The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [63]
“So, please listen. The Sixth Great Extinction has happened already. Because the human race has ruined the world. We have a severe climate crisis, and it’s terrible. Whenever we look up at the sky, we see danger and ugliness, and we know that’s our fault.”
She drew a breath, squared her shoulders. “But just suppose … That no matter how bad we human beings thought we were, there was something even worse waiting for us. Suppose that the world ruined the human race. Suppose that a giant volcano burst up out of the Earth, and it just wrecked everything. For no reason! It turned the sky black. The innocent died in millions, even billions … and everything that we loved about the beauty of this world was turned into ashes, right in front of our eyes … and we had to survive in the darkness and the ugliness, and life would be that way for centuries …”
Their mouths hung open.
“I can tell you exactly what that would be like. Because I already know. I know that we would fight that like hell! We would fight! We would never, never despair! We would help one another. We would teach our children how good things had been. We would save every precious memory from our heritage. And when we fixed the Earth, and we would fix it—we would make it better … We would make the new Earth a lot better.”
Radmila stepped into a pool of sunlight from an overhead window. “So: You see what I want to say? If there’s a world catastrophe caused by a supervolcano, then it means that our human disaster, our own big crime against the sky, was just too small to count. Maybe we did our worst as human beings, but we were too small to matter. So we can just forget about that. We can forgive ourselves that! Because the world would have been ruined anyway. We don’t have to obsess anymore, or feel so proud about our own evil! All we have to do is survive and plan to prevail! We survive the next catastrophe and we rebuild our world. We can do things like that in this Family. I know that we can do it. We’re doing it right now.”
The silence was broken by Lily, who hadn’t said a word until now. “That was totally the coolest extended set-speech that I ever heard Mila perform. That was just totally wow.”
“Me too,” said Doug. “That’s exactly how I feel, too. Except I couldn’t put that into an extemporaneous monologue.”
“I was just dying over here!” Elsie complained, jumping from her chair. “I never know why I show up for these stupid Family business meetings! But now I do know. Mila’s got all the brains in this Family. So stop wasting your time with that arguing, and let’s do what she says.”
THE BIGGEST URBAN FIRES in Los Angeles were crushed within twenty-four hours. That left the delicate political task of destroying the worst-damaged buildings.
For political work in the climate crisis, this kind of triage was the ultimate urban-management challenge.
The intractable problems of LA’s seaside urban slums had taught the Family that lesson long ago. The Family had learned that damaged buildings had to be demolished, and that demolition had to be done at breakneck speed, while the original pain of the disaster was still fresh. Otherwise, the cost of prolonged litigation would soar unbearably. Completely new buildings could be built for much less money and effort.
The classic Dispensation gambit was to charge in and discreetly smash the damaged buildings while also rescuing their inhabitants. Naturally the legal system had caught on to this sneak-attack technique and put a stop to it. The next refinement was to smash the damaged buildings while leaving the façades apparently intact. The interiors were rebuilt in modern fashion with quick-setting fabricated plastics, so that the old-fashioned building still appeared to stand there, observing all the legal proprieties. Unfortunately this fraud was also too obvious; plus, there was something cheap and vulgar about it.
The latest refinement, one pioneered by the modern Los Angeles star system, was to smash the damaged buildings quickly, but in as loud and public and glamorous a way as possible. The buildings would still