Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  There’s a wild soaring sensation as she springs upward from the transmission horn into the sky, bounds free of solid matter. Jaspeer’s regular road grid falls away beneath her, dropping far faster than it had in Martinus’s aerocar. The visual details fade as she climbs, but the awareness, the knowledge, of what’s below never seems to leave her mind: steel and stone, brick and concrete, the ponderous matter that encloses and shelters and sustains all the world’s fragile life, that generates plasm and powers her ascent.

  Scattered white cloud drops below, overlaid on the world like one of the Authority’s transparencies, and joyously Aiah continues her ascent. She can see the world curve away on all sides, the implastic gray mass of the city that wraps the globe, that stretches to every horizon. And then she looks up, and her mind staggers ...

  She hadn’t intended coming this close to the Shield. But there it is, seemingly just above her, at this distance not opalescent gray but burning featureless white, the source of light and heat for the world. Aiah senses its enmity, its roaring power, an energy not merely the opposite of plasm, but plasm’s destroyer, the raging enemy of all things earthly, power that will, if she touches it, snuff her out in an instant — and in the face of its fury she falters, loses command of herself, and her spirits reel. The horizon tumbles sickeningly about her. She can’t tell her direction of motion — is she falling or still rising? And if so might she come in contact with the Shield, and be obliterated?

  Panic reaches for her throat with clawed fingers.

  — Ah. Constantine’s presence speaks softly to her inner ear. Stabilize so. Now down, and slowly.

  The spinning stops. She and Constantine are drifting downward, away from the Shield, safe as if he were holding her arm while descending a stair. In a corner of her awareness, she knows that, far below, her heart throbs furiously in her body, her breath rasps in her throat.

  — It’s requiring rather a lot of plasm to maintain our lifeline to my apartment, Constantine tells her. Aiah can sense the amusement in his voice.

  — Next time, he continues, we’ll have to do this from underground

  — We can go back if you like, Aiah sends. Reluctantly.

  The bright clouds rise toward them.

  — We may as well stay. To Aiah’s relief. We can play up here, with no ill consequences to anything below.

  Plasm adverts, brief flares of incandescence, flash below over the city.

  — Plasm is of incalculable value, Constantine says, and do you observe how we use it? To reduce tumors and to advertise shoes, to wage war and to entertain children. For purposes either absurdly foolish or deeply profound, and virtually nothing in between, a characteristic plasm shares with everything else of great value.

  — I see your point.

  — One might say this exercise is foolish, these aeronautics on the end of a plasm tether. But I find it useful, if for no other reason than it instructs me concerning your nature: that is, given some small encouragement, the first thing you desire is to take flight.

  Aiah wonders if, back in Mage Towers, the blood burns in her cheeks.

  — And what better desire to keep in your heart? Constantine continues. There are too many people who fence their minds with walls of stone and concrete, but to your credit you are not of these.

  — No, she sends, no walls for me, it seems I’m transparent.

  Amusement chimes in her senses, then fades. Aiah intuits that he is regarding her closely.

  — You seem calmer now, he says.

  Aiah is aware again of his fingers riding her pulse, and wonders if the whole purpose of this discourse was to control her panic by keeping her thoughts busy.

  — Perhaps we can commence some actual instruction now, Constantine sends.

  — I’m sorry if I’m wasting time with all this.

  — No time was wasted, he says firmly. We have learned much, and I no less than you.

  Though now there is much else to do, Aiah’s surprise at this judgment fades only slowly.

  *

  Black, empty faces of video monitors gaze down at her. Constantine has removed the t-grip and put it away, but Aiah still sits on the sofa, immersed in the lingering sensation of plasm.

  Constantine moves back and forth along the buffet, putting food on a plate. He pours sparkling wine, holds it to the light for a moment, then sips. He turns to look at her.

  “Well,” he says, “I believe all you need from this point is experience. You have the talent.” Aiah looks at the plasm focus in her hand, lifts her eyebrows, begins to speak, to say something like, “ Have I?”, but an inner knowledge amounting to certainty keeps the modest commonplace from her tongue.

