City on Fire m-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  There seems no doorbell or knocker, so Aiah finds a piece of the design—a border pattern of oak leaves—that curves conveniently in the form of a handhold, and gives the door a firm tug.

  Although the door is heavy, it opens smoothly. Inside there is a bare room a half-dozen paces square—gray flags, gray stone walls, a groined arch overhead with a globular electric lamp dangling on an iron chain. Two simple arched doorways on either side lead to corridors. In an arched alcove in the back of the room a young woman lies on a mattress. She wears a simple gray knee-length shift and watches without expression as Aiah’s party enters.

  Aiah’s nerves prickle as she realizes that the woman is wired to a plasm well. Even though there are no visible signs that the dreaming sister is working any magic here, she’s broadcasting signals of power perfectly recognizable to anyone who spends her days working with plasm.

  Aiah’s guards are trained to recognize the signs as well, and fan into the room in case there’s any threat of violent sorcery. The three-man inspection team, suspecting nothing, follows Aiah through the door. Aiah approaches the woman, who—reluctantly, it seems—sits up to receive her. A wire trails out of her mouth, her connection to the plasm well. The woman—nun? postulant? Simple Person?—is copper-skinned and black-haired, with the hair kept severely short in a bowl-shaped bob. She’s thin and waiflike and looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare, and her leg and armpit hair are unshaven.

  The dreaming sister removes the plasm connection from her mouth and holds it in her hand. The wire ends in a simple curved piece of copper metal, with a gleaming little copper ball on the end, an appliance like some people use for cleaning their tongues.

  “May I help you?” the woman asks.

  “My name is Aiah. I work with the ministry.” She shows her ID. “We’d like to examine your plasm meter.”

  “It’s behind a door around back. The meter readers normally don’t bother us.”

  Aiah looks over her shoulder at the inspection team, and their leader nods. “We’ll find it,” he says, and they push back out through the door.

  Aiah turns back to the young woman. “Is there someone in charge I may speak to?” she says. “We’re here for more than a meter reading.”

  The woman’s disinterested expression does not change. “May I ask what this concerns?”

  “You’ve got a license for a plasm accumulator, and we’d like to see it. And there’s also… something more complex. Is there someone I can speak to?”

  The woman’s lips give a little twitch of resignation. “Very well,” she says. Her brown eyes glance over each of the bodyguards in turn. Disdain enters her voice. “The gentlemen with the guns can wait here,” she says. Aiah sees her guards bristle, and she turns to them and tells them to stay.

  If the Dreaming Sisters turn out to be defrauding the government of plasm, she realizes, she’ll need more than these few guards to deal with this place. A battalion may be more in order.

  The dreaming sister, without looking back, has already drifted down one of the corridors, and Aiah is forced to hurry after her. The corridor follows a series of seemingly random curves, with other corridors intersecting at intervals, and the pathway rises and falls as well. The interior of the building, Aiah realizes, is as much a maze as the carved ornament outside. The dreaming sister walks without once looking back, as if she doesn’t care whether Aiah is following or not. Her bare feet don’t make a sound. Occasionally one of Aiah’s pumps skids out from under her—the flags beneath her feet have been polished slick by generations of bare feet.

  The corridor is mostly plain gray stone, lit every so often by hanging globular electric lamps. At intervals there are arched alcoves, each equipped with a mattress, a bolster, and plasm connections. Some of the alcoves are empty, some have women lying in them, each with a copper connector in her mouth, eyes closed or dreamily half-closed. Each has hair cropped short and wears only a gray cotton shift; each looks surprisingly young—Aiah sees no one who looks over twenty. Sometimes the sisters share mattresses, in pairs or threes or more, a pile of dreamy bare limbs and cropped heads. The women strewn atop mattresses might suggest the languid aftermath of a particularly strenuous orgy, but somehow the effect is strangely sexless: even lying in piles the women do not seem particularly aware of one another, of their surroundings, or for that matter of Aiah and her guide walking past them down the corridor. It seems more as if they are all addicted to the same narcotic, the juice of poppies perhaps, and are being stored on shelves until it is time for another dose.

