Metropolitan (24 page)

Mr. nar-Ombre’s long fingers reach for his computer. “Very good, miss,” he says.

A few more days’ interest will offset the penalties, she concludes. When she leaves the bank, she asks the usher for his recommendation as to a hotel, and when she goes there, she takes a cab.

Learn to live well, she thinks.

She manages her entire day in Gunalaht without entering a single casino. If she’s not going to be Constantine’s
passu
, there’s not a lot of point to becoming the
passu
of an entire state.

GRADE B PLASM LEAK IN KARAPOOR!

HUNDREDS INJURED!

DETAILS ON THE WIRE!

Again, that incredibly fast work: over the weekend Aiah spent in transit to and from Gunalaht, the factory has been readied for use. A row of workstations has been built inside the completed collection web, each with a comfortable padded chair and a pair of oval video monitors, side by side like a pair of eyes, to provide an outside feed. A metal shed roof now covers the whole installation to protect it against any attempts to drop the factory’s ceiling, and the high windows have been taped so thoroughly that almost all outside Shieldlight has been cut off.

Aiah’s lessons in plasm use will take place here from now on. Unlike the plasm at Constantine’s apartment, the goods here are free.

Three men are using the workstations, hands clasped around copper t-grips, eyes closed, concentration etched into their faces. Two are Jaspeeris, surprisingly young and with bad skin, but they’re neatly dressed in quiet gray, like the uniforms of an elite school, an effect that only makes them seem younger. One whispers inaudibly to himself as he dips the well, his upper body swaying left and right in response to some secret inner pulse. The third is older and black-skinned and looks Cheloki: he has a hard face, a hawk nose placed like a sword between his eyes, and may well be a veteran of Constantine’s wars.

Through the as-yet-untaped windows of the office, Aiah glances out at the truckload of sandbags just arrived in the loading bay, then turns to Constantine and lifts an eyebrow. “Who are you planning on attacking, exactly?” she says.

He glances up from his desk. “Sorya said you were curious.”

He doesn’t seem upset by the thought, but just to play it safe Aiah says, “Who wouldn’t be?”

A trace of a smile plays about Constantine’s lips. “You don’t need to know the answer.”

“It’s obvious enough you’re planning some kind of war.”

“I’m planning a change,” Constantine says. “An evolutionary transformation. And it should come cheap at the price.” He stands, flexes burly shoulders. His burning eyes are fixed on the workstations.

“
Nothing changes in our world,” he says, “because the cost of change is so enormous. Not the least is simply the cost of
space
. Consider what’s needed simply to build a new building. There
will
be something on the site already, so the old building must be purchased, and all the people living or working there moved. All those displaced people will have to go somewhere else, at enormous cost, and even if the builders manage somehow not to pay the displacement fees,
somebody
will. So every new structure is a drain on the economy before it even starts. Few banks can afford to finance such an effort unless it’s guaranteed by the government or the central bank, and that just adds another layer of complexity to the whole problem. Jaspeer can afford a new Mage Towers perhaps every dozen years. Nothing can be transformed in any significant way, because the cost of transformation is just so high. So most people can’t put up new buildings, just remodel old ones, but that means accepting the older buildings’ design limitations, the way they’re tied into the infrastructure.

“And so,” he nods, “I wish to redesign the world. Rethink it. Transform it.”

“So what are you going to do?” Aiah asks. “Knock a bunch of it down and start over?”

A laugh gusts out of him. “I wish I could!” He shakes his head. “They could have used me when Senko and his crowd were setting things up. Ah well.”

Aiah nods at the three intent men at the workstations. “What are they up to?”

Amusement lights Constantine’s eyes. “Preparing to knock a few things down.”

“Seriously.”

“
They are ...” he frowns. “Quarrying. Remember when I told you about combat mages? Their short lifespans in action? Well, that is
one
sort of military mage, those used in battle. The kind who turn,” he looks at Aiah and smiles, “into giant burning women who hammer the enemy with sheer blasts of power.”

