Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  EXPERIMENTAL ROCKET CRASHES IN LIRE-DOMEI

  2000 PEOPLE KILLED IN BLAZING ACCIDENT

  LEGISLATURE CALLS FOR BANNING ROCKET EXPERIMENTS

  When Aiah leaves the hospital she returns to her office. There are fewer demands on plasm second shift, and there’s only one person in the office, Vikar, the plump Grade Six who’s inhabiting Aiah’s chair during the service shift this week. She greets him and takes Telia’s chair. She jacks in her headset, calls Compilation and Billing, and asks for Guvag’s records. When they complain, she tartly reminds them that she’s working Emergency Response and she needs the information now. Forty minutes later it arrives, tightly rolled plastic flimsies in two message cylinders that thunk out of the message system into her wire tray.

  She reads the records and doesn’t find much: Guvag doesn’t use much plasm, at least not officially. Neither does the Shade Club. There’s an address, and a red tab, which isn’t actually red, or even a tab, just a printed message that reads “red tab”, an indication that Guvag has been convicted of plasm theft and that his file bears watching.

  It’s pointless to try getting any records out of the Investigative Division, so the next step is probably to get public records from the Wire’s information service. She’d like to use the computer in the office, but it’s built to Arvag standards while the Wire uses the incompatible Cathobeth compression system, so Aiah will have to walk to the Wire office two streets away.

  Aiah says goodbye to Vikar, finds the office still open, and rents one of the library consoles. She plugs coins into its slot and calls for a complete public records search on Guvag. An hour and a half later she has everything printed out on slick plastic fax paper, and she stuffs the rolled records, still smelling of the developing fluid, into a bag for reading on the pneuma home.

  Guvag was indeed convicted of plasm theft twelve years ago, and did a couple years’ stretch in Chonmas. The chromograph taken at his conviction shows a bullnecked, mustached man scowling at the camera; extravagant amounts of lace explode from his collar and chest, and he wears an expensive Stoka watch on one wrist, a trademark of connected Operation types. According to the records he’s also been accused of assault numerous times and convicted once, though most of the charges seem to have been dropped — probably, Aiah thinks, because the witnesses changed their minds about testifying.

  Not just an Operation thug, she thinks, but a violent one. Khorsa and Esmon have their work cut out for them.

  Aiah looks again at the printout. Nothing much to go on, she concludes, but she’ll see what she can do.

  TRACKLINE SCANDAL DEEPENS

  CALLS FOR INTENDANT’S RESIGNATION

  DETAILS ON THE WIRE!

  The Emergency Response team has been demobilized. Oeneme’s declared victory on Old Parade, and now Aiah’s back in the office full time.

  A message tube thunks from the pneumatic message system into Aiah’s wire basket. She opens it, scans the note - another dreary reminder about personal use of telephones — and then she wads the plastic flimsy and drops it in the recycling box.

  Why do they bother?

  No one in the Authority seems to have any real work to do. All they do is pass pointless instructions back and forth.

  She’s heard from Galaiah about Esmon. He’s had plasm treatments and is much better, cheerful even. She’ll call him later and talk to him in person.

  One of the personal calls the Authority is so upset about. To hell with them. Over ninety percent of the budget, she remembers Constantine saying, in maintaining that which is. Each executive in her little box, bored out of her skull, waiting for someone above to die or move up so everyone can advance.

  Like a dance in which every step takes ten years.

  She remembers the mosaic in the Rocketman terminal, the bright new whitestone city broadcasting rays of golden glory. The mosaic has become her mind’s view of Constantine’s New City. A little dirtied and chipped perhaps, but worthy of salvage.

  Aiah turns to Telia, who is watching little Jayme scuttle about the floor on his stomach. He isn’t crawling properly yet, on hands and knees, he’s just at the insect stage.

  “They don’t know what they want,” Aiah says. “The decorator says something, and suddenly they’re ripping out finished cabinets and rearranging everything. And then I have to change all the access ports around.”

