Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  Aiah is assigned to find and repair breaks in plasm lines and spends most of the next twelve hours underground, walking through darkened utility mains illuminated by the jittering flash of her helmet light, old brick and concrete tunnels that smell of disturbed dust. Vertigo keeps tugging at her inner ear, turning the tunnels into distorted, nightmarish places. She performs her job with her heart in her mouth, terrified that a stray spark might set off an explosion in the fine, suspended dust particles in the tunnels, or that an aftershock might bury her and her team alive or flood the tunnel with water.

  At least, she thinks, Rohder’s anima won’t be wandering around Terminal, he’ll be busy elsewhere, locating survivors in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

  After twelve hours Aiah is allowed to go home. Aside from a broken mirror in the lobby, Loeno Towers is unharmed. The apartment is as she left it. The repaired commo set has logged a call from Gil inquiring as to her safety, and after an hour of trying — commo lines are jammed — she manages to leave a brief message telling him that she is all right.

  The plasm energy she’d fed herself at the hotel is long gone. Aiah showers, collapses into her bed, and is awakened only at 1800 when the doorman calls to tell her that her ride has arrived.

  She throws on clothing, washes her face, and combs her tangled hair in the elevator on her way down. On the ground floor she finds Khoriak quietly reading a magazine. He leads her to the Geldan and inserts the little car into the late rush-hour traffic. In the wake of the earthquake the sky blazes with advertisements for insurance companies.

  “Part of the collection net came down in the factory,” Khoriak says, “but that should be repaired within twenty-four hours or so. No one was hurt.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “The factory. Everyone else is there.”

  “Was there a lot of damage in Terminal?”

  “Not from what I saw.”

  And indeed there is very little. Terminal is sufficiently far from the quake’s epicenter that it’s lost none of its scaffolding, and damage seems to have been confined to broken windows and toppled shelves.

  A repair crew is already repairing the bronze collection net. The huge accumulators stand gleaming in their rows, reflecting the sparks that fall from welding torches in multiple golden waterfalls. Constantine and Sorya watch from amid a circle of their followers. As the car pulls in, Constantine crosses the stained concrete floor to open Aiah’s door for her. The others trail behind him. Constantine is smiling, and Sorya is hunched in a faded green brass-buttoned military jacket of an old-fashioned design. She wears a peaked cap pulled low over sullen, slitted eyes.

  “Our people at the Landmark have found something useful,” Constantine says as Aiah steps from the car. “When the quake hit, two of the Operation men we were surveying left their clubs and dashed to the same address to see if anything there was damaged. We’ve poked around a little further, and it’s their plasm house.”

  “Can you tell how much of the juice they are getting out of it?” Aiah asks.

  “It’s in an office building backed up against a huge public housing project. I’d say they’re tapping into the plasm link there.”

  A falling bit of bronze rod, cut loose by one of the torches, clangs loudly on the floor.

  “Congratulations, Miss Aiah,” Sorya says. “Your solution looks to be the right one.” The shadowed expression beneath her cap brim is unreadable.

  “What’s the next step?” Constantine asks. “An anonymous phone call to the Authority?”

  Aiah mentally pages through the Authority’s procedures. “That will just put it in a long queue,” Aiah says, “and someone may get around to checking the call in a few months, and it’s very likely that the call will be assigned to the man who’s being paid off in the first place. If you can get someone to lodge a formal complaint for the reward, the Authority will take it more seriously, but if it’s you filing the complaint, Metropolitan, or any of your known entourage, they’re likely to want to know how you know about all this illegal plasm.”

  “I see.”

  “Best to give me some time, and I’ll work out a way for the Authority to discover the building in its own way.”

  “We do not have time to spare,” Sorya says. “Perhaps there could be an accident in that building, something that might expose the heavy plasm use there.”

  A cold warning hand brushes Aiah’s neck at Sorya’s toneless word, accident.

  “Give me the address,” Aiah says. “I’ll check to see who’s registered at that meter.”

  “An accident is quicker,” Sorya says flatly.

