City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (43 page)

“Not everyone will be without skills,” Khorsa says. “Alfeg isn’t.” Her calm eyes hold steady on Aiah. “Neither am I,” she adds.

Aiah looks at her. “You’re here to apply for a job?”

“Yes.”

“You have it if you want it. But what about the Wisdom Fortune Temple?”

“We have enough trained assistants to take my place, at least for a while.”

Despair wails in Aiah’s nerves. “You don’t believe Charduq, too, do you? I can assure you that I’m not an immortal.”

Khorsa considers this. “I don’t know if it’s necessary that you
know
,” she decides.

Aiah turns away. “I don’t like this game,” she says.

“
The Cunning People need
something
,” Khorsa says. “The heart went out of us when the Metropolis of Barkazi was destroyed. Even though that happened three generations ago, we still live like
refugees
. You’re a hero to our people— you can change things.”

“It’s a delusion,” Aiah says. “And when nothing comes of it, everyone’s going to be hurt.”

Khorsa looks at her fixedly. “Is what you— you and Constantine— is what you’re trying to accomplish in Caraqui delusional?”

“
I hope not.” Aiah again turns away from the intent glimmer of expectation in
Khorsa’s eyes. “If Caraqui fails, however, it won’t be
my
fault. But if every hope the Cunning People hold for
me
turns to ashes, whose fault will it be? Who will they blame?”

“Different questions,” Khorsa says, “with different answers.”

Aiah tastes bitterness on her tongue. “I somehow doubt they will hold Charduq responsible.”

Khorsa’s voice is soft. “They are coming. I cannot say how many. But they are coming, whether you want them or not.”

“Go back to Jaspeer. Tell Charduq to shut up.”

“He won’t.”

Aiah waves a hand. “Then tell him the time isn’t ripe! Tell him to wait!” She represses a snarl. “Damn it, if I’m an immortal, he ought to do what I tell him!”

A hint of a smile glimmers across Khorsa’s face. “I can tell him that, I think.”

She is half the world away from her large and troublesome family, Aiah thinks, and now they pursue her, larger and more troublesome than she ever imagined they could be.

She notices a new folder on her desk, and knows it contains the results of the security scans performed in the pre-break. She grabs the folder, opens it, pages savagely through it until she comes to Alfeg’s file.

Clean, she discovers; no police spy, no contacts with the government of Jaspeer. No one’s agent. . . save maybe, in some sense, Charduq’s.

Right,
Aiah thinks.
You’re a rich boy— it’s time to spend some of Daddy’s money.

NEW CITY NOW

“You’re hired,” Aiah says. “Congratulations.”

Alfeg looks at her with a questioning expression, eyebrows lifted. “You sound as if you resent the fact you’re hiring me,” he says.

“There are some services I wish you to perform,” Aiah continues, “in addition to those covered by the job.”

A frown crosses Alfeg’s bemused face. “I’m sorry? There are conditions to my getting the job?”

Aiah places her palms firmly atop Alfeg’s file on her desk. “Not officially,” she says.

“Ah.” He blinks at her for a moment, touches his chin-lace in a self-conscious way, then nods. “What do you wish me to do?”

“Do you know Charduq the Hermit?”

The knowing smile dances across Alfeg’s face, a smile that suggests he and Aiah share a secret.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m familiar with him.”

“He’s a lunatic,” Aiah says, and watches Alfeg’s self-satisfied little smile twitch away. “He’s telling stories about me that aren’t true, and he’s trying to persuade Barkazils to give up their lives and come to Caraqui.”

“Ah— he’s—” Alfeg stumbles. Aiah holds out a hand.

“Let me finish, please,” Aiah says. “Since it seems I can’t stop him from talking, and since it would appear that some Barkazils, at least, are coming— and mostly those who have little to lose, I suspect— I want you to establish an organization for their reception. Help find them work, a place to live, that sort of thing.”

Alfeg takes a moment to process this. “Will I be receiving any funds for this project?” he asks.

“No,” Aiah says. “None but what you can raise yourself.”

“I—” He blinks.

“And you’ll have to do it in your spare time,” Aiah says, “because you’ll be starting here right away, and we’re all working shifts-and-a-half.”

