Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  So much, Aiah thinks, for her theory of the wrought-iron ornaments being used as broadcast horns.

  Rohder goes on to say that he’s been arranging for a Tactical Team to go into the building. In the meantime, Rohder hopes Aiah would be willing to start a review of the etching belts in the Intendency District, on the sixtieth floor in the main Authority building. The big buildings, public and private, in the Intendency were built much more scientifically than those around Rocketman, and if any plasm is being stolen, it would be in much larger amounts.

  Aiah calls Rohder’s office. His voice, when he answers, sounds distracted.

  “I’d like to thank you for offering to continue my assignment,” she says.

  “You’re welcome.” Long pause, “I’d like to thank you,” he adds, as if in afterthought.

  “I was wondering about what was going to happen with Kremag and Associates, and when.”

  “Ah.” Another long pause. The answer, when it comes, is long and drawn out, with pauses for Rohder to breathe cigaret smoke or sometimes just to think. “Well,” he sighs, “I’ve been in touch with the prosecuting judge who usually works with us, and he’s granting warrants. Once that’s done, we’ll send in a Tactical Team, but it helps our case if there’s illegal plasm activity going on when we actually storm in, and that means assembling enough mages to guarantee the Team’s safety while they’re breaking in and making the arrests.”

  “How long will that all take?”

  “What time is it now?”

  “23:00. It’ll be Friday in an hour or so.”

  “Probably in twenty-four hours or so, then. Late second shift Friday, or early third shift Saturday.”

  “That’s fast, then. Good.” Aiah is already wondering whether or not to call Dr. Chandros on this one.

  “I’m doing surveillance right now,” Rohder says. “I should probably end this conversation.”

  His spectral anima was floating somewhere in the vicinity of Kremag and Associates. No wonder he seemed preoccupied.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Aiah says. “Goodbye, and thanks again.”

  She presses the disconnect button and hangs up her headset. An image of Rohder floats through her mind: sitting in his smoky office, the Angels of Power gazing down at him with polished bronze eyes while his mind travels through the city on a stream of plasm.

  Aiah looks at the copy of the Proceedings that lies on her unmade bed and wonders about Rohder. She knows nothing about him, nothing but what is implied by that red-bound book, the last of fourteen volumes all unread by the audience for whom it was intended, and which nevertheless claims a revolutionary interpretation of the fundamental solvent of matter and mind.

  She looks at the end of the book and discovers that all the contributors had appended their vitae. She looks at Rohder’s, reads the first few lines, and feels cool surprise run up her spine.

  He’s over three hundred years old. After some mental math Aiah comes up with the exact figure: 317.

  Rohder has been working for the Authority since receiving his doctorate at the age of twenty-five, although he seems to have taken a fair number of sabbaticals in order to teach. No wonder, Aiah thinks, he has too much seniority to be got rid of. No wonder he has such high access to plasm. In a system that runs entirely on seniority, he must be nearly invincible.

  Her gaze drifts back to the communications array and wonders again if she should call the number given her by Constantine. If he knew the Tactical Team was going in within twenty-four hours or so, then he could get on with his plans.

  And, Aiah thinks, he’d have something else to do besides be irritable. She sighs, leaves the apartment, and heads for the elevator. There are some pay phones down in the ground-floor recreation area, between the swimming pool and the ball courts. It will be safe enough to make the call from there.

  *

  The next morning Aiah finds Khoriak waiting outside Loeno Towers. “Hello?” she says. “Is something up?”

  Khoriak brushes his blond bangs from his forehead. Behind him, a coffee advertisement unfolds in midair. “I have a message from the boss,” he says, and hands her an envelope.

  “Thank you,” surprised.

  “Would you like me to take you to work?”

  “Oh.” She looks at the traffic, barely moving, and makes a calculation. “I don’t think you could get me there in time. I’ll take the pneuma.”

  On her walk to the pneuma the face of the actor Kherzaki seems everywhere, scowling down from his New City in the sky. Aiah considers going to the chromoplay after work and wonders if it’s still possible to get a ticket. The hype is so huge on this one that every theater in Jaspeer may well be sold out.

