Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  Best keep family out of it, she thinks. That way, if it all goes wrong, she’ll be the only one to pay the penalty.

  Aiah works till her break, tells the tabulator she’s off, and then makes her way down to the third sub-basement, where all the phone lines and switches stand in scarred gray metal cabinets. With her alligator clips she makes a few jumps and connects her office phone line to the outside through extension 4301. It’s the office of Rohder, the man who snuffed the Bursary Street flamer and who is now in the Authority Hospital. Any calls she makes out of the building will be billed to Rohder’s office.

  Back when she was a kid, her family used to steal phone service this way.

  She returns to her office, jacks her headphones into the outside line, and carefully presses bright steel keys one by one.

  “Da?” The voice is male and disinterested. The answer is immediate, faster than Aiah anticipated, and it startles her. She takes a breath and tries to calm the sudden pounding of her pulse.

  “I would like to speak to the Metropolitan Constantine, please,” she says.

  And, as she speaks the words, she feels an invisible circuit being connected, some indefinable flow of potential being created between herself and Constantine ... things falling into place, a little act of subcreation . . .

  Not least among the things being created, she realizes, is a new Aiah.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mage Towers rears above Aiah like a tribe of fabulous threatening giants: a double circle of high black-glass pinnacles, so many-sided they might as well be round, each studded along its height with horns and protrusions and scallops of metal intended either to gather plasm or to repel an assault. Dark storm clouds, heavy with rain, scud low in the sky, impaling themselves on the baroque, spiraled bronze transmission horns that thrust toward the Shield from the crown of each tower. The towers’ twin circles are arrayed in careful geometries, each tower certain fractions of radii from each of the others, all with the intention of building and gathering plasm, and the entire complex built so as to take advantage of a confluence of relationships with other buildings, some of them many radii away.

  “No, I need to speak to the Metropolitan Constantine personally. . .”

  Glass doors, ornamented with gold scrollwork, part as Aiah approaches, and she enters a tunnel beneath Tower Seven. There is a soft, thick carpet under her new boots. An abstract mosaic floats gentle patterns down the slightly concave walls, swirling gold and black designs, suggestive of a descent into a sable and amber sea. At the end of the hall is a desk where a pleasant Jaspeeri woman, placid smile and expensive honey-colored soft wool jacket, checks Aiah’s identification. “Elevator bank four,” she says, and presses a discreet button that opens another set of gold-traced glass doors.

  “My name is Aiah. I’m an executive with the Plasm Control Authority. I need to speak to the Metropolitan Constantine concerning his plasm use ...”

  The tiles leading to the elevators are patterned with geomantic foci. The walls are mirrored, with black metallic streaks. The elevator doors are brass polished to a perfect, undistorted reflection. Aiah’s knees buckle slightly as the elevator begins its swift ascent.

  “Yes, I will speak to Special Assistant Sorya if you like, but I need to make an appointment to see the Metropolitan Constantine personally . . .”

  The elevator sways slightly as it rises — neither the elevator shaft nor anything else in this building is perfectly straight. The architecture is warped slightly in order to draw power. It requires exacting, expensive engineering and is fraught with inconvenience, but the inconvenience probably doesn’t matter overmuch to those who live on a diet of plasm.

  “Yes, Madame Sorya, you may have a callback number. My office is in the Plasm Authority Building on the Avenue of the Exchange. My extension is 4301.”

  Aiah’s stomach lifts as the elevator brakes to a swift halt, and she shifts her feet to regain balance. The polished bronze doors slide open in silence.

  Two men stand in the anteroom outside — immaculate lace, dark, bulky suit jackets, polite and attentive expressions. There is a certain intensity about their eyes.

  Aiah shows her ID card. “Aiah,” she says, “from Plasm Control.”

  One of them shows her a metal detector wand. “I hope you won’t mind submitting to a search?”

  Aiah realizes she’s holding her breath and lets it out. She steps out of the elevator into the long anteroom. Her boot heels click on polished bronze-and-black tile. She offers her briefcase to one of the men, then stands back and extends her arms to either side.

