City on Fire m-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  Aiah does not find this thought comforting. Later, as she leaves the meeting with Constantine, and bodyguards fall into step before and behind, he takes her arm and says, “I observed that you spoke to Licinias.”

  “Yes. We were both reflecting on the puzzling nature of my fame.” She looks up at Constantine. “Tell me about Licinias.”

  “He’s from Conpurna. He was a jurist, a specialist in intermetropolitan law. He was Conpurnan ambassador to the Polar League and the World Council and served on the Polar High Court, and after he failed at electoral office back home he began to devote himself to the thankless cause of making peace, which suggests that he is either a towering egoist or a genuinely good person.” He pauses, faintly surprised at his own judgment. “One does meet a good person from time to time, I find,” he adds.

  “I liked him.”

  Constantine raises an eyebrow. “Is it your preference for older men I hear speaking?”

  Aiah feigns indignation. “I don’t prefer older men. I like interesting men.”

  “Luckily for me”—Constantine grins—“I am both.”

  Since they are in the Swan Wing, he takes her to his current lodgings—marble-sheathed walls, plush carpet, and ornamental, scalloped wings of silvery alloy all deployed to disguise the plasm-generating Palace structure that runs inconveniently through the huge rooms. He has not spent much time here since the war began, preferring for safety’s sake to sleep in the empty suites he chose at random for his mobile office, and the rooms have an unused smell to them.

  Guards take up position outside the door, and others ghost through the rooms to make sure no ambush has been laid. Constantine closes the door and leans close.

  “I wished to speak with you privately,” he says. “We are beginning to receive indications that our propaganda is having some effect.”

  “Yes?” She should be delighted, she thinks, but there is a focused urgency in Constantine’s tone that makes her uneasy.

  “The Provisionals’ contract with Landro’s Escaliers expires in ten days. Normally there is an automatic extension—the Provisionals would pay another bonus, and the Escaliers would remain with their army—but now a possibility exists that the Escaliers may be persuaded to change sides.”

  “Is that what their agents in the Timocracy are telling you?”

  Constantine gives a brief shake of the head. “We would never deal with their agents on a matter like this—the agents make their living negotiating for reliable mercenaries; they would turn us down flat. We have approached the Escaliers directly, in occupied territory, and they have shown interest—and furthermore, we believe that their interest is genuine.”

  Dread oozes through Aiah’s nerves. She shivers. “And what does this have to do with me?”

  As she utters the words she feels she already knows the answer.

  Constantine hesitates before he speaks, and Aiah senses the calculation in his mind. “They wish to see you, directly. To negotiate with you, receive their guarantees from you.”

  “From my video persona, you mean. Or from Charduq’s Aiah, blessed of the gods and redeemer of Barkazi.” Bitterness flavors her words. “What happens when they meet the real me?”

  He takes her shoulders, speaks close enough so that his words puff her cheek with warmth. “You underestimate yourself. You are intelligent and experienced, and your mission will receive the best support I can arrange.”

  “And where is this mission? Lanbola, Nesca, Garshab—where?”

  He hesitates. “Let me tell you first what is at stake.” She looks at him. The Adrenaline Monster plucks at her nerves. “No. Tell me where I am expected to go.”

  Another moment of hesitation. He licks his lips and says, “Occupied Caraqui. Their officers cannot move freely, and they want negotiations in their area, where they can control security.”

  Anger flares in her. “Where they can control security!” she mocks. “Where is my security? Great Senko, I need bodyguards even in friendly territory!”

  She turns away and walks blindly into the vast room, heels clicking on polished pink granite. Constantine follows, his voice low and urgent. “If we cannot subvert the Escaliers, then we will have to try a direct assault across the security zone the Provisionals have created, and we will lose tens of thousands just crossing the zone, before we can even properly engage them. Or we can attempt Sorya’s right hook into Lanbola, and destabilize the entire region.”