  And then, as she opens Constantine’s envelope, a pair of tickets drops into her hand. I would invite you to the official premiere, in Constantine’s hand, but I fear it would be less than discrete for us to be together in such public circumstances. Take these with my compliments, and use them or give them away, as you please. If you are not too weary, or weary of me, I will be at the Landmark from 0200 on, procedures as before.

  Signed, Your expectant friend.

  The tickets are for a theater two blocks from the Loeno. Who does he expect me to go with? Aiah wonders, looking at the extra ticket, and then thinks, with a smile, that perhaps she’ll invite Rohder.

  At work she stops by her office to pick up her messages, and finds a pneumatic note from Mengene in her wire basket. Whatever you’re doing for Rohder, it reads, keep it up. He was raving about your performance a moment ago. Pleasure rises warm in Aiah at the message, though it takes a certain amount of mental effort to imagine Rohder raving — not unless it were a result of nicotine withdrawal, anyway.

  She takes the hydraulic elevator to Rohder’s office, the elevator doors cutting off the full cry of Telia’s baby which had just been unleashed by the opening of a neighboring elevator. It’s an event that can only expand Aiah’s gratification.

  “I took a peek at a couple of the other addresses you gave me,” Rohder tells her, “and at least one of them looks like a real plasm den. After we finish with this first raid, I’ll be looking for another warrant.”

  “I hope I’ll find you some more today,” Aiah says.

  On the sixtieth floor Aiah is treated like the Intendant’s personal representative — she’s given a clean private office, with a window that gazes straight across the Avenue of the Exchange into another window in the Bursary. The office is equipped with the latest-model Evo-Matic belt reader, and she’s given an assistant, a nervous junior department manager in black velvet and lace. Word has pretty clearly got out that she’s got some powerful people behind whatever it is that she’s doing.

  She scrolls through the belts carefully, but the Intendency District is well policed and affluent and is composed largely of government offices anyway. All day she finds only two suspect addresses, both inserted, she suspects, either by the same programmer who had left his handiwork all over Rocketman, or by another programmer using the same methods.

  One of the addresses is on Old Parade and probably concerns some fiddle having to do with the new construction. And the second address, she notes, is in the Investigative Division itself, the Authority’s own police.

  Who watches the watchmen? she wonders.

  Herself, apparently. A thought which increases in its amusement value the more she thinks about it.

  At the end of her day she reports her findings to Rohder.

  “Thank you,” he says. He huddles in his big chair, one foot drawn up beside him, and stares with peculiar intensity at the clutter on his desk while fiddling with his cigaret lighter.

  “What about the raid?” Aiah asks. “Is it tonight?”

  “Hm?” Rohder blinks, then gazes up at her with his watery blue eyes. “Oh yes, probably. The Tac Team will be moving into place at 20:00. After that, it depends on what our criminals are doing.”

  “Good luck, then.” Aiah turns to leave, then hesitate
s, turns. Rohder’s staring at his desk again.

  “Mr. Rohder?” she asks.

  “Yes?” He doesn’t look up.

  “I skimmed through the last volume of your Proceedings last night, and I was very interested to read about your affective units. Could I borrow the volumes that deal with them?”

  “Seven through twelve,” Rohder says briefly.

  Aiah looks at the long row of red-bound volumes. “Perhaps,” she says, “I’ll start with seven.”

  *

  In the end Aiah gives her spare ticket to her work-shift doorman, who goes off duty just as she arrives home. The theater is enormous, holding at least a couple thousand people, with a vast domed ceiling that features a fresco of the Inspirators giving divine guidance to writers, actors, directors and cameramen. The long white expanse of the oval screen seems half a block long. Every seat is full, and each audience member dresses formally for the occasion, even though the official premiere is being held elsewhere.

