City on Fire (Metropolitan 2)

by Walter Jon Williams

  “That will require tactful handling, if and when the difference becomes important. But you need not worry over the loyalties of most of your people— I’ve decided that everyone will require deep plasm scans, to discover where their loyalties really lie.”

  Aiah looks at him in surprise. “Who’s going to do the scanning?”

  “The Force of the Interior. Sorya’s department. It’s the sort of thing they’re good at.”

  Alarm jangles along Aiah’s nerves. “I don’t want Sorya in my brain!” she cries. Involuntarily she lifts a hand protectively to guard her head.

  Constantine reaches out, takes her hand in his, gently lowers it to her lap. “Not you,” he says. “Nor Ethemark, nor any other political appointee I am forced to accept. But everyone else, yes. You need an absolutely straight department, even if we have to hire every single one of them from outside Caraqui, and plasm scans are the only way to make certain.”

  She clasps Constantine’s big hand in her smaller ones, looks at him. A shiver of memory raises the hairs on her nape. “I saw Taikoen yesterday, Metropolitan.”

  He looks startled, then masters himself and nods. “Yes. He is ... making use ... of an officer of the Specials. A killer, a torturer. He broke hundreds in his dungeons, and murdered many.” His lip curls in disdain. “Such people are best disposed of with the trash. If anyone deserves Taikoen, it is he.”

  Aiah finds her lower lip shivering and wills it to stop. “Who knows about him? It.”

  Constantine’s eyes gaze somberly into hers. “You. Martinus, my bodyguard. Myself. Sorya may suspect, though I have not told her. And lastly that torturer, who though his body lives is already dead.”

  A shudder runs through her. “He recognized me. I was terrified.”

  “He will not harm you." Constantine puts his arms around her, cradles her against his massive chest. “Making use of Taikoen is the worst thing I have ever done. It is the worst thing I can ever conceive.” His hand caresses her jaw-line, turns her face up to his. There is a smoldering anger in his eyes, in the twisting muscles of his jaw. “Taikoen weighs on me,” Constantine says. “He is necessary, but...” There is a flicker in his pensive eyes, echo of a chill thought that passes through his mind. “I hope I judged this aright. The balance of rights and wrongs, the hope of a better outcome.”

  Aiah smiles wanly. “It isn’t all as easy as cooking, is it?”

  He nods in answer. There is a kind of painful hopelessness in his eyes. “Taikoen is a trap, I know. He is too powerful a weapon to ignore, but the very knowledge of him is ... corrupting. I hope that someday I may be strong enough to do without him.” He takes a deep breath. “And he is, sometimes, still the Taikoen who fought the Slaver Mages. Even in his current form he is not without his share of greatness. And he is...” Constantine searches for a word. “He is impaired, and, for all his power, diminished ... He has lost his humanity, and he wants it again, and he can’t find it.”

  He straightens, visibly summons himself, and gives Aiah a sharp glance. “You know that I worshiped Taikoen once, as part of a...” He licks his lips. “A cult. My cousin Herome was priest.”

  “You told me this,” Aiah says.

  “It isn’t a part of my life that fills me with pride. I was debased and desperate, and I sought company as debased as I. . . and there was Herome, in charge of my grandfather’s prisons, feeding prisoners to this thing, and playing at worshiping it. But strangely, it was seeing Taikoen so degraded that brought back my own pride— I had no great opinion of myself, princeling of a bandit regime, but I knew that I was better than this. And when I came to know him, I managed to remind him of his own greatness, and managed to instill in him a memory of his own pride...” An image of that pride broods in Constantine’s eyes, along with bright defiance.

  “And that,” he says, “was the end of Herome and his worshipers— Taikoen engulfed them all. It was my first strike against my family, for all they never knew it.” He looks down at Aiah, his glance uneasy. “And Taikoen has followed me ever since. And I have made use of him from time to time, and paid the price.”

  She reaches up a hand, touches his cheek. He looks down at her, a kind of need plain on his face. “I hope I may have your understanding in this,” he says. “And better, your compassion.”

