Metropolitan (29 page)

“Of course.” Here in the car with Martinus and the other bodyguard, Aiah’s been trying to behave and hasn’t given in to the impulse to touch Constantine, or even to rest her head on the big shoulder. Her apartment should be the perfect place to say farewell.

And then Constantine, catching Martinus’s look in the mirror, adds, “We won’t be seen at this hour. I won’t be gone for long.”

The Elton smoothly glides up to Aiah’s tower, and then a guard leaps to open the rear door. Constantine kindly carries her small bag. No one sees Aiah and Constantine on their walk past the potted chrysanthemums, through the locked lobby doors — the doorman is asleep in his office, waiting for the sound of a bell. In the elevator, reflected by the mirrored walls, they are free to embrace in a moment of flight as the mirrored box soars upward in the tall tower.

“I have a gift for you,” Constantine says, presenting a flat box.

It’s an ivory necklace, with matching earrings. The fabulously rare substance is smoothed into gracefully rounded knucklebone shapes, with a central pendant carved into the Trigram. Aiah is too awed to do much other than stammer thanks. The doors open, Aiah steps out, and Constantine fastens the priceless ivory around her neck. He kisses her nape and the shiver of pleasure tingles to Aiah’s fingertips. He must have had Martinus acquire the necklace, she realizes; he hadn’t had time to do it himself.

Aiah detects an air of faint curiosity in Constantine as she walks with him down the corridor. He is traveling in Loeno as a visitor, she realizes. No doubt he’s been in places like this before, but always with the assurance that he’ll be back in his own world before the end of the next shift. He’s never lived in this bourgeois world, let alone in a dubious tenderloin like Old Shorings. He’s as alien to this kind of life as she is to a penthouse suite in the Volcano Hotel.

“Try to ignore the pile of laundry on the bed,” she says, laughs, and turns her key.

She steps inside, turns on the lights, and a cold certainty floods her nerves that she’s made a mistake, a catastrophic one, even if she can’t, at this appalling moment, understand just how.

Gil blinks at them from the bed, hand raised to shield his eyes from the light. “Hello?” he says.

Aiah finds herself walking into the room, trying to respond normally. “I wasn’t expecting you back.”

Gil blinks, pushes yellow-blond hair out of his eyes, “I called and left a message, over a week ago. I said I’d be back for the weekend.”

And it’s early Sunday now. Aiah bethinks herself of the grinding play head that she keeps forgetting to lubricate, and which seems on this occasion to have let her down.

“I called the Authority,” Gil says, “and they said you’d taken some days off. And your sister hadn’t heard from you, either.”

Which means, of course, that the whole family knows by now.

“And your brother Stonn wants to talk to you. He didn’t say why. I didn’t know he was out of jail.”

Gil’s eyes, slowly becoming accustomed to the light, turn slowly toward Constantine. He is too fatigued to know quite what to make of the large black man, carrying Aiah’s bag, who stands silent in the doorway.

Aiah puts her hand to her throat and encounters the ivory necklace. She remembers Gil’s pride at being able to afford the bracelet with the single ivory bangle he’d given her, the bracelet Fredho had stolen.

It occurs to her that she has some explaining to do.

“Gil,” she says, “this is the Metropolitan Constantine. Constantine, this is Gil.” She takes a breath, gives Constantine an imploring look, “I believe you’ve heard me mention him.”

Constantine puts down Aiah’s bag inside the door and glides into the room with his usual perfect assurance. “How do you do, sir,” he rumbles. “Miss Aiah has spoken well of you.”

Gil is still too groggy to quite know what to make of one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial figures appearing in his apartment at this desperate hour.

Aiah figures he’ll start asking soon enough, though.

CHAPTER 15

Constantine takes his leave. Gil stares at the door. “Was that really—?” he asks.

“Oh yes.” She looks at the door, wondering what, exactly, has been shut off here. “I’ll explain later,” she says. “I’m too tired right now,” and turns off the light.

The explanation, she reflects as she takes off her clothes, had better be pretty good.

She kisses Gil and curls into a ball on the bed, her back to him. Calculations flood her mind, all ponderous, unnatural-seeming, implausible, probably destined to fade at the first touch of Shieldlight. Her nerves are like an array of tight-strung wires, tautly aware of Gil’s every breath, vibrating in sympathy to every sigh, every movement, every casual touch.

