Metropolitan (44 page)

Anger buzzes through Aiah’s brain. It’s all going to
waste,
she thinks.

“
Did you point out that one of the plasm cheats we found was
in
the Investigative Division?” she asks.

“Well. No. Not as yet.”

“
If we give the creepers our method —
my
method — any investigation in the district plasm stations will likely be carried out by the same corrupt officials who were paid off in the first place. And if word of the method gets out, the crooks will know that all they have to do is program a little more efficiently, and then we won’t catch them.”

Rohder frowns, then reaches for a pack on the table and thoughtfully draws out a cigaret. “I know,” he says. “And I’m sure the lesson’s been learned before, over the decades. Someone like you comes along, the thieves get cautious for a while, and then they get careless again and a few get caught and the rest learn again to be more cautious.” He sighs, looks at the cigaret for a moment, then puts it in his mouth and lights it.

His eyes shift restlessly; he won’t look at her. The cigaret bobs up and down in his mouth as he speaks. “What I’m saying is, well, fine, we caught a few. And the creepers will catch a few more with the information we gave them. But as far as developing any more leads goes, well, the Intendant doesn’t want it.”

“We make the Investigative Division look bad.”

“That’s a part of it, yes.”

Anger and frustration crackle through Aiah’s nerves. She doesn’t have to act this part, she knows, all her anger is perfectly genuine. The truth is bitter on her tongue as she lashes out.

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that I find a plasm thief in the Investigative Division, and within two days the creepers are trying to pin some kind of major crime on me?”

“I didn’t tell anyone of your discovery. I was going to approach the Intendant properly when the moment suited. Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Your office mate? Anyone?”

“No one at all.”

Rohder stares uneasily out the window. “Do you think someone crept in and read the notes on my desk? Most odd, if true — no one’s expressed an interest in my work in years.”

“How many years has it been since you uncovered a major crime being committed in our own headquarters building?”

“Oh, thirty years or thereabouts.” He waves a hand airily while Aiah stares at him in surprise. “I had forgotten, till this business reminded me.” Rohder draws in smoke, his watery eyes fixed on the distant horizon.

His glance lifts and, finally, he looks at her. “I have exerted myself on your behalf already,” he says. “I spoke rather forcefully to the creepers, and I will also speak to Mengene and the Intendant.”

Aiah tries to conceal her glee. Like every other division of government, the police are stacked heavy with layers of officialdom anxious to protect their jobs and their privileges. If Aiah can win the bureaucratic war on the top floors of the Authority building, she can stifle the investigation below before it properly starts. Unless they get more physical evidence, Aiah thinks, the creepers are out of luck.

“Thank you, Mr Rohder,” she says.

He cocks his head again, blue eyes blinking, and Aiah feels as if she’s being regarded by some strange, hunched waterfowl. “I am sorry to have to return you to your job. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly rewarding one. I looked at your record — you’ve never had any education in live plasm use?”

“No. I couldn’t afford it.”

“Your advancement here would go faster with a degree in plasm engineering.”

“Perhaps you know a millionaire I could marry.”

“Ah.” Cigaret ash falls on Rohder’s lace. He brushes at it absently, “I have occasionally taken leaves of absence from the Authority to teach,” he says, “and some of my students have kept in touch. One is now chancellor of Margai University, and there are scholarships that are within his prerogative. If I were to recommend you, you would almost certainly be accepted, and the Authority would be more than pleased to grant you a leave of absence. When you returned with the degree, your career prospects would be enhanced.”

The offer takes Aiah’s breath away. She stares at Rohder for a long moment and makes an effort to compose herself before answering. “Ah,” she says. “Yes. Yes, I’d be grateful for the recommendation.”

“Well then.” Rohder swabs at his lace again as he stands, and then he offers his hand. “It was a pleasure working with you. If you have any more of these little projects in mind, do call me.”

Aiah takes his hand. “Thank you again. I learned a great deal.”

Rohder looks puzzled. “I can’t see how, Miss Aiah. Good day.”

