City on Fire (Metropolitan 2)

by Walter Jon Williams

  “But there was no one to give the orders.”

  “Correct, miss.”

  The cold wind knifes through Aiah’s bones. Somewhere below a ship’s siren whoops three times, like an unanswered call for help. Aiah steps toward the edge, her feet crunching on glass from a rooftop arboretum blown open in the fighting, its rare trees and shrubs already withering in the cold.

  Above, between her and the Shield, plasm lines trace across the sky: The Situation Has Returned To Normal. Everything Is Safe. The New Government Asks That All Citizens Return to Work.

  “Are we safe?” she asks.

  “Against what?”

  “An attack.”

  Delruss shrugs. “A lot of the collection web has holes blown in it. We’ve got telepresent mages patrolling the perimeter, but they can’t see everything. Twenty percent of the transmission horns are off-line, and a lot of the sabotage inflicted during the coup hasn’t been repaired yet. . . well, not exactly not repaired.”

  He sighs, prepares his long story. “Certain of the sabotage was performed by groups with particular interests, in anticipation of particular rewards. They are making certain they get these rewards before repairing the damage they made.”

  “I see,” Aiah says. She believes she now understands how she’s getting one of the twisted as her deputy. “So it’s lucky there’s no fighting going on right now.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Aiah steps to the parapet and brushes wind-whipped hair from her eyes. She looks down, sees a statue in a niche below her, hanging from bronze straps. It’s the first time she’s seen one of these up close, and she sees that it’s three times human size, and that the upturned face is set into an expression of agony— eyes staring, lips drawn back in pain. Cold fingers brush her spine as she looks into the featureless metal eyes.

  “What are these?” she asks. “They’re all over the building.”

  Delruss looks over the parapet and gazes unmoved into the agonized face. He’s probably seen much worse in his time.

  “Martyrs,” he said. “The Avians used to hang political and religious criminals from buildings to die of exposure.”

  Aiah is appalled. “Hanging off the Palace?” she asks.

  “Not the Palace, but other buildings, yes. Originally there were other statues in these niches— gods, immortals, and Avians— but when the Avians fell, they put these here instead. And a lot of the local Dalavites hang themselves off buildings as a kind of ordeal, to commune with the spirits of their martyrs.”

  He looks at her, a trace of a smile touching his lips. “There were some tourist brochures in an office downstairs. I read them.”

  “I don’t suppose your brochure mentioned the Dreaming Sisters?”

  “Sorry, no. That’s new to me.”

  The sky shapes into an advertisement for the new Lynxoid Brothers chromoplay, the Lynxoids and the Blue Titan performing a violent dance across the sky. Aiah is freezing, and she’s seen enough for today.

  From the roof they descend into the structure, and Aiah inspects some of the local conduits, the electric switches that divert plasm from one place to another, the meters that record consumption for purposes of billing.

  She thanks Delruss and returns to her office to see if anyone has called— no message lights on the commo array— and finds that her new office furniture has been delivered. Since there seems little to do, she returns to her living quarters.

  The suite smells of fresh paint. The carpet has been cleaned, and a brand-new mattress waits on the bed, still in a clear plastic wrapper.

  It occurs to her that the situation is so fluid that she can only discover the limits of her authority by giving orders and seeing who obeys them. That she could so easily get service for her room and office argues for the fact that at least some people are inclined to do what she says.

  Get the office window repaired tomorrow, she thinks.

  She should make a list of everything she needs. Office supplies, access to the computers, scheduled use of the transmission horns, maybe access to secure files, if she can figure out where the secure files are....

  Ask for it all, she thinks. Maybe she’ll get it.

  She finds a piece of paper and begins to make lists.

  THE WHOLE WORLD IS TALKING ABOUT

  LORDS OF THE NEW CITY

  MORE THAN JUST A CHROMOPLAY

  A bar. Middle of service shift, after the stores have started to close. The place is a glittering profusion of mirrors, brass ornaments, crystal chandeliers, black sculpted furniture made of a shiny composite. It’s crowded and noisy, with a good cross-section of the local inhabitants— most of whom seem to possess both youth and dinars— but no twisted, which Aiah is relieved to discover.

