Walter Williams - City on Fire

He rubs his chin. “I am straining my mind to find a theory that will accurately account for this rise. And I can think of none.”

“I can’t think of this plasm increase as anything but a blessing.” Aiah shifts an overflowing ashtray on Rohder’s glass-topped desk, then perches on the desk’s corner, crossing her ankles and lazily swinging her feet.

“And your other work?” she asks.

“The atmospheric generation teams continue to report success, and the minister continues to press us to actually erect a building. We are on the verge of achieving a degree of expertise that may permit that, but I will not do such a thing until I’m ready.” He shakes his head, reaches absently into his shirt pocket for a packet of cigarets, and produces only an empty one. Crumpled, it joins other empty packets in the vicinity of his wastebasket. He looks at it with a drift of sadness in his eyes.

“You are going to get a formal report on this tomorrow,” he says, “but I may as well tell you now about the results from our Havilak’s team. You recall we were going to perform some freestanding transformations on an office building owned by the Ministry of Works—retroactively alter the internal structure to bring it in line with FIT—and they found the most extraordinary thing: it had already been done.” Rohder’s watery blue eyes gaze up at Aiah in bemuse-ment. “Some unknown mage, or maybe a group of mages, had already gone into the building and done the job on it!”

Aiah looks at him. She has been in charge of a government department long enough to know that the cause probably lies within the bureaucracy.

“Our people didn’t get the work order mixed up? The job wasn’t done accidentally by another of your teams?”

“That’s the first thing we checked, and the answer’s no. None of our teams had ever done a job that large—we’d only been experimenting with empty, war-damaged buildings until we could be certain we could do the job safely.” He shakes his head. “Besides, the job was done differently from the way we’d planned it. We chose that particular building because it was new, only a hundred and eighty years old, and we had the plans on file—our engineers had planned every change we were going to make ahead of time. And when we discovered the changes already made, we discovered that they were different, though still made in perfect accord with fractionate interval theory…” He shakes his head. “Who would have done such a thing? And why?”

“Fraud, perhaps?” Aiah ventures. “Trying to raise the amount of plasm generated by the structure, and siphoning it off for their own use?” She reaches for a pad and paper. “I’ll have the ministry send a team to inspect the meters—”

“I already have,” Rohder says. “And I checked the building’s records—they show the increase. No one stole it. The excess went into the public mains, just as it ought.”

Aiah looks at him. “So who, then? And why?”

Rohder considers. “The who is most interesting. Who in Caraqui knows enough of fractionate interval theory to make such concrete application?”

“FIT isn’t a secret.”

“No.” Rohder’s voice turns rueful. “Not a secret, but I doubt that more than a handful of people have ever read Proceedings. So far as I know, our own teams are the only people ever to try to apply the theory in practice.”

“Perhaps someone on our transformation team is working on his own? Maybe the office building was just practice, and he intends to strike out on his own?”

“But why pick a building that he knew we were going to alter?”

Aiah looks out the window. Plasm displays shimmer on the near horizon. She bites her lip at the relentless conclusions that fall into place in her mind.

“Altering that building was illegal,” she says. “The plasm used to make the alterations might have been stolen.” She looks at him uneasily. “I regret to say that one part of my department may have to start an investigation of another part.”

Rohder leans back in his chair, looks at the data. “I can narrow the investigation for you. I can safely say that there are only a dozen or so people in my section that could have pulled this off.”

A falcon dives past the window, talons arched for prey. Aiah turns to Rohder again. “Very good. If you would send me the names…?”

Rohder gives a reluctant sigh, his eyes never leaving the screen. “I suppose I must.”

Regret sighs through Aiah’s mind. She herself, working for Rohder, had deceived him; it is possible, therefore, that someone else had.

Rohder’s division hadn’t undergone the stringent security checks required of the more paramilitary PED; Rohder had just hired as much young talent as he could find.

And it is necessary that an investigation be performed. In order to clear Rohder and Aiah themselves, at least.

An investigation might eventually mean brain scans for some of Rohder’s most skilled, valuable mages. Aiah wouldn’t be surprised if some of them quit rather than submit.

And in the end the mages involved might prove to be another group entirely.

Aiah bites her lip, then brings up the matter that has brought her to Rohder’s office in the first place.

“On another subject entirely,” she says, “what do you know about hanged men?”

Surprise lights Rohder’s eyes. He rears back in his seat and cranes his neck to look at her, the discomfort of his position a reflection of the discomfort visible in his face.

“Ice men, you mean?” he asks. “The damned?”

“Yes.”

Rohder frowns. “// they exist—and I am not entirely convinced that they do—then hanged men are very rare and highly dangerous. Toxic. If you ever encounter one, I would run as fast as possible and pray to Vida the Merciful while I ran.”

“How do you kill them?”

“It’s far harder than the chromoplays would suggest.” His frown deepens. “Why are you asking?”

Aiah leans closer. “I trust this will go no farther?” He shrugs. “Who would I tell?”

Were Rohder a Barkazil, his returning a question in this manner would tell Aiah that he was planning on telling everyone in the world; but Rohder is not a Barkazil, and Aiah reckons she can trust him with the falsehood she has carefully prepared.

Even lies, she knows, require a degree of trust. She retrieves her story from the mental closet where she has stored it. “I’ve found… something… out there in the plasm well. The thing scares me—it’s cold and it’s strong, and it’s lurking around the Aerial Palace. I’m afraid it might be scouting for an attack.”

Rohder’s look turns inward, calculating. He gropes in his pocket for a cigaret, remembers he’s run out, and instead gnaws a nicotine-stained thumbnail.

“If it is a hanged man,” he says carefully, “and not some kind of plasm construction, I don’t know anything that can stop it should it decide to attack.”

“If it isn’t a hanged man,” Aiah says, “it’s something else that can live and move in a plasm well, so we might as well call it a hanged man.”

Rohder’s absorbed, thoughtful expression shows no sign that he’s heard. “If it is a hanged man,” he says slowly, “and it’s moving through the Palace plasm well, then it may be an ally of someone already in the Palace. Someone very powerful.”

A series of barking curses chase each other through Aiah’s mind. Rohder wasn’t supposed to work this out, at least not yet.

Vexed with herself for not anticipating this, she reminds herself that he is over three hundred years old. He may not be very worldly, but he’s done very little but deal with bureaucracy for all his professional life, and he understands the architecture of power.