Metropolitan Read online

  There had been a time, she remembers, when she’d really wanted to be alone. Wanted to be away from her huge, anarchic family, from their oppressive high spirits and noisy poverty and hopeless irresponsibility. In a place just like this, high and remote and sealed from the world by black glass.

  She and Gil had been together for a year when they’d bought the apartment on Loeno Towers, pooling their savings and still having to borrow half the down payment from his parents. They were both successful for a while, working hard, saving, allowing themselves one shift out every week, a few carefree hours when talk of finances was carefully banned.

  And then Gil got his transfer, a lateral movement across department lines that led to a job two thousand radii from the Scope of Jaspeer, far out in Gerad territory. The job was supposed to be temporary, lasting no more than two months, but now it had gone eight months with no real end in sight. Gil had been home only three times. His travel bonus wasn’t enough to cover his expenses: things were expensive in Gerad and his income was garnished twice to pay two different sets of taxes — a bookkeeping problem that was supposed to have been solved by now, but somehow wasn’t.

  Gil had been sending what he could, but Aiah couldn’t make up the difference on her own. Payments were falling behind, each by another day or two. Late payment penalties were piling up.

  She considered acquiring a roommate, but Gil was against it. It would be, he explained, like admitting defeat. He still expected his new job to end any week now, and he didn’t want to have to evict someone who’d just settled in.

  Roommates were against the Loeno protocols in any case, and she’d have to smuggle the person in.

  Not but that she couldn’t. She was one of the Cunning People, after all.

  And she couldn’t sell the place either. Loeno Towers had been built in expectation of a rise in demand for upper-middle-class housing and the demand hadn’t come. A third of the apartments were still vacant, and the rest were going for bargain prices. If she sold, she’d have to sell at well below what they’d paid.

  Gil wouldn’t consider selling in any case. He’d say it admitted defeat.

  Defeat was a stranger to Gil’s mindset, but not to Aiah’s: her whole culture, the entire nation of Cunning People, had all outsmarted themselves spectacularly three generations ago, and after that self-destruction no amount of cunning could piece together the wreckage. Even the Metropolis of Barkazi was gone, the once-sovereign commonwealth now carved into districts governed by former neighbors. Defeat and fragmentation was in the air Aiah breathed as a child. When she’d won her scholarship to the Rathene School, and then to the university, every single relative told her nothing good would come of it. They’re teaching you to betray your people, her mother insisted.

  Well, maybe they were. She had been awed by the Jaspeeris, by the utter simplicity of their optimism. Infected by their certainty, she’d signed up for geomancy classes, even though her scholarship didn’t cover the plasm fees required.

  The two years of theory went well, but after theory came practice, and she’d run into a stone wall: she simply couldn’t afford her own discipline. So she shifted to administration and after graduation applied to the Plasm Authority. At least the civil service hired Barkazils, and in the back of her mind she’d thought that in working for the Authority she’d at least be learning something about plasm.

  When she’d met Gil, she found him the most certain man she’d ever met; for a while Aiah thought Gil and his people had somehow found the magic her own ancestors had inexplicably missed. He was pale-skinned and Jaspeeri and practiced optimism as if it were a religion.

  “All Barkazil heroes are losers,” he pointed out once, after she told him a few stories from her people’s tradition. “Have you noticed that?”

  No, not till he mentioned it. Then she thought of Karlo, the greatest Barkazil hero, who had been offered the Ascendancy and refused it, and who had been walled off by the Shield along with everyone else; and of Chonah, who tricked her brilliant way through life until she lost everything and threw herself off a building, and in so doing got herself promoted to immortal in charge of hustlers; and of the Metropolitan Trocco, who got involved with Thymmah the prostitute and . . .

  Well. The point was made.

  Gil has no loser heroes. His role models all Ascended, or became Metropolitan of some district or other, or at the very least scored a winning goal in the last seconds of the big game. He read books on how to succeed by concentrating on the proper successful thoughts, and gave her solemn instruction in how it was all supposed to work.

