The Caryatids

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 time in her life, Radmila Mihajlovic had forgotten herself. She had forgotten to police her inner being within her walls of trauma, fear, and self-contempt. Because she had escaped the world. There was no weight in orbit, no hateful burden for a caryatid to support there. Outside the boundaries of Earth, love was deep, viscous, fertile. Love was all-conquering.

Radmila woke, and she knew that it had been a good dream. To have a dream so sweet and promising, at a time of such grief and confusion: It meant that she was strong. She would power her way through this impossible time. She would do her duty, she would bear up. Today, tomorrow, yesterday-the "event heap," as Synchronists called it-the event heap would sort itself out.

Radmila was hungry. The body mattered. The Montgomery-Montalbans were early risers and convinced believers in a proper breakfast.

But there was nobody around to share her meal. There was one special sunlit breakfast nook overlooking the Family's gardens, where she made a point of breakfasting with John and Mary, but John had gone away, and he'd taken the child with him. The breakfast nook, all Perspex and cellulose, was one of the prettiest spots in a beautiful building, but now it felt like a reproach to her.

Whenever John was gone on his business, Radmila would eat a more formal breakfast with Toddy, but Toddy Montgomery would not be dining this morning. No.

So Radmila ventured downstairs to the kitchen to eat with the staff. The mansion's gleaming kitchen was weirdly deserted. The staffers were kind and good to her: they knew that the Family's stars were just the graphic front ends for the Firm's commercial interests, but the staff were big fans as well as Family employees, so it always meant a lot to them whenever Radmila dropped by.

The staffers had all left. They were all Dispensation people, so they'd swarmed out of the Bivouac to go fight the emergency.

Radmila sullenly turned on a countertop meatrix and printed out a light breakfast. She nourished herself in ominous silence. Then she went to her boudoir and costumed herself in a morning gown.

It was time to go and see about Toddy. Radmila had few illusions about what she would see there, but she knew it was the right Family thing to do.

Uncle Jack was in Toddy's master bedroom. Jack was overseeing the family's robots as they methodically pried Toddy's treasures from their quake-proof sticky-wax.

It seemed that Jack hadn't slept all night. Yet Jack still had his buoyant smile and he was beautifully dressed: the role of a Family star was to keep up appearances.

Radmila cued a soundtrack and made her entrance. "It's so good to see you."

"You, too," said Uncle Jack.