  Aiah kisses him, driving her lips up into his. The only comfort she can offer, she thinks, is the comfort of her body. For a moment Constantine absorbs the kiss, inhales it as if it’s a consolation, an absolution, and then the kiss awakens in him a tigerish spirit, a fierceness, and his answering kiss is like a kiss of fire.

  He carries her bodily to the bedroom, then lays her on the bed and takes off his clothes. She presses the button that polarizes the windows, and in the resulting shadow she looks at the half-light gleaming off his huge shoulders, his massive arms, the powerful muscles of his thighs and buttocks...

  Either he is your passu, or you are his. Her grandmother’s voice floats through her mind, and she puts the treacherous thought away.

  Aiah welcomes Constantine into the circle of her arms, the circle of her legs. Outside the circle all is dubious, in flux, but the weight of Constantine’s body on hers assures her of her own certainty in the world, of her own consequence, at least until all identity, all thought, is obliterated by climatic fire.

  They lie together only a short while before Constantine has to leave. “A meeting,” he sighs, “cocktails. Would you believe it? But he is the Polar League’s ambassador, and we need League funds if we are to accomplish anything at all.”

  She touches his shoulder, her fingers following the sheen of light on his black skin. "I wish you would stay.”

  He bends over her, kisses her gravely on the forehead. “I cannot treat you as you deserve,” he says. “And for that, as much as anything else, I require your understanding.”

  “Sorya—,” she begins, then cuts short at his frown.

  “Don’t ask me to choose between you,” he says. “It is not simple. Sorya is what she is, and for a variety of reasons, I need her— her mind and skills more than anything.”

  “I was not asking for a choice,” Aiah says. “I was wondering if she would kill me. She and I had ... a side-agreement ... concerning you. I may have violated it by coming here. And she has already sent me a message.”

  All truces are temporary, Sorya said.

  Constantine’s brows knit. Aiah can see muscles working on the side of his neck, as if he is chewing the news over before he makes his calm answer. "If she harms you," he says (his eyes are stone, cold as the breath of Taikoen), “then it will be the end of her.”

  “I hope you will tell her that.”

  “I will see that she knows.”

  He kisses her forehead again, sealing the promise, then rises and begins to dress.

  Aiah lies still for a moment, her nerves humming with the strangeness, the peculiar uncanny intensity, of this life-and-death bargain, and then she remembers she has carried something with her to give to him. She rises from the bed, looks for a moment for a dressing gown before remembering she hasn’t as yet acquired one, and then goes to her baggage to find her treasure.

  She approaches him naked, the book offered on her upturned palms. “Yes?” he says, and cocks an eye at the gift.

  “I brought this for you. You can judge it better than I can— but I think it will help our work.”

  He picks up the book, looks at the gold lettering on the red plastic binding.

  “Proceedings of the Research Division of the Jaspeeri Plasm Authority. Volume Fourteen, no less.” He sighs. “An attractive title. You don’t want me to start at the beginning?”

  “The first thirteen volumes are all formulae and proofs,” Aiah says. “I don’t understand them. This volume has the recommendations, and they involve a way to increase plasm by about twenty percent through use of something called ‘fractionate intervals.’”

  Constantine looks skeptical.

  “The Authority spent eight years
producing the data,” Aiah says, “but then the Research Division got flushed. I think the decision was political, but I don’t know the details. The man in charge was Rohder— he’s brilliant, a real wizard, but I don’t think he’s very practical. Now he’s in charge of a whole suite of empty offices back in the Plasm Authority Building.”

  Constantine frowns, runs his thumb along the spine. “I will give it my attention when I can,” he says.

  Aiah puts her arms around him and holds him close, hoping to carry some last imprint of Constantine on her flesh. He kisses her— and for a moment she feels him softening, as if he might throw off his clothes and join her on the bed again, but the moment passes, and he says good-bye and returns to the Polar League’s ambassador and his duty.