  “An accident is more dangerous for us,” Constantine says. “We don’t want to have our business discovered as a result of a tangential brush with the Operation. Nor do we want to attract their attention, having successfully eluded them thus far.” He looks at Martinus. “We’ll take Miss Aiah there,” he says, and then turns to Aiah again. “But not just yet. You look tired, and it doesn’t do my cause any good to have your mind fuzzy. Refresh yourself at the t-grips, and then we’ll leave.”

  “Thank you, Metropolitan.”

  The plasm charges her body, quickens her mind. She wishes she could dawdle, remain connected to the huge well she had discovered, the awesome reservoir of raw power so fundamentally connected to the life of her world, to both its reality and its unreality. But she reluctantly flicks the switch on the operators’ console that disconnects her copper grip from the well, then pushes back her chair.

  She realizes that she has been aware of Sorya’s scent for some time.

  Aiah turns to see Sorya standing behind her, hands stuffed in the pockets of her faded green jacket. Aiah rises to her feet, mind and muscle blazing with plasm-courage, and says, “Yes?”

  Sorya’s tone of voice carries no hostility but little warmth, either. “A word of warning, Miss Aiah.”

  “Yes?” Aiah repeats. She almost laughs at the whole notion of warning. At the moment she feels capable of taking on an army.

  “Constantine and I have been together a long time,” Sorya says, “and though he and I are no fit companions for one another now, both being so tied, nerve and heart and bone, to this project of ours, and passionate over our differences, we nevertheless, once this endeavor is concluded, will be together for the future.”

  Aiah bites back an impulse to reply, a defiant Are you sure about that, lady? or something equally refined, equally a product of the old neighborhood.

  Sorya’s flat green eyes gaze from under her cap brim. “I bear you no animosity for your interlude here with Constantine,” she says. “Insofar as you provide him a little release, a little forgetfulness — well,” she nods, “that is good. You provide a service, if you will, for which I haven’t the time or energy myself. But it is an interlude, Miss Aiah, and it would be dangerous for you to think otherwise.”

  Aiah clenches her teeth. She can feel her hackles rise, her hands trying to form claws. “Are you threatening me, Miss Sorya?” she asks.

  A touch of contempt enters Sorya’s eyes. “Why should I do that? Do you think you’re the only worshiper at this particular shrine? For it’s worship he wants, make no mistake, and I know him too well to give him quite the credulity he demands.” She shakes her head. “No, I merely wish to reiterate that he and I are both among the powers of this world, those blessed with greatness and the will and means to use it, and that this fact alone makes us dangerous to our friends as well as our enemies.”

  “This power —” Aiah gestures toward the contents of the factory, the huge accumulators and consoles and grids, “— this power was my gift.”

  Sorya tilts her pointed chin. “Ah, but you gave it away, didn’t you? or rather sold it. If you were one of the great, you would have kept it and made use of it to lay the foundations of your own ascendancy.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t power that I want.”

  “Does that make you great? I don’t believe so.” She shakes her head. Behind her,
sparks fall gracefully to the factory floor. “I ask you but to look at Constantine’s history. How many from the old days are still around him? Martinus and Geymard alone of those who mattered, and Geymard is here almost against his will and only because I worked on him for days.”

  Sorya glances over her shoulder at Constantine, who stands in consultation with Martinus and Geymard. Her voice turns contemplative. “Constantine has a way of being fatal to his friends. It is, in a peculiar way, a measure of his greatness that he survives what they do not. Consider: all his family are dead, even those who took his side in the war. All his old advisors, his companions, those lovers who remained with him for any space of time . . .” Her eyes return to Aiah. “All but me. Because I can match him, in terms of will and greatness, in talent and power. Because I am no worshiper of his thought or philosophy or —” her lips twist contemptuously “— or his goodness, but of his true greatness, his will and power and his ability to dominate others; and because . . .” She leans closer to Aiah, close enough for Aiah to scent the spice on her breath. Sorya’s voice turns confiding. “Because I tell him the truth,” she says softly. Despite the silky tone her eyes are hard, pitiless. “He wants worship, he wants the uncritical adoration of those such as yourself, but after he has glutted himself on devotion, it’s the truth he needs, and it’s the truth I give him.”

