City on Fire (Metropolitan 2)

by Walter Jon Williams

  “You are honest with yourself, at least. You do not lie to yourself about your feelings. But despite your distaste you hire them, if you think they’re qualified, and that is admirable of you.”

  She looks at him. “They never make you uneasy? Or even afraid?” She thinks of Dr. Romus, the snake-mage, and represses a shudder.

  Constantine considers this for a moment. “I must admit,” he says finally, “that I find myself comfortable amid all manner of unlikely people.”

  Aiah reaches for her brandy. “That is your gift. It isn’t mine.”

  “People born with money and position, I find, often possess this talent. I was raised a prince, and even considering that I was a prince of pirates, still it makes for a level of security in dealing with others.”

  “And I’m a poor kid raised on the dole,” Aiah says. “But I don’t see what that has to do with consistency, or the lack of it. The rich seem to be as inconsistent as anyone else.”

  He smiles. “Conceded absolutely,” he says. “But we were speaking of security, not hypocrisy. The Barkazil were refugees in Jaspeer, poor, confined to low-status jobs. Perhaps they competed with the twisted for work or for living quarters.”

  “So far as I can tell,” Aiah mumbles into her drink, “we competed with poor longnose Jaspeeris, who hated us. I hardly ever saw a twisted person when I was growing up.”

  “A theory only.” Constantine shrugs, and then his eyes turn to her. She sees in them a glow as mellow as that in the brandy that swirls in his glass. “Since you put such store in communication between members of the department,” he says, “let me communicate to you what I perceive in your PED. I am utterly gratified that you came to Caraqui. I was right to choose you for this work. You confirm my judgment every day, and I thank you.”

  Heat rises in Aiah’s cheeks. She touches her glass to his, the crystal chime singing in the air for a long moment before she drinks. Constantine’s lips, tasted next, are afire with brandy.

  Desire has its way. Neither is in a hurry, and both in a mood to prolong this banquet of pleasure as long as possible: there are hors d’oeuvres on the sofa, soups and salads sampled on the bed, and then the main course, served with a full range of tangy condiments.

  Aiah pushes Constantine onto his back and captures him between her legs, gazing down at his supine body, the broad cords of muscle that cross his massive shoulders and barrel chest. Her breath hisses between her teeth as she rides him. He regards her with a lazy, catlike smile, indolent eyes half-closed. His big hands set her skin afire where he touches her. She bends to lick his scent from him, covering his chest with a waterfall of her dark hair.

  “I adore you utterly, Miss Aiah,” he says, baritone voice a resonant murmur in her ear, like the deep bedrock far below whispering a secret to her; and the words set her plasm-charged nerves alight, firing her flesh, melting her groin, and suddenly she finds herself peaking, the climax coming all unexpected, and from the words alone...

  Breathless, she grabs fistfuls of his pectorals and pushes herself upright, arching her back, looking down at him through the skein of her hair.

  That was fun, she thinks. And fortunately, she adds to herself, there are plenty more where that one came from.

  *

  She has yet to purchase any sleepwear, so afterward she pulls an undershirt over her head so that she and Constantine won’t stick together. He smiles at the sight.

  “I should buy you some dainties,” he says, “satins and lace.” He smiles. “I need recreation, a break from my official worries. It will be good for me to exercise my imagination in this regard.”

  “You gave me that lovely negligee of gold silk,” Aiah recalls, “but I had to leave it behind in Jaspeer.”

  “I will replace it with a better,” Constantine says. He throws his arms over his head and brings his body to full stretch, arching on the bed as he brings slumbering muscle awake. “What now?" he says. “Shall I fetch the brandy bottle, and we toast each other till end of sleep shift?”

  “I had in mind a more literary pursuit.” She reaches to the bedside table, takes Volume Fourteen of the Proceedings, then returns to the bed and depolarizes the window to let in a little illumination.

  Constantine screws up his eyes against the light. “You’ve trapped me, by the immortals,” he murmurs. “Trapped, deprived of my strength, and no hope but to attend.”

