Metropolitan Read online

  “Still got business in my basement, lady?”

  “Yes.” She begins to shoulder her way through the group of men. Powerful shoulders and pendulous guts loom at her like sagging buildings. She tries not to flinch at the powerful smell of beer.

  “You find anything down there?” the super asks. Aiah stops, looks at him.

  “Why? You lose something?”

  A couple of the men snicker into their beer. The superintendent scowls.

  “I’m just looking after my building,” he said. “I don’t like having people wandering around.”

  Aiah shoulders past him, steps into the building foyer, turns to face the superintendent. She knows she doesn’t dare let him gain the upper hand, that she needs to put him in his place now. “You never stopped anyone wandering around before,” Aiah says. “There were people living down there.”

  The man shrugs. His friends watch in silence, their amusement gone, their eyes shifting from Aiah to the superintendent and back, charting the little shifts in power.

  “You weren’t controlling access,” Aiah says, “and you’ve got gimmicked meters in your building. Maybe you know where there’s a plasm source down below. Do you?”

  The superintendent looked into the street. “Those meters could’ve been cracked years ago, before I ever got this job. There hasn’t been an inspection in all the years I’ve been here.”

  Aiah’s heart is racing. Maybe she should quit now, before she provokes him into doing something she won’t like, like calling her superiors to complain.

  But something — instinct, maybe, or the euphoria of plasm — urges her to press on.

  “The building owners are going to get fined no matter when the meters were rigged,” she says. “They won’t be happy with you. And if you want me out of your basement, you can tell me where the extra plasm was coming from.”

  The superintendent stares fixedly at the street. “Don’t know nothing.”

  Aiah shrugs. “I get paid no matter what,” she says, and heads down to the pneuma.

  Now, she wonders, was that careful?

  Not particularly, but it was necessary.

  Down below, beneath the iron and brick and concrete, Aiah can hear the plasm calling, a blaze of fire in the cold wet darkness.

  *

  A charge of plasm carries Aiah, rung by rusted rung, up the old air shaft. Subterranean rain pours off the corrugated channels of her hardhat. She’s decided to use an exit that won’t compel her to carry charged plasm batteries past a collection of resentful drunks.

  Aiah flexes her legs and raises a heavy iron grate she’d had Grandshuk loosen two days before. She unclips her safety line and emerges into the weak yellow light of a utility tunnel, a concrete-walled oval, below street level, lined with color-coded electricity, steam and communications pipes. A row of low-intensity bulbs, each glowing dimly in its metal cage, illuminates her crouching walk as she moves in what she calculates is the direction of the trackline station.

  She hears street noises above, finds steps molded into the curved concrete wall. She plants the toes of her boots into the concave steps and hoists herself up, then cautiously nudges the manhole cover over her head. She doesn’t want to drop a truck on herself, but she can’t hear any traffic noises or vibration, and she suspects the street is for pedestrians only.

  Aiah pushes up with both hands, carefully shoves the manhole cover out of its inset steel socket. Peering out of the oval crack, she sees furry socks on feet jammed into old carpet slippers. She pushes the cover a little more, sees an elderly male face peering down at her through thick bifocal lenses.

  “You like some help, lady?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  He’s a retiree earning a little money by renting a piece of concrete in front of a crumbling, scaffold-draped brown-stone. His wares are displayed on an old gray metal door propped up on concrete blocks — a sad collection, timeworn kitchen utensils, battered children’s toys, a few yellowed books held together by tape.

  Plasm seems to flush Aiah’s muscles as she drops the manhole back into its socket.

  “You’re pretty strong,” the old man says, and sits in his folding chair. “Wanna buy something?” he says hopefully.

  Aiah scans the rubbish on the old steel door, sees a few cheap metal lucky charms on metal necklaces. One is in the shape of the Trigram, a useful tool transformed into worthless popular magic. “I’ll take that,” she says. The old man takes her money and she puts the charm around her neck, tucking it into the high collar of the jumpsuit. The symbol of power sits cool on her breastbone.

