City on Fire m-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  “It would seem,” Faltheg says finally, “that however this happened, we must decide how to react. Denial is possible, so we must deny.”

  Sorya tosses her head, exhales smoke over her shoulder, picks a bit of tobacco off her lip. “Others may try to dislodge our friends in Charna, as they tried to dislodge us,” she points out. “We must make it clear that the new government has our support.”

  “I would phrase it more diplomatically,” Belckon says. “To the effect, perhaps, that we support the right of any metropolis to change its government unhindered.”

  “That should make our point well enough,” Sorya says, and gives her lilting laugh. “That,” she adds, “and all the guns in all the hands of all our soldiers.”

  Later, Aiah walks barefoot down the silent, carpeted hall of the Swan Wing, her shoes dangling by their straps in one hand, the other hand in Constantine’s.

  “I can tell you what will happen,” Aiah says. “Once Sorya has got us to announce support for the new government in Charna, she will stage-manage a confrontation—or perhaps she’s confident it will occur without her intervention. A countercoup, a threat of invasion from another metropolis, a wave of terror and assassination… some threat to Charna that will force us to respond. And once we respond, the confrontations will escalate, and those fine soldiers and all their fine guns, as Sorya calls them, will get used again, all for her purposes and not our own.”

  Constantine looks down at her. “You know this?”

  “I know Sorya’s style.” She answers his look with one of her own. “And so should you.”

  His brooding eyes look inward. “Yes. Her pattern is there.”

  They approach one of the bronze-and-glass compartment doors, and it slides open on silent ball bearings. They pass the door and it rolls shut: Aiah finds herself glancing behind, making sure they are secure from any snooping trail of plasm.

  “The last time she had her way,” she says, “she started a war.” She holds his hand more tightly, looks up at him. “You said, once it began, that you needed her to help us win it.”

  “Yes.” He nods. “And her service was invaluable, brilliant.”

  “The war is won,” Aiah reminds. “She is a danger as long as she remains with the Force of the Interior. You know that.”

  His chin lifts a little, and there is a glimmer in his eyes, as if reacting to a challenge. “She is dangerous, yes. But then,” pensively, “I admire Sorya most when she is dangerous. She is at her best then, superb. And…” He tilts his head, as if to consider the problem from another angle. “Removing her from her position would not necessarily make her less dangerous,” he says. “She knows much about me, about the war… a dangerous amount. She might be more dangerous on her own, given what she knows.”

  “Don’t fire her, then,” Aiah says. “Pin a medal on her and promote her. A bigger department, a bigger budget, a bigger salary. Let’s see how dangerous she can be once she’s Minister of Education.”

  Mock alarm enters his eyes. “You aren’t terrified by the idea of letting Sorya educate the next generation?”

  “Post and Communications, then. Or Waterways.”

  A mischievous smile touches Constantine’s lips. “Or let her exercise her humanitarian instincts as chairman of the Refugee Resettlement Commission.”

  “As you like.”

  Constantine gives a contemplative look. “I will give the matter more serious thought. All these proposals are amusing, but they would not make suitable use of Sorya’s talents, and she would see through the scheme at once. No, I must give her a promotion that would flatter her into accepting it.”

  He gives an offhand wave to the invisible security man behind the elaborately framed mirror at the end of the hall, thumbs numbers on the gold twelve-key pad on the door to his suite, and presses the wing-shaped door handle.

  Aiah steps into the silence of Constantine’s suite, listening to the whisper of the circulating air, and then Constantine’s voice comes low to her ear.

  “That’s a very attractive gown. It suits you well.”

  “Thank you. Aldemar recommended the designer. Hairdresser, too.”

  His hand sweeps the hair back from Aiah’s ear, sifts through it as if assaying its worth.

  “I would not have had you cut short your trip to Chemra. This crisis didn’t require your presence.”

  She turns to him. “Well. I’m here now.”

