Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  The water tastes more strongly of salt than she expected — she’d done her two hours’ training in a freshwater tank. Her suit lets in an insulating layer of seawater, and it seems oily on her skin. She lets the buoyancy harness support her, tries to calm her heart, her breath. Panic doesn’t seem very far away.

  Constantine follows her into the water, then swims to the sled and climbs aboard. He moves with the same powerful confidence he displays on land, and Aiah feels a stab of envy at his ability to be at home anywhere. Electric motors whine as he tests each propeller. Cavitation bubbles stream in halogen light. Then Constantine starts dumping ballast, air first hissing, then bubbling, from the valves. The raft settles in the water.

  Aiah’s heart gives a leap as something white flashes beneath her feet. The dolphin.

  Constantine looks at her. “Climb on board,” he says, “if you’re ready.”

  Aiah concludes she’s as ready as she’s ever going to be. She kicks up alongside the sled, then wriggles up next to Constantine on the webbing stretched between the two motors. As long as she’s on the sled, she can use the raft’s air supply. Compressed air hisses as she tests one of the sled’s regulators, then puts it in her mouth. Salt sprays across her palate as she takes her first breath.

  “Dump the air from your harness,” Constantine says. “We’ll use the sled to provide buoyancy.”

  Aiah nods and reaches with clumsy gloved fingers for the pull-valve that will release air from her harness pockets. Constantine dons his mask and regulator, clears his ears, then begins again to submerge the sled. Escaping air sounds loud in the dark watery hollow.

  The dolphin surfaces, breath snorting from his nostrils, and looks at the humans with his little eyes for a brief second before submerging once more. The bubbling water splashes up past Aiah’s face. Claustrophobia claws at her heart. She pinches her nostrils and tries to clear her ears.

  Below the surface, the world is an eerie opalescent green. The barnacle-covered hulls of the pontoons stretch down into utter darkness below. Aranax flies in and out of the light, his pale hunched body soaring in its element. He’s got a fin on his back that Aiah hadn’t noticed before, and he’s wearing a sleek harness, with streamlined pockets that won’t ruin his hydrodynamics.

  The sled sinks slowly. The nose pitches down and the headlights carve an empty tunnel in the gloom. A greenish radium glow illuminates the control panel. Aiah has nothing to do but watch and clear her ears. Her right ear seems resistant, pain mounting as the sled drops, but Aiah clamps down with her teeth on her mouthpiece and swallows, and there’s a strange sound, like air squeaking from a child’s balloon, as air is forced to her middle ear.

  As Constantine starts the sled’s motors there is a teeth-clenching buzz that seems to transmit itself through Aiah by bone conduction. It grows darker as the sled moves out from beneath the area of illumination beneath the speedboats. Aranax flies past, his long, outcurved feet pumping together as they propel his hunched body through the water. Constantine steers after him.

  There is a moment of claustrophobia, a pressure in the ears and in the mind, as the sled moves beneath the flat-bottomed bulk of one of Caraqui’s huge pontoons. Over the whine of the sled’s engines Aiah can hear a constant throb of marine engines. With the pontoon above to reflect the sound, the engines sound as if they’re right overhead, a grinding pulsation over which Aiah can detect the whine of intakes, the high-pitched shriek of small boats, random metallic clangs that seem to resonate in the water like the distant bang of a gong. In the light Aiah can see hatches, gratings, vents, intakes, all coated with aquatic life that seems blue or gray until touched by the sled’s lights, at which point they blaze with color, reds and yellows and brilliant striking greens.

  Minutes pass, and Aiah finds herself relaxing, almost enjoying the strange environment. Pale fish swim in and out of the sled’s headlights. Pontoons pass overhead, dark and ponderous. Aranax flies to the surface for air, then races down to resume his lead.

  The water brightens ahead, Shieldlight coming down from above, and the sled slows. As it passes beneath a final pontoon Constantine lets air hiss into the ballast tanks and the sled begins to drift upward. Aiah looks up, trying to see above the protruding rim of her mask. The water is soupy here, green with an algae that seems to coat Aiah’s tongue with a taste of copper.

