Walter Williams - City on Fire

The dreaming sister hesitates. She looks away, face sober beneath her pale cap of hair. “We have seen you in our meditations. The plasm displays are nothing we do, nothing we create consciously… They are reflections of our meditations, of what we feel in the plasm. And though we feel the plasm’s pleasure, we also sense, through our contemplation of the imagoes, that their present interaction is likely to lead to violence.”

“The plasm is pleased by the idea of war?”

The dreaming sister seems shocked. “No. Of course not. The plasm’s joy is in the present, and the war, if our visions are true, will be in the future. The war is not a dream, it is a nightmare, and it haunts us.”

“My face was all over the sky, and it’s all over this building. And other faces are repeating themselves, Sorya and Constantine and…”

“Yes.” Order of Eternity rises from her couch and takes a few thoughtful steps. “We are seeing the faces on the imagoes repeating one another. Every Apprentice is you, every Architect is the same man, the one with the braided hair. You are all important to the plasm, somehow. It has to do with the change that we sense, the plasm that sings to us, in us. This has not happened before, not in the memory of anyone here, and we suspect not in the history of our order.” “ Death,” Aiah says.

The sister’s eyes turn hard. “Yes. We have felt that one, too, creeping about the plasm mains. An unholy thing, half-unreal, a perversion of plasm itself.”

“Help me kill it,” Aiah says.

Order of Eternity looks up at her, surprise on her face. “You can’t kill Death,” she says.

“This Death can be killed,” Aiah says. “And if it is perverting the plasm that is giving you such joy, you’ll want it destroyed.”

“We do not act,” insistently. “We contemplate. We observe the things that are, the things that are fundamental. We do nothing in the world. We do not kill, we do not undo, not even the things that are better undone.”

Aiah narrows her eyes as she looks at the smaller woman. Put it, she thinks, in their terms.

“Death,” Aiah says, “ this Death, this particular Death, will bring down the Architect. The Architect, the Apprentice, and the Mage are changing the world, building something new, and the plasm is singing to you—the plasm itself is telling you that it approves of what the Architect is doing. If Death and the Shadow have their way, the war will come—the vision of war that haunts your dreams, the vision that you spread across the sky yesterday so the whole metropolis could share in your nightmare.”

Order of Eternity spreads her hands, gives Aiah a helpless look. “We do not do,” she says.

The sisters’ insistence grates on Aiah’s nerves. She, Aiah, has been on the front lines of one battle or another for months, and she has no patience left for those who can’t choose sides.

“Then you will be right, by your own lights,” she says. “You will do nothing, and you will be right, and Death and the war will come. People who do nothing are always right, they always retain their moral superiority over the rest of us,” sarcasm touching her voice, “but that’s not because it’s right to do nothing, it’s because if you act, you take a chance that your action might be wrong, and you’re not the sort to take chances, are you? You’ve never had your ideas tested, and if you have anything to say about it, they never will be tested…”

Order of Eternity merely looks at her. Aiah stares back, anger a dull ache at the back of her skull. She is willing to continue the argument until the sisters give in from sheer weariness, but she knows there must be a better way, a key that Cunning Aiah can find, then turn to unlock the situation. She looks around to view her audience, the group of sisters who stare back at her, expressionless, as if she were but a figure in a dream. Behind them, framed on the wall, is a relief of The Apprentice, Aiah’s own frowning face gazing at the book of recipes.

Ah, Aiah thinks. She has forgotten, lost in this maze, that her image possesses power, that she is, to these people, a splinter of their own dreaming…

She turns back to Order of Eternity, straightens her spine, looks down at the smaller woman. “I am an imago,” she says. “An imago stands before you to tell you these things, and the plasm that forms these imagoes would not lie to you. I tell you this: The Death must die! The Architect must be saved! The war must not come to pass! I come from your own dreams to tell you this!”

Order of Eternity stares at her, eyes wide, a touch of fear crossing her young, freckled face. She sighs, turns away, takes Aiah’s arm, leads her to the alcove.

“Come sit in my place,” she says. “And explain these things to us. We do not know you, not really, and we don’t know these other people whose images lie in our dreams, and—for the first time, perhaps, in ages—we would hear of the world outside.”

“First,” Aiah says, “tell me about The Mage.”

“The Mage is a powerful imago,” says Order of Eternity. “The Mage is he who reorders nature in accordance with his will, who demands obedience from reality itself. But he is heedless as to consequence—his actions proceed from his own will alone, without regard for what follows. His actions can lead to tragedy as well as glory. His force of will makes him nearly invincible, but he is a dangerous figure to know, and often fatal to those around him.”

Rohder? she thinks. Dangerous? The world-bending will sounds much more like Constantine than the mild-mannered Rohder.

Well, she thinks, the imagoes can’t be right all the time.

Aiah sits in the alcove and gazes out at her audience, two dozen or so women in gray shifts, all looking at her with solemn, youthful faces, the one exception the twisted Avian with the fierce eyes and the brown, barred wings tented over her shoulders. “Please sit down,” she tells them, and as they do Aiah smiles at this reflection of the classroom, with herself the teacher and these ageless, youthful-seeming women in their gray uniforms the students. She remembers herself, seated before a speaker on Career Day, drowsing through a lecture on the joys of being a marketing executive for Colorsafe Soap.

The Dreaming Sisters know nothing of the world outside, and Aiah has to explain who the players are. A few of the younger sisters have heard of Constantine; none have heard of Sorya or Rohder or the PED. She finds it easier, in the end, to speak of the Architect, the Shadow, and the Mage.

She is aware, as she speaks, that the interpretation she is feeding them may not be true—it may not be Rohder’s techniques that are making the plasm sing in the sisters’ minds; it may not be Taikoen that is threatening the peace of their dreaming—every word she speaks might be a lie, a piece of pure manipulation.

But so might the sisters be manipulating her: stealing plasm to create the huge displays that lured her here, diverting her from an investigation by putting her face on the imagoes, all for some subterranean purpose of their own.

Users and the used: who is the passu, who the pascol? It doesn’t matter.

She needs their cooperation, and she must do what she can to get it.

In the end, the Dreaming Sisters agree to do as she asks. Death will die.

Aiah returns from her visit to the Dreaming Sisters and finds Alfeg waiting in the corridor near her apartment, standing uneasily beneath a carving of apricots and carnations. He holds a file in his hand, and his eyes are grave.

Aiah signs him not to speak until she opens her door and leaves the surveillance zone outside her apartment. The scent of massed flowers strikes her as she presses the light switch and she sees the surprising floral blaze, flowers everywhere, on every table, chair, or horizontal surface, their combined aromas heavy in the room.