  “Madame Sorya, I have been reviewing the Metropolitan Constantine’s record of plasm use. I believe that with one of our use plans, I will be able to save him twenty to twenty-five percent off his plasm bill, but I will have to explain the use plan to him personally ...”

  The metal detector rings at Aiah’s belt buckle, at buttons and zips, and at the cheap metal charm that, with a bit of embarrassment, she pulls from beneath the band of lace around her collar. The other guard waits with polite attention for this business to conclude, then glances in Aiah’s briefcase and finds nothing but papers.

  “Follow me, please?”

  The anteroom is mirrored, with tables and chairs and fresh-cut flowers in crystal vases. Aiah glances at herself in the mirrors, adjusts her throat-lace, brushes ringlets into place. She wants to look a certain way — a successful woman, businesslike, in charge — and she wears a suit of gray tailored wool that is the single most expensive purchase Aiah has ever made, and which she’s bought on credit. She’s taken two days off from work, days devoted half to shopping, half to research. She’s spent hours sitting in a booth at a local cafe, one with the black-and-red Wire sticker in the corner, plugging coins into the machine and calling for all available information on Constantine. She’s printed out everything and stared at the plastic flimsies till her eyes ached. She was surprised to discover his age, that Constantine is over sixty when he doesn’t look older than his thirties. That’s what living around plasm does, Aiah thinks.

  He hasn’t been idle since losing the war in Cheloki. He’s been an advisor to governments. Supposedly he’s had a hand in a few wars and revolts here and there, though usually on the losing side.

  Still trying, she hopes, to build the New City.

  Aiah’s heart throbs smoothly, driving adrenaline power to her limbs. She has to keep reminding herself to move slowly, deliberately, and not with the twitchy speed her adrenaline-charged body demands. Her throat is dry, her palms moist.

  One of the guards pushes at a wide metal door that swings open on noiseless hinges. Everything, Aiah realizes, moves silently in this place. She steps through the doorway into a long drawing room. Its far wall is glass, with a view of rooftops that stretches to a cloud-shrouded horizon. Planted in front of the view is a curved steel brace, scalloped and ornamented but still unlovely and inconvenient, one of the compromises in polite living undertaken by those who live their lives in a power generator.

  A green-eyed woman watches Aiah from a doorway. Her hair is streaked blonde, her chin is sharp, her stance artful, weight on the back leg, the front foot drawn up in a dancer’s pose, toes pointed almost accusingly at Aiah as they rest on the rust-red carpet. Her apricot-colored gown leaves her arms and clavicles bare. The belt that rests low on her hips is composed of gold links, each link forged in the shape of a geomantic focus.

  Aiah slows as if she’s run into a wall. A flush prickles her skin. The woman’s presence has an almost physical impact.

  Aiah looks down at her wool suit, its fibers the precious product of sheep raised on rooftops or penned in alleys, fed vegetable matter grown in vats with resources that might otherwise have been used to support human beings ... the garment Aiah had thought extravagant now seems ridiculous in contrast to this place, this person. The other woman’s gown is probably worth twenty times the value of Aiah’s suit.

  “You’ve been around plasm, haven’t you?” the woman say
s. She speaks with an indefinable accent. Her green eyes narrow. “Emergency surgery, from the look of it.”

  Aiah restrains herself from lifting a hand to her cheek. When she’d inspected herself in the mirror before breakfast she’d seen only minute signs of the beating, and then only because she knew where to look.

  “I had an accident,” Aiah says.

  The woman says nothing, continues her inspection. “No live plasm now,” she says. “Only residual. No lifeline. No foci, no time bombs, no traces of mental intrusion.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Aiah asks.

  The woman lifts her pointed chin. “Someone you don’t know.” She nods. “Come with me, please.”

  As she steps back Aiah sees a wire leading from her hand to the other room and realizes the woman was dipping the well, reading her with a plasm connection. Aiah should have recognized that sense of warmth, that prickling of the skin. Aiah’s boots glide silently on the plush carpet as she follows the woman through the door into a spacious office room equipped with an elegant glass-and-alloy desk and a terminal and a silvery spiral stair. The green-eyed woman unjacks her wire from a plasm connection in the desk, then coils the wire around her fist as she mounts the stairway: Aiah follows and is halfway up the stair before she realizes that the central pillar is structural, that it’s a plasm-generating inconvenience artfully disguised.

