The Caryatids

Part Two RADMILA Los Angeles

RADMILA CLIMBED DOWN THE THROAT of the rehearsal pit. Her skirt floated around her kneecaps, a jeweled mass of air-tecture, bro­cade, and electric chiffon.

Glyn spoke up in her earpiece. “Mila, get back up here.”

“I need one last run-through for my chair stunt. Just to test this cos­tume.”

“You are perfect,” Glyn pronounced. “You were perfect when you left makeup.”

“This is for Toddy. Tonight I’ve got to be superperfect.”

“Roger that,” said Glyn, a little sourly.

Radmila found her footing in the blackness. Sensing her presence, the rehearsal space woke around her. Wireframe exploded from the darkness. Prop sticks tumbled loose from their racks and flew like flung batons. The sticks clanged together, joining end-to-end.

The pit suddenly held the skeletal frame of a theater set: couches, a chair.

“Okay,” Glyn told her, “you are a go.”

Radmila dug her reactive slippers into the memory foam. “This pit is good. This place is so state-of-the-art. This is, totally, the hottest re­hearsal pit that the Family-Firm has ever built.”

“Just watch your hat,” said Glyn patiently.

Golden footmarks glowed on the floor. Radmila braced herself for performance.

“Whoa,” said Glyn, “I’ve got a bad stress readout from your left ankle.”

“My ankle is fine now!”

“The everyware knows you better than you do,” said Glyn.

Radmila rucked up the hem of her costume. The stage gear protested scrunchily. Kinetic textiles never liked departing from their script.

Radmila flexed her left knee and extended her foot. “Okay, so let me see it. Show me now.”

Narrowly focused beams sprang from the walls and ceiling. They bril­liantly painted her leg with projected data. Her bones and ligaments ap­peared, neatly coded and labeled: “Navicular.” “Cuboid.” “Anterior Talofibular.” The working pieces of the human ankle. What ugly names they had.

Radmila bent at the waist, gripped her extended toes, and rotated the joint. The simulated meat and bones writhed in a lively fashion, very glossy and painterly. Yes, she felt one leftover pang deep in there. One ugly, ankle-sprain pang. “Damn.”

“You’ve overdone it. Let’s cancel your stunt tonight.”

“I can’t cancel my chair stunt!”

“You’re booked for that big hotel opening Monday. They want your full set: your precision jumps, your vaults, all your backup dancers… If you wreck your ankle here tonight, your investors will kill me.”

Radrnila’s temper, always sharp before she went on stage, sharpened further. “Am I supposed to publicly appear tonight in the Los Angeles County Furniture Showroom, and deny the public my signature stunting­with-furniture?”

“Oh, is the diva losing her composure?” mocked Glyn.

“We can tape my ankle. That won’t take a minute.”

“Look: Tonight should be simple. You catwalk over to Toddy. You sit on Toddy’s fancy couch. Toddy lectures her public all about historical furniture, and you just listen nicely and be all ingenue about it.”

“I hear your concept,” said Radmila. “Your concept stinks.”

“We’re in a furniture museum! Toddy’s fans are a million years old! They won’t care if you don’t fly around the room like a fairy princess!”

Radmila seethed silently. What a pain Glyn was. No one could pull the rug out from under you like a member of your own family. Glyn un­derstood Montgomery-Montalban family values, nobody knew them better-but Glyn had never taken those values to heart. Because Glyn was a stage technician, not a star. Glyn had no magic.

“Toddy specifically asked me to stunt tonight. At dinner, Toddy asked me in front of everybody. I know that you heard Toddy ask me to stunt.”

“If you’re finally asking me about that idea, well, I think your cheap stunt upstages Toddy at her retirement show.”

“That’s why Toddy wants me to stunt,” said Radmila. “She’s handing it over to me in public tonight, don’t you get that? Toddy is the old school. Toddy’s retiring! Her public’s very sentimental, they love an emo pitch like that!”

“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.”

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.”

“No, no, you look exactly the way girls were supposed to look in movie disasters,” Lionel marveled. “Sort of half naked, dirty, and ripped-up, but still intensely glamorous.”

Freeway lights flashed rhythmically on Lionel’s eager young face. Lionel was a Family star. He had a strong and growing pull in the male fifteen-to-twenty-two demographic.

Lionel still wore his black Kabuki stage gear, which had certainly come into its own in this dire situation. Lionel’s knightly security gear was scorch-proof,. rip-proof, well-nigh bulletproof, and full of handy pockets. Best of all, it was entirely independent of the net and it carried all its own software processing. Radmila felt safe with him.

Lionel generally dressed like a kick-ass, paramilitary LA street kid, but he was the kind of superbly eye-catching street kid that only a very rich kid could possibly be. Lionel was a child of advantage: he did hor­monal bloodwork, ate a strict nutraceutical diet, trained in gymnastics, and had three martial-arts coaches.

Radmila suffered in the high-tech Family gym, but Lionel lived in that gym. Lionel could walk on his hands better than most teens could walk on their own feet.

Radmila handed him a tissue from the glove compartment. Lionel took the hint, and wiped his grandmother’s stage makeup from his lips.

Lionel had puffed air into the old woman’s dead lungs. He’d pounded her heart into action with his fists. Lionel was core Dispensa­tion: he knew first aid.

“You did really good tonight, Lionel. You have saved your grand­mother’s life.”

Lionel held his chin high. “You have to use your head when you’re working security.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“I made the right choice,” he said artlessly. “See, that dead costume killed Grandma, right? It smothered her. I wanted to pull my knife and slice it off of her. But I didn’t. I waited for her power to reboot.”

“That was smart. You were thinking like a grown-up. Your brother will be proud.”

“The system crashed—but only for a little while,” Lionel said. “As soon as her underwear came back on, that got her breathing. We can’t panic and wreck the system. Because we are the system.” He nodded, pleased with his insight. “It takes three trained staffers to tuck her into that costume. So I’m sure glad I didn’t improvise.”

“When we get back home safe, I’ll improvise you a nice roast-beef sandwich.”

“Are you sure that I did the right thing tonight, Mila? I mean… Grandma was dead.”

“You did just fine, Lionel. You’re a wizard, you’re a true star.” Rad­mila propped her flip-flopped feet on the greenly blinking dashboard. “I sure wish John was home tonight. John would mix me a drink. Nobody mixes a nice Greenhouse Tequila like he can.”

Lionel pulled something large and ugly from a Velcro slot on his chest.

“So what’s that thing?” Radmila said.

“Hey, this is my cool street blade, sister!”

“Let me see it?”

He handed it over, hilt-first.

The knife’s awkward handle was wrapped in length after length of multicolored electrical wire. Lionel’s homemade knife was made en­tirely from junked computer parts. A dozen big silicon chips—all black and heat-discolored—had been set into a melted plastic handle. Those chips were like a jagged row of shark’s teeth.

“This stage prop sure is weird,” Radmila said. “It smells awful! Why does it stink so much?”

“Yeah, that’s the blood they put on it!” said Lionel. “When you make a prison shiv, you get, like, every guy in your prison gang to drip some blood on your blade! That screws up the DNA evidence.”

“California doesn’t have any ‘prison gangs.’ California doesn’t even have prisons.”

“Yeah, so this is, like, a modern electronic-parole prison shiv!”

Radmila held the makeshift weapon with one thumb and two fingers. It was more than merely strange and awkward: it looked insane.

The more she looked at this desperate, far-fetched contrivance, the worse it made her feel. It was not a stage prop at all. Some stranger somewhere had put a fanatical, psychopathic effort into making this strange parody of a knife. Its very crudeness was scary. It radiated a de­termined, lethal, sacramental feeling. Evil was pouring off of it, like the peppery dust from a shattered mass of concrete.

Radmila looked into the guileless young eyes of her brother-in-law. “Can I keep this knife for you?”

“Keep it? What, keep it where? Are you gonna tuck it into your bra?”

She wasn’t wearing a bra. “Well, you shouldn’t carry a thing like this.”

’’You can keep my knife if you want it,” Lionel said, putting a brave face on his wounded feelings. “You’re the one who gave that to me.”

“I never gave you this thing. This thing is not my style.”

Now Lionel was was upset. “But you did! You came onto my action set and gave that to me. It was all wrapped up in pink butcher paper.”

“Where would I get a prop like this? I haven’t done an action role in ages! I hate violent action roles. I do ingenue roles and supportive­girlfriend.”

“Okay,” Lionel said, blinking, “Fine, I get it. That’s all right.” He tucked the knife back into the slash in his suit. “See! It’s all gone! End of story, roll credits.”

His face had paled with her unmeant insult. There was some pro­found misunderstanding going on here.

Radmila knew that it had to be her own fault somehow. Because it was always her own fault. Innine years of knowing them, in becoming one of them: Every time she’d ever put a foot wrong with the Montgomery­-Montalbans, it had been her own fault.

She was always outthinking and outfeeling the Family-Firm. She was always failing to grasp how simple and clear they were.

The Montgomery-Montalbans were California aristocrats. They were rich and powerful and secretive and very civilized. Being aristo­crats, they were naturally slightly stupid, and in their utter devotion to their Family values, there was something sunny, airheaded, starry-eyed, and cosmically lucid about them.

That was their charm. They had a lot of charm. Charm was their stock-in-trade.

It was unthinkable that sweet Lionel, who doted on her, would ever lie to her. So, maybe she really had brought him the ugly knife. That was remotely possible. She often carried packages for Lionel whenever he was on his sets. Just as she would faithfully bring snacks and toys to her own daughter, whenever Mary was on. To show up with a gesture of support, to be there physically, breathing the same air, eating lunch on set—that was a steadying, reassuring Family thing. Family stars did that for each other all the time. Just to show that—no matter how weird things might get in Los Angeles—you had someone who understood and cared about you.

Mary. Mary. Mary Montalban. Her baby was so far away from her now. The baby’s father, too. John was so much like his brother Lionel. Except that Lionel was fine, or at least okay, while John was doomed to be her husband.

John was the smartest Montgomery-Montalban, the cleverest one. Nowadays, John understood a lot of things. He understood things much too well.

A pang of guilty love for her nearest and dearest rose within Radmila. Her fit of passion was strong enough to taste, like a taste of bloody iron. Her love for her family was a very blood-and-flesh kind of love. It was large and tragic and liquid and squishy.

Ever since the pain and terror of fleeing that nasty little island in the Adriatic, Radmila had known, with a heart-crushing clarity, that no human being could ever love a monster like herself. Still: The only thing of any value in life was to love and be loved. Knowing she would never find any love, she had despaired of love and tried hard to hide from love.

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 .. .”

Toddy herself had conspicuously forgotten one important thing. Rad­mila Mihajlovic was the cloned creation of a Balkan war criminal. That awful fact preyed on Radmila’s mind every time that she saw her own face in a mirror, but Toddy never breathed a single word about the sub­ject. She seemed to have simply forgotten it. Toddy was a major star, and Mila Montalban was her handpicked disciple, and that was how things were.

Like all Synchronists, Toddy was rigorously bodycentric. Her philos­ophy was obsessed about the flow of time through human flesh. It fol­lowed that Toddy’s cure for every kind of crisis centered on the body: exercise, sleep, nutrition, and determined primping. “Never forget to go to the gym every morning,” Toddy would say, “because that’s the worst thing that will happen to you all day, and that’s such a comfort to know.”

It was particularly important to go to the gym whenever you were be­wildered, feeble, lousy, grieving, and scared half to death. For a woman to go to the gym in such conditions was a show of steely mettle. It proved that you were serenely surpassing the limits of lesser, less committed, lit­tle people.

So Radmila rose early from her lonely bed of memory foam, threw on her dancing skeins, and crept silently downstairs to confront the Fam­ily’s machines.

The Family gym was walled with display screens. Machines mapped and recorded the transformations within her flesh. Her organs, skin, blood, hair. The screens showed her the six hundred and fifty different muscles in her body. They mapped two hundred and six different bones.

It wasn’t very hard to shape a muscle. Fed and properly stressed, a muscle would change shape in a week. A professional actress took more interest in the slow, limestone-like re-formation of the bones. If you watched the bones closely, mapping their glacial movements day by day, you could learn to feel the bones. Toddy claimed that she could act with her bones.

Pain was the sign of ugliness leaving the body.

Radmila had slept briefly and badly, but she kept at her rigorous labors till some Family kids thundered in: Drew, Rishi, Vinod, and Li­onel, of course, who was their ringleader. Whooping, the Family teens literally bounded off the walls: kongs, cat jumps, dismounts, cartwheels, and shoulder rolls. It was thoughtless of them to stunt so much on such a dark day. Radmila aimed a grown-up scowl at them. That calmed them down.

Stupefied with exercise, she nestled into the gym’s black support pod. Sleep hit her like a falling wall.

Inside the pod’s velvety, mind-crushing darkness, an oneiric dream stole over Radmila. She dreamed of weightlessness: a dream of LilyPad. It was John who had taken her up to LilyPad, as a privilege for her, as a sign of his trust for her.

Some quality in weightlessness had soaked into her flesh forever. The body could never forget that experience: it would come back to her on her deathbed. She dreamed of the warm silence of orbit, of the accept­ing and impassive Earth so far below them, with tainted skies, its spread­ing deserts, and its long romantic plumes of burning forests.

In the orbital sanctum of LilyPad, for the first and last time in her life, Radmila Mihajlovic had forgotten herself. She had forgotten to police her inner being within her walls of trauma, fear, and self-contempt. Be­cause she had escaped the world. There was no weight in orbit, no hate­ful burden for a caryatid to support there. Outside the boundaries of Earth, love was deep, viscous, fertile. Love was all-conquering.

Radmila woke, and she knew that it had been a good dream. To have a dream so sweet and promising, at a time of such grief and confusion: It meant that she was strong. She would power her way through this im­possible time. She would do her duty, she would bear up. Today, to­morrow, yesterday—the “event heap,” as Synchronists called it—the event heap would sort itself out.

Radmila was hungry. The body mattered. The Montgomery­Montalbans were early risers and convinced believers in a proper break­fast.

But there was nobody around to share her meal. There was one spe­cial sunlit breakfast nook overlooking the Family’s gardens, where she made a point of breakfasting with John and Mary, but John had gone away, and he’d taken the child with him. The breakfast nook, all Perspex and cellulose, was one of the prettiest spots in a beautiful building, but now it felt like a reproach to her.

Whenever John was gone on his business, Radmila would eat a more formal breakfast with Toddy, but Toddy Montgomery would not be din­ing this morning. No.

So Radmila ventured downstairs to the kitchen to eat with the staff. The mansion’s gleaming kitchen was weirdly deserted. The staffers were kind and good to her; they knew that the Family’s stars were just the graphic front ends for the Firm’s commercial interests, but the staff were big fans as well as Family employees, so it always meant a lot to them whenever Radmila dropped by.

The staffers had all left. They were all Dispensation people, so they’d swarmed out of the Bivouac to go fight the emergency.

Radmila sullenly turned on a countertop meatrix and printed out a light breakfast. She nourished herself in ominous silence. Then she went to her boudoir and costumed herself in a morning gown.

It was time to go and see about Toddy. Radmila had few illusions about what she would see there, but she knew it was the right Family thing to do.

Uncle Jack was in Toddy’s master bedroom. Jack was overseeing the family’s robots as they methodically pried Toddy’s treasures from their quake-proof sticky-wax.

It seemed that Jack hadn’t slept all night. Yet Jack still had his buoy­ant smile and he was beautifully dressed: the role of a Family star was to keep up appearances.

Radmila cued a soundtrack and made her entrance. “It’s so good to see you.”

“You, too,” said Uncle Jack.

