Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  Aiah returns to her room, brushes her hand down the blue satin bedspread, looks at herself in the diamond-shaped mirrors planted in the walls. She looks ready for an off-shift out. Pity she doesn’t know anyplace to go, and she doesn’t even know why she’s here. Her room has a connecting door with Constantine’s and she can hear voices murmur in the other room. They have a terrace as a well, but they’re dining in Constantine’s room to make it harder on eavesdroppers.

  Aiah wonders if she’s one of the eavesdroppers in question. Alcohol spins in her head.

  She puts her fingers on the handle.

  There is a dangerous taste on her tongue. Why not? she decides, and presses the handle down gently. She eases the door open until she can see a sliver of the room’s silver-and-black decor. Geymard, Sorya and Constantine are seated at a table less than five paces away. Aiah presses her head to the tiny gap.

  “The aerodrome’s not important,” Geymard says. Aiah can see the back of his head, one ear, a bit of cheekbone. He has a drawling accent that Aiah can’t quite place. “There won’t be any reinforcements landing there — all the important units are near the Metropolitan’s palace anyway.”

  “The aerodrome is important,” Constantine says calmly, “because we wish to prevent people leaving.” Aiah can see him in profile. His face and body mask Sorya, who is behind him.

  “Also,” Constantine adds, “it is vital to be seen to control forms of transportation.”

  “It’s a diversion of force better used elsewhere.”

  “You don’t need that much force to control an aerodrome,” Constantine says. “Just park some vehicles on the runways. A few snipers in nearby buildings can keep the ’drome’s personnel from moving them.”

  He leans back and Aiah’s heart lurches as he unscreens Sorya, who seems to be staring straight at Aiah. But Sorya’s expression is languid, her hands are distractedly caressing her wineglass, and there’s no sign she’s seen Aiah at all.

  Not yet, anyway. Very quietly, very slowly, Aiah closes the door, and steps back.

  Nothing happens, of course. As if someone would come crashing in with a pistol.

  Aiah kicks off her shoes, polarizes the windows to a perfect obsidian black reflection, and builds a nest of pillows on the bed. She lies down and presses the remote control panel that gives her video. The oval screen blinks on, a drama about a singer who was trying to fight her way to the top while battling the Operation’s attempts to control her career.

  Absurd. As if they wouldn’t just slice up her face with a razor to make an example of her. Plenty more singers where she came from.

  Aerodrome. The word forms itself on Aiah’s tongue.

  Constantine’s target would seem to be an entire Metropolis. Why else seize an aerodrome? And not for itself, but to keep people from escaping.

  Cheloki again? Could he be trying to seize his old home by force?

  But that didn’t quite make sense. Cheloki was on the other side of the world: why conspire here? Why give Aiah a day’s training in underwater breathing apparatus and take her to another metropolis under a false name?

  This, she decides, is going to require some reflection.

  Aiah rises from the bed and fetches her glass and the bottle from her table. Maybe the rest of the wine will help her think.

  *

  The video is babbling and Aiah doesn’t hear the knock at first. When the knock comes again she sits up too quickly and the wine she’s drunk takes a sudden spiral curve along the inside rim of her skull. She runs fingers through her hair, takes a deep breath to clear her head, says, “Come in.”

  It’s Constantine, still dressed formally. Perhaps in honor of his guest his jacket is of a military cut, though he carries no rank or insignia, “I’m sorry to have left you alone for so long,” he says. “Had I given it any thought, I would have had one of the guards take you to see the sights.” He looks at the empty bottle of wine, the smudged glass, and a glint of amusement shines in his glance. “Should there be any ill effects, a little plasm on awakening and you’ll feel good as new.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Aiah reaches for the video control, slaps it off. “I didn’t realize Sorya would be here,” she says.

  “We came by separate paths. Safer that way. And I didn’t want you at dinner, because that way Geymard would have been able to identify you.”

  She blinks at him. “To whom?”

  “It hardly matters to whom, but you would be a blackmail target for the rest of your life.”

