Metropolitan (25 page)

Constantine pauses, then impatiently dismisses his own argument with a contemptuous wave of his hand. Without warning, moving with absolute suddenness and intensity, he snatches Aiah’s wrist, the same grasp used when giving her instruction; but now a different power than plasm flows from him, lights the furious energy in his eyes —
passion
, she realizes, startled, but of a different order from what she’s accustomed to. A world-eating passion, fierce and hungry and able, without constraint or compromise. No School of Radritha, she knows, could possibly suppress
this
.

“
Listen, Miss Aiah,” he says, and she recognizes the powerful whisper again, the deep voice that resonates in her bones, “if the New City comes into being, then any sacrifice —
any
— will have been justified. Because I see no hope otherwise, anywhere, in our prison of a world.” The hand clamped on her arm is more powerful than a vise; Aiah knows better than to try to break free.

Electricity flares through her nerves, as if in resonance with the fury that seems to blaze in his mind.

“And if the New City fails,” he continues, “then Sorya’s old disciples of Torgenil are right, and we are Damned, and in Hell. In which case —” And the power leaves him, the fierce eyes grow dim, his big hand now without strength; Aiah retrieves her arm, straightens her sleeve. “In which case,” he repeats, even the voice now without power, “then nothing matters, nothing. Death least of all.”

Aiah looks into the shrouded eyes that gaze into the bleakness of a hopeless, caged world, and she suppresses again the overwhelming urge to comfort him. Ridiculous, she thinks, that he would need her comfort.

The car glides silently beneath the plasm-streaked sky. Aiah thinks of power coursing beneath the streets like arterial blood, cities lying on the crust of the earth like granite-shouldered parasites, human lives flaring like matches in the dark canyons — a little heat, a brief light, extinction.

“
What can I do to help?” she says. A deep ancestral voice wails in her head,
He’s your
passu! She needn’t give him comfort, only take his money.

Constantine lifts an eyebrow, “I don’t suppose you can breathe underwater?”

She stares at him. “Are you joking?”

“Not at all. Do you know the apparatus?”

“I’ve never used it.”

“Can you take two days off this next week? We can get you instruction in the meantime.”

Aiah opens her mouth, closes it. “I suppose I could take two vacation days,” she says.

She can’t believe she’s saying yes to this. Constantine had arranged to retrieve her money any time it suited him, and now she is doing him favors. It’s for the New City, she thinks. It’s for the dream. Because even a Barkazil girl from Old Shorings needs something to believe in.

CHAPTER 14

For a change Constantine is trying not to look like himself. Traveling on passports from Gunalaht that Constantine had somehow materialized, he and Aiah fly in an aerocar to the Metropolis of Barchab, on the shore of the Sea of Caraqui. Constantine alleges himself to be one Dr. Chandros, dressed in a simple gray traveling suit and conservative lace, with his famous braid pinned up and a long reddish wig floating off his shoulders. Aiah is Miss Quelger, his assistant. She can’t help but think that Constantine with a red wig is even more conspicuous than Constantine without.

Nobody ever looks at the passports anyway.

The aerocar lands with wailing turbines on the rooftop pad of the ziggurat-shaped Hotel Volcano, and as Aiah, head still swimming from the descent, walks along the roof toward the hotel entrance, she stares in surprise at the blue volcanic peaks that overwhelm the western horizon, their cragged snowy crests unmarked by the gray city that advances like a tide halfway up their steep flanks, then comes to a halt. She’s never seen a piece of ground that wasn’t built on before, not even at a distance.

“They’re active, of course,” Constantine says. “Forty years ago Chukmarkh, that southern peak, blew and killed fifty thousand people.”

“Is that why they don’t build on the tops?” It seems a shame to waste that much potential plasm.

“Too dangerous.”

“I’m surprised people don’t move up there anyway.” People are like a flood, she knows, pouring across every empty, available space unless forcibly walled away.

“I’m sure there are a few,” Constantine says. “But it requires too much infrastructure to support a population for long at that altitude, in those temperature extremes.”

Elevators and a small army of assistants speed them to their suite, all silver and black and mirrors. Sorya waits in the suite in a bright green dress, a vibrant chromatic contrast to the background. Aiah hadn’t expected her here.