  Carvings are also placed at intervals along the corridors, under simple rounded arches of the same style as the alcoves and branching corridors. Each is a carved relief, like the exterior door, and tries to give the impression of looking through a window or doorway; each features a central allegorical figure, a man or woman in characteristic dress, carrying objects peculiar to them: a broom, a rattle, a machine pistol, a lantern. The name of each figure is carved into the arch overhead. The Apprentice, Aiah reads. The Gamester… The One Who Stands Outside… Death… The One Who Drags Down.

  She wonders if in this dreaming cavern she is permitted to speak at all. “How many of you are there?” Aiah asks.

  “Two hundred fifty-six,” the sister replies. Aiah nods: in geomancy that is a Grand Square, a square of a square.

  “How long has this place been here?” Aiah asks.

  The sister looks over her shoulder at Aiah. Her eyes are dark and faraway, lost in the world of dreams.

  “Ten thousand years,” she says, in a voice that suggests, perhaps, that she does not care whether Aiah believes her or not.

  Surprise stops Aiah dead in her tracks by one of the alcoves. The dreaming sister lying there has twisted genes, but more than that, she is an Avian, one of the elite class, infamous for their cruelty, who ruled Caraqui before the Keremaths. Her face is thin and delicate, with huge half-lidded golden eyes and a raptor beak that looks as if it might easily bite her plasm connection in half. Her body is dainty and fragile, as if her bones were made of paper, and her hands, two taloned fingers and an opposable thumb, grow from atop the joint of the huge wing, soft brown-gold feathers barred with black, that is folded protectively over most of her body.

  “This is an Avian,” Aiah says in her surprise. The twisted woman is beautiful, Aiah thinks, but in the same way that a sculpture can be beautiful, or a piece of music. As an artifact, not as something human.

  She is glad that the Avian’s mind is elsewhere, that her eyes are not fully open to fix Aiah within their golden orbs.

  A touch of impatience enters the voice of Aiah’s guide. “We accept initiates of all races and conditions,” she says.

  “It’s illegal for her even to be here.”

  “Is that so?” In a tone of perfect indifference. Aiah’s guide turns and begins to walk away, and Aiah follows reluctantly, casting glances over her shoulder at the Avian until the twisted woman is out of sight.

  Another figure walks toward them. She is petite and blonde, with creamy skin so pale it seems translucent and a scattering of freckles over her nose and cheeks. She seems younger, if possible, than Aiah’s guide.

  “You asked for someone in authority?” she says.

  Aiah hesitates. “I meant,” she says, striving for tact, “someone older.”

  The girl raises a bare foot and scratches her instep. “I am four hundred fifty-one years old,” she says. “My name is Order of Eternity. I am therefore senior to Whore.” Her bright blue eyes travel to the other sister. “Who is two hundred and…?” Her voice trails off.

  “Two hundred fifty-eight,” says the first sister, whose name is apparently Whore. “I celebrated my Grand Square two years ago.”

  “Of course,” says Order of Eternity. “Pardon my lapse.” She smiles, balanced like a crane on one foot. “Thank you for bringing our guest. You may return to the door.”

  “Yes, Sister.” Whore turns and walks away, without looking back.

>   Order of Eternity puts her foot back on the floor and returns her attention to Aiah. She is short and barely comes to Aiah’s chin. “I am the most senior of the sisters available. How may I help you?”

  // this is a joke, Aiah promises herself, / am going to have my police take this place apart stone by stone.

  But instead she looks after the receding form of the other sister. “Is her name really Whore?”

  “Oh yes.” Nodding. “When we enter the order, we take a name either reflecting the outside world, which we wish to overcome, or a name reflecting that toward which, in our new life, we aspire.”

  “Was she a whore on the outside?”

  The dreaming sister shrugs. “Possibly. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.”

  Aiah turns to Order of Eternity, looks down at her impossibly young face. “You don’t look four hundred,” she says.

