Metropolitan Read online

  “Of course. I’ll call down to Records for you.”

  “Our maps aren’t always current if they’re not our district. I’ll want a map from— what’s the substation between here and Grand City? Rocketman?”

  Mengene looks surprised. “I think so. I’ll call Rocketman, if that’s what you

  want.”

  Sometimes, she’s learned, Jaspeeris are amazed when something intelligent comes from her lips. She’s learned to cope with the phenomenon.

  Still, she can’t ask any questions she truly needs the answers to.

  Special assignment. What joy.

  *

  Speech is human, silence is divine —

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

  *

  A few hours later, wearing an official yellow jumpsuit and hardhat, Aiah climbs out of a trackline car at Rocketman Station. She’s followed everywhere by her two assistants: Lastene, a young kid with pimples, and Grandshuk, a grizzled man so short and squat and powerfully built that she suspects some ancestor may have had his genes twisted.

  Rocketman Station, the station run by the Trackline Authority, has the same name as Rocketman Substation, the Authority plasm station. No clue as to why either is called “Rocketman” — most of the names for these neighborhoods are so old they’ve lost all meaning.

  The trackline station is ancient and deep below the surface. An old mosaic on the platform, once-bright colors grimy and chipped, shows how the aboveground must have looked at one time, bright whitestone buildings shining under the gray Shield, some with odd ball-topped antennae broadcasting plasm in the form of shining gold zigzag rays.

  No rockets in the mosaic, though.

  The tunnel to the substation isn’t properly walled, just screened off with steel mesh. Aiah’s boots boom on temporary flooring that was probably installed decades ago. She ascends past layers of human strata, all visible through steel mesh: old brickwork, scrolled iron stanchions, water pipes, brown stone, concrete, sewer pipe glistening with condensation, gray bricks, red stone, white stone.

  Everything a generator of plasm, of geomantic power.

  Mass creates its own energies— for that matter is energy, albeit in another form. The disordered pile that is the world-city, the structures of iron and brick and rock and concrete, generates its own intrinsic power. The power accumulates slowly within the structures themselves, fills them like rising water entering every crevice, and lies latent unless tapped. Geomantic relationships have been shown to matter more than mass itself— the design of a building, or the relationship of buildings to one another can multiply power generation, concentrate or direct it to one place or another. The metal structures of buildings, reaching down into bedrock and up toward the Shield, gather and concentrate that power, make it available for use and broadcast.

  And the power — plasm — resonates within the human mind. It is susceptible to control by the odd little particules of human will, and once controlled, can do almost anything — on the small, microcosmic end, plasm can cure illness, alter genes, halt or reverse aging, create precious metals from base matter and radioisotopes from precious metals. On the macrocosmic end plasm can create life, any kind of life a person can think of, can invade a target mind, destroy a person’s will and make him a puppet for the manipulator, can burn out nerves or turn living bones to carbon ash, turn hatred to love or love to hate, can wreak death in any number of obscene forms, can fling missiles or bombs or people anywhere in the world, all in a snap of the fingers. Can blow buildings down in a tornado wind, carry skyscrapers through the air for a thousand miles and set them down feather-light at the point of destination, create earthquakes to shiver a hundred structures to the ground, can grant earthly power beyond the wildest dreams, can do anything except punch a hole through the Shield that the Ascended Ones set between the world and whatever exists outside of it.

  But you have to get the stuff first. And it’s collected, distributed, metered, taxed. There’s never enough. Governments require colossal amounts of plasm as a foundation for their own power. Complexes like Mage Towers or Grand City charge their tenants horrific sums, all because their buildings are constructed so as to concentrate and transmit plasm efficiently, and the tenants — geomancers of astounding wealth and power — live there because they can afford it. Because they can afford to call for power tfn, to let the meters run.

  Never enough. But buildings are always going up, or tearing down, or going higher, or remodeling, and the configurations are always changing, mass achieving new balances with mass, producing new potentials. That’s why plasm divers burrow through the foundations of the world, through abandoned cellars and long-forgotten utility mains and rubble-filled inspection tunnels, all in hope of finding a source that’s off the circuit, that hasn’t been metered yet, a source of plasm that can be tapped or sold or used to fulfill the diver’s uttermost dreams.

  And if it goes wrong, Aiah thinks, if the diver takes on more power than she’s trained to handle, maybe you have hundred-foot-tall flaming women wailing down the street, burning off a hundred years’ chance accumulation of plasm in one horrifying, burning instant.

  At Rocketman Plasm Station it takes a while to establish Aiah’s credentials. Mengene never made the promised call. The archives are kept in a room below street level, and are reached through the wide Battery Room where the station’s power is contained in huge plasm accumulators and capacitors, three times human height, gleaming copper and brass layers with shining black ceramic. Controlling them is a black metal wall filled with switches, dials, and levers that monitor and control the vast power stored here, that cause it to flow and surge at the drop of a contact. In the corner, near the control bank, is an icon to Tangid, the two-faced Lord of Power. The two controllers sit in comfortable chairs in front of the control board and spend their days reading magazines. Their job is almost entirely automated, but the union insists they have to stay here in case of an emergency, and their contract even gets them hazard pay, just in case terrorists burst in the door waving machine-guns and demanding a dose of power.

