Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  “And so,” he nods, “I wish to redesign the world. Rethink it. Transform it.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Aiah asks. “Knock a bunch of it down and start over?”

  A laugh gusts out of him. “I wish I could!” He shakes his head. “They could have used me when Senko and his crowd were setting things up. Ah well.”

  Aiah nods at the three intent men at the workstations. “What are they up to?”

  Amusement lights Constantine’s eyes. “Preparing to knock a few things down.”

  “Seriously.”

  “They are ...” he frowns. “Quarrying. Remember when I told you about combat mages? Their short lifespans in action? Well, that is one sort of military mage, those used in battle. The kind who turn,” he looks at Aiah and smiles, “into giant burning women who hammer the enemy with sheer blasts of power.”

  That smile makes Aiah uneasy, and she wonders for an uneasy moment if he could have heard about Guvag. But Constantine, apparently unaware of Aiah’s anxiety, continues.

  “The other kind of military mage is more subtle,” he says. “Refrains from attacking, and instead tries to worm his way in. Finds weak points in the enemy’s defenses, maps them, tries to work out ways to exploit them without alerting the opposition. They are less warriors than spies, and each is worth a hundred of the other sort. These,” he nods at the three men, “are among the best.”

  “Those two boys ...”

  “Naturals.” A smile lights Constantine’s lips. “Like yourself, Miss Aiah. People who have learned plasm use instinctively rather than through formal applications. Young minds are very suitable for that sort of work, being free of inhibiting structures, of overjudicial interpretation.” He nods again. “They are very successful, those two.”

  “Isn’t what they’re doing dangerous? If they’re detected. . .”

  He looks at her appraisingly. “They understand the risks better than you, I believe.”

  Aiah rephrases her objection. “They’re young. They can’t possibly know what they’re getting into. You’re using them.”

  Constantine smiles with his strong white teeth. “Miss Aiah,” he reminds, “you are young, and I am using you. And — I assure you — you do not know what you’re getting into, either.” He spreads his hands. “But you find yourself here, do you not? Your will led you here; and my will,” he waves a hand, embracing the factory, the huge accumulators, the web and workstations, “brought this into being. And will shortly bring into being other things, ideas brought to the world of reality.”

  Aiah finds herself unwilling to let Constantine escape into metaphysics, at least not yet. “ I’m older than they are, anyway,” she says. “They can’t possibly—”

  Constantine’s eyes turn hard. “Why value the lives of the young more than those of the old?” he asks. “It is the qualities that come with youth that make them valuable to me, or, at this stage, to anyone. Years from now, they will look back on this episode as their golden time, the time when they discovered, as few young people ever do, who they are, and what they are capable of. And if they do not survive to that time . . .” He steps up to Aiah, puts a heavy hand on her shoulder, looks at her with eyes of stone. “I learned long ago,” he says, “that the actions of the powerful have consequences. As a consequence of my actions, thousands of boys have died, and girls, and babies, and thousands and thousands of ordinary people who had nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill them myself, I didn’t wish them dead, and if I could have prevented it I would, but they died none the less. And these boys,” nodding to the two mages, “at least volunteered.”

  Aiah had forgotten the cost of the Cheloki wars, the destruction of a metropolis as thorough as the devastation that had been wrought in Barkazi. She licks her lips. “I wouldn’t want that sort of responsibility,” she says.

  He leans closer to her, his deep voice almost a whisper but still powered by his ferocious energy, a low rumble that Aiah can feel in her toes. “Miss Aiah, your sentiment is too late. You’ve given me power, and are as responsible as anyone for what follows. And,” almost offhand, “there have already been deaths.”

  Aiah stares at him in horror. Forget the man, she remembers, the problem is over.

  “They were bad people, I believe, and dangerous,” Constantine says. “If that knowledge will help you sleep.”

  “I don’t think it will,” Aiah says.

  He steps back, lets his hand fall from her shoulder, gives her an appraising glance. “I have had sleepless hours myself,” he says, “but by and by they passed.” He reaches out, takes her wrist as he has in all their lessons together. “Shall we have your lesson now?” he asks. “Or were these last moments lesson enough?”

  We seek to enlarge our scope. Our power. Sorya’s words.

  Power, Aiah thinks. Perhaps she ought to get used to it.

  “The lesson, if you please,” she says, and lets him lead her to a console.

  GARGELIUS ENCHUK WEARS GULMAN SHOES!

  Why Don’t You?

  “The School of Radritha defines three sorts of power,” Constantine says. “Power over the self, power over others, and power over reality. And of these, they conceive the first to be the only worthwhile goal, because they consider the only thing a man can know truly is his own mind, and his knowledge of anything else is but a reflection of his inward sight. Which is why I broke with them finally, because their scope was limited only to self-knowledge and self-mastery, without any conception of what the self-mastery is for.

  “I will agree that power over the self is primary,” he says, nodding, “because with self-knowledge and self-mastery, power over others and over reality will naturally follow. The School had power — some of the most powerful minds I’ve ever met — but it had withdrawn entirely into self-contemplation. And was a little smug about it, truthfully.”

