Metropolitan (21 page)

“My battles,” she says briefly, “have been on a less grand scale.” She turns, opens the office door, then looks at Aiah over her shoulder. “But on the whole,” she adds, “mine have been more successful than his. Perhaps I am less distracted by unrealities.”

Aiah follows Sorya onto the factory floor. From above comes the flap of pigeon wings.

“You may as well tell me, you know,” Aiah says, “I may be able to help you.”

“It’s not my decision,” Sorya says. She tosses her streaky hair and offers her trilling laugh. “Besides,” she says, “it’s amusing watching you try to guess.”

“Thank you,” Aiah says flatly.

Sorya, she thinks, seeks power, and enjoys such power as she has, even if some of it is petty.

But the power of knowledge is a temporary thing, Aiah suspects. She has her own little data points, and sooner or later they’ll point to something.

Fire tests precious metal, and grief tests men.

— a thought-message from His Perfection, the Prophet of Ajas

District Hospital Twelve is of gray stone, centuries old, with sagging floors, windows fixed in their frames by a hundred layers of paint, cobwebs in the high-cornered ceilings, cracked plaster, peeling paint. The building is covered with ornamental stonework, leaf-traceries and statues of the Messengers of Vida flying on membranous wings to the aid of the sick. As a child Aiah had always been afraid of the stern-faced statues with their bat wings, rain-pitted hair, blank eyes and gaping, wordless mouths. Inside, the smell of disinfectant cannot entirely conceal the sad scent of age and despair: too much sickness, too much pain, over too many years.

Aiah catches a heel on a broken tile, stumbles, recovers. She makes a turn into a room, and here is her family standing round one of the room’s four occupied beds, and a situation she needs to deal with.

“Hi there.” From the bed her cousin Esmon waves listlessly, hand bulky with wrapped finger splints. His face is badly cut, his eyes masked by swollen tissue.

Aiah remembers the rain of boots and fists in the trackline station, the blast of plasm fire that brought an end to the beating. Esmon hadn’t any plasm batteries to protect him. It looks as if his attackers went at him very thoroughly.

Aiah approaches Esmon and bends over to carefully kiss each cheek. She looks to clasp a hand, but one is splinted, and the other, and with it the entire forearm, is strapped into some kind of tape-swathed box. She runs her hand over the top of his head, and her nerves flare as she sees him wince. Even there, he’s sensitive.

She remembers Esmon at the Senko’s Day celebration, proud in his green-and-gold sequined coat, his plans to join the Griffins for next year’s parade . . .

Aiah looks up at the rest, sees her mother, her grandmother Galaiah, Esmon’s witch-lover Khorsa. “He was attacked?” Aiah says. “What happened exactly?”

A call from Esmon’s brother Spano had come late in her work shift, and she’d taken the rest of the shift off and rushed to the hospital, but the summons had been short on details.

“Don’t want to go into it again,” Esmon says in a thick voice.

“Gangsters,” says Galaiah in a fierce voice. “Gangsters did this to him.”

Surprise stiffens Aiah’s frame. She looks from Esmon to Galaiah and back again. “You’ve got mixed up with the Operation? Or who? The Holy League?”

“Longnose gangsters,” Galaiah says.

“Don’t know it was them,” Esmon insists.

“Let’s talk outside,” Khorsa says. “I’ll tell you the story.”

Doubtfully Aiah lets the witch take her arm and lead her from the room. Another woman follows, a stranger in a red turban. As Aiah passes into the hallway she notices that the door has gone from the hospital room, that the doorframe holds only empty hinges.
Who would steal a door?
she wonders.

“This is my sister Dhival,” Khorsa says, nodding at the other woman.

Dhival, Aiah remembers, is a priestess, whereas Khorsa is a witch. She does not know the practical difference between the two, if any.

Tiny Khorsa looks up at Aiah, bites her lip. “It all has to do with us,” she says.

Aiah is not surprised. Her contact with mages of the caliber of Constantine and Sorya has made her less impressed with back-alley witches than ever.

“Before anything else,” Aiah says, “how is Esmon?”

Khorsa nods. “The two men who attacked him gave him a very thorough working over. He’s sedated right now, so he’s not in much pain.”