  Aiah is escorted to the archives. Lastene and Grandshuk follow like obedient hounds. She’s back in the Battery Room a few minutes later, she and her team carrying bundles of maps, transparencies, and updates, all wrapped in official orange Authority strapping. She sits at a table near the controllers and drags them open.

  The overflight maps are chromographs taken by aircraft, jigsawed carefully together, and carefully scaled to give an idea of relationships. Transparent celluloid overlays are supposed to show what’s underneath. Some of the cels are so old that they’ve yellowed or deteriorated. Anything that can alter plasm generation is supposed to be in the overlays or the updates. It’s all a pleasant fiction.

  It’s easier to let entrepreneurs do the work — that and greed. The Authority knows that the total of plasm stolen is enormous, impossible to keep up with. But if a plasm diver finds anything new, sooner or later someone will turn him in for the reward and the Authority will find the source and wire it into the circuit.

  Aiah spends an hour looking at the maps. The area between the Exchange District and Grand City is vast, hundreds of square radii. She sets her dividers against the map scale and marches out the relationships between the various structures, then puts down the transparencies one by one and tries to add in their effects. The maps swim before her eyes.

  It occurs to her that her job is impossible. Mengene, she decides, is up to something. Maybe he wants her to fail.

  Aiah decides she wants to think about that for a while.

  She looks up at her crew, who are reading the controllers’ magazines. “You can leave if you like. I’m going home.”

  Grandshuk looks at his partner, then back at Aiah. “We were sort of hoping to draw some overtime.”

  “I’m on salary,” Aiah says, “I don’t get overtime. But you can take yours in the bar across the street if you want. I’ll meet you here right at t
he beginning of work shift tomorrow.”

  Grandshuk looks at his partner again, then nods. “If that’s okay with you, then.”

  “Yeah, sure. Have fun.”

  She looks down at the maps again, the yellowed transparencies that mark utility mains, old tubeways, the foundations of buildings long since demolished by wrecking ball or by earthquake. If she dove anywhere, anywhere, she’d probably find some plasm. Make an announcement back at the office, hey, problem solved. Get her pat on the back, go back to her yellow-eyed computer and scalar and the wails of Telia’s baby.

  No, she decides. That’s the sort of thing her brother Stonn might do. He’d even think it was smart, at least until another Grade A screamer started blowing out windows on Exchange.

  There has to be a way around it, she thinks. A cunning way.

  A Barkazil way.

  She’s one of the Cunning People, she thinks. It’s time to get those cunning genes into action.

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  Her cousin Landro works in a hardware store in Old Shorings, the neighborhood where Aiah spent her girlhood. That’s an hour-and-a-half commute from Rocketman, and in the wrong direction from where she lives at Loeno Towers. Aiah tracklines out carrying a heavy satchel full of maps, wearing her jumpsuit and hardhat — she is feeling unlovely and unloved by the time she drags her feet up the broken escalator to the entrance tunnel, but as soon as her feet touch the sidewalk she feels her heart begin to lift.

  A vocal group sings somewhere, the sound floating out of an upper window. Aiah finds herself smiling. A cold wind pours down the narrow corridor between buildings of soiled red brick, all so old they lean over the street like old women leaning on their sticks.

  The street is narrow and closed to vehicle traffic. The buildings have shops on the lower floor, apartments above. Most buildings have metal scaffolding extending their fronts out over the sidewalk and into the street. Officially speaking, the scaffolding is supposed to support the old brick walls, but the scaffolds are all inhabited, divided up into cubicles where people sell clothes or gadgets or toys, lucky charms or advice or vegetables raised in roof gardens. Sometimes poor people live there, with plastic sheeting for roofs and walls. It’s all illegal, and the scaffolding and its contents will turn into missiles in the next earthquake, but nobody in this part of the Scope of Jaspeer has cared about building codes for a very long time.

  Aiah did much of her growing up here, in public housing a few blocks away. Cooking smells hang heavy in the air, familiar Barkazil spices. Hawkers smile and offer homemade musical instruments, pigeon pies, incense, scarves, lucky charms, handbags, and watches with phony labels. No end of music, music everywhere, booming from amplifiers turned out the windows, slippery Barkazil rhythms competing with the boom of plastic sheeting in the wind. Children play football in the street. Old men drink beer on front stoops. Young men stand on street corners to protect the neighborhood from whatever they think is threatening it, presumably other young men.

  At a scaffold shop she buys a meal of hot noodles with chiles and onions and a bit of meat for seasoning. She has to put down a five-clink deposit for the cheap ceramic cup with a chip on its rim. It’s the sort of meal her grandmother was always warning her against: the meat is supposed to be chicken grown in a vat or on someone’s roof, but it might well be sewer rat.

  Aiah doesn’t care — it tastes wonderful.

  A flying billboard hawking cigarets soars overhead with a siren wail. It’s illegal for plasm displays to make that much noise, but in certain neighborhoods the noise statutes never seem to be enforced.

