City on Fire
( Metropolitan - 2 )
Walter Jon Williams
In a mind-bending odyssey through a world rife with tyranny, a rebel group schemes to harness a radical new energy source—plasm.
Walter Jon Williams
City on Fire
ONE
The car shoots through the InterMet tunnel, flying beneath the world-city as if propelled by the breath of a god. Drowsing on the car as it flies beneath the world, Aiah dreams of the Burning Man.
He stands tall above the neighboring buildings, a figure of fire. A whirlwind surrounds him, a spiral blur of tortured air, flying debris, swirling ash. Holocausts leap into being at his approach; buildings explode into flame merely at his passage. A torrent of fire flies from his fingertips, turning to cinders everything it touches.
Unwilling, unable to help herself, knowing somehow it is a duty, Aiah approaches the Burning Man. A scream comes from the hollow throat, a cry mixed of terror and rage, and Aiah realizes that the giant figure is a woman.
As she comes a little closer, Aiah looks full into the face of the raging figure and sees that the Burning Woman is herself.
She wakes with a start and finds herself in motion, in the pneuma car that hisses along beneath the world. Sweat plasters her collar to her neck. She swabs her throat with a handkerchief and again closes her eyes. Fire pulses on the insides of her eyelids.
The arrow-straight tunnel of the pneuma is surrounded by the eternal weight of the city… brick and stone, steel and iron and alloy, concrete and glass, rising from bedrock and stretching toward the Shield far above. The mass of it all is beyond comprehension. So is the power it creates.
All that is human is a generator—every building, every foundation, every conduit or sewer or elevated trackline. All the world-city, every frame and stone of it, produces and stores plasm, the foundation of geomantic power.
Power which, for a moment or two of brilliant comprehension, Aiah had held in her mind. She had possessed its possibilities, its glories. Felt it change her. Felt herself change the world. Felt its fires scorch her nerves.
Those certainties are gone now, replaced by confusion, hesitation, danger. If she can get the power back, she thinks, even for a moment, all will become clear.
If.
If.
If she can somehow get the power back.
MARTIAL LAW STILL IN FORCE
SURVIVING KEREMATHS DENOUNCE COUP FROM EXILE
By the time she gets to Caraqui, Aiah has almost talked herself out of it. Foolish, she’s decided, to leave her place in Jaspeer, foolish to run, foolish to think that the new government in Caraqui would give her a place. No Barkazils here—she will be even more a foreigner here than in Jaspeer. And Constantine will not give her anything—he did not love her—he had only used her for what she could give him, the keys to power, and could not possibly have any further interest in her.
But the police had been after her, the Plasm Authority creepers, and sooner or later they would have found something that would put her in prison. It was time to leave Jaspeer. In her mind she had already leaped a hundred borders—crossing them physically was almost an afterthought.
And once exiled, once that leap has been taken, where else is there to go?
Caraqui. Where the New City, consigned to ashes years ago, might undergo an unscheduled rebirth. Caraqui. Where her future waits. Assuming, of course, it waits anywhere.
LORDS OF THE NEW CITY BREAKS RECORDS THIRD SMASH WEEKEND FOR BIO-CHROMO
Gravity tugs at Aiah’s inner ear as the InterMet brakes, drops out of the system, comes with a hum of electromagnets to a stop at the platform. A banner splashed with red letters hangs against a bright mosaic on the back of the platform.
Welcome to Free Caraq… The last letters are obscured by the banner’s dangling upper corner, come loose and fallen across the message.
And that’s it. There is no one on the platform, just the message on the banner.
Somehow Aiah had expected more.
Pneumatics hiss as the car’s doors swing open. The other two occupants disembark. Aiah rises, takes her bag from the overhead rack, and carries it out onto the platform. The bag is light—she had left all her belongings behind as she fled, and only bought a few things in Gunalaht on her way. There is only one heavy thing in her bag, a book, red plastic leatherette binding with gilt letters. Her legacy to her new home.
