Metropolitan Read online

  Aiah looks out over Martinus’s broad shoulder, sees a wide avenue moving smoothly past, office blocks half-deserted on a Saturday, pastel neon adverts scribed across empty black windows.

  “Another thing,” she says. “Do you have climbing gear? Safety lines, harnesses, carabiners?”

  “Will we need them?”

  “Only if we want to do this safely. I don’t want to return you to Constantine in a damaged condition.”

  Sorya seems amused. “Tell us what we need, and we’ll buy it on the way.”

  Sorya carries a checktube charged with a significant amount of cash, because even when Aiah gets extravagant with her requests the gear is purchased quietly, without complaint, the checktube plugged into the cash register, little gears singing. The purchases set Aiah’s mind running in fiscal channels.

  “Don’t think,” she says after she returns to the car, “that you’ve purchased this source for the money I found in my pocket yesterday.” In fact it had amounted to five thousand dalders, all in untraceable coin, enough to clear Aiah’s debts and still have plenty left for the bank.

  “Take it up with Constantine,” Sorya says.

  “I’m taking it up with his representative,” Aiah says. “You know my price. No amount of interfering with my head will change that.”

  “That,” Sorya says, “was not my idea.”

  “It was dangerous. I could have suffered brain damage.”

  “We stopped short of that,” Sorya says. “But we needed to know if you are what you say you are.”

  Aiah gives Sorya a skeletal little grin. “And am I?”

  “All we could tell,” smoothly, “was that you believe what you told us. You could still be delusional, or you may have overestimated the strength of the power source.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  One pale brow arches. “Miss Aiah. We don’t know you.”

  “Get on the Trans-City heading west.” To the driver. “That’ll be quickest.”

  She directs the driver to Terminal, then begins making wider and wider circles around the area in hopes of finding a business district where there won’t be quite so many people on the street. She doesn’t, but she does succeed in locating a subterranean parking garage from which she’s fairly certain she can gain access to utility tunnels. While the chauffeur leans on the fender of the car and smokes a quiet cigaret, Aiah uses her Authority passkey to unlock a scarred steel door and leads her party past the building’s plasm meter and into the tunnels.

  The streets are a regular grid here, fortunately, and with only small hesitation Aiah manages to find one of the pneuma’s crumbling brick-lined air shafts. Underground rain drizzles on her hat as she waits at the bottom for the other two to work their way down the slick, rusting iron ladder. When they arrive at the base of the shaft, they seem thankful for Aiah’s insistence on safety gear. The platform waits in silence, Aiah’s bootmarks the only sign of humanity. Martinus glides along the concrete, alert, silent as a cat despite his size. Sorya looks around expectantly, and Aiah smiles.

  “Watch your step,” Aiah says, and walks through the wall.

  It’s some moments before Martinus follows, a suspicious hand bulky in one pocket, presumably folded around a weapon. He looks around the empty concrete room, gazes at the fallen brace, then steps back to the platform, the illusion closing behind him like a beaded curtain. Sorya is with him when he returns.

  “Careful,” Aiah says. “Don’t step on the guideline.”

  Sorya steps away from the line on the concrete, then turns to contemplate the plasm curtain. “A nice piece of work,” she says. “Yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re hard to keep stable.”

  “I didn’t have much trouble,” Aiah says, faint surprise tingling in her mind at the mention of the stability problem.

  “It wasn’t this one who made the screen?” Martinus has found the plasm diver. He pulls back the blanket and stares at the body with professional detachment.

  “No,” Aiah says.

  Martinus looks up at Aiah. “Did you kill her?” he asks, and a chill rolls up Aiah’s spine at his matter-of-fact tone.

  “No,” she says, and wonders if she’s said it too quickly. She lowers her voice, tries to speak slowly. “She was the Bursary Street flamer. When I found her she was like that, with her hand on the brace.”

  “Ah,” coldly. “I suppose this kind of death can happen accidentally, but when I’ve seen it, it’s always been quite deliberate.”