Toddy owned a host of pretty knickknacks: fabjects, hobjects, gov­jects, all her awards, of course; her art collectibles, mementos, and her Twentieth-Century Modern-Antiques, for those had always been her particular favorites.

Uncle Jack was methodically stripping the bedroom of every trace of Toddy and her possessions. Every stick of Toddy’s famous furniture was already history.

Uncle Jack was in here, rather than out warring with the ongoing urban catastrophe, for Uncle Jack was old and sentimental. Even after retiring from his own stardom, he had devoted himself to running gen­tle simulation games for children. Jack preferred to rusticate in his play worlds rather than duke it out over politics and budgets.

Kindly Uncle Jack had been the first person in the Family-Firm to de­cide that she might be okay. “Our Johnny has found himself a pretty for­eign girl,” Jack had said, “an illegal alien, no prospects, no capital, bizarre education, unspeakable heritage” —and then Jack made himself her friend.

Inthe sunlit, louvered spot where Toddy’s big, frilly bed had once stood, a bright-eyed entity was busy inside a medical bubble. The crea­ture in that bubble was alive, but it was no longer Toddy Montgomery. The creature did not recognize Radmila. Random, empty expressions crossed its waxy face. It scratched at the black bruises on its long, skinny haunches, and it stared into a crystal ball.

“I almost thought that she knew me for a moment, when they re­booted her last night,” said Jack. “But I was dreaming. I’d hoped that she might recognize you now. You were always the daughter in this Family that she loved best.”

“They revived her body… ?”

“Yes, she’s pretty much exactly as she looks. I’m really sorry.”

The old woman had always been particularly obsessed with her bio­sphere hobjects. Those complicated pocket worlds, so safe and protected and serenely distant from reality, always consoled her somehow. The gleaming world in Toddy’s distracted grip was comforting her even now.

“She’s still interacting with that hobject there,” Radmila said hope­fully. “Surely that has to mean something… I mean, if she can still en­gage with it.”

“She’s become part of it,” said Uncle Jack remorsefully, “and it is part of her.”

“I never understood what people see in those things.”

“I understand that matter quite perfectly,” said Jack, “but that cer­tainly doesn’t make me like this situation any better.”

“So—what do we do now, Jack?”

“We have to deal with the legal snarl.” Uncle Jack shrugged. “She had her Living Will and all that business, so we plucked her loose from her life support… And here she is. Her simpler organs and tissues, those are all juiced-up and hyperactive, but her poor tired old pumpkin up here… “ Jack patted the fine, silky hair on his own skull. “She can’t speak anymore, she can’t walk… She tore all her clothes off, she won’t stay dressed… I think she might be able to feed herself. Someday. She’s still got her appetite. Those monkey hands and eyes keep right on going, but she’s way overdrawn at the brain bank.”

Radmila stared through the tender skin of the antiseptic bubble. “I guess something like this has to come to all of us, sooner or later…”

“She was medically dead for fifty-seven seconds,” Jack said. He turned away from the pod, pulled his wand, and brusquely shot a com­mand at a robot.

Radmila had nothing to say to that. Being Hollywood stars with strong political interests, the Family-Firm had suffered many scandals, intrusions, voyeuristic interventions, vile rumors, sometimes even armed assaults… Yet this was the single worst, most heart-sickening calamity she had ever seen the Family suffer.

Jack spoke again. “When I was a kid your age… there was this curse called ‘Alzheimer’s disease.’ Have you ever heard of that syndrome?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s gone now. That syndrome was even worse than this. In some ways.”

“Oh wow.” Radmila drew a breath. “So, let’s take some action. What can I do to help right now, this minute?”

Jack was pleased by this, for it was a very with-it, Family-Firm thing to say. “Well,” he said, “you can help me make the Family’s Directors see some sense about the situation… Her investors will truly hate this de­velopment.”

“Okay. I’ll do that. What’s our game plan?”

Uncle Jack pointed skyward with his elegant ivory wand.

Radmila was incredulous. “We launch her into outer space?”

“Plenty of room up in LilyPad.” Uncle Jack nodded. “That’s the Family’s attic. At least it’s way, way out of Californian legal jurisdiction. That was always the best thing about outer space, if you ask me.”

Radmila had no counsel to offer about hiding a crazy old woman in orbit. Such events had certainly been known to happen. Jack knew about that, and she knew about that; adults didn’t have to linger over the details. It was a dispensation. A way to duck the consequences of a tan­gled legal, ethical, social system that couldn’t deal with catastrophe.

That was the true genius of the Dispensation. They weren’t exactly revolutionaries, but they always had some brand-new way to shuffle from the bottom of the deck.

Radmila dodged a robot with a socketed tray of stray hobjects. “What will the investors make of her prognosis?”

“Stars don’t die easy, but the woman did die.”

“She doesn’t look very dead this morning. The brain is just another organ, isn’t it? There must be some kind of investment path for us there.”

“Of course there’s an investment path,” said Uncle Jack. “We could waste an incredible amount of our Family capital trying to revive our oldest star… Or we could invest that same amount of money into you. Or into Lionel. Or best of all, into little Mary… What course of action has the best long-term return for our Family? You can do the math.”

“I hate math,” Radmila lied.

“We have to think in the long term. That is our core Family value. So we stick by our core values now, eh? We’ve got to cut and run on Toddy. She’s become a sinkhole. We’ve got to get those knotheads to reroute her investment stream. As soon as we can.”

“I would never ask the Family to do that for me.”

“Well, it’s time for you to ask for that. No, more than that. You’re a big, grown-up girl now, Mila. It’s time for you to bite off a chunk and just tell those sons of bitches who the star is. You have to do that for us. You’re the Family’s biggest star now. Nobody else will be able to ask for that, and make that stick with our investors.”

“That sounds so selfish of me.”

“It is not selfish. It’s practical. Toddy always did practical things. Toddy did a hundred things like that, and worse things, harder things. Being beautiful, that is not a pretty business. You can see where that leads. Because: Look at her. That’s your own future, girl. That is what you will be asking for. In the long term, inside there, that’s you.”

Inside the puckered plastic bubble, the naked creature sucked at her wizened fingers and glared madly into her fine glass toy. Radmila real­ized, fatally and finally, that she would never get another kind word from Toddy. Not another smile, not another knowing nod of approval. Grief rolled through her like thunder.

Radmila wanted to die. She’d never wanted to die in this keen way be­fore. She’d never realized that dying could be such an aspiration.

She drew a breath. “No, that is not me! Not my future! Never! By the time I’m her age, this world will be transformed!That future world will be nothing like this world! The brilliancy, the lightness… we don’t even have words for that world.”

Her outburst surprised Uncle Jack. “Mila, I never realized you were quite so Synchronistic.”

“My husband insists on all that.”

“Are we entirely on the same page here?” asked Jack. “By Synchronis­tic standards, I rather let the Family down… God knows I tried to buy into that modern highbrow stuff, but, well, my heart was never in it.”

Jack’s embarrassment was painful. “Well,” she said haltingly, “I do know, for sure, that Toddy would want me to remain a star… So I’ll do that. For her. She gave us all that, because she had so much to give to her audience… She brought so much grace and elegance and beauty into people’s lives… Toddy Montgomery never forgot her public! Toddy always wanted to give them beautiful dreams.”

Jack’s nose wrinkled a bit. “That’s how you remember her?”

“I know I’m talking silly star-hype… but I can remember how she made me work. Discipline, personal transformation, and thorough re-hearsals. Toddy made me what I am. I’ve lost so much… “ Radmila waved vaguely at the peach-colored bedroom walls. “She built all of this, and all I can do is to try to hold it up.”

“That won’t be easy,” Jack told her, “but she handpicked you. Every­body knows you’ve been groomed for that role. You’re in a strong posi­tion, if you can stand the pressure.”

“Jack, I can stand it. I can stand anything. Worse things have hap­pened to me than this. You will help me, won’t you?”

“You always called her ‘Toddy,’ “ Jack said. “’Theodora Montgomery.’ Well, I remember another woman—Lila Jane Dickey from Hawkinsville, Georgia. That’s who I remember when I see that thing in the bubble. You meet a creature like Lila Jane maybe once in a generation.”

Jack chased a busy robot from the windowglass, which was already spotless. “You ever heard of a thing called ‘AIDS’? AIDS was another plague.”

“Of course I’ve heard of that one, Jack.”

“Well, Toddy, or rather Lila Jane—she showed up in this town right after we first cured that illness. Curing AIDS was awesome. It was like somebody hit Hollywood with a promiscuity bomb. You could literally see the dust blow right off the sexual revolution.”

Uncle Jack liked to talk in an old-fashioned way. There was some­thing deeply touching and endearing about him. That nostalgic glow in Jack’s fine old face was illuminating her dark mood. The future might be painful, even chaotic, but no one could rob the Montgomery­-Montalbans of their heritage.

“Toddy was the bomb,” said Uncle Jack. “Any star might choose to sleep with some big director, but Toddy liked to sleep with the techni­cians. The ugly, geeky, meta-media guys! Yeah, she cut through those nerds like the scythe of doom! She even married one of them—she mar­ried Montalban.”

Jack tugged at his tasteful cuff links. “I told her, way back then: ‘Lila, he’s a nouveau riche Spanish-language digital media mogul! And we’re proper Hollywood stars, so he’s just not our kind of people!’ But I was dead wrong, and Toddy knew better. It took a visionary to carry off her strategies. Toddy was so totally clued-in. The Next Web was sure to take over the world. The Next Web had everything, because the Next Web was everything! All it needed was some oomph! It needed some big sexy va-va-va-voom! And Toddy had that stuff by the megaton! All people could do was stare.”

Jack stared into Toddy’s medical bubble. “Not that I like to stare at her just now… but yeah, the people stared, all right. Even the ma­chines stared. Forget TV, movies—the old entertainment vehicles. Toddy could scratch her ass on any public beach and pull down ten mil­lion web-hits from homemade spy videos. She walked through her life in a universal cloud of voyeurs.”

Radmila blinked. “Toddy never told me much about those aspects of her profession.”

“Oh, come on, come on! Your generation never thinks like that at all! That’s all over for you. You young folks are an entirely different breed of star. You crazy superhuman kids, you don’t even have four-letter words for sex! Birth rates, children: That’s what you people fuss about. You. think that sex is all engineering.”

“Gender roles are engineering,” said Radmila.

“Fine, sure, go ahead, be that way… Well… the Toddy you knew was a wise old woman. The girl I knew was young: a hungry, very deter­mined pop idol with a body like a force of nature. And even though I’m as gay as a box of birds, I sure had the better deal out of that one.”

RADMILA DID A COSTUME CHANGE, snapping herself into her formal Dispensation uniform. To dress in this way: so simple, stern, and functionally ergonomic—it always helped her morale. She was proud of her medals and the hotlinks racing down her lapels: they were the visible evidence of endless fund-raisers, hospital visits, ribbon cut­tings, awards ceremonies. “Community leadership.”

The Family’s Situation Room was a legacy from old Sergio Montal­ban. It was the master geek’s addition to the Bivouac, part of his dogged campaign to stabilize the family finances. When Sergio had been Fam­ily chairman, the Situation Room had been his dashboard for the Fam­ily’s fortunes.

The Family’s fortunes had prospered mightily, but the pioneer’s hard­ware had been badly dated. Today the Family’s investments were so in­terwoven with the urban fabric of Los Angeles that maps made more sense than spreadsheets.

So the Family used the plush, hushed Situation Room as an infor­mal romper space. They watched old movies in there. Most modern Angelenos couldn’t watch movies—because they couldn’t sit still and quiet for two solid hours without taking prompts from the net. But the Montgomery-Montalbans were a disciplined, highly traditional folk.

The Family-Firm didn’t exactly “watch” the old movies—not in the traditional sense—but they would crowd together bodily in the Situa­tion Room, slouch on beanbags, cook and eat heaps of popcorn, and crack silly jokes while movies spooled on the walls. The Situation Room had been the scene of Radmila’s happiest hours, when she was pregnant and gulping chocolate ice cream. John had been proud of her then, truly happy about her, and Family members always went out of their way to be kind to a pregnant girl. It was the first time in her life that Rad­mila had been part of a human family: accepted, relied upon, taken for granted, just plain there.

Radmila even rather liked to watch the old movies. Especially the very, very old silent movies, which seemed less bizarre and abrasive than the other kinds.

The Situation Room was crowded this morning, but the Family­Firm’s games today were grim. The Directors had brusquely abandoned Sergio’s screens. A modern autofocus projector painted the wall with a geolocative map.

This disaster map was busily agglomerating the damage reports from the net, which were flooding in by their millions. The map filtered this torrent of noise, so as to produce some actionable intelligence.

Southern California was measled all over with color-coded dots: scar­let, tangerine, golden, cerulean, and forest green. The map refreshed once each second, and as it did, all the colored dots denoting their small threats and ongoing horrors would do a little popcorn jump.

Politely, Radmila did a star entrance into the Situation Room. They could tell by her gloomy choice of soundtrack that her news was bad.

Glyn was manning the interactive table near the wall. Glyn had the most experience with the Family’s big crisis map, so she was required to drive it. Glyn peered up from her hectic labor. “Mila, how is Toddy?”

Radmila killed her soundtrack and silently shook her head. The Fam­ily knew the truth instantly. They’d all feared the worst, but they’d dared to entertain some hope.

Radmila conjured up a chair and had it carry her to Glyn. Glyn groped at her touchscreen, jacked her target cursor around, and stared at the busy projected dots, but Glyn was taking this news harder than anyone. Glyn was twitching all over and on the verge of tears.

Toddy’s heirs sat before the disaster map in their ragged, worried half circle, glumly clutching their control wands. Guillermo, Freddy, and Sofia Montalban were the Firm’s driving forces these days. Buffy and Raph Montgomery had shown up to make a Family quorum.

Doug and Lily were Buffy’s children, while Rishi and Elsie were Raph’s. The Family grandchildren clustered in the back of the Situation Room. They were the younger folk, so it was their business to run out into the field and do sit-reps.

Radmila slid her fingers over Glyn’s pale knuckles. “Let me drive this, Glyn.”

“I can do it,” Glyn said tautly.

“Glyn, take off. Some breakfast would do you good.”

Nobody else seemed to realize this, but Glyn was coming out of her skin. Glyn was always the quiet, self-sacrificing one in the Family-Firm: the one who was always there for everybody else. Glyn was the normal one, the quiet one. Glyn was no star. She wasn’t a Synchronist. Glyn took no interest in Dispensation politics. Glyn never made any big, starry public appearances. Glyn had the lowest public profile in the Family.

Because Glyn was Toddy’s clone.

Glyn had been the biggest public scandal that the Family-Firm had ever suffered. Even the tragic assassination of their governor had caused them less turmoil. It had been an epic Hollywood calamity when the public learned that one of Toddy’s wealthy geek lovers had cloned Toddy. The legal and political fight to get custody of that little girl­—away from her so-called parents—had brought the Family years of heartache.

But Hollywood scandals faded, since there were always some hotter, fresher scandals. Thirty years had passed, and now Glyn was a sturdy fix­ture of the Family, just as loyal and just as welcome as any other adopted child.

But that was not how Glyn herself had felt about that situation. Glyn had never been at peace about that issue; no, not for one single day.

Glyn half collapsed in her command chair. Radmila had never seen such a strange, desolate, bewildered look. At least, she’d never seen that look on Glyn’s face. She’d certainly seen that look on her own.

What was this strange, hot feeling that welled up within her? It felt like love, but it was so dense and heavy and there was so much pain in it. That powerful feeling overwhelming her now: It was pity. She felt so much pity for poor Glyn.