  “At least you’re getting paid for all your work,” Telia consoled. Her eyes brighten. “How’s he getting along with Momo?”

  “They’re in love again.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “Won’t last, though. I’ll give it a week.”

  Telia looks at the wall clock. “Break time. You want to go first?”

  Aiah shakes her head. “Go ahead.”

  Telia contacts the tabulator and tells her that she’s offline for the next fifteen minutes. Aiah smiles — she’s invented a false Constantine, a false Sorya, and all for Telia’s benefit. She calls them Bobo and Momo. She’s been inventing details of their relationship and inability to make decisions; she’s made them the most absurd couple imaginable, a family out of a chromoplay comedy.

  Such a couple wouldn’t be up to anything illegal, would they?

  Telia picks up Jayme, wipes drool from his chin, carries him away. Aiah programs a broadcast into her computer, then sits for a long moment and listens to the distant clicks of the gears.

  “May I come in?”

  A man stands at the door dressed in a rumpled gray suit. Blue eyes peer at her from a red, lined face, and a cigaret hangs carelessly from a corner of his mouth. She’s seen the man around, and perhaps she should know his name.

  “Take a seat,” Aiah says. In order to hear him better she pulls back one earpiece of her headset and places it against her mastoid.

  The man enters and reaches for one of a pair of metal chairs standing against the wall.

  “Not those,” Aiah says. “Broken — we reported them months ago, but no help. Use my office-mate’s chair, she’s on break.”

  The man nods and cigaret ash falls onto his chin lace. He moves Telia’s chair next to Aiah’s desk and sits.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met, but Mr Mengene speaks well of you,” the man says. He holds out a hand. “I’m Rohder.”

  Alarm sirens wail along the back-alleys of Aiah’s nerves. This is the man who snuffed the Bursary Street flamer, who saw with the enhanced eyes of his anima the flamer’s sourceline stretching to Terminal.

  He’s also the man whose phone she gimmicked, making her initial calls to Constantine appear to come from his desk.

  Aiah peels back the lace from her wrist and shakes Rohder’s hand. “Good that you’re out of the hospital,” she says, and hopes he can’t see the pulse leaping in her throat.

  Rohder smiles. “I got a little jangled,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with a large-scale emergency at my age.”

  “Everything’s all right now?” Aiah wonders if her voice is too loud.

  “Oh yes. Good as new.”

  “14:40 hours,” says the voice on Aiah’s headset, “Horn Four reorientation to degrees 033.3. Ne?”

  “Ne,” Aiah says. “Say again, please?” She looks apologetically at Rohder and returns the speaker to her ear. The accustomed actions of programming her computer, the simple movements of fingers and eyes, help her assemble for herself a precarious state of serenity.

  As she sets her dials she remembers that both Sorya and Khorsa, on first meeting, had been able to tell she’d been working with plasm — though at least Sorya had been pumping the well at the time. In the last two weeks Aiah has used a thousand times more plasm than she had when she’d met Sorya. Rohder is senior enough to have access to plasm — probably, at his age, using most of it to extend his life and therefore seniority - and might be able to recognize a fellow user.

  And he used to be head of the Research Division, Aiah thinks, before he got his funding pulled. So he’s probably very good at what he does.
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  Lies flicker through her mind as her hand jacks the cable into the transmission scalar. Aiah is a bit surprised at the facility of her invention. Apparently deception improves with practice.

  My temple lets me use plasm, she decides. In the rites. That’s the one she’ll use.

  “Yes?” she says, pulling back the earpiece once more. “How can I help you?”

  Rohder looks in vain for an ashtray, taps a long gray worm of ash into his palm instead, then wipes the hand on his ash-gray slacks. “You headed the group that Mr Mengene sent east, toward Grand City.”

  Aiah shifts in her chair, tries fiercely to will herself into a state of tranquility. “That’s right,” she says.

  “And you found nothing?”

  “I thought I’d found something promising. But it turned out there was nothing in it.” And get that door bricked up now, she thinks.

