Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  She hesitates for a long time before she dares to put a foot in the water. Whatever the creature was, it doesn’t reappear.

  The platform seems larger than the day before, the shadows darker, angles stranger. Aiah’s thundering heart sounds louder in her ears than the sound of her echoing boots. She remembers the dead woman’s hollow eye-sockets, remembers she’s been dead for three days now and this isn’t going to be pleasant at all. Aiah hesitates outside the door to the old toilet, sweeping her hand torch over the platform, trying to make sure nothing’s there.

  She’s just delaying things, she knows. Either she’s doing this or she isn’t. She takes a breath, turns, enters the room.

  The dead woman lies on a mound of broken concrete next to the canted brace. Aiah sees a dark spill of auburn hair, heavy boots, one hand dangling, the other still fiercely clamped on the brace. The mouth is open, a perfect oval of an endless scream. Her hollow eyes grow larger as Aiah moves closer. Aiah’s steps slow, then halt. She doesn’t want to get any closer.

  Aiah’s nostrils twitch obsessively, but she detects no odor of decay. The woman seems curiously shrunken inside her olive-green overalls.

  Aiah’s heart thunders in her chest. She takes a step closer, then another. The woman’s skin seems stiff, parchment-like, the lips shrunken, long teeth visible in shrunken gums. There are no eyes in the hollow sockets, nothing there at all.

  Aiah kneels by the body, reaches out a hand that freezes in mid-air. Air spills from Aiah’s lungs in a soft hiss.

  The woman is mummified, she realizes. Moisture drawn out, nerves burned away, soft organs like the eyes just gone. All consumed by the Bursary Street holocaust as surely as the lives of its other victims.

  Aiah’s already wearing insulated gloves. Carefully she reaches for the woman’s arm, takes it gently, pulls the clawed hand away from the hot brace. There’s no resistance, no rigor; the arm seems to weigh nothing at all. Aiah opens her hand and lets the arm fall.

  Sister, she apologizes, I’m sorry.

  She takes the blanket out of her tote, lays it next to the plasm diver, and then rolls the body onto it. She picks the body up — it weighs no more than a heap of dry rags — then moves it around the fallen brace to the back of the room, where it won’t be seen in the first flash of someone’s torch.

  The auburn hair is disordered. Aiah tries to arrange it about the hollow-eyed face, happy she’s wearing gloves when a fingertip scrapes across a withered cheek. Then she covers the body with the blanket.

  Aiah stands, open-mouthed stare still in her mind, and feels the weight of the surface world about her, all the foundations and beams and brick and concrete, all of it inadvertently generating power, the plasm waiting in its well like water, poised in this old iron brace like a drop at the end of a faucet. . .

  She has things to do, and time is passing.

  Feeling a prickly psychic pressure from the corpse right behind her, Aiah moves her tote behind the brace and takes out the battery leads, then attaches the alligator clips to the fallen brace. She’s not about to touch the brace itself if she can help it. She watches in fine surprise as the batteries fill almost instantly, as the little indicator on top, reacting to the plasm field, goes from red to purple to blue, and then begins to give off an ominous, unearthly cerulean glow, one just like the pile of a high-pressure fission reactor, and potentially just about as dangerous.

  She leaves the batteries in place, takes the tote, ducks under the brace, and leaves the room. She approaches the fluted iron pillar on the platform, carefully examines the electrolytic footprint, the rusty indication of iron trying to find its way to a powerful nearby circuit.

  Aiah gets out oil and rags and her file and tries to scour the footprint away. Her arms and back still ache from yesterday. Her feet hurt. She finds herself panting for breath, sweat dripping from her nose, and she’s barely started.

  She thinks of plasm waiting in its batteries.

  Aiah returns hesitantly to the plasm source as her mind works through the idea. She hasn’t handled live plasm in four or five years, not since the one lab course at college she’d convinced herself she could afford and had to drop in mid-term.