The Directors went about the Family’s dire business, highlighting the stricken map with their wands and murmuring together. It struck Rad­mila, with a revelatory force, that Glyn had never been the clone of Theodora Montgomery. No, never. Glyn had always been the clone of a stranger: Lila Jane Dickey.

That was a sudden, boiling insight into her best friend’s basic charac­ter. Suddenly, Radmila held the golden key to Glyn’s role in the world. As an actress, she had captured Glyn’s character; she held Glyn right in the palm of her hand. Radmila felt a little stunned.

“Glyn,” she said tenderly, “I know that you’ll be all right.”

Glyn’s lips trembled. Glyn was anxious that no one else in the Family should know this, but Glyn was secretly overjoyed by the loss of Toddy. Glyn was grieving, her eyes were wet with hot tears, but the destruction of Toddy Montgomery was the happiest day of her whole life.

How many people in the world were like this? Radmila wondered. How many people had to conceal the shame and horror of their secret lives?

All of them, maybe. Everybody in the stricken world.

Glyn was muttering aloud. “I think, maybe… yes, maybe I’ll go lie down a little.”

“Eat, Glyn,” Radmila told her. “Sleep is good hygiene, too.”

“You can run this map now. You can do all this for us.”

“Sure I can, Glyn. You can depend on me.”

Glyn pulled herself slouching from her chair and trudged from the Situation Room. Glyn never made any poised entrances and exits, like a star would do. The Family had tried to make Glyn a star, they had sunk some money into improving her, but the treatments had just never taken on Glyn. Nobody knew why.

Radmila settled herself into running the disaster map. The Directors were cautiously projecting little chips of the Family’s resources into the ongoing swirl of relief. They did this interface work with long pointer wands. They looked soberly elegant yet slightly awkward, like socialites with badminton rackets.

Rishi chose to walk in front of the map, covering his suit with pro­jected cityware. The map swiftly re-formed itself behind his body. Rishi was a younger member of the Family, so he lacked a Director’s wand. In­stead, he held a fat black plastic brick in his hand, a gooey interface all dented with his fingers. “What are the stakeholder specs on Grandma’s celebrity endorsements?”

“They’ve still got her immersive-world endorsements,” Guillermo said. “Those endorsements don’t need any real Toddy.”

“Her investors say they need a guideline concept right away,” Rishi insisted.

“We tell them that my mother is ‘stable,’ “ said Freddy.

“Meaning?”

“Our guideline concept is ‘stable,’ “said Freddy stoutly. “’We are closely tracking developments as Toddy’s condition evolves. Her bench­marks now are consistent with her benchmarks yesterday.’”

“That’ll work.” Guillermo nodded. “Go feed’ em that, Rishi.”

Rishi stepped out of the projection, and clamped the gooey brick to his ear.

“Look at all that damage around the Showroom!” Freddy com­plained. “Why did we build that palace right on a fault line?”

“Because the land was cheap there,” said Guillermo. “Zoom that zone, Glyn. I mean, Mila.”

Radmila obediently zoomed.

“See, look there! Everything that we built there came through the quake like aces. That is so beautiful! Rishi, I want you to get through to that architect’s people—Frank Osbourne. We need to congratulate him! As a Family courtesy.”

“I’ll do that,” said Rishi.

“Let’s check housing values,” said Freddy.

Radmila stroked the touchscreen and peeled an onion of interpreta­tive overlays. Real-estate values were the X-ray of the Angeleno soul. The real-estate map was already spattered with high-volume blobs of rapidly moving money.

As might be expected, a strong postquake surge of investment was already hitting the blue-ribbon districts of Watts, Crenshaw, La Mirada, Lakewood, and Paramount. And Norwalk, of course, that fortress of glamour and privilege where the Bivouac stood firm: there were some scattered blue and yellow trouble-dots in Norwalk, but nothing dreadful.

It was the poorer, dodgier neighborhoods that were always stricken hard in times of crisis: grim, crime-ridden Beverly Hills, the fire­tormented canyons of Mulholland, the stricken shores of Malibu… There the dots clustered into complicated, hopeless wads of bleak pastels.

The slums along the tortured Pacific shoreline were the worst parts of the city. Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Santa Monica… Racked by the rising seas, these had been the first real-estate zones to become unin­surable. Money was stuck there, nailed there. You could almost smell the money burning.

The cooling Pacific had retreated slightly during the past ten years of the climate crisis, but that good news, paradoxically, made real-estate matters much worse. The uninsured had been feuding over their shore­line slums for decades, in tooth-gritting, desperate, crusading, save-my­backyard urban politics. The prospect that salt water might leave their basements made them crazy.

“You know what we need here?” said Raph, lightly popping the tor­tured map with the saffron beam of his wand. “We need to stop swatting flies at this emergent level and get ourselves a big strategic overview.”

Raph always talked like that. He was his father’s son, a Montgomery, and frankly a little dim.

“We’ll handle this quake the way we always handle a quake,” growled Freddy Montalban. “The grown-ups circle the wagons, and we send out the kids to commiserate. Wind up the Family’s charity machine… Big star turns to lift the morale in all the worst-hit regions… Let’s make a quick list of those. Mila, find us that casualty map.”

Mila struggled with the interface.

Raph was agreeable. “We could send little Mary up to Malibu. Mary is great in the derelict properties.”

“Little Mary is in Cyprus,” said Freddy.

“Mljet,” Radmila broke in, forsaking the puck for the joystick. “Mary and John are touring Mljet.”

“I can’t even pronounce that,” Raph lamented. “So, how soon can we ship Mary home for some quake duty? Little Mary is super with the tot demographic.”

“The Adriatic is the other side of the world,” said Guillermo. “That’s about as far away from LA as it is possible to get. In fact, that’s why we wanted to invest over there. Remember that big discussion?”

“Can’t we fly Mary back in?” said Buffy, brightening where she sat. Buffy Montgomery loved to fly. Buffy had been the heart and soul of the Family’s scheme to buy LilyPad. That was entirely typical of Buffy, be­cause LilyPad, for all its spacey gloss, was a big white elephant.

“John would never fly,” Radmila told them. “Jets were a major cause of the climate crisis.”

They knew better than to say anything about John’s principles. John’s father, the Governor, was dead. So John might bow his knee to his grandmother Toddy on occasion, but otherwise, John did his Family duty as John himself construed that duty. Which was to say, John was al­most impossible.

Troubled, Radmila had lost her way in the map’s widgets. To impro­vise, she pulled an old trick that Toddy had once taught her.

“So what was that?” said Freddy at once.

It was an old trick, but often a good one. Most trend-spotters using the net looked for rising news items that were gaining public credibility. But you could learn useful things in a hurry if you searched for precisely the opposite. News that should have public credibility, but didn’t.

Sometimes the public was told things that the public couldn’t bear to know.

Radmila had discovered a different map of Los Angeles: Los Angeles seen from deep within the Earth.

“Get rid of that,” said Raph.

“What is it?” said Sofia, who was sitting there dutifully, but using her two wands as a pair of knitting needles. Sofia had always been like that. Sofia was Family because she had three kids. By three different men, but that was Hollywood.

“That’s a forecast for underground weather,” said Raph. “So-called. Everybody knows that you can’t predict earthquakes.”

The map was a garish space of exotic flows. It was a scientific map: ugly, user-unfriendly, speckled all over with menu bars, to-do lists, threat meters, and behavioral prediction.

Those scratchy-looking color-blobs had to be lava, or magma, or strain tensors in the shifting continental plates. All very complicated. Radmila had never seen this map before, so she was at a loss.

Still, it was obvious at a glance that the heavier action was outside this part of the map. So Radmila scrolled the map sideways.

The map’s edge led her to a nexus: a big maroon knot. It looked like a bloodstain.

Freddy flipped his wand around and painted a circle onto the pro-jection. “That node there looks interesting.”

Guillermo said, “So who is hosting this map?”

“Who made it?” said Freddy.

Radmila had been hastily accessing the tags, so she was a little ahead of the game. “Some kind of Acquis science group. They’re based in Brussels.”

“It’s from Brussels?” scoffed Raph. “Get rid of it!”

“Better let me drive,” Freddy decided. He rose from his seat and set his solid, suited bulk into Glyn’s abandoned chair.

Freddy lacked any grace at net surfing. He simply found every tag that looked big and active and pounded it. He popped up his personal notepad and hauled cogent chunks of data onto it. Freddy was a seasoned Family businessman. He never bored easily.

“Okay,” Freddy summarized, after seven tedious minutes. “We seem to have some kind of major movement of liquid rock… an unprecedented movement… deep under Yosemite Valley.”

“They made all that up,” said Raph. “That’s some Acquis political ploy. Propaganda. They’re always like that.”

Guillermo popped loose the electric snaps of his uniform jacket.

“You really think that Acquis scientists would lie about magma?”

“Maybe not ‘lie,’ exactly. But the Acquis are always big alarmists. That’s all a simulation. It’s not like they’re actually down there looking at the real lava. You know that’s impossible.”

“But they’re scientists! They don’t know we’re looking at this map of theirs! They’ve got nothing to gain by lying to us!”

“They’re doing this to harm our cultural values,” said Raph.

“Your thesis isn’t quite clear to me, Raph. What are the scientists doing with this map, exactly? They’re launching some huge culture-war conspiracy to fake the data, just to make us feel unhappy about our earthquakes?”

“Fine,” said Raph, losing his temper, “what are you trying to say to us? That there’s some kind of brand-new, giant weird volcano growing under California? What next, Guillermo? Are we supposed to act all happy about that idea? We don’t have enough troubles this morning? Our hometown just got hit by a Richter Six!”

“That is the point,” said Guillermo.

“What’s the point?”

“That’s why we’re getting hit by so many earthquakes. This huge lava movement underground: That might be the root cause of that problem.”

Raph shrugged. “That notion sounds pretty far-out to me.”

“Raph, you’re always saying that you want the big strategic picture. This is a big strategic picture. Boy, is it ever big.”

“Yosemite is a park,” said Raph, straining for politeness. “Yosemite Park doesn’t make earthquakes.”

“Let’s look that up,” Freddy counseled. “I’ll tag our private correlation engine for ‘Yosemite’ and ‘volcano.’”

This action took Freddy about fifteen seconds. The results arrived in a blistering deluge of search hits. The results were ugly.

They had hit on a subject that knowledgeable experts had been discussing for a hundred years.

The most heavily trafficked tag was the strange coinage “Supervolcano.’ Supervolcanoes had been a topic of mild intellectual interest for many years. Recently, people had talked much less about supervolcanoes, and with more pejoratives in their semantics.

Web-semantic traffic showed that people were actively shunning the subject of supervolcanoes. That scientific news seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way.

“So,” said Guillermo at last, “according to our best sources here, there are some giant… and I mean really giant magma plumes rising up and chewing at the West Coast of North America. Do we have a Family consensus about that issue?”

Raph still wasn’t buying it. “The other sources said that Yellowstone’ was a supervolcano. Not ‘Yosemite.’ Yellowstone is way over in Montana.”

“You do agree that supervolcanoes exist, though. They’re a scientific fact of life on Earth. That’s what I’m asking.”

“They exist. If you insist. But the last supervolcano was seventy-four thousand years ago. Not during this business quarter. Not this year. Not even one thousand years. Seventy-four thousand years, Freddy.”

Freddy looked down and slowly quoted from his notepad. “ ‘The massive eruption of a supervolcano would be a planetary catastrophe. It would create years of freezing temperatures as volcanic dust and ash obscured the warmth of the sun. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.’”

Guillermo’s face went sour. “Okay, that is total baloney. ‘Nuclear winter: that sounds extremely corny to me.”

“That’s because this source material is eighty years old. Geologists know a whole lot about supervolcanoes. Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes.”

Buffy was losing her temper. “But this is so totally unbelievable! The sky already darkened! The black rain already fell on us! We already have a climate crisis, we have one going on right now! Now we’re supposed to have another crisis, out of nowhere, because California blows up from some supervolcano? What are the odds?”

“Well, that question’s pretty easy,” said Freddy. “A supervolcano under the Earth doesn’t care what we humans did to the sky. If it blows up, then it just blows up! So the odds of a supervolcano are exactly the same as they always were.”

Rishi, who was bright, had gotten all interested. “Well, what exactly are the odds of a supervolcano? How often do supervolcanoes erupt, and turn the sky black, completely wrecking the climate, and so forth?”

It took Freddy a good while to clumsily bang that one out. Maybe a minute and a half. “Sixty thousand years, on the average. That would mean we’re already fourteen thousand years past our due date.”

A contemplative gloom settled over the conclave.

“Look,” said Raph at last, “I’m a Synchronist like the rest of you guys, but let’s not get completely goofy here. We can’t go making our investment decisions on a forty-thousand-year time frame. That’s not due diligence and sustainable business planning. That’s just plain weird.”

“The pace of quakes in LA has been picking up,” said Guillermo. “That trend is clear.”

Raph had a ready answer. “Well, that comes from climate change. All those heavy rains lubricate the local fault lines. And we get rising groundwater, too.”

“Raph, how come climate change can cause earthquakes, but supervolcanoes don’t cause earthquakes?”

“Okay, so you got me there.” Raph shrugged. “I never said I was a sci­entist.”

Freddy contemplated the geological display map. “Mila, give us that current-situation map again.”

Radmila did this. The Family studied the colorful popping disaster dots with a renewed sense of dread. They were clustered on certain lines. Those seismic lines.

“Do we have any Family game plan for the complete destruction of California?” said Freddy.

“John does,” Radmila said.

Freddy lifted his brows. “Oh?”

“Yes. John once told me that if the planet Earth became completely unfit for life, there would be two places for our Family to go: up into orbit, or down under the Earth.”

“I never heard John say that to me,” Buffy complained.

“We were floating up in LilyPad when John told me that. On our honeymoon.” They had been floating at a porthole and gazing at the distant Earth. There were certain angles of orbit, in the host of whizzing sunsets, when the sweet old planet had looked thin and meager: like some small, distant town on the skids.

“John’s such a romantic,” said Freddy, who had never liked John much.

“Our Family would do that!” Radmila shouted. “We would do it, we would cut a deal with that reality! We’d be floating up in the sky, in some kind of bubble. Or under the ground, in some other kind of bubble. Of course we would do it! What else could we do? This Family thinks in the long term, because the Family has to survive!”

Rishi came forward. “I have Frank Osbourne waiting for you.” Freddy was glad for the change of subject. “Let’s have a word with the gentleman.”

The starchitect’s avatar appeared in a corner of the Family’s situation map.

“So, Frank,” said Freddy, “you’re in a simulation at the moment?” “Gotta be in a simulation,” grumbled the architect. “All the big construction business happens inside simulations.”

“You didn’t notice the most recent big earthquake?”

“Was there a tremor?” Osbourne said. “I’m logging in from Vancouver.”

“No? Then let us be the first to tell you that your new showroom museum came through a major seismic event with flying colors! Congratulations.”

“No kidding?” said Osbourne. “Swell!”

“Except for a power outage,” Guillermo put in sourly.

“I told you to let me handle the power!” the starchitect shouted. “I told you I needed full command over the grid! I told you that! I told you all that from day one!”

“We did our best for you on the very difficult power issue, Frank,” said Freddy cordially. “Actual architecture differs from virtual architecture. We can’t just reconfigure everything on the fly.”

“Didn’t you read my white paper? You can’t make those obsolete distinctions anymore! Bits and atoms: Bits are bits of atoms! The sensorweb is Reality 2.0! So it’s all exactly the same! Debate over!”

“It’s great to see you’re the same old Frank Osbourne,” said Freddy. “We’ve really missed working with you. That was always so stimulating.”

“Yeah?” said the avatar, its host of tiny polygons brightening a little.

