Metropolitan (20 page)

Nothing. At least the structure isn’t hostile to her.

Aiah doesn’t know the type of hard alloy used here, and doesn’t know enough chemical geomaturgy to find out, but she reasons that at the very least she can melt the stuff, so she calls for an increase in plasm flow along her sourceline from Mage Towers, and directs the power as heat energy along the arms of her anima.

For the longest time nothing happens. But the metal finally blackens, then begins to burn with a dull red heat, and then at last glows white. Little bits of flame lick up. Drops of liquefied alloy spill from the exposed rebar. Aiah pulls the liquefied metal upwards with a tug of her mind, pulls it out of the concrete, and sees it settle like bright quicksilver in low places in the fractured concrete. She wants to get rid of it altogether, so she lofts it up, a reverse waterfall of bright liquid metal, out the lip of the pit and along the floor of the room. There it can cool and harden for all she cares. She visualizes herself more arms, each one touching a piece of exposed rebar, and then calls for more power. The concrete cracks with sharp popping sounds as the metal within expands. She extracts more and more of the alloy, then reaches downward with her arms, into the concrete itself, and gathers more metal into her incorporeal fingers. Her awareness reaches out into the structure and she can see the whole alloy web, feel the weight of the concrete, sense, below this layer, the huge beams that support its weight.

Aiah digs into the structure like a burrowing animal, ripping up concrete with her claws, throwing it back into the room behind her while she fountains molten alloy upward. Her awareness effortlessly encompasses the workers who have seen, or probably heard, the activity and are watching with interest while keeping a wary distance. Aiah punches through the concrete layer into the soft layer below, then one of her plasm-fingers touches a support beam.

Aiah feels herself light up like a neon display. The liquefied metal shoots white-hot through her veins. The support beam is a part of what they’re looking for, the glory hole, and the huge sleepy well of power leaps instantly to life, the power awesome and inexorable, like a reservoir of energy suddenly burst into flood.

Aiah laughs, and it seems as if all Jaspeer trembles to the sound. Aiah draws her fingers upward, drawing the power up after her, concrete shattering at the force of her power, whirling out of the pit, the remaining rebar twisting at her force, snapping like licorice.

The pit is clear, and the workers can set up their tap now. Her anima hovers over the hole, in a billowing cloud of concrete dust, and she feels herself inflate with power, become a giant with a heart of blazing fire. It occurs to her that she ought to tell the workers that the beam below is part of the plasm well, and that they shouldn’t touch it, but she knows they can’t see her anima, and she doesn’t know how to communicate to them.

She creates a wind to blow the dust away, and tries to fashion a body for herself out of her thoughts; imagine it, the lines of it, the skin and sinew and structure, a heart that pumps glowing plasm through its veins. Aiah wills the plasm-skin to fluoresce, become visible to the workers. She sees them react, throwing up hands to shield their eyes from the light — she can see her red-gold radiance reflecting from the pillars, glowing in the clouds of dust that she’s pushed out to the limits of the room. She tries to give herself a mouth, a tongue, a breath, a voice that she can speak with.

“The iron beam at the bottom of the pit is live,” she says. “You must insulate yourself from it. Nod if you understand me.”

Some of the stunned figures clap hands over their ears, but they all nod. Aiah laughs at her triumph, at the energy that floods her, leaps at the very touch of her will. More hands clap over ears.

Her task is done, but Aiah finds herself reluctant to leave. The energy that floods her mind is exhilarating, a liberation greater than anything she’s known. Nothing seems beyond her capabilities. She considers going for a stroll in her current anima — flying into the sky, righting a few conspicuous wrongs, inscribing a poem across the sky ... something dazzling.

But no. The workers need to get into the pit, and it would be dangerous to have a live sourceline, charged with plasm, running out of the pit to Aiah’s anima. Aiah decides to compel her second sourceline to shrivel, to close off the tap of power, but a few reluctant seconds pass before she can will it to happen.

