Metropolitan Read online

“That’s crap,” Grandshuk says. “We know people have been down here. Nothing’s going to cave in.”

  Aiah hesitates.

  “I can’t feel my feet any more,” Lastene says. “Let’s do whatever’s quickest.”

  Aiah shines her light down the river. It’s the most dangerous way: if they’re to split, two people should take that route, and one the other.

  She’s the leader, she thinks, the downward path should be hers.

  On the other hand, she’d really like to wring out her socks.

  “You two go down that way,” she says. “If it’s more than a hundred paces, come back and wait for me here. I’ll check the upper platform by myself.” They don’t seem to resent her giving herself the driest job. Grandshuk and Lastene begin wading down the corridor. Aiah watches them descend, silhouetted against their own lights, then takes the other corridor.

  Within ten paces she’s on the old platform. Her bootfalls echo in the dark. Wet squelches beneath her soles.

  It’s a pneuma, all right, the oval tunnel makes that clear enough, and there are runners instead of tracks at the bottom of the pit.

  The ceiling is supported by a row of iron stanchions, fluted, each with clawed feet bolted to the concrete platform through a frayed old pad of asbestos insulation. Light supports hang from the ceiling, the light fixtures themselves long since scavenged away. Chunks of wall are missing where fixtures have been torn out.

  Aiah wets a finger, holds it up. No obvious air currents: the pneuma line is probably sealed off farther down the track. She slowly walks the length of the platform, examining everything carefully in the light of her torch.

  She stops, redirects the light. Her heart lurches.

  There’s a streak of reddish dust floating down the length of one of the station’s support stanchions. She looks closer, sees that powdery rusted iron seems to have migrated to the surface of the stanchion, pooled around the clawed feet, overrunning the asbestos pad and pointing straight across the platform.

  Electrolytic deposition. Sometimes this happens if there’s an electric current in an atmosphere heavy with electrolytes, but that water spilling down the stair was fresh, not salt. Hairs rise on the back of Aiah’s neck.

  Connections. What is that stanchion trying to connect itself to?

  She flicks the light from the stanchion across the platform, sees a doorway. The door has long been removed, and there’s a little gnomon in the doorframe where a lock was once placed. Her heart is in her throat. She walks to the doorway, flashes her light in.

  It was a public toilet. The fixtures and even the pipe have been removed, leaving gaping holes in the walls and floor. There’s been a cave-in — an old L-shaped iron brace has fallen through the roof, probably in an earthquake, and now lies cantwise along the length of the room.

  Aiah approaches hesitantly, pans her light along the room.

  Empty eye-sockets stare back at her. Aiah’s throat clamps shut in terror and suddenly she can’t breathe. Something — pulse probably — crashes in her ears. The room swims in front of her. She leans against the doorway for support.

  The burning woman. She remembers the terror-filled face, humanity consumed in flames. The plasm exploded through the woman’s mind, and though it soon had a mind of its own it retained the diver’s pattern.

  She takes a long series of deep breaths and steps forward, tottering on her heavy boots. She tries to focus her mind on theory, on a scientific theory of what’s happened here. Earthquake drops brace, disrupting the plasm well. The quake probably caused enough damage to the mains and meters above so that a small amount of missing plasm wasn’t detected.

  The plasm had been building for years, most likely, till one lone plasm diver found it and triggered a blowhole that exploded through her body and brain and ran amuck in the world outside.

  As she approaches the beam Aiah tries to keep her eyes away from the corpse, from what the plasm has done to it. There’s probably a small amount of plasm collected here since the catastrophe, most likely a detectable amount. She unhooks the portable meter from her belt, connects an alligator clip to the brace, focuses her helmet light on the dial, and watches wide-eyed as the needle almost leaps off the logarithmic scale.

  For a moment she’s aware of nothing but the pounding of her own pulse. The plasm well is brimming over and immeasurably powerful, fully capable of burning every nerve in her body if she’s careless.

  It’s not a one-time thing. She’s found a glory hole, a lost well worth millions. That old plastics factory, all the iron and steel in its foundation, and who knows what that’s connected to besides the pneuma station.

  With trembling hands she pulls the alligator clip off the brace, then gropes her way back to the door, trying to keep her eyes off the body. Once outside on the platform, she leans her back against one of the torn walls and tries to collect her breath, her thoughts.

  The burning woman stalks through her mind. Her shrieks echo in Aiah’s ears. Some time later she hears the clump of boots, sees lights dancing in the entrance tunnel. She begins walking toward her team. A torch dazzles her, and she raises a hand to block the light.

