A part of her life is beginning, she thinks. Another part is ending. But which? And with whom?
Gil’s hands move intently along Aiah’s body. He is making a purposeful effort to arouse, perhaps by way of apology for waking her. Every touch of his stubby fingers sets off a kind of cacophony in her high-strung nerves, neurons firing signals for panic, pleasure and flight all at once. It occurs to her that she would probably enjoy this more if she could manage, somehow, to relax. She closes her eyes, tilts her head back, and lets breath sigh from her lungs.
Who, she wonders, has a claim on her flesh? Her heart? Her allegiance?
Gil kneels between her legs, browses her body with his lips and tongue. Aiah tries to relax but her nerves leap with every touch. When he tongues her sex a bolt of sensation almost doubles her up, far too intense to be pleasurable. She cries out and presses her fists into her eye-sockets. Gil seems to take this reaction as encouragement because he doesn’t stop.
Aiah hisses through clenched teeth. “Take it easy.”
Gil’s urgency eases — he’s always been a perfectly reasonable lover. His tongue makes delicate little lacy swirls about her clitoris. The load of sensation declines to a manageable level. Aiah feels the cold edge of fear — is Gil searching for Constantine there, for the scent or taste of his rival?
No, she thinks. He’s a perfectly practical man. If he wondered, he’d just ask.
And this reminds her why she likes him. The way he looks at things, the way he approaches a problem as something to be solved, to be disassembled like a puzzle, taken apart by his stubby fingers and understood. If he doesn’t comprehend something, he just asks. He’s not manipulative or dramatic or driven, he’s just himself. An optimist who believes any problem can be conquered if you just approach it with the right frame of mind.
Aiah tries to relax again, closes her eyes, breathes slowly. Pleasure expands like a warm plasm tide. Her hips lift to the delicate touch of Gil’s tongue. The pleasure rises, flooding, trembles at the brim of the cup, overflows.
Gil rises to his knees, dabbing delicately at his crooked smile with a corner of the sheet. He enters her and she presses herself to his furry chest. Every movement is familiar, unsurprising, a kind of homecoming. Aiah is pleased to discover that she’s not drawing mental comparisons between Gil and Constantine. Anyway she knows that no comparison is possible, not between Gil and a fantasy as unreal as her Metropolitan lover, a figure already fading in contrast to the reality of her home, of domestic realities, of the man who lies, secure and genuine, between her legs...
*
They buy fresh bread and pastry at a local bakery, make coffee, fold down their little table from its place in the wall. Tomatoes and cucumbers are plucked from the plants flourishing in the pocket garden. The course of a luxurious breakfast covers the plastic table surface with coffee circles and crumbs.
Gil sips his coffee. “I looked into our bank account yesterday,” Gil says. “And there’s over a thousand in there.”
“Eight hundred of that is the money you sent from Gerad,” Aiah says, “and the rest is what I earned from my consulting job.”
Not to mention the six thousand and change, clanking coins, hidden in a bag of fertilizer under the tomato plants.
Little creases deepen between Gil’s brows. “What is this consulting job exactly?” he asks.
A taut fist clenches between Aiah’s shoulder blades. “It’s a lot of little jobs, actually,” she says. “The Metropolitan Constantine wants me to . . .”
The memory takes Gil by surprise, “I’d forgotten!” he says. “He really was here this last sleep shift?”
Relief stumbles into Aiah’s mind. “Yes. He and I were—”
“Imagine you working for that old gangster!” Gil says. “What does the Jurisdiction think about it, ne?”
Aiah shifts uneasily in her seat. “They don’t know, and I didn’t ask them,” she says. “We needed the money too much. So if you could keep this thing quiet...”
Gil grins and reaches for a pastry. “How did you meet him, anyway?”
“Well,” Aiah says, “I sent him a fan letter.”
He frowns, his pastry half-raised. “Through the mail?” he asks, irrelevantly. Letters cost more than wiregrams.
“Yes,” Aiah said, “I read on the Wire that he’d moved into Mage Towers, and the Lords of the New City chromo-play is getting all this attention, and I just thought. . .”