That smile makes Aiah uneasy, and she wonders for an uneasy moment if he could have heard about Guvag. But Constantine, apparently unaware of Aiah’s anxiety, continues.

“The other kind of military mage is more subtle,” he says. “Refrains from attacking, and instead tries to worm his way in. Finds weak points in the enemy’s defenses, maps them, tries to work out ways to exploit them without alerting the opposition. They are less warriors than spies, and each is worth a hundred of the other sort. These,” he nods at the three men, “are among the best.”

“Those two boys ...”

“Naturals.” A smile lights Constantine’s lips. “Like yourself, Miss Aiah. People who have learned plasm use instinctively rather than through formal applications. Young minds are very suitable for that sort of work, being free of inhibiting structures, of overjudicial interpretation.” He nods again. “They are very successful, those two.”

“Isn’t what they’re doing dangerous? If they’re detected. . .”

He looks at her appraisingly. “They understand the risks better than you, I believe.”

Aiah rephrases her objection. “They’re young. They can’t possibly know what they’re getting into. You’re using them.”

Constantine smiles with his strong white teeth. “Miss Aiah,” he reminds, “
you
are young, and I am using
you
. And — I assure you —
you
do not know what you’re getting into, either.” He spreads his hands. “But you find yourself here, do you not? Your will led you here; and
my
will,” he waves a hand, embracing the factory, the huge accumulators, the web and workstations, “brought this into being. And will shortly bring into being other things, ideas brought to the world of reality.”

Aiah finds herself unwilling to let Constantine escape into metaphysics, at least not yet. “ I’m older than they are, anyway,” she says. “They can’t possibly—”

Constantine’s eyes turn hard. “Why value the lives of the young more than those of the old?” he asks. “It is the qualities that come with youth that make them valuable to me, or, at this stage, to anyone. Years from now, they will look back on this episode as their golden time, the time when they discovered, as few young people ever do, who they are, and what they are capable of. And if they do not survive to that time . . .” He steps up to Aiah, puts a heavy hand on her shoulder, looks at her with eyes of stone. “I learned long ago,” he says, “that the actions of the powerful have consequences. As a consequence of my actions,
thousands
of boys have died, and girls, and babies, and thousands and thousands of ordinary people who had nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill them myself, I didn’t wish them dead, and if I could have prevented it I would, but they died none the less. And
these
boys,” nodding to the two mages, “at least volunteered.”

Aiah had forgotten the cost of the Cheloki wars, the destruction of a metropolis as thorough as the devastation that had been wrought in Barkazi. She licks her lips. “I wouldn’t want that sort of responsibility,” she says.

He leans closer to her, his deep voice almost a whisper but still powered by his ferocious energy, a low rumble that Aiah can feel in her toes. “Miss Aiah, your sentiment is too late. You’ve given me power, and are as responsible as anyone for what follows. And,” almost offhand, “there have already been deaths.”

Aiah stares at him in horror.
Forget the man,
she remembers,
the problem is over.

“They were bad people, I believe, and dangerous,” Constantine says. “If that knowledge will help you sleep.”

“I don’t think it will,” Aiah says.

He steps back, lets his hand fall from her shoulder, gives her an appraising glance. “I have had sleepless hours myself,” he says, “but by and by they passed.” He reaches out, takes her wrist as he has in all their lessons together. “Shall we have your lesson now?” he asks. “Or were these last moments lesson enough?”

We seek to enlarge our scope. Our power.
Sorya’s words.

Power, Aiah thinks. Perhaps she ought to get used to it.

“The lesson, if you please,” she says, and lets him lead her to a console.

GARGELIUS ENCHUK WEARS GULMAN SHOES!

Why Don’t You?

