The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [51]
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?”
“Qué 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.”
Radmila’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