  Sorya stands next to the brace and looks at it with cautious respect. She takes a portable meter from her pocket, attaches the alligator clip. Her eyes glitter as the glowing dial illuminates her face from below. Aiah sees a new regard enter Sorya’s face as she reads the meter.

  The blonde woman raises her other hand, bites the forefinger of one glove, pulls her hand out, then quickly puts the bare hand on the beam. Aiah’s nerves give a cry, and she takes a half-step toward the other woman, an unvoiced protest on her lips.

  Sorya turns to her and smiles. There’s a cold light in her green eyes, something bright and inhuman drawn from the iron brace. She takes her hand off the metal.

  “Very well, Miss Aiah,” she says. “I think we can do business.”

  *

  The Elton takes Aiah all the way to Loeno Towers. Underground muck gets all over the seats, but Sorya doesn’t seem to notice. Cleaning upholstery, Aiah figures, is pretty clearly for other people.

  As the car pulls into Loeno’s drive, Sorya turns to open a compartment in the shelf behind her seat. Her arm and shoulders strain as she brings out a heavy suede bag, then gives a tight smile and tosses it into Aiah’s lap. Aiah can’t prevent a convulsive jerk of her body, a protective curl, as the jingling weight crashes onto her thighs.

  “Ten thousand,” Sorya says.

  “I don’t sell this cheap,” Aiah said.

  “I didn’t say you would,” Sorya says. “It’s an advance. But I don’t mean to imply that Constantine has any spare millions lying around, either.”

  “Tell me another joke,” Aiah says. She permits herself a contemptuous look at the money, at the Elton, at the chauffeur who has parked the car under the building’s awning and has left the car to open Aiah’s door.

  “Oh, he’s worth millions,” Sorya says. “But ready money is another business.” The door opens at the chauffeur’s touch. There is a brief singing, a brief vibration, from the contra-rotating flywheels.

  “Don’t do anything foolish with it,” Sorya says.

  “I don’t do foolish things with money.”

  “Don’t buy a new car. Or new diamonds. Or ten thousand lottery tickets. Nothing that will call attention to you.”

  Aiah smiles at her sweetly. “Can I get new shoes?” she says.

  Sorya returns the smile. “Two pair, if you like.”

  Aiah lets the smile flick off. “Remember what I said.”

  Sorya reaches into a pocket for a slim cigaret, poses for a moment with the white stick between her fingers. She’s fond of striking poses, Aiah thinks.

  “And I’d advise you,” says Sorya, “in all friendship and sincerity, to remember what Constantine said, Miss Aiah. We are not little people.” She arches a brow, produces a platinum lighter glittering with diamonds, and with an effortless touch of her thumb turns on a delicate, golden flame.

  “Money isn’t a little thing,” Aiah says. “Good day.”

  The chauffeur closes the door solidly behind her. As she walks through the door she sees her fellow tenants looking at her, at the grimy Authority worker in her yellow jumpsuit and hardhat stepping out of a chauffeured Elton, and Aiah concludes her standing has risen a bit in the status-conscious world of Loeno Towers.

  Sincerity and friendship. Of the things Aiah had sensed from Sorya, these were not among them.

  As she walks through the building lobby Aiah can see, repeated over and over again in the mirrored walls, the long gray Elton pulling away. Her neighbors watch
with interest. This, she thinks, is not a discreet conspiracy. The sack of money tugs at her arm. Solid. Heavy. Real. All coins made of exotic alloys that could only be made with magework, so that they couldn’t be counterfeited. Not little people, Aiah thinks. So maybe they believed they were giants. Aiah plans to find out if giants are a match for one of the Cunning People.

  CHAPTER 10

  Aiah watches as Constantine stands with his big hands curled around the jigsaw curves of the baroque iron terrace rail. He stares moodily at the city below while wind twitches at the collar of his black open-necked shirt. There is a coiled, restless energy in him that seems to inflate his presence, that dwarfs the terrace. His words are directed outwards, a rhetorical question addressed as much to the wind as to his guest.

  “What is it, Miss Aiah, that you want?”

  “Many things,” Aiah says. “Money will do.”