  Aiah doesn’t in any case believe they’d have wanted her listening to their talk of aerodromes and the Metropolitan’s palace and other targets, but she’s willing to give credit to Constantine for an inventive and reasonably gracious apology. She sits down on the bed, arranges her skirt, looks up.

  “Metropolitan,” she says, “why am I here?”

  “I have come on purpose to tell you. May I sit?”

  She nods like Meldurne playing a gracious hostess in a chromoplay. He plucks at the knees of his tight pipestem trousers and sits on the wine-colored satin spread. She can scent his hair oil over the perfume of the lavender water someone’s sprinkled on the sheets.

  “Tomorrow I’d like you to join me on a trip across the border into Caraqui.”

  All she knows about Caraqui is the famous Aerial Palace. “And we’re going to dive there?” she asks.

  “I would like to show you some plasm connections that are similar to ones I’ll need to ...” He shrugs coyness away. “To destroy or disable. Disable, for preference. They’re underwater cables, all alike, more or less. In the actual target — not Caraqui, you understand — they lead to a combat platform that we’d like to deprive of sustenance. At the core are bundles of steel cable — 164 of them, to be precise — and these are armored with linked ceramic plates. And then they’re wrapped in multiple layers of plastic sheathing, and then protected on the outside with a linked bronze collection web.”

  Aiah finds herself laughing. “And you want me to do what with this?”

  “Offer any suggestions that occur to you.”

  Aiah laughs again, falls back against her nest of pillows. Constantine continues in perfect seriousness.

  “The traditional method of dealing with these cables is to pack a garland of plastic explosive around them and set it off, but that may not be possible, and it doesn’t always work anyway. And there are over forty of these cables on the actual target, multiple redundancy, and even more conventional plasm conduits above the water on bridges.”

  Aiah shakes with laughter. “Why are we bothering?”

  “Because the other option,” Constantine says, “is a surprise attack against the combat platform with everything we’ve got. And that would kill hundreds, maybe thousands of people who I would just as soon not send to the Shield.”

  Aiah’s laughter dies away into a long moment of cold silence. She sits up, shakes her head. Not a laughing matter, she thinks, after all. “All right, Metropolitan,” she says. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you, Miss Aiah.” Constantine takes her hand, leans over her, kisses her lips. She looks at him, wine burning in her cheeks. He stands.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Breakfast on the terrace?”

  “Certainly.”

  He glides to the door and presses the handle down. “Have you ever been on a powerboat?” he asks.

  “I’ve never been on any kind of boat.”

  “I think you will enjoy it. Sleep well.”

  “Thank you, Metropolitan.”

  Constantine closes the door silently behind him. Through the wall Aiah hears Constantine’s deep voice, Sorya’s trilling laugh, then silence.

  She closes her eyes and thinks of floating out with Constantine on a long, slim powerboat, soaring across an endless quicksilver sea, a fantastic body of open water smooth and reflective as a mirror, heading toward a blue horizon such as does not exist anywhere in the world.

  *

  The halo
gen lights of Constantine’s speedboat carve a bright tunnel in the darkness beneath the city of Caraqui. Marine engines echo loud in the hollow concrete cavern. Aiah can taste salt in the wind.

  The Metropolis of Caraqui forms a skin across the sea like a giant lily pad spread across a pond. Huge pontoons of concrete, linked by hawsers thicker than tree trunks, are spaced across the open water, with buildings atop them. Bridges carry most transportation and utility connections, and the larger bridges have people living on them, urban accretions so much larger than the bridges themselves that it’s sometimes difficult to detect the bridges’ original purpose. Public transport travels high above the water, and sometimes far below.

  There are wide, aquatic thoroughfares here; most commerce moves by water. But the majority of the watery paths are narrow and dark, crowded and overshadowed by the vast slablike sides of the pontoons, the overhanging buildings constructed above, and the overgrown bridges and causeways. Trash bobs listlessly in the dark water. Clusters of barnacles stretch down from the pontoons’ waterline, and rusting iron ladders lead upwards at intervals, presumably for the salvation of anyone unlucky enough to tumble into the unwholesome waters.

