Metropolitan (35 page)

An icy hand touches the back of Aiah’s neck. “So what is it they want?” she says for the second time. The car arrives at ground level, Shieldlight beckoning just ahead, promising a world of normality, safety, the company of human beings.

Constantine looks at Aiah, his eyes hard, “It wants life. To be back among living things, to know the touch of the wind, the taste of wine, the joys of the flesh. It can’t accomplish this by itself, because it’s no longer a thing of matter, and cannot work with matter but to destroy. But with the help of a capable mage —
my
help in this case — it can take a body, occupy it. Use it for a time.”

The brandy tries to rise past Aiah’s throat again, and she fights it back down. “And what happens to the person occupied by this thing?”

Constantine’s voice is toneless. “The body is used up; the hanged man is fatal to life in the long run. In a matter of days the body becomes a husk. And as for the victim’s soul, I suppose it goes wherever it is that souls go.”

Sadness swims through Aiah. She leans back, rests her nape against plush fabric. “And these victims?” she asks. “Who will they be?”

Constantine sighs. “Criminals, I suppose. Perhaps some of Caraqui’s utterly deserving political class. It is a sad fact of political life that once you concede the notion that certain people deserve death, it isn’t hard to find them.”

“
And this cult you belonged to? What did
it
offer this hanged man of yours?”

“My cousin Heromë was the priest. He was also in charge of our political prisons. The hanged man did not lack for souls to eat.”

Aiah shudders. Constantine’s toneless, objective voice goes on. “Years later, at my instigation, the hanged man destroyed Heromë and his whole circle. He did not like them, you see, or the things they required of him . . . he is a distinguished personage, even among his kind. Once he was Taikoen, Taikoen the Great, the man who saved Atavir from the Slaver Mages.”

Aiah glances at Constantine in astonishment. Taikoen is one of the great heroes in all history.

“Cults all over the world worship him.” A cold little smile plays about Constantine’s lips. “Would they still if they knew what he had become? The man I most admired in the last five hundred years, and when I met him he was the all-powerful slave of Heromë, a grubby little prison warden. After Taikoen’s retirement he lost himself in plasm and now cannot live without it. You thought he came out of the wall? No, he was within the cable. That is where he lives now — he cannot survive for long outside a plasm well.”

Aiah runs fingers through her hair. Sorrow wells through her body. “I don’t know what to think,” she says.

Constantine leans forward, takes her hand between his own. He looks at her for a long moment, and Aiah sees pain and longing in his eyes. “It’s the worst thing I have ever done,” he says, “or shall do. And for some reason it comforts me that you know of it.”

There is a long silence. Aiah’s hand is warm between his palms, “I have no right to ask you, I suppose,” he says. “But will you forgive me?

Aiah licks her lips, withdraws her hand. “Will you take me to Old Shorings?” she asks.

Surprise glows in his eyes. “Right now?”

“Yes.”

He turns to Martinus and gives the order. She holds out her glass. “More brandy, please,” she says. “A piece of paper, and a pencil.”

It’s a long ride, and neither Constantine nor Aiah finds much to say. When they reach the neighborhood, Aiah guides Martinus until she finds the place she has in mind, the gray stone temple on its tiny lot. Aiah props Constantine’s notepad on her knee and writes on the thin leaf of plastic:

Let my friend have Caraqui.

She tears away the paper, takes the brandy bottle and leaves the car. Street hustlers peer alertly from doorways, but when Martinus gets out of the car to stand guard they swiftly lose interest. Aiah walks across the empty street, walks up the steps of the temple, looks up at the carvings, the plants and serpents and creatures of myth. Aiah kneels on the cold stones, feels grains of rice against her knees.

Little leaves of paper flutter in the cracks of the huge door. Faded flowers and a few small coins lie scattered on the stoop. Aiah unstops the brandy bottle and pours it across the threshold as an offering. Then she leans forward against the huge iron door, feeling rust against her forehead, and folds the paper very small and inserts it in the crack between the two metal doors.

“Whoever is there,” she says, “please forgive my friend, and give him what he wants.”

