Metropolitan (6 page)

“Yes. We could barely afford this place before you left. Now we can’t afford it at all.”

Gil’s tone was patient. “We worked out a budget.”

The heavy plastic-and-metal headset is hammering her skull, pounding places already chafed by her hardhat. “Yes, we did,” Aiah says. “Based on you sending me a certain amount every month, which you have not done.”

“
You’re saying it’s
my
fault now? How is it my fault that I’ve had all these expenses?”

Aiah has to take a breath or two. “I’m not laying blame,” she said. “I’m just telling you how things are.”

“Things are expensive in Gerad,” Gil says. “You should see the place I’m living in — it’s pathetic, maybe three mattresses wide, but Havell got it for me and I’m stuck with it. And I’m obliged to take all these other people out, buy them drinks, and the prices are rigged in the places catering to executives, because they’re all owned by the Operation, so . . .”

“You have to take people out?”

“That’s how business is done here. It’s all done over meals and at clubs. And the company only reimburses part of it, and . ..”

“I think you need to stop doing that kind of business, Gil.”

“The quicker I get it all done, the quicker I get home.”

“We’re going bankrupt,” Aiah says.

There’s another silence.
Banshug wouldn’t do that!
says a voice on the phone.

“I’ll try to come home,” he says. “Soon. There’s got to be a way to work something out.”

For the first time Aiah looks up at the plasm batteries waiting in her tote bag.

“Soon,” she says. “I need you soon.”

I need you to save me from this
, she thinks.

*

Aiah locks the pneuma station grill behind her, then walks down the old stair to where the water spill begins. She holds to the rusted iron guardrail as she carefully treads down the little series of waterfalls. She realizes her steps are slower than they really have to be.

She comes to the bottom of the stair and her shirting helmet light catches a glimpse of writhing liquid silver — a flash of belly scales, of needle teeth — of something moving in the shallow lake, and her heart gives a terrified leap.

The serpentine thing writhes away at the touch of her light. Aiah waits, one insulated glove clamped on the rail, torchlight beams stabbing at the water while her pulse drums in her skull.

Whatever the thing was, it’s gone. A kind of resonance effect generated by untapped plasm sometimes gives birth to creatures unhealthy, unnatural; or maybe someone actually built the thing, and then set it free or allowed it to escape.

She hesitates for a long time before she dares to put a foot in the water. Whatever the creature was, it doesn’t reappear.

The platform seems larger than the day before, the shadows darker, angles stranger. Aiah’s thundering heart sounds louder in her ears than the sound of her echoing boots. She remembers the dead woman’s hollow eye-sockets, remembers she’s been dead for three days now and this isn’t going to be pleasant at all. Aiah hesitates outside the door to the old toilet, sweeping her hand torch over the platform, trying to make sure nothing’s there.

She’s just delaying things, she knows. Either she’s doing this or she isn’t. She takes a breath, turns, enters the room.

The dead woman lies on a mound of broken concrete next to the canted brace. Aiah sees a dark spill of auburn hair, heavy boots, one hand dangling, the other still fiercely clamped on the brace. The mouth is open, a perfect oval of an endless scream. Her hollow eyes grow larger as Aiah moves closer. Aiah’s steps slow, then halt. She doesn’t want to get any closer.

Aiah’s nostrils twitch obsessively, but she detects no odor of decay. The woman seems curiously shrunken inside her olive-green overalls.

Aiah’s heart thunders in her chest. She takes a step closer, then another. The woman’s skin seems stiff, parchment-like, the lips shrunken, long teeth visible in shrunken gums. There are no eyes in the hollow sockets, nothing there at all.

Aiah kneels by the body, reaches out a hand that freezes in mid-air. Air spills from Aiah’s lungs in a soft hiss.

The woman is mummified, she realizes. Moisture drawn out, nerves burned away, soft organs like the eyes just gone. All consumed by the Bursary Street holocaust as surely as the lives of its other victims.