  “Exactly,” Aiah says, “it was an ambush all along.” She joins him on the bed and props the heavy volume on her sternum. “Now listen, and I promise you will not be bored.”

  He bolsters his head on his arm. Aiah turns pages, tries to find the choicest place to start. “We therefore recommend the complete reformation of human infrastructure along the following lines,” she begins, and hears Constantine puff disbelief.

  “Give the fellow credit for ambition.”

  “You’ll be giving him credit for more in a moment.”

  She reads on, spicing abstruse comments about building codes and social foundations with her own footnotes. Rohder’s Research Division had uncovered what they called “fractionate intervals,” a distance at which plasm generation could be multiplied that was smaller than the smallest accepted unit, the radius. The results, all things being perfect, would be at most a 20 percent increase in the generation of plasm...

  “Let me see that,” Constantine says, and reaches over her to pluck the book from her hands.

  Aiah watches Constantine’s constant scowl as he reads, snorts, flips to another page, reads again. At the point where he reads three consecutive pages, she snatches the book from his hands and throws it over her shoulder to the floor. He looks at her in surprise.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “What do you think?” she asks.

  He frowns critically. “Badly written,” he says, “the worst of scholastic- and specialist-prose, never to the point, fogged with obscurities and solipsisms. And the matter, these fractionate intervals, is either the greatest delusion in the world, or—”

  “Or Rohder is a genius,” Aiah says, “though maybe not in writing reports.” She looks at him. “Remember that I told you no one in the Authority ever talked to anyone else? They had a way of augmenting plasm, but they never realized it.”

  “If all this is true, then you may have saved the revolution, and perhaps the world.” He reaches across her. “Give me that book again.”

  Aiah puts a hand on his shoulder and firmly pushes him back to the mattress. “If I have just saved the world," she says, “don’t I deserve to have your undivided attention for the next few hours?”

  Constantine’s look softens. One hand enfolds her shoulder, the massive instrument, made for smashing bricks or bending iron, now gentle as the warmth in his eyes.

  “Very well,” he says. “You shall have it.”

  Aiah can sense, in the taste of his lips, the tangy flavor of possibility.

  You may have saved the revolution... She is, then, more than the mistress of a powerful man promoted above her abilities: she has seen something no one else has, and will now arrange to bring it before the world.

  It is as if the future has her name written on it. She wonders if this is how Constantine feels all the time, if he looks on the future as something he owns, has nestled in the palm of one of his giant hands.

  Maybe so. But for now, Aiah is content with her triumph, and with her place in things to come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Here is our secure room, for our sensitive files.”

  The triumvirate and their entourage look into the bronze-lined room with polite disinterest. They have seen secure rooms before, and this one is no different. The bronze sheathing and the bronze-barred door are designed to keep plasm out, and there is a guard and a pass system that allows only authorized people inside.

  The shelves are mostly empty. Drumbeth looks at them with a military eye. “How soon do you anticipate being able to commence operations?” he asks.

  “We’ve already commen
ced,” Aiah says. “Though our operations at present are directed at gathering intelligence.”

  “You would seem not to have gathered much,” says Gentri, observing the empty shelves. He is the Minister of Public Security, head among other things of the police, and no friend to the Plasm Enforcement Division. He is a balding man in wine-colored velvet, and he looks about with obvious disdain as he strokes his graying mustache with his right index finger.

  “It’s early days,” Aiah says. “We’re not up to strength yet.”

  “I meant active operations,” says Drumbeth.

  She looks down at him— he is half a head shorter than she.

  “That’s a policy decision,” Aiah says. “We can start arresting people right away, of course, but there are still some weeks to go in the amnesty, and I’d rather keep gathering information for the present.”

  She’s making a deliberate hedge. The triumvirate are traveling with a large entourage, and she doesn’t know how many of them might be conduits to the Silver Hand.

  “Can you give me a date?” Drumbeth presses.