Sorya seems all in motion, her bright gauzy scarf and blonde-streaked hair floating, the linked gold foci on her belt chiming lightly as she approaches Constantine, then wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him firmly.

Momo loves Bobo again,
Aiah thinks, and feels an unaccustomed surge of annoyance.

“Geymard said yes!” Sorya says. Her grin is triumphant. “You’ll still have to talk to him, though.”

Calculations dance in precise sequence across Constantine’s face. “
Very
good. Is he still here?”

“I can arrange a meet any time.”

“And Drumbeth?”

Sorya’s brows come together. “He can come across the border, but it will have to be arranged carefully.”

“I want to do my reconnaissance with Aiah first,” Constantine says. “Then I’ll have something to tell him, one way or another.”

Sorya’s eyes shift briefly to Aiah, just long enough to nod a greeting, and then they refocus on Constantine. She takes his hand and draws him away. “Let me tell you about Geymard,” she says. “I had to use a certain line with him, and you don’t want to shift from it.”

Aiah stands by the door for a moment, uncertain where to put her feet, and then one of Sorya’s functionaries leads her to her room. It has a private terrace — the advantage of the hotel’s ziggurat design — with fragrant orange trees sitting in tubs and a view of the volcanoes.

She misses the solid, reassuring presence of Martinus. But Martinus is simply too conspicuous, a pointer that leads only to Constantine, and Martinus was left behind in Jaspeer.

Aiah dines alone on her terrace next shift, served elegantly on bone porcelain set on a white-clothed table wheeled in by functionaries. The elegant gold leafwork on the porcelain reflects the colors of overhead plasm displays.
Lords of the New City
is as heavily advertised here, Aiah notes, as in Jaspeer. Constantine and Sorya are eating with Geymard, an erect, crop-haired man who, despite civilian dress, looks as if he just marched out of the Timocracy of Garshab. Aiah picks fretfully at her meal and drinks a half-bottle of wine. Orange-scented wind teases her hair. She leaves the table and leans on the bright aluminum terrace rail and looks at the gleaming peaks of the volcanoes, the rooftops of surrounding buildings. A distant airship gleams silver in Shieldlight. One of the nearby roofs has a blue plastic foam running track set on its perimeter, and she watches a man in a blue-and-white jumpsuit dutifully, joylessly, circle the track. He doesn’t look at the volcanoes once.

Something crosses the sky above the volcanoes and Aiah’s heart leaps as she realizes that it’s an avian, a winged humanoid. It soars, a winged black silhouette against the Shield, and then folds its wings and stoops like a falcon, diving to someplace unknown. Aiah watches for a while, but it doesn’t return.

Aiah returns to her room, brushes her hand down the blue satin bedspread, looks at herself in the diamond-shaped mirrors planted in the walls. She looks ready for an off-shift out. Pity she doesn’t know anyplace to go, and she doesn’t even know why she’s here. Her room has a connecting door with Constantine’s and she can hear voices murmur in the other room. They have a terrace as a well, but they’re dining in Constantine’s room to make it harder on eavesdroppers.

Aiah wonders if she’s one of the eavesdroppers in question. Alcohol spins in her head.

She puts her fingers on the handle.

There is a dangerous taste on her tongue. Why not? she decides, and presses the handle down gently. She eases the door open until she can see a sliver of the room’s silver-and-black decor. Geymard, Sorya and Constantine are seated at a table less than five paces away. Aiah presses her head to the tiny gap.

“The aerodrome’s not important,” Geymard says. Aiah can see the back of his head, one ear, a bit of cheekbone. He has a drawling accent that Aiah can’t quite place. “There won’t be any reinforcements landing there — all the important units are near the Metropolitan’s palace anyway.”

“
The aerodrome is important,” Constantine says calmly, “because we wish to prevent people
leaving
.” Aiah can see him in profile. His face and body mask Sorya, who is behind him.

“Also,” Constantine adds, “it is vital to be seen to control forms of transportation.”

“It’s a diversion of force better used elsewhere.”

“You don’t need that much force to control an aerodrome,” Constantine says. “Just park some vehicles on the runways. A few snipers in nearby buildings can keep the ’drome’s personnel from moving them.”

