Metropolitan (11 page)

Aiah reaches for another battery.

A few minutes later the two-tone chime of her array interrupts her. She decides to ignore the call, but when she hears the first grind of the communications head she realizes it might be Gil, and she leaves the battery and limps to the array. She picks up the headset and holds an earpiece to one ear, and hears her mother’s voice.
“Here’s what I thought,”
Gurrah says, and Aiah doesn’t need to hear any more. She returns the headset to its hook and goes back to the bathroom.

The communications head grinds on as Aiah continues her attempts at healing — apparently Gurrah’s remembered to keep the message key depressed this time. Aiah’s cheek warms as plasm flows through it. She straightens, takes her hand off the battery, brushes the skin with her fingertips. Acceptable, she thinks.

There’s an abrasion she can’t seem to heal entirely, and a little bruising around the eye, but she can cover these with cosmetics. The grotesque swelling has faded entirely.

And now the rest. She treats her foot, her bruises. Skill grows with practice. As a finale she pours energy into her body, banishing the after-effects of pain and fatigue.

Better. The battery indicator glows purple, so there’s still a half-charge in it. Aiah puts on her jumpsuit and hardhat and leaves for work, arriving late to find Lastene and Grandshuk waiting. She leads them off on the day’s assigned search. Far underground she finds an isolated, uncharted pipe with a small plasm potential, and she notes it on her charts and marks it with a red tag.

Making the city a little richer.

After lunch bought from a street-corner vendor Aiah returns to the Avenue of the Exchange. From a hardware store she buys a pair of alligator clips, then after buying her usual one-dalder lottery ticket passes warily under the mosaic of the Goddess of Transmission. She wonders if anyone waits in her office. She changes in the Emergency Response Team locker room, puts on the suit and lace she’d worn the day before.

She doesn’t even know how frightened she should be. She considers this fact and wonders if it is not pathetic.

No one waits in her office, not even Telia and her baby, though the room has a faint odor of uric acid. She sits down at the scarred metal desk and throws her computer’s start switch, watches the yellow dials begin to glow. Promptly at 1300 she puts on her headset and tells the operator her station is open.

It isn’t a very busy postbreak and she has a chance to make a few calls. Her authority as a member of Emergency Response goes unquestioned; she has some flimsies sent up in a pneumatic message cylinder with the account numbers of everyone at Mage Towers. Once she has Constantine’s account number she calls another department and has another set of flimsies sent up with his records. These are sufficiently thick that they have to come up by messenger, not by tube.

When she isn’t monitoring the computer or setting up transmissions, she spends her time studying the patterns of Constantine’s plasm use.

He doesn’t call for transmission very often, she finds; the normal plasm relays within Mage Towers are for the most part sufficient for his needs. But that’s only because he lives in a place like Mage Towers, where huge plasm connections are available: his weekly bill for plasm is greater than Aiah’s yearly salary, and he pays them on time.

He has money, and apparently lots of it. Considering that he’d left a shattered Cheloki behind when he finally withdrew, a deserted pile of rubble only now beginning a recovery, Constantine seems to have come out of the deal with his bank balance to the good.

So much the better, she thinks.

Plasm, in Constantine’s system, is the foundation of a nation’s wealth as well as the guarantee of the people’s liberty. She wonders how much cold cash a glory hole like Terminal would be worth to him.

Her phone rings — the outside line, not one of the Authority tabulators — and she unplugs her headset from one socket and into the other.

“Da,” she says.

“Aiah?” Her grandmother’s voice. “You were never home when I called.”

Aiah’s heart gives a leap. “I’m working a lot of overtime,” she says. “Looking for that leak.”

“Your mother is a fool,” Galaiah says, “but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong, ne? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

Aiah tries to keep her voice level. “No,” she says. “No, I’m not.”

“You can talk to me, you know. I won’t tell Gurrah. Or anyone else, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

Aiah hesitates, wanting badly to be able to tell Galaiah of her discovery, her plans, her terrors.

Then the other line buzzes. “Excuse me, Nana,” she says. “There’s another call. I’ll be right back.”

She shifts her headphone jack to the internal line, hears a familiar cigaret-husky voice call breathlessly for a ten-minute plasm transmission at 044 degrees.