  Coming across the border from Barchab offers no problem. There are hundreds of these watery thoroughfares, and it’s impossible to police them all. Brightness appears ahead, grows larger. The boat shoots out onto a wide watery canal, turns left. The bodyguards’ boat, disciplined, follows a mere half-second behind. The water is a bright green carpet of algae broken only by floating trash. Scabrous-looking waterfowl paddle in the green water. The boulevards on either side are lined with trees. Tall glass-walled apartment buildings and towered temples gaze down at the verdant water. A wealthy district, clear enough, with only a few people in the streets and no commercial traffic on the water except for a few small barges.

  “The Martyrs’ Canal,” Constantine says. “The Avians used to tie Delavites together and throw them in.”

  Aiah stands in the boat with her face above the windshield, enjoying the flood of wind on her face. She looks for the famous Aerial Palace but can’t find it. She looks to her left and sees Constantine standing next to her, the collar of his blue jacket raised against the wind, his black profile cutting the air, hands on the wheel controlling the boat with a light, effortless touch despite the intensity of his expression, as if he were involved wholly with the boat, the water, the very concept of motion, arrowing from one place to another, every second a journey, a transit, from one state to another. The School of Radritha, she suspects, for all that Constantine seems to scorn it now, has nevertheless left its mark, has enabled Constantine to approach everything he does with that same level of intensity, of involvement.

  Or maybe it’s just being hooked into plasm long enough. Who knows?

  Kherzaki’s scowling face leaps into existence in the sky above. Another ad for Lords of the New City.

  Constantine throttles down, his eyes scanning the faded numbers painted on the vast pontoons, the rust-pitted signs hanging beneath the low bridges. He finds what he’s looking for, turns right into a cool narrow cavern, the local equivalent of a dark alley. A flock of swallows explodes from nests constructed amid arching girders and streams toward the light. Constantine doesn’t increase speed much; his eyes still scan the walls in the vivid illumination of his halogen lights, looking for landmarks. The Shield is a thin bright strip overhead, like a distant fluorescent tube. Engine noise booms off the concrete walls.

  After a few moments Constantine throttles down. There’s no light visible overhead: the pontoons above have been completely built over, turned into components of a raft. Constantine turns on underwater spotlights. The boat planes on briefly, slows, drifts toward one of the slablike pontoons. The water below is a milky soup in the halogen light. Constantine springs to the foredeck, reaches for a coil of rope, ties it to a rung of one of the ladders placed at intervals along the pontoon. The bodyguards’ boat, still under power, comes up slowly and lashes itself alongside.

  “Put the sled in the water,” Constantine tells the guards. He turns to Aiah. “We may as well get ready.”

  The bodyguards manhandle the big underwater sled off the back of their boat and into the water. It lands with a slap, scattering spray. Aiah pulls off her sweater and baggy wool pants.

  “We’ve timed this for slack tide,” Constantine says. “The tide can cause swells, currents, tidal waves rolling up between the pontoons. Sometimes people surf the waves on boards.”

  “I saw that on video once,” Aiah says. On the Oddities of the World program she used to enjoy when she was little.

  Tides are evidence of a universe outside the Shield — Aiah was taught that in school. Because once the sky was supposed to have been dark, except there was something in it called a Sun, and another thing called the Moon, and they both fluoresced or something to make the sky light up, like plasm adverts broadcasting from outside the atmosphere, and their gravity was responsible for the tides — so they weren’t plasm, anyway, but matter, because plasm didn’t have gravity. Aiah had always pictured them as big neon tubes twisted into circles.

  And now the Shield stands in the way of anyone seeing them, but the Sun and Moon are presumed still to be out there, causing tides. Because so far as anyone knew, gravity was the only force that could get through the Shield.

  Aiah supposed she could believe in the existence of a Sun and Moon that predated the Shield and were still in existence somewhere, but some other traditional details of the Premetropolitan world were harder to credit. It was said, for example, that different parts of the world somehow existed in different times. Aiah couldn’t understand that part at all, how you could move into the future or past simply by going from one part of the globe to another.

