Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  STRIFE ALLEGED IN OPERATION

  TWO STREET COLONELS ASSASSINATED

  Another creeper turns up in her office and asks her a lot of familiar questions. Aiah answers patiently, her answers consistent with everything she’s said before, and she looks up into the scowling face of her interrogator and thinks: You may have a new boss soon, courtesy of me.

  She settles into her stolen chair. “I thought the government was officially blaming Constantine for this one,” she says. “Why are you bothering to question me at all?”

  “Constantine may have had accomplices.”

  “Constantine’s accomplices aren’t lousy Grade Sixes in Jaspeer,” Aiah says. “Constantine’s accomplices are being appointed to run whole departments in Caraqui. Do you really think if I knew Constantine, I’d be stupid enough to stay here when I could be in Caraqui living like a queen?”

  Asking the question leaves a bitter taste in Aiah’s mouth. Sometimes, she thinks, a question implies its own answer, its own perfect truth.

  “Maybe you don’t want to leave Jaspeer,” the creeper says. “You were born here and have lived here all your life, and you have a lover here. Jaspeer is your metropolis.”

  “My metropolis,” Aiah says, suddenly in passionate love with the truth, “was destroyed before I was born.”

  After the creeper leaves, Aiah puts on her headset, logs in, and, between calls on her computer, begins to plan her escape.

  If the ID is really going to follow her everywhere, she thinks, that’s going to complicate everything.

  LODAQ III OVERTHROWN!

  IS CONSTANTINE’S INFLUENCE SPREADING?

  DETAILS ON THE WIRE!

  Aiah gives it three more days. The creepers are still following her at least part of the time; sometimes they’re easy to spot, particularly after she starts recognizing faces, but sometimes she just can’t be sure. Any plan she develops has to deal with the possibility that she might be tailed without knowing it.

  Aiah calls the Wisdom Fortune Temple and finds out the times of their services.

  The easiest way to follow her, she knows, is through telepresence. From the back of one kitchen cabinet she takes one of the plasm batteries that, all those weeks ago, she carried in her tote bag to and from Terminal. She takes it to her plasm meter and fixes the battery’s alligator clip to the live well wire.

  Dials click over as the battery fills. It’s the first time Aiah has ever used the plasm connection in her building.

  She puts a finger on the contact and feels her nerves cry at the touch of plasm. The sensation takes her breath away.

  She had tried very hard to forget what this was like.

  Aiah recalls how plasm turned gold in the sky when she was feeding it to Red Bolt. She takes a breath and expands her sensorium, tries to attune it to the presence of plasm. Carefully she scours her apartment.

  Nothing other than the glow she’s generating herself.

  But any hypothetical mage following her might have guessed what she was attempting and flown his anima somewhere else. So she pops her own anima out into the hallway outside — nothing there — and then looks in the apartment across the hall, above, below and to either side.

  Still nothing, saving the knowledge that the lady next door is cutting her toenails.

  Aiah takes the finger off the contact, makes certain the battery is full, and detaches the alligator clip. She looks at the meter and realizes she now owes six hundred dalders to the Authority.

  She puts the battery in her tote along with a dark blue jacket, her ivory necklace, Volume Fourteen of the Proceedings, a floppy hat and her passport. She takes the money from under her mattress, hesitates for a moment, then adds the portrait of Karlo. Then she dons a light beige jacket, picks up a pillow and leaves the apartment.

  In one of Loeno’s basements she uses her Authority passkey to open a metal door leading into the utility tunnel. Once inside she puts her finger on the battery contact again, checks for watchers, then takes her checktube from its hiding place behind the plasm main, wipes off the gritty dust and stows it in her tote.

  She leaves Loeno Towers by her usual door and almost at once sees the creepers’ car drifting down the street after her. When she drops into the New Central Line Station, two creepers have to exit in a hurry and follow her.

  New Central Line to Red Line to Circle Line. The last car jolts so badly it nearly puts her back out of joint. She leaves the trackline at Old Shorings and almost dances to the surface.