  Aiah asks direction to the trackline station. “Just around the corner,” the old man says, and Aiah thanks the man again and heads for the station. Along the way she scents cooking smells and stops at another scaffold-stall. There’s a pink-cheeked maternal woman behind the counter who smiles at her and looks apologetic.

  “Oh, sorry,” she says. “We sold out of the stew, and the new batch isn’t ready yet, and the pigeon’s been on the fire too long and has gone all dry — I’d hate to sell it to you.”

  “No problem. Thanks anyway.”

  Aiah sees another stall across the street and buys a bowl of soup with pasta and vegetables fresh from someone’s roof garden. It has too much comino, like most Jaspeeri food, but otherwise its warmth and its taste is gratifying to someone who’s just hoisted herself up from the underground with three heavy plasm batteries in her sack.

  As Aiah stands by the stall and eats her soup she sees the pink-cheeked woman sell stew and skewered pigeon to three different passers-by.

  Aiah feels her cheeks burn.

  She isn’t used to being shafted by people who smile so helpfully.

  She returns the empty soup bowl to the vendor and stalks toward the trackline station. A group of young Jaspeeri men stand on a streetcorner and watch her in sullen silence. Jaspeeri Nation territory, she thinks. Barkazils not served.

  At least, Aiah figures, now she knows the neighborhood, and her place in it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Two days later it’s Senko’s Day. Aiah has the day off, since Mengene’s moved the plasm search to a lower priority. Aiah dresses in blacklight colors, fluorescent red and green and gold, and carefully arranges her hair in the ideal long ringlets that are too much of a bother the rest of the time. She wears the bracelet with the little etched ivory disk that Gil gave her, and the metal lucky charm under her blouse. Then she hoists her tote on her shoulder and heads for the trackline station. If she can mix her holiday with business, so much the better.

  Aiah drags her heavy tote up from the underground and discovers the streets already full. The weather is fine, with only a few light clouds beneath the Shield. Women in bright, flowing gowns pose artfully on balconies. Bellowing men in tufted headgear, bare chests striped with paint, swagger down the street carrying containers of beer and wine. Apartment dwellers have turned their sound systems onto windows and balconies, and the amped sound ricochets along brick and concrete, rattles windows, jumps inside the skins of the revelers. Bass rhythms rock the pavement beneath Aiah’s feet. Aiah finds a grin breaking out on her face, and her steps are lighter despite the tote’s strap digging into her shoulder.

  The street is closed to traffic and already strewn with litter. Aiah bobs a zigzag course through people dancing on the pavement, then past a group of stiltwalkers, all dressed as fabulous animals with horns and sweeping tails made of soft plastic foam.

  A series of booms overhead, accompanied by dazzling flashes, heralds an advertisement for Lord of the New City. Kherzaki’s huge, determined face scowls down out the sky.

  Aiah’s cousin Elda has an apartment overlooking the parade route, one where the inevitable scaffolding has been turned into regular balconies with scalloped wrought-iron rails — a nice place, because her husband Nikov was a member of the Operation who got assassinated, and the Operation has an excellent insurance plan that’s been taking care of Elda and her kids ever since.
r />   Aiah and many of the family wrote off Elda when she married. After what had happened to Henley, Aiah couldn’t believe Elda could marry someone like Nikov. But now that Nikov’s ashes are safe in their little cement cubicle far underground, certain elements of the past can be buried with him. If Henley could forgive, Aiah supposed that she could as well.

  Aiah can hear the high pitch of conversation and the throb of music as soon as she steps off the elevator. She enters through Elda’s open door and is swept up in a whirlwind of embraces. Small children clasp her knees. She greets them all and manages to drop the heavy tote behind the sofa where it won’t attract attention.

  And then she encounters Gurrah, her mother, the only person who greets her with a frown. “You didn’t come see me the other day,” Gurrah says in her thick-tongued Barkazil accent; and then she makes a show of reluctantly embracing her daughter.

  “Mother,” Aiah says, “I was working. I wasn’t up here for a social call.”

  Gurrah sniffs. “Landro told me what you were working at. Looking for ways to put your people in prison.”

  “I was looking for ways to keep someone from blowing up Bursary Street again.”

