Metropolitan (33 page)

“But alter gravity itself? Who has tried? And besides — who knows what the Malakas were thinking of when they built the Shield? Perhaps it is not intended as an eternal barrier, but as an intelligence test.” He looks at her, his voice rolling on like a deep, inexorable river.

“Why hasn’t the Shield been breached? One may as well ask why there is still poverty and hunger, why war is permitted, why there is such gross inequality in wealth and opportunity. It is because we, as a political species, permit all these to occur. Perhaps we permit the Shield as well. If we can put aside our foolishness, our shortsightedness and greed, we may discover the realm of the Ascended is in our grasp, and has been all along.”

Aiah feels her head spin with the wine of Constantine’s words. The Shield has been there, immovable, irreconcilable, for thousands of years; it is a
fact
, as assuredly a fact as the bedrock beneath the hotel’s foundations. And Constantine would abolish it. Might as well, she thinks mirthfully, abolish hunger and war, abolish the planet itself.

Constantine sits up in bed and leans toward her, his voice confiding. “I would reckon it a favor if you would not confide to anyone this particular ambition of mine,” he says. “I would prefer not to be laughed out of all respect, or condemned as a heretic by some fanatic. I’m treated with enough skepticism as it is.”

Aiah puts her arms around his neck and kisses him. “Who would I tell?”

He shrugs. “Some inquiring
Wire
reporter, I suppose.”

“Maybe when I’m an old granny,” Aiah says. “The statute of limitations on plasm theft won’t expire till then.”

The room takes a sudden lurch, as if a giant had just kicked the hotel’s cornerstone. Something in the bathroom falls off a shelf with a crash. Aiah and Constantine scramble erect as the hotel lurches a second time. Aiah’s feet nearly shoot out from under her. And then there are a diminishing series of smaller shocks as the building rocks back and forth on its massive floating foundation, a swaying that continues long after the actual earthquake is over.

Constantine is jumping into his clothes before the last shock fades. Aiah stands silent and still, gulping air in reaction to a sudden wave of inner-ear nausea.

“I must check the factory,” Constantine says. “Have someone take you home—”

“I have to go to the Authority,” Aiah says. “I’m Emergency Response, remember?”

He nods. “Tell Khoriak.” And then is out the door into the busy front room, thrusting one arm through a sleeve of his shirt.

*

It is a middle-sized quake, and in Jaspeer causes only 16,000 casualties, 1,100 of which are fatal, mostly from scaffolding that peels away from buildings in poor neighborhoods and rains down on the off-shift traffic below. Some bridges and tunnels collapse. A food vat ruptures in the basement of a processing plant and drowns twelve workers in a deluge of krill. A few older buildings fall while a rather larger number go up in flames. Among the fallen buildings is a brand-new and very fashionable apartment that will soon be the subject of an investigation to find out which inspectors were paid off and when.

Aiah is assigned to find and repair breaks in plasm lines and spends most of the next twelve hours underground, walking through darkened utility mains illuminated by the jittering flash of her helmet light, old brick and concrete tunnels that smell of disturbed dust. Vertigo keeps tugging at her inner ear, turning the tunnels into distorted, nightmarish places. She performs her job with her heart in her mouth, terrified that a stray spark might set off an explosion in the fine, suspended dust particles in the tunnels, or that an aftershock might bury her and her team alive or flood the tunnel with water.

At least, she thinks, Rohder’s anima won’t be wandering around Terminal, he’ll be busy elsewhere, locating survivors in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

After twelve hours Aiah is allowed to go home. Aside from a broken mirror in the lobby, Loeno Towers is unharmed. The apartment is as she left it. The repaired commo set has logged a call from Gil inquiring as to her safety, and after an hour of trying — commo lines are jammed — she manages to leave a brief message telling him that she is all right.

The plasm energy she’d fed herself at the hotel is long gone. Aiah showers, collapses into her bed, and is awakened only at 1800 when the doorman calls to tell her that her ride has arrived.

She throws on clothing, washes her face, and combs her tangled hair in the elevator on her way down. On the ground floor she finds Khoriak quietly reading a magazine. He leads her to the Geldan and inserts the little car into the late rush-hour traffic. In the wake of the earthquake the sky blazes with advertisements for insurance companies.

