City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (7 page)

Aiah feels beads of sweat dotting her scalp. Her heart throbs in her throat.

Ice man. Hanged man. The damned.

Taikoen, Constantine’s creature.

Aiah could tell the couple seated next to her that the officer, whoever he is, hasn’t been set free. He’s
gone
, obliterated, and soon his body will follow.

The hanged man is a creature of plasm, trapped in the pulse of fundamental energy, and so hostile to life, to matter, that he’s cut off from it, from the comforts of humanity or the distractions of the flesh ... he can’t escape the single elemental fact of his own existence.

Not without the help of a first-rate mage.

Constantine had put the hanged man in the officer’s body, had sent him lurching out into Shieldlight to seek his pleasures. Thus was the creature rewarded for helping to overthrow the Keremaths.

The hanged man, in the long run poisonous to life, would wear out the officer’s body within a matter of days. The man would be found dead, and the new government would not be blamed. And Taikoen would slip back into the plasm mains, into the heart of the power that gave him life, and wait for his next victim.

Aiah looks down at the wineglass she’s half-raised. Her hand is trembling and the wine splashes over her hand and wrist. She firmly places the glass back on her table.

She wants to leave the bar and flee back to the Palace, but for all she knows the hanged man is still outside, and she doesn’t want to encounter him.

Best wait for her meal, she decides.

She wonders if it will taste like anything but ashes.

SNAP! THE WORLD DRINK

LIFE IS BETTER WITH A SNAP! IN YOUR FINGERS

It’s almost sleep shift before Aiah gets back to the Palace. Her room, clean and smelling of paint, awaits her, antiseptic as a room in a hotel.

The walls are bare in the bedroom— all mirrors, pictures, and ornaments have been taken down while the paint dries. Aiah begins to put them back up, but several are chromo-graphs of people— the former occupant, or his family or friends— and Aiah puts these in a closet designed as a pocket garden, with buckets of loam and grow lights but with nothing planted, presumably because the former occupant could afford to buy vegetables instead of growing them.

She goes to her bag, takes out her icon of Karlo, and puts it on the wall.

With its lacy frame of cheap tin, the icon looks incongruous on the wall of the luxury suite, but Aiah finds it comforting. Karlo is
her
immortal, the hero of the Barkazils— the great first leader of the Cunning People, who man who refused the Ascendancy because it was not granted to all, and was thus condemned to remain with his people when the Malakas, the Ascended, built the Shield as a barrier between themselves and the planet’s teeming billions...

Aiah walks toward the terrace doors. Bronze wire in a diamond pattern is sandwiched between the glass plates of the doors, part of the building’s defense system, and she gazes through the gleaming diamonds at the Shield, the world’s opalescent shell, which provides light and heat but which is also the wall of a prison, at once the world’s savior and warder.

Karlo had tried to prevent the Shield from going up and failed, and that was both his tragedy and the world’s. And in the thousands of years since Karlo nothing, fundamentally, had changed: the sky was barred, no human had Ascended, and all was pointless, or folly.

Until Constantine. With him, perhaps, the world could change— Aiah could see in him the blend of ideas, desire, vision, talent, ambition, brilliance, and world-reaching passion that offered the possibility of change.
If the New City comes into being,
he told her once,
then any sacrifice— anything— is justified.

He saw no hope elsewhere. He desired liberation, for others as well as for himself, liberation from the archaic systems that had ruled the world since before Karlo’s day, and—an ambition expressed only in his powerful whisper— ultimately liberation from the tyranny of the Shield.

Aiah thinks of Taikoen, the hanged man, reeling through the floating districts of Caraqui in the body that Constantine gave him, and she tastes the bile that rises in her throat.

What could justify Taikoen? she wonders.

Steel firms her thoughts.
She
could justify him, she thinks. If she is true to her new life, if her department can do what it was designed to do, if she can break the hold the Handmen have on the people and liberate the stolen plasm for Constantine to use to build the New City. . . .

Only then, she thinks, is a monster like Taikoen justified.

So, she decides, she had better get busy and make it all work.