  There is a girlish lilt to the dreaming sister’s voice. Even her voice box seems not to have matured.

  “Our life is healthy and free from stress,” she says. “We spend our days in touch with plasm, which is the lifeblood of the world. There is no reason for us to age.”

  “If you sold your techniques,” Aiah says, “you could make millions.”

  A shrug again. “If we cared for millions,” says Order of Eternity, “we would.”

  A cynical little demon tugs at the corners of Aiah’s mouth. “I can’t think of many religions that don’t care about money.”

  “Are we a religion?” Order of Eternity cocks her head ingenuously and gives every impression that she has never considered this question before in her life. “I think not,” she concludes. “We have no congregation, no worshippers. Though some of us have private devotions, we do not as a group offer obedience or sacrifice to any particular gods or immortals. We live simply, according to the rules of our order, and contemplate that which exists—is that religious?”

  “Most people would think so.”

  “Then they are confusing natural life with religion. It is a comment on how unnatural their life has become. Would you like to walk with me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she begins to stroll down the corridor. Aiah shortens her own long-legged strides to match the other woman’s.

  Aiah frowns. “You’re living on a rusty old barge in the middle of the sea, and you’ve got electricity and sewer and plasm connections… is that natural? Shouldn’t you be living in a cave on a mountaintop somewhere?”

  “Simplicity,” says Order of Eternity, “is not the same as discomfort. Why recline on a sharp rock when there is a mattress near to hand?”

  “Living isolated, in a place like this, hardly seems natural.”

  “It is natural for us. We make no claim for anyone else.” Order of Eternity looks up at Aiah and gives a puzzled frown, wrinkling her freckled nose. “What is the purpose of your being here, exactly?”

  “I’m from the Ministry of Resources. I’m here to examine your plasm use and check your accumulator.”

  The sister gives a little nod, as if confirming an inward supposition. They walk past an arch containing a relief, Entering the Gateway, similar to that on the front door. The long-haired woman pushing open the door is of stone, not of bronze, but otherwise it is the same figure.

  “We do not employ significant amounts of plasm,” the sister says, “because we strive not to use it. We strive only to live in mutual awareness with plasm, to use it as a vehicle for an apprehension of the fundamental reality of this world.”

  “You use it to extend your life and youth,” Aiah points out.

  Order of Eternity nods. “When our bodies are damaged, we strive to repair them.”

  “When a doctor uses such techniques, his plasm bills are very high.”

  “When a doctor uses such techniques,” says Order of Eternity, “his techniques are intrusive and hasty. He must repair the damage of years, and do it in a matter of hours. We, on the other hand, have years, decades sometimes, to attune our bodies to the ways of health. A doctor cannot afford to spend years working on a single patient, but we can. My name is not chance-chosen—we attempt to live according to the order of eternity, not to the needs of the moment. Years of meditation makes us aware of our bodies and their needs in ways that are uncommon outside these walls. We can become aware of wrongness—illness—years before anyone outside would think to bring the matter to the attention of a doctor. At such times only a small effort is required to correct the problem. Our plasm use is therefore subtle, and our usage small.”

  Order of Eternity’s path takes her through an arch on the right, opposite a relief titled The Archon, a man in a long robe holding a multibranched candlestick, or perhaps a stylized tree… Dragging her eyes away, Aiah follows the dreaming sister.

  “There are also your aerial displays to consider,” she says. “I have seen them, and they are impressive.”

  A wistful smile crosses the sister’s youthful face. “I have not seen the displays in centuries. Not since I came to the Society when I was a girl.”

  “Someone here arranges them.”

  “We all do, in a way…” Order of Eternity’s voice trails away as she searches for words. “These displays… they are a glimpse into our meditations, but they are only a side effect. We seek to live in accord with plasm, the greatest creative power in the universe, and sometimes actual creation takes place.”