“Part of the collection net came down in the factory,” Khoriak says, “but that should be repaired within twenty-four hours or so. No one was hurt.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“The factory. Everyone else is there.”

“Was there a lot of damage in Terminal?”

“Not from what I saw.”

And indeed there is very little. Terminal is sufficiently far from the quake’s epicenter that it’s lost none of its scaffolding, and damage seems to have been confined to broken windows and toppled shelves.

A repair crew is already repairing the bronze collection net. The huge accumulators stand gleaming in their rows, reflecting the sparks that fall from welding torches in multiple golden waterfalls. Constantine and Sorya watch from amid a circle of their followers. As the car pulls in, Constantine crosses the stained concrete floor to open Aiah’s door for her. The others trail behind him. Constantine is smiling, and Sorya is hunched in a faded green brass-buttoned military jacket of an old-fashioned design. She wears a peaked cap pulled low over sullen, slitted eyes.

“Our people at the Landmark have found something useful,” Constantine says as Aiah steps from the car. “When the quake hit, two of the Operation men we were surveying left their clubs and dashed to the same address to see if anything there was damaged. We’ve poked around a little further, and it’s their plasm house.”

“Can you tell how much of the juice they are getting out of it?” Aiah asks.

“It’s in an office building backed up against a huge public housing project. I’d say they’re tapping into the plasm link there.”

A falling bit of bronze rod, cut loose by one of the torches, clangs loudly on the floor.

“Congratulations, Miss Aiah,” Sorya says. “Your solution looks to be the right one.” The shadowed expression beneath her cap brim is unreadable.

“What’s the next step?” Constantine asks. “An anonymous phone call to the Authority?”

Aiah mentally pages through the Authority’s procedures. “That will just put it in a long queue,” Aiah says, “and someone may get around to checking the call in a few months, and it’s very likely that the call will be assigned to the man who’s being paid off in the first place. If you can get someone to lodge a formal complaint for the reward, the Authority will take it more seriously, but if it’s
you
filing the complaint, Metropolitan, or any of your known entourage, they’re likely to want to know
how
you know about all this illegal plasm.”

“I see.”

“Best to give me some time, and I’ll work out a way for the Authority to discover the building in its own way.”

“We do not have time to spare,” Sorya says. “Perhaps there could be an accident in that building, something that might expose the heavy plasm use there.”

A cold warning hand brushes Aiah’s neck at Sorya’s toneless word,
accident
.

“Give me the address,” Aiah says. “I’ll check to see who’s registered at that meter.”

“An accident is quicker,” Sorya says flatly.

“
An accident is more dangerous for us,” Constantine says. “We don’t want to have our business discovered as a result of a tangential brush with the Operation. Nor do we want to attract
their
attention, having successfully eluded them thus far.” He looks at Martinus. “We’ll take Miss Aiah there,” he says, and then turns to Aiah again. “But not just yet. You look tired, and it doesn’t do my cause any good to have your mind fuzzy. Refresh yourself at the t-grips, and then we’ll leave.”

“Thank you, Metropolitan.”

The plasm charges her body, quickens her mind. She wishes she could dawdle, remain connected to the huge well she had discovered, the awesome reservoir of raw power so fundamentally connected to the life of her world, to both its reality and its unreality. But she reluctantly flicks the switch on the operators’ console that disconnects her copper grip from the well, then pushes back her chair.

She realizes that she has been aware of Sorya’s scent for some time.

Aiah turns to see Sorya standing behind her, hands stuffed in the pockets of her faded green jacket. Aiah rises to her feet, mind and muscle blazing with plasm-courage, and says, “Yes?”

Sorya’s tone of voice carries no hostility but little warmth, either. “A word of warning, Miss Aiah.”

“Yes?” Aiah repeats. She almost laughs at the whole notion of warning. At the moment she feels capable of taking on an army.

“Constantine and I have been together a long time,” Sorya says, “and though he and I are no fit companions for one another now, both being so tied, nerve and heart and bone, to this project of ours, and passionate over our differences, we nevertheless, once this endeavor is concluded, will be together for the future.”