As she walks past the mosaic she realizes that it’s political, a noble-looking man wearing a kind of uniform and gazing off into the far distance. My father made the political revolution, it promises. / will make the economic revolution.
Covered now by the banner of the real revolution.
She doesn’t know precisely who the figure on the mosaic is supposed to be, but she knows it has to be one of the Kere-maths, the family that had ruled Caraqui for generations. The promise of economic revolution had been a lie—during their years of power the Keremaths ruled by kleptocracy, a government by gangsters bent on looting their own economy, their own people.
They were mostly dead now, the Keremaths. Constantine’s revolution had killed them, and it had been Aiah who had, against every law, given Constantine the plasm necessary to accomplish their destruction.
It is a matter of more than casual interest to discover how grateful Constantine will prove. Especially as she now has nothing to offer him, and gratitude is all she can expect.
The book in Aiah’s bag bangs against her hip as she walks down a short corridor lined with adverts—familiar posters for the new Lynxoid Brothers chromoplay, the Inter-Metropolitan Lottery, Gulman Shoes (“Meet for the Street”), all alongside more exotic promotions for Sea Mage Motor Craft and the New Theory Hydrogen Company. Then suddenly she’s out of the tunnel and into the main body of the station, and her heart leaps as she sees armored soldiers with their guns out, sets of goggled eyes gazing at her. Mercenaries, she thinks, because half of them have the black skins of the veteran Cheloki exiles who have been following Constantine for years.
The masked eyes pass over Aiah without pause. They’re not interested in arrivals. They’re clustered around the departure platforms.
They’re interested in people trying to escape.
There are counters for customs officials to interview arriving passengers, but no one is there: perhaps they haven’t shown up for work. Outside Aiah finds herself on a promenade overlooking a canal. A pair of ascetics, bearded and grimy, sit on beds of nails before their begging bowls. One of them brandishes a handmade poster about the “Uniting of the Altogether.” The canal water is bright green with algae. There is salt in the air and bobbing rubbish in the water. Caraqui, except for a strip of mainland here and there and some islands, is built across its sea on huge, ancient concrete pontoons, all linked together by bridges, cables, and anchors.
From atop the worn promenade rail allegorical bronze statues, weathered, pitted, and green, gaze down at Aiah from ruined, pop-eyed faces. She is uncomfortable under their gaze, but isn’t certain where to go from here.
She looks up as shining silver-blue letters track across the gray sky: There is no need for alarm. All fighting is over. The curfew has ended. The revolutionary government encourages citizens to go about their normal business.
An elderly female lottery seller, going about her normal business, shuffles toward Aiah on bare, swollen feet. She was probably selling tickets at the height of the fighting. Aiah buys one.
For luck, she thinks.
There’s a sign pointing down some steps, with the legend Water Taxis. She follows it.
The taxi is a small outboard with a tattered red plastic awning, driven by a weathered man of middle years. The hand that reaches for her bag is missing
the first two fingers. A handwritten sign next to the meter says, We take foreign currency.
Aiah has read a guide to Caraqui on the Wire, and knows the name of a hotel near the government center. She had tried to call to make reservations but the lines were down.
“Hotel Ladaq,” she says.
He helps her into the boat with his clawed hand. “Can’t do that, miss,” the driver says. “Hotel Ladaq’s full of soldiers.”
“Do you know another hotel in the area?” “All full of soldiers, miss.”
“Get me as close to Government Harbor as you can.”
He starts the meter. “Right away, miss.”
But it doesn’t happen right away. The driver casts off, but then he can’t start the outboard, and as the wind pushes the water taxi broadside down the canal he has to take the cover off the motor and tinker with it, and then try to start it again, then tinker some more. Several taxis leave from the station in the meantime, and Aiah’s taxi rocks in their wake.
The meter, Aiah notices, is still running. She points this out to the driver, but he affects to be too busy with the engine to notice.
He tries to start the engine and fails. Aiah points out the meter is still running, but the driver starts kicking the motor and screaming.
