The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [46]
“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 unheard-of 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.”
“Surf’s 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,