  “And you think you’re the only person who tells him the truth.”

  “There are truths about Constantine that only I know,” Sorya says. “I know power and wealth and magic, and it is their truth to which the greatness in Constantine speaks.” She fishes in her pocket for her cigaret case. “Believe me,” she says, “I have nothing but the best of wishes for you, and that is why I’m speaking to you now. I wish to protect you from disappointment, from any consequences of broken hopes.” Aiah watches the little bright flame leap up from Sorya’s platinum lighter to ignite the cigaret poised between Sorya’s fingers.

  “With all respect,” Sorya finishes, “you are well out of your depth. In the league in which Constantine and I play, you’re not even rated.”

  “Thank you for your advice,” Aiah says, managing to speak the words without the sarcasm she feels in her heart, and then simply walks away, toward Constantine and the big Elton.

  With an elegant gesture Constantine opens the door. Aiah settles onto the leather seat and Constantine closes the door behind her with that too-solid thunk, that sound of armor falling into place between her and everything outside.

  Constantine is buoyant on the way to the plasm house, joking about the dolphins and their pretensions, about the Operation street captains who are about to have an unpleasant surprise. After a few moments of his insistent good humor, and with plasm vitality filling every cell, Aiah feels the tight-coiled anger slowly relax about her nerves.

  The plasm house is kept in a nondescript office building, its red-brick walls gone gray with grime. Behind it squats the dark bulk of the housing project, a garden of fortress-like buildings crowned by pigeon coops and roof gardens. As the car pulls up Aiah peers upward out the window to look at the top of the building and sees a thorny, decorative crown of ornate wrought iron. Possibly there are antennae concealed there, possibly not.

  She enters through stained bronze doors. Inside the air smells of fish fried in grease. Booming dance music echoes up a tall atrium surrounded by a ramp that spirals all the way to the top. There are young men loitering against the iron rails in the foyer, hoping to find a friend or a girl willing to pay the cover charge for one of the clubs. They look startled at Aiah’s arrival, and she feels a warning cry through her nerves. Insulated by drivers, armor and limousines, she’s grown careless about Terminal, about the Jaspeeri Nation stickers in the windows. But other than the usual whistles and pick-up lines they’re civil enough, and she steps into the building and gazes upward.

  The atrium is surrounded by an ancient webwork of wrought iron, an intricate spiral design that, reflecting the Shieldlight brought in by the big skylight above, looks like a silvery spider’s web funneling up to the ceiling. An elevator, a wrought-iron cage, pilots people to and from the restaurants. Aiah walks slowly up the spiral ramp, mentally calculating loads, distances, masses of brick and iron. She’ll have to pull the plasm records for the whole building.

  On the second floor she buys some ice cream from a vendor and continues her walk. The businesses here seem to be pawn shops, loan offices, clubs, music stores and bail bondsmen. Pairs of young lovers, pressed against one another in doorways, pay Aiah no attention as she walks by. The plasm house is in an office on the fifth floor, a gray metal door with flaking white lettering, Kremag and Associates. She doesn’t spare it a second glance, but she suspects she sees video monitors concealed in the wrought-iron leaves sprouting from the false iron pillars on either side of the door.

  Aiah walks up another couple floors, then takes the elevator back down.

  There is power, she thinks as she interlaces her fingers in the wrought-iron elevator wall, and power. Sorya knows of one kind, and Aiah another. And though Aiah wasn’t born to Sorya’s kind of power, she is learning it.

  Is she afraid of Sorya? she wonders, and realizes that the answer to her question is no. She wonders why, and suspects this is probably a comment on her sanity.

  She leaves the building and dives into the limousine. “Nothing much to see,” she says, “I’ll have to look through the records.”

  Constantine nods, “I can take you home now,” he says, “but I have a stop along the way. A meeting.” He lifts his head, and Aiah can see a kind of excitement in him, a fierceness in his look, a readiness coiled in his restless body. He looks at her. “There is an element of danger. You can stay in the car with Martinus.”