Alfeg clears his throat. “Is this some kind of test?” he asks.

“No.”

He stares at Aiah, searching her expression for a clue which Aiah refuses to give. Then, after a long silence, he gives an uncomfortable tug to his collar and turns away. “I’ll do it,” he says.

“Thank you.” Briskly. She hands him a paper. “Your office will be Room 3224, which you’ll share with one or two others. You’ll be in Ethemark’s division— report to him tomorrow at 08:00, start of work shift, for orientation and assignment. Your badge will be waiting at the reception area, northwest gate.”

“Yes. Ah.” He licks his lips, stands. Aiah rises from behind her desk and shakes his hand.

“And if I hear from any indigent Barkazils,” Aiah says, “I’ll refer them to you.”

His head gives a little jerk.

“Yes,” he murmurs, “of course.”

WATCH THE LYNXOID BROTHERS . . .
AS THEY FACE THEIR GREATEST MENACE . . .
TYROS THE TERRIBLE

It’s an arrest, one like many others. The suspect is a midlevel plasm seller, probably not a Handman but one of their cousins, whose plasm tap is in a secret room in the back of his apartment. He has been having a party for several days, looks like: there are empty bottles and used glasses everywhere, and the acrid tang of cigar smoke fills every room. There are two girls here, obvious professionals despite their youth, and no sign of the plasm seller’s wife and children.

Aiah, playing plasm angel, hovers invisibly in the room, along with a pair of her colleagues. They seem redundant: there is no sign of traps or resistance, and the suspect is so drunk he can barely walk.

The military cops cuff his hands behind his back and prop him up while they pat him down. He’s wearing only underwear, and looks terrible: pale, unshaven, with deep circles beneath his eyes and patches of sweat on his undershirt, as if forty-eight hours of hangover had caught up with him all at once.

The girls stand naked in the corner, under guard. One modestly crosses her arms over her breasts, the other merely lets a cigaret hang from her lips, drinks from her little bottle of whisky, and watches the soldiers with contempt. They are both licensed prostitutes, each with her official yellow card, and though Aiah suspects at least one card misstates an age, suspicion is not quite enough given the department’s wartime urgency, and the two will be released as soon as the apartment is properly secure.

One of the military cops comes out of the bedroom carrying a pair of the suspect’s trousers. He and his colleagues try to maneuver the drunken suspect into them, a little comical dance ... and then the suspect’s head explodes.

Aiah stares in shock. The police stagger back, swabbing blood and brains off their faceplates. Red spatters the breasts of the whisky-drinking whore. The suspect drops like a rag doll, leaving a wide streak of blood on the wallpaper behind, and then a cold voice whispers across Aiah’s thoughts.

—
You interfere overmuch with my pleasures, lady.

Ice shivers Aiah’s bones. Her teeth chatter. But Taikoen does not speak again— he is gone— and Aiah slowly breathes out, summons her scattered thoughts, and makes visible her anima in the cousin’s apartment. She knows what she must do.

“Did anyone see what happened?” she says, and begins the official investigation that she hopes will never point in the right direction.

Afterward, Aiah’s had enough.

She takes off, her anima aimed straight up, rising fast as a bullet away from all this, from death and squalor and endless grinding duty. The city fades, a flat plain of brown and gray and green spread like a lily pad over its level sea. Get enough height, she thinks, and you’d never see the war. She tunes her senses to the air, feels its cool, burning touch as if it were her physical body climbing like a rocket, as if she were feeling the burning wind on her cheeks. She penetrates a layer of scattered white cloud and watches it fall away beneath her, become part of the increasingly abstract landscape below, a new bright element added to its jigsaw.

The Shield alone stands above her, barring her ascent— luminescent source of light and life for the world; impenetrable, energy-devouring barrier to the tens of billions crowded on the curved surface below— and as she gazes up at it, a cold anger settles into her. This is what has created her world, this barrier put by the Ascended in the path of humanity, allegedly as a punishment for sins that have only grown more obscure in the ages since. It is carefully sited, this Shield: a little higher, Aiah’s teachers told her in school, and objects could be put into an elliptical path that would circle the globe without falling— more evidence, if any were needed, that the Ascended Ones didn’t want anything or anyone sharing their realm.