“So, how’d your mossy old mansion come through the latest quake? When are you guys gonna do your major facelift on that place?”

“Do you have something specific in mind for us, Frank?”

“For you? For the Montgomery-Montalbans? Absolutely I do! You know those mobile geodesics in the LACFS?” The architect called his posh structure “Lack-Fuss,” an irony that hadn’t been lost on Radmila.

“Spontaneous construction!” the avatar declared. “The potential there hasn’t begun to be tapped! We could do amazing things with that technique. Incredible things. And fast. I could do that tomorrow! If it weren’t for those Neanderthals in the seismic code departments!”

The avatar’s face wasn’t moving much, but they could hear Osbourne furiously hissing through his teeth. “That’s all political crap! It’s got nothing to do with public safety! It’s all about the trades and the subcontractors. They’re a lousy bunch of featherbedders! They’re a vast conspiracy!”

“We’ve heard that before,” said Freddy.

“Yeah, but you people could handle a thing like that. Easy! That little zoning war in La Mirada, you people were wizards at that.”

“That’s very kind of you, Frank. We appreciate your confidence in us as clients.”

“You people are such a class act,” the architect said. “It was sweet of you to tell me about my latest triumph in reactive engineering. We might try to get the word out about that, a little. Spread that around on the net some.”

“We’re doing that right now, Frank,” Freddy lied calmly. “The eye­witnesses certainly won’t soon forget it.”

“That is just great. That’s tremendous. That is out of this world. You sweet people call me any time you want, all right? Don’t mind my secretary.”

“We’ll do that, Frank. You stay busy.” The avatar vanished.

Radmila seized her chance to bolster the Family’s mood. “You always handle him so well, Freddy.”

“He’s just another brilliant, irreplaceable creative genius.” Freddy shrugged. “They’re all the same.”

“I want to say something now, please,” Radmila said, standing and triggering a soundtrack. “I felt something so deep in my heart today… This terrible loss our Family suffered… and this nightmare about this volcano… I know that bad things can happen in this world. We’ve suffered a very great loss. And yes, things are getting worse: so that a great disaster seems likely to happen. But that doesn’t scare me. No. That’s what I want to tell you—right now. I’m not afraid. Because I believe in us.”

They were all staring at her. Machines couldn’t have stared half as hard.

“So, please listen. The Sixth Great Extinction has happened already. Because the human race has ruined the world. We have a severe climate crisis, and it’s terrible. Whenever we look up at the sky, we see danger and ugliness, and we know that’s our fault.”

She drew a breath, squared her shoulders. “But just suppose… That no matter how bad we human beings thought we were, there was something even worse waiting for us. Suppose that the world ruined the human race. Suppose that a giant volcano burst up out of the Earth, and it just wrecked everything. For no reason! It turned the sky black. The innocent died in millions, even billions… and everything that we loved about the beauty of this world was turned into ashes, right in front of our eyes… and we had to survive in the darkness and the ugliness, and life would be that way for centuries…”

Their mouths hung open.

“I can tell you exactly what that would be like. Because I already know. I know that we would fight that like hell! We would fight! We would never, never despair! We would help one another. We would teach our children how good things had been. We would save every precious memory from our heritage. And when we fixed the Earth, and we would fix it—we would make it better… We would make the new Earth a lot better.”

Radmila stepped into a pool of sunlight from an overhead window. “So: You see what I want to say? If there’s a world catastrophe caused by a supervolcano, then it means that our human disaster, our own big crime against the sky, was just too small to count. Maybe we did our worst as human beings, but we were too small to matter. So we can just forget about that. We can forgive ourselves that! Because the world would have been ruined anyway. We don’t have to obsess anymore, or feel so proud about our own evil! All we have to do is survive and plan to prevail! We survive the next catastrophe and we rebuild our world. We can do things like that in this Family. I know that we can do it. We’re doing it right now.”

The silence was broken by Lily, who hadn’t said a word until now. “That was totally the coolest extended set-speech that I ever heard Mila perform. That was just totally wow.”

“Me too,” said Doug. “That’s exactly how I feel, too. Except I couldn’t put that into an extemporaneous monologue.”

“I was just dying over here!” Elsie complained, jumping from her chair. “I never know why I show up for these stupid Family business meetings! But now I do know. Mila’s got all the brains in this Family. So stop wasting your time with that arguing, and let’s do what she says.”

THE BIGGEST URBAN FIRES in Los Angeles were crushed within twenty-four hours. That left the delicate political task of destroying the worst-damaged buildings.

For political work in the climate crisis, this kind of triage was the ultimate urban-management challenge.

The intractable problems of LA’s seaside urban slums had taught the Family that lesson long ago. The Family had learned that damaged buildings had to be demolished, and that demolition had to be done at breakneck speed, while the original pain of the disaster was still fresh. Otherwise, the cost of prolonged litigation would soar unbearably. Completely new buildings could be built for much less money and effort.

The classic Dispensation gambit was to charge in and discreetly smash the damaged buildings while also rescuing their inhabitants. Naturally the legal system had caught on to this sneak-attack technique and put a stop to it. The next refinement was to smash the damaged buildings while leaving the facades apparently intact. The interiors were rebuilt in modern fashion with quick-setting fabricated plastics, so that the old-fashioned building still appeared to stand there, observing all the legal proprieties. Unfortunately this fraud was also too obvious; plus, there was something cheap and vulgar about it.

The latest refinement, one pioneered by the modern Los Angeles star system, was to smash the damaged buildings quickly, but in as loud and public and glamorous a way as possible. The buildings would still end up demolished, but they’d be killed in front of huge street crowds, who would watch the effort and heartily approve it as an act of mass entertainment.

The huge street crowds certainly weren’t hard to find; they were composed of the refugees and the destitute, packed like sardines in their bunks and cots across a huge expanse of Southern California. Having briefly been a refugee herself, Radmila knew their lives: Angeleno bread and circuses. Crackers, soup, foam mattresses, and immersive illusions.

The city grid of Los Angeles doubled as a giant game board for immersive game players: one would see these game adventurers, mostly young, angry; and unemployed, on foot, on bicycles, clambering walls, jumping fences, bent on their desperate virtual errands. And since the Montgomery-Montalbans, as media aristocrats, owned the means of game production, they could guide those crowds of gamers wherever they liked.

An engineered urban mob had its purposes: to demolish buildings, for instance. This daring act required a planned coalition of LA’s poor-est and wealthiest: the poorest, who owned no real property but had the numbers and the overwhelming street presence, and the richest real­estate developers, who could supply cover with the police and who stood to profit handsomely by the eventual reconstruction.

Wrecking the damaged fabric of LA had become a massive, daylong popular festival, complete with parades, original music, gorgeous costumes, mass dancing, and the flung distribution of favors and bribes to the roiling crowds of the poor. In the world capital of the entertainment business, this was the fastest and cheapest method yet found to rezone the city.

This practice had never been legalized, but as a classic Dispensation work-around, it was pretty close to an all-around win-win-win. Many learned academic papers had been written about LA’s innovative deconstructive rezoning. The practice was spreading rapidly to other cities.

Radmila did a celebrity signing, for a crowd-drawing star turn by a local idol was strictly required. She briefly graced an assembly of forty local top game players, who were being feted and petted. These gaming champs were mostly scrawny, scampering male teens: leapers, stunters, backflippers, window climbers… They looked and dressed very much like Lionel Montalban, their beloved pop idol.

Radmila signed commemorative books, handed out prizes, allowed them a lingering touch of her star-spangled feudal robe. Stars were the linchpin of this effort. No everyday landlord would dare to sue a major star. The costs in bad publicity and lost public goodwill were much bigger costs than simply accepting the fate of dead buildings.

The Montgomery-Montalbans had always been very big on new construction: Toddy had been genially ribbon-cutting for years. The violent smashing of defunct buildings was, by contrast, one of Radmila’s personal specialties.

Toddy was no longer there to advise with show production, and her steadying, classic hand was sorely missed. Radmila’s carnival would briskly smash three damaged buildings in a mere hour and a half: a ten­story former insurance building in Central City, a twelve-story hotel on Figueroa, and an adjoining mall.

The Family had piled on the effects with a lavish hand, but not a sure one.

It was late August, and in the dog-day Greenhouse heat, Radmila’s dance costume showed a lot of her skin. “Never forget,” Toddy would have said, “that in show business, we women have to show.” Radmila did not mind showing her body to her public—that was what she built her body for—but to cut big flesh-baring holes in electronic costuming seriously damaged the integrity of the performance garment.

Radmila’s signature stagecraft involved split-second performance stunts, a superhuman proof-of-concept best held in upscale venues like Sacramento’s California State Legislature. The Family-Firm had gained enormous political capital through being publicly superhuman.

Still, the collapsing buildings were the real stars of an effort like this. Collapsing buildings overwhelmed any stunt any mere actress could do. The overblown demolition machinery that smashed the buildings supplied the coup de grace of urban spectacle. Of course they were not mere dynamite or wrecking balls, they had to be obligatory monstrous stage props. The latest mechanism of destruction had been designed for the Family-Firm by Frank Osbourne. Osbourne, like many Angeleno architects, was enamored of set design and sincerely hated all premodern buildings. He loved to see real-estate leveled.

Osbourne’s writhing and rambling urban destroyer had been first designed within an immersive world as a popular hallucination. Still, the toy physics in a modern sealed immersive play world were almost identical to the genuine stress dynamics of real-world architecture. So Osbourne’s game contraption worked: it stepped seamlessly out of the immersive play world, into the real-world streets of Los Angeles, and it smashed things.

Osbourne’s walking anti-city burned ethanol and ran on three wiggling accordion legs of crystal-steel rebar and nanocarbon cable. Since he’d built only one of these monster devices, it naturally looked like nothing else on Earth. The gamer crowds were delighted to see Osbourne’s monster in action. They were used to playing with monsters. They no longer drew distinctions between immersive games and the city streets. Advances in modern entertainment had erased those notions.

The air still stank of the newly doused urban fires when Radmila’s twenty backup dancers filed onto their metal stage—a stage bracketed on top of Osbourne’s walking monster. The dancers had slightly puppetlike dance steps, for they were following immersive cues.

The cue arrived for her obligatory labors. Radmila bounded onto the stage, with the urban-scale version of her signature entry track. The racket was audible for blocks around.

A flurry of aerial stage lights followed her as she shimmied through her paces. The city wrecker rose beneath her feet like a thrill ride. Its snaky legs slithered, buckled, wriggled. It clomped the cracked side­walks with the tread of doom.

With its complex, gripping feet and its unstable tentacle legs, Osbourne’s city wrecker could walk straight up the sides of buildings. When it did this, the tripod’s stage tipped and dropped like a falling elevator. That fluttered the floating veils of the backup dancers.

Of course all this dramatic stunting was entirely safe, since it had been simulated a million times within immersive worlds. Still, a city­crushing metal monster looked very remarkable in daylight, especially if one was ten years old.

As the city breaker cakewalked through the chosen streets, it fired dust-glittering beams into the doomed buildings—lasers of some kind, she’d been told. The lasers were entirely for show, for the buildings had been booby-trapped by busy Dispensation operatives. It was a pleasure to see such professional work. The useless old buildings literally curtsied to the public as they fell. The precisely wrecked structures fell with a soft mock intelligence, as if they were truly tired of standing there and genuinely glad to make way for the Shock of the New.

Radmila dutifully mimed her awed rapture at these catastrophic goings-on. The demolition was conforming to schedule, but her pride was rather hurt. Radmila knew there was something kitschy and cheesy and intensely Californian about surfing over the city on a dance stage. This overbaked and overpriced public spectacle revealed a kind of childishness in the culture. To simply destroy a badly damaged building should not require any dancing bimbos. The Dispensation was a military-entertainment complex, it always had to throw its marked cards into the magician’s hat, its disappearing rabbits, its custard pies… As an artist, she felt that this was demeaning to her.

And yet, it always pleased Radmila to have a popular hit. Show business did have its native satisfactions for her: shoulders back, chin up, big smile, deep breath, just go… Do it: perform, be there in public, be public. In certain timeless, gratifying zones of raw sensation, Radmila absorbed showbiz right through her own skin.

Performance was a spiritual act. The unfolding ensemble: that happy roar from the crowds, the rank smell of the smoke, the dust and her own sweat, the physical effort of her dancing, the pervasive rhythms… Los Angeles was a mystical city by nature. It required its sacraments.

Radmila felt herself vanish into the ambient substance of the spectacle. She could feel herself just… holding it all up. And then letting it fall: with one almighty, dust-hurling thump.

With a final bone-blasting flourish of her soundtrack, Radmila wire­walked off the top of the rollicking tripod, capered straight up the side of a building, and “vanished into thin air.”

Ascending into the heavens was something of a Family cliche. Still, when it came to live street art, the best tricks were the oldest ones.

Safely out of the public eye—if one didn’t count the flying spycams of the amateur fans, those pests, those nuisances— Radmila fled to her portable trailer.

There she powered down her spangled demolition costume, disembarked from it, dumped the wig, and sat before the darkened makeup mirror, half naked, panting for breath and chugging ice water.

She sponged off her makeup, wrapped herself in anonymous black security gear, and ventured over to Glyn’s trailer.

Glyn was still running the event’s dying spasms of street choreography, flicking her puck across an urban weave of placemarks and camera angles. “You were really on today,” Glyn told her.

“Yeah, the good people of La-La Land, they sure love those big­budget effects.”

Glyn casually peeled up a screen, deployed some police muscle, and smoothed it back again. “No, Mila. Those street crowds love you. I checked their skin responses, their pulse rates, everything. They always love to watch some big weird machine kick some ass, but without you in their picture to give them something to care about, nothing much matters to them.”

“Oh, that was just my slutty costume talking. Hot and sexy never really suits me.”

Glyn sighed. “I am waiting so hard for the day when you stop doing that.”

“Stop what?”

“When you stop putting yourself down! You were terrific out there! You were close to perfect! Why can’t you be happy about that for one minute? Stop selling yourself short all the time! I swear to God that drives me crazy.”

“I’m not perfect. Toddy would have been superperfect.”

“That is not the issue. Theodora is history. And anyway, Toddy was never as good as you think she was. Yes, she was a big popular star—so what? She was like any pop idol—she was a scared, hungry woman who needed the public to love her, And the public did love Toddy, because Toddy loved her public. She was the love-slave of those unwashed morons. She loved them more than she loved you, me, or herself.”

“I should aspire to that level of artistry.”

“Have you completely lost your mind? That is not ‘artistry’! And you could give a damn about the public, Mila. You wouldn’t care if the public all got killed! And they still connect with you. That’s the amazing part.”

Glyn scratched at her control screen. “You will never be a great actress, but you’ve got some true rapport, you’re a true pop star. You’re like the Gothic Bride of Shiva. The people here love it whenever you strut out and shake your ass and smash up our city. They know you’re very dark inside. Because you are. You’re very dark. And so are they.”

“You’re dark inside.”

“Yes, I am dark inside. So sue me.”

“All right, so what’s eating you today, Glyn? Why are you being like this? I guess it wasn’t my performance.” Radmila laughed. “You know why I aced all that? Because she wasn’t watching me. Just for once. She’s really gone! I never felt so free!”

Glyn sent a half-riotous crowd of fans stumbling down the street in a cavalcade of glowing dots. “I finally figured out what to do with myself.”

“You got any gin in here?”

“I will never marry,” Glyn told her somberly. “I will never have a child. Because I am a monster. I cannot bear to have Toddy’s children with Toddy’s spare body.”

“You got any performance drinks? Maybe a little taurine, some vita-min B?”