  He looks at her, reflective. “I think we may have an hour or two before the next crisis calls me away. But you must be tired.”

  “I’m used to being tired.” She puts her arms around Constantine, presses herself to him, his lace fluttering against her cheek. “Since I have known you, I have never been anything but tired.”

  His hand speculatively strokes her back. “Officially,” he says, “you are still on leave for a few days. There is nothing in your office that immediately requires your presence. Why don’t you stay away from the PED for that time? I will endeavor”—amusement touches his lips—“to spend as much time as possible with you, except when crises call me away.”

  She lifts her face to his, kisses him. “I accept,” she says, and he smiles.

  But if she’s right about Sorya and her intentions, she muses, the next crisis will be soon.

  COUNCIL OF COLONELS CONTROLS CHARNA FORMER GOVERNMENT FLEES TO NESCA

  “I have done as you requested,” Rohder says. Though he sits at the dining table in her apartment, he speaks in a low voice, as if afraid he might be overheard. He opens the green plastic file cover on the table, glances down at the files.

  “I discovered that there is a rather lively scientific literature in regard to hanged men, one that till the present had escaped my notice,” he says. “There is a great deal of arcana and speculation, very little of it reliable, but I have combed through it for articles written by people who might actually be qualified to discuss such matters, and…”

  He looks down at his notes, shakes his head. “There was a hanged man operating in Injido about a century and a half ago, killing people at random, it seems, and I read the report from the head of the team that hunted it down and killed it—or thought they’d killed it; at any rate it did not reappear.” His faded blue eyes drift up from the page. “A number of bystanders were killed in the course of suppressing the creature. Several of the team were hospitalized after telepresent contact with the thing. Shock, mental disorders of a type associated with trauma. One remained institutionalized for the rest of her life.

  “Another case,” looking down at the notes again, “concerned a kind of extortion ring in Qanibar about two centuries ago. A gang of criminals were working in league with a hanged man, somehow aiding the creature to possess the bodies of living people, wealthy victims. It would turn over the victims’ wealth to its human allies in exchange for a few days in a human body, after which the contact with the hanged man somehow caused the body to fail. But so many people died in this way that the authorities became suspicious, and managed to trace the money to the criminals’ bank accounts. One of the extortionists cracked under interrogation, and the police were able to ambush the hanged man when it turned up for a meeting.” “How did they… dispose of it?”

  Rohder turns away, fumbles awkwardly for a cigaret, pats his pocket for a lighter. “Each team developed its own method,” Rohder said. “I do not find either of them entirely satisfactory from an operational point of view—both are based on theories that are in essence unproven, and the only way to prove either was to risk life and sanity.”

  “Tell me.”

  Rohder sighs, looks unhappy. “Both teams operated on the assumption that hanged men are a kind of living being that exists in the plasm well, a kind of modulation in plasm itself. They assumed that these creatures will die if deprived of plasm, or forced to live outside of the plasm well without a human host.

  “In Injido the team managed to locate the hanged man within an office building—it had killed someone there—and then shut off th
e plasm supply to that building. They then attacked the creature with plasm drawn from outside—they tried to nullify the creature, overwhelm it with masses of destructive plasm. The mages were told to configure plasm using the focus of the Great Bull, which is supposed to aid offensive action. They also intended to compel it to use up all available plasm in the building in repelling their attacks, in effect to use up its life force in its own defense. Wear it out.”

  He shrugs. “It was messy. The building was not empty—full of workers—and the hanged man rampaged through it. It killed over a dozen people. You don’t want to see the chromographs of that, and I didn’t bring them. The Great Bull aside, none of the mages really knew how to configure plasm so as to kill a hanged man, and it kept slipping away while they improvised their attacks. Reading the reports, I have the impression that there was a great deal of chaos within the mage team, perhaps some panic. Finally the target creature tried to merge with the plasm that was attacking it… tried to become the plasm, to seize control of it from the minds of the mages who were using it. The mages fought off the thing’s attacks, but several were so traumatized by mind-to-mind contact that they required hospital care, two for extended stays, and one, as I said, for good. Eventually they killed it, or so the team believed. In any case, if it got away, it did not return to Injido.”