  Rohder leans toward her, a watery light in his bright blue eyes. Aiah wonders how old he is — he seems surprisingly youthful in spite of the white hair and the network of creases around his eyes, but with regular plasm treatments he could easily be over a hundred.

  “And that something was?” he says.

  Aiah takes a breath. “There was an abandoned pneuma station called Terminal. The access was right under a building where someone had been gimmicking the meters, so I thought maybe they’d been tapping off some plasm from an unknown structure. But my team searched the station thoroughly and didn’t find anything.” She shrugs. “We took two days at it. So all it amounts to was that someone was gimmicking the meters to hide some plasm use, and that was that.”

  “What made you start in this particular neighborhood?”

  Aiah decides not to mention the abandoned plastic plant she’d found on the Rocketman transparency. She still has the original in her possession, and she doubts there’s another copy of the four-hundred-year-old eel in existence.

  “The pneuma station seemed promising,” she says. “And we had to start somewhere. It wasn’t as if there was more than one team working the whole district.”

  A flag snaps over on the scalar with an audible click, and Aiah jumps. A transmission ending.

  Rohder nods. “I understand Oeneme thought that Old Parade was more promising,” he says. He nods again. “But nothing was found on Old Parade.”

  “Nothing much,” Aiah corrects. “A few leaks. But they could have built up to a Grade A leak over time.”

  Rohder draws on his cigaret meditatively. The bright line of flame, advancing up the length of the cigaret, touches his lips, but he seems used to it. He draws the wet stub from his mouth, looks at it for an uncertain moment, and then balances it precisely on the edge of Aiah’s desk, the burnt end overhanging the floor’s plastic sheeting. He breathes out smoke, looks at the cigaret butt, and frowns.

  “I saw the thing’s sourceline heading east,” he says. “I was a little addled when I got into the hospital, so perhaps I didn’t explain myself properly, but I know I wasn’t wrong.” He gives a little smile. “Curious how Oeneme chose to disregard this. Old Parade was just so much more convenient for him — right there in public near the Broadcast Complex, to make it convenient for his press releases, and he didn’t have that long commute out to Grand Towers.”

  He reaches into a jacket pocket, comes out with a cigaret case, thumbs it open.

  “Did it occur to you to wonder why the pneuma station was abandoned?” he says.

  This is precisely the line of reasoning that led Aiah to the plastics factory. She doesn’t at all like Rohder’s reasoning.

  “No,” Aiah says promptly. Then she shrugs again. “The overlays are full of old structures.”

  Rohder methodically lights his cigaret, lets smoke drift upward. “That neighborhood was built four hundred years ago,” he says. “I had some people at Rocketman look it up.”

  Aiah tries to smile. “I wish I’d had the authority to tell Rocketman that. It would have saved me a day.”

  “It had to have been built on the site of something that had been there previously, though there’s no record of what it was. A water treatment plant, a food factory, something big. And when people no longer had to commute to Terminal to work, they closed the pneuma.”

  Aiah attempts a thoughtful look. “If you can get permission,” she says, “I could resume my search.” And make sure, she thinks, that nothing gets found. “I’ve become familiar with the district,” she adds.

  Rohder shakes his head. “Oeneme was in charge,” he says, “and he’s told everyone the problem’s solved.” He sighs, “I could get the investigation reopened, I suppose, but it would be a struggle, and I have too many enemies in this organization as it is. No,” he looks up at her, “we’ll just have to wait, and alert the creepers that work that district. If anyone’s tapping that old structure, someone’s bound to turn her in sooner or later.”

  Her? Aiah thinks. She smiles and feels insects crawling up and down her spine.

  Rohder stands and returns her smile. “I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity,” he says. “Mengene said you were bright, and I wanted to see for myself.”

  Aiah stands to see him off, crouching a bit at the limit of her headset cord.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says.

  He shakes her hand, peering at her with his watery blue eyes, and then ambles away.

  Aiah wonders if she dares tell Constantine about this. What would be Constantine’s response? Forget the man . . . the problem is over. No, she thinks. She doesn’t want anything like that on her conscience.

