City on Fire

SEVENTEEN

Aiah wants to cringe as she watches herself on video. “On behalf of the government and the Barkazil community of Caraqui,” the woman on-screen bellows, “I’d like to welcome you all to our metropolis!”

Senko. Is her voice really that harsh?

Tumultuous cheers follow, far more impressive than the cheers at the actual event. The sound has been dubbed in after the fact.

The chromo is called The Mystery of Aiah. In it, a journalist named Stacie—a woman whom Aiah has never met—attempts to solve the mystery of Aiah’s character and personality.

“There’s no mystery about me!” Aiah protests when she sees the direction the chromoplay is taking.

“There is now,” Constantine says, a purposeful light in his eyes.

Aiah sits on a sofa between Constantine and Aldemar, her hands clutching theirs. The two veteran performers are amused as she shrinks away from the journalist’s attempts to “solve” her.

The reporter interviews various figures from Aiah’s life in Jaspeer, including Charduq the Hermit, still on his pillar, who cheerfully proclaims her the redeemer of the Barkazi, a claim that Khorsa’s sister Dhival, in full sorceress getup, is all too happy to confirm—she has talked, she says, to spirits on the matter, and they confirm Charduq’s assessment. Old chromographs from Aiah’s school career are displayed, and some of her teachers from the prep school to which she’d won a scholarship are interviewed, teachers willing to testify as to her brilliance. Aiah remembers the praise during her girlhood as being far less fulsome.

“Aiah’s family declined to be interviewed,” the narrator reports, managing to imply they fear Aiah’s disapproval and vengeance. Aiah is relieved beyond words… the very thought of her mother babbling away on video is terrifying, and Senko only knows what she would say. But if the family actually had been approached—which Aiah is inclined to doubt, as she has heard nothing from them—they had closed ranks against the outsider.

Aiah had broken Jaspeeri laws, and her family knew it. No indictments had ever been filed, but there was no sense in giving the prosecutors information.

The section on her life in Caraqui is a hash of suggestion and demented fantasy. Aiah can’t even take it seriously enough to shrink from the image presented. There are hints of her great influence in the councils of power. “Aiah has single-handedly broken the gangsters’ control of the Caraqui economy and their hold on the people,” the chromo intones, and follows with jittery camera shots of police actions and of disheveled Handmen being led off to justice. Images of Karlo’s Brigade are mixed with suggestions that they are soldiers loyal not to the regime but, personally, to Aiah. There are pictures of Barkazil neighborhoods, which Aiah recognizes from Jaspeer, but they are ingeniously mixed with images from Caraqui to suggest that a large Barkazil community is in place here, and that Aiah is their unquestioned leader. Supposed Barkazil immigrants, allegedly drawn to Caraqui by Aiah’s personal magnetism, are shown being welcomed by Caraqui officials.

“She is our commander,” Alfeg says. He looks quite natural and comfortable on camera. “She fights for her people, her nation. We are here to serve her.” Two of the departmerit’s total of four Barkazils, looking far less comfortable than Alfeg, sit in the background and nod stiff agreement.

“Aiah has transformed this metropolis,” Khorsa confirms. She has forgone her witch dress and appears in the conservative gray suit of the professional mage and member of the PED, albeit with one of her glittering jeweled foci pinned neatly to her lapel.

“I can’t think of another person,” she says, “who could have so totally destroyed such a huge, malevolent, and emplaced organization as the Silver Hand.”

“I haven’t destroyed it,” Aiah points out, but Aldemar hushes her.

There is a short diversion from the chromo’s relentless pursuit of its subject while the narrator embarks on a brief biography of Great-Uncle Rathmen and points out that his money is financing the current insurrection.

And then Khorsa is back, smiling brightly. “Of course Aiah is Constantine’s lover,” she says.

“No!” Aiah cries in horror.

Constantine glances at her sidelong, and a smile touches his lips. “If I can put up with this,” he says, “you can.”

Aiah watches with increasing dread as the chromo plunges into her relationship with Constantine. That few of the details are correct doesn’t make it any less horrifying.

“He was besotted by her the first time he saw her,” reports a talking head, alleged to belong to one of Constantine’s friends. “She’s his secret general—his good luck.”

“What is the point of this?” Aiah demands.

“It will make you interesting,” Constantine says. “Few will care about some shadowy figure in the Caraqui government, but revealed as my lover you will become the focus of millions.”

Aiah sinks hopelessly into her seat. “I don’t suppose there is any point in protesting,” she says.

“Well,” Aldemar offers, “it’s true. The gist, anyway. You are lovers, after all. And you do chase criminals, and you are a Barkazil.” She gives a tight-lipped little smile. “It’s much more true than most of my publicity.”

Aiah looks at Constantine. “What does Sorya say about this?”

Constantine’s answer is matter-of-fact. “Sorya is the head of the secret service. She doesn’t want publicity. Whereas publicity, the more sensational the better, is exactly what is required for you.”

The chromoplay drags on to its conclusion, and Aldemar gives a satisfied smile.

“Satisfied with the edit?” she says. “Other than the few rough spots?”