  Childhood memories rise along with the scent of food and the sound of music rolling out of open windows. The buildings lean on their scaffolds like old friends bending over her to wish her well. Chardug the Hermit greets her cheerfully from his pillar, and she drops a little change in his basket.

  The last time, she thinks, she’ll see any of this.

  For good luck she buys a bowl of hot noodles flavored with onions and chiles, her favorite. Above her head, plasm Lynxoid Brothers battle the Blue Titan in an advertisement for the new chromoplay. Glancing down the street she can see the unhappy pale faces of the Jaspeeri cops standing out like neon displays amid the brown Barkazil population, and Aiah has to turn away to hide her smile.

  Aiah climbs the worn metal stair to the Wisdom Fortune Temple, passing two elderly women in white-and-blue temple garb who have stopped on the landing to catch their breath. The steel door is open and Aiah enters, breathing in the scent of the packaged herbs behind the store counter. Behind the counter is Dhival, Khorsa’s sister, dressed in red-and-gold velvet robes, her face dramatic with heavy cosmetics.

  Dhival looks surprised, but comes out from behind the counter to give Aiah an embrace and a kiss on each cheek. “Have you come for services?”

  “Is Khorsa here?”

  “In her office. I’ll get her.”

  “I need to speak to her privately, if I might.”

  Dhival looks surprised. “Fine. Just go back, then.”

  Aiah finds the office and knocks on the open door, and Khorsa looks up from a thick ledger. Splendid in her scarlet temple robes, she rises to give Aiah a hug. At the touch of Khorsa’s cool cheek on her own, Aiah feels a degree of tension ebbing from her.

  Khorsa looks at the pillow Aiah carries and says, “Can I loan you a robe?”

  “The pillow’s camouflage. Actually I was hoping for some help.”

  Khorsa draws back, looks at Aiah, and shows no surprise at all. “Of course, after everything we owe you. What do you need?”

  “There are two Jaspeeri men following me. I want to evade them for a few hours.”

  Khorsa tilts her head and considers the problem. “Evade how? I can send a message to the Vampire clubhouse and have those two sent to a hospital, if that’s what you want.”

  “No. That would only get people in trouble. All I’d like is to get out the back way, if there is one, and for you to make certain I’m not being followed till I get to the pneuma station.” Aiah reaches into her tote, pulls out the full plasm battery. “Can you or Dhival use telepresence technique?”

  “I’m better at it than she is,” Khorsa said. “But you don’t have to give me plasm. I can dip my own well.”

  Finger-cymbals begin chiming from the temple. Aiah holds the battery out.

  “Take it. It’s too heavy to carry with me.”

  Khorsa looks at the battery, reluctance on her face, then takes it in her many-ringed hands. She looks back at Aiah. “Dare I ask what this is about?”

  “It’s very complicated,” Aiah says, hoping she won’t have to make a passu out of Khorsa, but the tiny woman keeps looking at her, and finally Aiah gives in. “Those two are police,” Aiah says, “I found out some things about their department — it involves corruption — and now I want to get away from them for a while.”

  Khorsa absorbs this and shifts at once to practical matters. “Do you need shelter?”

  “Oh no. Thank you. If I can get a few hours away from them, things will settle themselves. I just need to k
now that no one is following me — neither those two, nor a mage.”

  Khorsa nods, “I’d best go into the temple and let them know that someone else will have to beat the drum during the service. Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  Khorsa puts the plasm battery on her desk and bustles out. Aiah takes off her beige jacket and puts it into her tote, then takes out the blue jacket and puts it on. She pins up her long hair, then pulls the floppy hat out of her tote and tugs it over her head.

  A drum beats tentatively in the temple and Khorsa returns. She looks at Aiah, reaches up to pull the hat brim more firmly into place, and then nods. “If I see anyone following,” she says, “I’ll give a signal. A red glow right in front of your face. I’ll try to make certain you’re not blinded, but I want you to see it.”

  Aiah nods.