ATTACK OF THE HANGED MAN BANNED IN LIRI-DOMEI

ALDEMAR’S THRILLER CLAIMED “TOO VIOLENT”

Aiah gets only a few hours’ sleep, since she’s up late making lists and plans. Constantine has authorized her to hire a staff of 120 people, of whom a third can be mages, "preferably with specialties in telepresence and police work." During raids on plasm dens, she is authorized to call on the military.

Forty mages, not to mention soldiers.

She puts aside any doubts concerning whether she can organize and command forty mages, all with more experience than she, and concentrates instead on making lists of what she’ll need.

Aiah looks with a start at the clock, and discovers it’s 03:00. She looks for a window crank and can’t find one, then discovers that the windows polarize against the Shieldlight with the press of a button.

Luxury. Right. She keeps forgetting.

She’s too keyed up to get much rest, and when the alarm chimes at 07:00 she comes awake perfect in the knowledge that she’s going to spend the day thick-witted and dragging herself from one task to the next. During a search for coffee she comes across a plasm tap in the kitchen, and only a few seconds later thinks to wonder what in the immortals’ name they could have used a kitchen plasm tap
for
.

Personal plasm allowance.
Constantine had wangled her one. If there’s a tap in the kitchen, there will be taps elsewhere.

Aiah sets the coffee brewing and looks for taps, finding three in the main room alone. A search through drawers discovers a wire, a jack, and a copper transference grip, an “orthopedic” design custom-shaped for a hand somewhat smaller than Aiah’s.

A dose of the goods, she thinks, is better than coffee any day.

She moves an armchair near the tap, puts the t-grip in the seat, and jacks the wire into a tap. With a flick of her thumb she can connect herself to the plasm well, the huge system that creates, moves, and stores plasm within the Metropolis of Caraqui. All the vast apparatus she had seen yesterday— the accumulators and capacitors and control boards, the transmission horns and receivers, the bundles of cable and taps and substations—all of it exists, Aiah realizes, only so that she, and people like her, can do just what she intends to do right now.

Aiah reaches into the collar of her sleepshirt and pulls out the plasm focus she wears on a chain around her neck. She had bought it just a few weeks ago, at the start of her adventure with Constantine, from an elderly man who earned a precarious living selling junk and trinkets from a desk made of a battered door. He had sold it to her as a “lucky charm,” a cheap bit of popular magic alleged, through its connection with genuine magework, to have virtues even without plasm. The token is in the form of the Trigram, and like all plasm foci its scrolling lines are meant to give a pattern to the flow of plasm through Aiah’s mind, a kind of safety device to prevent plasm from taking any unexpected turns.

She sits in the chair, looks at the focus in her palm, tries to relax, let the Trigram center her mind. And then Aiah bends to pick up the t-grip and thumbs the button that switches on the plasm connection. Her nerves come awake with a snarl. Her mind, comes alive with a cold neon glow.

It has been far, far too long since she’s had a chance to touch this reality.

The Trigram burns in her backbrain. Power sings in her ears.

The first thing Aiah does is send the Trigram through her body, flushing out fatigue toxins, filling every cell with energy. Then she simply sits back in her chair and closes her eyes and lets plasm fill her senses, awareness expanding like ripples in a pond.. ..

She can sense the plasm network around her, the Palace delivery system, conduits and branches, that laces the building like a network of veins, arteries, and capillaries. Sense the vast well of plasm beneath, the fiery lake of raw power that floods out into the city...

Hypersensitive, hyperacute, her senses encompass physical reality as well. The texture of the walls impresses itself on her mind, the nubbly surface of a throw pillow, the coolness of the lacy tin frame on the icon of Karlo. The carbon-steel frame of the building, all gentle plasm-generating curves, glows in her perceptions like bones in a fluoroscope. And two people passing in the corridor outside flare in her mind like passing torches. Other, more distant people glimmer at the outside of her awareness.

But there is a curious constraint to her physical sensation. It is as if she is in a box of which her suite is only a component. Focusing her concentration, Aiah expands her senses, gently probes outward ... no result. She frowns, draws more energy from the plasm tap, pushes her sensorium outward. The only result is the alarming sensation of power flowing away, bleeding out of her, as if her plasm is spiraling down a drain.