  “How do you know?” she says instead, and puts the focus back around her neck.

  “I gave you all the power you asked for,” he says, “and you wasted none of it. When you took flight, you carried your anima intact, with a fully-formed mentality and a full sensorium.”

  “I lost control,” Aiah says.

  He frowns, shakes his head. “Inexperience only. You weren’t closer than a hundred radii from the Shield, but without any other point of reference you thought you were much nearer. And even when you panicked, your personality didn’t fragment — your sensorium stayed intact, and your anima. Telepresence may well be your forte.” He smiles, poured another glass of wine, and offers it to Aiah. She takes it, looks at the amber fluid with its tiny streams of bubbles rising, each bursting free as it explodes on the surface.

  Constantine drops next to her on the couch, chews meditatively on a sweet bread. “Do you know how they’d teach you to fly in the schools?” he says. “You’d be put through a long procedure to evoke a spirit body and then endow it with senses. You’d spend an hour or so giving it sight, and hearing, and taste and so on, and then you’d very carefully walk — walk — through the doors, and down stairs, and out into the street. It would cost you a fortune in plasm, but that’s the way you’d learn to do it, step by tedious step; and perhaps after a year or so of walking about they’d let you imagine yourself in an aircraft and take a few hesitant swoops through the air . . . and they’re cautious because most people are afraid of any real power, any real taste of liberty, and when they have it they just go to pieces. But you, my daughter,” he sips the wine and smiles, “you knew what you wanted, and you did it, and all I did was feed you the power, and make a small correction when you lost your concentration. You had no fear, no hesitation, and you were capable of imagining everything you needed — and these qualities are the true attributes of the mage, not the miserable university degree, written on plastic and hung on a wall, that demonstrates only your ability to overcome the limitations imposed by your instructors.”

  Aiah drinks her wine. Bubbles explode like little worlds on her tongue, implying a universe of expanding possibility. Plasm does a dance of power in her brain.

  “You must decide what manner of abilities you wish to cultivate,” Constantine goes on. “Creation, illusion, chemistry, communication. You’re courageous enough to be a combat mage, I think, but I wouldn’t wish that on you. A combat mage survives perhaps twenty minutes of battle before obliteration.”

  Aiah looks at him. “Who would employ me? I have no credentials.”

  A dismissive sound puffs from Constantine’s lips. “With my training? With my recommendation? And with your ability? You may write your own future, Miss Aiah. Burn it across the sky in letters a radius high, if you so desire.”

  Aiah reclines against the soft black calfskin. The wine warms its way, an expanding radiance, through her veins. “I can’t picture it,” she says.

  Constantine shrugs. “It’s as I said: only experience is lacking. Experience, as well, in knowing what you want, as opposed to that which you have had to accept.” He rises from the couch. “I believe Sorya wants to speak with you before you leave. Take a plate of food with you — this may take a while.”

  She rises, steps toward the buffet, sees her image twisted in the curved
surface of the gleaming copper chafing dishes.

  Constantine’s voice turns meditative. “Perhaps, if you are to work with Sorya, I should tell you something about her.”

  Aiah reaches for a plate, hesitates. “Yes?” And now recalls the earlier scene that plasm had driven from her mind, the diamond necklace flung in the trash.

  Constantine looks pensively at the arboretum, green reflections in his brown eyes. “She comes from an oligarchic family of Carvel, belonging to the Torgenil faith. Do you know what that means?”

  The Torgenil, Aiah knows, are a religion given to extravagant, colorful ceremonies. Though the main branch of the religion is thought respectable enough, some of its offshoots had unsavory reputations relating to necromancy, experiments in twisted genetics, human sacrifice. But she knows little of their beliefs and thinks it best to say, “No, Metropolitan.”