  Landro sees the yellow jumpsuit first, and he looks at Aiah a little warily until he recognizes her. At once he gives her an expansive hug, answers question about his girlfriend and various children, hers, his, theirs together.

  “I thought you worked in an office now,” he says.

  “I’m underground for a few weeks.”

  “Have you seen your mama?”

  Annoyance dances along Aiah’s nerves on little insect feet. “No,” she says, “I just got here, and —” Deep sigh. “Actually, I’m working.”

  Wariness enters his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I was hoping you could give me some answers. About diving.”

  Landro gives a look over his shoulder at the store manager frowning from behind a screen at the back of the store. “Why don’t I show you some samples?” he says, and takes her over to the paint section.

  Upper management, Aiah thinks, is everywhere.

  “I’m not looking to get anyone in trouble,” he says, and hands her a card with paint samples.

  For several years Landro was a plasm diver, feeding his discoveries into local circuits through meters he’d carefully sabotaged, supplying local adepts with the amounts of plasm necessary to keep their predictions reasonably on the mark, their love spells boiling, their curses suitably calamitous. Till the Authority creepers caught him and sent him to Chonmas for a six-month stretch.

  “I don’t want to arrest anybody,” Aiah assures, “I just want to find somebody’s source. I need to know what to look for in a meter that’s been cracked.”

  “There must be a dozen ways.”

  “Just the most common. Probably small-time stuff. Little meters, apartments, and small offices.”

  Landro licks his lips and tells her what she wants. He used little magnets to retard the dials on the continuous-flow meters, and the gear-driven ones were gimmicked with special gears of slightly different sizes than the ones called for in the specifications. Aiah nags him until he tells her just where the magnets were placed, just which gears were swapped.

  “Thank you,” she says, and kisses his cheek.

  “See your mama,” he says.

  “I’m working now,” glad for the excuse, “but I’ll see you all on Senko’s Day.”

  He looks after her doubtfully as she hoists her map case off the floor and heads out. She’d like to stay in the neighborhood a little longer, but chances are she’d run into another relative, and then her mother would hear about it. Besides, considering that it’s shift change, it’s at least a two-hour ride to her new neighborhood.

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  Aiah is thankful for the noodles by the time she gets home. She can’t afford to eat out in her neighborhood, and she really can’t afford to buy groceries there, either; she usually buys food one stop up the pneuma line and walks home from there.

  But she doesn’t take the pneuma this time, because it doesn’t connect to Old Shorings. Instead, she has to use the trackline and transfer, Circle Line to Red Line to New Central Line — and every single car on Aiah’s journey is overdue for service on its suspension and tires. It’s a tooth-rattling ride, and by the end Aiah’s kidneys ache and her bladder is full.

  She has to walk a block and a half from the trackline station to her apartment at Loeno Towers. Hydrogen-powered cars hiss by on soft polymer wheels. Black clouds cruise under the Shield like hunter-killer craft, threatening a rain strike at any moment. It’s dark enough so that some of the stormlights go on.

  Loeno is a new apartment complex built on the rubble of a decayed residential district, sixteen tall black glass monoliths, housing maybe ten thousand people in all. The place is expensive and Aiah and Gil could barely afford to buy it.

  Now, it turns out, they can’t afford to sell.

  Well-dressed neighbors look at her with well-contained surprise as she walks to the elevators — assuming they notice her at all in the course of the day, something she doubts; they’re used to seeing her in her gray suits, heels, and white lace.

  The elevat
or carries her briskly to the thirtieth floor; from there it’s a hundred quick steps to her apartment door.

  Aiah steps inside and feels her boots sink into carpet. The first thing she notices is that the yellow message bulb on her communications array isn’t lit. The apartment is one largish room, with a counter between the living area and kitchen. There’s a small shower and toilet, a small room for a pocket garden, with grow lights and a tub of loam for vegetable cultivation. Through the black glass wall is a spectacular view, mostly of other black glass windows. It’s the largest area Aiah has ever had entirely to herself.

  She throws the map case onto the bed she hasn’t bothered to convert back to its sofa configuration in weeks, sits down on the disordered sheets and unclips her boots. She rubs her feet, locates a few places that will blister if she isn’t careful. Tomorrow she’ll wear a more appropriate style of sock.

  There’s something in a jumpsuit pocket that feels uncomfortable, and she unsnaps it to find the chipped ceramic cup that held her noodles. She forgot to redeem it for her five clinks. She puts it on the bedside table.

  Aiah takes a shower and wraps herself in a velour bathrobe. A tune sung by the vocal group in Old Shorings plays itself faintly in her head. She looks at the message machine again, just to make sure Gil hadn’t called when she was in the shower. No luck.

  An aerial advertisement shines through the black glass window, tracks its yellow light across the room. Vote No on Item Fourteen, letters snaking between the Loeno Towers. She’s never heard of Item Fourteen before.

  She sits on the bed, looks first at the life-size portrait of Gil on one wall, then the icon of Karlo on the other. The two poles of her personal universe.

  From the armrest control she turns on the video and lets the oval screen babble at her. It’s some kind of silly action chromo with Aldemar blowing up half a metropolis. She wishes Gil would call. She’d call him, but she never knows when he’s going to be near a phone.