“What are the doctors doing for him?”

“
We —” Khorsa corrects herself. “
I
— I can afford plasm treatments, so he’ll get them starting tomorrow. The only reason they’re waiting is they want to make sure he’s perfectly stable before they begin.”

There’s a bitter taste in Aiah’s mouth. She remembers Khorsa at the Senko’s Day party, the witch’s suspicious reaction to Aiah’s question about the Operation . .. anger burns hot in Aiah’s heart.

“So how have you two got involved with the Operation?” she asks.

Khorsa’s eyes widen. “We
haven’t
,” she says.

“They’ve got involved with us,” Dhival says. Her tone is bitter. “There’s this street captain, Guvag, he’s been trying to push his plasm on us, and we won’t take it. So he’s had some of his thugs attack Esmon.”

Aiah isn’t sure she believes this. “You’re not in debt to them? You don’t gamble?”

“No,” Khorsa says. “And Esmon doesn’t, either.”

“
You’ve never bought the goods from this man? Or sold them? Or walked the streets for him? Or
anything
that would give him a foot in your door?”

“
No!”
Khorsa insists. “Absolutely not! That’s why we wanted to talk to you — you work for the Plasm Authority. Is there someone you know in the Authority police that we can talk to?”

Aiah thinks for a moment. The Authority creepers, the Investigative Division, are a separate jurisdiction that report only to the Intendant.

“No, I don’t know anyone specifically,” she says. “But I can make some inquiries.”

“If you could?” Khorsa says. “And soon?”

Aiah reaches for her notebook. “What’s the man’s name again? And do you have an address for him or anything that would help me track him?”

“I don’t have an address, no. But he hangs at the Shade Club on Elbar Avenue with his soldiers.”

Aiah writes this down. “I’ll see what I can do. But the question is: will you testify?”

Khorsa and Dhival look at each other. Dhival licks her lips.

“People don’t testify against the Operation,” she says.

“What if I could get you protection?”

“We’d still lose everything, wouldn’t we? You couldn’t protect us forever. We couldn’t keep the Temple going with the Operation after us. We’d be in hiding for the rest of our lives.”

Aiah looks at the two. She knows what their choice will be: testify and lose everything at once, or submit to the Operation’s demands and lose everything slowly, beginning with pride and independence and eventually everything else, the Operation slicing off one bit after another, their money, their possessions, eventually the Wisdom Fortune Temple itself.

“
We were hoping,” Khorsa says slowly, “that we could get Guvag arrested for something else other than threatening
us
. He deals illegal plasm — maybe if we alert the authorities to his activities he can get arrested for selling it to someone
else
.”

Faint hope, Aiah thinks. She puts away her notebook. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says. “In the meantime, I want to see Esmon get the treatments he needs.”

Khorsa looks up at her, eyes wide. “Of course.”

“And you might also talk to a lawyer. Find out what your options are.”

The two sisters look at each other again. Lawyers, Aiah knows, are not a part of their world. The impersonal mechanism of the law is not something that would ever enter their life unless they’d either been arrested or maybe evicted. Lawyers are the enemy, as are the police and the judges, and the thought of having one on your side is something that is perfectly alien.

Aiah puts away her notebook, “I need to make a call,” she says. “Do you know where I can find a phone?”

Khorsa points down the hall, and Aiah follows the pointing finger. She has to tell Constantine that he needn’t send a car to pick her up for her plasm lesson. Family emergencies, unfortunately, come first.

EXPERIMENTAL ROCKET CRASHES IN LIRE-DOMEI

2000 PEOPLE KILLED IN BLAZING ACCIDENT

LEGISLATURE CALLS FOR BANNING ROCKET EXPERIMENTS

When Aiah leaves the hospital she returns to her office. There are fewer demands on plasm second shift, and there’s only one person in the office, Vikar, the plump Grade Six who’s inhabiting Aiah’s chair during the service shift this week. She greets him and takes Telia’s chair. She jacks in her headset, calls Compilation and Billing, and asks for Guvag’s records. When they complain, she tartly reminds them that she’s working Emergency Response and she needs the information
now
. Forty minutes later it arrives, tightly rolled plastic flimsies in two message cylinders that thunk out of the message system into her wire tray.

