Metropolitan (2 page)

Sometimes advertisers have a sense of humor.

“Oeneme thinks it has to do with the new construction of Old Parade,” Mengene says. He touches his little blond mustache. “The Unity Hospital is being demolished, there’s an office building going up one and a half radii away, and there’s an excavation for a new trackline station right in the middle of the street. The configuration is a little irregular—”

“Irregular? There’s a map, isn’t there?” Denselle booms. He’s a fat man who loves his own voice. Thick blooms of lace spill from his jacket cuffs.

“Not yet.”

“Why the hell not?”

Mengene sighs. “Because Oeneme’s office didn’t send one.”

“Couldn’t you get one yourself?”

Mengene ignores him and begins giving out assignments, work team numbers. Aiah begins to realize that her own name hasn’t been mentioned. She holds up a hand, is ignored, finally raises her voice.
“Mr. Mengene!”

There is a moment of silence.

“I haven’t been given a job,:” Aiah says.

Mengene looks at her. “I know,” he says.

“Then why am I here?”

Mengene is annoyed. “I was getting to you. You’ve got a special assignment.”

Her heart leaps, but she sees daggers in others’ eyes. What right has
she
to a special assignment?

Mengene can see the daggers as well as anyone else, “It’s Rohder’s idea,” he says, and the others instantly lose interest. Aiah’s hope fades. Rohder is a cobwebbed relic of the old Research Division, far gone in abstruse speculation and philosophy, but with too much seniority to fire.

The others receive their briefings. The boardroom chairs are big, heavily padded, with fan-shaped backs adorned with a huge gold chrysanthemum. They make it far too easy to feel drowsy. Aiah closes her eyes, finds herself thinking of Gil, of his short-fingered, powerful hands, the way they touch her.

Mengene finishes. Aiah waits for the others to file out and for Mengene to light another cigaret. Mengene sits, blows smoke, gestures for her to join him at the head of the table. She gets out of her chair, walks up the room. Sees her reflection in the wall’s gold-plated crysanthemums, automatically pats her hair.

“It was Rohder who snuffed the flamer,” Mengene says. “He was inside Transmission Control when it happened, saw the thing coming on an exterior monitor and dropped his butt in the hot seat. He’ll get commended, but handling that much plasm at his age put him in the hospital.” He shakes a cigaret partway out of his pack, offers it to her. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.” She sits down next to him. Behind him a peregrine dives past, squab in its sights. If she’d blinked she would have missed it.

“Rohder called me an hour ago from the hospital. He says that when he dropped the shoe on our flamer, he got an impression of her sourceline. He says he got a fairly clear impression the transmission was coming from the east.”

“Old Parade is not east,” Aiah says.

“
The sourceline dropped below the horizon somewhere this side of Grand City. He says he
saw
it.’

“From inside Transmission Control?”

Mengene looks uncomfortable. “That’s what he says.”

“On an exterior monitor?”

Mengene gazes fixedly at the tip of his cigaret. “In his mind’s eye.”

Futility wails in Aiah’s nerves. She’s going to spend days underground searching for an old man’s hallucination.

“Rohder’s good, you know,” Mengene says. “He’s solid, a real wizard. I worked with him, back when he set up Research. Bailed out before the whole department crashed. But the crash wasn’t Rohder’s fault—too much interference from above. You can’t come up with a new field-tested theory of plasm use in a few months.”

“If this is so solid,” Aiah says, “why are you sending only me on it?”

“Because I don’t work for Rohder, I work for Oeneme, and Oeneme thinks the problem’s on Old Parade.” Mengene drives his cigaret like a nail into the titanium ashtray. It spins lazily from the momentum. Aiah wonders if Mengene’s just set up Oeneme to take a fall, perhaps on behalf of the Intendant. And whose fault will it be if Mengene’s little plot doesn’t work?

The scheming Barkazil, of course. Everyone knows they’re always looking for advantage, scheming, setting up a chonah or two. Aiah knows the situation well enough to know that she has no allies.

“The credit will be entirely yours,” Mengene says.

Escaping the credit is clearly something she needs to think about.

Mengene swabs away cigaret ash with his lace cuff. “I’ve drawn you a two-man support team,” Mengene says. “They’ll be available right after midbreak. I know you’re inexperienced with source-finding, but they might be able to guide you through—”

“I’ll want an overflight with transparencies, densities, and patterns.”

“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 the 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.

3 DRUG DEALERS TO HANG

21:00 VIDEO SEVEN