It’s a chonah, Aiah thinks. The driver’s a confidence rigger and there probably isn’t anything really wrong with the engine.
If she were home she’d know what to do. But the fact she’s a stranger in this place makes her hesitate.
Finally Aiah steps forward and turns off the cab’s meter. The driver is stern.
“Can’t do that, lady. It’s government regulation. Only the driver can touch the meter.”
He steps forward to turn it on again. She keeps her hand over the button. “Start the engine first,” she says. “Then you can start the meter.”
The driver shrugs. With showy, large gestures, he tinkers with the engine again. Puts the cover on. Starts it without so much as a cough.
Aiah is entertained. She’s a Barkazil, one of the Cunning People. Her ancestors have rigged chonahs for thousands of years. This sort of thing is in her blood.
The pontoons and barges are old in this district, layered with barnacles beneath the waterline. The buildings on the pontoons are old as well, and as layered, new structures barnacled atop the old, until the form and shape and function of the original building has been completely obscured.
When she arrives at her hotel, she tries to calculate exchange rates, and gives the driver what she thinks is the correct amount in Gunalaht dalders. She knows, from the driver’s sudden bright grin, that she’s overpaid. Suddenly he’s pressing a plastic business card into her hand.
“My name is Callaq, miss! Please call at any time! I will show you the sights, the Aerial Palace, the place where all the battles were fought, anything!”
“Maybe.”
“Please call! I’ll take you anywhere!” “Thank you, Callaq.”
She carries her bag up corroded marble steps slippery with sea slime. Beggars hold out cupped hands on the stairs. From the top she turns to look back at this strange metropolis, sees the taxi churning away, an old moored tugboat that probably hasn’t moved in years and is flying a string of laundry, a flock of scabrous waterfowl staring at her with agate eyes.
And then, in the air above the canal, there forms a pattern, lines and colors interlinking, the pattern flowing like water… It bursts so swiftly in the sky, like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, that she can only catch a fragment of the wholeness, a curve, a maze, a wonderment. Aiah stares openmouthed.
“The Dreaming Sisters,” says a strange male voice.
The colors fade, leaving an imprint on Aiah’s vision, which glows for a few seconds like the afterburn of a photographer’s flash.
She turns to see who was speaking, her tongue poised to ask more questions; but it’s a businessman, sallow and sleek, and from the glint of his eye she can tell he’d like nothing more than a frolic with a strange woman, so she merely nods, then takes her bag indoors.
NEW GOVERNMENT CALLS FOR EXILES TO RETURN
“WE NEED YOUR SKILLS TO REBUILD CARAQUI,” SAYS TRIUMVIR DRUMBETH
The hotel is an ancient place that has seen better days. Prostitutes cruise the lobby, either shockingly young or shockingly aged. Ribbed plastic sheeting protects old, broken tiles that were once bright with abstract designs dating from the old Geoform movement. Aiah’s room has a lovely plastered ceiling with a life-size figure of the immortal Khomak brandishing his assault rifle overhead and riding that fabulous animal, the sea horse… but from the sea horse hangs a wire, and on the end of the wire is a naked bulb. The bed has a cheap steel frame and the bedsprings squeak. There is no other furniture. Over the sink hangs a sign: Hot Water Available 05:00-07:00.
It’s 10:31, according to Aiah’s watch. She guesses she’s missed her bath for the day.
There is a communications jack but no telephone. Aiah finds she can rent one by the hour and does so. It’s an unusual piece, with a pair of heavy brass earphones and a trumpet-shaped mouthpiece braced up in front of her face by a butter-smooth brass prop in the shape of a human arm.
Constantine, she knows, is Minister of Resources in the new government. She calls the ministry in Government Harbor, but all they will do is take a message, so she phones the Aerial Palace and asks to be connected to his suite. She can’t even get anyone who will promise to take a message to him.
“Not unless you’re on the list,” she’s told.