The Shield’s pearly luminescence brightens, grows hot, becomes blazing white. Its power roars in Aiah’s transphysical ears, and she knows it for an enemy. Matter that touches the Shield is annihilated, transformed into bursts of X rays. Plasm, the most powerful terrestrial force, vanishes as if it never were, anima-probes dissolving on contact, giving no information to the mages below and leaving them with nothing but bills for the plasm wasted. Nothing can touch the Shield and survive.

The sensation of wind is long gone— atmosphere is thin up here. Anger drives Aiah ever upward.
Kill me, then,
Aiah thinks at the Shield.
Annihilate me and prove what a bastard you are.

The blazing whiteness of the Shield consumes her senses. She can feel its heat, its enmity. She knows it is near, and prepares for the touch of annihilation...

And then she is through it to someplace else, a place both of darkness and blazing light. To her astonishment she sees the Shield curving away beneath her, a perfect white sphere, its snarling energies intact.

Her staggered senses perceive mostly blackness— an emptiness so vast, so infinite, that she finds her own reactions, her very being, contrasted into insignificance. And there are
structures
, spidery things of silvery metal, each flying in the absolute silence of the void, rolling up toward the Pole. . . Without scale she can’t tell how large they are, but she suspects they are
huge
, each capable of containing a metropolis, despite their appearance of fragility...
One,
she counts,
two, three, four, six, ten; many.

A spherical incandescence burns in the sky, white and angry as the Shield, a perfect sphere of raging light. It fixes the silvery surfaces of the flying structures in its glare, limning their surfaces with merciless precision, and it reflects as well off another spherical body, a green little marble with wisps of white cloud and strange, unnaturally brilliant splashes of blue. Part of it, a black unlit crescent, is in shadow.

One, Aiah thinks in staggered wonder, is the long-lost Sun, and the other the Moon.

And then another dimension infuses Aiah’s perceptions, as if a transparent sheet had been laid over the void, a sheet painted with another layer of actuality. The Sun, she sees, is also a
person
, a man who dances within the sphere of eternal flame. He wears a full sleek beard with the tip curled up, and a red conical hat with its peak pointed forward; there is a glowing sphere in one hand, and a silver rod in the other. He moves, stepping precisely but without hurry, an enigmatic smile on his lips, through a dance with no beginning and no end.

There is another dancer, Aiah sees, who is the Moon, a woman with gray skin— not mere pallor, but actually
gray
, gray as slate. Her black hair falls free in ringlets, and she wears a red flounced skirt and jeweled toe-rings on her bare feet. She, too, is dancing; Aiah suspects it is the same dance as the man in the Sun, the man who is the Sun— but if so, her long dark eyes never seek those of the dancing man, though her lips bear the same equivocal smile.

Aiah’s perceptions seem to shift again, and all the structures are gone, and with them the brilliant spheres, and even the Shield with the world below it; Aiah sees only dancers, some of them not even remotely human, stepping across the sky in an unhurried progression, a dance to the rhythm of eternity, to a music that has lasted for an age...

And then there is a snap, a sizzle, a flare in Aiah’s mind that fills her vision with molten silver and her ears with white noise; and she finds herself, breathless, in her chair in the op center, the t-grip in her hand, and looks down at the controls that show her broadcast horn still pulsing power, firing plasm straight at the Shield, where, presumably, it is being consumed.

She switches it off.

The Shield had briefly opened, she thinks, a tiny hole, and by chance she had flown through it, giving her a glimpse of what lies beyond; and then it had cruelly shut behind her, snapping off her plasm tether, returning her to her own world, to the war that is Caraqui.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Adrenaline Monster rips Aiah from sleep— she sits up in bed, sucks in air, every sense straining for sign of danger. Her thoughts automatically perform a checklist: no explosions, no shellfire, no alarms.

No danger. The Adrenaline Monster is just keeping in practice.

She gasps for breath, her heart a trip-hammer beating against her ribs. A face with an ambiguous smile floats briefly before her eyes, a remnant of her dream, the Man Who is the Sun.