“No. No, and hell no. And also, hell no, shut up and listen to me.” Radmila sat down to listen. She put her cheek in her hand.

“Given that fact,” said Glyn, “that I will never marry and I will never leave the Family… and given the fact that you married into the Family and you can’t leave it, either… well, we have to do something big. She built this huge tradition, and now she’s gone. We are her heirs. That means it’s all up to us.”

“I’m listening to you,” Radmila said.

“It’s too bad that you can’t stand your husband anymore. That’s a big drawback.”

“I can stand John,” Radmila protested. “John is the smartest guy in the Family. He’s smarter than you.”

“Yes, John is smart,” Glyn said, “but John’s always in the Adriatic, or he’s in orbit, or he’s doing a charity tour of refugee camps, or he’s work­ing late hours at the bank, or he’s in bed with one of your sisters. John is never going to be there for us. Anyway, John is not a star. John can’t do the things you can do.”

“John’s a knight in shining armor. John is gallant to the ladies.”

“John is a poor little rich boy who wants to rule the world. He’s a mess inside.”

“That is not true,” Radmila said stoutly. “There were two years—well, twenty months—when I was delirious about him. I don’t care if I live for two hundred years, I’ll never love like that again. If I’d been burned into ashes and thrown out the airlock and scattered into orbit, it would have been worth it to me. I was so completely happy. It was worth my whole life, every heartbeat, just to learn that love was possible.”

Glyn silently rolled her eyes.

“Of course,” said Radmila, “then John did figure out some things about me.”

“Men do that,” said Glyn.

Radmila was suddenly blanking with raw fatigue. She had just spent two hours rehearsing and dancing. Her bones were numb.

“You got a new boyfriend?” Radmila said clumsily. “You never act this strange without a new boyfriend.”

“My mother just died,” Glyn said patiently. “That’s what’s new for me. Toddy’s worse than dead, and she’s not even my mother… I’m not Toddy, I was never Toddy. I do have one quality, though, where Toddy and I are just the same. I have ambition.”

“Uh-oh.”

“So, we take over,” said Glyn. “You and me. That’s what I want, that’s my big plan. That’s what I’m telling you. You play the major Family star, and I am your tech support. It’s very traditional. I make you our dynasty’s Queen of Los Angeles. All the older people: they’re our investors and backers. They still matter, because they have the capital—but you and me, we’re the executive directors. We are the directorial team: because you’re the only one who understands me, and I’m the only one who un­derstands you. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Of course that’s right, Glyn.” Radmila loved everyone in her Family, but Glyn was the one she loved best. Except for Mary.

“We both know how to work,” said Glyn. “Because she trained us. So, from now on, we do all the work.”

“That makes you happy, Glyn? I want you to be happy.”

“Shut up! This isn’t a theme song, so stop talking like some blitzed­out drama queen! This is not about our being happy, that’s not the way to frame this. We are the players. We take power because we belong in power. You’re the graphic front end, and I am the back operation. The Family-Firm is our bank. Are you cool with all of that? I get tired of re­peating myself.”

“Can we really get away with doing that?”

“Yeah, we can,” said Glyn. “I will tell you how. They will give it to us if we ask for it in the right way. Every night, we go in for the Family din­ner. We put all the toys and machines aside, there’s no calls, no prompts, no nothing. It’s just us. People. We all sit there together and we eat. And at the head of the table—there was Toddy. But there’s nobody sitting there now. There’s a ghost there.”

“Yes. That’s very true.”

“Well, either somebody sits in that chair at the head of the table… and the others let her sit there—or else we stop meeting for dinner. In which case, the Family dies. Because, although we’re a huge corpora­tion, we’re also a human family. We need a warm body with a heartbeat to cluster around. Or else we all scatter. You understand what that means, right? If we scatter?”

“Of course I understand that!” Radmila said. “I’m Family! It’s breaking my heart.”

“Who belongs at the head of the table?”

“John’s dad should sit there. The Governor. But somebody shot him.”

“You belong there.”

Radmila bit her lip.

“You know that you belong there, Mila. You. So, don’t waste any more time. The mourning period is over. We’re sick of mourning any­way. You end the mourning for us. You just tweak your soundtrack, you dress to kill in total star-style, you prance to the head of the Family table and you just sit down. You don’t ask anybody’s permission. You just be­long there, and you pass us the mashed potatoes. You can do that. You have to do that. Because I can’t do it. Nobody else is willing or able.”

Radmila pulled at a sweaty lock of hair. “I’m the head of the Family?”

“No. You’re the heart of the Family. I’m the head. The head doesn’t matter all that much—because I’ve been doing all the thinking lately anyway, and nobody ever notices.”

Glyn was her best friend. Radmila had to let her down easily. “If that would work, I’d do it. But Toddy’s kids won’t let me do it. They’re older than us, and they’ve got priority.”

“That’s the key,” said Glyn. “Because you’re not an older woman. You’re a young woman, so you can give the Family children. The next generation. Futurity. That’s what you announce to them tonight.”

“I gave them a child already.”

“No,” said Glyn soberly, “you say you plan a major Family expansion. The patter of dynastic little feet. You want to have lots of children. Seven children. You promise them that. And you mean that when you say it.”

“Seven children? Who, me?”

“Toddy had seven children. Ifyou count me. A matriarch needs motherhood. That’s why they will let you do this. It’s because you’re the mom, that’s why. That’s a pretty weird kind of power, but it’s the kind that brooks no dissent.”

“You’ve really thought a lot about this.”

“I’m rich, but I’m not stupid.”

“I’m way too busy to expand the Family by having seven kids. I have my star obligations. We have other women in the Family. Let them have more kids.”

“They’re all too busy, too. No woman ever has the spare time to get pregnant. Especially a rich woman. No rich and famous woman wants to lie on a couch burping ice cream while her belly button turns inside out. Bearing kids is demeaning, hard work: it’s work for the poor. But do you want to run the Family? Those are your dues. You give them chil­dren and a dynastic future, and they will bow the knee to you. I promise you they will. They have to.”

Radmila understood why this mad scheme had sprung into her best friend’s head. Neither of them had ever been in a conventional family: with a father, with a mother… They were two women who had both come into the world by other means entirely. This coup would finally put them at the center of things.

“You’re proposing that I bear six more of John Montalban’s children? John would like some say about that.”

“John will do whatever you tell John to do. I know that John has been with Vera, and John is with Sonja, too. That’s very bad. He’s a head case about you and the others. But you’re the one who married him.”

“You know that what John did to me is unforgivable. The fact that those women exist is appalling to me. I hate them. I hate him for loving them.”

’’Yes, Radmila, I know all that. That fact is burningly, blazingly obvi­ous to me. I know that better than anybody. I’m exactly like you: so I know all about that. You’re the only one in the world who can’t stand it.”

Radrnila’s heart was pounding in her ears.

“Listen,” said Glyn, her face rigid. “I cried a lot these last few days. I cried a whole lot about my own big drama-trauma, and I have made up my mind. I grew up. My mother’s dead and I grew up. I have new grief, so I got over my old grief. I want you to do the same for me. Just grow up. Get over your past. Get over being Radmila Mihajlovic. Get over her, she’s as dead as Toddy Montgomery. From now on, you have to be dif­ferent. Because you’re not the little lost clone girl with no real mommy and daddy. You are the star. And you will become a megastar. I promise.”

“Why are you saying all that to me? You know that will make me crazy.”

“I can say it because you’re not crazy, Mila. If you were crazy, I might forgive you for the crazy way you behave. I know that you’re sane: but sometimes, you are just too damn stubborn to live. I know all about you, the three sisters, your brother Djordje… “ Glyn stopped. She smiled in sweet reminiscence at the thought of handsome Djordje. That was never a pleasant thing to see,

“I know about the three dead girls, and the horrible ways that they died. I know about your mother. My so-called mother was a piece of work… but your so-called mother doesn’t even walk this Earth!”

Glyn looked her straight in the eye and drew a determined breath. “So: I know all that, I still love you, Mila. I do love you. You know that I do. So: Just stop shaking all over like a banana leaf. You don’t pull that stupid crap on me anymore. Not on me. I’m tired of seeing you do that, that is all done, it should be long over. You and me: We may have no blood relation, but we are closer than any two sisters. So listen to me: I learned all this from you, Radmila. I learned it from what you said to the Family. Sometimes, a huge crime justdoesn’t matter. You were com­pletely right about that.”

“No, my crime always matters.”

“Get over yourself. Become a different woman. This is not some lit­tle secret island in the Balkans twenty-seven years ago where they hap­pened to clone some people. This is Los Angeles, stupid! This is the big time, in a big town! In the years to come, we’ll move Toddy’s invest­ments into you. There are no technical limits there. When you swan around this city, all brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glamour, you will be so huge, so gorgeous, so totally vested in stardom they won’t even have words for you. The past will be done. Finished. Sealed inside a plas­tic bubble dribbling on itself.”

Radmila was sweating. “But I never asked for that. I don’t want it. I can’t believe you’re telling me to have seven children!”

“Radrnila, we’ve never been part of the human race. This is how we buy into all of that.”

“I did buy into it. There’s Mary.”

“Your children will all be fine children. Seven is not too many. You are making up for the rest of us decadent aristocrats. You will be proud of your children. I know Mary. I love Mary. Mary is my favorite niece. I know her better than you do. Mary is not one of you-and-yours. Mary Montalban is definitely one of us-and-ours.”

Radmila smiled and wiped her eyes. “Well, thank God for that, at least.”

“Mila, you are really close to achieving a huge, lasting, major, public success. Just wise up a little. You are the perfect person to revive this Fam­ily and lead it into futurity. You are a lovable person. Toddy loved you. John loves you. Jack loves you. I love you very much. The other Family people, they all respect you, they’ve decided you’re all right for us. But that kid of yours: Everybody loves little Mary. Everybody. She is adorable and she is destined to be huge. This is your golden chance to turn your­self into the source of unity in our sad, strange little clan. If you turn down that chance because you’d rather be so hurt and proud and emo­tionally remote from us, you will never get another. Because you won’t deserve it. So do you hold it up, or do you kick it down? That is your choice.”

“Okay,” said Radmila, “I just heard your big, passionate set-speech. That one was pretty good. You obviously rehearsed that thoroughly, so it was great. So: I choose to hold it up.”

Glyn brightened. “Really?”

“Yeah. You have just talked me into it, Glyn. Because you talked me into it with my own advice. I can’t be such a hypocrite as to deny what I said to my own Family. Yes. You are right about putting the past behind us. We absolutely have to do that, we both have to do it. We must. We will get over ourselves, we will turn our faces straight to whatever comes next. I love your big bold plan. Your plan makes perfect sense to me. I will make up with my estranged husband. Fine. I will step into the ruby slippers of the dead superstar. Great. Somebody has to do all that: of course I’ll do it.”

Radmila leaned in. “And you, Glyn Montgomery: You think you’re pretty smart, but you’d better work like you’ve never worked before. Be­cause the Firm’s gotten fat and lazy. We need skill and discipline. You think you know what pain and trouble is all about? You are the fair­haired child of fortune, girl! You don’t know half of what it means to suf­fer in this world. Well, I do know that: and you will know it. So you just get-ready.”

Glyn stared at her in astonishment. Glyn was genuinely frightened. But Glyn was frightened in a new and different and much more con­structive way.

This was going to work. This had to work. Radmila would make it work.

RADMILA’S FAMILY COUP D’ETAT went according to Glyn’s careful plan. If the new Montgomery-Montalban system was not yet a regime, it was at least a provisional government. It was a huge emotional relief to the Family-Firm that someone-anyone-had stepped into the aching gap left by Toddy Montgomery.

So that first bold act would carry Radmila a little ways, but to cement her position, she would need a Dispensation-style juggernaut of rapid and effective action.

So: a major household remodeling project. The Bivouac was well overdue for a remake and remodel, and it was one arena where Radmila would not be challenged.

Toddy Montgomery had placed the gymnasium in the basement of the mansion, for a lady did not show her public that she had to sweat. Obviously, in the modern Los Angeles star system, where stars were physically dominant, swaggering street presences, the gym had to be­come the lady’s power base.

So: Radmila moved the gymnasium into the former Situation Room. Radmila hired—not Frank Osbourne, he was too much the seasoned es­tablishment starchitect—but one of Osbourne’s best disciples, a younger woman freshly gone into her own practice. This young archi­tect was ambitious, modish, and contemporary, and she badly needed a leg-up.

Grateful for her big break, the new decorator didn’t dawdle. Rad­mila’s new gym was transformed. It was no longer a dusty place of clank­ing iron and steroidal machismo. No, it was the “Transformation Spa,” a gleaming balletic wonderland of Zen river pebbles embedded in clear Perspex, reactive areogel yoga mats, sunlight-friendly, semitranslucent, ultra-high-strength oxide ceramic roof panels, with a one-way treatment that repelled passing spyplanes…

Furthermore—lest the Family-Firm feel neglected—the newly emp­tied basement was swiftly transmuted into the new Situation Room, or rather, the Montgomery-Montalban Situation Bunker.

If California was facing a looming supervolcano, then the revived and vigorous Family-Firm would not wring their hands about that challenge. Their new Situation Bunker was entirely mounted on tremor-proof springs, and fully sealable against volcanic, seismic, atomic, biological, and chemical mishaps.

The Situation Bunker was soberly traditional in its design philosophy­—American Superpower traditional. It was a bunker fit for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Planning for D-Day: pragmatic, sleek, no-nonsense, efficient, incorruptible, and continental in scale. Very Bell System, very Westing­house, very General Motors.

There was some mild grumbling about Radmila’s ambitious reforms, but Glyn held up her end, Uncle Jack was with her all the way, Lionel was infallibly enthusiastic, and there were no Family arguments at all about the new nursery.

Furthermore, no one could deny that a young matriarch was much more fun than an elderly matriarch. For all Toddy’s wisdom and street smarts, Toddy’s last years had had a Hapsburg Empire feeling, an over­wrought, enfeebled system tottering toward its grave on a baroquely gilt walker. With Radmila in charge, the Family-Firm had a spring in its step again. There was a clear dynamic visible. There was forward motion.

Since the house was not finished, the Family could not die.

Radmila moved more of the star budget into the coming generation: Lionel and Mary. Let it not be said of her that she was personally hog­ging the limelight and eating the Family’s seed corn. No: she aspired to be steady, dutiful, fully professional, an engine of production.

Radmila still went to her gym, but not with the fanatical intensity of a front-line diva. A woman planning for motherhood needed some body fat. Even if Radrnila didn’t bear the biblical horde of kids that Glyn de­manded, there would have to be one. One or two. Three. There would have to be children, no matter how one felt about one’s husband: any Queen of England knew that. That was a dynast’s reality.

Early October arrived. Soon John would return from his meander­ings in the Adriatic. The Family-Firm would be watching that reunion with care; it was a crucial performance for Radmila. She was deter­mined to ace it.

Radmila performed her gym routine—“the worst thing that would happen all day”—and retired into her new oneiric pod for beauty sleep. This brand-new gym pod—oblate, speckled, seamed, it looked like a giant hemp seed—was said to feature all kinds of exotic benefits to neu­ral well-being. It was like a Zen spa with a hinge.

As far as Radmila could tell, there was little more to this pricey dream machine than Californian hype. The pleasant flashing lights, the dron­ing swoony ambient noises, and the so-called aroma “therapy” had done nothing much for her: or to her. Still, given that she was one of the product’s sponsors and it was quite a handsome little earner, she saw no harm in using it.

Radmila climbed into the pod and clicked it shut. This time, as she fell into a pleasant doze, something about the pod’s routine touched her brain—not with the harshness of an Acquis neural intrusion, but in a civilized, consumer-friendly fashion.