  “If I wished to make displays of this sort,” Aiah says, “a public relations agency would charge tens of thousands of dinars in plasm fees alone. You can’t claim, as with the life extension treatments, that you spend years creating these things, and that the plasm required is therefore small. I know how much plasm it costs to light up the sky.”

  Order of Eternity pauses, again searching for words. Behind her, two women lie in their niche, their eyes closed, dreaming in the soft light. One of them is twisted, her small embryo body looking like a grotesque doll that has been placed by the other’s pillow.

  “We do not entirely understand the phenomenon,” Aiah’s guide says. “The displays are not something we create consciously. And yet we live in harmony with plasm, and plasm is a constant of our world—it underlies all matter, all reality, and it reacts to the humans who use it, views the world through their perceptions as if through a lens. It knows things of which no human is consciously aware… and sometimes it creates things without a human consciously willing it.”

  A grin spreads across Aiah’s face. She has to admit that Order of Eternity had her going for a moment. Don’t try to fool one of the Cunning People, she thinks. We’ll see who’s the passu here.

  “You’re saying that nobody creates these things? Nobody sticks them up in the sky?”

  “Plasm is our life, our breath,” the dreaming sister says, “and we live in harmony with its motions and bind to it our souls. Plasm is a higher order of reality—it both creates reality and alters it. It would seem that plasm sometimes reflects our meditations, but it does so without our direction.”

  “And without running through your meter.”

  The dreaming sister simply shrugs. “Apparently so. Here is our accumulator.”

  Aiah follows the sister into a circular room and realizes she is beneath the copper dome. Slits in the dome’s base let in Shieldlight, and it glows on a carved screen that holds a small plasm accumulator. The screen is of some kind of dark wood and features intricate carvings similar to those on the building’s exterior, a profusion of faces and bodies and floral displays, humans and plants and creatures all laced together, caught in a complex moment of transformation.

  There are arched gaps in the screen that allow access to the accumulator, and Aiah steps through one. The accumulator comes only to Aiah’s waist, but Aiah can see her reflection in its polished bands of black ceramic and copper.

  “You’re not the first to wonder about us,” says the dreaming sister as Aiah walks a circuit around the accumulator. “Every so often someone from the ministry will come by. She will examin
e the meter, perhaps subject our building to inspection, and then go away. Nothing is ever found.”

  “There’s a war going on. Plasm is precious.”

  “Plasm is always precious,” correcting, “but we have become aware of the war, yes. The movement of plasm… the patterns of use… the resonance of violence within our hearts as we dream… yes,” she nods, “we are aware of the war. The last time we felt such disturbance was eighty-nine years ago, but that war did not last long. We would have to remember two hundred fourteen years for a conflict of similar duration and intensity, and then the fighting was terrible. This building was converted to a hospital, and we sisters were confined to a small part of it.”

  “What was the war about?” Aiah asks. Her knowledge of Caraqui history doesn’t go back that far.

  The dreaming sister pauses and gazes at Aiah through the lacework screen. A shaft of light dropping from the dome gleams on her cropped hair.

  “Ignorance,” she says.

  Aiah leaves the screen area and walks to the control panel. It is silver metal and very old, its edges scalloped in a fluid pattern that is dimly familiar to Aiah, perhaps from old college classes on architectural history.

  She looks at the dials and switches. The accumulator is topped up with plasm. A heavy black plastic knob sets a rheostat to provide the building with a smallish hourly amount that, divided between two hundred and fifty-six Dreaming Sisters, makes a tiny, truly insignificant dose of plasm for each, an absurdly small amount.

  There are other devices on the control panel, clocks and timers, the function of which does not seem immediately apparent. “What are these?” Aiah asks.

  “We tend to lose track of time during our meditations. The timer cuts off our plasm so that we will know to take meals, clean the building, have meetings, and so on.” She tilts her head like a bird. “All is in order?”

  Dials, Aiah thinks, can be rigged to show far less plasm than really exists. To prove it would involve taking apart the mechanism and metering the plasm lines, but Aiah thinks she can demonstrate the sisters are cheating without going to that much effort.