“Very well satisfied, thank you,” Constantine says.

“I told you Umarath would get the job done.”

Aldemar releases the second spool on the big commercial etching belt, picks up the red plastic belt, then puts it in its battered metal case.

“Who is this reporter?” Aiah asks.

“She’s not a reporter, she’s an actress,” Aldemar says. “Stacie used to be on Metro Squad—ever watch that? She phoned in her performance from Chemra.”

“So she didn’t actually interview any of these people?”

“Oh no. There wasn’t time. We had three units shooting picture, and Umarath put the whole thing together in the editing room.”

“It’s so… intrusive,” Aiah says. “And horrid. And all the facts are wrong, too.”

Constantine cocks an eyebrow at her. “Would you rather it told the truth? You must have broken a hundred laws working for me in Jaspeer.”

“That’s not what I meant. It’s showing me as a celebrity’s favorite fuck.”

“Oh no.” Aldemar shakes her head at this, and her reply is perfectly serious. “We would have been taking that tack if we’d mentioned you were Constantine’s lover first. But the image we chose for you is that of the secret mastermind operating behind events. The sex is a validation of your status. It’s not that you’re important because you’re Constantine’s lover, it’s that being Constantine’s lover confirms the fact that you’re important.”

“This is too sophisticated for me.” Aiah shakes her head. “Politics is so…” She gropes for the right word. “So solipsistic.” She looks at Aldemar. “And so is show business. It can create a reality that has nothing to do with anything real.”

A touch of sympathy enters Aldemar’s tone. “If you do not like the resulting image, you may alter it in time—give an interview, release a statement, commission another documentary, whatever you like.” The sympathy fades. “But let the video do its work first. For the moment, communicate with the public only through the press assistant we will provide for you.” She smiles. “In time you may find that you like what this does for you. It will open a lot of doors.”

“But will I want to walk through them?” Aiah asks. Aldemar only shrugs.

“I think the video will do quite well for us,” Constantine says. “It plays right to the mind-set created by the other side’s propaganda—which, much to the annoyance of our government, has always maintained that I am the real power in Caraqui, and the triumvirate my puppets. This chromo is aimed straight at a target which I think it is almost certain to hit.”

Aiah looks at him darkly. “Landro’s Escaliers,” she says. Constantine’s expression is satisfied. “Indeed.”

Aiah’s computer terminal hums, and grinds, and wafts a scent of ozone; and then its oval screen displays the message:

The Dreaming Sisters are not to be found anywhere in the ministry’s plasm records, or anyway not as such—it’s not that there’s no record of them, but that they probably have some other, more official name used in the files. The Arch-Revered Order of Transcendental Plasm Suckers, or something…

Aiah shuts off her terminal, hearing that little disappointed whine of the gears cycling down, and then sets her receptionist, Anstine, to work on it. That, after all, is what he is for.

Half a shift later the file appears on Aiah’s desk. Society of the Simple, 100 Cold Canal. A modest name; a forbidding address.

Aiah opens the file, sees the totals, and frowns.

The huge aerial displays that Aiah has seen since her arrival in Caraqui used enough plasm to cost tens of thousands of dinars. Yet the Society’s bills are modest, a few hundred dinars each month.

Which leaves open two possibilities: either their building is so big that it generates all the plasm they need… or they’re stealing the stuff.

She presses the intercom button on her commo array and speaks a moment with Anstine, asking him if he’s sure… Oh yes, Aiah is assured, the Society of the Simple is every so often the subject of news and video reports—those big aerial displays attract public attention; all Anstine had to do was call up the information on the Interfact.

Aiah puts the headset over her ears and makes some more calls. A boat, a pilot, some bodyguards, and an inspection team.

“Tell the camera crew they may not come.”

If they’re plasm thieves, she’ll arrest the lot of them, whether they spend their days talking to the gods or not.

Parq’s spy, floating about her department, has not made her charitable toward the idea of religion.

If they’re not thieves, then maybe they’re something much more interesting.

LORDS OF THE NEW CITY MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER!

Travel has become less pleasurable in the days since Aiah became famous. Since Constantine wants to keep her constantly in the news, camera crews follow her everywhere, and—as most of her travel consists of walking from her apartment to her job at the start of the day, and then taking the reverse path ten or twelve or sixteen hours later—the ministry, through her press spokesman, exerts itself to find newsworthy things for her to do.

When she accepted Brigadier Ceison’s polite invitation to dine with him and his staff, the video cameras followed along, and the next day stories appeared in all the media concerning Aiah’s important meeting with Barkazil military leaders. When Alfeg’s embryonic relief organization turned up a few indigent Barkazils in neighboring districts and persuaded them to move to Caraqui in search of employment, Aiah appeared on video handing them their dole cards. When Khorsa’s sister Dhival, imported for the occasion from the Wisdom Fortune Temple in Jaspeer, conducted for any interested members of Karlo’s Brigade “a traditional Barkazil religious service”—there of course existing in reality no such thing, religion in Barkazi being as chaotic as it was in most places on the globe—Aiah was on hand to clap her hands to the beat of the drums and nod approvingly as spirits of the air and the afterlife communicated their wishes through Dhival.