“Da,” she repeats. “15:30, Horn Five transmit 044 degrees at 08 mm, transmission to cease 15:40. Confirmed.”

She programs the transmission into her computer and scalar, then shifts the headphone jack back to the outside line.

“Nana?”

“I’m still here.”

Aiah takes a breath. One hand covers the flimsies on her desk, as if hiding them from her grandmother’s sight. “I’m not in any trouble,” she says, “and my only real problem is that Gil has been gone too long.”

There is a little silence on the other end, and then, “If you’re certain.”

“If I ever need help,” Aiah says, “you’ll be the one I call.”

Best keep family out of it, she thinks. That way, if it all goes wrong, she’ll be the only one to pay the penalty.

Aiah works till her break, tells the tabulator she’s off, and then makes her way down to the third sub-basement, where all the phone lines and switches stand in scarred gray metal cabinets. With her alligator clips she makes a few jumps and connects her office phone line to the outside through extension 4301. It’s the office of Rohder, the man who snuffed the Bursary Street flamer and who is now in the Authority Hospital. Any calls she makes out of the building will be billed to Rohder’s office.

Back when she was a kid, her family used to steal phone service this way.

She returns to her office, jacks her headphones into the outside line, and carefully presses bright steel keys one by one.

“Da?” The voice is male and disinterested. The answer is immediate, faster than Aiah anticipated, and it startles her. She takes a breath and tries to calm the sudden pounding of her pulse.

“I would like to speak to the Metropolitan Constantine, please,” she says.

And, as she speaks the words, she feels an invisible circuit being connected, some indefinable flow of potential being created between herself and Constantine ... things falling into place, a little act of subcreation . . .

Not least among the things being created, she realizes, is a new Aiah.

CHAPTER 8

Mage Towers rears above Aiah like a tribe of fabulous threatening giants: a double circle of high black-glass pinnacles, so many-sided they might as well be round, each studded along its height with horns and protrusions and scallops of metal intended either to gather plasm or to repel an assault. Dark storm clouds, heavy with rain, scud low in the sky, impaling themselves on the baroque, spiraled bronze transmission horns that thrust toward the Shield from the crown of each tower. The towers’ twin circles are arrayed in careful geometries, each tower certain fractions of radii from each of the others, all with the intention of building and gathering plasm, and the entire complex built so as to take advantage of a confluence of relationships with other buildings, some of them many radii away.

“
No, I need to speak to the Metropolitan Constantine personally. . .”

Glass doors, ornamented with gold scrollwork, part as Aiah approaches, and she enters a tunnel beneath Tower Seven. There is a soft, thick carpet under her new boots. An abstract mosaic floats gentle patterns down the slightly concave walls, swirling gold and black designs, suggestive of a descent into a sable and amber sea. At the end of the hall is a desk where a pleasant Jaspeeri woman, placid smile and expensive honey-colored soft wool jacket, checks Aiah’s identification. “Elevator bank four,” she says, and presses a discreet button that opens another set of gold-traced glass doors.

“
My name is Aiah. I’m an executive with the Plasm Control Authority. I need to speak to the Metropolitan Constantine concerning his plasm use ...”

The tiles leading to the elevators are patterned with geomantic foci. The walls are mirrored, with black metallic streaks. The elevator doors are brass polished to a perfect, undistorted reflection. Aiah’s knees buckle slightly as the elevator begins its swift ascent.

“
Yes, I will speak to Special Assistant Sorya if you like, but I need to make an appointment to see the Metropolitan Constantine personally . . .”

The elevator sways slightly as it rises — neither the elevator shaft nor anything else in this building is perfectly straight. The architecture is warped slightly in order to draw power. It requires exacting, expensive engineering and is fraught with inconvenience, but the inconvenience probably doesn’t matter overmuch to those who live on a diet of plasm.

“
Yes, Madame Sorya, you may have a callback number. My office is in the Plasm Authority Building on the Avenue of the Exchange. My extension is 4301.”

Aiah’s stomach lifts as the elevator brakes to a swift halt, and she shifts her feet to regain balance. The polished bronze doors slide open in silence.