She lets more brandy trickle from the bottle and repeats her prayer many times. Her knees grow wet with brandy. When the bottle is empty, she leaves it on the stoop and walks unsteadily back to the car, sits next to Constantine, and lets him take her in his arms.

“I would like to go home now,” she says, and as the big car carries her away to Loeno she falls asleep on his shoulder.

CHAPTER 17

The scent of bowel hovers in Aiah’s nostrils as Telia changes Jayme’s diapers. “I can’t understand why you want to leave,” Telia complains. “Rohder’s a spent force in the Authority. He can’t get you anything.”

Aiah wraps the cord around her headset and places it on the hook for Mokel, who has this desk on service shift this week.

“Good for a change,” she says. “Maybe I’ll pick up some pointers.”

“Rohder got his whole department flushed,” Telia says. “How many pointers can he give?”

“Bye,” Aiah says.

“I’m going to be lonely!” Telia wails, and Aiah heads for the 106th floor.

Her nerves spark fire as the elevator rises. Rohder will be her
passu
, and through him, the Authority. Jaspeer’s most powerful force will be doing her bidding.

On arrival she finds Rohder seated in his big padded chair, one hand dropped casually on a copper t-grip, the other holding a cigaret to his lips. When Aiah enters, the cigaret points Shieldward in a gesture that tells her to wait.

Aiah waits for a few moments, then a few moments longer. The imperious Angels of Power gaze at her sidelong from their niches on the corner. She walks to one of the huge windows and looks out at the great city, the steep gray grid topped by water towers, roof gardens, cisterns and animal pens. A silver airship two blocks long drifts along the horizon, its belly bright with advertisements.

Rohder lights a new cigaret, smokes it, lights another. Aiah wanders away from the window, walks alongside a long shelf built against the back wall. Identical sets of thick volumes are laid along it, books bound in red plastic with gold lettering along the spines.
Proceedings of the Research Division of the Jaspeeri Plasm Authority,
it says. Fourteen volumes. Aiah picks one at random and leafs through it. Complex mathematical formulae swarm before her eyes.

“The Intendant found it overly abstruse, I’m afraid,” Rohder says. He’s finished his business and is walking around his huge rayed desk toward her. “But I felt I had to publish the proofs. If you look in the last volume, you’ll see our recommendations.”

Aiah closes the heavy volume and returns it. “Maybe you should have put the recommendations first,” she says.

Rohder blinks as if this is a startling new idea. “Perhaps.” He walks up alongside the shelf and runs his hand along the long row of volumes. “It took my department eight years to produce those books,” he says, “and I’ve always had the feeling that no one in the Authority ever read them.”

The law of the chonah is for the
pascol
to agree with the
passu
whenever possible. “That strikes me as fairly typical of the Authority,” Aiah says. “Spend years and a lot of money on an elite commission, then flush its recommendations the second they’re made.”

Rohder looks bemusedly at the shelf of books. “Would you like a set? I seem to have a few to spare.”

“I don’t think I’d understand them. But I’d like to borrow the last volume, if I may.”

“Of course.” His blue eyes gaze blankly at her for a long moment, and then he seems to remember why she’s here. “Terminal,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You think you can help me?”

“What I need you to do,” she says, “is call Compilation and Billing and tell them that I need to go through the records for that area for the last five years.” She speaks with care, suspecting that Rohder might not follow through unless she spells it out. “That means I need access to the belts, and someone to handle the belts for me, and a reader-computer. You need to insist that I be given access immediately, because otherwise they’ll just put me off forever.”

Rohder nods at each point, as if ticking them off mentally. “Very well. I’ll call Niden first, then have him call his underlings and give the orders.”

He heads back to his desk. Aiah follows. “How is your aerial search going?” she says.

“I’ve found some small-scale use that’s probably illegitimate, but nothing big enough to cause the Bursary Street flamer.”

“Let’s hope I can find something interesting for you.”

“Mmm.” Rohder’s look is already abstracted as he reaches for his headset.