Obedience is the Greatest Gift
— a thought-message from His Perfection, the Prophet of Ajas

“Creepers!” Telia reports. She’s nursing Jayme, and for once the office is quiet. “I just spent half an hour with them! What the hell is this about?”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing!” Telia’s eyes are guileless, “I don’t tell people things, you know that.” She leans closer and lowers her voice, and Aiah hopes there isn’t some mage hovering in the room, overhearing every word. “I didn’t mention your little after-hours thing,” Telia whispers. Or course she’d told maybe a hundred other people in the building, but maybe the creepers wouldn’t know to ask any of them.

Aiah wonders how many people had seen her driving off in Constantine’s limousine.

“The folks upstairs are covering their asses,” Aiah says. “They’re trying to lay blame on me because they wrote off the Bursary Street flamer without a proper investigation.” She drops into her gray metal chair and it sags about twenty degrees to the right. Anger flares in Aiah’s heart. She swivels the chair left and right, but the list remains.

“
Shit!”
she shouts, stands and kicks the chair across the room, where it crashes into the other two disabled chairs. All three chairs tumble onto the cracked tile floor. Fury flares in her veins. “I don’t know how many reports we’ve filed with Maintenance in the last year!”

Urgency enters Telia’s voice again. “But the investigation . . . what are you going to
do?
”

Aiah restrains herself from giving the chair another kick. “Tell me,” she demands, “if I should be afraid of an organization that can’t even fix a chair.”

TRACKLINE INTENDANT RESIGNS!

MAINTAINS INNOCENCE

SCANDAL CLAIMS ITS GREATEST VICTIM

Aiah walks into the 09:00 emergency meeting pushing her broken chair in front of her. While the others watch, she places the chair against the wall and then sits in one of the comfortably padded chairs at the long boardroom table. The others observe but do not comment.

Oeneme is present in person, testifying to the seriousness of the meeting, “I’m not interested in facts,” he says. “I’m interested in
impressions.
”

Oeneme’s subordinates duly supply him with their impressions, relieved of the duty of mentioning the fact that it was Oeneme himself who ignored Rohder’s report that the flamer’s sourceline was eastward and instead ordered Emergency Response to Old Parade.

The meeting drags on for three hours and, as no one is willing to say anything pertinent, accomplishes nothing.

In the New City, Aiah thinks darkly, all these people would be thrown out onto the street to beg for their bread.

When Aiah leaves the meeting, she drags her plush chair behind her and takes it to her office. Everyone sees, but no one says a word.

Her office smells of urine and baby stool. Two creepers wait for her there, small, polite men in neat suits, a different style from the street bruisers she met yesterday. “We’d like you to come with us,” one says, speaking over the wails of the baby.

“Are you going to buy me lunch?” Aiah asks.

They look at each other. “No.”

“Then you can wait till after midbreak.”

She plants the stolen chair in front of her desk and leaves. Outside, she buys a bowl of savory broth with rice noodles from a vendor and eats it while sitting on a bench on the Avenue of the Exchange. She reads
Proceedings
, making notes, for the rest of the lunch hour, then collects the deposit on her soup bowl and heads back to her office.

The creepers are waiting when she returns. Telia leaves for her own lunch, taking the baby with her. For the next hour Aiah answers the creepers’ patient questions. When they start to ask the same questions all over again, hoping to catch her in some contradiction, she calls an end to it.

“Unless you have anything new to ask, I have a job to do.”

Somewhat to her surprise, the creepers put away their notes, thank her pleasantly, and leave.

NEW CITY STUDY GROUP FORMING

CONTACT BOX 1205

“15.31 hours, Horn Six reorientation to degrees 114m. Ne?”

“Da. 15:31 hours, Horn Six reorientation to degrees 114. Confirmed.”

“15:31, Horn Six transmit at 800 mm. 30 minutes. Ne?”

“Da. 15:31, Horn Six transmit at 800 mm. 30 minutes. Confirmed.”

IS ALDEMAR CONSTANTINE’S NEW LOVER?

SPECULATION SWEEPS MEDIA!

Her yellow message light blinks furiously in her apartment. All the messages are from relatives approached by the creepers: they all want to know what they should say, if anything, and simultaneously demand to know what she’s really up to.