  She snaps off one of the alligator clips from a battery, takes the battery to the platform. She opens her old college textbook to one of the plasm-control diagrams she used then, the Trigram. She kneels on the platform and feels her heavy boots pressing up against her buttocks. She puts the open book in front of her and props her hand torch up so that it shines on the pages. Then she strips off one of her insulated gloves and holds the battery lead with one hand, keeping her fingers carefully on the insulated wire and not daring to touch the bare metal of the alligator clip.

  Suddenly this seems the most ridiculous thing in the world. Stolen plasm, a battery, a college textbook she hasn’t looked at in years — the potential for harm is absurd.

  Still. The battery shouldn’t have that much power.

  She looks down at the Trigram, tries to fix it in her mind, fix the pattern of it, the balance of energies. Human will, dry lecture-voice echoing in her mind, is the modulator of plasm. Time to get her will moving, to visualize some successful thoughts.

  She can’t remember any of the chants she learned in training.

  I am the power. The power is mine. Idiotic, but it’s all she can think of. And the point is focus anyway, not what’s actually said.

  The power is a part of me. The power responds to my will.

  She closes her eyes and the Trigram glows on the inside of her lids. Carefully she inches her fingers up the battery lead, touches bare metal, and . . .

  It’s like a peregrine falcon diving off a building ledge for the first time, a moment of shock, then surprise at finding herself in her natural element, the wind rustling through pinions, smoothing the feathers at the base of the neck, the airy medium itself responsive to her will, to the merest inflection of a wing. . . . It’s effortless. It’s easy. . .

  The Trigram burns in her mind like fire, the same blue radiant color as the battery indicator. She can taste power on her tongue.

  The weariness is banished from my body. My body is whole and well and powerful.

  The energy pulse is so powerful that the words seem redundant, but she guides the Trigram on a mental journey through her body, urging the weariness away, banishing fatigue toxins, flushing tissues with energy.

  Aiah opens her eyes, sees through the burning pattern of the Trigram the fluted iron pillar with its telltale upwelling of rust. She stands, one hand still clamped on the metal I clip, and she tries to remember the atomic composition of iron oxide — is it Fe2 or Fe3O2? It doesn’t matter, she decides, she should use the atomic number, but now, suddenly she can’t remember it. Six? Eight? She seems to remember eight.

  She reaches to the pillar, feels the cool red dust under her fingers, then projects her power through her fingertips, another ridiculous chant running through her head, O8 out! O8 out! O8 out! and maybe the plasm knows more about atomic composition than she does, because to her amazed delight she sees the fluted rust shrink, turn dark, become iron — poor iron, spongy and brittle, but iron none the less.

  She moves her hand up the pillar, plasm flowing through her body into the rust, transmitting it . . . and then the power fades, and she gives a little cry of disappointment as she feels the last of the battery’s contents drain away.

  Aiah stands on the platform, mouth half-open in amazement. Power still tingles in her nerves. Her heat throbs like a turbine. She raises a hand, touches her breast, feels an aroused nipple. Her vagina is heavy with arousal. An astonished laugh escapes her throat.

  The little hints of power she was permitted in school were nothing compared to the touch of this miraculous reality.

  She almost dances back to the glory hole, fills the battery, returns to the platform. Brings the Trigram to her mind, connects again to the circuit, projects her power to the iron pillar. Aiah burnishes the rust away, then stands for a moment,
reluctant to let the circuit drop. She puts the alligator clip carefully down on the concrete platform, then stands for a while, enjoying the power that hums through her veins.

  Aiah peels back the jumpsuit’s elastic wrist, checks her watch. She doesn’t have much time left.

  She glances up and down the platform again. The gaping lavatory door mars the stripped concrete wall. What if Lastene or Grandshuk decided to take a look inside? Hell — what if one of them just wanted a private place to piss and wanders in?

  She fills the battery again and tries to focus the power on the doorway, on creating an illusion of an unbroken concrete wall. Her first attempt is translucent and wavery, but after she charges the battery another time she succeeds in producing a satisfactory wall, complete with the little lines of plaster that remained when the original tile was stripped away by the reclaimers. She has to put an arm through it to make absolutely certain that she didn’t produce an actual concrete wall.