  “Martinus isn’t going with you? It’s his job to protect you.”

  “With this — gentleman — I’m best protected from here, from the car.”

  Power, Aiah thinks. This could be an interesting lesson. “Does it matter if he sees me? Is it like the situation with Parq, that he might blackmail me if he knows who I am?”

  A private smile touches Constantine’s lips. He shakes his head. “No. Blackmail is not a danger here. My principal worry is that if things go awry, the both of us would be swiftly and certainly killed.”

  He looks at her, eyes sparkling. The thought of death seems to amuse him.

  “May I come?” Aiah asks.

  Constantine laughs. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  He is daring her. Cheerful defiance rises in her mind on a whirlwind of plasm, and she grins back at him. “Why stop taking chances now?” she says.

  Constantine’s mirth answers her own, and then a hint of caution crosses his face, “I don’t know if I want you to see me with this person,” he says. “It may injure your good opinion of me.”

  Aiah laughs. Constantine takes her hand, laces his fingers through hers.

  “Very well,” he says. “But you are asking more of yourself than you know.”

  Constantine has a way of being fatal to his friends. Aiah remembers Sorya’s words, then defiantly dismisses them.

  The car takes the Trans-City east, then leaves the highway and heads north. Tall office buildings gleam, white stone and bright metal and glass, on all sides. Off-shift, there is very little traffic. Martinus drives into a parking garage, winds down a spiral ramp to the bottom. He parks but leaves the engine running. Then he drops a panel on the dashboard, takes out a t-grip, and holds it ready.

  Surprise floats through Aiah. “There are plasm batteries in the car?” she says.

  “Of course. For protection.”

  It’s obvious enough, but somehow the idea never crossed Aiah’s mind. She follows Constantine from the car.

  “Martinus is a mage?” Aiah asks.

  “Martinus is a protection specialist. His abilities to protect me against plasm attack are considerable, and have never failed me.”

  Constantine leads her to a steel door inset into
the wall, takes the handle, pulls, and the door swings open. A loud buzzing sound rattles out of the darkness beyond. Constantine hesitates.

  “I must caution you not to run,” he says, “It may . . . awaken instincts best left asleep.”

  Constantine finds a light switch and turns it. The room beyond is full of pumps screened off by mesh cages; apparently the garage is below the water table and needs constant pumping. Aiah follows Constantine past them and to another metal door with a yellow-and-red Authority sticker on it. Aiah pats her pockets for keys, but Constantine opens this door as easily as he had the other, and with a chill Aiah realizes that someone else has preceded them.

  Beyond is a utility tunnel, hot and humid, with sweat beading its round concrete walls and a rivulet of water at the bottom. Yellow electric bulbs hang in metal cages every quarter pitch. A bulky shielded cable, held to the wall by huge metal staples, carries a fortune in plasm from one place to another. There is a smell of suspended dust. Earthquake anxieties rise in Aiah’s mind and she tamps them firmly down as she follows Constantine.

  Aiah loosens her collar in the hot air. “Who lives down here?” she says. “Who would want to meet anyone here?”

  “He said the fourth light,” Constantine murmurs. Even though he has to crouch his pace is rapid and Aiah strains to keep up. The sound of their bootsteps is loud in the small space.

  And suddenly Aiah knows something else is there, sharing the tunnel with them, and despite the heat her blood runs cold. She gives a cry and shrinks away, the curved tunnel firm against her spine. It seems to have come in through the tunnel wall just ahead of them, oozing through it as if the concrete were porous.

  “Greetings,” Constantine says, his voice firm, but Aiah can see fists at the ends of his arms, fists clenched so tight the nails gnaw at his palms.

  Aiah can’t tell what it is he’s talking to. For some reason, even though there’s no obstruction, it’s impossible to get a clear view of it. It seems silver, gleaming under the light, and yet also deep black, black as the deepest abandoned pit, and yet there are hints of other colors, whole spectra running fast through its uncertain outlines, like an interference pattern on the video.