The Caryatids

Troubled, Radmila had lost her way in the map's widgets. To improvise, she pulled an old trick that Toddy had once taught her.

"So what was that ?" said Freddy at once.

It was an old trick, but often a good one. Most trend-spotters using the net looked for rising news items that were gaining public credibility. But you could learn useful things in a hurry if you searched for precisely the opposite. News that should have public credibility, but didn't.

Sometimes the public was told things that the public couldn't bear to know.

Radmila had discovered a different map of Los Angeles: Los Angeles seen from deep within the Earth.

"Get rid of that," said Raph.

"What is it?" said Sofia, who was sitting there dutifully, but using her two wands as a pair of knitting needles. Sofia had always been like that. Sofia was Family because she had three kids. By three different men, but that was Hollywood.

"That's a forecast for underground weather," said Raph. "So-called. Everybody knows that you can't predict earthquakes."

The map was a garish space of exotic flows. It was a scientific map: ugly, user-unfriendly, speckled all over with menu bars, to-do lists, threat meters, and behavioral prediction.

Those scratchy-looking color-blobs had to be lava, or magma, or strain tensors in the shifting continental plates. All very complicated. Radmila had never seen this map before, so she was at a loss.

Still, it was obvious at a glance that the heavier action was outside this part of the map. So Radmila scrolled the map sideways.

The map's edge led her to a nexus: a big maroon knot. It looked like a bloodstain.

Freddy flipped his wand around and painted a circle onto the projection. "That node there looks interesting."

Guillermo said, "So who is hosting this map?"

"Who made it?" said Freddy.

Radmila had been hastily accessing the tags, so she was a little ahead of the game. "Some kind of Acquis science group. They're based in Brussels."

"It's from Brussels?" scoffed Raph. "Get rid of it!"

"Better let me drive," Freddy decided. He rose from his seat and set his solid, suited bulk into Glyn's abandoned chair.

Freddy lacked any grace at net surfing. He simply found every tag that looked big and active and pounded it. He popped up his personal notepad and hauled cogent chunks of data onto it. Freddy was a seasoned Family businessman. He never bored easily.

"Okay," Freddy summarized, after seven tedious minutes. "We seem to have some kind of major movement of liquid rock...an unprecedented movement...deep under Yosemite Valley."

"They made all that up," said Raph. "That's some Acquis political ploy. Propaganda. They're always like that."

Guillermo popped loose the electric snaps of his uniform jacket. "You really think that Acquis scientists would lie about magma?"

"Maybe not 'lie,' exactly. But the Acquis are always big alarmists. That's all a simulation. It's not like they're actually down there looking at the real lava. You know that's impossible."

"But they're scientists! They don't know we're looking at this map of theirs! They've got nothing to gain by lying to us!"

"They're doing this to harm our cultural values," said Raph.

"Your thesis isn't quite clear to me, Raph. What are the scientists doing with this map, exactly? They're launching some huge culture-war conspiracy to fake the data, just to make us feel unhappy about our earthquakes?"

"Fine," said Raph, losing his temper, "what are you trying to say to us? That there's some kind of brand-new, giant weird volcano growing under California? What next, Guillermo? Are we supposed to act all happy about that idea? We don't have enough troubles this morning? Our hometown just got hit by a Richter Six!"

"That is the point ," said Guillermo.

" What's the point?"

"That's why we're getting hit by so many earthquakes. This huge lava movement underground: That might be the root cause of that problem."

Raph shrugged. "That notion sounds pretty far-out to me."

"Raph, you're always saying that you want the big strategic picture. This is a big strategic picture. Boy, is it ever big."

"Yosemite is a park," said Raph, straining for politeness. "Yosemite Park doesn't make earthquakes."

"Let's look that up," Freddy counseled. "I'll tag our private correlation engine for 'Yosemite' and 'volcano.'"

This action took Freddy about fifteen seconds. The results arrived in a blistering deluge of search hits. The results were ugly.

They had hit on a subject that knowledgeable experts had been discussing for a hundred years.

The most heavily trafficked tag was the strange coinage "Supervolcano." Supervolcanoes had been a topic of mild intellectual interest for many years. Recently, people had talked much less about supervolcanoes, and with more pejoratives in their semantics.

Web-semantic traffic showed that people were actively shunning the subject of supervolcanoes. That scientific news seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way.