Walter Williams - City on Fire

A crystal comprehension forms in Aiah’s mind, and suddenly she knows.

Constantine was trying to justify an attempt to end Taikoen’s existence. To kill it.

But he didn’t. He never tried. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, or he found a reason to keep Taikoen alive.

The columns of print swim before Aiah’s eyes. She takes a deep breath, tips her head back, and lets what she knows of Constantine’s biography enter her mind. Constantine would have encountered Taikoen in his early twenties, before he met Aldemar and went into the School of Radritha. Constantine had been a member of a kind of cult, and then his cousin and all the other cult members were killed, and Constantine wrote his article and went to university for an advanced degree, and from there, and from Aldemar, to the monkish order of the School of Radritha, where he was taught an extreme self-discipline, a philosophy based on the denial of the world and of passion, a retreat from action and power.

He was fleeing, Aiah realizes. Running from Taikoen, from what with this essay he had promised to do… But the university had not been far enough, nor had Aldemar’s arms; he needed something more radical, like Radritha, a school which maintained that nothing mattered outside the perfectly balanced, passionless mind. If nothing outside the mind mattered, it didn’t signify whether Taikoen existed or not.

Aiah glances out the window, sees splashes of brightness in the sky where disembodied clothing dances in ecstasy over Colorsafe Soap. A cold hand brushes her spine. The thought of Constantine afraid is in itself frightening: he has never seemed afraid of anything.

Of course, she thinks immediately, he was young. Later he left the school and returned to Cheloki to begin his New City campaign, and there were no hesitations there.

But when he reestablished contact with Taikoen, it was an alliance that Constantine offered, a bargain. Two lives per month, two bodies, and then, when he needed Taikoen again, more lives, more bodies.

Color bleeds across the sky. Aiah closes her eyes and wonders if she will have the courage to face the thing that Constantine did not.

GARGELIUS ENCHUK WEARS GULMAN SHOES WHY DON’T YOU?

Aiah strolls into the antechamber to the secure room, and smiles at the clerk, a huge stoneface who could probably keep the files safe simply through her intimidating presence.

“Hello,” the clerk says. “I thought you were on vacation.”

“Officially. But there was something I need to look at. I need to check the logs and see which files I had out last week.”

The clerk obligingly turns the logbook around to face Aiah, who pages back through the book until she finds Constantine’s signature. Only four days ago. Her nerves hum as she jots the file numbers down—no names are used in the logs, nothing that might reveal their contents to an outsider—and then she turns the book around again and thanks the clerk. “Let me just look one of those up,” she says, and heads for the secure room’s barred gate.

Refiq, Tollan, Brandrag. The names attached to the files that Constantine had read. Cousins—not Handmen, but bad enough for all that. One of these, Aiah assumes, will be Taikoen’s next victim.

She checks the files out just long enough to copy the pages and the cousins’ chromographs, and then returns them to the strong room.

And wonders about the next step.

COLONELS’ COUNCIL DEMANDS EXTRADITION OF FORMER OFFICIALS

NESCA DECLINES TO REVOKE ASYLUM

“Did you have a good time?” Aiah asks. Khorsa nods. “Very fine, yes. Lost a few too many dinars in the casinos, though.” “And the airship?”

Khorsa smiles. “The Dharku was lovely. The smoothest, most comfortable trip imaginable. And the views! We spent half our time in the observation lounge.”

“I’m glad. Would you like some coffee before you sit down?”

Khorsa, just back from her honeymoon, helps herself to some. Alfeg is already present, his notebook ready.

“By the way,” he says, “you have a request from the Sector Gazette for an interview.”

Sector was a euphemism for Barkazi, as the latter did not, officially, exist. The evasion permitted the magazine’s distribution in Jabzi, where the word Barkazi did not officially exist either.

“When?” Aiah asks. She is sick of interviews.

“Deadline’s in three days.” Alfeg offers a modest smile. “They must have noticed how much that profile in Corona boosted circulation.”

“I’ll think about it. Next time they should give more warning.”

Khorsa stirs sugar in her coffee and drops into a chair. Aiah pushes files toward them. Refiq, Tollan, Brandrag.

“I need the two of you to set up a rotating surveillance on these three,” she says. “This surveillance involves the highest possible security. Only the three of us know about this assignment. I want the surveillance to be run with extreme caution, from a distance. Configure your sensorium so that you can perceive plasm. Assume that the subjects are wired to plasm at all times, and are aware they might be surveilled. No one else must be permitted to know what the two of you are up to.”

Alfeg picks up a file, looks through it, then glances up at Aiah.

“This is a copy of the original file,” he says. Aiah nods. “Yes.”

“These files aren’t supposed to be copied.”

Aiah looks coldly into Alfeg’s eyes. “Yes,” she says.

Alfeg glances nervously down at the file. “Ah,” he says.

Khorsa pages through another file. “I don’t see anything unusual about this Mr. Brandrag,” she says. “A typical cousin, so far as I can see. Why does the surveillance have to be so secret?”

Aiah looks at them both. “Because,” she says, “one of these three men is scheduled to come down with the Party Sickness.”

COLONELS’ COUNCIL DEMANDS EXTRADITION, MOBILIZES FORCES

NESCA “WILL NOT BOW TO INTIMIDATION”

Aiah arrives breathless in Constantine’s anteroom, briefcase full of the latest plasm figures, and finds others waiting outside the office door: the other triumvirs clustered with Belckon, Sorya smoking a cigaret in the corner, Geymard and Arviro, both in undress uniform, and Personal Secretary Drusus pretending to look busy behind his desk…

Martinus, the bodyguard, stands quietly in front of Constantine’s door, his callused hands folded quietly. His attitude is polite, but clearly nothing is getting past him right now.

Aiah pauses at the door, catches her breath. The message had said, Come at once.

Come yesterday is what its tone had implied.

And now Constantine is keeping even the other triumvirs waiting outside his door. Aiah can tell from their expressions that they aren’t happy about it.

Aiah walks up to the guard, lifts her brows in a silent query, receives in return a minute shake of Martinus’s armored head. She turns back toward the room and drifts toward Drusus’s desk.

“Mr. Drusus? Is the president—?”

“The triumvir is on the phone,” softly. “It’s urgent.”

Aiah glances down at Drusus’s communications array and sees that no lights shine to mark that any of the phone lines are being used. She bends down and whispers into his ear.

“If the triumvir were on the phone,” she says, “there would be something lit, ne?”

A look of horror crosses Drusus’s face. He picks up a headset from the cradle and presses buttons. Lights begin to flash. Aiah straightens, moves away from the desk, and wonders if anyone else has observed this discrepancy.

Plasm buzzes in her nerves. Before the panic started, she’d given herself a dose to clear her head and burn off the fatigue toxins. Now she finds plasm-energy twitching at her, making her want to do anything rather than sit in a waiting room.