Aiah’s already wearing insulated gloves. Carefully she reaches for the woman’s arm, takes it gently, pulls the clawed hand away from the hot brace. There’s no resistance, no rigor; the arm seems to weigh nothing at all. Aiah opens her hand and lets the arm fall.

Sister
, she apologizes,
I’m sorry.

She takes the blanket out of her tote, lays it next to the plasm diver, and then rolls the body onto it. She picks the body up — it weighs no more than a heap of dry rags — then moves it around the fallen brace to the back of the room, where it won’t be seen in the first flash of someone’s torch.

The auburn hair is disordered. Aiah tries to arrange it about the hollow-eyed face, happy she’s wearing gloves when a fingertip scrapes across a withered cheek. Then she covers the body with the blanket.

Aiah stands, open-mouthed stare still in her mind, and feels the weight of the surface world about her, all the foundations and beams and brick and concrete, all of it inadvertently generating power, the plasm waiting in its well like water, poised in this old iron brace like a drop at the end of a faucet. . .

She has things to do, and time is passing.

Feeling a prickly psychic pressure from the corpse right behind her, Aiah moves her tote behind the brace and takes out the battery leads, then attaches the alligator clips to the fallen brace. She’s not about to touch the brace itself if she can help it. She watches in fine surprise as the batteries fill almost instantly, as the little indicator on top, reacting to the plasm field, goes from red to purple to blue, and then begins to give off an ominous, unearthly cerulean glow, one just like the pile of a high-pressure fission reactor, and potentially just about as dangerous.

She leaves the batteries in place, takes the tote, ducks under the brace, and leaves the room. She approaches the fluted iron pillar on the platform, carefully examines the electrolytic footprint, the rusty indication of iron trying to find its way to a powerful nearby circuit.

Aiah gets out oil and rags and her file and tries to scour the footprint away. Her arms and back still ache from yesterday. Her feet hurt. She finds herself panting for breath, sweat dripping from her nose, and she’s barely started.

She thinks of plasm waiting in its batteries.

Aiah returns hesitantly to the plasm source as her mind works through the idea. She hasn’t handled live plasm in four or five years, not since the one lab course at college she’d convinced herself she could afford and had to drop in mid-term.

She snaps off one of the alligator clips from a battery, takes the battery to the platform. She opens her old college textbook to one of the plasm-control diagrams she used then, the Trigram. She kneels on the platform and feels her heavy boots pressing up against her buttocks. She puts the open book in front of her and props her hand torch up so that it shines on the pages. Then she strips off one of her insulated gloves and holds the battery lead with one hand, keeping her fingers carefully on the insulated wire and not daring to touch the bare metal of the alligator clip.

Suddenly this seems the most ridiculous thing in the world. Stolen plasm, a battery, a college textbook she hasn’t looked at in years — the potential for harm is absurd.

Still. The battery shouldn’t have
that
much power.

She looks down at the Trigram, tries to fix it in her mind, fix the pattern of it, the balance of energies.
Human will,
dry lecture-voice echoing in her mind,
is the modulator of plasm.
Time to get her will moving, to visualize some successful thoughts.

She can’t remember any of the chants she learned in training.

I am the power. The power is mine.
Idiotic, but it’s all she can think of. And the point is focus anyway, not what’s actually said.

The power is a part of me. The power responds to my will.

She closes her eyes and the Trigram glows on the inside of her lids. Carefully she inches her fingers up the battery lead, touches bare metal, and . . .

It’s like a peregrine falcon diving off a building ledge for the first time, a moment of shock, then surprise at finding herself in her natural element, the wind rustling through pinions, smoothing the feathers at the base of the neck, the airy medium itself responsive to her will, to the merest inflection of a wing. . . . It’s
effortless
. It’s
easy
. . .

The Trigram burns in her mind like fire, the same blue radiant color as the battery indicator. She can taste power on her tongue.

The weariness is banished from my body. My body is whole and well and powerful.