The radiance reflecting off the brick pillars fades to a dull orange. Even though her original sourceline to Mage Towers is still alive, Aiah feels diminished. To avoid disorientation she prepares herself mentally to return to Mage Towers, then slowly turns the other tap, the Mage Towers sourceline, and allows her anima to shrivel, her plasm-senses, so brilliant and alive, to fade away, to be replaced by the diminished reality and shrunken perceptions of a young woman sitting in someone else’s apartment many radii away.

CHAPTER 13

LOTTERY SCANDAL ALLEGED!

DETAILS ON THE WIRE!

Work has ended for the day. Aside from a pair of guards, Aiah is alone with Sorya in the big building. Their heels clack loudly in the narrow spaces between the looming accumulators.

“A flaming woman,” Sorya says. Her long forest-green dress swirls about her ankles; ruby earrings and necklace glow in the shadows with a smoky light. “You astounded our crew,” she says. “I must say, Miss Aiah, that you have a greater dramatic sense than I’d given you credit for.”

Surprise tingles ominously along Aiah’s nerves as she walks with Sorya along the factory floor.

“A burning woman?” Aiah says. “Is that what I looked like?”

Amusement glitters in Sorya’s green eyes. “Didn’t you know?”

“I wanted my anima to fluoresce. I didn’t know what I really looked like.”

Sorya gives a tigerish grin. “You nearly scorched the eyebrows off a couple of them.”

“
Ah.” Aiah is absorbed by thoughts of the burning woman.
Is this how it starts?
she wonders. If she hadn’t turned the tap when she did, perhaps she would have become a flaming giant stalking the streets of Jaspeer.

Sorya pauses, lips tilted in a smile. “Not that the crew would look away,” she adds, “since you forgot to give your anima any hint of clothing.”

“Ah.” Aiah glances down at her gangly body and is embarrassed to consider its defects magnified by plasm, skinny legs and pointed elbows and every rib visible — more humiliating, really, than the mere fact of nudity. Now, she thinks enviously, if she’d really wanted to give the workmen an eyeful, she should have thought to clothe her anima in Sorya’s body, with its abundant curve of hip and breast, narrow waist and legs of whipcord muscle.

Sorya reaches out, touches the black ceramic surface of an accumulator. It’s so polished that Aiah can see the blue eddies of the other woman’s reflection in its surface. “At least we’re tapping the stuff now,” Sorya says. “No more monsters, no more strange effects to call attention to what we possess. Since we won’t be needing it, we’ll want you to lead a work party down into the pneuma station to seal off that old toilet.”

Entombing the plasm diver’s mummy, Aiah thinks. If only remembrance was buried as easily, memories of the empty eye-sockets, the mouth with its silent scream . . .

“Get Authority jumpsuits and hardhats for your party,” Aiah says, “and let me know when you want it done.”

Sorya’s fingers leave smudge marks on the immaculate black ceramic as her hand drifts away. She glances up at the bronze collection web that protects the plasm batteries. As if in response to her glance, one of the factory’s pigeons flaps upward from its new resting place.

Sorya’s glance narrows. “Will the cage work?” she says.

Aiah is amused. Sorya is used to the elaborate collection webs built into the architecture of structures like Mage Towers and the Plasm Authority Building; this improvised apparatus looks suspicious to her.

“
If the web’s extended into the basement,” Aiah says, “and also covers the tap, yes. But it’s hard to make specific judgments without knowing what the web is intended to protect the accumulators
from
.”

Sorya gives Aiah a sidelong look out of her eyes, then looks up to the web again.

“We’ll need some way to project our power more efficiently,” she says. “Transmission horns or something like them, but they’ll have to be hidden. We can have a fixed horn pointed straight at Mage Towers to give us power there, but there will need to be other horns with multidirectional capability.”

Aiah gives this some thought. “Billboards,” she says. “Put billboards on top of the factory. The scaffolding can disguise your apparatus, ne?”

Sorya looks at her in surprise. “Very good,” she said.

Aiah grins.
“Warriors of Thunderworld,”
she says. “With Khore and Semlin. They used that trick in the chromoplay.”

Sorya laughs. “Obviously I’m not sufficiently in tune with popular culture.” She walks toward the little office, bright silk skirt outlining her legs at each stride. Aiah follows.

“What’s it in aid of?” she asks.

“Say again?”

