The Caryatids

Rishi chose to walk in front of the map, covering his suit with projected cityware. The map swiftly reformed itself behind his body. Rishi was a younger member of the Family, so he lacked a Director's wand. Instead, he held a fat black plastic brick in his hand, a gooey interface all dented with his fingers. "What are the stakeholder specs on Grandma's celebrity endorsements?"

"They've still got her immersive-world endorsements," Guillermo said. "Those endorsements don't need any real Toddy."

"Her investors say they need a guideline concept right away," Rishi insisted.

"We tell them that my mother is 'stable,'" said Freddy.

"Meaning?"

"Our guideline concept is 'stable,'" said Freddy stoutly. "'We are closely tracking developments as Toddy's condition evolves. Her benchmarks now are consistent with her benchmarks yesterday.'"

"That'll work." Guillermo nodded. "Go feed 'em that, Rishi."

Rishi stepped out of the projection, and clamped the gooey brick to his ear.

"Look at all that damage around the Showroom!" Freddy complained. "Why did we build that palace right on a fault line?"

"Because the land was cheap there," said Guillermo. "Zoom that zone, Glyn. I mean, Mila."

Radmila obediently zoomed.

"See, look there! Everything that we built there came through the quake like aces. That is so beautiful! Rishi, I want you to get through to that architect's people-Frank Osbourne. We need to congratulate him! As a Family courtesy."

"I'll do that," said Rishi.

"Let's check housing values," said Freddy.

Radmila stroked the touchscreen and peeled an onion of interpretative overlays. Real-estate values were the X-ray of the Angeleno soul. The real-estate map was already spattered with high-volume blobs of rapidly moving money.

As might be expected, a strong postquake surge of investment was al-ready hitting the blue-ribbon districts of Watts, Crenshaw, La Mirada, Lakewood, and Paramount. And Norwalk, of course, that fortress of glamour and privilege where the Bivouac stood firm: there were some scattered blue and yellow trouble-dots in Norwalk, but nothing dreadful.

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.