Gil looks at her in surprise. “You mean to say you actually admire him?”
Heat flushes Aiah’s cheeks. “Yes,” she says.
Gil thoughtfully chews his pastry as he gives this revelation some thought.
“But he destroyed his metropolis, didn’t he? Cheloki’s a sewer now. And Constantine is living high off his loot.”
Aiah is surprised by the fury that flashes through her. She bites down hard on her anger, tries to speak in normal tones. “He didn’t destroy his nation, he was attacked! That whole coalition of gangsters and crooked politicians and—”
“They would hardly have attacked him if they hadn’t felt threatened by him,” Gil says reasonably. “All his moves to strengthen his plasm reserves and build the army — what was he intending to do if not attack his neighbors?”
Aiah’s fingernails dig into her palms. “He was trying,” she says, “to help people.”
“People like Constantine don’t help anyone.”
“He was trying to change things!” Aiah waves an arm. “Things that need changing!”
“Nothing,” Gil says flatly, “needs changing that badly.”
For an instant a cold hatred floods Aiah’s heart. Gil — smug, judgmental, sitting at the table licking margarine from his fingers — is suddenly no different from the complacent Jaspeeris who have stood, indifferently, dully convinced of their own intrinsic rightness, as an immovable wall between Aiah and her fortunes.
“You wouldn’t know,” Aiah says. “You’re a member of the privileged class here.”
An alert glint in Gil’s eyes demonstrates awareness that he may have just walked into danger, “I haven’t been particularly aware of being privileged,” he ventures.
“You are,” Aiah says. “Believe it. And from my non-privileged perspective, I would say, as far as change is concerned, Whatever it takes. Because either you make people free, or you don’t; and if you don’t, what good are you? And if people aren’t free, what good is anything?”
These are Constantine’s ideas, but the ferocity is Aiah’s alone, born of her experience.
Gil’s thoughts tread almost visibly across this dangerous ground. He and Aiah have, perhaps incredibly, never discussed this root matter, the difference in their backgrounds, their caste, their ethnicity. Aiah, at least, had told herself that it didn’t matter, and now she finds she was wrong, that suddenly it’s the most urgent thing in the world.
Gil opens his mouth, hesitates, speaks carefully. “Do you feel,” he says, “that I’ve maltreated you in any way, that I’ve held you down, or kept you from — I don’t know — being free?”
Aiah’s anger dies away, replaced by an upwelling of sorrow. He’s taken the subject away from the sphere of abstracts and returned it to the two people sharing breakfast over their folding table. Her fingers seek out Gil’s hand.
“No,” she says. “No. You’re the only man I’ve met who ever thought I was all right.”
Except for Constantine. The treacherous thought will not keep to itself.
Gil is faintly puzzled. “Is that true?”
Aiah nods. “If other people were more like you, there wouldn’t be a problem. But even you could use a few new perspectives.”
Gil offers a faint smile, “I’m beginning to see that.”
“You don’t know what a long, tiresome struggle it was just to get here. To this little place we share. It’s natural for you to find a place like Loeno at this point in your life, but for me it’s the result of a battle that’s gone on for years. And if I hadn’t
had to spend so much energy on fighting for everything you take for granted, who knows where I’d be?”
He nods, but Aiah can’t tell if he understands. That every step upward is a struggle against great weight, against her own family dragging her back, against those above her whose ponderous weight of privilege holds her down; a hopeless, endless struggle, wearying and so full of frustrations that, finally, she’d done something so dangerous she didn’t even dare tell him.
Made him her passu, which he did not deserve.
The argument, if that’s what it is, fades away through sheer weariness. Aiah is exhausted, and Gil had slept badly on the train from Gerad and is tired from overwork. They spend the day at home, leaving only once for a walk.
Gil doesn’t ask about Constantine or her job. Perhaps he’s wary of starting another disagreement, but Aiah is beginning to think he’s genuinely incurious. Constantine is something so remote from the practical realities of his life that he can’t manage to raise any interest.