Hours later, after the turn of the shift, Aiah falls into a kind of wary sleep, intent and restless, from which Gil’s arms, enfolding her from behind, wake her with a start. He gently kisses her nape. Sensation shrieks along her nerves.

“Sorry to wake you,” he says, “but it’s late, and this is our only day together . . . and we’ve been away from each other for a long, long time.”

Aiah turns slightly toward him and he burrows along her collarbone, his jaw-bristle scratching her clavicle. She brushes hair from her face and, out of force of habit more than anything, absently strokes the back of his neck with her hand. “You smell good,” he says, but she can’t think why this would be the case.

A part of her life is beginning, she thinks. Another part is ending. But which? And with whom?

Gil’s hands move intently along Aiah’s body. He is making a purposeful effort to arouse, perhaps by way of apology for waking her. Every touch of his stubby fingers sets off a kind of cacophony in her high-strung nerves, neurons firing signals for panic, pleasure and flight all at once. It occurs to her that she would probably enjoy this more if she could manage, somehow, to relax. She closes her eyes, tilts her head back, and lets breath sigh from her lungs.

Who, she wonders, has a claim on her flesh? Her heart? Her allegiance?

Gil kneels between her legs, browses her body with his lips and tongue. Aiah tries to relax but her nerves leap with every touch. When he tongues her sex a bolt of sensation almost doubles her up, far too intense to be pleasurable. She cries out and presses her fists into her eye-sockets. Gil seems to take this reaction as encouragement because he doesn’t stop.

Aiah hisses through clenched teeth. “Take it easy.”

Gil’s urgency eases — he’s always been a perfectly reasonable lover. His tongue makes delicate little lacy swirls about her clitoris. The load of sensation declines to a manageable level. Aiah feels the cold edge of fear — is Gil searching for Constantine there, for the scent or taste of his rival?

No, she thinks. He’s a perfectly practical man. If he wondered, he’d just ask.

And this reminds her why she likes him. The way he looks at things, the way he approaches a problem as something to be solved, to be disassembled like a puzzle, taken apart by his stubby fingers and
understood
. If he doesn’t comprehend something, he just asks. He’s not manipulative or dramatic or driven, he’s just himself. An optimist who believes any problem can be conquered if you just approach it with the right frame of mind.

Aiah tries to relax again, closes her eyes, breathes slowly. Pleasure expands like a warm plasm tide. Her hips lift to the delicate touch of Gil’s tongue. The pleasure rises, flooding, trembles at the brim of the cup, overflows.

Gil rises to his knees, dabbing delicately at his crooked smile with a corner of the sheet. He enters her and she presses herself to his furry chest. Every movement is familiar, unsurprising, a kind of homecoming. Aiah is pleased to discover that she’s not drawing mental comparisons between Gil and Constantine. Anyway she knows that no comparison is possible, not between Gil and a fantasy as unreal as her Metropolitan lover, a figure already fading in contrast to the reality of her home, of domestic realities, of the man who lies, secure and genuine, between her legs...

*

They buy fresh bread and pastry at a local bakery, make coffee, fold down their little table from its place in the wall. Tomatoes and cucumbers are plucked from the plants flourishing in the pocket garden. The course of a luxurious breakfast covers the plastic table surface with coffee circles and crumbs.

Gil sips his coffee. “I looked into our bank account yesterday,” Gil says. “And there’s over a thousand in there.”

“Eight hundred of that is the money you sent from Gerad,” Aiah says, “and the rest is what I earned from my consulting job.”

Not to mention the six thousand and change, clanking coins, hidden in a bag of fertilizer under the tomato plants.

Little creases deepen between Gil’s brows. “What is this consulting job exactly?” he asks.

A taut fist clenches between Aiah’s shoulder blades. “It’s a lot of little jobs, actually,” she says. “The Metropolitan Constantine wants me to . . .”

The memory takes Gil by surprise, “I’d forgotten!” he says. “He really
was
here this last sleep shift?”

Relief stumbles into Aiah’s mind. “Yes. He and I were—”

“Imagine you working for that old gangster!” Gil says. “What does the Jurisdiction think about it, ne?”