  A structure looms above them, a vast shadow, and then the sled rises beneath it. Air bubbles rise as Constantine adjusts buoyancy. The structure slowly comes into focus, a long round flexible connection, like a plastic water main or a huge bundle of communications cable, all sheathed with webbing that winks bright yellow in the light of the Shield.

  Aiah’s nerves begin to hum.

  Constantine stabilizes the sled beneath the structure, pulls off one of his gloves, and reaches out to touch a copper t-grip built onto the sled’s console. There are plasm batteries in the structure of the sled, insulated from the sea. His other hand touches Aiah’s wrist at the juncture of glove and insulating jacket. Constantine’s thoughts intrude delicately on her own.

  — You see my problem.

  — Yes. She considers for a moment.

  — I’m leaving the sled. I’ll have to get closer.

  Aiah shifts to her own regulator, then pulls herself forward off the sled, kicks out, and promptly realizes that she’s sinking. She flails for the inlet button while her feet thrash in an effort to keep her level, then lets air into her harness and stabilizes her buoyancy. Aranax watches her with his fixed grin. Aiah kicks out with her fins and examines the connection close up, seeing it wrapped in the honey-colored bronze collection web, made flexible and untarnishable by some hermetic process and probably burnished daily by a group of apprentice mages.

  Plasm moves through there, huge amounts, heading to Constantine’s “command platform”. And there are supposed to be so many other connections that it amounts to a perfectly ridiculous amount of redundancy.

  Aiah’s supposed to figure out how to sabotage all this. Wonderful.

  Aiah examines the cable from the sides, then kicks up above it. It doesn’t look any different. Aranax darts away, diving beneath the nearest pontoon. She kicks along it for a while, but there’s really nothing to see — even aquatic life seems to have been kept off the cable. She returns to the sled.

  Constantine’s hand touches her wrist.

  — Take me to look at the connections

  Without comment Constantine starts the motors, turns the sled, and moves back in the direction from which they’d come.

  — Where did Aranax go? Aiah asks.

  — Probably needed to breathe.

  — Why didn’t he go straight to the surface, then?

  — This is a restricted area. He could be shot.

  Aiah’s startled laugh bubbles out through her regulator. Constantine is full of surprises today.

  A pontoon looms up ahead. The cable is attached to it through a complex support mechanism, heavy stainless metal struts that help to support the cable’s weight, but they seem redundant. Aiah doubts that it would really matter much if the struts were damaged. And she can’t see where the cable goes after it enters the pontoon. She leaves the sled and circles the cable again, but nothing worthwhile comes to mind.

  Aranax shoots up from the darkness and does an effortless somersault over the cable. When he slows to a hover Aiah can see that he’s eating a fish, his rows of bright triangular teeth worrying at it. Blood blossoms like a red flower from his beak. The fish stares toward the surface with dead eyes.

  Aiah reminds herself that she’s an alien here.

  She returns to the sled, touches Constantine’s wrist.

  — I don’t know, she admits. You could try blowing the connection, but...

  — We’ll give it some more thought. Do you need to see anything more?

  — No.

  Then, after a pause, she adds, Sorry. Constantine gives an exaggerated shrug of his big shoulders.

  — It seemed worth
a try.

  The sled follows Aranax back to the welcome pool of light that surrounds Constantine’s boats. A thousand little fish circle like moths in the glow. Constantine adjusts the sled’s buoyancy to hover beneath the boats for a five-minute decompression stop — Aiah pictures bubbles of poisonous nitrogen frothing in her blood, being nudged reluctantly toward her lungs by each throb of her heart — and then, the safety stop over, the sled rises to the surface in a long hiss of air and a roil of oily water.

  Constantine’s guards efficiently pluck Aiah from the water by main strength and strip her of her harness and fins. She pulls off her hood, shakes out her hair, gropes for a towel. Suddenly she’s quaking with cold. A hot bath is the most desirable thing in the world.