She reads the records and doesn’t find much: Guvag doesn’t use much plasm, at least not officially. Neither does the Shade Club. There’s an address, and a red tab, which isn’t actually red, or even a tab, just a printed message that reads “red tab”, an indication that Guvag has been convicted of plasm theft and that his file bears watching.

It’s pointless to try getting any records out of the Investigative Division, so the next step is probably to get public records from the
Wire’s
information service. She’d like to use the computer in the office, but it’s built to Arvag standards while the
Wire
uses the incompatible Cathobeth compression system, so Aiah will have to walk to the
Wire
office two streets away.

Aiah says goodbye to Vikar, finds the office still open, and rents one of the library consoles. She plugs coins into its slot and calls for a complete public records search on Guvag. An hour and a half later she has everything printed out on slick plastic fax paper, and she stuffs the rolled records, still smelling of the developing fluid, into a bag for reading on the pneuma home.

Guvag was indeed convicted of plasm theft twelve years ago, and did a couple years’ stretch in Chonmas. The chromograph taken at his conviction shows a bullnecked, mustached man scowling at the camera; extravagant amounts of lace explode from his collar and chest, and he wears an expensive Stoka watch on one wrist, a trademark of connected Operation types. According to the records he’s also been accused of assault numerous times and convicted once, though most of the charges seem to have been dropped — probably, Aiah thinks, because the witnesses changed their minds about testifying.

Not just an Operation thug, she thinks, but a violent one. Khorsa and Esmon have their work cut out for them.

Aiah looks again at the printout. Nothing much to go on, she concludes, but she’ll see what she can do.

TRACKLINE SCANDAL DEEPENS

CALLS FOR INTENDANT’S RESIGNATION

DETAILS ON THE
WIRE
!

The Emergency Response team has been demobilized. Oeneme’s declared victory on Old Parade, and now Aiah’s back in the office full time.

A message tube thunks from the pneumatic message system into Aiah’s wire basket. She opens it, scans the note - another dreary reminder about personal use of telephones — and then she wads the plastic flimsy and drops it in the recycling box.

Why do they bother?

No one in the Authority seems to have any real work to do. All they do is pass pointless instructions back and forth.

She’s heard from Galaiah about Esmon. He’s had plasm treatments and is much better, cheerful even. She’ll call him later and talk to him in person.

One of the personal calls the Authority is so upset about. To hell with them. Over ninety percent of the budget, she remembers Constantine saying, in maintaining
that which is
. Each executive in her little box, bored out of her skull, waiting for someone above to die or move up so everyone can advance.

Like a dance in which every step takes ten years.

She remembers the mosaic in the Rocketman terminal, the bright new whitestone city broadcasting rays of golden glory. The mosaic has become her mind’s view of Constantine’s New City. A little dirtied and chipped perhaps, but worthy of salvage.

Aiah turns to Telia, who is watching little Jayme scuttle about the floor on his stomach. He isn’t crawling properly yet, on hands and knees, he’s just at the insect stage.

“
They don’t know what they want,” Aiah says. “The decorator says something, and suddenly they’re ripping out finished cabinets and rearranging everything. And then
I
have to change all the access ports around.”

“At least you’re getting paid for all your work,” Telia consoled. Her eyes brighten. “How’s he getting along with Momo?”

“They’re in love again.”

“Bad luck.”

“Won’t last, though. I’ll give it a week.”

Telia looks at the wall clock. “Break time. You want to go first?”

Aiah shakes her head. “Go ahead.”

Telia contacts the tabulator and tells her that she’s offline for the next fifteen minutes. Aiah smiles — she’s invented a false Constantine, a false Sorya, and all for Telia’s benefit. She calls them Bobo and Momo. She’s been inventing details of their relationship and inability to make decisions; she’s made them the most absurd couple imaginable, a family out of a chromoplay comedy.

Such a couple wouldn’t be up to anything illegal, would they?

Telia picks up Jayme, wipes drool from his chin, carries him away. Aiah programs a broadcast into her computer, then sits for a long moment and listens to the distant clicks of the gears.