  “If they follow you, what will you do then? Will you need protection?”

  “I’ll come back and attend the service. Then I’ll go home, and I’ll know that they’re better than I had reason to suspect.”

  Khorsa purses her lips and looks thoughtful, “I wish I could give you more help.” The drum beats steadily now and Aiah can hear Dhival calling for everyone to enter the temple. The worshipers begin clapping and chiming finger cymbals as they file in.

  “Might as well get started,” Khorsa says. She reaches behind the desk, opens a small door, reveals a plasm connection and contacts. Khorsa produces a t-grip from her robe pocket, jacks it into the connection, and then settles herself into her chair.

  The battery remains on her desk. Perhaps she means to return it to Aiah later, or maybe she just wants the city’s well because it gives her more flexibility.

  “I’ll scout the outside of the building first,” she says. “If someone’s watching the back alley we may have to rethink everything.”

  Khorsa closes her eyes in concentration, and Aiah uneasily shifts her tote from one shoulder to the other. She can feel perspiration gathering under her hat brim.

  Music rises and falls, an invocation of Dhoran of the Dead. Aiah pictures it spilling out into the street through the open windows, the Jaspeeri cops looking up and wondering.

  A laugh bubbles up from Khorsa’s lips. “They’re both out front,” she says. “They are looking very uncomfortable. What kind of cops are these? You’d think they’d be more at home on the street.”

  “Authority cops.”

  “Oh.” Dismissively. “No wonder.” There is another moment of silence. “No one in the alley,” she says. “No one watching that I can see.”

  Jump to it, girl, Aiah thinks. But her feet don’t move, she stands in place and looks at Khorsa and suddenly wants never to leave, to shelter here forever amid the sweet smell of herbs, the music and chanting...

  It is Dhoran of the Dead they are invoking, she remembers, and thinks of the barges trailing little wisps of ash as they move down the Martyrs’ Canal.

  Her legs jerk as if hit by an electric shock, and take her out of the room faster than the speed of thought.

  Down the stair, out the back hall. The tote bangs against her hip. She hits the back door, pushes it open against resistance. Something clatters as the door opens, and she steps out into an alley that smells of urine and rotting food.

  The alley is filled with broken glass, old furniture and piles of human feces. Whoever lives here doesn’t seem to be around at the moment, and Aiah darts around the worst of the mess. The sound of chanting follows her like a friendly memory. Once out of the alley she heads east in order to put several streets between her and the Authority cops, and then turns north to the pneuma station. The pneuma isn’t really in this neighborhood, being almost a radius away, but with brisk walking she thinks she can probably make it in ten or twelve minutes.

  She crosses a street and marches halfway down the block before she recognizes the big building coming up on her left, the old temple covered with stone carvings, the vines and monsters that loom at her out of her childhood. The porch before the steel doors is dusted with rice and other offerings.

  Aiah slows as she passes, then dips a hand into her pocket, pulls out some coins, and flings them at the steel door. They splash like the silver drops of a fountain as they strike, a series of clean ringing sounds; and Aiah turns her back on the place, laughs and runs onward.

  She hopes Khorsa is amused.

  No red lights appear in front of her face.

  There is a long, anxious wait on a cold, empty pneuma station. A stray sad thought of Gil sticks like a lump in her throat: he will return home to an empty apartment, to bills his salary won’t cover. She will have to send him money from her bank account, twenty or thirty thousand, something that will pay for half the apartment.

  She climbs aboard the pneuma once it arrives, and it takes her straight to Gold Town InterMet, where she buys a ticket for Karapoor. Anxiety tingles through her thoughts as she has to show her passport to the sleepy-eyed ticket clerk to prove she can get into Karapoor — there might be a watch out on her. But the clerk doesn’t even glance at the picture, punches the button on her console, and Aiah’s token spins down a gray metal slide into her hand.

  From Karapoor she can get on a high-speed pneuma that will take her halfway to Caraqui by noon tomorrow.