  The guards are already attending to Constantine. Aiah yanks off her suit and draws sweater and baggy pants on over her bathing costume. Constantine and the guards wrestle with the sled, drag it aboard the guards’ boat and lash it down. Aranax floats whitely in the glowing water, and then suddenly there are more dolphins here, a dozen or so breaking water at almost the same instant, hovering silently in the water, watching Constantine with their pebble eyes. The bodyguards seem nervous. Aiah shivers and looks down at the expanding puddle of water beneath her feet.

  Constantine has a long conversation with Aranax then, but Aiah can’t hear it because Constantine uses the plasm batteries on the guards’ boat and converses mind-to-mind. Thus-and-so, Aiah thinks, concerning this-and-that, and without misapprehension.

  “Your Illumination,” Constantine finally says aloud, “your wisdom is destined to guide my fumbling and uninformed efforts toward success,” and after another exchange of compliments, the conversation is over. The dolphins kick their feet high and vanish.

  “That went well, I think,” Constantine says as he returns to the boat’s controls.

  “Is Aranax really a prince?” Aiah asks. The title has a quaint, musty ring to it, like something out of mythology, from the time of Karlo or Vida the Compassionate.

  Constantine grins at her as he starts the speedboat’s engines, “I’ve never met a dolphin who wasn’t a prince. Or a king, or queen, or pasha. They’re generous with titles, dolphins. But Aranax is an influential voice among them, insofar as anyone is. And he’s honest, as dolphins go.”

  “And what is he getting out of this?”

  Aiah knows Constantine’s look, the sly, confiding pleasure at the sharing of secrets. “Would it surprise you to know that dolphins have bank accounts?”

  “I suppose not, now that I think about it. How do you know him?”

  “Ah.” Constantine’s eyes gleam in reflected light, “I’ve been here before. I was studying the dolphins’ social organization. What they have is too loose to be called a "government", exactly, not with all royalty and no commoners. I thought it might have something to teach us.”

  “And does it?”

  “Not unless we all become subaquatic, no. But it’s an interesting ideal.”

  Constantine jumps forward, unties the boat from its mooring, then returns to the cockpit. He maneuvers his boat clear of the other boat, turns, then pushes the throttles forward and begins the return journey. Aiah settles into the seat beside him, hunches protectively behind the windshield to keep the chill from her bones.

  “I’m sorry I can’t really help,” she says.

  “That’s all right. You have a fresh perspective which has been useful elsewhere — it was worthwhile to try it here.” He gives her a smiling look. “Besides, you needed a vacation.”

  This is a vacation? she thinks. Perhaps for Constantine it is. But she says, “Thank you.”

  “All I can think of,” she says, “is to try for the control stations, or maybe the switches. They’ve got to use switches when they choose which of the cables their plasm is to move along. The switches are electric, and if you can cut the power . . . well, it’ll be inconvenient for them.”

  Constantine nods, smiles. The look is the sly one again, as if he were in the secret process of having knowledge confirmed.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ll look into it.”

  *

  Hair matted, shivering with cold, Aiah returns with Constantine’s party to the Volcano, Constantine donning his red wig for his brief public moment in the elevator. Sorya awaits them in the suite. She is dressed exquisitely in delicate gold jewelry and blazing red silk, and the silk matches the fiery anger that greets Constantine the second he arrives.

  “Parq is coming here for dinner?” she demands. “You arranged this?”

  Constantine hands the red wig to one of his entourage. “Indeed,” he says.

  “I told you not to trust him!”

  “I don’t,” Constantine says calmly. “I’m using him.”

  Sorya’s long-nailed hands slice the air like knives. “He’s betrayed every leader, every associate ...”

  Constantine nods to acknowledge the truth of this statement. “And therefore,” he says, “is perfectly predictable.”

  Sorya rages on. The bodyguards tactfully find other parts of the suite that require defense from intruders. Aiah concludes that she had best leave Bobo and Momo to their own devices, and sidles around the storm center toward her room.

