City on Fire

TWENTY-SIX

Romus and one of the guards enter the plasm well and stand sentry, ready to repel an attack.

It’s a nice gesture, but Aiah knows it’s futile. If Constantine wanted to attack her here, he would first shut off her plasm with a call to the control room deep in the bowels of the Palace, and then do whatever he wanted.

Rohder arrives an hour later, and the guards, after asking Aiah’s permission, allow him in. Aiah and Rohder sit, Barkazil style, at the kitchen table, sip tea and munch biscuits Aiah has found in a cupboard. Aiah holds her aching head in her hands. The apartment is oppressive, the walls looming like angry giants in her deranged perception. Rohder lights a cigaret.

“It’s been settled,” he says. “Your resignation, if you’ve written it, will not be accepted.”

“I did not think you were going to involve yourself in this,” Aiah says.

He looks at her levelly. “As a loyal civil servant,” he says, “I felt obliged to bring certain things to the triumvir’s attention. That the PED is his idea, his brainchild, and that disaffection in its ranks would not help him. That disaffection in the military would not work to his benefit, either. That if my entire transformation team, as an example, found itself unhappy with the current administration, we could all resign and sell our valuable services elsewhere, and his much-publicized attempts to build housing out of nothing would be set back by months. That if any stories concerning hanged men or the Party Sickness reached the ears of our now uncensored press, his reputation would be severely compromised, perhaps damaged irrevocably. I pointed out that evidence already exists, evidence which he can neither suppress nor deny. I suggested to his imagination what might happen if a polemical genius like Hilthi obtained the evidence in question.” He taps ash from the cigaret into a saucer. “I believe the triumvir saw reason.”

Aiah looks at him, winces at the effort it costs her to keep him in focus. “Thank you,” she says. Then, thinking aloud, “Should I be thanking you?”

“I don’t know.” Rohder sips tobacco smoke. “I did it entirely for my own benefit. I want an ally sitting between me and the administration.”

Aiah looks at Rohder and thinks, He really is The Mage… He who reorders nature according to his will… He is the only one of all of them who has got exactly what he wants. His transformation teams, his theory put into practice, his autonomy, and his presence indispensable to everyone concerned.

After Rohder leaves, Aiah sends her guards home—she embarrasses them by giving them baskets of flowers, all they can carry—and then turns to Dr. Romus.

“I want to thank you,” she says. “Things could have gone badly there.”

There is a fierce glint in Romus’s yellow eyes. “Where I come from,” he says, “we fight for our friends.”

And that is all I was doing, Aiah thinks. Fighting for Constantine.

If only Constantine knew it.

She kisses Romus’s wrinkled cheek—it is dry, like ancient bone—and lets him out.

And is alone with her apartment, her flowers, and her weariness.

She wakes with the Adrenaline Monster pounding in her chest and the knowledge that she will die, that Constantine or Sorya lurk outside the door, waiting to finish her off, or that Taikoen—not dead after all—dwells next to her in the plasm main, ready to tear the life from her… The walls loom in, threaten her with their silent solidity, with the knowledge that her very sight is contaminated by Taikoen’s perceptions.

The terror fades. The heavy scent of Constantine’s flowers fills her chest, makes it hard to breathe. She looks at the clock: 04:11.

She calls up a pair of her guards, apologizes for the hour, and asks them to meet her in the boat pool. Then she dresses, goes to the PED offices, and leaves a note on Khorsa’s desk telling her where she plans to go. People stare at her as she goes about her errand. They are a different lot than were on duty last shift, but they’ve obviously heard what happened, and doubtless the story has not got any smaller in the interval.

At the water gate, Aiah meets her guards, signs out a motorboat, and leaves the Palace. Bright cloudless Shieldlight beats down on her aching head. The surrounding buildings threaten her like a hedge of spears. She wishes she had thought to bring shieldglasses.

She is still, officially, on vacation. No reason not to take advantage of it.