Radmila tumbled into a lucid, prophetic dream.

She dreamed that John had come home. John was not the gloomy, burdened, and apologetic philanderer whose company she dreaded. No, he was the younger John, the daring swain who had discovered her. In Los Angeles, Radmila had tried so hard to be a skulking stateless nameless thing, and yet John had located her, and John knew who she was and where she came from. He even cared about her and what hap­pened to her.

She had little more to offer this prince than sweet surrender, but this seemed to be what the prince most desired from a woman in his life. Her abject emotional and sexual dependence on him steadied his self­image. He was no longer a rich young parlor radical with some rather sinister interests in emergent technologies. John Montgomery Montal­ban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to him­self that he had the power to transform himself and others.

Here he was back again, smiling and full of good cheer, the young John, the tech magician, and he had brought her mysterious gifts, as he always liked so much to do: two of his black hobby-objects. One hob­ject was a fizzing black shoe box, and the other one was even more mysterious, high-technical, and powerful, and it was… in stern dream logic… another fizzing black shoe box…

“Eureka!” cried the young John in his ecstasy: charismatic and sexy. “I have saved the world!”

What could it be? John was so busy with his colored wires and tubes… Never a moment for her, not a smile, not a kiss or hug… The first black shoe box was nothing much, the even more sinister shoe box was nothing much either, but to connect the two shoe boxes… Of course! Networking! A network would change everything!

Now the brilliant John, with all the passionate conviction that had first won her heart, was declaiming something solemn and arcane and yet fantastically convincing about his amazing black boxes… The first was sonoluminescent cold fusion, a host of screaming tiny bubbles hot­ter than the surface of the sun…

Banging on the shoe box, yes, John cried, sonoluminescence, a true miracle technology that had never quite worked yet.

The second fizzing black box was chemosynthetic black bubbling slime straight from the Freudian bottom of the ocean… It was a true biological miracle, it made life from darkness and nothing, it could live on pure volcano goo… John was pulling the black volcano goo out of his black box as he ranted about it to no one in particular, it was stink­ing of primeval sulfur, it was oily, drippy, satanic, it was all over his hands, it was running down his perfect sleeves like black blood…

Bubbling wildly as it dribbled, spewing oxygen in fizzing sheets, it was the stuff of breath and life, this stinky chemo goo bubbling merrily like California champagne…

The radiation from the fusion bubbles was wildly stimulating the black slime bubbles, somehow it was exactly what the germs needed to do their magic. The radiation was a tonic to the magic germs, it made their metabolism a hundred times more efficient, no, a thousand times, a million times…

Her husband’s black boxes were slurping poison out of the air, just vacuuming carbon dioxide, fizzing like reverse geysers now, all yeasty and industrial…

She wanted to laugh wildly in her dread and ecstasy, for the two black bubbling boxes were sucking centuries of industrial poison out of the sky, just gobbling pollution and turning it back into coal and crude oil, literally tearing the filth right out of the firmament! The unhealthy sky under which she had passed her whole life was peeling back before her dreaming eyes like a wrinkled skin on badly scalded milk… and be­hind that skein of horror and decline and utter hopelessness, the revi­talized sky was blue, blue, bluer-than-bluebird blue…

Radmila’s eyes shocked open. She tore herself from the gentle grip of the hallucination. She pried herself from the oneiric pod… She lay breathing shallowly on the color-coded elastic floor of the new gym… Her head was reeling. What on Earth had that machine done to her? It had torn something loose within her, something dark and ugly and yet integral to her being… Ithad oiled and loosened up some an­cient trauma within her… Ithad popped off of her like a rust flake.

She had lost something dark and complicated deep within herself. She was a different person now. Freer, much easier at heart. She felt footloose. Mellowed. Agile and even giggly. Full of honest joy.

She stared at a fluffy morning cloud through the tinted panels of the roof. “Oh my God,” she told the cloud, “I’ve finally become a Cali­fornian.”

RADMILA AND TODDY HAD ALWAYS ATTENDED the same hairdressing lab. This salon lab was an intensely private place, likely the best such lab in the world. Staffed by committed cosmeceutical profes­sionals, it was chilly, hushed, and cheerless. That state-of-the-art estab­lishment was much frequented by the political elite. Generally Toddy and Radmila went there together, arriving in a Family limo with darkly tinted windows, then departing under deep cover.

Sometimes there were clouds of hobject spyplanes whizzing over the place, all run by paparazzi idiots with websites. These toys never got anywhere and never saw a thing, for the hairdressing lab was the single most secure locale that Radmila knew.

Radmila had spent a great deal of the Family’s money at the hair de­signers’ —for the Family partly owned the lab. This fact didn’t make the local hair designers treat Radmila any better. On the contrary.

Presented with a fresh surge of Family capital, they had simply and brusquely ripped out all of her hair. The new implants, their roots soaked in fresh stem cells, were state-of-the-art: radiant blond filaments that were genuine human hair, but with a much-enhanced ability to be­have.

Radmila’s damaged scalp was soaked with hot, wet, antiseptic foam. Her head was locked by a stainless fume hood where robot surgical arms whirred on tracks, took unerring aim, and deftly pierced her scalp. Im­planting fresh hair took forever, like being tattooed. And, of course, it hurt a great deal.

Any session at the hair lab was always boring and painful. Today it was extravagantly painful, but it was no longer boring.

Because her brother Djordje had demanded an audience with her. And, so as to show Glyn that she had fully renounced all her troubles­—she had agreed to meet Djordje in person.

With a final vindictive burst of needling at the nape of her neck, the hairdressing robot finished stitching her scalp. A somber, white-suited technician arrived, removed the metal hood, rinsed her deftly, and wrapped her head in a hot medicated turban.

The fresh implants twitched in her violated scalp, itching like lice.

Few women in modern Los Angeles knew what lice were like, but Radmila was one of them. Toddy Montgomery had known what lice were like, too. Lila Jane Dickey—the larval, teenage form of Toddy Montgomery—she had known about lice, and she had known much worse things.

“So—you really don’t hate me anymore?” Djordje said, rocking on his heels and watching her as she suffered. It was terrible to have Djordje standing so close to her. He was literally consuming her air.

Djordje—or “George Zweig”—was a tall, hefty, somewhat out-of­shape Viennese businessman in a tasteless European suit. He looked like he was wearing the clothes that his silly wife was buying him. He sported a thick, bristling mustache, and Radmila could swear he was carelessly losing his hair. Why didn’t he take care of all that?

“Djordje, you are one of my husband’s business associates. I don’t enjoy seeing you. But I’ll see you for political reasons, because I know that global politics has to trump my merely personal concerns.”

“That is great news,” said Djordje. “Your cordial attitude is very cheering. You talk much more sense than the other girls do. I am proud of you, Radmila, truly I am. Because you have become ‘Mila Montal­ban’! Your career is amazing! You’re the only one of us to truly suc­ceed… you’re an American superstar!”

Djordje pinched the bridge of his beefy nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Events went badly in Mljet. I don’t know what John has told you about that. Vera is hostile and ignorant. She is mentally unstable. She has fled into some disaster area in the mainland Balkans and she will not speak to anybody.”

“I don’t care. Do not mention her name to me. Please.”

“Right. Sure! Fine!”

There was a horrid silence between them.

“I have two children,” Djordje told her. “May I show you their pic­tures? They’re normal children.”

“Shut up.”

“Fine,” said Djordje. “Let me tell you why I flew here, all the way to Los Angeles.” He licked his mustached lip. “Your friend… your hus­band, Mr. John Montgomery Montalban, has met with a small business setback, as I said to you. A lot of Acquis capital was invested in reviving Mljet, and there was broad hope for a general consensus that—”

“I’m glad that part’s over, at least,” said Radmila.

“What?”

“Those atrocities that the Acquis were committing on that filthy little island. Those attention camps. The brainwashing. My head hurts all over just thinking about that. John may not own that island yet—that scheme was a stretch, even for John—but I’m sure that John has put a swift end to that business.”

“Mr. Montalban still hopes and plans to turn the island into an en­tertainment destination… I did my best to help him there, but… “

“I don’t want you to talk to John any longer. Or to Glyn, either. Leave Glyn alone. You have no place within my Family-Firm. Do you under­stand that? You’re an intruder and your presence isn’t welcome.”

Djordje’s face changed. It became much harder. “I do understand that,” he told her, “but I must point out that it was John Montgomery Montalban who came looking for me. I don’t have the vast wealth that you have slyly married into—because I made my own way in this world. I mind my own business. My logistics business. Primarily, interface lo­gistics between the Acquis and the Dispensation. Your husband has meddled in an Acquis project while enlisting my help. He has compro­mised my relationship with the Acquis.”

“Take your problems up with John.”

“You just told me not to take my problems up with John. I can cut my relations with your John—he’s a very charming fellow, but he’s not en­tirely faithful to his word. Still, I want to be made whole with the Acquis. I want a return to my status quo ante before your husband interfered with my business affairs. That’s only proper, isn’t it?”

“Suppose that I solve your problems. Do you promise you’ll stay far away from Los Angeles, Djordje? You won’t contact me, or anyone in my Family, anymore?”

“I might agree to those terms, Radmila. If Dr. Feininger also agrees to your terms. Dr. Feininger also flew with me here to Los Angeles. He wants to redress this unfortunate Mljet situation. Dr. Feininger is upset. He has good reasons for that. If you can mollify him, then I will do as you ask. Otherwise, you and I have a quarrel.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m glad that you noticed,” Djordje said cheerily. “If you don’t want my threats, then don’t offend me. Let’s just be reasonable… no, let’s be pretty! You are so pretty, Radmila! What on Earth did they do to you, all those movie-star people?”

“We’re not movie stars, for God’s sake. We’re just ‘stars.’”

“In Vienna, we still love the old cinema. We love many fine, civilized things, in Vienna. It would be pleasant if you Americans would stop de­grading them.”

Radmila ached to leap to her feet and slap the smirk off Djordje’s face. It was a luminous, creeping, burning urge.

Toddy would never strike a man in the face. What would Toddy do?

Radmila smiled sweetly and touched one finger to her cheek.

Djordje’s eyes widened.

“Djordje dear, your friend has come a long way to Los Angeles, under some trying circumstances. I apologize to you for your present difficulties. I promise that I did not intend those troubles. Why don’t you check out of this clinic, retrieve your possessions from security, and send your Dr. Feininger in here to see me? I have an offer to make to your Acquis friend and I think he will be pleased to hear it.”

“You mean all that?”

“Yes, I do, and I don’t lack for resources. I plan to put things right, and I’ll trust to your sense of decency not to trouble my Family further.”

“That strange tone of voice, that way you move your lips,” Djordje marveled. “That is amazing. You’ve truly changed, Radmila. You’re gor­geous, you’re famous, you’re rich… You’re a complete alien! I hope you’re happy.”

“I’m happy when the people I love are happy.”

“What a wonderful, inspiring thing to say. Those words give me such hope. I watch all your performances! You truly have talent! Don’t be­lieve those bad reviews. You’re improving steadily!”

Radmila said nothing. She assembled a smile.

“Radmila, you are so much closer to escaping our curse than the rest of us. Maybe that has been fated to happen. As children… we were created and raised as an evil plan for this world. But in a world as truly evil as our world truly is—maybe we can act for good. When I look at you, I can almost believe that.”

“I’m glad that we had this heart-to-heart talk, George. It has cleared the air. Let’s not keep your important friend waiting.”

Djordje shuffled from polished foot to foot on the antiseptic clinic floor. He seemed genuinely moved. “Listen, Radmila: Please be careful with him. Dr. Feininger is my friend. That doesn’t make him your friend. He should have taken his issues up with your husband. For him to come here to confront you, instead: That’s not good news for you.”

“Oh, I may be only a humble star, but I am from a political family. I’ve met Acquis pundits before.”

Muttering, dithering, intolerable, Djordje finally left her alone. At last, Radmila was able to draw one clean, untainted breath. Her heart­beat slowed. That had been very bad.

But it was not so entirely bad as she had feared. She’d managed to play her way through that ordeal. She’d simply acted her way through it without ever breaking character. Stardom was full of suffering.

Radmila even felt a little bit guilty about refusing to glance at the pic­tures of Djordje’s children. Maybe someday she’d be able to meet Djordje’s children and establish some kind of relationship with them. After Djordje was dead, of course. That was a pleasant thought: espe­cially the part about Djordje dying.

Once, and once only since leaving Mljet, Radmila had met one of her sisters: Sonja. They had simply blundered into each other: of all the people in the unlucky world. The horror had occurred on a peaceful tourist overlook above the glassy ruins of New York.

Radmila had glimpsed a pretty woman in a Chinese military uni­form, brandishing a pair of elaborate binoculars, leaning at the railing of the overlook, and carefully studying the blast pattern.

Then that woman, sensing danger somehow, had turned and looked back, and that woman was Sonja.

Before Radmila could decide on anything, to scream or to run, Sonja had stalked straight over, silently, fluidly, and kicked Radmila in the stomach. Sonja’s black-booted foot came blasting forward with blinding, immediate, practiced speed and slammed all the wind out of Rad­mila. That devastating kick had knocked her cold.

Other tourists had helped her after Sonja had stomped away. When John arrived, deeply worried, Radmila had lied to him. She had claimed that she had fainted, overcome by the shocking sight of the fa­mous ruins of New York. John, who had loved her very much at the time, had known at once that she was lying to him. All kinds of trouble had followed from that.

The trauma of that event had been much worse than confronting Djordje, here in her home stronghold of Los Angeles. Being a man, and the last and the youngest, Djordje was less painful than the others. Djordje had always been different in that way.

At least she knew that Djordje would go away. Djordje was a traitor: he had always excelled at running away.

Now Dr. Feininger entered the hairdressing clinic. The Acquis diplo­mat seemed discomposed. The hairdressers’ security people were even more ruthless to visitors than they were to the clientele.

“How do you do, Dr. Feininger? Let me persuade the staff to fetch you a chair.”

“Oh no no, please, I don’t want to speak with those people.” Dr. Feininger had an overly perfect, German-accented English. She could hear him carefully machining his verb tenses. “So: Miss Mila Montal­ban, at last we meet. In person, so much smaller you seem than in your simulations!”

Radmila offered him a tender smile. “You flew here from Europe just to meet me? How exceptional!”

“Yes, I have what they used to call ‘jet lag’!” Feininger pretended to yawn into his manicured hand.

“Please tell me all about your fascinating trip!”

“I logged every minute on my pundit site,” said Feininger, shifting on his feet. “Round and round we spin inside that ring of magnets, many gravities… We were fired into suborbital arc… Free-fall, truly weightless…! You could see all of it! Though I don’t compare my me­diation with yours.”

“I’m sure that your pundit site is very popular with your viewers.” Feininger’s enthusiasm for his toys reminded her of John. She had Feininger tagged by now: he was what they called an Acquis “thought leader.”

As a postgovernmental organization, the Acquis was peppered all over with radical, crazy extremists, but pompous, netcentric blowhards like this guy were the organization’s meat and bread.

Nothing ever made pious, politically correct Acquis geeks happier than some dully public “frank exchange of views.” Radmila had met so many of them, at so many tiresome, life-draining political events, that she could literally smell Acquis thought leaders. Dr. Feininger smelled of cologne.

“What city is your own home base, Dr. Feininger?”

“My base is Cologne.”

Radmila laughed musically. “Such a beautiful city!”

“I never expected to meet an American star so simply and modestly dressed,” said Feininger, eyeing her cleavage in her terry-cloth gown. “One expects an American star to… well… billow, if that’s the right word.”

“Oh, we stars do billow. But this is my private life, and I chose to meet you here very privately.”