  “Anything?” Grandshuk's voice booms loud in the empty space.

  Aiah takes a deep breath.

  “Nothing,” she says, “I found nothing.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The lower platform, Grandshuk says, is the final station of the old eastward-bound pneuma line, hence the name Terminal. The leaking water pours across the platform into the pits where the old passenger elevators once were — apparently the old drain system works perfectly well, because the lake isn’t very deep.

  Grandshuk wants to go down the tunnels, lots of old metal and brick down there, but Aiah wants to get her team off the platform as soon as possible. There are big empty spaces behind the station, where complicated machinery, salvaged long ago, once turned the pneuma cars around and shot them to the upper platform. And there have to be air shafts that fed the compressors, and other stairways to bring the passengers down.

  “If the diver found a source, she’d need to get it to the surface,” Aiah says. “If we can find a connection in one of those shafts, we can track it back to the source, ne?”

  She takes the other stairways up, finds they’ve been cut off by new construction. The air shafts are huge, empty, drafty things, brick planted with old iron rungs leading to the surface. The rungs are wet with leakage or condensation and covered with rough flakes of rust. Aiah insists on textbook safety procedures, the team members clipping and unclipping safety lines as they clamber up and down. Drizzle mists down on her hardhat as she climbs. Her thighs ache with the effort.

  All the deliberate work takes time, and Aiah can use time to map the place thoroughly in her mind, to work out all the possible access routes to the station. She doesn’t want to keep walking down that waterfall again and again.

  In the darkness, it’s very easy to close her eyes and see the burning woman pulsing on the insides of her lids.

  The shift passes, then a few hours of the next shift. Finally the team drags itself back up the waterfall to the basement of the apartment building. The superintendent has long since vanished.

  “I want to get in a couple hours’ research first thing tomorrow on how far those tunnels extend,” Aiah says. “We don’t want to walk for ten radii tomorrow.”

  “We clock on at 08.00,” Grandshuk says.

  “Fine. Clock on by all means. But you don’t have to meet me here till 10:00.”

  A flash of paranoia makes her look at Grandshuk carefully, just to see if there’s a look of suspicion in his eyes, but all she can see is weariness.

  Outside there’s a solid wall of black cloud under the Shield. Chill rain pours down in solid sheets. The streets are full to the gutters and black, with the emergency lighting on. But it’s no more wet under the street scaffolding than it was in Terminal Station, so Aiah stays fairly comfortable on a walk to the nearest hardware store. She gets a strange look
from the man who sells her a big padlock, then notices the Jaspeeri Nation sticker only on her way out.

  She returns to the Terminal Station entrance and puts the bright new padlock on the chain, then puts the key in her pocket.

  A glory hole, Aiah thinks. A river of power, vast and strong and limitless. And she’s the only one who knows about it.

  She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with it yet, but she’s thinking hard. She’s one of the Cunning People, after all.

  *

  Aiah leans against the wall of the Loeno elevator. Streaks of dirt run down her face and jumpsuit. Neighbors frown at her politely: she’s leaving dirty smudges on the elevator mirror glass. When the door opens she wearily shoulders her tote bag and marches out.

  It’s well past the start of third shift. She figures she’ll get about five hours’ sleep.

  After she left Terminal she went back to Rocketman to do the research she’d promised to do the next day. She finds documentation that relates to the transparencies that should have been in the map file, but which disappeared or decayed or got misfiled. The old pneuma had been constructed for the purpose of bringing workers to the plastics factory from their company housing forty radii away. When the factory closed the whole pneuma had been decommissioned, its equipment salvaged but the tunnels left in place. New construction probably cut the tubes somewhere, but Aiah doesn’t bother to research the location; she figures that tomorrow she’ll lead Grandshuk and Lastene as far downtube as the next station, then switch to the other tunnel and return. A futile mission, but at least it has the virtue of keeping her team busy and away from the transphysical power well humming away on the upper platform.

  Her feet ache at the thought of the long walk.

  As she enters the apartment she sees the yellow bulb glowing on her communications array. Aiah drops the tote bag with a thud and walks to where the array is inset into the wall. She has a hard time focusing her eyes on the dial, which shows three messages. She presses a button and hears a whine as the etching belt begins to roll and then a grinding noise as the play head moves to the first position. She’s got to lubricate that play head soon.