  “Briefly,” Constantine says, “The Torgenil hold that we are damned and living in Hell. That we are exiled from paradise and hope of redemption, that we are so corrupt we can only contaminate the souls of the elect, and that the Ascended Ones therefore created the Shield to seal our tainted lower world from their own. The Torgenil ceremonies, with their color and ecstasies, are not rites of worship but celebrations of despair. And despair motivates as well the vicious rites of the cults associated with the Torgenil: if nothing matters, if no hope exists and we are damned no matter what our actions, then why not perform all, why not exercise power in its most depraved form?”

  He sneers, gestures largely with the wineglass, then gusts a contemptuous laugh. “Were I to know myself damned, I trust I could behave with greater pride than that.”

  “Sorya is a part of this?” Aiah asks. A cold finger touches Aiah’s spine as she remembers Sorya’s cold eyes alight with plasm in the darkness of the old underground terminal. Suddenly the notion of Sorya participating in rites of blood sacrifice and plasm resurrection is not quite beyond belief.

  “Sorya has left that faith, and all others, behind,” Constantine says. “But not the attitudes instilled by that faith, and by the oligarchs of Carvel among whom she was raised.” He looks down at his wineglass. “She knows power, and all ways of raising it and using it. She can make use of people — use them with consummate skill, such that they often do not realize they are being used — but, because her view of people is conditioned by despair, she does not think to look for the good in them. She can use a person, command him or dominate him or persuade him through hope of reward, but she cannot inspire him, doesn’t look to raise him above himself.” He looks meditative, pauses for a long moment. “It is curiously small of her,” he says finally.

  Aiah looks at Constantine, her mind aswim with questions. He sees her look and smiles. “Try the poached eggs with truffles,” he says, and lifts the lid of a chafing dish. “I think you will find the sauce quite accomplished.”

  “Thank you.” She takes a plate and puts food on it. She doesn’t even recognize half the food items on display. She hesitates, puts the plate down. Plasm still buzzes distantly in her nerves. “Metropolitan?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “What about the plasm diver?”

  “What about her?”

  “What happened to her? Why was she . . . destroyed?”

  His eyes turn inward. “Who can say? Some inner flaw, perhaps, magnified by the plasm. Perhaps she was caught unawares. Or perhaps she intended, deliberately, to use the plasm for destruction, but her plans went awry. I’ve found that people who are destroyed by plasm are the ones who, perhaps all secretly, desire to destroy themselves. There is a perverse impulse in them that seeks out failure, that turns their own lives to poison.” He approaches Aiah, puts both hands on her shoulders, looks at her closely. “Forget the diver. Her fate is not yours, I promise you that. I have seen enough to know you do not have that dark seed in you.”

  He kisses her, lips warm against hers for a long moment, and then turns back to his desk. “Sorya must be getting impatient,” he says over his shoulder. “Don’t forget your briefcase.”

  Aiah, motionless for an instant, wonders what promise it is that she tastes on her lips.

  She gathers her briefcase, plate and glass, and carrying them leaves the room and awkwardly descends the spiral staircase. She finds Sorya in the parlor, sunk in an armchair with her boot-heels resting on a low, heavy table of marble.

  The spotted panther, Prowler, is stretched luxuriously across a sofa like a huge, dangerous kitten, asleep with its belly-fur displayed and its paws curled in the air.

  Aiah wonders if she should tell Sorya her necklace is in the trash. She suspects it isn’t the sort of news Sorya would welcome.

  Still, perhaps it’s better than to let Sorya think Aiah walked off with her jewelry.

  Sorya lifts an eyebrow. “Ah,” she says. “Are we a mage now?”

  Aiah decides not to mention the necklace. “Not yet,” she says. She can taste Constantine on her lips.

  Sorya draws in her legs, tucks them under the chair. “While the Metropolitan deals with grand strategy,” she says, “it would seem I am confined to matters of engineering. Perhaps you would favor me with your maps.”

  Aiah draws up a chair and opens her briefcase. The table is made of “broken” marble, patterns of cream and deep brown wrenched by subterranean forces into new, contorted shapes. Aiah covers the pattern with her maps of Terminal, her official transparencies and the old transparency she found at Rocketman Substation, then puts her food plate on the corner of the table. Sorya takes the yellowed celluloid in her hand, holds it up to the light. Then she places it on the map.