  During the course of this shift’s explorations she’s found that about half the inhabitants of Caraqui feature the stocky build and copper skin that registers as “normal” here, but the rest are every conceivable variety of build and skin tone, a wide enough variety that Aiah, with her brown skin and eyes and black hair, doesn’t feel as out of place as she would on a normal street at home in Jaspeer.

  Aiah sits in a corner surrounded by packages and waits her turn in the restaurant section.

  “A gentleman is buying drinks for the house,” the waitress says. “What would you like?”

  The waitress tugs at the hem of her red velvet vest while Aiah considers. The number of customers leads Aiah to conclude that whoever is buying could afford another round of what she’s drinking.

  “Markhand white. Two-Cross,” she says, and taps her crystal glass. Not without a twinge of guilt.

  Before she’d met Constantine she hadn’t ever realized that wine could be good, or that food could be delicious as a normal thing, without special effort. When Aiah was growing up, assembling a good meal was akin to a treasure hunt: good vegetables traded for, or plucked from roof gardens; favors exchanged for a good grain-fed chicken or squab or, on special occasion, a goat; fruit acquired through a process of barter too complex to be apprehended by the outsider.

  But for Constantine good food is simply part of the background— he can afford the best: fruit and vegetables grown in select arboretums, animals and fowl fattened on food that otherwise would have been given to people, wine grown in rooftop vineyards, fermentation and acids balanced by magecraft.

  Being around Constantine had left Aiah with expensive tastes, tastes at variance with the thrifty habits of a lifetime, but then Constantine had also left Aiah with money in a bank account in Gunalaht.

  She has spent a lot of money this service shift, almost a month’s wages at her old job in Jaspeer. She’d realized that she needed new clothing— she’d fled Jaspeer with only the clothes on her back, and bought only a few items in Gunalaht on her way to Caraqui—and so she’d crossed one of the graceful arched bridges leading from the Palace on a shopping expedition.

  It was an expensive part of the city. When she handed over her checktube in order to pay, it required a certain effort of will.

  But at least she will be able to dress as befits her station, whatever that turns out to be.

  The waitress brings Aiah the complimentary glass of wine and takes her empty glass. “Another round!” someone shouts. The voice is loud and male, and followed by cheers.

  “Another round?” the waitress asks.

  “Not yet.”

  Aiah sips the wine, and a tingling taste of apples and ambrosia explodes across her palate. A young couple— both in subdued lace and velvet, the man in black, the woman in violet— struggle through the crowd and dump a pair of heavy briefcases under the bench next to Aiah’s table.

  “I can’t believe they let him go,” the man says. “After all the people he disappeared.”

  “He probably knows something,” the woman says. “Something about Drumbeth or Parq or someone else in the new government.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

  The woman smiles thinly. "Are you growing cynical about our new gov
ernment already?”

  “I am a good citizen,” the man says, “and will be pleased to support the revolution if it will support me to a promotion.”

  “Plenty more where that came from!” roars the man buying drinks. More cheers. He comes into sight, dancing clumsily in hobnailed military boots. He’s wearing a uniform that Aiah doesn’t recognize, but she gathers from its ostentation that he ranks high. The tunic is unbuttoned, revealing a broad stomach and a shirt stained with wine, and he hasn’t shaved in days. He waves a bottle of wine in one hand and a checktube in the other.

  “Let’s dance!” he bellows, and makes a bearlike pirouette. The couple next to Aiah watch with clear distaste.

  Aiah half-raises her glass to her lips. The officer staggers, recovers, looks up at Aiah with pale blue eyes...

  The hair on Aiah’s neck rises. Ice floods her veins. The blue eyes stare back at her in a terrifying moment of mutual recognition.

  The man staggers again, recovers, then turns abruptly and heads for the door. The crowd gives a good-natured groan of disappointment as he stalks out. He wanted to be anonymous, and Aiah has somehow spoiled his fun.