“I understand that important distinction,” said Feininger. “In politi­cal life, one also treads a fine line between public credibility and per­sonal authenticity.”

“It was brave of you to personally fly to Los Angeles,” said Radmila. “I’m so proud that spaceflight is finally returning to vogue! Aerospace once meant a lot to California. We’re so sentimental about our her­itage… New attitudes from Europe, that’s encouraging. We have some new American launch methods—those giant slingshots, I forget what you men call those… “

“Those are called ‘tensile accelerators.’”

“Yes, that was it.” Radmila nodded respectfully. “Dr. Feininger, do you suppose, someday, those two methods might be combined? Then we could settle outer space—mankind’s dream come true!”

“I happen to know rather a lot about this topic,” said Feininger un­surprisingly. “Sadly I must inform you that no, the Acquis spaceflight methods, which are very extensively tested and constructed on the strictest precautionary principles, are by no means the same techniques as the aberrant efforts of certain American zealots who fling giant nanocarbon slingshots up the slopes of the Rocky Mountains.”

“Have you ever seen that kind of space launch performed, Dr. Feininger?”

“What, me? No, certainly not.”

“Would you like to see that done? My Family-Firm has a private launchpad.”

“I see. I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Yes, we need that private launchpad in order to reach our private space station.”

“I did know that the Montgomery-Montalbans had built a space sta­tion.”

“Well, we didn’t exactly build that. The Government of India built LilyPad. We simply took over management when India suffered their difficulties.”

“Terrible business about India.”

“Very terrible. We have so much to learn from Indian spiritual values.” Feininger wasn’t happy about his lack of a chair or the way he’d been treated by the local staff, but he was clearly pleased to meet a Hollywood star so willing to talk his kind of utter crap.

“I like to think,” said Feininger slowly, “that I have rather good in­stincts about people. You are not at all like your public image. I can sense that the private Mila Montalban is a rather fresh, direct, and un­pretentious woman.”

“I hope you won’t tell anybody that,” Radmila twinkled. “My public­relations people get all upset with me when I fail to allure and mystify.”

“May I ask you something, Miss Montalban? Not a personal ques­tion, but a public political issue? Why do you own a giant war machine that destroys the homes of helpless refugees with heat rays?”

“What, you mean in an immersive-world simulation? I can’t remem­ber my roles in immersive worlds— there are just too many.”

“No, I meant last August,” said Feininger politely. “In the streets of Los Angeles. You were lasciviously dancing on the top of a giant walking tripod that fired laser weapons into people’s homes.”

“Oh that!” said Radmila. “You mean our urban-renewal festival.”

“That behavior truly baffles us in the Acquis,” said Feininger.

“Please try not to worry,” said Radmila, wide-eyed. “I’m just an ac­tress. It’s all for show.”

“Leaving aside the social-justice aspects of preferentially wrecking the neighborhoods of the poor,” said Feininger, “are you aware of what happens, technically speaking, within the legs of those tripods?”

“Should I be?”

“I know the sinister genius who constructed that device,” said Feininger. “His name is Frank Osbourne, and he repeatedly seeks out radical construction methods that are judged unsafe by Acquis central committee. Then Osbourne deploys those methods! Not in harmless simulations—in real life! He builds structures with dangerous crys­talline iron and unproven nanocarbon piezo-cables, and then he uses those hazardous devices to demolish historical buildings. A deliberate provocation! “

“Frank is a very theoretical architect,” said Radmila. “I think you’re reading too much into his acts of whimsy.”

Toddy’s tea trolley rolled into the room. Toddy had gone to repeated effort to have tea served as she recovered from her hair-design interven­tions. Toddy would sit, sip tea, and stare into her hobject globes…

Toddy was no longer here, yet her infrastructure had survived her. Fresh tea had just arrived for the insane husk of a woman who’d been quietly fired into orbit.

“Oh, the tea is here!” Radmila chirped. “I do hope you like Indian tea, Dr. Feininger.”

“It’s Indian tea?”

“Yesof course! They’re restoring plantations in Assam!”

With surprising spryness and multicultural fluidity, Feininger sat cross-legged on the floor.

Radmila joined him, arranged the cups, and poured. Their ritual took a leisurely six minutes. They scarcely spoke. When they were done, the two of them had reached a certain level of rapport.

Radmila fully understood why the Acquis pundit had attacked Frank Osbourne. Osbourne was a Dispensation architect. So naturally Osbourne would push the limits of whatever the Acquis considered acceptable practice. Feininger was not truly upset about Osbourne. Feininger was angry because of Mljet.

Feininger wasn’t wearing a neural helmet or attention-camp blinders—Feininger was a professional, he wasn’t some crazy Acquis engineer of human souls—but Feininger knew that John had gone to Mljet to interfere with that effort.

The Acquis cadres in Mljet were cranks, radicals, and zealots. Of course some Dispensation agent had arrived there for containment and push-back. John had ventured to Mljet as a Dispensation activist.

John would lure the cranks aside with a tasty carrot if he could; if that effort failed, he would slide a stick straight through their spinning wheels.

Because John seemed so polite and refined, people underestimated him. His quietest attacks, always carried out in a low, scholarly voice while wearing a business suit, were brutally effective.

Feininger understood modern global realpolitik. His bluster about the architect was his counterploy. Feininger was radiating the obvious: she could sense that in the poised way he held his teacup.

Acquis interests had been threatened on a certain part of the global game board. Feininger could try to defend that dodgy Adriatic territory—those weirdos with helmets and skeletons—or he could boldly and swiftly fly over to counterattack within Los Angeles. That was what Feininger had come here to demonstrate.

All in all, his choice of a target—the Family’s favorite Los Angeles architect—that was a civilized gambit. Feininger had to know about Vera in Mljet. He could have been nastier with her.

Feininger would not get nasty, because Feininger was almost exactly like John. Dr. Feininger was an Acquis counter-John. Dr. Feininger, having learned what John could do, was planning to out-John John. Dropping by to put a scare into Mrs. John—there must be Acquis strate­gists chuckling over that tactic, behind a network screen someplace.

“Dr. Feininger, I’m only a pop star. While you are a moralist. A thought leader. You’re a global techno-social philosopher.”

Feininger laughed. “If it’s any help, we go through vogues just like you do.”

“I know about the Acquis. We Americans have a lot of Acquis people. In Boston, San Francisco, Seattle… Still, they can’t compare to the truly global Acquis thought leaders. The American Acquis don’t think as creatively as you do.”

“I didn’t expect to hear this from you,” Feininger allowed. “This might be significant.”

“I’m thinking: we need to try something unexpected. Fresh. Con­temporary. Of the moment. Something unexpectable.”

“This should be interesting.”

“Mind you, this is just my own personal proposal. I’m in no position to dictate terms to my Family-Firm—I hope you understand that.”

“I know who Mila Montalban is,” said Feininger, smiling at her. “So do half the people in the world.”

“Well, I’m thinking: a public event. Nothing too ‘global.’ Because that word sounds so old-fashioned now. I’m thinking postglobal. Super­global. A quiet, elite kind of political summit. Held in orbit.”

“A political summit held in orbit?”

“Yes, up in LilyPad. You wouldn’t exactly call LilyPad ‘the space frontier’… because sweet LilyPad is not a primitive place, exactly… but it’s certainly remote. And, Dr. Feininger: We don’t want any boring, tedious people at our theory summit held in outer space. We should be inviting: the very exceptional, very high-level thinkers visionary, nonpartisan people, the people far outside the global box…Not even one hundred people. The truly significant postglobal civil society thinkers. Maybe fifty of you.”

Feininger considered this suggestion. He was flattered to be one of the world’s fifty most important thinkers. Then it dawned on him that he was being asked to pick and validate the other forty-nine.

This was much more important to him than any small Adriatic island. “Seventy people?” he said.

“Sixty, at the very most? We’d be stretching the launch services.”

“If you could launch fifty, the magnetic pad in Eastern Germany could launch twenty-five.”

“We could house seventy people. We could feed them and give them nice fresh air.”

“You could do that? You’re sure?”

“Not me personally as a society hostess, but the Montgomery­Montalban Family-Firm… Our guests rarely complain about our hos­pitality.”

A slow smile appeared on Feininger’s lips. “And would your space event have cachet, Miss Montalban?”

“Europe does cachet, sir. Here in California, we do glamour. And we do glamour by the metric ton.”

Feininger set his teacup down with a tender clink. “Glory, lightness, speed, and brilliancy.”

RADMILA WALKED THE ARTIFICIAL BEACH, vamped be­fore the floating cameras, and gazed into the sun-glittering Pacific. Six lunatics were surfing out there. For the life of her, Radmila could not understand surfers in Los Angeles. Obviously riding on a wave was a nice stunt performance, but inside the ocean? There were whole chunks and shoals of broken China bobbing around out there, all glass, nails, slime, and toxic jellyfish.

The scanty fabric of Radmila’s swimsuit belonged to a sponsor. So did the hairstyle, the watch, the sunglasses, and the hat. This privatized beach, like all modern tourist beaches, was a fake, as elaborate as an im­mersive world.

Radmila was looking sexy today, as contractually required. Looking sexy was a basic theatrical craft. The critical problem came when the se­vere labor of looking sexy made one forget to actually be sexy. Radmila did not feel at all sexy, in this swimsuit, on this beach. She felt dread.

Certain men direly wanted to have sexy sex with professionally beau­tifulwomen: sex with the stars. Those men were delusionary. Sex with a star was an awful idea, like having sex with a rosebush. You were not supposed to get into bed with a rosebush. You were supposed to give it horse manure and sell the blossoms.

Radmila knew that her most loyal fans, her truest devotees, were not men gloating over her gym-toned body and her tawny, sunlit skin: her biggest fans were all women. They were humbled, jittery, self-critical women with an underlying streak of resentful violence. Her fans were women very much like herself, except less lucky and more stupid.

She, Radmila Mihajlovic, had become Miss Mila Montalban. She had done that because she had, almost by miracle, found the technical and financial capacity. There was just no way—no way at all, no way in hell—that the similar fantasies of her fans could ever be fulfilled.

The fans could never become like the stars. This body that flaunted its perfect female curves before the camera: she had created this body through an exhausting, comprehensive ordeal. Having seven children was easier, for that was the sort of thing untrained women had once done without anesthetic.

So she wasn’t walking on a beach, being pretty. She was tormenting her fans with her star glamour. Insome strange way, this unity in frus­trated suffering was the true relationship of stars and fans.

That was why her fans loved to see her suffer. Fans knew that she de­ployed her charm and beauty as a weapon to tantalize, and they were spiteful about that torment and they wished her the worst. Their hatred and envy of celebrities could be lethal.

It was especially awful to “confide” to one’s fans, artlessly discussing one’s starry hotness, through some low-life aggregator of planetary eyeballs… Pretending to reveal her personal secrets to the fans was the worst and vilest toil in the industry.

“Exclusive star interviews.” They were ancient rituals. They always made her long for death.

Yet the fans had to be fed. For the fans were forever hungry.

“Yes, my John brings truth and justice to some of the most desperate people in the world… I miss John every day. I want John to fly home to me. He promised he would break his own rules and he’ll fly here in a rocket. Yes, those rumors are true. No, not that we’re breaking up. That’ll never happen! The rumors are true that the fire is back in our re­lationship! John and I had our rough spots, we had our trouble and grief, but you just can’t keep us down! Just you wait and see, you’re going to see some very good, very happy news from both of us… “

When the interview at last expired in its puddle of flaccid lies, she fled in a Family limo, then went to join Lionel. Lionel was kind to her, because Lionel understood these things.

Lionel was having a late lunch at a posh restaurant. The restaurant was noted for its excellent seafood, because it marched on gleaming centipede legs deep into the restive ocean and it grew all its seafood by itself. The “swordfish,” for instance… that gleaming white flesh on Li­onel’s platter was very far from a wild, sea-native swordfish, but a DNA scan would never tell.

Lionel had matured a great deal since Toddy had (as the Family privately phrased it) “passed up.” His personal upgrades had cost much more than Radmila’s makeover, and since Lionel was so young and duc­tile, the effects on him were drastic.

Lionel had put on kilos of male muscle in his back, legs, and shoul­ders. His eyebrows were thicker, and blue stubble haunted his lips and chin.

Most critically, Lionel had changed his signature look. The new per­sonal dresser had swiftly ditched his Peter Pan delinquent street-kid cos­tumes, and made Lionel sexier, more transgressive. He looked like a bad boy in power now. He looked slicker, like the upscale version of an un­dercover cop.

Radmila arrived at the table, hidden in stage-ninja gear. None of the diners took much notice of her: Lionel always had his bodyguards in this restaurant. Lately he’d had a whole posse of them. The Angeleno street gangs loved Lionel. They were his biggest fans.

Glyn silently passed her a menu and a half-empty shaker of tequila. Radmila poured and drank. Alcohol was blue ruin, but she wouldn’t have to look so painfully sexy again for quite a while. She was going to put on weight. John was going to get her pregnant. That was all arranged.

The older Family folks—Guillermo, Freddy, Buffy, Raph—they’d been surprisingly calm and accepting about the new Family order. In the sudden power vacuum of Toddy’s absence, it was Lionel, Toddy’s grandchild, who was proving the hardest to handle.

Lionel was starting to have adult ideas. His generation’s take on reality was unique.

“What does that mean, ‘grasp the nettle’?” Lionel demanded.

“A nettle is a weed,” Glyn told him. “It stings you when you touch it.”

“But why would people let plants sting them? Plants don’t even have brains.”

“Our Family budget is like a nettle,” Glyn told him patiently. “When you stick to that budget, that hurts, but you just have to accept that.”

“We’re rich.”

“We’re not infinitely rich, and a Family star is supposed to spend his star allowance on enhancing his star potential.”

“That’s what I did,” said Lionel. “I know that I spent money, but I’m almost eighteen.”

“Lionel: You bought weapons.”

“Glyn: Just listen to me for once, okay? I’m not Little Mary Montal­ban, the world’s most adorable child star! I’m a tough guy! I’m a ghetto, barrio, Los Angeles dirty-pop, kick-your-ass, street-credibility star! We do agree on that, don’t we? I’m the Family’s gangster star.”

“You’re Dispensation. You’re a spontaneous-reaction, volunteer grass­roots star of our street militias. Those people aren’t ‘gangsters.’”

Lionel sighed and looked to Radmila. “Mila, just tell her. Please.”

“Lionel does have a certain point,” Radmila said. “His core demo­graphic is rebellious male teens. Especially, lower-income.”

“That is where the Family placed me as an idol,” Lionel said. “I am playing the role I was given. I’m playing straight to my fan base.”

“Weapons, Lionel?”

“Sure, technically, shoulder-launched rockets are ‘weapons.’ But practically speaking, they’re rapid urban-demolition equipment. You wouldn’t know this, being a girl—but very few people ever get killed by shoulder-launched rockets. It’s the buildings that get killed by shoulder­launched rockets. It’s all about ‘warchitecture.’”

Lionel pointed his leather-gloved finger outside the gorgeously lit restaurant window and at the gray, lightless, derelict structures lining the shore of the Pacific. That endless mummified seaside slum was a sight to daunt the bravest real-estate developer: armored in chain-link fencing, wrapped in razor wire, with ancient vidcams 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 re­sponsible.”

“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.”

Radmila put her fork aside and rubbed at her aching eyes.

“Okay, now I get it,” said Lionel. “There is someone here who is just like you. There’s a clone loose here in Los Angeles.”

Glyn and Radmila glared at him silently.

“I mean, another clone besides both of you two gals. A clone who’s like an evil-twin identity.”

The two of them exchanged glances.