  His head turns slowly and he looks at her. Aiah tries not to let her breath catch in her throat: his look is so intense it seems to crawl up the map of her nerves. “What can money do,” he says, “that I cannot?”

  “Are you offering me yourself ?” The thought is so absurd Aiah has to smile. “What would I do with you? You’re a little large for my closets.”

  “I am not offering myself, but what I am,” Constantine says, “and that is not inconsiderable.”

  It’s Sunday, halfway through first shift. The previous day, after Sorya had made her report, Constantine had called Aiah, in person, to invite her to a late Sunday breakfast.

  Sorya herself isn’t present, and neither is her panther. Breakfast had been served by a silent Jaspeeri, a stranger. There had been a huge bowl of fruit, presumably grown in the conservatory or someplace like it, and Aiah had never seen or tasted anything as mouth-watering: fruit with skins bright as if they’d been polished, the flesh filled with juice, flavors alive and sparkling on the tongue ... the pathetic bruised stuff for which she pays fortunes in stores are nothing by comparison. She’d had to restrain herself from gorging.

  “What can you offer me,” Aiah counters, “that money cannot?”

  “Wisdom, I hope,” Constantine says. There is cold self-mocking irony in his face. His eyes leave Aiah, shift out over the city below, and Aiah feels relieved, as if a searchlight had just passed over her.

  “Any wisdom in particular, Metropolitan?” Aiah asks. “And how much do you think it’s worth?”

  The wind flutters Aiah’s lace. Constantine pushes his hands into the pockets of his charcoal-gray slacks. He gives another little grimace as his eyes rove over the city.

  “Once I thought being right was enough,” he said, “and then I learned I was incorrect, that mere Rightness is not wisdom.” The hands in his pockets form fists, begin to gnaw the fabric. “I learned wisdom in the worst possible way, watching everyone I loved die, everything I cared about be destroyed.” His voice is relentless, his gaze a pensive stare into the past. “Watching it all happen slowly,” he continues, “over a period of years, and knowing all the while it was my fault. What sort of wisdom do you think I gained?” His eyes flash to Aiah again, challenging.

  “I can’t say, Metropolitan.” She can’t imagine herself with that kind of self-knowledge, the weight of that kind of responsibility dragging her down.

  “What do you think I will do with this plasm of yours?” Constantine shifts his course, a probe in another direction.

  This is business, she reminds herself.

  “I don’t know. It isn’t my concern.”

  “Not your concern. I could use these goods of yours to create another flaming woman on the Exchange. Destroy this smug little Jaspeer of yours.”

  Aiah licks dry lips. “I would suggest, Metropolitan, that such a project is beneath you.”

  Laughter booms from deep within Constantine’s barrel chest. Sly delight crosses his face, a suggestion that Aiah and he have just shared a wonderful jest. “Well said, daughter!” he says. “An encouraging sentiment!”

  He pulls his chair out from beneath the breakfast table and mounts the chair by easily kicking one foot up over the chairback, then sitting down, a simple, dancelike movement that belies his true age. “I could do it so much better now, you see,” he says, “I thought if I could simply seize power in Cheloki, then my ideas alone would guarantee success, would deliver my corrupt, hapless metropolis to a new age. Would create progress, create an impetus toward change that it would be impossible to stop. But I’d been away from government too long. I’d forgotten how entrenched it all is, how many interests depend for their very existence on human inertia, how thousands of years of living in a shell—” He jerks his chin upwards toward the opalescent, enigmatic Shield, the eggshell skin of the world, the wall stretched across the whole of the sky, a barrier, but a barrier that gives light and life “— how the shell has made us timid,” he continues, leaning closer as if including Aiah in a confidence, “timid as all creatures who live in shells. And I’ve never realized how other governments would view mine with alarm, would feel terrified by anything that threatened their placidity, anything that demonstrated their smug satisfaction for what it was, delusion and hypocrisy,” the words roll on, hypnotic, intense, as if he were drunk on them, and by now Aiah is beginning to feel a little giddy herself, “hypocrisy because they were happy to do business with my gangster family as long as we were looting our own people, our own economy, driving our best away or putting them in prisons, but as soon as I tried to liberate them, to transform the whole metropolis into an evolutionary instrument. . . .” He hesitates, his ferocious intensity fading as he catches himself in mid-screed. He barks a laugh, makes a dismissive gesture with his hands.