  He catches her, takes her shoulders again. She tries to shrug him off, fails, permits him in the end to wrap his arms around her stiff, resisting frame.

  “You have created this,” she says. “You created this video image of me deliberately, and now they want this thing.”

  Constantine’s low tones sound in her ear. “I did not anticipate they would demand to speak to you directly. I would not have put you at risk in this way.”

  “Of course you would have.” Coarse laughter bubbles from her throat. “One must keep one’s true end in view—how many times have I heard you say it? And your goal is not love or peace but victory for the New City, and so…” She waves a hand. “It is a game, and you move a piece, and the piece is me. And even if you lose the piece, your position is stronger. And that is the way it’s always been for me, here in your game.”

  There is a moment’s pause, and then she hears Constantine’s sigh, and feels the tension in him fade, the strength ease in the arms that circle her. “If you wish it,” he says, “I will tell them no, and we will try to work out something else.”

  She laughs again. A bitter taste stripes her tongue. “You know me better than that,” she says. “You know I won’t want thousands of deaths on my conscience. Of course I’ll go.” She turns, looks up into his face, his guarded face.

  A crackling fire, anger and resentment, burns in her heart.

  “You say you want me to have my own power base,” she says. “Very well, I’ll have it. If I bring Landro’s Escaliers over, I want them—I want them here with me, and I want command of them, real command, whatever other purely paper arrangements might be made. I want Karlo’s Brigade as well. I want to be involved in any decision involving their deployment. I want Alfeg’s organization to get official backing and money, and any Barkazils he brings over to work or to fight for us—I’ll want command of them, too.”

  Constantine considers this, eyes narrowed, fleshy face impassive. “Anything else?” he asks.

  “I would ask for your fidelity, for something like marriage and maybe even children someday, but—” She gulps for breath. “You’d probably rather give me an army.”

  He nods, as if confirming an observation he has made to himself. He bends and gives her cheek a kiss—not the kiss of a lover but, perhaps, the paternal benediction of a father.

  “You have changed much since I first met you,” he says.

  “For the better, Metropolitan?” she asks. “Or otherwise?”

  There is a kind of sadness in his eyes. “Those sorts of judgments are beside the point. The change happened, and it has made you stronger.”

  Constantine straightens, drops his arms, and walks away from her, lost apparently in his own thoughts. Aiah calls after him.

  “Do I get what I want, Metropolitan?”

  He hesitates, looks at her over his shoulder with a kind of surprise. “Of course,” he says. “I thought it went without saying.”

  NINETEEN

  Aiah looks in surprise at her own face carved in stone. It gazes down at her with a serious expression, a little furrow of concentration between the brows.

  The carving is called The Apprentice, and shows a woman at a kind of crude bench covered with equipment—retorts, burners, the sort of gear that might naively be assumed to inhabit laboratories. The figure looks down into a book for a recipe as she uncertainly holds a beaker in either hand.

  Last time Aiah was here, the figure had another face.

  “It changed two or three days ago,” says Inaction, the dreaming sister who guides Aiah
through the winding corridors. “I recognized the face when I saw it.”

  “You didn’t think to call me?”

  The sister looks at her. “We meditate upon the imagoes. We do not phone them.”

  Aiah looks at her, feels amusement tugging at her lips. “Have you ever met one before?” she asks.

  The sister’s dark-eyed gaze is guileless. She looks about twenty, with flawless, silken brown skin that excites Aiah’s envy.

  “In our meditations,” she answers, “we strive to meet them all.”

  Aiah turns again to the image of herself. She had returned to the Dreaming Sisters’ retreat without quite knowing why, understanding only that she was due to go into Provisional territory within a few days and might never again have the chance to wander through the ancient maze that is the Society of the Simple.

  The department’s monitors had failed to discover any sign that plasm was moving into the building in large qualities. But she hadn’t seen any of the Dreaming Sisters’ plasm displays since her last visit, so perhaps they were avoiding attracting any attention to themselves.