“
The School of Radritha defines three sorts of power,” Constantine says. “Power over the self, power over others, and power over reality. And of these, they conceive the first to be the only worthwhile goal, because they consider the only thing a man can know truly is his own mind, and his knowledge of anything else is but a reflection of his inward sight. Which is why I broke with them finally, because their scope was limited only to self-knowledge and self-mastery, without any conception of what the self-mastery is
for
.

“I will agree that power over the self is primary,” he says, nodding, “because with self-knowledge and self-mastery, power over others and over reality will naturally follow. The School had power — some of the most powerful minds I’ve ever met — but it had withdrawn entirely into self-contemplation. And was a little smug about it, truthfully.”

Aiah sips at her wine as the Elton cruises away from the factory. The shift’s lesson had flushed her with plasm. Power sings in her blood, a chorus of exhilaration and control. But now she finds the wine a little bitter, and Constantine’s discourse on power the last thing she wants to hear.

Already been deaths
. . . She hadn’t wanted to think about it until Constantine’s whisper had forced her to confront the fact. And now she is compelled to wonder whether her efforts to educate herself in the use of plasm are worth the loss of life.

“The School desired to give their initiates freedom,” Constantine continues. “Freedom from passion, from impulse, from — in essence — the world itself. Imagine the reaction of my family,” he smiles, “when I told them I wished to study there. The School stood in opposition to everything they held dear, and that, I imagine, is why I wished to go.” He shrugs.

“
But detachment from all things?” he says. “Is that not also a trap? To say that nothing matters, or that nothing
should
matter, except that which occurs in the perfectly passionless mind . . .” He utters a black, sneering laugh. “This they call freedom? Skulking in their meditation chambers, hiding from the sight of the world, peering obsessively at the landscape of their own minds, terrified they might be caught in an impulse, an emotion, an urge...”

Detachment, Aiah decides, seems like a pretty good idea right now. Let us, she thinks, consider the problem dispassionately. People, I am informed bad people, have died. Although I do not absolutely know that these are the people who attacked me, I nevertheless suspect that they are. In which case I have evidence, written on my bones with the toes of boots, that they were in fact bad people, and therefore deserved punishment.

“Avoidance of passion does not conquer passion,” Constantine continues, “and the School of Radritha, for all the power of their minds, seemed not to know this. They did not conquer passion, they merely denied it. And that is why they were so afraid of power, because they knew it was dangerous to them . . . power becomes a slave to passion so easily, and to an unacknowledged passion easiest of all.”

And, Aiah thinks, if they are dead, I did not kill them. I didn’t ask for it to be done, I didn’t
have
it done. And so, perhaps, it has nothing to do with me at all.

Colored light floods the car, and a distant scream: an advert tumbling down the canyon of the street, crying its wares with a siren voice.

“
Though it is true that a man who is a servant of his passions is not free,” Constantine says, “neither is a man in flight from those same passions. And, since the passions are an inevitable consequence of our own humanity, it is impossible to eliminate them so long as we wish to remain human. But Radritha was wrong: it isn’t passions that make us weak, but rather uncontrollable passions. Harness the passions and reason together, and the person, the
real
person, becomes free . .. and capable of liberating others, which is the only defensible use of power.”

But, Aiah thinks, if these deaths have nothing to do with me, why don’t I simply ask Constantine what happened?

Because, she concludes, I am afraid of the answer.

Constantine’s flow of words comes to a halt. He looks at Aiah appraisingly. “I see my discourse has failed in its intended purpose,” he says. “You remain buried in your own thoughts.”

“Yes.” She is unable, for some reason, to turn her face to him, to achieve any level of personal contact. She stares instead at the seat opposite her. Tries to achieve detachment.

“Perhaps my discourse on power was too abstract for the purpose,” he says. “I wanted to point out that my ultimate goals are not abstract, but concrete: the New City, power, and liberty. And not for me alone, but for all. And — ” he licks his lips, “sacrifices occur. In a world as entrenched as ours, thousands of years without substantial change, revolution does not happen easily, or neatly, or without consequence. From a strictly practical view, a little ruthlessness now may save much blood later.”