The energy pulse is so powerful that the words seem redundant, but she guides the Trigram on a mental journey through her body, urging the weariness away, banishing fatigue toxins, flushing tissues with energy.

Aiah opens her eyes, sees through the burning pattern of the Trigram the fluted iron pillar with its telltale upwelling of rust. She stands, one hand still clamped on the metal I clip, and she tries to remember the atomic composition of iron oxide — is it Fe
₂
or Fe
₃
O
₂
?
It doesn’t matter, she decides, she should use the atomic number, but now, suddenly she can’t remember it. Six? Eight? She seems to remember eight.

She reaches to the pillar, feels the cool red dust under her fingers, then projects her power through her fingertips, another ridiculous chant running through her head, O
⁸
out! O
⁸
out! O
⁸
out! and maybe the plasm knows more about atomic composition than she does, because to her amazed delight she sees the fluted rust shrink, turn dark, become iron — poor iron, spongy and brittle, but iron none the less.

She moves her hand up the pillar, plasm flowing through her body into the rust, transmitting it . . . and then the power fades, and she gives a little cry of disappointment as she feels the last of the battery’s contents drain away.

Aiah stands on the platform, mouth half-open in amazement. Power still tingles in her nerves. Her heat throbs like a turbine. She raises a hand, touches her breast, feels an aroused nipple. Her vagina is heavy with arousal. An astonished laugh escapes her throat.

The little hints of power she was permitted in school were nothing compared to the touch of this miraculous reality.

She almost dances back to the glory hole, fills the battery, returns to the platform. Brings the Trigram to her mind, connects again to the circuit, projects her power to the iron pillar. Aiah burnishes the rust away, then stands for a moment, reluctant to let the circuit drop. She puts the alligator clip carefully down on the concrete platform, then stands for a while, enjoying the power that hums through her veins.

Aiah peels back the jumpsuit’s elastic wrist, checks her watch. She doesn’t have much time left.

She glances up and down the platform again. The gaping lavatory door mars the stripped concrete wall. What if Lastene or Grandshuk decided to take a look inside? Hell — what if one of them just wanted a private place to piss and wanders in?

She fills the battery again and tries to focus the power on the doorway, on creating an illusion of an unbroken concrete wall. Her first attempt is translucent and wavery, but after she charges the battery another time she succeeds in producing a satisfactory wall, complete with the little lines of plaster that remained when the original tile was stripped away by the reclaimers. She has to put an arm through it to make absolutely certain that she didn’t produce an actual concrete wall.

She leaves the battery just inside the door, its copper contact touching the illusion, feeding it.

How long will it last? She has no idea, though it probably won’t stay there for long. Just an hour or two is all she needs.

It’s only then that Aiah realizes she forgot to use the Trigram as a focus. She was so dizzy with success that she forgot proper procedure.

Better not do that again,
she admonishes herself.
It could be dangerous.

It’s time to leave but she really doesn’t want to go — the whole experience has been far too glorious, too satisfying. The last thing she wants to do is play troglodyte in some damp dungeon.

She makes certain all her gear is hidden behind her illusory wall and heads for the surface. Plasm still energizes her body — she feels she could run a hundred radii without stopping to catch her breath.

When Aiah comes to the shallow little river between the platform and the stairwell she doesn’t hesitate. Any scaly monsters, she figures, had better watch out.

Grandshuk and Lastene are waiting for her outside the barred door. Lastene looks surprised as she mounts the stair. She looks down at herself, sees the wet boots, the fresh mud scars on her jumpsuit. She turns the key in the padlock, opens the door.

“I got uneasy about that cave-in and leak,” she said. “I went down to take a look at it, see if there was something we missed.”

“That violates procedure,” Lastene says. He seems suspicious, though probably only that Aiah might have cheated him out of some overtime.

“Anything there?” Grandshuk asks. He hasn’t bothered to shave today. He has to turn his broad, powerful body sideways to get through the door.

“Nothing,” Aiah says, repeating her most successful thought. She keeps wanting to laugh. “Nothing at all.”