The gray stone home of the Dreaming Sisters squats beneath its gleaming copper dome like an intricately carved puzzle, its outward complexity—the carved, entangled faces and vines-only an intimation of the subtle convolutions within. On the doorstep she sends her guards back to the Palace.

“You’ll be safe here?” one of them asks. “Are you sure, miss?”

“If I’m not safe here,” Aiah tells him, “I won’t be safe anywhere.”

The cool twilight of the sanctuary is a glorious relief after the unrelieved brightness of the Shield. The sister on duty—Aiah does not recognize her—takes her without a word to Order of Eternity, who greets her with her usual dreamy composure.

“I’m sorry,” Aiah says, “for the deaths.”

“We know the risks,” calmly, “when imagoes war with one another. We put ourselves in the center of the battle willingly.” Sadness crosses her features. “Though now that it is over, and two of our order lie dead, I cannot help but feel in my heart that our action was wrong.”

“It was the right thing,” Aiah says. “It was perhaps the only right thing done in all this affair.”

The dreaming sister looks up at Aiah, weariness in her eyes. “I hope you are right,” she says. “Time will tell.” She reaches out a gentle hand, touches Aiah’s throat. “You are bruised.”

“There was violence afterward. I am all right.”

“You don’t look all right.”

“I haven’t slept. Not in months.”

Order of Eternity tilts her head, speaks in her girlish voice. “Do you wish to sleep here?”

“Yes.” Weariness falls on Aiah like a shower of cooling rain. “Yes, I’d like to sleep here.”

A smile ghosts across the sister’s face. “I think we can promise you good dreams.”

Order of Eternity takes her arm, draws her down the corridor.

“It’s supposed to be organic,” Aiah says. “Something about the adrenal gland.”

“We will repair it,” says the dreaming sister, “and anything else we may find.”

If anyone else had said this, Aiah would have fled at the very idea of this kind of plasm intrusion into her body. But if anyone had earned the right to float through Aiah’s mind, the Dreaming Sisters had.

Besides, Aiah is too weary to resist. A hammer batters her skull with every beat of her heart.

They pass a carving of Death, and there is Taikoen, still with that eerie shimmer. Aiah gives a shudder and shrinks from the image.

“It’s still there,” she says. “Shouldn’t it have changed by now?”

“These things come in time.” “I was afraid that it was still alive.” “No.” On this point the sister is firm. “That configuration of being no longer exists.”

“I feel him in my head, in the way I see things. I keep thinking he’s alive.”

“We will correct that as well.”

She finds Aiah an empty alcove, helps Aiah lie down. The plasm contact is already there, and Order of Eternity uncoils it and hands the curved copper tip to Aiah.

“What do I do?” Aiah asks.

“Take the contact into your mouth,” the sister says. “Close your eyes. Breathe deep. You need do nothing else—our meditations will find their way to you.”

Aiah takes the cool metal into her mouth and feels at once the touch of plasm—not plasm fire, not the raging primal essence, but a soft tingling warmth, a glow. She had expected the copper to taste bitter, but it seems to have no taste at all. She closes her eyes.

“Thank you,” she mumbles around the contact.

Order of Eternity does not answer, and instead Aiah hears the slap of the sister’s feet on the flags as she withdraws.

The tingling warmth of plasm seems to steal into Aiah’s frame. Like sleep, she thinks, but more than that, a kind of strange awareness of something other…

Images seem to pulse on the backs of Aiah’s eyelids, mere phosphor glow at first, then things more concrete, images of airships and dolphins, children and trees, sky-topping buildings and birds in flight, all processing through her thoughts, dissolving one into the other… like the sisters’ aerial displays, but far more stately, each image lingering, impressing itself on Aiah’s mind, like figures in an eternal dance. And with them there is a sound, like a primal wind keening across the sharp corners of the world.

Ah, she thinks, it’s true! The plasm does sing.

And then she topples into dream.