  She steps into the InterMetropolitan and looks at her fellow travelers, mostly glassy-eyed commuters heading for home, and finds a seat by herself. The doors close. The wind whistles across the smooth surface of the car as the system inhales, and then there’s a kick to her spine as compressed air spits her out into the world.

  Constantine has a way of being fatal to his friends. Sorya’s words flash through Aiah’s mind.

  Well, she thinks, she’ll just have to take her chances.

  She takes out the fourteenth volume of Proceedings and opens it. Rohder’s research will be her gift to Constantine when she arrives.

  There’s no sign at the border to let her know she’s left Jaspeer, that she’s made her escape — there’s only the hiss of pneumatics as the car slows, as it drops out of the system and glides to a halt at the Karapoor InterMet station.

  And then, as the weary passengers gather their belongings, the car is filled with sudden light, little glowing flecks of plasm fire that drop from the ceiling, that fall like particolored snow on the wondering, uplifted faces of the passengers. A gift from Khorsa, who has followed Aiah all this way.

  The magical snowfall, Aiah notes, is every color in the world but red.

  THE END

  The following is an excerpt from City on Fire,

  The second book in the saga of Aiah and Constantine

  Hydrogen engines cough into life, and their barking roar echoes off the buildings. Winches roll; the huge cables straighten, then grow taut. Engineers peer at the bridges as the structures begin to creak— they are built to expand and contract as needed, at least within limits, but nothing has moved these structures in the centuries since the buildings were erected, and though everything has been cleaned and greased there is nevertheless anxiety that the bridges may not behave. Other engineers peer into bulky brass viewfinders set atop portable tripods: they are determining the distance between the buildings.

  The wind moans around the cables, a baritone hum that rises occasionally to a shriek. Nothing anchors these buildings on their pontoons, nothing but the hugeness of their own inert mass and the mass of the other structures to which they are moored. Although the winches are slowly drawing in cable, it’s impossible to estimate by eye whether the buildings are moving closer or not. Elsewhere, out of sight, other cables are being slacked as these are drawn in.

  The men at the viewfinders shout into their radios, and the winches grind to a stop; there is the sound of banging from the bridges, and then Rohder is waving his arms and the engines rumble to a stop. The sound of helicopters beats surprisingly loud in the sky.

  Aiah walks out of the alcove and looks up— no copters, but letters flaming red against the dull gray clouds: The Provisional Government orders
the public to behave in an orderly manner.

  Provisional? Ridiculous. And what has there been but calm? Who is wasting government plasm on this? Above, the hermit twists in the wind. Below, Constantine is amid a clump of engineers, but he’s clearly visible, a head taller than any of them. His presence seems expanded by a wide grin. In the crowd, Rohder is distinguished only by the puffs of his cigaret smoke that are whipped away by the wind. The camera circles the group of men, patiently waiting for a revelation. Aiah approaches, reaches the fringes of the group, then hesitates. She really isn’t a part of this.

  Rohder is shouting into a handheld radio, pink face flushing. “What did you say? Say again!” Its curved antenna dances with every word. Constantine, grin broadening, reaches for the radio, takes it, turns a little plastic knob, and hands it back. “That should work,” he says.

  Rohder shouts again. When he gets his answer, he looks up at Constantine and speaks in a soft voice. “Six percent.” Aiah can barely hear him.

  Constantine tilts his head back, and his laugh booms out above the sound of helicopters. He is playing, Aiah knows, to the camera, but his joy must be genuine enough. “Congratulations,” he says.

  Rohder frowns. “We’ll do better next time. These buildings are two or three hundred years old, and the plans are lost. Our mass estimates were approximations.”

  “Six percent is very good!” Projecting his voice to the man with the microphone.

  That frown again. “I had hoped for better.” In a mumble that the soundman almost certainly did not catch. Apparently Rohder is not interested in securing his place in history.

  Rohder has people monitoring the plasm outflow from the two buildings in order to get instant readings on any increase. The data is preliminary, since it might be skewed by any plasm use in the buildings, and only averages over the next several weeks will produce a final figure.