  Aiah clenches her teeth. “I’d . . . rather not, sir. May I show you our ops room? It is just down the hall.”

  Hilthi gives her an accusing look. He is another triumvir, the former journalist whose opposition to the Keremaths became a byword. A tall man with tilted, supercilious eyes, he jots in a notebook with a golden pen as he speaks.

  “You are not prepared to arrest these criminals? The problem of stolen plasm is vast and requires immediate remedy.” He frowns at her. “Totalitarian governments always find their chief allies within the criminal classes. Though the last government is gone, their allies still remain, causing untold suffering among the population.”

  It is as if Hilthi were caught between his old profession of journalist, interrogating guilty members of a wicked government, and his new occupation, a politician who makes speeches.

  “We can arrest a few now,” Aiah says. “Or many later. No official policy has yet been formulated concerning which of these options we consider desirable.” She casts a glance at Constantine. He has been in the back of the crowd, looming over the triumvirate with an imperturbable expression on his face, and till now content to let her do the talking.

  “I’m afraid that’s my fault, gentlemen,” he says. “I wanted better information on the dimension of the problem before taking action. The amnesty is still in place, after all, and we have all been on the job only a few weeks.”

  Hilthi scowls and writes on his pad.

  “May I point out,” Gentri says, “that Public Security has a policy in place, and that our plasm squads arrest criminals almost daily? Was it not Mr. Hilthi”— he gives a slight bow to his superior— “who issued the directive about eliminating redundancy whenever possible?” He looks at Aiah. “I do not doubt the enthusiasm of these, ah, amateurs, but I very much doubt if they will give you anything like satisfactory results.”

  Aiah feels Gentri’s sting lodge in her heart. It would hurt less, she knew, if she weren’t, in fact, such a complete novice at everything she’s done.

  She looks at Gentri levelly. “Give us six months,” she says, “and we shall see whose record is better.”

  “A bold challenge,” Gentri says, “but my personnel outnumbers yours by tens of thousands. You don’t have a chance.”

  Aiah’s response is ready on her tongue— in your pants, perhaps, or call the neighbors, or some other expression from her old neighborhood— but though the words are ready, she manages to bottle them up at the last second. Perhaps Drumbeth senses her struggle, because he chooses this moment to speak.

  “Perhaps,” he says, “we will observe an exhibition of the values of competition. Now shall we go on to the ops rooms?”

  The ops rooms, one large and one small, are still a shambles: video monitors with their copper cables hanging, plasm connections with hardware yet to be installed, plastic flooring still in huge rolls in the corner. But Aiah finds herself growing enthusiastic as she explains what it will look like when it’s finished, how supervisors will use the monitors to coordinate the actions of mages and military police.

  “This is all very well, and you speak with enthusiasm and charm,” says Parq, whose title is not only triumvir but Holy. “The material functions of the room— its mighty purpose and dread, impersonal power—are impressive indeed. But I sense a certain moral uncertainty at work here. Perhaps the young lady stands in need of guidance.” He approaches Aiah and takes her hand.

  Aiah cannot conceive of a more perfect image of a spiritual leader— Parq is tall and dignified and handsome, with solemn brown eyes in a long, copper-skinned face. His curling gray beard is long and silky and perfumed, and his soft, satin baritone projects a perfect sincerity. He wears gray robes, beautifully ornamented with silver lace, and a soft mushroom-shaped hat.

  If Aiah didn’t know he was a corrupt tyrant who had only been elevated to his position because he was willing to collaborate with the Keremaths, she might well have fallen under his spell.

  At close range, Parq gazes into Aiah’s eyes with utter concern. “Wouldn’t your task be made easier,” he asks, “if you had a spiritual guide in your division, one to give you insight into the complex decisions with which you will be faced almost daily?”

  Aiah restrains the impulse to yank her hand back from his satin grip. “I’m sure that’s not for me to say, sir,” she says.

