The Caryatids

She had little more to offer this prince than sweet surrender, but this seemed to be what the prince most desired from a woman in his life. Her abject emotional and sexual dependence on him steadied his self-image. He was no longer a rich young parlor radical with some rather sinister interests in emergent technologies. John Montgomery Montalban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to himself that he had the power to transform himself and others.

Here he was back again, smiling and full of good cheer, the young John, the tech magician, and he had brought her mysterious gifts, as he always liked so much to do: two of his black hobby-objects. One hobject was a fizzing black shoe box, and the other one was even more mysterious, high-technical, and powerful, and it was...in stern dream logic...another fizzing black shoe box...

"Eureka!" cried the young John in his ecstasy: charismatic and sexy. "I have saved the world!"

What could it be? John was so busy with his colored wires and tubes...Never a moment for her, not a smile, not a kiss or hug...The first black shoe box was nothing much, the even more sinister shoe box was nothing much either, but to connect the two shoe boxes...Of course! Networking! A network would change everything!

Now the brilliant John, with all the passionate conviction that had first won her heart, was declaiming something solemn and arcane and yet fantastically convincing about his amazing black boxes...The first was sonoluminescent cold fusion, a host of screaming tiny bubbles hotter than the surface of the sun...

Banging on the shoe box, yes, John cried, sonoluminescence, a true miracle technology that had never quite worked yet.

The second fizzing black box was chemosynthetic black bubbling slime straight from the Freudian bottom of the ocean...It was a true biological miracle, it made life from darkness and nothing, it could live on pure volcano goo...John was pulling the black volcano goo out of his black box as he ranted about it to no one in particular, it was stinking of primeval sulfur, it was oily, drippy, satanic, it was all over his hands, it was running down his perfect sleeves like black blood...

Bubbling wildly as it dribbled, spewing oxygen in fizzing sheets, it was the stuff of breath and life, this stinky chemo goo bubbling merrily like California champagne...

The radiation from the fusion bubbles was wildly stimulating the black slime bubbles, somehow it was exactly what the germs needed to do their magic. The radiation was a tonic to the magic germs, it made their metabolism a hundred times more efficient, no, a thousand times, a million times...

Her husband's black boxes were slurping poison out of the air, just vacuuming carbon dioxide, fizzing like reverse geysers now, all yeasty and industrial...

She wanted to laugh wildly in her dread and ecstasy, for the two black bubbling boxes were sucking centuries of industrial poison out of the sky, just gobbling pollution and turning it back into coal and crude oil, literally tearing the filth right out of the firmament ! The unhealthy sky under which she had passed her whole life was peeling back before her dreaming eyes like a wrinkled skin on badly scalded milk...and behind that skein of horror and decline and utter hopelessness, the revitalized sky was blue, blue, bluer-than-bluebird blue...

Radmila's eyes shocked open. She tore herself from the gentle grip of the hallucination. She pried herself from the oneiric pod...She lay breathing shallowly on the color-coded elastic floor of the new gym...Her head was reeling. What on Earth had that machine done to her? It had torn something loose within her, something dark and ugly and yet integral to her being...It had oiled and loosened up some ancient trauma within her...It had popped off of her like a rust flake.

She had lost something dark and complicated deep within herself. She was a different person now. Freer, much easier at heart. She felt footloose. Mellowed. Agile and even giggly. Full of honest joy.

She stared at a fluffy morning cloud through the tinted panels of the roof. "Oh my God," she told the cloud, "I've finally become a Californian."

RADMILA AND TODDY HAD ALWAYS ATTENDED the same hairdressing lab. This salon lab was an intensely private place, likely the best such lab in the world. Staffed by committed cosmeceutical professionals, it was chilly, hushed, and cheerless. That state-of-the-art establishment was much frequented by the political elite. Generally Toddy and Radmila went there together, arriving in a Family limo with darkly tinted windows, then departing under deep cover.

Sometimes there were clouds of hobject spyplanes whizzing over the place, all run by paparazzi idiots with websites. These toys never got anywhere and never saw a thing, for the hairdressing lab was the single most secure locale that Radmila knew.