  Upstairs is another empty office, though this glass desk has some loose flimsies on its gleaming surface. The woman knocks at a door, then enters without waiting for an answer. Aiah follows and is face to face with Constantine before she realizes it.

  There’s a strange little moment of adjustment in which Aiah has to reconfigure her mental image of the man; now she realizes that every chromograph she’s seen, every flat-screen video image, has diminished the reality. Constantine is a powerful man, a head taller than Aiah, with great bull-like shoulders and a barrel chest that an opera baritone might commit murder to possess. His hands and wrists were made to bend iron. His skin is blue-black. His face is a little fleshy, not unattractively, and his tight-coiled hair is oiled and braided and worn over the left shoulder, the braid tipped with ornamented silver. Aiah recognizes the symbol worn by a graduate of the School of Radritha.

  Lord of the New City, she thinks.

  Lord of Creation, looks like. She knows there are people who worship him, literally, as an avatar of Senko.

  She is beginning to see their point.

  Constantine wears loose black trousers stuffed into suede boots, a plain white shirt, a thigh-length leather vest worked with obscure symbols. Aiah recognizes some of them as geomantic foci, but the others are unknown. No need for lace, Aiah thinks. The leather and suede alone must have cost—

  “You want to save me money?” he says. The voice is deep and, for the moment, expressionless.

  “Yes, sir.” Aiah tries to speak slowly, not permit the adrenaline that burns through her veins to blurt out the words.

  “How unusual in a bureaucrat,” Constantine says.

  He turns without a word and pads back into the room, drawing Aiah after. He has a delicate way of walking, poised and balanced, that makes her think of armored warriors who have to adjust to the inertia of their combat suits, as if he’s somehow carrying more weight than is otherwise apparent. . .

  It’s a long room, big enough to contain any three Loeno Towers apartments the size of Aiah’s. One whole wall of the room is transparent and looks out into a huge conservatory that must cover most of the tower roof: there are full-sized trees under arching glass, all heavy with fruit, and above them the curved, shadowy shapes of the tower’s huge transmission horns. Colorful birds flap among the high branches. A battery of huge video sets, all dark, looms down from high wall mountings.

  Constantine walks to the far end, steps behind a desk and sits in a big chair that seems all chrome rods and black tanned calfskin. There’s the sigh of pneumatics, the creak of leather. Constantine puts his big hands on top of the desk.

  “Tell me, then.”

  She catches movement out of the slant of her eye and her heart gives a surprised leap. A huge spotted cat is walking through the ferns of the conservatory, padding purposefully toward the glass wall. Shieldlight gleams from jewels in its collar.

  “It’s Prowler,” the woman says. “He’s seen me. May he come in?”

  “Yes.” Constantine’s eyes haven’t left Aiah. She drags her attention from the glass wall and tries mentally to reassemble the presentation she’d so carefully prepared, the plan she was going to offer him. She glances left and right, sees chairs.

  “May I sit?”

  “It’s going to take that long?” Unsurprised. “Very well.”

  As she draws up a chair she hears a little hiss behind her, the sound of a sealed door opening. There is a waft of warm air, the scent of fruit and vegetation and decay. Aiah tries not to react to it, to the somber eyes of Constantine that haven’t moved once from her face.

  She opens her briefcase, pulls out the flimsies that detail Constantine’s plasm use. Something patters on the glass ceiling of the arboretum: the promised rain.

  “Your use patterns,” she says, “demonstrate that much of your plasm use is second or third shift, so you’re already getting much of it at off-peak rates.”

  “I do not keep conventional hours,” Constantine says.

  “I thought perhaps you were attempting to economize.”

  Constantine’s eyes shift briefly, somehow encompassing the long room, the huge conservatory, the expensive furniture, Mage Towers itself. Do I need to economize? he seems to ask.