  A dozen people killed, several mages hospitalized. Hardly a satisfactory solution.

  “And the Qanibar group?” Aiah asks.

  “They had an advantage—the extortionist who cooperated with the authorities. He informed them of the body the creature was occupying, and agreed to lure the creature to a place where it was vulnerable. All plasm in the area was used before the creature turned up, and then the host body was attacked and destroyed. The creature was contained and then killed as it tried to escape to the nearest plasm source.”

  “Were there any casualties?” Aiah asks.

  “No. But the Qanibar police had advantages given them by good intelligence—knowing where the hanged man was going to be—and also by the fact that Qanibar was at the time a totalitarian state. They opened the action by killing the hanged man’s host, something the authorities certainly cannot do in any society that values the rights of humans beings and of victims.” He looks troubled. “Nor am I certain that the creature was, properly speaking, a hanged man or ice man. Perhaps it was a Slaver Mage who had convinced the extortionists he was a hanged man, or maybe it was a…, vampire…” His face twists uncomfortably at having to deal with yet another creature out of superstition. “Perhaps something that has not been categorized,” he continues, “or a delusion. I will continue searching for information, if you like.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “I also found this… curiosity.” He takes out a sheaf of plastic flimsies, pushes it across the table to Aiah. “It is mostly speculation, but I thought you might want to read it, for reasons of historical and personal interest.”

  The plastic flimsies smell of developing fluid. “Toward a Psychology of the Ice Man,” Aiah reads, by Constantine of Cheloki.

  Aiah’s mouth goes dry. “How old is this?” she asks.

  “It was published thirty-seven years ago, in a journal of philosophy.” An analytical smile touches Rohder’s lips. “There is very little science in it.”

  Constantine must have met Taikoen by then, Aiah thinks.

  She tries for a moment to read the blue eyes, the ruddy skin, the network of fine lines in the old mage’s face, and wonders what it is he knows. She gives up, looks down at the article, then drops her hand over it.

  “I’ll look at it later. Can I see the other reports?”

  Rohder closes the folder and pushes it across the polished table surface. The soft plastic cover and the flimsies inside flutter in the brief breeze. Aiah picks up the article by Constantine and slips it into the folder. She feels the throb of her heart, its acceleration to a higher state of alertness, a touch of the Adrenaline Monster upon her nerves… It is as if she is responding to the notion that the file itself is a threat, and she wonders if she will ever have the courage to make use of this information, to somehow put an end to Taikoen, or even to read the article, of historic and personal interest, that Rohder has given her.

  She looks up at Rohder, forces a polite smile onto her lips. “Would you like some coffee?” she asks.

  Talk turns to other matters, particularly to Rohder’s teams, who are busy increasing Caraqui’s plasm supply, and then the old man takes his leave. Aiah turns up the ventila-■ tion to clear the cloud of cigaret smoke and looks at the closed folder waiting for her on the table.

  Her nerves hum louder than the ventilation fans.

  She opens the green folder, slips out Constantine’s article, and composes herself to read it: sitting straight in the straight chair, feet flat on the floor, hands framing the pages on the table. As if she were a schoolgirl at her desk.

  Constantine’s style, she notices, is informed but not quite at ease. She can tell he’s been to college: he uses words like noetic and mensuration. The later Constantine, with less need to impress, would adopt a less specialized vocabulary, and a more accessible style.

  He discusses at some length the legendary attributes of the ice man and discusses theories of how such creatures may be created. The tone is speculative—he endeavors to make it seem that he knows less about this matter than, in fact, he does. And then he addresses the primary contradiction of the ice man legends.