  Aiah’s image looks back at her, frowning in concentration. It occurs to Aiah to wonder how Inaction recognized her face. She and Inaction haven’t met before; Aiah’s last guide through the Dreaming Sisters’ stone mazework called herself Order of Eternity.

  “How did you recognize me?” she asks. “We’ve never met.”

  Inaction frowns in thought and scratches herself under the left breast through the coarse gray fabric of her shift. “I don’t know,” she says. “Perhaps I saw you in our meditations.”

  The Dreaming Sisters, Aiah has learned, specialize in answers that imply a great deal but don’t actually seem to mean anything. Aiah shrugs, steps back from the stonework imago, looks at it again. “Tell me its meaning.”

  “The Apprentice follows upon the imago Entering the Gateway, which denotes she who has come to an apprehension of her own ignorance, and who therefore seeks knowledge. The Apprentice is she who strives to apprehend nature through the medium of a difficult art. The Apprentice strives at this stage not for meaning but for proficiency—full understanding is not implied, but may come at a later stage. There are associational meanings regarding youth, energy, enthusiasm, duty, joy in learning. There is also a great question, unresolved in this image.”

  Inaction’s words don’t come as a set speech, aren’t rattled off: her voice is a bit dreamy, her dark eyes focused on something a thousand stades away. It is almost trancelike, a reflection of her own dream state.

  “And the question?” Aiah asks.

  “The Apprentice is a transitional figure, in movement from one place to another, from the gateway to the world beyond. The question involves the imago’s destination—will she surpass her teachers and achieve mastery, or will she find herself with no singular gift, her talent and art lost amid the great clutter of the world. Satisfaction or frustration—the imago promises one or the other, but does not resolve the matter within itself.”

  Aiah frowns, looking at herself in the improbable act of balancing a pair of beakers. “There are other carvings of this figure, yes?” she says.

  “Oh yes. The imagoes are repeated throughout our building.”

  “Is my face on all of them?” Inaction looks blank. “I don’t know.” “May we look? I’m curious.” “If you like.”

  Aiah follows Inaction down the stone corridor. Sorya appears as The Shadow no less than three times, and Aiah recognizes no one else but herself. No Constantine, she thinks in surprise. Her own face is repeated a half-dozen times, and she feels as if she has entered a hall of mirrors improbably constructed of stone.

  For once Aiah catches Inaction in an expression of surprise. “Perhaps,” the dreaming sister says, “you have become important.”

  PEACE TALKS CONTINUE; PROGRESS UNCERTAIN

  PROVISIONALS DENOUNCE GOVERNMENT’S “UNREALISTIC CONDITIONS”

  The oval screen of Rohder’s computer is framed in a polished copper case chased with ornamental scallops and speed lines designed to make the viewer think that the screen, or at least data, is zooming from place to place with mighty efficiency. The ornament fails to convince anyone familiar with the ways of computers. The chief efficiency of the speed lines and ornamentation is to attract Rohder’s floating cigaret ash.

  Rohder, Aiah, and Constantine sit before the screen and watch crude images, gold on gray, blink and shimmer as Rohder’s model of his work slowly moves pictured pontoons and barge outlines into new, ideal configurations. The computer is in the midst of a ponderous, labored dialogue with another, larger computer elsewhere in the Palace, for which it relies on data: Aiah thinks of prisoners laboriously transmitting messages from one cell to the next by beating on pipes. Gears hum, needles click back and forth on the computer’s yellow dials. Then there is silence as the final image lumbers up on screen, and the dials drop to the neutral position.

  Rohder taps the screen with a nicotine-stained finger. “I’ve got about as far as I can with the current crews,” he says. “I started at a central location and moved outward, but as I expanded, the area to be covered increased geometrically, and in order to continue the work effectively at the current rate, I’ve got to increase my workforce by an order of magnitude.”