The routine business of her life is suddenly invested with the kind of portentous and highly artificial significance that only comes with heavy media exposure. Her appearances at cabinet meetings become “vital reports on the critical war situation.” Her briefings of PED personnel and military cops prior to raids on plasm houses are now considered “transmitting vital instructions to highly trained strike teams.” And any of her meetings with Constantine—often on thoroughly routine subjects—are now “a discreet rendezvous conducted in the citadel of supreme power.”

At least she can kiss him in public now, a fact of which she takes intermittent advantage.

Grooming takes up an ever-larger slice of her life. Every day begins with the ritual visit of the hairdresser, manicurist, and cosmetician. She finds herself fretting over the work she’s missing.

“It’s your job to look interesting,” Aldemar tells her. “This is work.”

With the increased media exposure comes increased exposure to danger. She is given security briefings, cameras are set up outside her apartment, and she is forbidden to travel outside the Palace without bodyguards. The guards come from a pool available to all government employees above a certain grade—she has no regular guards, as Constantine does—but now she has to become accustomed to looking at the world through a screen of broad, besuited male backs.

Aiah checks out a boat from the vehicle pool, and after the guards declare it safe from bomb or hidden assassin, she ducks down into the cabin and lets the helmsman take the boat out of the immediate vicinity of the Palace, at which point her guards allow her to come out into the air.

It is best, Aiah has been told, to assume that all traffic entering or leaving the Palace is being monitored by someone hostile to the government. Aside from the likelihood that there are observation posts in the tall buildings surrounding the Palace, Aiah knows from personal experience that mages working surveillance can be very unobtrusive indeed.

But any enemy surveillance is limited. Anyone watching will grow tired and bored and soon be overwhelmed by the task. Hundreds of wheeled vehicles and watercraft enter or leave the Palace every day. If nothing intriguing is seen in the boat in the first few moments of its journey, it is unlikely that any observer will maintain interest, and will instead go look at something else.

After the boat has traveled a radius from the Palace, Aiah is allowed out of the shielded cabin. As hydrogen turbines whine, the boat speeds over bright green water through a residential district of elegant flats. The buildings, about three hundred years old, have sinuous fronts, silver-bright metal alternating with long rows of window glass, and each building is topped with a crystal-roofed arboretum; and Aiah’s heart gives a leap as she realizes she’s out of the Palace again, in a speeding boat, on a bright Shieldlit day, on an errand all her own and none that belongs to the war.

Elections slogans are everywhere. Vote New City… Dalavan Party for Peace, Virtue, and Victory… Mariath for the Assembly… New City NOW.

Then she notices other graffiti unconnected with the elections, painted on the slab sides of the pontoons that support the apartment buildings—could gangs be marking their turf even here?; but as she looks closely she sees that the graffiti consists of repetitions of geomantic foci, particularly the White Horse and the Quadromark, one believed to be a warding sign and the other a sign to attract good luck.

The people here are trying to keep the war away. Drop the shells somewhere else, the marks are saying. We’ve got too much luck to be in danger.

It’s all nonsense, of course, popular magic without foundation in the real world of plasm science. The marks are a sign of how superstition can swarm into the world in times of uncertainty.

But it’s happening even in well-off neighborhoods like this one, a sign of how far the war has penetrated.

Suddenly the day seems less bright.

The boat slows and turns into a side canal. The long shining buildings fall behind, and here brown-brick apartments and warehouses crowd up close to the water, overhanging the canal and bridging it in places. The old, rusting bridges are encumbered with structures—shops and even small houses—that hang off them like barnacles. In these narrow watery corridors the turbines rumble loudly. Laundry floats overhead like faded artificial clouds, and swarms of noisy gulls circle. The White Horse and the Quadromark are displayed here as well, on pontoons crowded with other graffiti of a purely local interest.

Aiah sees two groups of Dalavan Militia, neither of them doing anything in particular, just drinking beer and strolling in packs along the quays. Each Militia member, Aiah sees, carries a staggering amount of firepower. An assault rifle over one shoulder, often with a sawtooth bayonet glinting in Shieldlight; a submachine gun under one arm; two or three pistols stuck into waistbands or holsters; knives big as short swords stuck into boots or jammed into cartridge belts.

Aiah can see her guards exchange looks of contempt. No serious soldier, she thinks, needs so many weapons, and no real policeman does either. All the weaponry is just to impress the neighbors, and each other.

Put these people up against the Provisional army and they’d fade into the mist.

The boat passes a stockyard and its adjacent slaughterhouse, pens packed with miniature beeves and sheep with wool the color of industrial grime. The smell is ghastly, but the swarms of gulls are thriving. Animal smells drench the air—wet wool, dung, blood, steam, offal, and a pungent chemical stench that probably has to do with how hides and wool are processed.

Aiah feels her gorge rise and turns away from the sight.