  The eyes return to Aiah’s face. It is not an unfriendly stare, but there is no warmth in it either. Not even expectancy. Just a frowning challenge: give me something useful, or go away.

  Aiah licks dry lips, “I can enroll you in a plan that can get you a minimum of 1500 mm per hour at a cost fifty percent off the top rate — there’s a lump sum payment of a million up front. Or you can go five million out front, in which case you can forget any hourly charges.”

  Constantine doesn’t change expression. Rain is a constant drumming overhead.

  “That sounds attractive,” he says.

  “I take it you’re interested?” Aiah hears a cough behind her, a growl. That big cat. She tries to keep her mind on business.

  “Who did you say you are exactly?” Constantine asks.

  “I work for the Plasm Authority,” Aiah says. “’I’m a Grade Six. One of your people checked my ID, but perhaps you’d like to see it.” She reaches into her briefcase, takes her identification, holds it up. Constantine’s eyes don’t even flicker toward her picture, instead remain focused on the original.

  The blonde woman ghosts up by Aiah’s side. The big spotted cat is with her, butting her hip with its huge head while she scratches its ears. Its rasping purr sounds loud as a portable generator. Humid breath bathes Aiah’s cheek, and she can scent raw dead flesh.

  “I thought perhaps you were working for a private individual,” Constantine says. “Someone with his own building or other plasm generator, who needs an installment of money so badly that he’s willing to sell future plasm at below market rates.”

  “It’s something like that,” she says.

  “What’s the problem?” Frowning. “A gambling debt? If it’s to the Operation, then your principal can just sell them plasm.”

  “And then never stop selling it to them,” Aiah says. “That’s how the Operation would work it. But no, nobody’s in debt to the Operation.”

  “Then why this great generosity?”

  Aiah allows herself to smile. Her heart sounds in her ears louder than the purr of the great cat. “I’m an admirer of the New City Movement,” she says. Constantine makes a surprised sound deep in his throat, a growl that sounds as if it might come from the cat. The blonde woman gives a brief, trilling laugh.

  “The New City Movement,” Constantine says, “was dead when you were in diapers.”

&nb
sp; “Not that long ago,” Aiah says. “I remember you.”

  “The movement was a stillbirth.” He shifts in his seat. “None of us realized it, that was all.”

  The big cat approaches, sniffs Aiah’s hand. Aiah restrains the impulse to snatch it away. She glances at the green-eyed woman, then faces Constantine.

  “May we speak privately?” she says. “I was hoping for a private interview.”

  Constantine absorbs this, leans forward, clasps his big hands on the desk as he gazes at Aiah. “Madame Sorya has my confidence,” he says.

  Sorya. The Special Assistant, Aiah remembers. She and Aiah had spoken on the phone, and it had taken Aiah a lot of effort to get past her.

  Thunder speaks nearby and the building trembles. Aiah glances at Sorya again, sees the green eyes regarding her casually, without interest. She turns back to Constantine and takes a breath.

  “The plasm is mine,” she says. “I’m the person who needs the money, though it’s not for anything so romantic as a gambling debt.”

  Constantine says nothing, just continues his stare. Aiah resists the impulse to fidget, keeps her hands still, her shoulders square to her target. “You may remember,” she says, “the flaming plasm apparition that appeared on Bursary Street a few weeks ago. There were deaths.”

  “That was you?” Constantine’s voice shows no amusement, but Sorya trills another laugh. Aiah feels herself flush.

  “No,” Aiah says. “But since I’d volunteered for the Authority’s Emergency Response team, I was sent out to look for the source.” She pauses, presses her hands firmly to her thighs, onto the rich gray wool. “I found it,” she says.

  “Congratulations,” Sorya says. Constantine says nothing, just continues his open stare.

  Resentment skates along Aiah’s nerves. Constantine isn’t doing anything, isn’t saying anything. He’s making her do all the work.

  Draw him out, she thinks. Make him respond to her.

  “What would you do, Metropolitan,” she asks, “if you found a renewable plasm source that powerful? A glory hole worth millions, that no one knows about?”