No messages from her mother; maybe the creepers haven’t located her as yet.

Aiah goes out to buy supplies for supper, and while at the grocer’s uses a pay phone to call her grandmother.

“
What’s happening?” Galaiah demands. “Did you do something stupid? Did that
passu
of yours get you in trouble?”

“I haven’t done anything stupid. I haven’t done anything at all. It’s some people above me who are trying to cover up their idiocy — too complicated to explain, really.”

“You’re a Barkazil. They’ll sell you out without even thinking about it.”

“I know.” Aiah looks at the grocery customers standing in lines with their sacks of food and wonders if she’s being followed. There are some Jaspeeri men loitering by the exit, but then on the other hand there are always people loitering there, and they don’t have to be creepers.

And of course if some mage is following her on an invisible plasm tether, she’d never know.

“Nana,” she says, “I’d appreciate it if you could just ask everyone in the family to tell the police they don’t know anything, and they think I’m an honest person. I don’t know if it would help, but at least it wouldn’t put anybody in jeopardy.”

“Your mother,” Galaiah says darkly.

“Yes,” Aiah says, heart sinking. Gurrah would tell the creepers anything that came into her head and worry about incriminating her daughter later.

“I’ll tell her to throw them out and say nothing,” Galaiah says. “That way she can play a scene.”

Aiah is relieved. “Do that, please. If I suggest that, she’ll just do the opposite.”

“True.”

“And tell people that I... well, someone may be listening on my phone, so they should be careful about the messages they leave me.”

“Yes. I’ll tell them.”

“Thank you, Nana.”

“You be careful. You can’t trust longnoses.”

“I know.”

“Don’t you talk to them, either.”

“I don’t have anything to tell them, anyway.”

On the way home Aiah buys a few pieces of fruit from a street vendor — a battered orange and a pair of plums. At home she washes the plums carefully with water and chlorine bleach — that’s what you do with street fruit — and eats one. The pulp is strangely tasteless, full of juice but without savor.

Constantine’s arboretum, she thinks, has spoiled her for the ordinary stuff.

HYDROGEN LEAK KILLS 50 IN FIFTEENTH WARD!

Aiah makes a sauce for vat curd out of freeze-dried vegetables and some spring onions from her pocket garden, then watches the video news. Disaster teams from other areas are pouring into Caraqui. Drumbeth, on behalf of the new triumvirate, speaks about the need for aid and compassion, his voice firm, his tone a bit fierce. A member of the Keremath family, who as ambassador to another metropolis escaped the coup, denounces the new government as murderers and proclaims a government in exile. The few surviving Mondray’s Regulars, having surrendered, are being air-shuttled back to the Timocracy.

Considerable air time is devoted to speculation about Constantine, even though he hasn’t appeared in public since yesterday. There’s much more interest in Constantine than in Drumbeth or any other member of the actual government.

Aiah swallows a mouthful of pasta and curd. In Caraqui, she thinks, things are
happening
.

GARGELIUS ENCHUK ON TOUR

TICKETS AVAILABLE ON THE
WIRE
!

“09:00 hours, Horn Two reorientation to degrees 040. Ne?”

“Da. 09:00 hours, Horn Two reorientation to degrees 040. Confirmed.”

“09:00, Horn Two transmit at 1400 mm. 10 minutes. Ne?”

“Da. 09:00, Horn Two transmit at 1400 mm. 10 minutes. Confirmed.”

COUP SURVIVOR DENOUNCES CONSTANTINE

CALLS FOR WORLD COUNCIL INTERVENTION

By midbreak the
Wire
has found out about the burned factory’s connection to the coup in Caraqui and a pack of reporters sits in the Authority lobby demanding information. Another emergency meeting is called.

“Simple,” Mengene says. “We blame everything on Constantine. The factory fire, the Bursary Street flamer, everything.”

“There’s no evidence connecting him to either,” Oeneme points out.

“
Who else could it be? And even if it wasn’t, who cares? We’re not judges, we don’t
need
evidence just to smear him in the media. It gets us completely off the hook.”