  The chromoplay comes over the wire, premiering simultaneously in theaters throughout the world precisely at 20:00 hours — everywhere it’s not banned as subversive, anyway, and sometimes even there, smuggled in on wires strung across borders. There’s an hour of programming before the play even starts, live interviews with the cast and with the director Sandvak, with celebrities, with a token historian who, professionally enough, manages to summarize the Cheloki Wars in the thirty or so seconds granted him. And then of course there is Constantine. His modest white lace and black velvet vest contrasts with the extravagance of an ankle-length snakeskin coat. Sorya stands with him, another contrast in silken reds and yellows, the belt of gold linked foci low around her hips, its falling tail curving suggestively over a smooth, carefully posed thigh revealed by the slit skirt.

  A reporter is unfortunate enough to ask Constantine what he thinks of a chromoplay based on his life.

  “This chromo is one of the signs, I think, that the New City is undergoing a rebirth,” Constantine says. His smile is genial, but there’s a yellowish intensity in his eyes, the smallest touch of something feral. “Perhaps we are at a distance now where we can judge ideas for themselves, and not for the sad and bloody circumstance of their birth.”

  The reporter seems not to know what entirely to make of this — he wanted a little bonbon of a quote, something enthusiastic and tasty and instantly forgettable, and not this banquet of prose.

  “Do you think the chromo will help people understand your ideas, then?” he interrupts. Constantine looks into the camera and bares his teeth in a carnivore smile, his face looming above tens of thousands of people in theaters worldwide. A cold glow lights his eyes, and Aiah feels a shudder of recognition run up her spine, a recognition of the intensity and passion that, for this instant, Constantine has permitted his audience to see. This was clearly the opportunity he was waiting for.

  “The world,” he says, “has not lost its capacity to astonish. And neither has the New City,” he leans toward the camera, his voice an abrupt, startling theatrical growl, “and neither have I.”

  There is a moment of absolute silence in the theater, and Aiah wants to applaud Constantine’s pure astonishing craft — and after a second she does so. Others in the theater take her cue and begin to echo her applause, but the reporter, himself slow to recover from the intensity of Constantine’s unexpected performance, rises gamely with another question.

  “Is this an announcement, Metropolitan?”

  Constantine’s smile might as well have been borrowed from the cat that stole the cream. “When I perform a thing,” he says, “I perform it — others may do the announcing then, if they like.”

  The reporter clearly finds all this too alarming, and turns to Sorya for relief. “And you, Madame Sorya,” he says, “are you looking forward to the premiere?”

  “I expect great things,” Sorya says. “Both in the theater — and outside it.”

  There follows the reportorial equivalent of fleeing in abject rout — the poor man turns to the camera and cuts thankfully to an interview with one of the minor players, who will presumably provide all the bonbons necessary.

  The chromo is fabulous, the actor says. Kherzaki is fabulous, and so is Sandvak. The whole experience of working with them was, in a word, fabulous. While bonbons fall thick and fast, Aiah goes to the theater bar and has a glass of wine. She’s accustomed to Constantine’s vintages and has forgotten how dreadful the ordinary stuff is, and she leaves the glass half-finished on the bar and returns to sit next to her doorman.

  The chromoplay, when it finally begins, makes Aiah forget the bad taste in her mouth. The opening scene, a frenzied devotional dance performed in a monastery, is purely riveting — whirling bodies, flaming robes, popping eyes, clashing cymbals — and is followed by a long, smooth, silent pan, through the legs of the dancers as they file out, along the length of a monumentally long room, to the actor Kherzaki seated in a posture of meditation, a tasseled prayer stick in each hand. Red and yellow ritual marks are painted on his forehead and cheeks. There is even more silence — a long, long silence — before the actor rises, still without speaking, and walks away. The only sound is the whispering silk of his robes.

  Aiah marvels at a director who knows how to use silence and stillness. She can’t remember when she’s last seen a chromoplay that wasn’t all fast cuts and constant movement.

