Walter Williams - City on Fire

They lie together only a short while before Constantine has to leave. “A meeting,” he sighs, “ cocktails. Would you believe it? But he is the Polar League’s ambassador, and we need League funds if we are to accomplish anything at all.”

She touches his shoulder, her fingers following the sheen of light on his black skin. “I wish you would stay.”

He bends over her, kisses her gravely on the forehead. “I cannot treat you as you deserve,” he says. “And for that, as much as anything else, I require your understanding.”

“Sorya—,” she begins, then cuts short at his frown.

“Don’t ask me to choose between you,” he says. “It is not simple. Sorya is what she is, and for a variety of reasons, I need her—her mind and skills more than anything.”

“I was not asking for a choice,” Aiah says. “I was wondering if she would kill me. She and I had… a side-agreement… concerning you. I may have violated it by coming here. And she has already sent me a message.”

All truces are temporary, Sorya said.

Constantine’s brows knit. Aiah can see muscles working on the side of his neck, as if he is chewing the news over before he makes his calm answer.

“If she harms you,” he says (his eyes are stone, cold as the breath of Taikoen), “then it will be the end of her.”

“I hope you will tell her that.”

“I will see that she knows.”

He kisses her forehead again, sealing the promise, then rises and begins to dress.

Aiah lies still for a moment, her nerves humming with the strangeness, the peculiar uncanny intensity, of this life-and-death bargain, and then she remembers she has carried something with her to give to him. She rises from the bed, looks for a moment for a dressing gown before remembering she hasn’t as yet acquired one, and then goes to her baggage to find her treasure.

She approaches him naked, the book offered on her upturned palms. “Yes?” he says, and cocks an eye at the gift.

“I brought this for you. You can judge it better than I can—but I think it will help our work.”

He picks up the book, looks at the gold lettering on the red plastic binding. “ Proceedings of the Research Division of the faspeeri Plasm Authority. Volume Fourteen, no less.” He sighs. “An attractive title. You don’t want me to start at the beginning?”

“The first thirteen volumes are all formulae and proofs,” Aiah says. “I don’t understand them. This volume has the recommendations, and they involve a way to increase plasm by about twenty percent through use of something called ‘fractionate intervals.’ ”

Constantine looks skeptical.

“The Authority spent eight years producing the data,” Aiah says, “but then the Research Division got flushed. I think the decision was political, but I don’t know the details. The man in charge was Rohder—he’s brilliant, a real wizard, but I don’t think he’s very practical. Now he’s in charge of a whole suite of empty offices back in the Plasm Authority Building.”

Constantine frowns, runs his thumb along the spine. “I will give it my attention when I can,” he says.

Aiah puts her arms around him and holds him close, hoping to carry some last imprint of Constantine on her flesh. He kisses her—and for a moment she feels him softening, as if he might throw off his clothes and join her on the bed again, but the moment passes, and he says good-bye and returns to the Polar League’s ambassador and his duty.

Aiah decides she might as well follow his example, and begins to make a list for the next day.

In the end, Aiah’s heart fails her where Gil is concerned. She writes him a letter and sends it surface mail instead of using a wiregram or making a phone call. Her written explanations and excuses are awkward, unconvincing even to herself. She knows that he will have a hard time paying for the apartment they’d shared, and so she wires him ten thousand dalders out of her account in Gunalaht.

Conscience money. And sure proof to the Jaspeeri authorities of her profitable, and to them criminal, activities.

She and Ethemark march through the Owl Wing, putting plastic slips on the doors of empty offices that announce they are now part of the Plasm Enforcement Division. She then informs the Palace Property Department, in charge of room allocations, that the offices are now theirs. Theirs, by right of conquest and the fact that no one, in the confusion, disputes them.

The interviewing and hiring begins. Drumbeth announces publicly that plasm thieves have a thirty-day amnesty in which to inform the authorities of their illegal plasm taps, meters, and connections. Public response is tepid, but the deadline provides Aiah with a firm date by which she has to be ready.

She promises herself that the first arrests will be made at 24:01 on the day following the deadline. One minute after the amnesty ends.

During the next two weeks, Constantine visits her twice more in her suite, spending his rare moments of spare time in her company. She is working double shifts, but his schedule is worse. Depending on the state of his elusive progress through the complexities of coalition politics, his moods swing between booming elation and fretful anxiety. But when he touches her, when he kisses her or moves with her in bed, his mood shifts: he is entirely there, intent eyes holding her as if she were pinned in the radiance of searchlights, a kind of scrutiny that would be frightening if it weren’t for the fact that, apparently, he approves of what he sees.

Daily Aiah feeds on plasm-energy to keep away the bone-weariness that, in normal circumstance, her responsibilities and schedule should inflict upon her. But the plasm also makes her fearless, gives her a sense of invincibility. She is bolder than she would be otherwise.

The taste of power sings through her nerves all day, an echo of the world’s ultimate chorus, of its strangely pliant reality.

She is willing certain things into being. Time will tell if she is successful.

SECOND TITANIC MONTH LORDS OF THE NEW CITY SEE IT NOW!

Aiah soars out over the city. Plasm sings a song of triumph in her ectoplasmic ears. In the distance, ringing the metropolis on all sides, she can see the city’s crown, the point at which it becomes possible to build on bedrock, and where thousands of tall buildings loom over the flat aspect of the sea.

A vast, invisible technical array makes possible this flight. Underneath it all is the well of plasm that interlaces Caraqui, that underlies it like its very own sea, that flows in mains and is collected in capacitors and powers the aspirations of a thousand mages.

Beneath the Aerial Palace is one collection point, the huge room sheathed in steel and bronze, holding its collected plasm in towers of gleaming brass and black ceramic. Governing this power, beneath the watchful eyes of the icon of Two-Faced Tangid, are the technicians in the control room, watching their dials, consulting their schedules, throwing worn butter-smooth brass levers that lower contacts into the receptacles atop the accumulators, that start the flood of plasm along its predestined route. And from there the plasm floods upward, like water under high pressure, along circuits and conduits to the roof, where it pours along the scalloped transmission horn set at 044 degrees true, and from there leaps into the sky.

Aiah sits in her office, the t-grip in her hand now wired into the circuit. Her mind molds the plasm to her will, controls her flight over the dome of the city. Her sensorium—the complex of senses with which she has endowed herself—sights for landmarks, finds them, corrects her flight. She brings her awareness from her plasm-sensorium into her body, laying a mundane reality onto the hyperreal sensations of plasm.