The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [52]
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