  Constantine considers this, then nods. “It will pay for itself,” he says. “Send me a budget and I’ll sign it.”

  Rohder nods and lights a new cigaret off the old. Aiah briefly considers taking advantage of Constantine’s generous mood to ask for an increase elsewhere in the PED, but she decides that this expansion will cause enough administrative headaches for the present.

  One of the few benefits of Caraqui’s state of war is that many of the necessary government expansions and contractions have been accomplished without the usual amount of paperwork. But Aiah knows the paperwork will catch up sooner or later, and then there will be nothing but paper, pay slips, requisitions, and signatures for weeks and months, and possibly ever.

  Constantine turns his eyes from the computer and asks the question that has brought him here. “How many days of full-out offensive can you give me?”

  “Can you give me an approximate time frame? When do you intend to begin?”

  There is a flicker in Constantine’s eyes as he considers how much of his schedule he is willing to entrust to Rohder, or even to speak aloud.

  “Before your new crews can make a difference,” he says.

  Rohder nods, looks at Aiah. “The figures won’t change that much, then.”

  Aiah answers Constantine’s question. “Three days of full consumption using domestic resources only,” she says. “If our neighbors fulfill their commitments, we will be able to extend the offensive for another day, possibly two.”

  Constantine nods. “Well,” he says. “We must hope to make a breakthrough early. A soldier cannot advance without a mage clearing the enemy ahead of him, and he can only hold an area if enemy mages are kept off his neck.”

  “We’ve had some unanticipated side effects,” Rohder says. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  Rohder taps keys, the screen flickers and the computer makes a grinding noise as it gets up to speed, and then the crude images are replaced with columns of figures, gold on gray.

  “There would seem to be a synergistic effect to the multiplication of plasm through the fractionate interval theory,” he says. The rest of the department has taken to referring to fractionate interval theory as FIT, but Rohder prefers the older, more elaborate term.

  “This”—he taps figures again with his knuckle—“this is the predicted increase of plasm, by district, in line with theory… and this,” tapping again, “the initial increase. It is less than predicted, because the methods we used to move structures were less than ideal, and our estimates of the composition of the structures themselves were in most cases approximations. But now—note this third set of figures. These are very recent, based on meter readings conducted
within the last two weeks.”

  Constantine looks into the screen, columns of numbers reflected in his eyes. “Some are larger,” he says.

  “In some cases,” Rohder says, “larger than theory predicts.

  There must be another mechanism working here, something we have not previously observed. Since fractionate interval theory has never been tested on such a large scale before, some unanticipated results are to be expected, but this…” He taps the screen again. “This is different. Two weeks ago, some new effect was introduced.”

  “Maybe it’s cumulative,” Aiah suggests. “You get a certain amount of mass into this configuration and then the effect multiplies.”

  Rohder draws on his cigaret, lets the smoke drift slowly past his lips while he continues to contemplate the figures. “Could be,” he says. “We’re basing this only on meter readings, and the meters are not really designed to produce the more sensitive data we need to understand the phenomenon. However, I think I can promise you considerably more plasm for your Strategic Plasm Reserve than you anticipated.”

  Reflected columns of gold figures glitter in Constantine’s eyes. “May we keep this information between us?” he says. “I see no reason to inform the government when all these figures are so preliminary.”

  Rohder shrugs. “You’re the boss. But allow me to point out that if this phenomenon continues, and if you can postpone your offensive for a few months, I’ll be able to keep it going for a lot longer. Perhaps as much as a week.”

  Constantine gives a minute shake of his head. “Not possible. There are time-dependent considerations.”

  Aiah looks at the screen and feels a fist gently tighten on her throat. Those considerations have to do with the six days left on the Escaliers’ contract.

  But Constantine is absorbed by another thought entirely. “After the war, I want to dedicate the Plasm Reserve to work with Havilak’s Freestanding Hermetic Transformations… and possibly even more.”