  One message is from Telia, informing her that there’s another meeting at end of work shift tomorrow. The second is from her mother and complains that Aiah was in Old Shorings and hasn’t paid a visit. The message, which promises to be fairly long, as usual cuts off in mid-word, either because her mother’s wall unit is faulty or because she forgot to keep her thumb on the transmit key.

  The third is from Gil. When she hears his voice Aiah closes her eyes and leans her head against the grain of the polymer paneling and lets her breath slip past her lips, just lets the weariness and sorrow flow.

  He’s sorry she’s not home, he says. He’d like to hear her voice. He misses her. The acquisition is looking more complicated every day but he’s working double shifts and he hopes to be back soon. He had this unexpected expense — to do with his apartment lease, something called “bed money” — and the company should reimburse him eventually; but this month’s cashgram is going to be a little short.

  He wishes she were home. He loves her. Maybe she can call him early tomorrow, an hour or so before first shift. Maybe in a month or so he can get some time off and come home for a few days. Goodbye.

  Aiah opens her eyes, lets the room come back into fragile focus. A plasm ball with the logo for Gulman Shoes rotates past her window. She looks down at her feet, sees her bulky tote bag, and she remembers what she’s carrying in it.

  She picks up the tote, carries it to the kitchen table, opens it. Its main contents are three plasm batteries, layers of copper and brass and ceramic coated in white insulating plastic. Heavy things, miniaturized versions of the giant capacitors in the basement of Rocketman Substation.

  Aiah plans to bleed off plasma from the glory hole, sell it somewhere — she doesn’t quite know where just yet, but Old Shorings is never far from her thoughts. Then, after she’s raised a little money, she’ll have to think of something else, because she can’t keep shuttling batteries around forever.

  She adds to the tote a blanket, a file, some light machine oil, some cleaning rags — then, after some thought, one of her old college textbooks on plasm use. She takes a shower, thinks about drying her hair, decides not to. Shieldlight is breaking through the rainclouds overhead, so she unfolds the brushed aluminum crank from the wall, cranks the window polarizer a few times, darkens the room. She falls into bed and reaches for her alarm clock so she can set it a little early and call Gil, and then her hand freezes in mid-air.

  What, she wonders, will she tell him? That she’s found a plasm source worth millions, that she’s going to tap it slowly and bleed it off, that with luck she can make a fortune but she’ll most likely end up in prison? She can also tell him the damn plasm source is so powerful it may just blow on its own, cause another catastrophe for which she’ll be responsible.

  She can’t even imagine his reaction. Whatever it would be, she knows, it would be utterly reasonable. He would break the situation down, make a list of logical steps. Is it too late to turn back? he’d wonder. Probably he’d want her to find a lawyer, follow his advice. Or maybe just find a psychiatrist, who knew?

  Aiah picks up the alarm clock, sets the wake-up time fifteen minutes early. She’ll tell him she’s working on proper visualization of her successful thoughts.

  *

  Aiah dreams of the burning woman, of her terrifying progress down Bursary Street, her passage leaving a river of fire. She hears the screams of the woman’s victims, cries echoed by the woman’s own wailing cry. And then the burning woman turns onto the Avenue of the Exchange, and Aiah relives the moment when she sees her standing there, flame pouring from her fingertips, the central figure mirrored and re-mirrored by the glass walls on either side of her, three views of the burning face, the hollow eyes, the lips parted in a scream that never ends . . .

  The face is Aiah’s own.

  The woman’s scream rises from Aiah’s throat as she wakes.

  The room is silent around her. The building, its vast webbed structure built for the generation and containment of plasm, broods silently, gathering power.

  The three batteries sit waiting on the table, awaiting their fate.

  *

  The connection to Gerad is bad, full of other voices, half-heard conversations that act as a chorus to Aiah’s words. But her heart aches even at a distorted version of Gil’s voice, a voice fogged with sleep and weariness, and Aiah doesn’t dare look up at the kitchen table with its tote and plasm batteries, reminders of what she’s planning.

  “I’m sorry I missed you,” Aiah says. “I was working.” She tells him about the plasm blow out, the fact she’s working shifts-and-a-half underground.

  “Did you catch the part of my message about the apartment lease? The bed money thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t send you as much this month. I hope that’s all right.”

  She can feel the anger entering her voice and can’t quite hide it. “It’s fine with me, Gil. But the people we owe money to might think otherwise.”

  “Who do we owe money to?”

  She can’t believe he has to ask. She gives him the short list, then hears a brief silence broken only by a stray voice, one from another conversation, saying What in the prophet’s name?

  “There’s got to be something wrong,” Gil says finally.

  “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.