  “Were you there when it happened?” asks her sister Henley, and Aiah gratefully turns to her. Henley is as tall as Aiah, a year older, and carries herself with an uncommon grace of movement that Aiah has always envied. Henley is pregnant again, Aiah knows. At least, she thinks, Henley’s husband is a reliable sort.

  “Yes,” Aiah says, “the flamer blew out the window of the room I was in.”

  Henley gasps, puts a hand to her throat. The hand is swollen and deformed with arthritis.

  The keen edge of a useless anger touches Aiah’s throat at the sight. “I had my hair pinned up,” she says, “and it burned the back of my neck. Got a few glass cuts, too.”

  She lifts her hair to demonstrate. Suddenly Gurrah is a model of concern.

  “You didn’t tell me,” she complains, and insists on Aiah bending over so that the neck can be examined. The last thing Aiah sees, before she bends over, is the amusement in Henley’s eyes.

  Aiah can’t remember ever taking Gurrah seriously. Aiah is the fifth of seven children, and followed the older sibs in treating her mother lightly. Gurrah is an expert on dramatics, alternately devastated or exalted according to circumstance; but none of the drama ever seems to be about anything in particular, though it revolves round the necessity of Gurrah being the center of attention at all times.

  Gurrah’s fingers pinch vertebrae. “You need to eat more,” she says. “You’re all bones.”

  “I eat plenty.” Aiah straightens and tosses back her hair.

  “Aiah!” It’s one of her cousins, age six or so, waving from the scaffolding overlooking the street. “Come see! It’s the Lynxoid Brothers!”

  Aiah gratefully steps out onto the scaffolding and watches the orange-skinned Lynxoids dance along the street below, passing out packets of candy to the children. Plasm displays sweep the sky overhead, hyping liquor, tobacco, entertainment. A leaf drops onto her cousin’s hair, and Aiah brushes it off. The roof of this building is covered with mulberry trees because the landlord raises silkworms.

  The first parade goes by, the Warriors, ranks of marchers in paint and sequins and nodding foam plastic plumes, some in marching bands, others carrying toy weapons made from the iron that, in the Barkazil tradition, Karlo gave to Senko in order to defeat the Lord of the Trees.

  Aiah leans on the metal rail and scans her relatives discreetly as they watch the Warriors below. Some of them would know of a place to sell her plasm — the question is who, and how discreetly? She likes Elda — now that she’s a widow, anyway — but any contacts she’d have would be in the Operation, and that’s unacceptable. Aside from family history, if they found out about her source, they’d own her.

  Landro? He had the contacts once, but so far as she knows he’s been on the safe side of the law since his term in Chonmas. Any of his knowledge might be years out of date.

  Her brother Stonn? He’s been in and out of jail all his life and might know people, but he’s a minor criminal at best and she has no regard for his intelligence or discretion.

  The Warriors Parade passes and the people below surge into the street. The family drifts off the balcony in search of refreshments. Aiah takes a glass of beer, drifts and chats and watches the others carefully.

  Aiah’s grandmother enters, with Aiah’s cousins Esmon and Spano and a woman Aiah doesn’t know. Esmon looks fabulous, with billowy, immaculate lace and a coat glittering with green and gold sequins. His buttons are expensive, polished ivory.

  “You should be in the Warriors Parade,” Aiah says as she kisses his cheek.

  “After the new year I’m joining the Griffins,” he says. He introduces Aiah to the stranger, a small, sturdy woman in a red turban decorated with gemstones in expensive settings. Aiah recognizes the Trigram, the Mirror Twins, and other geomantic foci. She’s Esmon’s girlfriend, and her name is Khorsa.

  It’s pretty clear, Aiah figures, who’s dressing Esmon these days.

  She clasps Khorsa’s many-ringed hand and gazes down into lively, interested eyes rimmed dramatically with kohl. The eyes narrow a bit at Aiah’s touch.

  “You’ve been somewhere interesting, ne?” she says. Aiah prefers not to pursue this. She moves toward her grandmother and gives the old lady a hug.

  “Would you like a seat out on the scaffold, Nana?” she asks. “I’ll get you one.”

  “I’d rather have a glass of wine.”