  “The human mind generates its own plasm,” he said. “You just have to get it working for you.” It’s not what they taught her in her geomancy classes at the university, but she figured she didn’t have anything to lose by believing.

  Successful thoughts. She’d thought nothing but successful thoughts for months, and the bills still arrive on the commo almost daily.

  For a moment she considers asking her father for help. She’s only met him three times in her life — he’d left the family when she was two. A couple years ago, just after Aiah had started at the Authority, he’d called her, a voice on the phone she didn’t even remember, and asked if perhaps they might have dinner.

  She didn’t remember the face, either: he was a middle-aged stranger, plump and fairly well-off, the half-owner of a machine shop. After leaving Aiah’s mother he’d remarried and had another family; Aiah has a pair of half-brothers she’s never met. They managed to spend a pleasant hour together in the restaurant, and have met for dinner twice since and spoken every so often on the phone.

  No, she decides, she won’t ask her father for help. After all these years, she doesn’t want to feel she owes him anything.

  A yellow flash lights up the room. Aiah assumes it’s another advertisement until, a few seconds later, thunder rattles her black glass wall.

  On the video news, Mengene is leading a jumpsuit-clad team into some utility mains on Old Parade. Oeneme appears and makes reassuring sounds at the camera. Aiah can’t figure out why he looks different until she realizes that, for the video, he’s laced himself into a corset.

  Aiah’s eyes slide from the oval screen to the little door set into the wall by the apartment entrance. The door set into the dark grained polymer paneling, the door with its little silver lock that only Authority keys will open.

  Loeno Towers is set up to deliver plasm to each room, not huge amounts like Grand City, but enough to get a lot of things done. That was part of the fantasy once: when they got ahead financially, Aiah could resume her geomancy studies.

  Aiah thinks about what her cunning cousin told her about meters.

  She rises from the bed and drifts across the room. One lightning flash after another lights her way. As a member of the Emergency Response teams she has a passkey, just in case she has to cut off someone’s power. She opens the door, looks at the meter for a while. The Authority’s yellow-and-red seals look back at her.

  Her mouth is very dry.

  She could open the meter with the same key, observe the silent gears that haven’t moved since she’d bought the apartment. A couple substitutes placed just so, the gear ratio reversed, and her fortune is made. Aiah can bleed the plasm off into batteries, then sell it.

  But of course she’d get caught. Sooner or later someone would notice that the seals were broken on the gearbox. Sooner or later one of her clients, perhaps even a relative, would turn her in for the reward.

  And that would bring what remained of the dream to an end. The Authority would never employ anyone convicted of stealing plasm. The civil service would close, and she couldn’t imagine anyone else hiring her either. Then it would be back to her old neighborhood, to be surrounded by her family, a new child every year or so, the check from the government every two weeks . . . Her loser heritage fulfilled.

  Maybe it was inevitable. At least then, one way or another, it would be over.

  She closes the little door, go
es back to bed, and tries to summon cunning thoughts.

  None appear.

  ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT!

  METROPOLITAN LODAG III ESCAPES INJURY

  NEW PURGE OF GOVERNMENT!

  DETAILS ON THE WIRE.

  There’s a deep subsonic rumble as the pneuma’s hidden machinery inhales, a sound like the breath of a god, and then something kicks Aiah in the spine and the car is fired along its tube like a message cylinder through the Authority’s mail system.

  Aiah rubs sleep from her eyes. She’s up early in hopes another look through her maps and transparencies might provide an answer.

  She started with the earliest of the transparencies, one that showed a perfect rectangle of new apartment and office buildings going up four hundred years ago. And then it occurred to her to wonder what was on the site before. What was it that could have occupied that perfect six-block rectangle between 1189th and 1193rd Streets?

  An old factory? A government building? Industrial park? Whatever it was, there had to be remnants, old foundations, utility connections, piers, rebar ... a lot of mass for which there was no longer any real record.

