Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  There’s a crash of drums from down the street, the amplified cry of the Barkazi fiddle. Children begin to shriek.

  The Transvestites Parade is next, men wearing giant false breasts and enormously wide flounced skirts, women with absurdly padded shoulders and yard-long phalloi. The scaffold balcony sways with the weight of the onlookers’ good spirits. Alcohol swirls in Aiah’s head. Maybe she should have eaten something before drinking.

  After the Transvestites come the Tree Spirits with their elaborate green hairstyles and giant satirical balloons, portraying all human endeavor as absurd, pointless or crazy. The balloons sway past, vast and round, just tantalizingly out of reach of the little children. Aiah finds herself looking at Khorsa, at the jeweled charms on her turban. The tiny woman has worked her way to the front of the balcony, and has propped one of Elda’s children on her hip so he can see better. Her eyes glitter with delight as the balloons parade by.

  Well, at least she’s good-humored, not like the slit-eyed, mask-faced members of the Operation, all merciless calculation, or the outrageously dramatic witches who offer to remove curses and intervene with the ancestors’ spirits for a few hundred dalders, and all without plasm.

  After the parade passes Aiah approaches Esmon, but he’s surrounded by admiring relatives and in no position to talk privately, and she sees Khorsa drifting toward a freezer chest of beer. Aiah approaches, takes another beer for herself. Khorsa fills her glass and smiles at her.

  “Esmon seems happy,” Aiah offers.

  “I hope so.”

  “You’re a — what is it? — a priestess?”

  “My sister’s a priestess. I’m a geomaterga. I do magic, she talks to the gods.”

  “Do you go to school for that?”

  Khorsa puts her hand on Aiah’s arm and smiles.

  “No. It sort of runs in the family. My mother founded our teaching, and my sister and I have inherited it.”

  “Does the Operation bother you much?”

  It’s as if a mask drops into place — Khorsa’s smile is still there, but the amusement behind it is gone, and the eyes are like a wall of glass.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Warning sirens sound in Aiah’s mind. “I don’t know,” she says. “Just making conversation.”

  She will not, she thinks, sell plasm to this woman. Maybe Khorsa isn’t the Operation, but there’s some other angle that Aiah doesn’t know about and doesn’t want to get messed up in.

  Khorsa looks at her keenly, frowns, shakes her head. “We’ve kept them out,” she says. “Once you buy their unmetered plasm, they’re into you forever.” She sips beer, looks serious. “A lot of our clients come from among their victims. They always want us to soften the street captains’ hearts. But,” shaking her head, “of course the Operation has no heart.”

  “No,” Aiah says, thinking of Henley. “It doesn’t.”

  Khorsa gives her a shrewd look. “Why are you asking? You’re not interested in religious teaching, are you?”

  Aiah shakes her head, smiles. “Perhaps not today.”

  A drum rattles outside. There’s a subdued cheer.

  “Strange,” Khorsa says. “All this celebration and joy, and what we’re celebrating is really the greatest tragedy in human history.”

  “Yes?”

  Khorsa lifts her head, a bit defiantly. “Well, Senko failed, didn’t he? He beat the Lord of the Trees and the Prince of Oceans, but when he challenged the Ascended Ones they destroyed him, and they put the Shield over our heads to keep humanity from ever challenging them again, so ...” She waves her arms. “Why do we celebrate? Why aren’t we all weeping?”

  Aiah looks at her. “Because we get the day off ?”

  Khorsa laughs. “Maybe so.”

  “Perhaps I should contribute to party supplies. Excuse me.”

  *

  The little elevator passes the landing four times, each time jammed too full for Aiah to get on board, so Aiah walks down the twelve flights to the ground floor and steps out. There’s a liquor and cigaret store on the far corner, and Aiah crosses the street to reach it. The sky overhead sizzles with plasm displays. A stiltwalker strides past roaring and pounding his chest, his foam-plastic tail floating out behind him. A group of twisted people dance on the corner to music booming down from the scaffold above— they’re short and gray, with hairless, glabrous skins. A cold finger slides up Aiah’s spine at the sight. She hasn’t seen this variety of genetically tampered before.