Aiah bites back an impulse to reply, a defiant
Are you sure about that, lady?
or something equally refined, equally a product of the old neighborhood.

Sorya’s flat green eyes gaze from under her cap brim. “I bear you no animosity for your interlude here with Constantine,” she says. “Insofar as you provide him a little release, a little forgetfulness — well,” she nods, “that is good. You provide a service, if you will, for which I haven’t the time or energy myself. But it
is
an interlude, Miss Aiah, and it would be dangerous for you to think otherwise.”

Aiah clenches her teeth. She can feel her hackles rise, her hands trying to form claws. “Are you threatening me, Miss Sorya?” she asks.

A touch of contempt enters Sorya’s eyes. “Why should I do that? Do you think you’re the only worshiper at this particular shrine? For it’s worship he wants, make no mistake, and I know him too well to give him quite the credulity he demands.” She shakes her head. “No, I merely wish to reiterate that he and I are both among the powers of this world, those blessed with greatness and the will and means to use it, and that this fact alone makes us dangerous to our friends as well as our enemies.”

“
This
power —” Aiah gestures toward the contents of the factory, the huge accumulators and consoles and grids, “—
this
power was my gift.”

Sorya tilts her pointed chin. “Ah, but you gave it away, didn’t you? or rather sold it. If you were one of the great, you would have kept it and made use of it to lay the foundations of your own ascendancy.”

“Perhaps it isn’t power that I want.”

“Does that make you great? I don’t believe so.” She shakes her head. Behind her, sparks fall gracefully to the factory floor. “I ask you but to look at Constantine’s history. How many from the old days are still around him? Martinus and Geymard alone of those who mattered, and Geymard is here almost against his will and only because I worked on him for days.”

Sorya glances over her shoulder at Constantine, who stands in consultation with Martinus and Geymard. Her voice turns contemplative. “Constantine has a way of being fatal to his friends. It is, in a peculiar way, a measure of his greatness that he survives what they do not. Consider: all his family are dead, even those who took his side in the war. All his old advisors, his companions, those lovers who remained with him for any space of time . . .” Her eyes return to Aiah. “All but me. Because I can match him, in terms of will and greatness, in talent and power. Because I am no worshiper of his thought or philosophy or —” her lips twist contemptuously “— or his goodness, but of his true greatness, his will and power and his ability to dominate others; and because . . .” She leans closer to Aiah, close enough for Aiah to scent the spice on her breath. Sorya’s voice turns confiding. “Because I tell him the truth,” she says softly. Despite the silky tone her eyes are hard, pitiless. “He
wants
worship, he wants the uncritical adoration of those such as yourself, but after he has glutted himself on devotion, it’s the truth he needs, and it’s the truth I give him.”

“And you think you’re the only person who tells him the truth.”

“
There are truths about Constantine that only I know,” Sorya says. “I know power and wealth and magic, and it is
their
truth to which the greatness in Constantine speaks.” She fishes in her pocket for her cigaret case. “Believe me,” she says, “I have nothing but the best of wishes for you, and that is why I’m speaking to you now. I wish to protect you from disappointment, from any consequences of broken hopes.” Aiah watches the little bright flame leap up from Sorya’s platinum lighter to ignite the cigaret poised between Sorya’s fingers.

“With all respect,” Sorya finishes, “you are well out of your depth. In the league in which Constantine and I play, you’re not even rated.”

“Thank you for your advice,” Aiah says, managing to speak the words without the sarcasm she feels in her heart, and then simply walks away, toward Constantine and the big Elton.

With an elegant gesture Constantine opens the door. Aiah settles onto the leather seat and Constantine closes the door behind her with that too-solid thunk, that sound of armor falling into place between her and everything outside.

Constantine is buoyant on the way to the plasm house, joking about the dolphins and their pretensions, about the Operation street captains who are about to have an unpleasant surprise. After a few moments of his insistent good humor, and with plasm vitality filling every cell, Aiah feels the tight-coiled anger slowly relax about her nerves.