“Can I speak to Mr. Khoriak, then?”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s a member of Constantine’s suite.” One of his guards. “I’ll see.”
Aiah waits for ten minutes, hoping that Khoriak wasn’t killed in the fighting. “This is Khoriak.”
Relief pours through Aiah, relieving tension she hadn’t realized she’d possessed.
“Khoriak, this is Aiah. Aiah from Jaspeer. You remember?” “Of course.”
Of course. Idiot. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him.
“I’m in Caraqui. Hotel Oceanic. I would like to see the Metropolitan Constantine, but I can’t seem to reach him.” “I’ll tell him.”
Half an hour later, she’s on Constantine’s private launch. Fast work. She’s been in Caraqui less than two hours.
TRIUMVIR PARQ CALLS FOR DAY OF PRAYER
DALAVANS TO FAST ON FRIDAY
The launch seems to have been liberated from the Keremaths or their supporters: the hull is a shiny black polymer composite with silver trim—not chrome but actual silver, kept bright by the endless polishing of the crew, or perhaps through some hermetic process.
There is a deep whine as the boat accelerates, hydrogen burning through its turbines. It clearly has a lot of power to spare.
The captain is a black-skinned Cheloki, a newcomer. He drives the boat well but doesn’t know the territory: he constantly refers to the map pinned to the chart table next to the wheel. There is a soldier who places a fine white wine and a basket of sandwiches atop the table on the fantail. He is clearly uncomfortable in the role of servant—less than a week ago he was probably in combat—but he’s gracious enough, all things considered. Aiah realizes she hasn’t eaten since second shift yesterday, and she tries not to bolt the sandwiches.
The sleek motorcraft arrows neatly through the green water. The pontoons that loom on either side are painted with fading slogans and the images of dead Keremaths. Our family is your family—the slogan arches above dead, flaking faces. Aiah finds herself looking for dolphins—she had met one once, and spoken with him, and she knows they inhabit these waters. But no pale dolphins break the surface of the water.
Aiah is startled to see a large tram car float overhead along a set of cables. The green car, with its rounded, aerodynamic corners, is big as a bus, and obviously serves the same purpose.
Practical, Aiah thinks. It avoids congestion on the bridges, or building expensive tunnels underw
ater for pneuma and trackline transport.
Images of the Blue Titan and the Lynxoid Brothers brighten the sky, a plasm advert for the new chromoplay…
The buildings grow nicer as the boat approaches the Aerial Palace: expensive apartments, tinted glass and jutting balconies with fancy gingerbread scrollwork on the rails, and broad-shouldered office buildings crouching on their pontoons like animals ready to spring. Buildings don’t reach as high here as in Jaspeer, because it would make the pontoons top-heavy.
And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking: a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.
Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!
The Burning Man had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.
Twenty-five thousand dead. Including the mage. Several thousand soldiers. The rest civilians.
Aiah, in the coup’s headquarters, had watched it happen, had tried to stop it… too late.
Her fault. She had provided the plasm.
Come to mourn the dead!
There are people hanging, she sees, from the ruined buildings. Hanging in what look like sacks, feet sticking out the bottom, the sacks swinging free on lines secured to broken rooftops. They are not dead people, not casualties—they have hung themselves there since the burning.
Mad people? Mourners? Aiah cannot tell—they are all too far away.
Blowing soot brings tears to Aiah’s eyes. She dabs at them with her sleeve.
Then fantastic architecture of the Aerial Palace appears on the horizon, all swoops and spirals like the path of a falcon traced through the air. Shieldlight shimmers off the arabesques of the building’s collection web, bronze patterns set into the building’s exterior and designed to absorb and defuse any plasm attack, defense and ornament in one. The burnished bronze adds lovely bright accents to the building’s design, but its defense aspect failed drastically—the building is scarred, pocked by machine guns and punctured by rockets. Plastic sheeting is tacked up over shattered windows. The Keremaths lived here, and they died here, too. When the assault teams fought their way up the stairways they found only corpses.
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