  Aiah decides she might as well follow his example, and begins to make a list for the next day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In the end, Aiah’s heart fails her where Gil is concerned. She writes him a letter and sends it surface mail instead of using a wiregram or making a phone call. Her written explanations and excuses are awkward, unconvincing even to herself. She knows that he will have a hard time paying for the apartment they’d shared, and so she wires him ten thousand dalders out of her account in Gunalaht.

  Conscience money. And sure proof to the Jaspeeri authorities of her profitable, and to them criminal, activities.

  She and Ethemark march through the Owl Wing, putting plastic slips on the doors of empty offices that announce they are now part of the Plasm Enforcement Division. She then informs the Palace Property Department, in charge of room allocations, that the offices are now theirs. Theirs, by right of conquest and the fact that no one, in the confusion, disputes them.

  The interviewing and hiring begins. Drumbeth announces publicly that plasm thieves have a thirty-day amnesty in which to inform the authorities of their illegal plasm taps, meters, and connections. Public response is tepid, but the deadline provides Aiah with a firm date by which she has to be ready.

  She promises herself that the first arrests will be made at 24:01 on the day following the deadline. One minute after the amnesty ends.

  During the next two weeks, Constantine visits her twice more in her suite, spending his rare moments of spare time in her company. She is working double shifts, but his schedule is worse. Depending on the state of his elusive progress through the complexities of coalition politics, his moods swing between booming elation and fretful anxiety. But when he touches her, when he kisses her or moves with her in bed, his mood shifts: he is entirely there, intent eyes holding her as if she were pinned in the radiance of searchlights, a kind of scrutiny that would be frightening if it weren’t for the fact that, apparently, he approves of what he sees.

  Daily Aiah feeds on plasm-energy to keep away the bone-weariness that, in normal circumstance, her responsibilities and schedule should inflict upon her. But the plasm also makes her fearless, gives her a sense of invincibility. She is bolder than she would be otherwise.

  The taste of power sings through her nerves all day, an echo of the world’s ultimate chorus, of its strangely pliant reality.

  She is willing certain things into being. Time will tell if she is successful.

  SECOND TITANIC MONTH

  LORDS OF THE NEW CITY

  SEE IT NOW!

  Aiah soars out over the city. Plasm sings a song of triumph in her ectoplasmic ears. In the distance, ringing the metropolis on all sides, she can see the city’s crown, the point at which it becomes possible to build on bedrock, and where thousands of tall buildings loom over the flat aspect of the sea.

  A vast, invisible technical array makes possible this flight. Underneath it all is the well of plasm that interlaces Caraqui, that underlies it like its very own sea, that flows in mains and is collected in capacitors and powers the aspirations of a thousand mages.

  Beneath the Aerial Palace is one collection point, the huge room sheathed in steel and bronze, holding its collected plasm in towers of gleaming brass and black ceramic. Governing this power, beneath the watchful eyes of the icon of Two-Faced Tangid, are the technicians in the control room, watching their dials, consulting their schedules, throwing worn butter-smooth brass levers that lower contacts into the receptacles atop the accumulators, that start the flood of plasm along its predestined route. And from there the plasm floods upward, like water under high pressure, along circuits and conduits to the roof, where it pours along the scalloped transmission horn set at 044 degrees true, and from there leaps into the sky.

  Aiah sits in her office, the t-grip in her hand now wired into the circuit. Her mind molds the plasm to her will, controls her flight over the dome of the city. Her sensorium— the complex of senses with which she has endowed herself— sights for landmarks, finds them, corrects her flight. She brings her awareness from her plasm-sensorium into her body, laying a mundane reality onto the hyperreal sensations of plasm.

  She looks at her office clock. She has a few minutes before she has to keep her appointment.

  She will stay, then, in flight a moment more.

  Aiah expands her sensorium, concentrating on the city’s distant crown and the places that lie beyond. The Sea of Caraqui is wide, and Caraqui covers much more area than the average metropolis, though its population densities are lower. The long borders have given Caraqui a large number of neighbors, most of whom cannot be delighted with the new government popping up among them.