Two men stand in the anteroom outside — immaculate lace, dark, bulky suit jackets, polite and attentive expressions. There is a certain intensity about their eyes.

Aiah shows her ID card. “Aiah,” she says, “from Plasm Control.”

One of them shows her a metal detector wand. “I hope you won’t mind submitting to a search?”

Aiah realizes she’s holding her breath and lets it out. She steps out of the elevator into the long anteroom. Her boot heels click on polished bronze-and-black tile. She offers her briefcase to one of the men, then stands back and extends her arms to either side.

“
Madame Sorya, I have been reviewing the Metropolitan Constantine’s record of plasm use. I believe that with one of our use plans, I will be able to save him twenty to twenty-five percent off his plasm bill, but I will have to explain the use plan to him personally ...”

The metal detector rings at Aiah’s belt buckle, at buttons and zips, and at the cheap metal charm that, with a bit of embarrassment, she pulls from beneath the band of lace around her collar. The other guard waits with polite attention for this business to conclude, then glances in Aiah’s briefcase and finds nothing but papers.

“Follow me, please?”

The anteroom is mirrored, with tables and chairs and fresh-cut flowers in crystal vases. Aiah glances at herself in the mirrors, adjusts her throat-lace, brushes ringlets into place. She wants to look a certain way — a successful woman, businesslike, in charge — and she wears a suit of gray tailored wool that is the single most expensive purchase Aiah has ever made, and which she’s bought on credit. She’s taken two days off from work, days devoted half to shopping, half to research. She’s spent hours sitting in a booth at a local cafe, one with the black-and-red
Wire
sticker in the corner, plugging coins into the machine and calling for all available information on Constantine. She’s printed out everything and stared at the plastic flimsies till her eyes ached. She was surprised to discover his age, that Constantine is over sixty when he doesn’t look older than his thirties. That’s what living around plasm does, Aiah thinks.

He hasn’t been idle since losing the war in Cheloki. He’s been an advisor to governments. Supposedly he’s had a hand in a few wars and revolts here and there, though usually on the losing side.

Still trying, she hopes, to build the New City.

Aiah’s heart throbs smoothly, driving adrenaline power to her limbs. She has to keep reminding herself to move slowly, deliberately, and not with the twitchy speed her adrenaline-charged body demands. Her throat is dry, her palms moist.

One of the guards pushes at a wide metal door that swings open on noiseless hinges. Everything, Aiah realizes, moves silently in this place. She steps through the doorway into a long drawing room. Its far wall is glass, with a view of rooftops that stretches to a cloud-shrouded horizon. Planted in front of the view is a curved steel brace, scalloped and ornamented but still unlovely and inconvenient, one of the compromises in polite living undertaken by those who live their lives in a power generator.

A green-eyed woman watches Aiah from a doorway. Her hair is streaked blonde, her chin is sharp, her stance artful, weight on the back leg, the front foot drawn up in a dancer’s pose, toes pointed almost accusingly at Aiah as they rest on the rust-red carpet. Her apricot-colored gown leaves her arms and clavicles bare. The belt that rests low on her hips is composed of gold links, each link forged in the shape of a geomantic focus.

Aiah slows as if she’s run into a wall. A flush prickles her skin. The woman’s presence has an almost physical impact.

Aiah looks down at her wool suit, its fibers the precious product of sheep raised on rooftops or penned in alleys, fed vegetable matter grown in vats with resources that might otherwise have been used to support human beings ... the garment Aiah had thought extravagant now seems ridiculous in contrast to this place, this person. The other woman’s gown is probably worth twenty times the value of Aiah’s suit.

“You’ve been around plasm, haven’t you?” the woman says. She speaks with an indefinable accent. Her green eyes narrow. “Emergency surgery, from the look of it.”

Aiah restrains herself from lifting a hand to her cheek. When she’d inspected herself in the mirror before breakfast she’d seen only minute signs of the beating, and then only because she knew where to look.

“I had an accident,” Aiah says.

The woman says nothing, continues her inspection. “No live plasm now,” she says. “Only residual. No lifeline. No foci, no time bombs, no traces of mental intrusion.”