The Society of the Simple is nearby, still within smelling distance. It sits amid the grim old buildings on an ancient rust-streaked pontoon. The squat building is gray granite, with a leaded roof and a central bell-shaped dome of gleaming copper. The granite is overlaid with thousands of carvings woven together into an endless, complex knot that covers the whole building: vine leaves that turn into serpents, faces of pop-eyed demons and monsters leering out of the centers of flower blossoms… thorny brambles, ferns, trees with interwoven branches and bearing a dozen different kinds of fruit. Comic, grotesque figures hang out of carved buildings, waving papers or bottles or pigeon legs. Other buildings are ablaze, and little humans leap from the flames to their deaths. Half-hidden by the complex tracings, guns and armored vehicles can be seen. Dead women and babies hang on the bayonets of grinning soldiers, while tall, robed humans with faces of angelic serenity watch unmoved.

Everyone and everything woven together, unable to escape the vines, the brambles, the knots. It’s like one of their plasm displays carved into stone.

Aiah examines the exterior carefully as the boat approaches, but sees no figures that resemble those she has seen beyond the Shield.

A pier floats in the water on empty metal drums, and above it a rusting metal stair rises to the Dreaming Sisters’ home. A pair of Aiah’s guards bound up the stairs to check for sign of ambush, and find none. Aiah follows at a more sedate pace, still studying an intricate pattern of carved quincunxes…

The door, twice Aiah’s height, is of thick timbers with a trompe l’oeil relief of polished cast bronze stapled onto it, a relief in the shape of a door, and a young woman, seen from the rear, stepping through it. Superficially, tall and thin and with long hair in ringlets, the woman could be Aiah, or any of ten million other women. Above the relief are graven words, Entering the Gateway, in an old-fashioned, round-bellied script that Aiah has only seen in venerable inscriptions like this one.

There seems no doorbell or knocker, so Aiah finds a piece of the design—a border pattern of oak leaves—that curves conveniently in the form of a handhold, and gives the door a firm tug.

Although the door is heavy, it opens smoothly. Inside there is a bare room a half-dozen paces square—gray flags, gray stone walls, a groined arch overhead with a globular electric lamp dangling on an iron chain. Two simple arched doorways on either side lead to corridors. In an arched alcove in the back of the room a young woman lies on a mattress. She wears a simple gray knee-length shift and watches without expression as Aiah’s party enters.

Aiah’s nerves prickle as she realizes that the woman is wired to a plasm well. Even though there are no visible signs that the dreaming sister is working any magic here, she’s broadcasting signals of power perfectly recognizable to anyone who spends her days working with plasm.

Aiah’s guards are trained to recognize the signs as well, and fan into the room in case there’s any threat of violent sorcery. The three-man inspection team, suspecting nothing, follows Aiah through the door. Aiah approaches the woman, who—reluctantly, it seems—sits up to receive her. A wire trails out of her mouth, her connection to the plasm well. The woman—nun? postulant? Simple Person?—is copper-skinned and black-haired, with the hair kept severely short in a bowl-shaped bob. She’s thin and waiflike and looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare, and her leg and armpit hair are unshaven.

The dreaming sister removes the plasm connection from her mouth and holds it in her hand. The wire ends in a simple curved piece of copper metal, with a gleaming little copper ball on the end, an appliance like some people use for cleaning their tongues.

“May I help you?” the woman asks.

“My name is Aiah. I work with the ministry.” She shows her ID. “We’d like to examine your plasm meter.”

“It’s behind a door around back. The meter readers normally don’t bother us.”

Aiah looks over her shoulder at the inspection team, and their leader nods. “We’ll find it,” he says, and they push back out through the door.

Aiah turns back to the young woman. “Is there someone in charge I may speak to?” she says. “We’re here for more than a meter reading.”

The woman’s disinterested expression does not change. “May I ask what this concerns?”

“You’ve got a license for a plasm accumulator, and we’d like to see it. And there’s also… something more complex. Is there someone I can speak to?”

The woman’s lips give a little twitch of resignation. “Very well,” she says. Her brown eyes glance over each of the bodyguards in turn. Disdain enters her voice. “The gentlemen with the guns can wait here,” she says. Aiah sees her guards bristle, and she turns to them and tells them to stay.

If the Dreaming Sisters turn out to be defrauding the government of plasm, she realizes, she’ll need more than these few guards to deal with this place. A battalion may be more in order.

The dreaming sister, without looking back, has already drifted down one of the corridors, and Aiah is forced to hurry after her. The corridor follows a series of seemingly random curves, with other corridors intersecting at intervals, and the pathway rises and falls as well. The interior of the building, Aiah realizes, is as much a maze as the carved ornament outside. The dreaming sister walks without once looking back, as if she doesn’t care whether Aiah is following or not. Her bare feet don’t make a sound. Occasionally one of Aiah’s pumps skids out from under her—the flags beneath her feet have been polished slick by generations of bare feet.