*

All the data are kept in the nearest Authority station at Rocketman, a familiar trackline journey away. The station manager, at Niden’s bidding, gives her an alcove with an old Filbaq computer-reader in a room otherwise filled with people busy entering data. Aiah’s chosen assistant, Damusz, doesn’t seem happy to have drawn extra duty. Digging the old belt out of storage has striped his chest and thighs with grime. He silently and sullenly takes the belt from its case, loads the etching belt’s spool on the reader, then stretches the belt onto the secondary spool and tightens the continuous loop. “Thank you,” Aiah says, as nicely as she can, and adjusts the play head over the belt.

The Filbaq is an old model and has probably been sitting unused in this alcove for years. It’s still functional, fortunately, and ozone scents the air as its whining electric motor soon brings the belt up to speed. Dancing dust falls from the reader’s ornamental brass fins. The screen hasn’t been cleaned in ages, and Aiah swabs it with her wrist lace to no effect. She turns to ask Damusz to bring her a spray bottle of glass cleaner, but he’s already disappeared.

Squinting through the smeared lens, Aiah presses worn steel keys, finds Kremag and Associates in the directory, and calls up the data. Disappointingly, it’s all perfectly reasonable: the firm is twelve years old, is alleged to offer “ business consulting”, and hasn’t used an iota of plasm in all that time. Business consultants wouldn’t, would they? They just let it flow through the meters.

She needs to come up with a plausible reason why she hands Kremag to Rohder. None seems to be available from the data.

The most likely tampering would come with the matter of dates and names. She asks the reader to search the entire belt for other businesses at that address, a job that will probably take some time. While the read head whines over the long strands of data, Aiah provides herself with some coffee in a cardboard cup and finds a spray bottle of glass cleaner. She cleans the screen and drinks half the coffee by the time the reader comes up with the information she needs: no less than three other businesses occupied Kremag’s offices during the years Kremag has supposedly been there. And their plasm use is identical to Kremag’s, down to the last millimehr — it seems that whoever retroactively inserted Kremag and Associates onto this belt simply hijacked the earlier firms’ data.

It’s all suspicious as hell, but still it won’t provide Aiah with a reason why she chose this particular address in the first place. Aiah gnaws a thumbnail and stares at the screen and wonders if Rohder will even ask.

Possibly he won’t, but at this point she’s not willing to take a chance.

If the data were inserted retroactively onto this belt, she reasons, they might not be inserted sequentially with the rest. The idea excites her. She leans forward as her ringers hammer the clacking metal keys.

Yes!
she thinks. Triumph skips along her nerves. When data are entered on a belt in the normal fashion, it’s done more or less sequentially, one month’s string after the next. But Kremag’s data for the first years of its existence were layered in separately and lie on the etching belt years out of sequence. Whoever entered the false information should have overwritten the data from the earlier occupants of the office, but either it hadn’t occurred to him or he lacked the necessary programming skill.

Aiah leans back in her chair and smiles, and then it occurs to her that, if this particular programmer used this method more than once, she might well be able to find more examples of his handiwork.

She writes down the Kremag data, then starts slowly scanning the data on the belt, looking for data added out of sequence. There’s a fair amount of it, mostly gibberish, fragments of information slotted into empty or erased channels, but some of it is laid in whole, months and years out of sequence. Aiah jots these down as well.

The shift is almost over when she remembers that she forgot to eat lunch. Aiah calls Rohder and asks him to wait past shift change, as she’s found some important information.

“I was going to stay second shift anyway,” he says. Aiah wonders if he ever leaves.

Then she calls Constantine’s accommodation number and tells Dr. Chandros that she will be late, but will have important information when she arrives.

She gets onto the trackline just in time for shift change. The mass of bodies, swaddled close around her, keeps her from losing her footing on the long, jolting journey back to the Authority.

No one works through second shift but Tabulation, Transmission, and the odd emergency crew on standby, and the Authority building is almost deserted; whole decades of stories are vacant. She can’t remember the last time she was alone in the building’s elevators, let alone for a journey of over a hundred stories.

When Aiah enters Rohder’s office she finds him standing in front of his desk, a slight frown on his face as if he can’t quite remember how he came to be there. “Sir,” she says. “I have a list of possibilities and this one,” she points to Kremag, “this one is the most promising.”