  “My father is dead, Reverence.” The first words spoken by Kherzaki. The voice isn’t Constantine’s, but that of a near cousin: Kherzaki’s opera training gives him a resonance and authority similar to Constantine’s even though the timbre is different, smoothly flowing liquid rather than tempered steel.

  “Everything returns to the Shield in the end.” It’s the abbot speaking, a wizened man with a birdlike tilt to his head, a twittering voice, a holy symbol tattooed on his forehead and eerie blue blobs of mascara on his eyes.

  “I request leave to attend his funeral.”

  “You may have it, child of matter,” says the abbot.

  Kherzaki gratefully inclines his head. “I ask first for a gift of your wisdom.”

  “The gift is not mine,” the abbot demurs, “but that of the Great Path of Superior Perfection.”

  “I wish to inquire about evil.”

  “Evil is a transient phenomenon that cannot sustain itself. Purify your mind and heart of desire, and evil can gain no lodgment therein.”

  The student is persistent. “And what of exterior evil? Can it be overcome through action?”

  “All evil is transient. By its nature it cannot sustain itself. No action is necessary, nor required.”

  Kherzaki’s deep eyes glitter. “If evil is transient, then the transience is because evil destroys itself, and that destruction is inevitable. Cannot people of virtue aid evil in its self-destruction, so as to prevent its innocent victims from suffering?”

  The abbot frowns. “All weapons turn against their owners, child of matter. All desire corrupts. All action is futile. If you wish to aid those who suffer, then teach them to live without desire.”

  “Without desire for food for their children? Without desire for hope? Without desire for liberty or justice?”

  “Just so.”

  There is a long pause, and then Kherzaki turns and leaves. The abbot gives a bemused smile and sips gratefully at his tea.

  And Kherzaki, in his room, breaks his prayer sticks over his knee, leaves his robes in the closet, washes the ritual daubings from his face, and goes forth to make revolution.

  It’s not precisely history — Aiah knows that Constantine left the School of Radritha some years before he made his bid for Cheloki, and that Constantine’s father survived, under house arrest, into the civil war that followed. The chromoplay names no real names: Kherzaki’s character is called Clothius, the monastery is a fictional one, though characteristic of its type, and the metropolis over which Kherzaki strives is called Lokhamar. The fictionalizations are transparent but somehow aid the chromo’s purpose; t
he characters aren’t so much anonyms as literary constructs, a thing in keeping with the entire chromoplay, which is highly stylized, as if inspired by Kherzaki’s world of the opera. The actions are grander than in reality, the colors brighter, the gestures more sweeping, the silences more profound. The heightened style transforms a kind of historical outline into a mighty tragedy, a form far more powerful than the merely true.

  Kherzaki is never less than magnificent. He attempts no imitation of Constantine, but there are occasional intriguing echoes: an impatient gesture or pantherish glance, or phrases that Aiah remembers falling from Constantine’s lips. The actor is particularly effective at the end, after all hope is gone, striving to maintain his brittle dignity while trying to negotiate his own exile and the surrender of his metropolis to the corrupt forces that have brought about the destruction of all his schemes.

  Aiah is thrilled to the marrow, and she’s not alone, because at the end the audience burst into applause right along with her. She’s never seen a biography of such scope, nor a worthier testimony to someone’s life and thought.

  There’s a brief intermission, after which there will be a live report from the huge premiere party. After the five-course dinner that was the chromoplay, Aiah isn’t particularly interested in more bonbons from celebrities, so she rises and adjusts her jacket. Her doorman rises to give her room to pass.

  “Good chromo,” he says.

  “I think Constantine should be pleased.”

  “Constantine?” His brow furrows. “Was he in the cast? I don’t remember seeing him.”

  Aiah looks at the man. “It was about Constantine, about his life. Clothius was Constantine.”

  The doorman blinks. “Oh. Is that why he’s famous, then? I never knew.” And then, at Aiah’s startled look, he adds, “I don’t much keep up with the news.”

  Aiah makes an effort to master her surprise. “Well, I’m glad you liked it, anyway.” She shuffles past him on her way to the aisle.