  She draws herself a bath and soaks for a long time in the hot water, tries to let the scent and texture of bath oil caress her nerves . . . but it’s hopeless with angry voices rattling the door in its frame. Aiah can’t make out the actual words, but perhaps it doesn’t matter, very possibly they’re not intended to mean anything anyway, only convey a message of fury. Aiah remembers times in her girlhood where the day’s routine was suddenly interrupted by the screams of angry neighbors, their rage clearly audible through thin public-housing walls — or if not a fight, then the unmistakable sounds of coitus, or sometimes one followed inexplicably by the other. Aiah recalls the sensation of embarrassment, not for herself surely, but for those neighbors, people she saw every day, people she greeted in the hallways, who were so carelessly violating their own intimacy, proclaiming their secrets to the world.

  Bobo and Momo. Constantine and Sorya. Aiah realizes that she doesn’t really know anything about Sorya, only that she’s Carveli and rich. Aiah doesn’t know how long Sorya and Constantine have been together, or whether they fight like this all the time, or only when they’re planning a war. Aiah gives a little laugh at the thought, and washes her neck.

  Doors slam, and then there’s silence. Aiah washes her hair, sliding down the long porcelain tub into the hot water, submerging her whole body beneath the surface except for the islets of her kneecaps . . . another memory of childhood, looking up at a cracked bathroom ceiling through a blurry layer of water. Only here the ceiling is tiled, little blue-and-white mosaic chips in a swirling abstract pattern.

  The hotel furnishes wonderfully plush terry bathrobes with the name of the hotel beautifully embroidered on the front. Aiah wraps herself in one and spends some careful moments unratting her hair. The rest of the suite seems to have been shocked into silence.

  Aiah looks at herself in the mirror and wonders if the new memories are somehow visible in her eyes, if strangers can look at her and sense the difference brought by the taste of the sea on her tongue, the stare of the dolphin with its fixed grin, the brilliant colors of the sea-life in the headlights, Constantine’s profile cutting air as he stood behind the boat’s controls.

  There is a discreet knock on her door. She answers, finds Constantine half-dressed for his appointment, black braided pipestem trousers with loops over the insteps of his silk socks, braces, immaculate snowy shirt with the lace not yet buttoned into place. The abashed smile on his face is denied by the mocking amusement dancing in his eyes.

  “I suppose you heard,” he says.

  “I did my best not to.”

  “Sorya’s gone.”

  “Will she be back?”

  He shrugs. “That will be up to her, I suppose.” Aiah steps back from the door and lets Constantine drift into the room,
silk socks purring against the thick carpet.

  “There’s no manual for what we’re doing,” Constantine says. “I may never know whether my dealings with Parq make sense, but I know that without Sorya our cause is diminished.”

  She looks at him. “It’s Caraqui, isn’t it? You’re going to overthrow their government. And you need the dolphins for that.”

  The amusement vanishes at once from Constantine’s eyes, and suddenly Aiah feels herself the focus of his intensity, the full power that radiates from him, as if a tower beacon has just swept over her, then swept back, fixing her in its burning gaze. And what happens, she wonders, if he decides she’s unworthy to possess this knowledge?

  Thoughtful, his deep voice rumbles out. “I suppose it’s obvious enough.”

  “You wouldn’t go to all this bother with the dolphins and the trip underwater if this were just a theoretical exercise,” Aiah says. “Those cables bring plasm to the Aerial Palace, don’t they?”

  He nods, that intent gaze still on her. Aiah realizes she’s holding her breath. And then Constantine nods, and his look softens.

  “Will you help me with these plans of mine?” he says. “I don’t think I could abide it if another so exceptional a woman walked out on me today.”

  Aiah’s mouth is dry. “Of course I’ll help,” she says.

  They stand facing each other for a long moment, Aiah’s skin prickling under the terry robe. On the mirrored walls there are diamond-shaped Aiahs, diamond-shaped Constantines. Then Constantine, in one of those swift movements so unlikely in such a large man, steps suddenly forward. Aiah barely has time to raise her arms before he has crossed the distance between them, and she has a brief moment of surprise at his size, the simple cold fact of his physical power, before the power is simply there, in her arms, and she has to deal with it. She enfolds him, presses herself to the broad expanse of lace on his chest, drives her lips up into his . . . She doesn’t want him to think this is completely his idea.