  Aiah gets her grandmother Galaiah a large tumbler of red and a folding chair overlooking the street. The old woman takes a drink of wine and gazes fiercely out over the revelers. A couple of great-grandchildren venture onto her lap and snatch at her cheap holiday beads. As she dangles the beads in front of them, Galaiah looks at Aiah and cocks an eyebrow.

  “You have that passu of yours with you?”

  “He’s still in Gerad.”

  Galaiah sniffs. “At least he works.”

  Aiah’s hand strays to the ivory disk on her bracelet. “He works hard, Nana.”

  Galaiah shakes her head. “Pushing paper isn’t work.”

  Nor is going out and getting drunk with Geradi executives, Aiah thinks, though the job seemed to require that as much as anything else.

  “Esmon seems to be doing well,” Aiah says.

  “It’s his woman,” dismissively. “She’s a witch and makes good money.”

  “Does she work for the Operation?” A lot of witches do.

  “She’s on her own. Works with her sister, some kind of priestess.” Galaiah takes another drink and deftly prevents a descendant from toppling off her lap. “If she was working for the Operation, she wouldn't be able to support Esmon like that, eh?”

  “I suppose not.”

  Galaiah grins with coffee-stained false teeth. “Esmon better not step out on her, I’ll tell you that. Witches have ways, ne?”

  Aiah hesitates, casts a glance inward, “Is she reliable?”

  Galaiah gives Aiah a sharp look, one the children on her lap promptly imitate.

  “Why? You need a love conjuring to bring your longnose home?”

  “Nothing like that. But everyone needs—” Aiah hesitates again. “Needs something from time to time. And I’d rather get it from someone who isn’t a pascol.” Which is a Barkazil term for a confidence player or someone who makes her living by her wits. The word is usually meant to be admiring, and is etymologically related to passu, the person from whom the pascol gains her living.

  Galaiah looks at Aiah as if she were a simpleton. “Khorsa’s a witch. She runs a place called the Wisdom Fortune Temple, takes money from unhappy and desperate people and promises them miracles. How much more pascol can you get?”

  Aiah nods. During the course of Aiah’s girlhood her mother must have belonged to half a dozen tabernacles, all of them more or less the same. Somewhere along the way Aiah figured out why Gurrah was here,
Gurrah and most of the others. They were people who were failures or bewildered or maybe just unhappy, and they didn’t understand life all that well, or reality; and they needed to feel magical, special somehow, because if they weren’t magical they weren’t anything. And being Barkazil made it worse, because Karlo’s children were supposed to be magical, supposed to be better than everyone else. The Cunning People. And if you were supposed to be cunning and weren’t, and brilliant and weren’t, and magical and weren’t, where did you go?

  The Wisdom Fortune Temple. Or something just like it.

  Aiah looks down at the street. How much more pascol can you get? Galaiah is, as usual, to the point.

  Galaiah is a survivor. When the old Metropolitan Fasta died and Barkazi went smash, Galaiah brought her children out of the wreckage and to Jaspeer while her husband was fighting street by street as a member of the Holy League of Karlo. While her husband spent six years in a Fastani prison; Galaiah brought up her children alone, in a strange metropolis. And when Aiah’s grandfather had finally been released on the collapse of the Fastani and the occupation of Barkazi by the Regional Federation, she nursed him painstakingly back to health, only to have him drop dead of influenza a few years later.

  Elda, indoors, sets down a tray of pastry, and Galaiah’s grandchildren begin to squirm. Galaiah lets them down and they dash for the sweets. Galaiah takes a long drink of wine and looks up at Aiah.

  “You in some kind of trouble?” she asks.

  Aiah blinks. “No,” she lies.

  “Those longnoses treating you all right at the Authority?”

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  Aiah is surprised. “No,” she says. “ I haven’t even . . . it’s been months, Nana.”

  “Good. Plenty of time for babies later, when you’ve got a man from your own people.”

  Aiah smiles. “Yes,” she says, “of course.” Somehow even Galaiah’s bigotry seems so much more acceptable than that of other people, possibly because she never pretends to be anything other than bigoted.