel,” Radmila told him. “Killing people is for suckers. If we take good care of our own Family and we wait awhile, the bad people die all by themselves.” She took a measured breath. “’He was just seventeen, you know what I mean, but the way he looked…’”

“That was so beautiful,” said Lionel, leaning back at last. “That’s what’s so great about the classics. They give you that terrific sense of roots.”

TODDY MONTGOMERY HAD TAUGHT Radmila many useful things about life. Especially about life as an idol and star. Almost every single thing that Toddy taught about wealth and fame and glamour was grim and dull and dutiful. In the long run, those things always turned out to be the only things that worked.

“Never forget” was Toddy’s usual preface: “Never forget that just be­cause you get it doesn’t mean you get to keep it.” “Never forget that the world expects something from a somebody.” “Never forget that Holly­wood was built on the backs of us women.”

There were dozens of these wise sayings of hers. To her shame, Rad­mila had forgotten most of them. “Never forget that behind every woman you ever heard of is a man who let her down,” that one was memorable. “Never forget that charm and courtesy cost a woman nothing .. .”