  Aiah buys a case of beer at a marked-up holiday price, and a large plastic bag of salty krill wafers. While she stands in the long cashier line behind some local groover girls, she hears the booms and thumps of the Assassins Parade marching this way.

  She follows the groovers out of the store. Police are clearing the street, so Aiah crosses at the corner and glances up to see old Charduq the Hermit up on his fluted pillar at the old Barkazi Savings Institute. A warm memory rises in Aiah at the sight. She’d assumed Charduq had died years ago. She waves at him and calls out.

  “Hi, Charduq! Remember me?”

  The old man’s eyes twinkle from deep within wrinkled sockets. He’s bald except for a long beard that reaches to his lap. His naked skin is deep brown from constant exposure to Shieldlight, and he lives entirely off what people drop into the plastic bucket he lowers on a rope for offerings. He’s been sitting on one of the Savings Institute’s ornamental pillars for as long as Aiah can remember.

  “Hai-ee, Miss Aiah!” the old man calls. “You haven’t visited your old friend for years! Where have you been keeping yourself ?”

  “I graduated and got a job with the Plasm Authority,” Aiah calls up.

  “You live with a longnose lover, I hear. Is he rich?”

  Aiah smiles. Everyone in the neighborhood passes the time of day with Charduq, and he learns everything sooner or later. The hermit is supposed to be contemplating the All, but instead he’s become the most perfect gossip in the world.

  “No,” Aiah says, “he’s not rich.”

  “Then what good is he?” Charduq pats the pillar next to him. “Come up here, dearie, take off your clothes and live with me. I’ve been preserving my potency for years. I can make you happier than any passu Jaspeeri!”

  The hermit giggles and makes the penis-and-vulva sign with his fingers. Aiah bursts into laughter. She takes a beer and puts it in the old man’s offering bucket.

  “You’ve been up on that pillar too long,” she says. “You want a girl, you’d better cut that beard and get a nice job.”

  “You’d be surprised how many girls want to stroke my beard,” Charduq winks. He hauls in the rope and the bucket zooms upward. He’s got another bucket for waste which he lowers twice a day; whoever’s the junior clerk at the Savings Institute gets to empty it for him to keep it from stinking up the sidewalk.

  Aiah waves goodbye and heads through the crowd. The Assassins are marching past, shadowed by fat, satisfied-looking balloons — all prominent celebrities or political figures — and all stuck with balloon daggers, arrows or hatchets. Tuphar, Aiah recognizes, Gullimath the footballer, Gargelius Enchuk, and Constantine, who looks surprised at the number of daggers buried in his back .

  Constantine, she thinks, stopping dead in mid-stride, and then, of course.

  She dances through the dense crowd, then, after the elevator fails to turn up, and up the stairs to Elda’s flat. By the end of the trip she’s dripping sweat and her lungs are pumping like a bellows. She takes one of the cold beers and holds it against her forehead and tries to absorb the welcome chill. Then she drinks it down.

  She steps out onto the scaffold balcony and finds herself standing behind her mother. The Assassins Parade is about half over. One of the balloons is sagging, losing hydrogen; it looks as if its phony dagger has actually punctured it.

  Gurrah turns, looks at Aiah over her shoulder. “You sell that plasm to the witch lady?” she asks.

  Aiah feels herself flush as other relatives turn to gaze at
her. “You looked in my bag?” she says.

  Gurrah’s voice is loud in justification. “I thought there might be food in there. I didn’t want it to spoil.”

  “Yeah,” Aiah says. “I always put my food behind the couch.”

  “You sold the goods to Khorsa, ne?”

  “No. I’m not selling anything.”

  “Where’d you get it? You take it from work?

  Aiah tries to glare. “No,” she says. “I didn’t.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, working a chonah like that. You get caught, bad things happen when you steal from the passu government.” Her mother’s voice is rising, carrying to everyone on the balcony. Aiah lowers her voice almost to a whisper and hopes her mother will follow her example.

  “It’s not a chonah. I’m just doing someone a favor. Don’t make a fuss.”

  Gurrah’s voice rises above the sound of the parade. “I shouldn’t make a fuss?” she demands. “My daughter finds out how to gimmick meters and starts selling plasm and I shouldn’t wonder about it? I—”

  “Thank you,” Aiah rages, “for making everyone here think I’m a thief!”

