The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [59]
It was the poorer, dodgier neighborhoods that were always stricken hard in times of crisis: grim, crime-ridden Beverly Hills, the fire-tormented 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-my-backyard 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