  And if you could travel from the present to the past simply by moving, for example, from Jaspeer to Caraqui, then could you alter your present by going back in time somewhere else and changing things? The whole business was, somehow, counterintuitive.

  The damp chill makes gooseflesh prickle beneath Aiah’s bathing costume. Shivering, she begins to drag on the awkward diving suit. The foam plastic clings to her skin like wet towels, making every move a struggle. Despite the chill air she can feel sweat breaking out on her forehead. By the time she zips the jacket up to her chin, she feels like an object securely swathed for mailing.

  “Greetings to the glorious and immortal Metropolitan Constantine.” Aiah’s nape hairs crawl as the eerie disembodied voice rises from behind the boat’s counter. The hard first consonant of Constantine’s name is pronounced as an inhaled click.

  Constantine walks to the stern counter and peers over. His burly upper body is bare, with his diving suit jacket dangling from his waist, but still he carries himself with a strangely formal dignity.

  “Felicitations, Prince Aranax,” he says. “Your Illumination expresses a magnificent sense of condescension in deigning to speak to me without an intermediary.”

  There is a splash from behind the boat. The voice, Aiah concludes, can’t be anything human. “It is best to undertake certain tasks in person,” the voice says, “in order that certain matters may be communicated in such a manner as to facilitate perfect understanding. We must speak, thus-and-so, concerning this-and-that, and without misapprehension.”

  “Your illumination’s wisdom surpasses that of the immortals,” Constantine says gravely. “Surely your brilliance and enlightenment will not be exceeded in ten thousand decades.”

  “My pitiful understanding is but a reflection of the glory and the wisdom of Constantine,” the voice says. “The radiance of your genius illuminates the world as an incandescent ball irradiates the darkness beneath the water, attracting to its magnificent light such unworthy beings as myself.”

  “The courtesy that Your Illumination displays in affording me such a description is exceeded only by your greatness.” Constantine straightens, looks at Aiah. “Please allow me to introduce to Your Illumination my colleague, Mis
s Aiah, whose consummate knowledge shall guide us to our inevitable success.”

  Aiah walks dry-mouthed to the stern of the boat. She feels huge as an airship in her thick porous suit, and as clumsy.

  And Constantine of course had not prepared her for this. Another of his little surprises.

  The dolphin sits in a pool of halogen light, regarding her with small dark pebble eyes sunk deep beneath a bulging forehead. His skin is a pinkish albino white, with scars and blotches and a few open running sores. He seems to be strongly hunchbacked. The nose has been shifted back to the top of the head. His lower jaw is prognathous, hard and beaklike, fixed in a cold, unkindly grin.

  Once, she knows, the dolphins were the enemies of humanity, rulers of the world’s seas and the belligerents in a ferocious war for domination of the world. Since their defeat the dolphins have been confined to a diminishing role in the world’s affairs, and humanity has encroached on their world without hindrance.

  The closest Aiah’s ever come to a dolphin is watching the Dolphins march in the Senko’s Day parade.

  She glances at Constantine for support, then licks her lips. “I am,” she ventures, “awed by your presence, Your Illumination. Forgive my speechlessness at, ah, this encounter with your magnificence.”

  The dolphin flutters a hand, long spatulate fingers stirring the water. “The companions of Constantine are beacons of wisdom in a sea of darkness and ignorance.”

  Fortunately Constantine takes over the conversation from this point. The ludicrous flattery seems even more absurd in this space, from two exiles hiding from the light in a watery cellar.

  Eventually the conversation floats on puffs of extravagant compliments to its termination, and Prince Aranax kicks his broad feet up high and submerges. Constantine and Aiah resume their preparations for their dive. Aiah puts on her buoyancy harness, which contains both pockets for lead weights and inflatable compartments to adjust her depth. Constantine helps her with the flat air tank curved to fit comfortably on her back. In her foam-plastic swaddling, Aiah can hear her heart pounding, the rasp of her panting breath. Just wrestling with all the unaccustomed gear is exhausting. By the time she pumps up her buoyancy, dons her fins and mask, and rolls off the boat into the water, she’s relieved simply to be getting underway.