Aiah shifts uneasily in her seat. “They don’t know, and I didn’t ask them,” she says. “We needed the money too much. So if you could keep this thing quiet...”

Gil grins and reaches for a pastry. “How did you meet him, anyway?”

“Well,” Aiah says, “I sent him a fan letter.”

He frowns, his pastry half-raised. “Through the
mail
?” he asks, irrelevantly. Letters cost more than wiregrams.

“
Yes,” Aiah said, “I read on the
Wire
that he’d moved into Mage Towers, and the
Lords of the New City
chromo-play is getting all this attention, and I just thought. . .”

Gil looks at her in surprise. “You mean to say you actually admire him?”

Heat flushes Aiah’s cheeks. “Yes,” she says.

Gil thoughtfully chews his pastry as he gives this revelation some thought.

“But he destroyed his metropolis, didn’t he? Cheloki’s a sewer now. And Constantine is living high off his loot.”

Aiah is surprised by the fury that flashes through her. She bites down hard on her anger, tries to speak in normal tones. “He didn’t destroy his nation, he was
attacked
! That whole coalition of gangsters and crooked politicians and—”

“They would hardly have attacked him if they hadn’t felt threatened by him,” Gil says reasonably. “All his moves to strengthen his plasm reserves and build the army — what was he intending to do if not attack his neighbors?”

Aiah’s fingernails dig into her palms. “He was trying,” she says, “to
help
people.”

“People like Constantine don’t help anyone.”

“He was trying to change things!” Aiah waves an arm. “Things that need changing!”

“Nothing,” Gil says flatly, “needs changing that badly.”

For an instant a cold hatred floods Aiah’s heart. Gil — smug, judgmental, sitting at the table licking margarine from his fingers — is suddenly no different from the complacent Jaspeeris who have stood, indifferently, dully convinced of their own intrinsic rightness, as an immovable wall between Aiah and her fortunes.

“You wouldn’t know,” Aiah says. “You’re a member of the privileged class here.”

An alert glint in Gil’s eyes demonstrates awareness that he may have just walked into danger, “I haven’t been particularly aware of being privileged,” he ventures.

“
You are,” Aiah says. “Believe it. And from my non-privileged perspective, I would say, as far as change is concerned,
Whatever it takes
. Because either you make people free, or you don’t; and if you don’t, what good are you? And if people aren’t free, what good is anything?”

These are Constantine’s ideas, but the ferocity is Aiah’s alone, born of her experience.

Gil’s thoughts tread almost visibly across this dangerous ground. He and Aiah have, perhaps incredibly, never discussed this root matter, the difference in their backgrounds, their caste, their ethnicity. Aiah, at least, had told herself that it didn’t matter, and now she finds she was wrong, that suddenly it’s the most urgent thing in the world.

Gil opens his mouth, hesitates, speaks carefully. “Do you feel,” he says, “that I’ve maltreated you in any way, that I’ve held you down, or kept you from — I don’t know — being free?”

Aiah’s anger dies away, replaced by an upwelling of sorrow. He’s taken the subject away from the sphere of abstracts and returned it to the two people sharing breakfast over their folding table. Her fingers seek out Gil’s hand.

“No,” she says. “No. You’re the only man I’ve met who ever thought I was all right.”

Except for Constantine.
The treacherous thought will not keep to itself.

Gil is faintly puzzled. “Is that true?”

Aiah nods. “If other people were more like you, there wouldn’t be a problem. But even you could use a few new perspectives.”

Gil offers a faint smile, “I’m beginning to see that.”

“You don’t know what a long, tiresome struggle it was just to get here. To this little place we share. It’s natural for you to find a place like Loeno at this point in your life, but for me it’s the result of a battle that’s gone on for years. And if I hadn’t had to spend so much energy on fighting for everything you take for granted, who knows where I’d be?”

He nods, but Aiah can’t tell if he understands. That every step upward is a struggle against great weight, against her own family dragging her back, against those above her whose ponderous weight of privilege holds her down; a hopeless, endless struggle, wearying and so full of frustrations that, finally, she’d done something so dangerous she didn’t even dare tell him.

Made him her
passu
, which he did not deserve.