“Wow!” said Lionel. “That is dynamite! This is a hot entertainment property, all of a sudden! Because we’re living in a real-life crime! How many suspects are there? Wait a minute, wait a minute—I already know that! There’s Sonja… There’s Vera from Mljet… Hey wait, there’s your mom!”

Glyn leaned forward and slapped him.

A HOLE IN A SENSOR WEB was called a “blackspot.” The laws of physics decreed that there were always blackspots in the world. Com­puter science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless con­nections were not magic fogs. Real-world wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.

So: If you didn’t want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or create a blackspot. Some blackspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural blackness. Maybe there was nobody home to plug things in, or to reboot sys­tems. Enterprises went broke, buildings fell down or went derelict.

The unsustainable could not be sustained. There were climate­-crisis disaster areas—China, Australia, India, central Asia—where the blackspots were colossal.

When the seas rose, when hurricanes blew through, Earth tremors shook the land. Plague, famine, and pestilence… Stuff just got lost. Even in the modern world. Even in Los Angeles. There were always places in any major city where crime was visible, and yet tolerated. Red­light districts, narcotic shooting galleries, corporate boardrooms, city halls… There were thousands of tiny blackspots. Steel elevators. Brick basements. Narrow alleyways between two metal barns.

Or the black, stuffy, terrifying innards of a car trunk.

Sometimes people had mental blackspots hidden inside themselves.

People forgot that they lived in a dangerous world. They prospered for a while, they got used to being privileged, they got fatally complacent. People forgot to see straight, they overlooked things, they stubbornly ig­nored the obvious.

You could try to obscure that human limitation, deputize it to sur­veillance systems, conceal all the seams, try to make the system perfect, perfect, superperfect, secure, secure, supersecure… but any simple breakdown in sanitation was enough to chase people away. Any place with no running water and no toilets was halfway to a blackspot already.

And you might end up in a place like that. Tied up. Abducted. Alone. Hungry. Thirsty. Humiliated. Reeking of your own urine.

Derelict buildings, dreadful places, worse even than the car trunk from which you had just been dragged… Even a little kid could set fire to a wrecked building. How many kids were you willing to wound, or in­jure, or kill with an automatic antitheft “armed response”? After all, the kids were just kids… kids were always trying to look around… explore…do some graffiti… throw some bricks through the glass windows…steal some furniture… vandalize the building and burn everything to the ground.

Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites—they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing.

So many places like that in Los Angeles… in every big town really… where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem. The mere fact that a machine “saw” things happening didn’t mean that a machine could ap­prehend the crime, prosecute it, convict it, put an end to it…

What if the surveillance itself was the victim of the crime? They called that “sousveillance”—when angry people countersurveilled the surveillance. Some bold souls made it their business to spy out all the surveillance spies, map them, track them, spot them, shoot them, steal them, hack them, tap them, hold the machines to ransom…

Radmila rolled around on the grimy, derelict, unlit floor, testing the plastic wires that bound her arms. Her wrists were cinched, her arms were trapped behind her back, her ankle was snagged to a piece of fur­niture. Wire had no knots. She couldn’t break wire or pick wire or chew wire.

Nobody would ever find her in here. Not in this blackspot. She was as good as dead. That fast, that simple.

Radmila was strong and her body was flexible. Given a week, she might have shrugged and wriggled her way out of the wires. But when­ever she worked hard to escape her bindings, she needed some air, and the duct tape over her mouth was there to deny her that air.

It was extremely dangerous to have her mouth duct-taped shut in this way. She could die easily from that, because she might begin to weep in here, from her fear and despair and shame, and then her nose would clog from the weeping, and she would black out, and smother to death in her own snot.

That simple, that quick, that dead.

She had vanished from her world in twenty seconds. She had left the set, carrying the heavy hem of her costume, and naturally followed a friendly, beckoning ninja security staffer, then suddenly, instantly, with no warning, wham, her elaborate costume went stone-dead all around her. Then she was body-blocked straight into the open trunk of a car.

In seconds, off rolled the car, one mobile blackspot with Mila Mon­talban hidden inside of it. Who would ever see that? Who would ever guess that? Who would know?

Frantic with herself, Radmila had managed to squirm free of her de­stroyed costume, inside the cramped black confines of the car trunk. That was an impressive physical feat, something few women could have done, but the air was thick and stuffy in the black car trunk, and when she was done she was half stunned.

Then the trunk popped open. Before Radmila could think, act, or even shriek, she was struck by something that shot through her like lightning. Her hands were lassoed, her mouth gagged with tape.

When her kidnapper ran out of wire and tape—that took a while­—she was hauled, ankles-first, up a set of barnacled stairs and through the yawning, graffiti-bombed door of a derelict Malibu beach house.

This blackspot lair featured drooling patches of mold on every wall, warped wooden flooring, strange arching cantilevered walls of old cement… custom-designed and full of architectural genius. This must have been a gorgeous Malibu beach getaway, once, back when the sky was stable and the sea behaved itself. Some nice place for a rich family.

The airy living room, its sea-viewing windows sprayed opaque, was full of loot.

Someone had been on some dainty feminine crime spree. Cosmet­ics, mostly. Sweet, tempting little beauty kits that a thieving woman could easily hide in her hands. And other loot, more ambitious: hand­bags, women’s boots and shoes… stockings, perfumes, jewelry explod­ing from small discarded plush boxes… pink-cased electronics, sexy vicuna scarves, sunglasses in crushproof cases, cashmere throw rugs, thirsty towels, thirsty hand towels, thirsty face towels… Thirsty tam­pons, thirsty condoms… And crates and crates of thirsty booze.

Dying of thirst from the shock of her abduction, unable to move her bound, numbed arms, Radmila stared in anguish at a wooden rack of California chardonnays.

After dark fell, Biserka returned from her busy wanderings. Biserka was still wearing the Family-Firm ninja costume she’d used when she had kidnapped Radmila, only now this fake, phony costume of hers—it was amazing how shoddy it looked now, it was a cheap, halfhearted ef­fort like some kid’s Hollywood souvenir—it was ominously covered with freshly dug dirt.

Biserka plucked her black ninja hood off and ran her black-gloved fin­gers through her sweaty, smashed, blond hairdo. Biserka had six fancy emerald studs in her ears and green weepy eyeliner streaming down both cheeks. She’d been sweating like a pig inside that cheap costume.

“Time for Miss Montalban to go walkies,” Biserka remarked. Radmila lashed out and kicked Biserka in the shin. Biserka stepped back, with a sour, tired expression. She then came around, leaned down, and pinched Radmila’s nose shut with her thumb and finger.

In moments Radmila had a scarlet agony in her lungs and fatal dark­ness roaring in her ears.

“You don’t do that again,” Biserka explained. She left, stooped be­hind the couch, opened a beautiful shoplifted Italian leather satchel. She removed a bloodstained parole breaker’s knife. It had the blackened chips, the melted plastic, and the stink.

She then seized a hank of Radmila’s hair and sawed loose a fistful of it. She threw the hair into Radmila’s watering eyes. “Do you want to walk for me now, or will there be more attitude?”

Radmila gusted air through her nose and shook her head.

Biserka stuck her fingers through the network of cinched wires around Radmila’s chest. She hauled her upright, with an effort. Tired, she changed her mind and shoved Radmila onto an abandoned couch, which exploded with dust.

“I have a feeling we won’t see this locale again,” Biserka said, gazing around the mold-spotted walls and the damp-collapsed ceiling. “That is such a pity, but, you know, you get a sixth sense about a blackspot. I’m a girl who has a very negative rapport with ubiquitous systems.”

Biserka’s English had an odd foreign accent. It might have been French, or Chinese, or maybe both French and Chinese.

“I travel light,” said Biserka, “so we have to leave my toys here as a nice surprise for sneaky kids. Kids these days! They love to steal, because they have so little… But professional theft is over! All the smart players traffic in revenge! Vendetta. Venganza. Rache. That’s the universal lan­guage. It’s hard to steal from people—but to steal the people… Goods are trackable, but people are stalkable.”

Biserka gazed around her derelict hideout and sighed. “All my pretty toys! Should I burn the house down? You think?”

Biserka rummaged in a handcrafted box that might once have con­tained some fine hobject. “I do want my pearls. They’re my favorites. I’ll let you carry my pearls.” Biserka sank her clawed fingers into a mass of strung pearls and pulled them out like cold spaghetti.

“I was being funny, you know, because ‘Biserka’ means ‘Pearl.’ So I tell the jewelers: ‘I’m Mila Montalban, show me all your pearls.’ And they are like: ‘Oh yes certainly Miss Montalban! Such a pleasure to see you here in person! Would you like to see the wild pearls from the years before the seacoasts rose, or would you like to see the modern cultured pearls?’ And I reply: ‘Why not see both?’”

Biserka thrust the dripping mass of pearls into Radmila’s face. “So: They bring out all these for me! Little lumpy bastards—the wild pearls from the old days! And then—they bring out these really huge gleaming supetperfect ones!” Biserka draped strands of pearls, one by one, over Radmila’s head.

“And I say to them, ‘What’s the damage?’ and they reply… what a fraud! These little stinking mean dirty ones cost a cut-off arm and one leg! And all these big white perfect round ones, pearls which didn’t even grow from mother oysters… they are so cheap!”

Biserka cinched the thick rope of pearls around Radmila’s neck. She hauled Radmila to her feet.

Then Biserka hauled her forward, tugging at the leash of jewels. “Where’s the justice? I hated them for that! I mean: People did that to the whole world, didn’t they? Such a pearl of a world, they had once! And now look at it!”

Biserka dragged her outside and down the stairs of the derelict build­ing. There was a big black hearse parked in a seaweed-strewn gravel driveway. That hearse hadn’t been there before, when Biserka had first abducted her.

Radmila tried to look around, feeling jewelry bite into her throat. Tall brown palms towered over the mansion, all of them killed by rising sea­water.

Biserka meant to force her into the black hearse. Radmila moaned.

“Pretty evening for a drive,” said Biserka.

Radmila snorted through her nose.

“You’re planning to kick me again and then try to run away,” Biserka diagnosed. She placed one flat hand against Radmila’s collarbone and pushed her. Radmila, her arms trapped behind her, reeled helplessly, stumbled, and fell.

Biserka pulled Radmila’s shoes off. She filled each shoe with a hand­ful of sharp gravel. Then she daintily tied the shoes on. “So now­—happy dancing girl—let’s see you run, hey?”

Radmila had to take four steps to reach the hearse. Those steps were like walking on sharp nails. Tears came to her eyes.

Biserka heaved her through the door of the hearse, then joined her on a velvet pew in the back. They sat together next to a huge, dirt­stained coffin.

“I could rip that tape off your lipstick,” said Biserka, studying her, “but you’d give me all kinds of lip for that. If you’re mean to me, I might lose my temper!”

The black hearse rolled silently into motion. The machine left the shoreline, humped and bumped over a broken patch of flattened woven­wire fencing.

In a matter of moments, they were in the indestructible LA freeway system, quietly cruising under the flashing lights.

“I know you’re wondering about this big dirty coffin here,” said Bis­erka, languidly kicking it with rhythmic, bongolike thuds. “Well, there’s some good news for you. The coffin is not for you. The casket has an oc­cupant already.”

Some time passed. Biserka enjoyed a chilly sip from a cocktail ther­mos. “You’re not alert anymore,” she said. “Are you ignoring me?”

Radmila turned toward her, eyes burning.

“That’s better. Good. Okay, now I’m explaining tonight’s events to you. You can’t understand all this, because you are this rich-chick blond ac­tress and you’re kind of stupid. Never mind. Because I had a long time to think about this. It’s been one of those asymmetric terror things where the enemy is very rich and has all her skyscrapers, but I always have the ini­tiative. So: You become my hostage now. Only, Radmila: I don’t want you as my hostage, because, wow! Wow, wow! I can’t stand the sight of you!”

Biserka kicked the side of the coffin harder, with her cheap black rub­ber ninja boot. “This man is my hostage. This dead gentleman in his coffin. I dug him up out of a graveyard today. What an exciting day full of action for Biserka Mihajlovicl”

Radmila looked longingly at the thermos.

“You are thirsty, but you don’t want to drink this,” Biserka told her, yawning. “It would put you out flat on your ass!” Biserka rolled her neck on her shoulders, and massaged the back of her own skull.

“So, as I told you: the graveyards. I know that sounds weird to you: my dear lively sister Biserka, in the graveyards? But graveyards are blackspots! People don’t wire the graveyards, because there are no pay­ing customers in there, and they don’t imagine that the locals would get up and leave. So there’s an imagination gap in a graveyard.”

Biserka giggled, and enjoyed another sip from her thermos. “Because I can work fine in graveyards! They never scare me! I love them! Be­cause they’re a huge blind spot for everybody stupider than me. For peo­ple like you. Huh? So, you know, who else is in there in graveyards? Besides me. Well, your people are in there, that’s who. Every famous old family has famous dead people. Like Svetlana, Bratislava, Kosara! Half of us are dead already and we don’t even have real graves!”

Biserka wiped her mouth on her black ninja sleeve. She had a tattoo on her right wrist, a homemade tattoo, the kind of artwork people did in jail cells while afflicted by long lengths of time. “So, me and my friend the funny backhoe are working in this blackspot, and up comes this gen­tleman here: the former governor of California. Your husband’s dad.”

Biserka waited a patient moment. “All right: don’t get so excited. I wasn’t the one who shot him. He won’t get any deader now. When we’re done with our family business, I’ll leave him somewhere—with a beeper on him. You can come fetch him and bury him back into the ground. You can hush it all up. The Montgomery-Montalban Family hushes up so many matters and hides so many troubles already.”

Biserka rubbed her nose. Someone had broken it, years ago. “So: I don’t hold you for ransom. I mean, yes, I 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.

“Oh Lionel, Lionel, that gangster bad boy… that tasty morsel, Li­onel,” mourned Biserka. “I had such plans and hopes for him. Now he’s found my hideout and I want to kill myself. I think I will. Right now! I will ignite this hearse and I will blow both of us into little pieces and there won’t be anything left here but a cloud of your own DNA.”

Radmila rolled her eyes in contempt.

Biserka crawled into the front of the hearse, to mess at length with its interface. Distant sirens were howling, but the fabled rapid-response corps of Los Angeles were slow to fight these fires. Maybe because the fastest and most agile gangs on the street were the arsonists.

“Lionel and his friends are getting out of hand, Radmila! That’s a whole lot of pretty fire! I’ve seen towns on fire in China that were burn­ing less than your town is burning tonight.”

Biserka was frightened suddenly. “All right, you’re always claiming you love them so much. Go stop them from rioting. Go on, I’ll untie you. Go be superhuman. You can do that. You’re superperfect.” She pulled the wadded tape from Radmila’s lips.

“Kill us both,” Radmila said. “It’s easier.”

“You stink,” Biserka decided. “I think I’ll go help them, instead. I’ll say that I’m you, and I’ll tell them to burn everything. I’ll burn every­thing you ever built here! Because I look like you. I look more like you than you do.”

Flames lit the horizon. A dense, oily wave of smoke rolled over them. Biserka kicked open the door, left the hearse, slammed it behind her.

Radmila hated her life.

The hearse suddenly started again. It rolled, slow as a minute hand and just as inexorable, into the Pacific surf. Like every form of networked machinery, the car showed a supreme contempt for its own survival.

The hearse wobbled. Pacific surf rolled rhythmically over the win­dows. Seawater seeped under the doors.

Radmila managed to wriggle sideways in her bondage. She got her knees up, her legs up.

The foaming tide would not drown her until it reached the coffin. The tide rose steadily. The coffin began to float.