The corridor is mostly plain gray stone, lit every so often by hanging globular electric lamps. At intervals there are arched alcoves, each equipped with a mattress, a bolster, and plasm connections. Some of the alcoves are empty, some have women lying in them, each with a copper connector in her mouth, eyes closed or dreamily half-closed. Each has hair cropped short and wears only a gray cotton shift; each looks surprisingly young—Aiah sees no one who looks over twenty. Sometimes the sisters share mattresses, in pairs or threes or more, a pile of dreamy bare limbs and cropped heads. The women strewn atop mattresses might suggest the languid aftermath of a particularly strenuous orgy, but somehow the effect is strangely sexless: even lying in piles the women do not seem particularly aware of one another, of their surroundings, or for that matter of Aiah and her guide walking past them down the corridor. It seems more as if they are all addicted to the same narcotic, the juice of poppies perhaps, and are being stored on shelves until it is time for another dose.

Carvings are also placed at intervals along the corridors, under simple rounded arches of the same style as the alcoves and branching corridors. Each is a carved relief, like the exterior door, and tries to give the impression of looking through a window or doorway; each features a central allegorical figure, a man or woman in characteristic dress, carrying objects peculiar to them: a broom, a rattle, a machine pistol, a lantern. The name of each figure is carved into the arch overhead. The Apprentice, Aiah reads. The Gamester… The One Who Stands Outside… Death… The One Who Drags Down.

She wonders if in this dreaming cavern she is permitted to speak at all. “How many of you are there?” Aiah asks.

“Two hundred fifty-six,” the sister replies. Aiah nods: in geomancy that is a Grand Square, a square of a square.

“How long has this place been here?” Aiah asks.

The sister looks over her shoulder at Aiah. Her eyes are dark and faraway, lost in the world of dreams.

“Ten thousand years,” she says, in a voice that suggests, perhaps, that she does not care whether Aiah believes her or not.

Surprise stops Aiah dead in her tracks by one of the alcoves. The dreaming sister lying there has twisted genes, but more than that, she is an Avian, one of the elite class, infamous for their cruelty, who ruled Caraqui before the Keremaths. Her face is thin and delicate, with huge half-lidded golden eyes and a raptor beak that looks as if it might easily bite her plasm connection in half. Her body is dainty and fragile, as if her bones were made of paper, and her hands, two taloned fingers and an opposable thumb, grow from atop the joint of the huge wing, soft brown-gold feathers barred with black, that is folded protectively over most of her body.

“This is an Avian,” Aiah says in her surprise. The twisted woman is beautiful, Aiah thinks, but in the same way that a sculpture can be beautiful, or a piece of music. As an artifact, not as something human.

She is glad that the Avian’s mind is elsewhere, that her eyes are not fully open to fix Aiah within their golden orbs.

A touch of impatience enters the voice of Aiah’s guide. “We accept initiates of all races and conditions,” she says.

“It’s illegal for her even to be here.”

“Is that so?” In a tone of perfect indifference. Aiah’s guide turns and begins to walk away, and Aiah follows reluctantly, casting glances over her shoulder at the Avian until the twisted woman is out of sight.

Another figure walks toward them. She is petite and blonde, with creamy skin so pale it seems translucent and a scattering of freckles over her nose and cheeks. She seems younger, if possible, than Aiah’s guide.

“You asked for someone in authority?” she says.

Aiah hesitates. “I meant,” she says, striving for tact, “someone older.”

The girl raises a bare foot and scratches her instep. “I am four hundred fifty-one years old,” she says. “My name is Order of Eternity. I am therefore senior to Whore.” Her bright blue eyes travel to the other sister. “Who is two hundred and…?” Her voice trails off.

“Two hundred fifty-eight,” says the first sister, whose name is apparently Whore. “I celebrated my Grand Square two years ago.”

“Of course,” says Order of Eternity. “Pardon my lapse.” She smiles, balanced like a crane on one foot. “Thank you for bringing our guest. You may return to the door.”

“Yes, Sister.” Whore turns and walks away, without looking back.

Order of Eternity puts her foot back on the floor and returns her attention to Aiah. She is short and barely comes to Aiah’s chin. “I am the most senior of the sisters available. How may I help you?”

// this is a joke, Aiah promises herself, / am going to have my police take this place apart stone by stone.

But instead she looks after the receding form of the other sister. “Is her name really Whore?”

“Oh yes.” Nodding. “When we enter the order, we take a name either reflecting the outside world, which we wish to overcome, or a name reflecting that toward which, in our new life, we aspire.”

“Was she a whore on the outside?”

The dreaming sister shrugs. “Possibly. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.”

Aiah turns to Order of Eternity, looks down at her impossibly young face. “You don’t look four hundred,” she says.

There is a girlish lilt to the dreaming sister’s voice. Even her voice box seems not to have matured.

“Our life is healthy and free from stress,” she says. “We spend our days in touch with plasm, which is the lifeblood of the world. There is no reason for us to age.”

“If you sold your techniques,” Aiah says, “you could make millions.”

A shrug again. “If we cared for millions,” says Order of Eternity, “we would.”

A cynical little demon tugs at the corners of Aiah’s mouth. “I can’t think of many religions that don’t care about money.”

