City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (15 page)

And then he laughs, a sudden surprising boom that shatters her awestruck mood, and his arms cinch her below her ribs; he picks her up and she is flying, spinning in circles, her feet sweeping papers from her desk. . . .

He sets her down lightly, kisses her before she can catch her breath. “Perhaps I will forfeit it all,” he said, “for a few hours in your company, after our business is concluded today.”

“I wouldn’t want you to give up so much.”

He laughs again, spins round on his heel, thrusts out an arm at the scene beyond the window, the long cluttered view of the city built out over its sea. “Foolish to speak of ordering the world,” he says, “when I am confined to the role of a minor minister in a chronically misruled and impoverished metropolis ...” He laughs again. “You would not believe the absurdities to which I am subjected. Yesterday’s cabinet meeting spent hours discussing a problem having to do with capital spending. It was a thousand radii beyond trivial, with no remedy besides, and it occupied a full day.”

“I believe you volunteered for the job,” Aiah reminds.

He gives her a sly look. “Miss Aiah, I suspect you may keep me honest.”

She walks up to him and straightens a fold in his lapel. “We must both learn to be good subordinates.”

He gives a dry little laugh. “I will do what I can.”

“Will I see you third shift?”

“Ah. 21:00, perhaps?”

“And no cocktail parties later? No receptions? Cabinet meetings? Duty calls on the dolphins? Visits from the winner of the Junior New City League’s essay contest?”

“I believe not.” He gives a lazy smile. “But I will have to consult my calendar in regard to that last point.”

She stands on tiptoe and kisses his cheek. “Till later, then.”

His brows rise in mock offense. “Such a slight good-bye? I would have a better memory of you than that.”

His arms coil around her again— the pigeons on the window ledge see the swift movement and fly in panic— and Aiah laughs as Constantine bends her over backward, like a swooning girl in a chromoplay, and dines for a long moment on her arched throat.

1.5 MILLION FOR CHARITY!

ALLEGED GANGSTER GIVES TO CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

HOSPITAL HEAD RECEIVES “GREAT-UNCLE” RATHMEN

21:00. Aiah’s veins tingle with the plasm she’s just fed herself to keep weariness at bay. Constantine is on time, with a bottle of fine brandy and a crystal bowl of fruit plundered from one of the Keremaths’ rooftop arboretums.

Aiah feasts greedily on grapes, red-skinned and with a cool taste, their tiny seeds sweet like crystal-sugar, as if the fruit were stuffed with candy. Constantine pours brandy, swirls it in the glass, and sniffs it delicately, nostrils high, like a haughty bronze figure standing on some ancient wall gazing down at some conquered city. The liquor is made, Aiah knows, from actual grapes grown in actual gardens, not in vats with chemicals and hermetics.

“You have done admirably with your department,” Constantine says. “Two weeks, and it is actually functioning.”

“Not well,” Aiah grudges. She sighs, looks at her brandy, then puts the glass down. “When I worked for the Plasm Authority in Jaspeer I discovered that no one there ever talked to anyone else— our suggestions and complaints were transmitted off into the void, and were never acted on or even acknowledged, and orders came down from the hundred-fiftieth floor as if from beyond the Shield, with no consultation, no notion of how things actually stood, no concept of how to make it work.”

“Institutionalized dysfunction,” Constantine says.

“Oh yes. And institutionalized frustration as well. So now I am trying to set up the PED in order to facilitate lines of communication, to make certain that everyone has access to authority when needed ...” She sighs again and picks up her brandy glass. “But that authority is me, and that means I am consulted on everything. I have never worked so hard in my life, and still the department only lurches along.”

“It will dance and skip, given time.”

“The Ascended willing,” Aiah says, conceding somewhat to superstition as she sketches the Sign of the Ascended in the air with her brandy glass.

“But you have a department,” Constantine says, “and you have not gone mad, or had a fit of the vapors, or checked yourself into the hospital for a long course of sedation.”

“Give me time,” Aiah says, and smiles into her glass as she takes a sip.

“You deal well with Ethemark?”

She shrugs, feels a little insect-twitch of distaste crawl cross her face.

“As I must. He is gifted, even if he isn’t my choice.”

“But you have hired other twisted people.”

“They’re applying in swarms!” Aiah says. “Ethemark or his kin must have put the word out. I’m hiring only the most qualified.”

“As you should.” He cocks his head, regards her. “But you don’t like them?”

She sighs, puts down her glass. “Is it bad of me to wish the twisted people well, but not to wish them in my vicinity?”

He purses his lips as he chooses words. “
Bad
, I will not say. Inconsistent, perhaps?”

Aiah sighs and throws up her hands. “Then I am inconsistent. But it is what I feel.”

“
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 commenced,” 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.”