He leans back and Aiah’s heart lurches as he unscreens Sorya, who seems to be staring straight at Aiah. But Sorya’s expression is languid, her hands are distractedly caressing her wineglass, and there’s no sign she’s seen Aiah at all.

Not yet, anyway. Very quietly, very slowly, Aiah closes the door, and steps back.

Nothing happens, of course. As if someone would come crashing in with a pistol.

Aiah kicks off her shoes, polarizes the windows to a perfect obsidian black reflection, and builds a nest of pillows on the bed. She lies down and presses the remote control panel that gives her video. The oval screen blinks on, a drama about a singer who was trying to fight her way to the top while battling the Operation’s attempts to control her career.

Absurd. As if they wouldn’t just slice up her face with a razor to make an example of her. Plenty more singers where she came from.

Aerodrome
. The word forms itself on Aiah’s tongue.

Constantine’s target would seem to be an entire Metropolis. Why else seize an aerodrome? And not for itself, but to keep people from escaping.

Cheloki again? Could he be trying to seize his old home by force?

But that didn’t quite make sense. Cheloki was on the other side of the world: why conspire here? Why give Aiah a day’s training in underwater breathing apparatus and take her to another metropolis under a false name?

This, she decides, is going to require some reflection.

Aiah rises from the bed and fetches her glass and the bottle from her table. Maybe the rest of the wine will help her think.

*

The video is babbling and Aiah doesn’t hear the knock at first. When the knock comes again she sits up too quickly and the wine she’s drunk takes a sudden spiral curve along the inside rim of her skull. She runs fingers through her hair, takes a deep breath to clear her head, says, “Come in.”

It’s Constantine, still dressed formally. Perhaps in honor of his guest his jacket is of a military cut, though he carries no rank or insignia, “I’m sorry to have left you alone for so long,” he says. “Had I given it any thought, I would have had one of the guards take you to see the sights.” He looks at the empty bottle of wine, the smudged glass, and a glint of amusement shines in his glance. “Should there be any ill effects, a little plasm on awakening and you’ll feel good as new.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Aiah reaches for the video control, slaps it off. “I didn’t realize Sorya would be here,” she says.

“
We came by separate paths. Safer that way. And I didn’t want you at dinner, because that way Geymard would have been able to identify
you
.”

She blinks at him. “To whom?”

“It hardly matters to whom, but you would be a blackmail target for the rest of your life.”

Aiah doesn’t in any case believe they’d have wanted her listening to their talk of aerodromes and the Metropolitan’s palace and other targets, but she’s willing to give credit to Constantine for an inventive and reasonably gracious apology. She sits down on the bed, arranges her skirt, looks up.

“Metropolitan,” she says, “why am I here?”

“I have come on purpose to tell you. May I sit?”

She nods like Meldurne playing a gracious hostess in a chromoplay. He plucks at the knees of his tight pipestem trousers and sits on the wine-colored satin spread. She can scent his hair oil over the perfume of the lavender water someone’s sprinkled on the sheets.

“Tomorrow I’d like you to join me on a trip across the border into Caraqui.”

All she knows about Caraqui is the famous Aerial Palace. “And we’re going to dive there?” she asks.

“I would like to show you some plasm connections that are similar to ones I’ll need to ...” He shrugs coyness away. “To destroy or disable. Disable, for preference. They’re underwater cables, all alike, more or less. In the actual target — not Caraqui, you understand — they lead to a combat platform that we’d like to deprive of sustenance. At the core are bundles of steel cable — 164 of them, to be precise — and these are armored with linked ceramic plates. And then they’re wrapped in multiple layers of plastic sheathing, and then protected on the outside with a linked bronze collection web.”

Aiah finds herself laughing. “And you want me to do
what
with this?”

“Offer any suggestions that occur to you.”

Aiah laughs again, falls back against her nest of pillows. Constantine continues in perfect seriousness.

“The traditional method of dealing with these cables is to pack a garland of plastic explosive around them and set it off, but that may not be possible, and it doesn’t always work anyway. And there are over forty of these cables on the actual target, multiple redundancy, and even more conventional plasm conduits above the water on bridges.”