  Then she checked her largest-scale map with her dividers, marching them across the jigsawed chromograph sections, and found that the site was exactly 144 radii from Bursary Street, where the flaming woman first appeared. One hundred and forty-four, twelve squared. One of the Great Squares. A flamer’s sourceline, its umbilical cord to its energy source, might have fallen into that ratio naturally. A Grand Square like 81 would have been better, a square of a square, but she couldn’t hope for everything.

  The discovery set a little signal humming through her nerves. Now she’d check the archives and see if she could find out what had been on that site before the housing went up.

  Her ears pop as the pneuma dives under an obstruction, a deep structure or subterranean river. On the front of the car is a video screen, a wide bright oval intended to keep the passengers tranquilized. It’s covered with a slab of bulletproof glass and fixed to the car with heavy stainless steel bolts just in case anyone has a notion to remove it.

  The car’s speakers are wretched and buzz insistently. Aiah can’t hear any of the dialogue, but it doesn’t matter. She knows the story by heart. There’s the winsome blond apprentice with her white even teeth and innocent heart. There’s the old master with snowy eyebrows like pigeon’s wings, his manner gruff but his heart of purest hammered gold. The master answers the apprentice’s every naive question, imparts vaguely optimistic philosophy, explains the ways of geomancy, and offers brusque advice on the winning of the hero, who as the son of the Metropolitan is about a thousand social strata higher than the heroine but who, luckily for the apprentice, is in deep trouble.

  At the story’s climax the apprentice climbs into the hot seat in some Transmission Control office, takes a copper transference grip in each hand, and screams, “No time to explain! Give me full power now!” And the next thing you know the villain is thwarted, the Metropolitan’s ass is saved once again, and the apprentice and the hero are wrapped in a clinch in his rooftop arboretum. Fade to black. The end.

  Aiah’s seen the film a hundred times, and during her adolescence probably read a thousand books with a similar plot. And all she can think when she sees one now is, If only it were that easy.

  If only there were really these kindly old masters to explain everything, to predict the future unerringly, and guide you through life with a few homespun maxims. If only you didn’t have to pay impossible sums for all the plasm consumed during training. If only the heart’s advice were infallible.

  But the system is rigged, and now, with the voices of her Barkazil ancestors chorusing I told you so in her head, she can’t understand how she ever figured it wasn’t. Those who have access, whether to money or plasm, keep it to themselves, and so far as she can tell that’s true everywhere. Maybe the Ascended Ones are different, but they’re outside the Shield. The only way she’ll ever finish her training will be to risk prison by stealing the raw material. The only way she’ll ever find a teacher will be to pay him wads of cash she doesn’t have, or megamehrs of plasma she’d have to steal, or — maybe if she’s lucky — she’ll only have to trade him her body. And the only way she’ll ever meet the son of a Metropolitan will be if he runs over her in his flashy Bolt 79D automobile.

  Maybe she can find the flaming woman’s source. Maybe it’ll get her noticed if she actually does her job well.

  It’s not something anyone seems really to expect of her.

  There’s a blast of air as the pneuma car brakes, then a belly-queasing wrench as it drops out of the system to the designated platform. Humming electromagnets cut velocity further. Bright station lights pour through the windows, gleam from the Pneuma Authority’s blue-tiled walls.

  Time to go to work.

  It’s a four-block walk from the pneuma station to the trackline leading to Rocketman, then another kidney-punching ride to Rocketman Station on a car riding on its metal rims. After a forty-five minute search through the archives, she finds an old piece of paper, one that comes apart along its creases as she unfolds it. It describes an old plastics plant at a site called Terminal, one sold for scrap so that a “mixed neighborhood” could be built on the site.

  Triumph hums in her nerves.

  She may be onto something here.

  GARGELIUS ENCHUK SINGS THE MUSIC OF YOUR SOUL

  Two trackline stops east from Rocketman is Terminal, a station that isn’t, actually, the line’s terminal. Another one of those names come adrift from its original meaning.