  She turns, stalks away, drops onto the empty sofa. Her pulse throbs in her head like a runaway engine. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Gurrah draw herself up and look mortally offended, and then Aiah sees a trace of doubt enter her expression. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to her that her daughter wasn’t a thief. She begins to look anxious, perhaps wondering if she’s missed something.

  Too late, Aiah thinks. Too damn late.

  Among the relatives Aiah can see little knowing glances being exchanged. She hates being the subject of scrutiny, or pity, or speculation— whatever it is. She bolts up from the sofa, goes to the cooler, takes another beer. Maybe it’s time to go.

  She takes her tote and wanders out into the hall, finds the elevator miraculously standing empty, and takes it to the ground floor. The last of the Assassins have just marched past and the crowd is pouring out into the street, and Aiah goes with them. She buys a sandwich from a vendor, bread filled with vat shrimp spiced to perfection and hot from the fryer; and by the time she’s finished eating, the Dolphins Parade is starting, led by the huge red fiberglass float of King Crab waving his pincers over the crowd. People dressed as fish and crustaceans prance past. Some minor video actor is the Lord of the Dolphins this year, one Aiah knows is supposed to be famous; he stands on his float and tosses presents to the crowd: cheap plastic puzzles, whistles, crackers, toy drums.

  Aiah finishes her beer and drifts with the crowd. A stilt-walker offers her a drink from his wine flask. The Griffins and the Jaspeeris march past — the last are a burlesque, Barkazils mocking Jaspeeri over-seriousness and manners. The briefcase beaters leave her in stitches, people in suits with great gouts of lace pouring out of the sequined collars and sleeves, who chase each other and whack each other with briefcases. Overhead, the sky sizzles with patriotic displays and bright advertisements.

  She wanders into a bar, eats some bread chips and lets people buy her drinks. Video screens show extravagant parades from all over the world. A procession marches past outside while she’s in the bar enjoying herself. She feels more relaxed than she’s been in years — hell, she’s probably going to prison, she might as well have a good time while she still can.

  Aiah pushes out of the bar onto sidewalks ankle-deep in rubbish. Her shoes stick to the concrete as she walks. Music rackets out of a basement club, and the line is fairly short; Aiah joins it. There’s a special on some fashionably new cocktail, two for one, so she orders a pair of them and, while she’s waiting, cruises the dance floor.

  The band is solid in its grove, glorious, the musicians sweating harder than the concrete wall of the old cellar-turned-club. Aiah returns to her table after two dances and finds her drinks waiting for her. She sips one, gets an invitation to dance, says yes.

  There are a lot of men in the club. The one who interests her is Fredho — he’s utterly skilled on the dance floor, and when they spin to the music he makes her feel like a much better dancer than she is. If he can’t find a partner he dances by himself, spectacular spins and high kicks, handstands and splits. He wears an expensive white raw silk jacket over his bare chest, and the jacket’s got to be a gift because he doesn’t give a damn what happens to it; it’s smeared with dirt from the floor and the satin lining is coming to pieces as he thrashes around inside it. His skin is the fine brown color of burnt sugar, and his chest is smooth — lucky, because Aiah doesn’t want to be reminded of Gil’s hairy chest, not when she’s thinking what she’s thinking. And Fredho is nice— arrogant enough, but not demanding. At one point, ending a slow dance, he asks if she’ll take him home. She leans back in his arms, looks at him through slitted eyes, tries to make up her mind. “Maybe later,” she says, and leans forward to lick a trail of sweat off his chest— something she’s been thinking about for several minutes now.

  He shrugs, lets her go back to her table, dances alone for a while. Aiah wonders why he wants to go to her place, if he’s got a woman waiting at his own, and then she decides it doesn’t matter. Anyone living with someone like Fredho knows well enough what to expect.

  Later comes soon enough. She and Fredho take the trackline to the Loeno, and in the seat they’re all over each other, kissing, nibbling, teasing. The other passengers don’t know where to look.

  Aiah takes Fredho up into her black-walled tower and fucks him three times.

  Next day, after the alarm jolts her from sleep, she finds that Fredho has gone. Gone along with him is all her money, the plasm batteries, and the ivory bracelet that Gil gave her.