  She leaves the battery just inside the door, its copper contact touching the illusion, feeding it.

  How long will it last? She has no idea, though it probably won’t stay there for long. Just an hour or two is all she needs.

  It’s only then that Aiah realizes she forgot to use the Trigram as a focus. She was so dizzy with success that she forgot proper procedure.

  Better not do that again, she admonishes herself. It could be dangerous.

  It’s time to leave but she really doesn’t want to go — the whole experience has been far too glorious, too satisfying. The last thing she wants to do is play troglodyte in some damp dungeon.

  She makes certain all her gear is hidden behind her illusory wall and heads for the surface. Plasm still energizes her body — she feels she could run a hundred radii without stopping to catch her breath.

  When Aiah comes to the shallow little river between the platform and the stairwell she doesn’t hesitate. Any scaly monsters, she figures, had better watch out.

  Grandshuk and Lastene are waiting for her outside the barred door. Lastene looks surprised as she mounts the stair. She looks down at herself, sees the wet boots, the fresh mud scars on her jumpsuit. She turns the key in the padlock, opens the door.

  “I got uneasy about that cave-in and leak,” she said. “I went down to take a look at it, see if there was something we missed.”

  “That violates procedure,” Lastene says. He seems suspicious, though probably only that Aiah might have cheated him out of some overtime.

  “Anything there?” Grandshuk asks. He hasn’t bothered to shave today. He has to turn his broad, powerful body sideways to get through the door.

  “Nothing,” Aiah says, repeating her most successful thought. She keeps wanting to laugh. “Nothing at all.”

  *

  Aiah wonders if the plasm she gives herself is like a dose of push or amphetamine, if the buoyancy she feels will wear off and leave her exhausted and hung-over. But it doesn’t. She burns the energy off over the course of the day, but by the time she returns to the Authority Building for the meeting she feels much fresher than she would have coming down off any drug.

  She’s done everything possible to make the day uneventful. The illusion she’d built held up through the brief time it took to lead Grandshuk and Lastene down the upper platform, and the rest of the first half of the shift was spent in the tunnels. After the midshift break they finished exploring the old air shafts, then came up to the surface to start checking meters all over again.

  She opens her locker in the Response Team assembly room and gazes in faint surprise at the gray suit, lace, and heels she’d worn three days ago, before she’d changed into the yellow jumpsuit. It seems the costume of a stranger.

  Aiah goes to the changing room and puts on her suit and tries to comb her ratted hair. The sight of herself in the mirror makes her wish she’d carried a little of the plasm with her so that she’d make herself look beautiful, or at any rate presentable.

  She needn’t have worried. Mengene and the others, after the better part of three days underground, barely have the energy to greet Aiah as she walks into the room. She seats herself far away from Niden’s cold and waits for the meeting to start.

  Mengene’s opening address is rambling and circular, but Aiah soon realizes the point of it is to decide whether or not the Authority ought to declare victory and go on to other business. A few small plasm leaks have been discovered on Old Parade, leaks that could conceivably have built up, over time, into a big enough charge to produce the Bursary Street display.

  “Any indication that any of these sources were tapped?” Aiah asks. “Any sign of plasm divers?”

  The others give her weary looks. They’ve all been under Old Parade and they already know the answers. “No,” Mengene says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean these sources couldn’t have caused the conflagration. Sometimes a large enough charge of plasm will react to the massed consciousness of the population at large, there doesn’t necessarily have to be any one person to direct it.”

  That’s official policy, Aiah knows, but she doesn’t know if she quite believes it. She suspects that any events attributed to collected consciousness are in fact the result of a single consciousness who left no traces.

  The discussion proceeds listlessly. Nobody really wants to bring up the possibility that if the Authority announces it’s found the source and dealt with it, and then another flamer runs mad on Bursary Street, any number of careers could get torched right along with the financial district.