  Parq presses on, taking a soft step nearer Aiah so that she can feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. She suppresses the urge to claw his face to ribbons. “You would find such guidance to be of use, I’m certain,” he says, his soft voice like that of a suitor whispering into the ear of his beloved. “You are a stranger here, and so is Minister Constantine, and a wise advisor familiar with the local conditions would be worth everything to you ...”

  “That’s a decision that will have to be made at a higher level than mine, I’m afraid,” Aiah says, and slides her hand from his grasp.

  “Perhaps,” Constantine says, secret amusement glittering in his eyes, “you gentlemen would care to observe a few of our mages conducting a surveillance ...”

  GRADE B EARTHQUAKE IN DOLIMARQ

  75,000 DEAD

  TRIUMVIRATE EXPRESSES SYMPATHY FOR VICTIMS

  “A delicate escape from Parq,” Constantine says, “but nicely done. I could tell that you wanted to strike him, and on behalf of the Ministry of Resources I would like to commend you on your restraint.”

  The tour over, Constantine and Aiah take refuge in his office.

  Weariness and relief beat down on Aiah’s shoulders. She can’t tell if she’s done well or ill, but she is thankful that she will not have to deal with any more triumvirs today. She collapses into a chair, feels leather and hydraulics receive her.

  “I wish I felt I could have spoken to them more frankly,” she says. “I would like to tell them I’d make a hundred arrests the very day the amnesty ends.”

  He looks at her, fingers thoughtfully touching his chin. Behind him, visible through the huge oval window, plasm adverts glow in air. “Can you make a hundred arrests? Will you?”

  “You said you wanted them destroyed. I can’t do that, I suppose, but I’ll do what I can. If, of course, you’ll give me the soldiers to do it. And warrants.”

  “Naturally I shall. Geymard’s troops will get bored if they do nothing but guard the Palace.”

  She glances up at him. “I have learned something from you and Geymard and Drumbeth," she says. “A tactic I wish to employ.”

  “Yes?”

  “Decapitation is best. I want to slice the head of the Silver Hand clean off in one stroke.”

  “There are more Handmen than there were Keremaths,” Constantine observes. “And more heads.”

  “With their leaders gone, I hope the rest will fight over the spoils. And perhaps even inform on each other, to weaken their rivals.”

  Constantine nods. “A policy that promises well. Though you
should not count on them to inform— it is the one thing, the one guild rule, that is ruthlessly enforced.”

  “I would like to publicize a telephone number that informants can call. With rewards, perhaps. But that means hiring more clerical staff and coming up with reward money.”

  Constantine gives this notion a moment’s thought. “Wait until after your first arrests. If they are successful, I will have more leverage with the triumvirate.”

  “If you think that’s best.”

  Constantine looks down at his ebony-and-gilt desk. He opens a drawer, reaches inside, takes out Aiah’s copy of the Proceedings, and pushes it across the desk toward her.

  “I have ordered the entire set from the Jaspeeri Plasm Authority,” he says, and his grin broadens. “I wonder what they will make of it? Double-express delivery, and addressed to me personally, a man to whom the Authority police would very much like to speak.”

  She takes the heavy book from his desk and holds it in her lap. “I imagine they will take your money and send the books.”

  “I imagine they will.” His head cocks to one side, and he regards her from beneath half-closed eyes. “How well did you know this Rohder?”

  “Not well, though I worked for him at one point. Catching plasm thieves, because the Authority had given him no other job.” She smiles. “And because he needed a hobby.”

  “Would he come to work for us, do you think?”

  “I will call him, if you like.”

  “An interview first. At his convenience. I will send an aerocar for him.”

  “He has almost three hundred years’ seniority at the Authority. It’s a lot to give up.”

  “Well.” Constantine shrugs. “We’ll see how badly he needs a hobby.”

  Aiah smiles. “I will make the call.”

  There is a knock on the doorframe, and Sorya walks in. She wears a silk dress the color of apricots and a belt of linked gold geomantic foci low on her hips, and carries a file folder.