Aiah waves an arm. “All this. What’s it for? What’s the web supposed to be protecting you from? Why is everything being done in such a rush?”

Sorya looks over her shoulder, frowns a bit. She opens the door to the office, steps inside, closes the door after Aiah. The office is a mess, metal furniture stacked in a corner, the floor used as a storage area for a propane torch, bits of bronze rod, cushioned boxes of control equipment that haven’t been installed yet. Aiah looks for a place to sit and fails to find one.

Sorya leans her back against the door, folds her arms, looks at Aiah.

“What is plasm but power?” she says. “And what are plasm and power but reflections of the human will? It’s will that controls plasm, and power, and — ultimately — people.”

“What about access?” Aiah asks. “If you don’t have access to plasm, what good is will?”

“The will finds its own access,” Sorya says. “It did for you, did it not?”

Surprise touches Aiah’s nerves. “I suppose it did,” she says slowly.

“
Constantine told you once,” Sorya says, “that he and I were
not little people
. It is not our wealth that makes us giants in this world, but the force of our wills. And the strong will, ultimately, makes its own rules.” Her green eyes glitter as they gaze at Aiah, and Aiah seems to sense the formidable power of Sorya’s will, a constant pressure like that of wind funneling between two buildings. Aiah feels almost as if she needs to lean into it to keep from toppling backwards.

“
You and I,” Sorya says, “are breaking a hundred laws simply by standing here. But laws mean nothing in this place, because laws are made by
little people
— which I, at least, am not — and the laws are made to guard the small against the powerful. Futile, firstly because the truly powerful find their own opportunities; and secondly, because when the small suppress the great, they suppress as well the greatness of their own commonwealth.”

Sorya smiles, sharp teeth gleaming white in the small room. “Given this, given that the strong find their own place, and do so as inevitably as the water that seeks its own level, then what we intend here becomes clear enough. Specific details are inconsequential, but” Sorya takes a breath. “We seek to enlarge our scope. Our power. To project our will into the world. And this, inevitably, will bring us into conflict with others that possess the power we intend to make our own. And so, in this conflict of will, we must guard ourselves against those who may seek to attack us.”

Some kind of war,
Aiah thinks,
and Sorya’s no administrative assistant, she’s a general.

But war on who? An individual? The Operation? Or a whole metropolis?

Her mind chills at the thought that Constantine had, in one sense or another, warred on all three at one time or another.

“You’re guarding against a plasm attack, obviously,” Aiah says, “or you wouldn’t need a collection web.”

Sorya nods.

“If,” Aiah reasons carefully, “you were preparing to defend against, say, the police or military of Jaspeer, they would have to assault this place very carefully so as not to cause casualties among the population here. There must be ten thousand people living within a radius of this building.”

“Yes.” Sorya’s glittering eyes watch her with interest.

“But if, say, your . . . opponents .. . have no reason to care about casualties in the neighborhood, they could do great damage to you and your apparatus as things stand now.”

“Ah.” Sorya’s terse monosyllable gives her no clue as to whether Aiah’s speculations are the least bit relevant. Aiah bites back on her growing frustration and continues.

“They can’t hurt your equipment through the collection web,” Aiah says. “But they can damage its environment.” She glances through the office windows at the tented ceiling, the high arched windows. “Hit those windows hard enough and the glass flies in like a thousand knives. Knock the roof hard enough and it falls down on the collection web. It might break the web, and even if it doesn’t your personnel are going to take a bad hit.”

Sorya gives a thin, knowing smile, the briefest nod.
“Warriors of Thunderworld?”
she says.

“Common sense,” Aiah retorts. “A lot of the casualties of the Bursary Street flamer came from flying glass.”

“Indeed,” Sorya says, “your reasoning is impeccable. Given, of course, your premises.”

And if this place starts getting sandbagged, Aiah thinks, with shields put up over the delicate equipment and work spaces, then I’ll know a thing or two.

“Of course,” Sorya says, “Constantine and many of his people are trained warriors, who would already have considered these matters. Should,” she adds, again with that thin, ambiguous smile, “they be relevant to our goals.”

“
Are
you
a warrior, Madam Sorya?” Aiah asks.