  Eventually there’s a compromise. An announcement will be made — “in order to calm public fears,” as Mengene puts it, not to mention taking political pressure off the Authority — but the search for plasm sources will continue at a reduced scale. No more extra shifts, and people can spend alternate days at their desks. Mengene turns to Aiah.

  “Have you found anything?”

  “I found a promising source, one off the charts,” she says, “but there wasn’t anything in it.”

  “Right. You can join us on Old Parade, then.”

  Aiah tries to control her leaping exultation. No more worrying about Grandshuk or Lastene stumbling across the glory hole by accident. There’s a source of unlimited power, and only Aiah knows where it is.

  One of the Cunning People should be able to take it from there.

  *

  She walks down Bursary Street, flame shooting from her fingertips. People scream and wither and die. Buildings explode outward at a wave of her arm. Glass shatters at her scream. Power roils in her bones like a lake of fire.

  Her own screams wake her. Heart thundering, Aiah sits bolt upright in her bed, imprisoned in her silent tower of glass.

  CHAPTER 4

  The trackline car jolts and drives another blow up through Aiah’s legs and straight into her kidneys. Standing in the crowded end-of-shift car, she’s exhausted from working on New Parade for eight hours, but there’s still a bubble of energy in her spine, a phantom of yesterday’s plasm that keeps her on her feet.

  She’s heading out to Terminal again, to pick up her batteries. Two days from now is Senko’s Day and, unless Emergency Response insists she work underground on the holiday, she hopes to spend the day with her family and maybe sell some plasm.

  The trackline car jolts again and the lights flicker, then go out. The man standing behind Aiah passes the back of his hand over her thighs and buttocks. It’s normally the sort of thing she’d ignore — he’s not going to feel much through her waterproof jumpsuit anyway — but the spark of plasm dwelling in her makes her consider action, maybe a little upward jab of her elbow . . .

  The lights come on again but not fully, a strange yellow half-light that reveals nothing but sallow long-nosed Jaspeeri faces, and Aiah’s suddenly aware of the fact she’s the only brown-skinned Barkazil on the train, that she’s heading into Jaspeeri Nation territory without the formidable presence of Grandshuk backing her, and that maybe getting groped in the underground is going to be the least of her wo
rries. Maybe, she thinks, she ought to acquire some protection. One of her relations could get her a firearm.

  At the next stop, when the crowd eases a bit, Aiah moves to another place. From here she can see the platform with its spread of advertising: the new Lynxoid Brothers chromoplay, the new Aldemar thriller, an ad for cigarets, others for beer, for Gulman shoes (“Meet for the Street”), and a new chromo called Lords of the New City. She’s heard some of the buzz about this last item, because it’s directed by Sandvak and is supposed to be based on the life of Constantine. The lead is played not by an actor but by the opera singer Kherzaki, who’s supposed to give the role a unique quality of grandeur.

  Constantine was always in the news when she was younger. Lords of the New City isn’t the first chromo made about him and the wars in Cheloki, just the first to garner such prestige. His name and image and cause had hypnotized half the world. When she was in school she had a picture of Constantine up above her desk, and she’d read his books Power and the New City and Government and Liberty.

  One of her cousins, Chavan, had even been inspired to go off and fight for Constantine — though he ended up getting arrested for petty theft in Margathan and never got as far across the world as Cheloki.

  Horn Twelve transmit 1800 mm. Tfn.

  She can’t imagine what Constantine is doing in Mage Towers. Jaspeer seems far too tame for him.

  Maybe everyone gets old, she thinks. Maybe he’s just sitting up there using his talents to create aerial displays for Snap! or Aeroflash cars.

  The trackline car lurches away from the station. Terminal is two stops up the track. It’s time for Aiah to start maneuvering through the packed commuters toward the doors. Jaspeeri Nation territory. She’ll try to be careful.

  Whatever “careful” means in this situation.

  *

  As Aiah comes up she finds the building superintendent drinking on the stoop with some of his cronies, big men with beer bellies and callused hands. The superintendent looks at her sourly.