The Caryatids

A folding canvas director's chair hopped over and flopped itself open for her, amid a busy crowd of Montgomery-Montalban stagehands. Radmila sat serenely, spreading her costume and grooming it. What a fuss these stage clothes made about themselves: all that multilayer circuitry, the plastic threading, sensor pads, electric embroidery...Gleaming lights, conductive snaps, antenna yarn, laser-cut dust-repellent golden foil: Stage costumes looked terrific when they were turned on. When you sat still inside them, awaiting your cue, it was like wearing a hot-dog booth.

Radmila slipped on a pair of stage spex, groped at a midair menu, and touched her earpiece. Toddy was gently lecturing her audience about historical trends in Californian home decor. "Mission Style." "Arroyo Culture." "Tuscan."

Every star had a metier, and Toddy Montgomery was a decades-long sponsor of home-decor products. Californian furniture was of huge, consuming interest to Toddy's core fan base.

The Family-Firm was a network: real estate, politics, finance, everyware, retail, water interests...and of course entertainment. A network as strong as the LA freeways. A network whose edges were everywhere and its center...well, if the Family-Firm had any center, it was Theodora "Toddy" Montgomery.

Toddy's costume cascaded over her gorgeous chair: she wore her stiff support bodice, lace collar, her signature monster hat, her dainty feet just peeping out from under her big petticoats.

"Miss Mila Montalban will be joining us," said Toddy. There was a happy patter of applause.

Miss Mila Montalban was a trouper and a star. Miss Mila Montalban could do anything for her Family-Firm. She owed the Family her whole existence, and she was loyal and true. She would die for them. If a bullet came for any Montgomery-Montalban, Radmila Mihajlovic would swan-jump in front of that bullet with a deep, secret sense of relief.

Toddy paused for one long, strange moment. Then she caught up her lost thread and rambled on. Old people were so patient and garrulous. They never seemed to switch topics.

Glyn broke in. "Three minutes, Mila...Oh Jesus! Now what?"

Radmila stood on tiptoe. "Am I on?"

"We just got a tremor alert."

"What? That's the fifth tremor this week!"

"It's the seventh," Glyn corrected. Glyn was always like that.

"Well then," said Radmila, touching the mechanized crispness of a long blond curl, "the show must go on."

"Do you know what kind of hell we'd catch if there was a Big One and we didn't clear this building?"

"I sure know what kind of hell we'd catch if we shut down Toddy's retirement show."

"We can reschedule her retirement. Nobody reschedules an earthquake."

"Oh, just come off all that, Glyn."

" You come off it," said Glyn. "We built this place on a fault line! If this building topples over, it'll crush us all like bugs!"

This flat threat gave Radmila a serious pause. How could Glyn fail to trust the ubiquitous programming of the Los Angeles County Furniture Showroom?

"Put me on, Glyn. This building is totally modern."

"It is not 'modern,'" said Glyn, "it is 'state-of-the-art.' There's a big difference."

"What do you want from me? Toddy is on! Put me on, too!"

"Two minutes," Glyn agreed, but in the Showroom crawlspace, the normal chaos of tech support had a sudden hysterical edge.

The Family's security people always lurked backstage, wearing their masked black Kabuki costumes, and frankly doing nothing much, usually. Most of the Family's black-clad stage ninjas weren't even real Security. They were Family members whose faces were painfully famous, so they were happily invisible in masks.

A ninja reached out his sinister black-gloved hand and gently patted her costumed shoulder. "Break a leg," he murmured. The ninja was Lionel, her brother-in-law. Lionel was all of seventeen, and whenever his big brother John was gone on business, Lionel was always making gallant little gestures of support for her. He was a sweet kid, Lionel.

Toddy was babbling, and the soundtrack noodled through a gentle repertoire of medleys. Radmila listened keenly for her cue. Her cue was overdue.

The reactive DJ system drew its repertoire from audience behavior, and Toddy's core fans, her favorite shareholders, were getting anxious. Through any of a thousand possible channels, the tremor alert had jabbed them awake. These fine, dignified old people were not in a panic just yet, but knew they might soon have a good excuse.

Their interactive music had the air of tragedy.

Radmila finally went on. Her hair was okay, the face was more than okay, the costume would do, but her stage hat felt like a big live lobster. As a tribute, she was wearing one of Toddy's signature stage hats, a huge-brimmed feathered apparatus that framed a star's face like a saintly halo, but the old-school hat hadn't synced completely to the costume, and the awkward thing, appallingly, felt heavy. It should have wafted through the stage-lit air like a parasail. It felt like a bag of wet cement.