Nor does he recall noticing the ivory necklace that Aiah has by now carefully hidden, but if he had, he probably would have assumed the fabulously valuable thing was an imitation.
Aiah had thought that her relationship with Constantine was so huge that hiding it would have been like trying to hide Prince Aranax in the bathtub. To her increasing amazement, Gil seems to have noticed nothing at all. She wonders about her life and how it relates to other lives, like a circle intersecting with other circles. The common area shared by Aiah and Gil is only a fraction of their whole existence — perhaps, given all this, a smaller fraction than Aiah had ever realized. And Constantine has been edging his wider circle into her own, almost encompassing it, but has only now begun to encroach on the part of Aiah’s life that Gil has inscribed as his own.
But that’s not what Constantine has done. Constantine has uncovered a part of Aiah’s existence that even Aiah didn’t know existed.
You are at your most beautiful when you take flight.
But still it’s possible for Aiah to enjoy the part of her life that still overlaps with Gil’s. They spend the day together, doing pleasant things, among them the repair of the commo board; they make love again, very pleasantly, and then Aiah puts him on the train back to Gerad, and is pleased to find that he’s out of her way.
And then she wonders if, the next time she sees him, it will be through the bars of a jail cell.
*
“This is Miss Quelger. Please tell Dr. Chandros that my guest has left, and I’m available for work if he requires me.”
Aiah waits for a moment, wondering if anyone’s going to answer, and then takes her thumb off the transmit button. She leaves the phone booth and glances up at the huge bulk of the Authority building, the huge statues that scowl down from their niches, the twisted forest of antennae crowned against the Shield. Plasm messages write themselves across the sky, but none is addressed to her.
The phone number was one Constantine had made her memorize, to leave messages if it was important. She was always to call from a public phone, and not expect a reply.
There’s a wreck in front of the Authority building, two cars and an overturned cattle truck. Terrified miniature beeves, scarcely larger than sheep, run frantically beneath the wheels of oncoming traffic. Bemused Authority cops mill about in hope of being helpful. Aiah finds herself wondering if such a wreck could prove a useful distraction during Constantine’s coup, draw security out of their positions to a place where they could be attacked.
This train of thought doesn’t seem at all strange to her.
Once Aiah arrives in her office, she finds Telia eager to hear about her weekend with the boss. Aiah has long ago worked out what to tell her.
“Bobo made his move,” Aiah says, sitting down to her desk. Telia’s eyes gleam. “But I said no,” Aiah continues, and Telia’s expectations crumble.
“Why?” she demands. “Everything was so promising!”
Aiah turns on her computer and gives it a few minutes to warm up. “Would you have said yes?” she inquires.
“We’re not talking about me!” Telia says. “Why did you tell him no?”
Aiah puts her headset on, smiles, and dispenses a bit of her grandmother’s wisdom. “Because if he’s serious,” she says, “one no won’t stop him.”
Telia considers this thought and reluctantly concedes its merit. “Well,” she says, “you’ll have to tell me what happens next.”
“Of course,” Aiah says, and thoroughly enjoys the taste of the lie as it crosses her tongue.
*
Aiah’s heart lifts as she sees the Elton at the end of her shift. Constantine waits inside, sealed from his driver and guard by the raised glass screen. There is a chilled bottle of wine, fruit, flowers in cut-glass vases.
Constantine is slouched in the far corner, huddled in his black leather jacket, and only nods as Aiah enters the car. The unreadable look on his face sends little pulses of anxiety through her nerves. “Did yesterday go well with your friend?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. “No problems.”
“That’s good. I wouldn’t want to come between you,” he says, and then, realizing how commonplace and flat untruthful the words sound, he gives a little smile and says, “Not without an invitation, anyway.”
She answers the secret glow in his eyes, reaches to the seat between them, puts her hand over his. He sighs, shifts on the seat, and stares restlessly forward. “Sorya is back,” he says, “and at Mage Towers.”
The impact of the words actually takes Aiah’s breath away. Gradually, with effort, she finds it again.