“Are we a religion?” Order of Eternity cocks her head ingenuously and gives every impression that she has never considered this question before in her life. “I think not,” she concludes. “We have no congregation, no worshippers. Though some of us have private devotions, we do not as a group offer obedience or sacrifice to any particular gods or immortals. We live simply, according to the rules of our order, and contemplate that which exists—is that religious?”

“Most people would think so.”

“Then they are confusing natural life with religion. It is a comment on how unnatural their life has become. Would you like to walk with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, she begins to stroll down the corridor. Aiah shortens her own long-legged strides to match the other woman’s.

Aiah frowns. “You’re living on a rusty old barge in the middle of the sea, and you’ve got electricity and sewer and plasm connections… is that natural? Shouldn’t you be living in a cave on a mountaintop somewhere?”

“Simplicity,” says Order of Eternity, “is not the same as discomfort. Why recline on a sharp rock when there is a mattress near to hand?”

“Living isolated, in a place like this, hardly seems natural.”

“It is natural for us. We make no claim for anyone else.” Order of Eternity looks up at Aiah and gives a puzzled frown, wrinkling her freckled nose. “What is the purpose of your being here, exactly?”

“I’m from the Ministry of Resources. I’m here to examine your plasm use and check your accumulator.”

The sister gives a little nod, as if confirming an inward supposition. They walk past an arch containing a relief, Entering the Gateway, similar to that on the front door. The long-haired woman pushing open the door is of stone, not of bronze, but otherwise it is the same figure.

“We do not employ significant amounts of plasm,” the sister says, “because we strive not to use it. We strive only to live in mutual awareness with plasm, to use it as a vehicle for an apprehension of the fundamental reality of this world.”

“You use it to extend your life and youth,” Aiah points out.

Order of Eternity nods. “When our bodies are damaged, we strive to repair them.”

“When a doctor uses such techniques, his plasm bills are very high.”

“When a doctor uses such techniques,” says Order of Eternity, “his techniques are intrusive and hasty. He must repair the damage of years, and do it in a matter of hours. We, on the other hand, have years, decades sometimes, to attune our bodies to the ways of health. A doctor cannot afford to spend years working on a single patient, but we can. My name is not chance-chosen—we attempt to live according to the order of eternity, not to the needs of the moment. Years of meditation makes us aware of our bodies and their needs in ways that are uncommon outside these walls. We can become aware of wrongness—illness—years before anyone outside would think to bring the matter to the attention of a doctor. At such times only a small effort is required to correct the problem. Our plasm use is therefore subtle, and our usage small.”

Order of Eternity’s path takes her through an arch on the right, opposite a relief titled The Archon, a man in a long robe holding a multibranched candlestick, or perhaps a stylized tree… Dragging her eyes away, Aiah follows the dreaming sister.

“There are also your aerial displays to consider,” she says. “I have seen them, and they are impressive.”

A wistful smile crosses the sister’s youthful face. “I have not seen the displays in centuries. Not since I came to the Society when I was a girl.”

“Someone here arranges them.”

“We all do, in a way…” Order of Eternity’s voice trails away as she searches for words. “These displays… they are a glimpse into our meditations, but they are only a side effect. We seek to live in accord with plasm, the greatest creative power in the universe, and sometimes actual creation takes place.”

“If I wished to make displays of this sort,” Aiah says, “a public relations agency would charge tens of thousands of dinars in plasm fees alone. You can’t claim, as with the life extension treatments, that you spend years creating these things, and that the plasm required is therefore small. I know how much plasm it costs to light up the sky.”

Order of Eternity pauses, again searching for words. Behind her, two women lie in their niche, their eyes closed, dreaming in the soft light. One of them is twisted, her small embryo body looking like a grotesque doll that has been placed by the other’s pillow.

“We do not entirely understand the phenomenon,” Aiah’s guide says. “The displays are not something we create consciously. And yet we live in harmony with plasm, and plasm is a constant of our world—it underlies all matter, all reality, and it reacts to the humans who use it, views the world through their perceptions as if through a lens. It knows things of which no human is consciously aware… and sometimes it creates things without a human consciously willing it.”

A grin spreads across Aiah’s face. She has to admit that Order of Eternity had her going for a moment. Don’t try to fool one of the Cunning People, she thinks. We’ll see who’s the passu here.

“You’re saying that nobody creates these things? Nobody sticks them up in the sky?”

“Plasm is our life, our breath,” the dreaming sister says, “and we live in harmony with its motions and bind to it our souls. Plasm is a higher order of reality—it both creates reality and alters it. It would seem that plasm sometimes reflects our meditations, but it does so without our direction.”

“And without running through your meter.”

The dreaming sister simply shrugs. “Apparently so. Here is our accumulator.”

Aiah follows the sister into a circular room and realizes she is beneath the copper dome. Slits in the dome’s base let in Shieldlight, and it glows on a carved screen that holds a small plasm accumulator. The screen is of some kind of dark wood and features intricate carvings similar to those on the building’s exterior, a profusion of faces and bodies and floral displays, humans and plants and creatures all laced together, caught in a complex moment of transformation.