  Aiah sips at her wine as the Elton cruises away from the factory. The shift’s lesson had flushed her with plasm. Power sings in her blood, a chorus of exhilaration and control. But now she finds the wine a little bitter, and Constantine’s discourse on power the last thing she wants to hear.

  Already been deaths . . . She hadn’t wanted to think about it until Constantine’s whisper had forced her to confront the fact. And now she is compelled to wonder whether her efforts to educate herself in the use of plasm are worth the loss of life.

  “The School desired to give their initiates freedom,” Constantine continues. “Freedom from passion, from impulse, from — in essence — the world itself. Imagine the reaction of my family,” he smiles, “when I told them I wished to study there. The School stood in opposition to everything they held dear, and that, I imagine, is why I wished to go.” He shrugs.

  “But detachment from all things?” he says. “Is that not also a trap? To say that nothing matters, or that nothing should matter, except that which occurs in the perfectly passionless mind . . .” He utters a black, sneering laugh. “This they call freedom? Skulking in their meditation chambers, hiding from the sight of the world, peering obsessively at the landscape of their own minds, terrified they might be caught in an impulse, an emotion, an urge...”

  Detachment, Aiah decides, seems like a pretty good idea right now. Let us, she thinks, consider the problem dispassionately. People, I am informed bad people, have died. Although I do not absolutely know that these are the people who attacked me, I nevertheless suspect that they are. In which case I have evidence, written on my bones with the toes of boots, that they were in fact bad people, and therefore deserved punishment.

  “Avoidance of passion does not conquer passion,” Constantine continues, “and the School of Radritha, for all the power of their minds, seemed not to know this. They did not conquer passion, they merely denied it. And that is why they were so afraid of power, because they knew it was dangerous to them . . . power becomes a slave to passion so easily, and to an unacknowledged passion easiest of all.”

  And, Aiah thinks, if they are dead, I did not kill the
m. I didn’t ask for it to be done, I didn’t have it done. And so, perhaps, it has nothing to do with me at all.

  Colored light floods the car, and a distant scream: an advert tumbling down the canyon of the street, crying its wares with a siren voice.

  “Though it is true that a man who is a servant of his passions is not free,” Constantine says, “neither is a man in flight from those same passions. And, since the passions are an inevitable consequence of our own humanity, it is impossible to eliminate them so long as we wish to remain human. But Radritha was wrong: it isn’t passions that make us weak, but rather uncontrollable passions. Harness the passions and reason together, and the person, the real person, becomes free . .. and capable of liberating others, which is the only defensible use of power.”

  But, Aiah thinks, if these deaths have nothing to do with me, why don’t I simply ask Constantine what happened?

  Because, she concludes, I am afraid of the answer.

  Constantine’s flow of words comes to a halt. He looks at Aiah appraisingly. “I see my discourse has failed in its intended purpose,” he says. “You remain buried in your own thoughts.”

  “Yes.” She is unable, for some reason, to turn her face to him, to achieve any level of personal contact. She stares instead at the seat opposite her. Tries to achieve detachment.

  “Perhaps my discourse on power was too abstract for the purpose,” he says. “I wanted to point out that my ultimate goals are not abstract, but concrete: the New City, power, and liberty. And not for me alone, but for all. And — ” he licks his lips, “sacrifices occur. In a world as entrenched as ours, thousands of years without substantial change, revolution does not happen easily, or neatly, or without consequence. From a strictly practical view, a little ruthlessness now may save much blood later.”

  Constantine pauses, then impatiently dismisses his own argument with a contemptuous wave of his hand. Without warning, moving with absolute suddenness and intensity, he snatches Aiah’s wrist, the same grasp used when giving her instruction; but now a different power than plasm flows from him, lights the furious energy in his eyes — passion, she realizes, startled, but of a different order from what she’s accustomed to. A world-eating passion, fierce and hungry and able, without constraint or compromise. No School of Radritha, she knows, could possibly suppress this.

  “Listen, Miss Aiah,” he says, and she recognizes the powerful whisper again, the deep voice that resonates in her bones, “if the New City comes into being, then any sacrifice — any — will have been justified. Because I see no hope otherwise, anywhere, in our prison of a world.” The hand clamped on her arm is more powerful than a vise; Aiah knows better than to try to break free.

  Electricity flares through her nerves, as if in resonance with the fury that seems to blaze in his mind.

  “And if the New City fails,” he continues, “then Sorya’s old disciples of Torgenil are right, and we are Damned, and in Hell. In which case —” And the power leaves him, the fierce eyes grow dim, his big hand now without strength; Aiah retrieves her arm, straightens her sleeve. “In which case,” he repeats, even the voice now without power, “then nothing matters, nothing. Death least of all.”

  Aiah looks into the shrouded eyes that gaze into the bleakness of a hopeless, caged world, and she suppresses again the overwhelming urge to comfort him. Ridiculous, she thinks, that he would need her comfort.

  The car glides silently beneath the plasm-streaked sky. Aiah thinks of power coursing beneath the streets like arterial blood, cities lying on the crust of the earth like granite-shouldered parasites, human lives flaring like matches in the dark canyons — a little heat, a brief light, extinction.