Her heart thrashes in her chest. Frightened, she draws her senses inward and tries to understand what has just happened to her.

And then she remembers the diamond-shaped crosshatching in all the window glass, the shining bronze wire.

Aiah realizes she has run up against the Palace’s collection web, the network of bronze designed to intercept any plasm attack, deprive it of will, break it into bits, and feed it into the Palace’s own plasm system. As long as she was willing to be a passive receiver of outward sensation, the plasm merely amplifying her senses, she was able to enjoy her enhanced sensation; but once she tried to expand her awareness outside the bronze barriers, it absorbed all the plasm she was directing outward.

She hopes she hasn’t wasted too much of her precious plasm allowance. If she wants to use telepresence techniques to carry her outside the Palace, she realizes, she’ll have to schedule time on one of the Palace’s transmission horns.

Aiah allows her passive senses to expand again, swelling to the limit of the artificial constraints imposed by the building’s design. The Palace, she remembers, is compartmentalized, like a deep-sea vessel divided by watertight bulkheads. A breach in one component of the building’s defense will not necessarily endanger the rest. Her own particular compartment seems to encompass her suite, the two suites adjacent, corresponding suites across the hall, and the same units one floor down— twelve suites in all.

Her sensorium— the plasm-generated extension of her senses— is already in place. Aiah concentrates and builds an anima, a telepresent plasm body, a focus for the sensorium that she can move from place to place, and then she floats the anima out into the hallway outside.

A door opens in the suite to the anima-Aiah’s right, just past the bronze barrier, and a man steps out. He is a military officer, middle-aged, uniformed, with a briefcase in one hand. He frowns intently, as if his face had been trained to that expression by long years of practice. Straight-backed, he marches down the corridor, passing right through Aiah’s invisible anima. Aiah feels an illusory tingle in her insubstantial nerves.

The man marches on. Aiah drifts slowly down the corridor, tries to listen to what her sensorium is telling her. Only three of the twelve suites within her compartment of the Palace seem to have anyone in them at present, flares of warmth and life floating in Aiah’s perceptions. She takes a deep breath, exhales, lets the Palace speak to her, whisper in her ectomorphic ear . . . and then her breath is taken away by a surge of sexual desire that sets her nerves alight.

It originates on the floor below hers. Two people are tangled together in a moment of passion so intense that, once Aiah has opened herself to it, it floods her senses. Her mouth goes dry. For a moment she hesitates, indecisive, uncertain whether she should permit herself to pursue this path, and then she floats downward, passing through floor and wall, and finds the two lovers on their bed.

They are both soldiers, both young men. Uniforms and weapons are stacked neatly on chairs, ready to be donned at the end of their interlude. A bundle of keys sits on a table. Aiah doubts that either one of them is authorized to be here.

The ferocity and certainty of their passion sends a pang through Aiah’s nerves. Her heart is racing. She finds herself wanting to join them, to fling herself onto the bed in a sweaty knot of limbs and furious delight.

Voyeurism, she knows, is one of the privileges of the mage. No one, unless they’re hiding in a room sheathed with bronze, is immune to this kind of observation. She has no way of knowing if her own private moments have been observed in this way. The odds are against it— she can’t conceive of anyone with access to that much plasm ever being that interested in her— but there’s no way of knowing for certain.

Watching the soldiers, she realizes, is only making her conscious of her own
loneliness....

Aiah draws herself away from the scene, dissolves her anima, allows her sensorium to fade into her own natural perceptions. She thumbs the switch on the t-grip and the plasm ebbs from her awareness, leaving her alone in her silent room, aware of the rapid throb of her heart, the warmth and arousal that flush her tissues, the fiery pangs of lust that burn in her groin.

She closes her eyes. An image of the two soldiers seems seared onto her retinas. Loneliness clamps cold fingers on her throat.

She dips a hand between her legs and, in a few urgent moments, relieves herself of her burden of desire.