There are arched gaps in the screen that allow access to the accumulator, and Aiah steps through one. The accumulator comes only to Aiah’s waist, but Aiah can see her reflection in its polished bands of black ceramic and copper.

“You’re not the first to wonder about us,” says the dreaming sister as Aiah walks a circuit around the accumulator. “Every so often someone from the ministry will come by. She will examine the meter, perhaps subject our building to inspection, and then go away. Nothing is ever found.”

“There’s a war going on. Plasm is precious.”

“Plasm is always precious,” correcting, “but we have become aware of the war, yes. The movement of plasm… the patterns of use… the resonance of violence within our hearts as we dream… yes,” she nods, “we are aware of the war. The last time we felt such disturbance was eighty-nine years ago, but that war did not last long. We would have to remember two hundred fourteen years for a conflict of similar duration and intensity, and then the fighting was terrible. This building was converted to a hospital, and we sisters were confined to a small part of it.”

“What was the war about?” Aiah asks. Her knowledge of Caraqui history doesn’t go back that far.

The dreaming sister pauses and gazes at Aiah through the lacework screen. A shaft of light dropping from the dome gleams on her cropped hair.

“Ignorance,” she says.

Aiah leaves the screen area and walks to the control panel. It is silver metal and very old, its edges scalloped in a fluid pattern that is dimly familiar to Aiah, perhaps from old college classes on architectural history.

She looks at the dials and switches. The accumulator is topped up with plasm. A heavy black plastic knob sets a rheostat to provide the building with a smallish hourly amount that, divided between two hundred and fifty-six Dreaming Sisters, makes a tiny, truly insignificant dose of plasm for each, an absurdly small amount.

There are other devices on the control panel, clocks and timers, the function of which does not seem immediately apparent. “What are these?” Aiah asks.

“We tend to lose track of time during our meditations. The timer cuts off our plasm so that we will know to take meals, clean the building, have meetings, and so on.” She tilts her head like a bird. “All is in order?”

Dials, Aiah thinks, can be rigged to show far less plasm than really exists. To prove it would involve taking apart the mechanism and metering the plasm lines, but Aiah thinks she can demonstrate the sisters are cheating without going to that much effort.

“I see nothing unusual,” she says.

Order of Eternity turns and walks through the arch on her silent bare feet.

“There is a political philosophy about plasm,” Aiah says, following, “called New City. Do you know of it?”

“No,” over her shoulder, “and I do not in any case believe that it is new. I have lived over four hundred years,” she says in her young girl’s voice, “and I have yet to see a new thing. And of course the world is far older than I, and has spun upon its axis many millions of times since last a new thing stood upon it.” The dreaming sister pauses before one of the carved allegories, The Architect, a noble-looking man with a protractor and a pair of dividers.

“The Ascended Ones isolated us here,” the sister says. “We do not know why, or where they are now, or whether the Shield shall ever fall. We are a limited people, on a limited world, and we are condemned to wait. True freedom is denied us—the most unlimited thing in the world is plasm, and even that cannot penetrate the Shield.”

Wrong, Aiah thinks, remembering dancing figures in velvet blackness, but she holds her tongue.

“We are condemned endlessly to repeat ourselves,” says Order of Eternity, “in a world of limited choice. Over years, over thousands of years, all things return. That is why we meditate upon these figures,” touching The Architect, “which we call imagoes. All human possibility, all activity and type and form, are symbolized in these images.”

“How many imagoes are there?” Aiah asks, recalling that she has seen duplicates.

“Eighty-one.”

Another Grand Square. The Dreaming Sisters are consistent in their numerology.

“This one,” the sister says, “The Architect … a lofty-looking fellow, isn’t he? But in our meditations, this imago represents failure. Because though an architect will build his dream, and his heart will thrill to the sight of the image that he held in his mind rising floor by floor in the world of the real, nevertheless the world will work its will upon dream. The brilliant new creation will grow old, and crumble, and one day join the architect himself in the dust. And so… failure.”

“Are all your imagoes failures?” Aiah asks.

“By no means. Some are wise, and have learned to accept the constraints of the world.”

Aiah looks at The Architect and folds her arms. “No change,” she says, “no improvement, nothing new.”

“No permanent change. No lasting improvement.”

“Your philosophy sounds very much like despair.”

In the dim light the sister’s blue eyes are chips of dreaming ice. “Not despair,” she says. “Acceptance. You will concede a difference?”

“And if the Shield is penetrated?” Aiah asks. “If someone gets outside your world of limitations, into the world of the Ascended—what happens to your philosophy then?”

As Aiah speaks she feels the throbbing acceleration of her heart, feels her feet grow distant, sees her vision contract, narrow to the merest point of photon contact with the dreaming sister. The universe seems to wait for the answer.

“Perhaps nothing will change at all,” says Order of Eternity. “Humanity may carry its limitations with it—perhaps the imagoes rule our actions beyond the Shield as they do beneath it. Or perhaps everything will change—who can say?”

