The Caryatids

"So," said Guillermo at last, "according to our best sources here, there are some giant...and I mean really giant magma plumes rising up and chewing at the West Coast of North America. Do we have a Family consensus about that issue?"

Raph still wasn't buying it. "The other sources said that 'Yellowstone' was a supervolcano. Not 'Yosemite.' Yellowstone is way over in Montana."

"You do agree that supervolcanoes exist, though. They're a scientific fact of life on Earth. That's what I'm asking."

"They exist. If you insist. But the last supervolcano was seventy-four thousand years ago. Not during this business quarter. Not this year. Not even one thousand years. Seventy-four thousand years, Freddy."

Freddy looked down and slowly quoted from his notepad. "'The massive eruption of a supervolcano would be a planetary catastrophe. It would create years of freezing temperatures as volcanic dust and ash obscured the warmth of the sun. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.'"

Guillermo's face went sour. "Okay, that is total baloney. 'Nuclear winter,' that sounds extremely corny to me."

"That's because this source material is eighty years old. Geologists know a whole lot about supervolcanoes. Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes."

Buffy was losing her temper. "But this is so totally unbelievable! The sky already darkened! The black rain already fell on us! We already have a climate crisis, we have one going on right now! Now we're supposed to have another crisis, out of nowhere, because California blows up from some supervolcano? What are the odds?"

"Well, that question's pretty easy," said Freddy. "A supervolcano under the Earth doesn't care what we humans did to the sky. If it blows up, then it just blows up! So the odds of a supervolcano are exactly the same as they always were."

Rishi, who was bright, had gotten all interested. "Well, what exactly are the odds of a supervolcano? How often do supervolcanoes erupt, and turn the sky black, completely wrecking the climate, and so forth?"

It took Freddy a good while to clumsily bang that one out. Maybe a minute and a half. "Sixty thousand years, on the average. That would mean we're already fourteen thousand years past our due date."

A contemplative gloom settled over the conclave.

"Look," said Raph at last, "I'm a Synchronist like the rest of you guys, but let's not get completely goofy here. We can't go making our investment decisions on a forty-thousand-year time frame. That's not due diligence and sustainable business planning. That's just plain weird."

"The pace of quakes in LA has been picking up," said Guillermo. "That trend is clear."

Raph had a ready answer. "Well, that comes from climate change. All those heavy rains lubricate the local fault lines. And we get rising groundwater, too."

"Raph, how come climate change can cause earthquakes, but supervolcanoes don't cause earthquakes?"

"Okay, so you got me there." Raph shrugged. "I never said I was a scientist."

Freddy contemplated the geological display map. "Mila, give us that current-situation map again."

Radmila did this. The Family studied the colorful popping disaster dots with a renewed sense of dread. They were clustered on certain lines. Those seismic lines.

"Do we have any Family game plan for the complete destruction of California?" said Freddy.

"John does," Radmila said.

Freddy lifted his brows. "Oh?"

"Yes. John once told me that if the planet Earth became completely unfit for life, there would be two places for our Family to go: up into orbit, or down under the Earth."

"I never heard John say that to me," Buffy complained.

"We were floating up in LilyPad when John told me that. On our honeymoon." They had been floating at a porthole and gazing at the distant Earth. There were certain angles of orbit, in the host of whizzing sunsets, when the sweet old planet had looked thin and meager: like some small, distant town on the skids.

"John's such a romantic," said Freddy, who had never liked John much.

"Our Family would do that !" Radmila shouted. "We would do it, we would cut a deal with that reality! We'd be floating up in the sky, in some kind of bubble. Or under the ground, in some other kind of bubble. Of course we would do it! What else could we do? This Family thinks in the long term, because the Family has to survive!"

Rishi came forward. "I have Frank Osbourne waiting for you."

Freddy was glad for the change of subject. "Let's have a word with the gentleman."

The starchitect's avatar appeared in a corner of the Family's situation map.

"So, Frank," said Freddy, "you're in a simulation at the moment?"

"Gotta be in a simulation," grumbled the architect. "All the big construction business happens inside simulations."

"You didn't notice the most recent big earthquake?"

"Was there a tremor?" Osbourne said. "I'm logging in from Vancouver."