  “See what a fool I am?” he says, “I can still get caught up in it, still believe.” He spreads his hands. “That I matter. That any of this matters.”

  Aiah props her hand in her chin, leans across the table toward him. “What will you do with the plasm?” she asks.

  He frowns. “Some good, I hope. But access, that is the problem.”

  “Metropolitan?”

  “That disused terminal is hard to get to, by Sorya’s account. And if I were to use it, I’d have to send work parties down there, build accumulators, string cable to carry the plasm to where I could use it, or work some way to broadcast it from a building.”

  “There’s an easier way to do it, Metropolitan.”

  “Yes?”

  “The Authority buys plasm at fixed rates, then resells it. What you do is create a dummy company, one that owns a building at a fictional address. You create a fictional history to go with that address. And then you get yourself a phony work order to install a meter, get another saying the job’s been done, then sell the plasm from Terminal through that company. You take the money, then buy plasm for yourself here with it, and do it quite legally.” She smiles. “If you have someone at the Authority to keep all the paperwork straight, you could go on that way for years.”

  “I see.” Cold amusement glows in Constantine’s eyes. “But I lose something that way, don’t I? I’d sell plasm to the Authority at a rate considerably below that which I’d pay to use it. What if I simply wanted to use the stuff at Terminal, not sell it?”

  Aiah checks for a moment, rethinks. If Constantine actually wants to use the plasm at Terminal, it almost certainly has to be for purposes that would get his meters shut off here at Mage Towers. Something well over the border into illegality.

  Interesting, she thinks.

  “You don’t have to go to the pneuma station to tap that potential well,” Aiah says. “All you need to do is find another part of that old plastics plant — it’s all strung together. Tap any one part, you tap the entire structure. You might be able to find some of the structure using standard utility tunnels, with a little digging, anyway. There are hundreds of old tunnels down there, many of them so old they’re off the map.”

  “Hm.” He frowns.

  “But on the other hand,” Aiah says, “the disused platform would
make construction easier.”

  “I foresee nothing but difficulty,” Constantine says. “I’d need a control facility, a battery station, broadcast horns.” He shrugs. “I may have to buy a building in the area, remodel it to the necessary specifications. And that means working through dummy companies, hiding the money, coming up with a plausible cover. A complicated business.”

  Aiah leans back. This is a scope of effort she hadn’t quite contemplated. “You seem to have funds available, Metropolitan,” she says.

  “I can spend only a certain amount,” Constantine says, “before it becomes more cost-effective to buy my plasm from the Authority like any other mortal. If I must buy a building, you, Miss Aiah, would get less money.”

  Aiah considers this. The sky above brightens with an advertisement for jewelry, the sky glittering with diamonds that reflect rainbows.

  The advertising over Mage Towers, she observes, has a somewhat greater cachet than that over Old Shorings.

  “There’s always the way I first suggested. Reselling through the dummy company. It’s a sure profit-maker. That’s how the Operation sanitize their plasm, when they can.”

  “Profit.” Constantine is disdainful. “Profit is not why I do what I do.”

  “Either money matters, or it doesn’t,” Aiah says. “If it doesn’t, why are you haggling?”

  He looks at her stonily. Got you, she thinks.

  “If it’s a building you want,” Aiah says, “perhaps you need only rent a warehouse.”

  “Perhaps.” He leans back in his chair, moody again. “You know this metropolis better than I. Perhaps you could make the arrangements.”

  “Not I.” Aiah bares her teeth in a smile. “I’m the wrong color for that neighborhood.”

  Constantine laughs, puts his black hand on the table next to Aiah’s brown one. “If you’re the wrong color,” he says, “what am I?”

  “Too intimidating to deal with, I imagine. But not me — I’ve already been attacked once.”

  The laughter vanishes from Constantine’s face as suddenly as if it had been wiped away. “Who?” he says.