/ have been beyond the Shield. That is Aiah’s next line. But now, the moment come, blood singing in her ears and her mouth dry with terror, she can’t say it. It is not as if she brought anything back, nor learned anything while she was there.

It is not as if the Dreaming Sisters claim to know what is beyond the Shield, or have any particular gift in interpreting what Aiah saw there. It is not as if what Aiah saw there resembled the imagoes she has seen here in the sisters’ building. It is not as if the Dreaming Sisters do not disclaim any responsibility for the aerial displays, including the gray-skinned dancer that Aiah recognized as the Woman who is the Moon. There seem to be no answers here.

It is not as if the Dreaming Sisters are not, in some way, stealing plasm.

The throbbing tide of blood recedes from Aiah’s ears. Her vision clears.

She will postpone the moment.

“Thank you,” she says politely. “I think I’ve seen everything I need, for the moment.”

Order of Eternity turns and pads away without a further word. Aiah follows. Tremors flutter through her. She feels as if she’s just fought a battle.

It is not clear to her whether she’s won or lost.

Imagoes float past on either side. Women lie in their dimly lit alcoves, limbs splayed as if their dreams had caught them unawares and dropped them in their tracks. The flagstone path winds up, down, curves left and right.

Aiah stops dead as an image strikes her like a thunderbolt. Her mind reels. “What…?” she can only gasp.

Order of Eternity stops, hesitates, returns. “This imago? It is The Shadow.”

Aiah has already read the inscription. “I know this person,” she says.

Sorya stares at her, carved in stone. She wears a high-collared gown that floats off her figure into the background, softening the outlines of her form, making it indistinct. In one hand is a dagger.

Aiah raises a hand, hesitates, touches the cold stone face. Sorya’s lips seem to curl in contempt at Aiah’s confusion.

Order of Eternity studies the portrait, head cocked. “The Shadow is she-who-follows, she who pursues the great so closely that she is invisible in their shadow.”

“Until she strikes,” Aiah says. A chill shivers down her spine.

“Just so.”

Aiah’s hand drifts along the line of Sorya’s chin. Dry rough stone, nothing more. No dust to indicate recent polishing, no cracks or weathering to testify to age. No tingle of plasm to indicate that magic was at work, or that a plasm-glamour has been placed on this image.

“How old is this carving?” Aiah asks.

The dreaming sister narrows her eyes as she looks at the stone figure. “This was not the face it bore when last I saw it,” she says. “The figure is no more than three or four days old.”

Aiah turns to her in surprise. “Someone carved a new face?” she asks.

“Oh no.” Order of Eternity shakes her head. “The figures… change… from time to time. Like the aerial displays, it is another consequence of our meditations, not willed by us.

Say rather that the plasm itself, perceiving an imago active in the world, makes the alteration of its own accord.”

Aiah strives to wrap her mind around this idea. “So Sorya—the original of this figure—Sorya has become an imago?”

“You misunderstand.” The dreaming sister turns on Aiah the cold gaze of her indifferent blue eyes. “Sorya—if that is this lady’s name—has always been an imago, one or another of the eighty-one. So have I. So have you. Not always the same imago, because our nature is not immutable, nor does our role in life remain constant. If Sorya’s face has appeared here, it is because she, and the imago of which she is an image, has become important, or powerful, or somehow key to a critical situation.”

They’re tricking me, Aiah thinks. This is some kind of manipulation; they found out I’m frightened of Sorya and changed the statue while this woman kept me busy—they’re in my head! Panic flashes through her. They’re manipulating my thoughts!

But Order of Eternity’s aloof blue gaze is calm—hardly friendly, but not menacing either—and Aiah’s panic fades. She’s familiar enough with plasm that if she were being attacked, she’d know it.

They are manipulating her, yes. But they didn’t need to get into her head to do it; all that was necessary was that they had seen The Mystery of Aiah on video.

Aiah looks at Sorya’s statue again, gives a remote nod. “Interesting,” she says. “I’m surprised, after all these years, you do not more clearly understand the phenomenon.”

“It is not our goal to understand phenomena,” says the dreaming sister. “We strive to live simply and in consonance with plasm. That is all.”

Aiah follows Order of Eternity to the entrance. Whore is drowsing on her mattress, and Aiah’s bodyguards, and the inspection team, are clearly showing their impatience. Aiah thanks Order of Eternity for her time, then pushes her way out the heavy door.

She turns to the leader of the inspection team. “Anything?” she asks.

“The meter’s fine. No sign of tampering.”

“Tomorrow I want you to come back and put monitors on every plasm cable leading to this pontoon. Have a mage make certain there aren’t any hidden plasm cables under the surface of the water.”

The man nods. “Yes, miss.”

And then one of the other members of the team gives a gasp—“Look, miss!”—and Aiah’s gaze follows his pointing finger to the front door, to the huge cast bronze of Entering the Gateway.

A shiver of fear runs down Aiah’s back.

The figure on the door has changed. Where formerly the woman entering the door was facing forward, with the back of her head to the viewer, now she has turned her head to face over her right shoulder.

There is a sweet, knowing smile on her lips.

And the face is Aiah’s.