“Ah. More commonplaces, I see.”
Crumpled in his seat, Constantine looks the picture of misery, “I can’t afford to continue in the Caraqui business without her. She’s too valuable. I need . . .” He licks his lips, looks at her. “Everyone.”
Aiah finds words flying in the roaring tempest of her thoughts. “And what is it you ... need ... from me?”
There is a moment of thought before he speaks. “I don’t believe I can ask you for anything more than patience.”
“Well ... ” she begins, uncertain.
“But nevertheless,” amusement kindles in his glance, and his hand encloses hers, “I have had Khoriak reserve a suite at the Landmark Hotel, if you are inclined, after all this, to spend a little time with me. And if not, I certainly understand.”
For a second Aiah is tempted to laugh out loud. So it is to be her decision.
“Ah,” she says finally, “why not?”
*
There are some preliminary security maneuvers designed to guarantee Constantine anonymity, but after that things are all right. The walls are white, the carpet thick and soft, and the sheets are blue satin. Refreshment is available in the form of sections of blood-orange, grown in the hotel’s rooftop gardens, arranged artfully on a silver tray and drizzled with chocolate.
Aiah licks juice off her fingers. “Things have improved,” she says, “since the days of sex in stairwells.”
Constantine appears startled by this idea. “Why?” he asks.
“There was no privacy in the sorts of places where I grew up,” Aiah says. “Stairwells were as far away from people as we could get.”
“What about the roof ?”
“Filled with fenced-off private gardens — we didn’t have a key. The only open place was an altar where a local witch burned candles and sacrificed pigeons. Some of the kids used it, but we didn’t want to.”
He looks at her with a frown. “Was it pleasurable, sex in stairwells?”
Aiah is tempted to laugh — Constantine is naive in some matters. “Not particularly,” she says. “You had to do it fast, because people might interrupt, and the rail put a groove in the buttocks. Some of the local good-time girls were called ‘groovers’ on that account.” She smiles at the memory. “I’d forgotten that.”
“Then why do it at all?”
Aiah laughs, not at the question, but at Constantine
’s seriousness. “Because there was a boy I wanted, and it was the only way to get him. And of course there was an itch that needed scratching, even if it wasn’t scratched particularly well.” She shrugs. “But hey — poor people are used to their pleasures being compromised. They take what they can, when it’s available. And sex is something you can do whether you’ve got money or not.”
“What happened to the boy?”
“He found another girl, one with a job, so she could spend her money on him. She let him do it without protection, which he preferred, and of course she got pregnant. They were married for, oh, six months or so, and after that life went on.”
Constantine strokes her cheek with a hand that smells of sex and oranges, “I feel sad for that little girl, that Aiah,” he says. “Was she heartbroken?”
“No. I’d got what I wanted.”
“And what was that?”
“A few life lessons. And status — he was a very popular boy. I was an odd child, I should add, and the other kids didn’t know whether to accept me or not. I’d won this scholarship to this fancy private school, which made me suspect, and getting this boy made me one of the regulars.” She smiles. “But I didn’t take him to the Secret Place, so I couldn’t have loved him.”
“The Secret Place?” Constantine’s wistful smile is a mirror of her own. “Do we find it through anatomy or geography?”
Aiah laughs and picks up an orange slice. “Geography,” she says, and licks the chocolate off the top. “The Secret Place was an old temple in Old Shorings, a smallish place, on a tiny lot, surrounded by huge apartments. It was closed when the neighborhood turned Barkazil. I don’t even know which immortal was worshiped there. But the place was amazing — gray stone, carved with trees and leaves, birds, flowers, monsters, angels, the most intricate carvings imaginable — and when it was closed it was shut up behind these intimidating steel doors and shutters. But when I was little I knew that there were still things going on in there, and that someone, or something, still lived inside. Ghosts, vampires, the twisted, hanged men . . . I knew someone had to be in there, because local people still left offerings in front of those big steel doors, rice or beans or coins. And they’d write their wishes on slips of paper and slide them under the doors, and whoever lived in there would grant them.”
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