  “What can I do to help?” she says. A deep ancestral voice wails in her head, He’s your passu! She needn’t give him comfort, only take his money.

  Constantine lifts an eyebrow, “I don’t suppose you can breathe underwater?”

  She stares at him. “Are you joking?”

  “Not at all. Do you know the apparatus?”

  “I’ve never used it.”

  “Can you take two days off this next week? We can get you instruction in the meantime.”

  Aiah opens her mouth, closes it. “I suppose I could take two vacation days,” she says.

  She can’t believe she’s saying yes to this. Constantine had arranged to retrieve her money any time it suited him, and now she is doing him favors. It’s for the New City, she thinks. It’s for the dream. Because even a Barkazil girl from Old Shorings needs something to believe in.

  CHAPTER 14

  For a change Constantine is trying not to look like himself. Traveling on passports from Gunalaht that Constantine had somehow materialized, he and Aiah fly in an aerocar to the Metropolis of Barchab, on the shore of the Sea of Caraqui. Constantine alleges himself to be one Dr. Chandros, dressed in a simple gray traveling suit and conservative lace, with his famous braid pinned up and a long reddish wig floating off his shoulders. Aiah is Miss Quelger, his assistant. She can’t help but think that Constantine with a red wig is even more conspicuous than Constantine without.

  Nobody ever looks at the passports anyway.

  The aerocar lands with wailing turbines on the rooftop pad of the ziggurat-shaped Hotel Volcano, and as Aiah, head still swimming from the descent, walks along the roof toward the hotel entrance, she stares in surprise at the blue volcanic peaks that overwhelm the western horizon, their cragged snowy crests unmarked by the gray city that advances like a tide halfway up their steep flanks, then comes to a halt. She’s never seen a piece of ground that wasn’t built on before, not even at a distance.

  “They’re active, of course,” Constantine says. “Forty years ago Chukmarkh, that southern peak, blew and killed fifty thousand people.”

  “Is that why they don’t build on the tops?” It seems a shame to waste that much potential plasm.

  “Too dangerous.”

  “I’m surprised people don’t move up there anyway.” People are like a flood, she knows, pouring across every empty, available space unless forcibly walled away.

  “I’m sure there are a few,” Constantine says. “But it requires too much infrastructure to support a population for long at that altitude, in those temperature extremes.”

  Elevators and a small army of assistants speed them to their suite, all silver and black and mirrors. Sorya waits in the suite in a bright green dress, a vibrant chromatic contrast to the background. Aiah hadn’t expected her here.

  Sorya seems all in motion, her bright gauzy scarf and blonde-streaked hair floating, the linked gold foci on her belt chiming lightly as she approaches Constantine, then wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him firmly.

  Momo loves Bobo again, Aiah thinks, and feels an unaccustomed surge of annoyance.

  “Geymard said yes!” Sorya says. Her grin is triumphant. “You’ll still have to talk to him, though.”

  Calculations dance in precise sequence across Constantine’s face. “Very good. Is he still here?”

  “I can arrange a meet any time.”

  “And Drumbeth?”

  Sorya’s brows come together. “He can come across the border, but it will have to be arranged carefully.”

  “I want to do my reconnaissance with Aiah first,” Constantine says. “Then I’ll have something to tell him, one way or another.”

  Sorya’s eyes shift briefly to Aiah, just long enough to nod a greeting, and then they refocus on Constantine. She takes his hand and draws him away. “Let me tell you about Geymard,” she says. “I had to use a certain line with him, and you don’t want to shift from it.”

  Aiah stands by the door for a moment, uncertain where to put her feet, and then one of Sorya’s functionaries leads her to her room. It has a private terrace — the advantage of the hotel’s ziggurat design — with fragrant orange trees sitting in tubs and a view of the volcanoes.

  She misses the solid, reassuring presence of Martinus. But Martinus is simply too conspicuous, a pointer
that leads only to Constantine, and Martinus was left behind in Jaspeer.

  Aiah dines alone on her terrace next shift, served elegantly on bone porcelain set on a white-clothed table wheeled in by functionaries. The elegant gold leafwork on the porcelain reflects the colors of overhead plasm displays. Lords of the New City is as heavily advertised here, Aiah notes, as in Jaspeer. Constantine and Sorya are eating with Geymard, an erect, crop-haired man who, despite civilian dress, looks as if he just marched out of the Timocracy of Garshab. Aiah picks fretfully at her meal and drinks a half-bottle of wine. Orange-scented wind teases her hair. She leaves the table and leans on the bright aluminum terrace rail and looks at the gleaming peaks of the volcanoes, the rooftops of surrounding buildings. A distant airship gleams silver in Shieldlight. One of the nearby roofs has a blue plastic foam running track set on its perimeter, and she watches a man in a blue-and-white jumpsuit dutifully, joylessly, circle the track. He doesn’t look at the volcanoes once.

  Something crosses the sky above the volcanoes and Aiah’s heart leaps as she realizes that it’s an avian, a winged humanoid. It soars, a winged black silhouette against the Shield, and then folds its wings and stoops like a falcon, diving to someplace unknown. Aiah watches for a while, but it doesn’t return.