The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [45]
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 super perfect?”
“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,