  “It’s difficult to tell estate agents what we want,” she says. “An empty building, in such-and-such a neighborhood, with a deep cellar and neighbors who will not ask questions, nor mind a little reconstruction and digging

  “I can pull the records on any sites you find promising,” Aiah says.

  “Very good.”

  The transparencies are, Aiah explains, incomplete and out of date. Sorya doesn’t seem overly perturbed by this revelation. Aiah makes a note of certain addresses, eats bits of the food off her plate. Even cold the food is superb.

  Sorya leans back. “Good enough,” she says. “That’s a place to start. One thing left.” She reaches for a portfolio-sized case she’s leaned against the sofa. Prowler stirs, ropy legs stretched to full length. Shieldlight glints off unsheathed claws. Sorya drops the portfolio on the table, then reaches to rub Prowler’s soft belly. The cat’s purr rumbles vastly.

  Aiah opens the portfolio. “Batteries, control systems, switching stations, supply cables,” Sorya says. “I need to know how to disable them — not destroy them, just keep them out of action for some hours. Whatever damage is done must be quickly repairable.”

  “Ah,” Aiah says.

  Another interesting datum for the files.

  The plasm systems have an unfamiliar name — Ring-Klee — and so far as Aiah knows aren’t used in Jaspeer, a fact which occasions in her a certain relief. She flips through the large sheets looking for cutouts and finds them.

  “Here,” she says. “If the control board suffers certain kinds of damage, the operators’ instructions are overridden and the accumulator contacts are mechanically returned to a neutral position. There’s a lengthy procedure required to restart; it should take several hours, and that’s only if there’s qualified personnel available.”

  Sorya’s green eyes glitter with interest. “Thank you,” she says. “Can you give me a better idea what sorts of emergencies will provoke this response?”

  “It would be easier if I had an operators’ manual. Is there one?”

  “I can obtain a copy.” Sorya seems not so much to stand as to uncoil, rising sylphlike from her seat. The cat stands as well, shaking its shaggy head.

  “Thank you for your advice. I’ll call Martinus to drive you home.”

  The fruit and cheese still wait in the Elton, and a fresh bottle has replaced the one that was
opened. Aiah contentedly fills her glass and savors the wine as it crosses her palate.

  “Mr. Martinus,” she says.

  Martinus’s eyes meet hers in the mirror. “Yes?”

  Aiah searches for words. “The Metropolitan made a gesture earlier,” she says. “A necklace belonging to Miss Sorya ended up in the trash under the buffet table. I think the necklace should probably be retrieved — you would know best to whom it belongs.”

  Martinus’s expression doesn’t change. “Yes, miss,” he says.

  Aiah leans back against the plush headrest and closes her eyes.

  She breathes in, and the air tastes like wine.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Will this suffice, d’you think?”

  Constantine stands on a stained concrete floor in the midst of an old factory built of red brick. Arched windows high above the floor let in a grayish light; a double row of round iron stanchions helps support a tented ceiling. There is a smell of must and urine, and a scattering of old mattresses and blankets in grimy corners; people have been living in here.

  “Suffice? I suppose,” Aiah says, and watches pigeons flutter among the iron roofbeams.

  It’s second shift, and Constantine and Martinus brought Aiah here after work. In the last few days Aiah’s had three lessons at Mage Towers, sitting on the soft leather sofa with Constantine’s big hand lightly enclosing her wrist, each lesson followed by a detailed discussion with Sorya, complex analysis of sabotage, diagrams and plans and manuals, talk of intrusion and subversion and explosives, and these conversations, somehow, seem more unreal than any of the phantoms she’s been conjuring.

  Constantine hasn’t kissed her again, hasn’t touched her in any way other than to hold her wrist during the course of her lesson — and even then, in the midst of feeding her plasm and offering instruction, she’s had the sense that his mind, his deeper attention, is elsewhere.