The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

Author:Bruce Sterling
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345460622
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2009-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

RADMILA WALKED THE ARTIFICIAL BEACH, vamped before the floating cameras, and gazed into the sun-glittering Pacific. Six lunatics were surfing out there. For the life of her, Radmila could not understand surfers in Los Angeles. Obviously riding on a wave was a nice stunt performance, but inside the ocean? There were whole chunks and shoals of broken China bobbing around out there, all glass, nails, slime, and toxic jellyfish.

The scanty fabric of Radmila’s swimsuit belonged to a sponsor. So did the hairstyle, the watch, the sunglasses, and the hat. This privatized beach, like all modern tourist beaches, was a fake, as elaborate as an immersive world.

Radmila was looking sexy today, as contractually required. Looking sexy was a basic theatrical craft. The critical problem came when the severe labor of looking sexy made one forget to actually be sexy. Radmila did not feel at all sexy, in this swimsuit, on this beach. She felt dread.

Certain men direly wanted to have sexy sex with professionally beautiful women: sex with the stars. Those men were delusionary. Sex with a star was an awful idea, like having sex with a rosebush. You were not supposed to get into bed with a rosebush. You were supposed to give it horse manure and sell the blossoms.

Radmila knew that her most loyal fans, her truest devotees, were not men gloating over her gym-toned body and her tawny, sunlit skin: her biggest fans were all women. They were humbled, jittery, self-critical women with an underlying streak of resentful violence. Her fans were women very much like herself, except less lucky and more stupid.

She, Radmila Mihajlovic, had become Miss Mila Montalban. She had done that because she had, almost by miracle, found the technical and financial capacity. There was just no way—no way at all, no way in hell—that the similar fantasies of her fans could ever be fulfilled.

The fans could never become like the stars. This body that flaunted its perfect female curves before the camera: she had created this body through an exhausting, comprehensive ordeal. Having seven children was easier, for that was the sort of thing untrained women had once done without anesthetic.

So she wasn’t walking on a beach, being pretty. She was tormenting her fans with her star glamour. In some strange way, this unity in frustrated suffering was the true relationship of stars and fans.

That was why her fans loved to see her suffer. Fans knew that she deployed her charm and beauty as a weapon to tantalize, and they were spiteful about that torment and they wished her the worst. Their hatred and envy of celebrities could be lethal.

It was especially awful to “confide” to one’s fans, artlessly discussing one’s starry hotness, through some low-life aggregator of planetary eyeballs … Pretending to reveal her personal secrets to the fans was the worst and vilest toil in the industry.

“Exclusive star interviews.” They were ancient rituals. They always made her long for death.

Yet the fans had to be fed. For the fans were forever hungry.

“Yes,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.