The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [71]
Radmila moved more of the star budget into the coming generation: Lionel and Mary. Let it not be said of her that she was personally hogging the limelight and eating the Family’s seed corn. No: she aspired to be steady, dutiful, fully professional, an engine of production.
Radmila still went to her gym, but not with the fanatical intensity of a front-line diva. A woman planning for motherhood needed some body fat. Even if Radmila didn’t bear the biblical horde of kids that Glyn demanded, there would have to be one. One or two. Three. There would have to be children, no matter how one felt about one’s husband: any Queen of England knew that. That was a dynast’s reality.
Early October arrived. Soon John would return from his meanderings in the Adriatic. The Family-Firm would be watching that reunion with care; it was a crucial performance for Radmila. She was determined to ace it.
Radmila performed her gym routine—“the worst thing that would happen all day”—and retired into her new oneiric pod for beauty sleep. This brand-new gym pod—oblate, speckled, seamed, it looked like a giant hemp seed—was said to feature all kinds of exotic benefits to neural well-being. It was like a Zen spa with a hinge.
As far as Radmila could tell, there was little more to this pricey dream machine than Californian hype. The pleasant flashing lights, the droning swoony ambient noises, and the so-called aroma “therapy” had done nothing much for her, or to her. Still, given that she was one of the product’s sponsors and it was quite a handsome little earner, she saw no harm in using it.
Radmila climbed into the pod and clicked it shut. This time, as she fell into a pleasant doze, something about the pod’s routine touched her brain—not with the harshness of an Acquis neural intrusion, but in a civilized, consumer-friendly fashion.
Radmila tumbled into a lucid, prophetic dream.
She dreamed that John had come home. John was not the gloomy, burdened, and apologetic philanderer whose company she dreaded. No, he was the younger John, the daring swain who had discovered her. In Los Angeles, Radmila had tried so hard to be a skulking stateless nameless thing, and yet John had located her, and John knew who she was and where she came from. He even cared about her and what happened to her.
She had little more to offer this prince than sweet surrender, but this seemed to be what the prince most desired from a woman in his life. Her abject emotional and sexual dependence on him steadied his self-image. He was no longer a rich young parlor radical with some rather sinister interests in emergent technologies. John Montgomery Montalban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to himself that he had the power to transform himself and others.
Here he was back again, smiling and full of good cheer, the young John, the tech magician, and he had brought her mysterious gifts, as he always liked so much to do: two of his black hobby-objects. One hobject was a fizzing black shoe box, and the other one was even more mysterious, high-technical, and powerful, and it was … in stern dream logic … another fizzing black shoe box …
“Eureka!” cried the young John in his ecstasy: charismatic and sexy. “I have saved the world!”
What could it be? John was so busy with his colored wires and tubes … Never a moment for her, not a smile, not a kiss or hug … The first black shoe box was nothing much, the even more sinister shoe box was nothing much either, but to connect the two shoe boxes … Of course! Networking! A network would change everything!
Now the brilliant John, with all the passionate conviction that had first won her heart, was declaiming something solemn and arcane and yet fantastically convincing about his amazing black boxes … The first was sonoluminescent cold fusion, a host of screaming tiny bubbles hotter than the surface of the sun …
Banging on the shoe box, yes, John cried, sonoluminescence, a true miracle technology that had never quite worked yet.
The second fizzing black box was chemosynthetic