The Caryatids

Radmila stepped into a pool of sunlight from an overhead window. "So: You see what I want to say? If there's a world catastrophe caused by a supervolcano, then it means that our human disaster, our own big crime against the sky, was just too small to count. Maybe we did our worst as human beings, but we were too small to matter. So we can just forget about that. We can forgive ourselves that ! Because the world would have been ruined anyway. We don't have to obsess anymore, or feel so proud about our own evil! All we have to do is survive and plan to prevail! We survive the next catastrophe and we rebuild our world. We can do things like that in this Family. I know that we can do it. We're doing it right now."

The silence was broken by Lily, who hadn't said a word until now. "That was totally the coolest extended set-speech that I ever heard Mila perform. That was just totally wow."

"Me too," said Doug. "That's exactly how I feel, too. Except I couldn't put that into an extemporaneous monologue."

"I was just dying over here!" Elsie complained, jumping from her chair. "I never know why I show up for these stupid Family business meetings! But now I do know. Mila's got all the brains in this Family. So stop wasting your time with that arguing, and let's do what she says."

THE BIGGEST URBAN FIRES in Los Angeles were crushed within twenty-four hours. That left the delicate political task of destroying the worst-damaged buildings.

For political work in the climate crisis, this kind of triage was the ultimate urban-management challenge.

The intractable problems of LA's seaside urban slums had taught the Family that lesson long ago. The Family had learned that damaged buildings had to be demolished, and that demolition had to be done at breakneck speed, while the original pain of the disaster was still fresh. Otherwise, the cost of prolonged litigation would soar unbearably. Completely new buildings could be built for much less money and effort.

The classic Dispensation gambit was to charge in and discreetly smash the damaged buildings while also rescuing their inhabitants. Naturally the legal system had caught on to this sneak-attack technique and put a stop to it. The next refinement was to smash the damaged buildings while leaving the facades apparently intact. The interiors were rebuilt in modern fashion with quick-setting fabricated plastics, so that the old-fashioned building still appeared to stand there, observing all the legal proprieties. Unfortunately this fraud was also too obvious; plus, there was something cheap and vulgar about it.

The latest refinement, one pioneered by the modern Los Angeles star system, was to smash the damaged buildings quickly, but in as loud and public and glamorous a way as possible. The buildings would still end up demolished, but they'd be killed in front of huge street crowds, who would watch the effort and heartily approve it as an act of mass entertainment.

The huge street crowds certainly weren't hard to find; they were composed of the refugees and the destitute, packed like sardines in their bunks and cots across a huge expanse of Southern California. Having briefly been a refugee herself, Radmila knew their lives: Angeleno bread and circuses. Crackers, soup, foam mattresses, and immersive illusions.

The city grid of Los Angeles doubled as a giant game board for immersive game players: one would see these game adventurers, mostly young, angry, and unemployed, on foot, on bicycles, clambering walls, jumping fences, bent on their desperate virtual errands. And since the Montgomery-Montalbans, as media aristocrats, owned the means of game production, they could guide those crowds of gamers wherever they liked.

An engineered urban mob had its purposes: to demolish buildings, for instance. This daring act required a planned coalition of LA's poorest and wealthiest: the poorest, who owned no real property but had the numbers and the overwhelming street presence, and the richest real estate developers, who could supply cover with the police and who stood to profit handsomely by the eventual reconstruction.

Wrecking the damaged fabric of LA had become a massive, daylong popular festival, complete with parades, original music, gorgeous costumes, mass dancing, and the flung distribution of favors and bribes to the roiling crowds of the poor. In the world capital of the entertainment business, this was the fastest and cheapest method yet found to rezone the city.

This practice had never been legalized, but as a classic Dispensation work-around, it was pretty close to an all-around win-win-win. Many learned academic papers had been written about LA's innovative deconstructive rezoning. The practice was spreading rapidly to other cities.