  But get a team down to Terminal Station and wall that support brace up soon.

  Next day, it’s done.

  ATTACK OF THE HANGED MAN

  ALDEMAR’S SPINE-TINGLING NEW CHROMOPLAY

  “The First Degree of Terror”

  PREMIERE THIS WEEK!

  The day after walling up the toilet Aiah takes off the second half of her shift and heads for Old Shorings. Esmon’s out of the hospital and she should pay a visit. To that end she’s bought a chocolate cake as a gift. But another gift is the information on Guvag she’s collected, and she doesn’t want to trouble Esmon’s thoughts with it.

  She'll give it to Khorsa. It's really Khorsa's problem anyway.

  The Wisdom Fortune Temple is on the second floor of a brownstone office building. It smells strongly of herbs grown on rooftops and in closets, then packaged neatly in plastic bags behind a glass countertop. Candles stand on shelves, ready to be anointed with special charmed oils and burned for good luck. Packages of reconstituted soup-mixes are ranked on cheap wire racks — people take them home, brew them up, and have a little feast in order to fix what’s wrong with them, or maybe what’s wrong with the universe.

  Above the counter is a picture of Karlo in an ornamented tin frame, identical to the one Aiah has in her apartment.

  Through a beaded curtain is the temple itself. There are benches on the walls for elderly or infirm worshipers, but Aiah knows most of the rituals are done round the circle painted on the cheap tiles in the center of the floor, where the worshipers will don their temple garb, kneel on pillows brought from home, and sway back and forth to the sound of chanting. Inside the circle is painted the Branch of Tangid, with a live plasm circuit at its center. On the walls, icons of Tangid, Karlo, and Dhoran of the Dead alternate with the Mirror Twins and the White Horse and other foci.

  God, or the Gods, are too remote from humanity really to be worshiped in any kind of personal way; they’re far off somewhere, walled off by the Shield. It’s the immortals to whom people pray, and who are invoked in the ceremonies. The immortals were once people themselves, and they understand human desires and frailty. They are presumed capable of interceding on human behalf with the remoter divinities, the Gods or the Ascended Ones.

  Aiah remembers it all from her childhood: the herbal scent, the chants and drums and hand-claps, the congregation swaying and crying out and calling on the immortals. She knows how some of the worshi
pers will go into trance and cry out a message from some immortal or other, or sometimes just go into spasms that, to a jaundiced adult eye, look remarkably sexual. Aiah knows that the congregation consists largely of middle-aged women, their children and, for some reason, homosexual men. And she knows all Khorsa’s lines, the rhythmic speech meant to lull people into a mild trance, set them up for the special pleas for special sums for some special task or other, healing or redecorating or maybe even sending someone to the Barkazi Sectors to study at the feet of some illuminated seer.

  Khorsa sits behind the counter, ready to dispense soup or blessings or advice. She looks surprised when Aiah enters, and rises to greet her.

  “How’s Esmon?” Aiah asks.

  “Taking it easy in our apartment,” Khorsa says. “But he’s fine. The treatments were very successful.”

  “I’m on my way to see him,” Aiah says, “but I thought I’d drop these off first.” She reaches into her tote bag, pulls out all the information she’s gathered on Guvag, then puts the thick roll of fax paper on the countertop.

  “This is all I could find out,” she says, “and it’s not going to help. I’ve talked to some people in the Investigative Division about him, and they know his name and would be happy to put him back in Chonmas, but they can’t do anything if there’s no formal complaint and no witnesses. They’ve had a lot of witness problems with this one.”

  Khorsa bites her lip. “Would they provide protection?”

  “Probably not — not unless you agreed to turn informer and spy, work with Guvag for a while, and get close enough to him to find out some real criminality. I assumed you wouldn’t be willing to do that.” Khorsa gives a little shake of her head, then sighs. “Well, then,” she says.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I won’t work with the man. And I won’t close down the Temple. Perhaps if I get the right magic working, someone, if I make an appeal to the congregation . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “Well,” Aiah says, “good luck. I wish I could have been more help.”