City on Fire (Metropolitan 2)

by Walter Jon Williams

  The government of Caraqui sits on one side of the long table, the triumvirate in the middle, flanked by Constantine and Belckon and their various aides and supporters. Aiah is present, she suspects, largely so that video cameras can record her entrance and exit, more evidence for her audience that she is important, that cities are set atremble at her very word. But Constantine has, perhaps, another reason. “Might as well learn how this works,” he tells her, with a smile.

  The Minister of State Belckon, Aiah observes, has not found it necessary to bring Sorya. But Aiah does not doubt that Sorya will find out what happens sooner rather than later.

  Licinias, for his part, brings only a pair of assistants, though his air of composed authority seems to weigh the table subtly to his side.... It is an interesting effect, and Aiah wonders how he does it.

  There are formalities first: the government thanks Licinias and the Polar League for their interest in Caraqui’s problems; Licinias thanks the government for receiving him, and expresses the hope he may contribute to a settlement. He then offers to read a position statement from the Provisional Government.

  “It is kind of you to deliver it,” Constantine replies— he speaks in advance of the triumvirs, but since the three leaders show no surprise, Aiah concludes this is by prearrangement.

  “But sir,” Constantine continues, “I wonder if you would first enlighten us concerning two points: first, whether the so-called Provisional Government is willing to recognize this government as the legitimate government of Caraqui; and second, their timetable for evacuating their forces from our territory.”

  Licinias listens with apparent courtesy— if he is surprised, he hides it well— and then says, “The Provisional Government’s statement addresses neither of these points.”

  Constantine shrugs, his lip curling. “Then I fear that these proceedings are a waste of our time and yours,” he says.

  Licinias indicates the papers before him. “Shall I read you the Provisional Government’s statement?”

  Constantine scowls— Aiah wonders whether this, too, is prearranged— and then Faltheg raises a hand. “Proceed, Mr. Licinias.”

  It is, as Constantine predicted, a waste of time. The Provisionals’ statement is little more than a demand for surrender. The triumvirate rejects it unanimously, then produces a statement of their own position, prepared ahead of time, in which they promise amnesty for all the Provisional leaders but two— Kerehorn and Great-Uncle Rathmen are both named— if their forces are evacuated and disbanded at once.

  “You do not give me much maneuvering room,” Licinias says as he glances at the terms.

  “We cannot tolerate a hostile force occupying a part of our metropolis,” Constantine says. “Any settlement must be aimed at removing that force.”

  Licinias permits himself a delicate shrug. “I will inform the Provisionals of your conditions,” he says. “But I’m afraid an impasse may be created, and that will throw the matter before a general League council... on which, I am afraid, your opponents may command more votes than you.”

  “If the Polar League does not support the right of a metropolis to remain free of invasion,” Constantine asks rhetorically, “what good can anyone expect from them?”

  “The Provisionals maintain that their force in fact represents the legitimate government,” Licinias offers, “and that your government is usurping their authority.”

  “We are preparing, even in the midst of war, to hold an election that will confirm our legitimacy,” Constantine says. “What do the Provisionals offer?”

  Licinias hands the paper to one of his assistants, who puts it in a dispatch case. “We shall see,” he says.

  After which the meeting is brought to an end, a luncheon buffet is wheeled in, and the delegates mingle for a while. Aiah, holding a plate of vegetables and munching a stick of celery, finds herself near Licinias, and the envoy bows formally to her.

  “You are Miss Aiah?” he says. “I believe I recognize you from video.”

  Aiah offers him her hand. “I hope you don’t believe everything you saw,” she says.

  He shakes her hand with a dry, papery palm. “I am refreshed to hear that you do not believe it,” he says. “But I am inclined to wonder”— he looks thoughtful— “why your government has seen fit to place you in such prominence, and in such a sensational fashion.”

  Aiah smiles. “I am sometimes inclined to wonder that myself.”

  Licinias gives a dry laugh. “I have often found the actions of governments inexplicable,” he says, “but I confess it is refreshing to find such a prominently situated member of the government in question agreeing with me.”

  “I’m not prominent,” Aiah says. “I’m just on video.”

  Licinias gazes at her with wise brown eyes tucked up under winged white brows. “There is, you will discover, very little difference between the two.”

  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 an
d 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.”

  CHAPTER 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.