  Aiah feels beads of sweat dotting her scalp. Her heart throbs in her throat.

  Ice man. Hanged man. The damned.

  Taikoen, Constantine’s creature.

  Aiah could tell the couple seated next to her that the officer, whoever he is, hasn’t been set free. He’s gone, obliterated, and soon his body will follow.

  The hanged man is a creature of plasm, trapped in the pulse of fundamental energy, and so hostile to life, to matter, that he’s cut off from it, from the comforts of humanity or the distractions of the flesh ... he can’t escape the single elemental fact of his own existence.

  Not without the help of a first-rate mage.

  Constantine had put the hanged man in the officer’s body, had sent him lurching out into Shieldlight to seek his pleasures. Thus was the creature rewarded for helping to overthrow the Keremaths.

  The hanged man, in the long run poisonous to life, would wear out the officer’s body within a matter of days. The man would be found dead, and the new government would not be blamed. And Taikoen would slip back into the plasm mains, into the heart of the power that gave him life, and wait for his next victim.

  Aiah looks down at the wineglass she’s half-raised. Her hand is trembling and the wine splashes over her hand and wrist. She firmly places the glass back on her table.

  She wants to leave the bar and flee back to the Palace, but for all she knows the hanged man is still outside, and she doesn’t want to encounter him.

  Best wait for her meal, she decides.

  She wonders if it will taste like anything but ashes.

  SNAP! THE WORLD DRINK

  LIFE IS BETTER WITH A SNAP! IN YOUR FINGERS

  It’s almost sleep shift before Aiah gets back to the Palace. Her room, clean and smelling of paint, awaits her, antiseptic as a room in a hotel.

  The walls are bare in the bedroom— all mirrors, pictures, and ornaments have been taken down while the paint dries. Aiah begins to put them back up, but several are chromo-graphs of people— the former occupant, or his family or friends— and Aiah puts these in a closet designed as a pocket garden, with buckets of loam and grow lights but with nothing planted, presumably because the former occupant could afford to buy vegetables instead of growing them.

  She goes to her bag, takes out her icon of Karlo, and puts it on the wall.

  With its lacy frame of cheap tin, the icon looks incongruous on the wall of the luxury suite, but Aiah finds it comforting. Karlo is her immortal, the hero of the Barkazils— the great first leader of the Cunning People, who man who refused the Ascendancy because it was not granted to all, and was thus condemned to remain with his people when the Malakas, the Ascended, built the Shield as a barrier between themselves and the planet’s teeming billions...

  Aiah walks toward the terrace doors. Bronze wire in a diamond pattern is sandwiched between the glass plates of the doors, part of the building’s defense system, and she gazes through the gleaming diamonds at the Shield, the world’s opalescent shell, which provides light and heat but which is also the wall of a prison, at once the world’s savior and warder.

  Karlo had tried to prevent the Shield from going up and failed, and that was both his tragedy and the world’s. And in the thousands of years since Karlo nothing, fundamentally, had changed: the sky was barred, no human had Ascended, and all was pointless, or folly.

  Until Constantine. With him, perhaps, the world could change— Aiah could see in him the blend of ideas, desire, vision, talent, ambition, brilliance, and world-reaching passion that offered the possibility of change. If the New City comes into being, he told her once, then any sacrifice— anything— is justified.

  He saw no hope elsewhere. He desired liberation, for others as well as for himself, liberation from the archaic systems that had ruled the world since before Karlo’s day, and—an ambition expressed only in his powerful whisper— ultimately liberation from the tyranny of the Shield.

  Aiah thinks of Taikoen, the hanged man, reeling through the floating districts of Caraqui in the body that Constantine gave him, and she tastes the bile that rises in her throat.

  What could justify Taikoen? she wonders.

  Steel firms her thoughts. She could justify him, she thinks. If she is true to her new life, if her department can do what it was designed to do, if she can break the hold the Handmen have on the people and liberate the stolen plasm for Constantine to use to build the New City. . . .