  Why would the ice man, he asks, who exists in the core of creation, in the plasm itself, the great transformational substance, the heart of contingent reality that underlies our whole postmetropolitan world, wish to inhabit the body of a human being?

  Constantine finds the answer in the hanged man’s lost body itself.

  The attractions of plasm are many, but the most intense are those based on sensation. It is these appeals to the sensual, to enhanced and extended sight and hearing, to the stimulus of nerves and groin, that most often impel those who habituate themselves to plasm as an addict to morphia; and this sensual attraction, in subtler form, is a factor in the attraction of plasm to many of its other users, who experience sense gratification alongside plasm’s other enjoyments…

  For the ice man there are no longer nerves to stimulate, no sensory organs to enhance, no sexual impulse to satisfy. The vital element of sensory feedback is missing: no longer is the sensual body able to bring pleasure to its now detached, and oddly diminished, mind.

  But, Aiah thinks, a protest half-formed in her mind; but Constantine answers her objection before she can properly form it.

  It is true that when mages project themselves through telepresence they use plasm to build a sensorium, an array of ectomorphic sense-artifacts used to bring sense-stimulation to the receptive centers of the mind. But the sensorium, however enhanced it may be, is built in imitation of the body’s own natural sense organs, and furthermore upon a series of sense-memories contained within the mind. Without a material body and its sense-organs to apprehend the world, and without a sensual memory, reinforced at every moment by a thousand natural stimuli, how is a detached, immaterial mentality to apprehend the world?

  … The ice man must apprehend the world only through a created sensorium. For a human mage, a sensorium will be based on the mage’s own sense-organs and on sense-experience and memory. For an ice man, a sensorium will be based on organs that no longer exist and memories that grow ever more distant. Without an anchor planted in the body’s own sensual experience and memory, the ice man’s perceptions will become ever more distorted.

  Aiah knits her brows and contemplates Constantine’s argument. It must be true, she thinks; Constantine knew Taikoen when he wrote this, and must have based all this on observation.

  The hanged man lives in a world of erratic, distorted sense impressions. And Taikoen, the real man, died centuries ago. How, Aiah wonders, does he see the world now?

  Presumably it takes the ice man a period of time to realize t
hat the old pleasures are no longer there. The ice man at first may be gratified at being rid of the irritations and demands of the body. He can create an artificial sensorium and stimulate it as he wishes. The distortion of perception may not be at first apparent.

  But when the realization comes, it must be devastating. The body, the center of perception, no longer exists. Perceptions are growing distorted, even deranged. Even self-stimulation may prove futile, as the ice man, lost in the transphysical plasm well, begins to forget even the nature of pleasure. The ice man may well grow desperate.

  Constantine goes on to discuss the phenomenon of possession in some detail, explaining it, after numerous scholarly digressions, as a desperate attempt by the ice man to regain the sense perceptions that had once made him human.

  Aiah turns the page, reads Constantine’s conclusion. A metallic taste tingles along her tongue.

  What are we, then, to say of the psyche of the ice man, a murderous creature of deranged perception, forever isolated from the humanity that nurtured him, so desperate for a return to a world of sensible appearances and pleasures that it will accept temporary humanity at the cost of a human life?

  We now know which taxonomy is appropriate for this phenomenon. This creature that is at once powerful and diminished, ubiquitous and isolated, desperate and raging, deadly but impotent, possessed of being but not truly alive. Hanged man is not the appropriate name, nor ice man. The only appropriate name for this creature is our third choice—the damned.

  The conditions in which the ice man exists are, in almost literal terms, hellish. Uncertain as to its own perceptions, its spirit isolated, all pleasures artificial and fading, its only companions either victims or exploiters, the situation of the ice man is a compound of desperation and exile. Although its victims deserve our sorrow, the creature itself—damned—deserves more than a share of our compassion. Given the horrifying conditions under which the ice man must exist, an end to its existence must be looked on not as a death, not even as justice, but as a release, an act of mercy.