  From street level, Terminal is just like her old neighborhood, the leaning old brick buildings, scaffolding, the throb of music and cry of children and smells of cooking.

  But the food is spiced differently, the music bounces to a different beat, and the faces are pale and Jaspeeri and suspicious. There are Jaspeeri Nation stickers in some of the shop windows. A warning trickles up her spine as the import of all this begins to penetrate her consciousness.

  She concludes that her official yellow jumpsuit will protect her. But still she’s glad for the company of Lastene and Grandshuk as she begins her search over the old factory foundations.

  Success, right away. She checks three buildings in a row and finds gimmicked meters in every single one. A plasm diver has been operating here.

  There’s some contraband coming up from below, clear enough. Maybe not the source for the burning woman, but something.

  The third building she tries is an old office structure converted to residence. The building superintendent, a broad-beamed man in green gabardine pants, agrees to let her into the basement — not that he’s got a lot of choice — and one level below the street she’s surprised to find an old blue-tiled stairway leading down. Blue, the color of the Pneuma Authority, not the yellow of the Trackline Authority. An iron-barred door bars the entrance, closed with chain and a fist-sized padlock. A battered tin sign says TERMINAL, with a fistmark pointing down.

  “What’s that?” Aiah asks. She feels so close the plasm might as well be pulsing through her veins. The superintendent plucks at his suspenders.

  “Entrance to an old pneuma station.”

  Her mind swims as she tries to remember whether or not this was on any of her old overlays. “When did they close it off?”

  A shrug. “Long before I ever got here.”

  “Do you have the key?”

  The superintendent only laughs.

  “Do you have any bolt cutters?”

  “No.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to find bolt cutters in this neighborhood,” Lastene says, and the superintendent scowls.

  Grandshuk just walks up to the padlock and gives it a yank. The chain rattles, and the padlock falls open. Lastene barks a surprised laugh.

  Grandshuk unwraps the chain and pushes the barred door open. He looks at the superintendent.

  “Somebody’s been down here,” he says.

  The superintendent l
ooks innocent. “Nobody I know. Maybe one of the tenants. Or their kids.”

  Aiah switches on her headlamp and torch. “Let’s go,” she says.

  Heavy boots echo on the stair as the party descends. Memories rise in Aiah: the Plasm Authority has an apprenticeship program designed to acquaint budding executives with their jurisdiction from ground level on up. After college she spent two years underground, doing the sort of jobs that Lastene and Grandshuk do every day. She’d hated it at the time, but it taught her more about the way plasm is distributed than anything she’d ever learned at the university.

  There are footprints on the soiled tile steps, most of them tiny: children have been down here, and a few adults. On the second landing there’s an old bedroll, empty food tins, used fuel cells for a chemical stove, and an untidy pile of plastic liquor bottles.

  Grandshuk kicks at the bedroll and Aiah’s leaping light catches a mouse as it scurries away.

  “Years old,” he says. There are baby mice, Aiah sees, living in the bedroll. Her nerves wail as Grandshuk methodically crushes them all beneath his boot.

  At the next landing water erosion has caused the tile wall to collapse. Aiah and Grandshuk peer into the little cavern revealed, see chunks of old concrete, brick, a leaking water main. No real plasm source.

  Any footprints are now washed away by a water cascade that pours merrily down the stairs. Aiah walks carefully on the slippery tiles, keeps one gloved hand on the corroded rail. Something swims away as they approach a lake at the bottom of the stairs. The water level goes over Aiah’s ankles. It’s cold and she begins to shiver as damp soaks through her socks.

  A level corridor sloshes along for about half a pitch, then divides, UPPER PLATFORM, one sign says. The sign for the other is missing. The water all pours off that way, so its level has to be lower. Aiah looks at Grandshuk. His face is yellow in the light of her lamp.

  “Procedure says we don’t split up,” she says.