  Only then, she thinks, is a monster like Taikoen justified.

  So, she decides, she had better get busy and make it all work.

  ATTACK OF THE HANGED MAN BANNED IN LIRI-DOMEI

  ALDEMAR’S THRILLER CLAIMED “TOO VIOLENT”

  Aiah gets only a few hours’ sleep, since she’s up late making lists and plans. Constantine has authorized her to hire a staff of 120 people, of whom a third can be mages, "preferably with specialties in telepresence and police work." During raids on plasm dens, she is authorized to call on the military.

  Forty mages, not to mention soldiers.

  She puts aside any doubts concerning whether she can organize and command forty mages, all with more experience than she, and concentrates instead on making lists of what she’ll need.

  Aiah looks with a start at the clock, and discovers it’s 03:00. She looks for a window crank and can’t find one, then discovers that the windows polarize against the Shieldlight with the press of a button.

  Luxury. Right. She keeps forgetting.

  She’s too keyed up to get much rest, and when the alarm chimes at 07:00 she comes awake perfect in the knowledge that she’s going to spend the day thick-witted and dragging herself from one task to the next. During a search for coffee she comes across a plasm tap in the kitchen, and only a few seconds later thinks to wonder what in the immortals’ name they could have used a kitchen plasm tap for.

  Personal plasm allowance. Constantine had wangled her one. If there’s a tap in the kitchen, there will be taps elsewhere.

  Aiah sets the coffee brewing and looks for taps, finding three in the main room alone. A search through drawers discovers a wire, a jack, and a copper transference grip, an “orthopedic” design custom-shaped for a hand somewhat smaller than Aiah’s.

  A dose of the goods, she thinks, is better than coffee any day.

  She moves an armchair near the tap, puts the t-grip in the seat, and jacks the wire into a tap. With a flick of her thumb she can connect herself to the plasm well, the huge system that creates, moves, and stores plasm within the Metropolis of Caraqui. All the vast apparatus she had seen yesterday— the accumulators and capacitors and control boards, the transmission horns and receivers, the bundles of cable and taps and substations—all of it exists, Aiah realizes, only so that she, and people like her, can do just what she intends to do right now.

  Aiah reaches into the collar of her sleepshir
t and pulls out the plasm focus she wears on a chain around her neck. She had bought it just a few weeks ago, at the start of her adventure with Constantine, from an elderly man who earned a precarious living selling junk and trinkets from a desk made of a battered door. He had sold it to her as a “lucky charm,” a cheap bit of popular magic alleged, through its connection with genuine magework, to have virtues even without plasm. The token is in the form of the Trigram, and like all plasm foci its scrolling lines are meant to give a pattern to the flow of plasm through Aiah’s mind, a kind of safety device to prevent plasm from taking any unexpected turns.

  She sits in the chair, looks at the focus in her palm, tries to relax, let the Trigram center her mind. And then Aiah bends to pick up the t-grip and thumbs the button that switches on the plasm connection. Her nerves come awake with a snarl. Her mind, comes alive with a cold neon glow.

  It has been far, far too long since she’s had a chance to touch this reality.

  The Trigram burns in her backbrain. Power sings in her ears.

  The first thing Aiah does is send the Trigram through her body, flushing out fatigue toxins, filling every cell with energy. Then she simply sits back in her chair and closes her eyes and lets plasm fill her senses, awareness expanding like ripples in a pond.. ..

  She can sense the plasm network around her, the Palace delivery system, conduits and branches, that laces the building like a network of veins, arteries, and capillaries. Sense the vast well of plasm beneath, the fiery lake of raw power that floods out into the city...

  Hypersensitive, hyperacute, her senses encompass physical reality as well. The texture of the walls impresses itself on her mind, the nubbly surface of a throw pillow, the coolness of the lacy tin frame on the icon of Karlo. The carbon-steel frame of the building, all gentle plasm-generating curves, glows in her perceptions like bones in a fluoroscope. And two people passing in the corridor outside flare in her mind like passing torches. Other, more distant people glimmer at the outside of her awareness.