  Aiah has done her homework, laboring away on one of the terminals of the Worldwide News Service. Worldwide was the Keremaths’ wire and data service, and its background reports showed the signs of their policy and their censors, but Aiah was able to read between the lines of censorship, the shifting boundaries of what could be said and not-said, and has now gained an idea of what lies beyond Caraqui’s crown.

  Behind Aiah, to the south, is Barchab, with its prominent twin volcanoes. Barchab is a kind of oligarchy, reasonably prosperous, with an economy based on mining the mineral resources of its volcanic plateau. The government features a dozen major parties, each representing a coalition of moneyed interests, all vying for control of a weak legislature. Governmental influence is limited, and the wealthy arrange things among themselves.

  Aiah does not believe that Barchab will look on the new government of Caraqui with any great delight.

  Southeast and east is Koroneia, where a conservative oligarchic government called the Committee of Sixty has displaced a well-meaning military junta, the Metropolitan Social Revolutionary Council, whose staggering ineptitude reached its climax when its own military declined to fight in its defense. The Committee of Sixty, which took power with Keremath support, has ruled for three years now, and has not yet succeeded in defining its objectives, let alone managing a coherent policy.

  Ahead, to the northeast, is Lanbola. Though the constitution is that of a federal republic, the Popular Democratic Party has managed to win every election for the last sixty-seven years through methods ranging from bribery and extortion to a low-level terror campaign waged against its rivals. Lanbola’s attitude toward Caraqui’s new government may be summarized by the fact that, since the coup, it has banned the chromoplay Lords of the New City and has given refuge to some of the surviving Keremaths.

  Northward Caraqui shares a short border with Charna, a state that sprawls north to the Pole. The military seized power in Charna fifty years ago and haven’t given it up, despite occasional brief periods of fighting among cabals of officers. Charna had got along perfectly well with the Keremaths.

  Northwest is Nesca, a smallish metropolis that rejoices in a functioning parliamentary democracy. Its government seems inexplicably hostile to Caraqui’s new rulers, and has issued a number of statements condemning the violence with which the triumvirate established itself.

  West is the horror of Sabaya, which has been dominated for the last seventy-five years by Field Marshal the Serene Lord Dr. Iromaq, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Magical Arts, Savior of the Nation, etc., etc., a man f
rom whom even the Keremaths recoiled. Sabaya’s ghastly regime, inept, cash-poor, and brutal, is a byword for poverty, terror, and oppression. Whatever goes on behind its closed borders goes on largely unobserved, as if within some all-encompassing shroud of darkness.

  These are the neighbors among which Caraqui’s new government now stands. Uneasy, hostile, or unstable, friendly for the most part with the Keremaths, none are likely to welcome an unruly set of newcomers like Caraqui’s triumvirate, let alone an ominous foreign presence like Constantine.

  And then, below her hovering anima, a miracle blossoms: color expands in midair from a central point like water bursting from a main, like a kaleidoscope gone mad . . . but soon concrete images begin to form— faces, images, fancies— one turning into another like the products of dream. A man on skates. A tree that blossoms in seconds and produces red fruit, which falls of its own accord into the laps of a circle of smiling children. A tall building, granite and glass, which begins to contort, to shimmy in a kind of dance. Disembodied hands and eyes, a burning egg, a burning key, a wine bottle made of stone...

  The Dreaming Sisters are at play in the sky.

  Aiah looks for a sourceline for the cloud of images but can’t see one. The vision begins to move westward, toward ominous Sabaya, skipping through the air like a plate skimming the sea. Aiah watches in delight until it vanishes in the distance.

  She will have to find out more about the Dreaming Sisters someday.

  But now her concerns are more mundane. She orients herself over her target, then drops into a district of cheap flats, warehouses, and illegal factories where the children of Caraqui toil at unforgiving machines for double shifts every day.

  The half-world of Aground lies somewhere hereabouts, hidden beneath the streets. On these shallow mudflats, many of the buildings have conventional architecture, with foundations reaching to bedrock; and others, centuries old, are on concrete pontoons that moored themselves in mud long ago.