  Head pounding, she looks at the picture of Gil on the wall and promises him that, real soon now, she’s going to get smarter about all this.

  CHAPTER 6

  Aiah has a breakfast of coffee and vitamin pills and drags into work twenty minutes late, but so does half the staff and no one offers a comment. While she spends her pre-break at her battered metal desk, insulated from Jayme’s shrieks by her headphones and her hangover, she considers her situation.

  After lunch she has to go out onto Old Parade with Grandshuk and Lastene. She spends an exhausting post-break dragging herself through muck-filled tunnels and scrapes a shin on a broken pipe.

  After work she buys new plasm batteries and heads for Terminal.

  *

  Plasm pours through Aiah’s body, filling every cavity like warm rising water. The Trigram glows in her mind, a deep luminescent blue, power pulsing through its design. Existence leaps into focus as her clarity sharpens, as her senses quicken — it’s as if she’s just plugged into the well that waters the world. Perceptions extend through the darkness, and Aiah is suddenly hyperaware of the texture of the scarred concrete walls, the invisible supporting web of metal behind the walls that stand out like bones on an x-ray, the rapid heartbeat of some animal, a rat probably, that sleeps curled under the crumbling platform.

  She hadn’t noticed this effect before. Too overwhelmed by the whole experience, probably.

  Aiah directs the plasm through her body, burning off fatigue toxins, pouring energy into herself. She’s practiced at this by now, and by the end of the procedure she feels like a bottomless well of potential, of power. Her senses seem to extend to the Shield and back.

  Her plasm battery is fading, so she takes another of the three she’s just charged. She tries some elementary visual effects, bright streaks of color that splash themselves along the length of the platform, will o’ wisps that shine softly from corners, bright light glowing from the old, empty, gutted sockets that pockmark the ceiling.

  She tries to create a picture of Constantine, imprint it on the wall opposite, but the result is so ridiculous, worse than a child’s scrawl, that she wipes it.

  She exhausts the second battery and goes to the third. Decides to try something new, to attempt to reach out westward to the Metropolis of Gerad. She calls into her mind first the Trigram, then an image
of Gil, invokes his kind blue eyes, his gentle, thick-fingered hands, the feel of his fine freckled skin against hers, the touch of his furry chest against her cheek . . . and at that particular memory a chill sad finger touches her heart, a sensory image of Fredho, the taste of his sweat and skin, but the fire in her nerves and mind is too pure, too powerful, to permit sadness for long; and instead she tries to send her spirit westward, a message to Gil wherever she may find him.

  And for a moment she touches him, a fleeting connection to his psyche, so immediate and surprising that it startles her and makes her lose the contact almost immediately. She knows that he’s in a bar, or club, surrounded by other men; she knows he’s moderately drunk — she can taste watery beer on her tongue, feel it swim in her head. She knows that he’s bored.

  That boredom, she decides, wins him a lot of points.

  Carefully she probes again, more gently this time, invoking him, calling up his image. Gradually he comes into focus. He’s startled, she realizes, by the moment of contact. She calls up her thoughts: longing, sorrow, desire. She tries to wrap Gil in her tendresse as if it were a warm fuzzy towel. And, slowly, she finds him relaxing into reverie, into a yearning that answers hers.

  The moment fades. Aiah realizes that tears are falling from her eyes. She blinks them away and looks at the battery and sees that it’s drained. Apparently long-distance communication takes a lot of power.

  Contact’s effect slowly recedes from her mind. Aiah takes the batteries into the old toilet in order to recharge them. She connects the alligator clips, sees the charge indicators go through their swift rainbow shifts to blue. She spends another half hour working with the plasm, accustoming herself to its charge, always with the batteries as a buffer.

  She’s decided that she needs to do something about the open door. If she puts up an illusory wall with plasm from the batteries, it will eventually fade. She has to connect the illusion to a live circuit.

  Aiah takes a deep breath, puts on an insulated glove, and takes a plasm pen out of her jumpsuit. Carefully, with her insulated hand, she clears rubble from the area where the brace fell. Then she uncaps the pen, draws a line — carefully shaped, crosshatched just so, to guide the power properly — down the last few feet of the beam, then out across the concrete floor.