Aiah hides her amusement. Ethemark is trying to rig a chonah for her.
It will take more than this little gray-skinned homunculus to catch one of the Cunning People.
At this point there is a knock on the outer office door, and Aiah rises to discover the workers come to replace her window.
At least she can successfully give orders to the maintenance staff. This was more than she ever achieved in her old job at the Plasm Authority in Jaspeer.
She turns to Ethemark and resigns herself to spending more time with him. “Very well,” she says. “I hope we will not have to go too far.”
THE BLUE TITAN THREATENS… BUT THE LYNXOID BROTHERS ARE READY! NEW CHROMOPLAY AT THEATERS NOW!
It isn’t far—forty minutes by aerial tram from the station nearest the Palace—but in terms of a difference in character, for sheer existential antithesis, a hundred hours would not be far enough.
Aiah leaves the department files, still in their briefcase, at one of the palace guard stations. A change of clothing is necessary: Ethemark advises waterproof boots, overalls, a waterproof hat. Aiah buys them en route. Dressed like a sewer worker, she enjoys her first ride on an aerial tram. It flies much faster than she’d expected, and when the high winds catch its slab sides the tram bobs alarmingly on its cable. Below, boats leave silver tracks in gray, watery canyons. The white granite towers of Lorkhin Island loom close, then are left behind.
Once they leave the tram station, they find a water taxi, but the taxi will take them only so far, and drops them off on a steel-mesh quay scarred with rust and graffiti. Aiah looks uneasily around her at a decaying, abandoned factory structure and ramshackle brick tenements.
“You are safe,” Ethemark says. “These people know me.”
Weathered Keremath faces gaze at Aiah from the pontoon opposite.
The white towers of Lorkhin Island are still visible on the near horizon. Ethemark hails and hires a boatman who happens to pass the quay. The boatman is twisted—a huge creature, broad and powerful, a walking slab designed for a hard life of manual labor. His family lives on the boat with him, beneath a tarpaulin roof: an old grandmother—a white-haired, wrinkled slab, still powerful as a truck—and a number of children. Their deformities, the boundless terrain of bone and muscle, become more pronounced as they grow older—the youngest is almost human in appearance, the oldest a near-copy of her father. The hull is some kind of foam which, when scarred or torn, can be repaired simply by adding more foam. The boat’s engine is a noisy old two-cycle outboard that runs off the same hydrogen tank as the single-burner stove, and also powers a dim light stuck up on a short mast forward.
Ethemark nods toward their hosts. “These people are among the more common of the altered,” he remarks conversationally. “They’re commonly called ‘stonefaces.’ ” Nictitating membranes shade his eyes. “
“Are these terms, ah, insulting?” Aiah asks. “Would I use them in polite company?”
“It depends on how you use them,” Ethemark says.
Aiah nods. There are Jaspeeri words for the Barkazil that can vary the same way in their meanings.
Aiah feels a chill of apprehension as the boat slips away from the warmth of Shieldlight, into the darkness beneath a pair of lumbering concrete pontoons: the buildings above the pontoons are crumbling brick tenements, bad enough in themselves, and who knows what lives underneath?
The boat moves slowly onward. Aiah’s eyes adjust to the darkness. Ethemark stands by the little mast forward and signals to Aiah. “Will you join me?”
Reluctantly Aiah makes her way forward in the last of the light, stands, and holds the mast for balance. A webwork of lights glows ahead, dim yellow dots that resolve, as Aiah nears, into bulbs strung on long strands. Somewhere there is the unmuffled cough of a generator, heard even over the racket of the boat’s two-cycle engine.
Slowly the dimensions of a floating city emerge, a city built in the shadow of the larger, Shieldlit floating city above. On the fringes are boats packed together, seemingly at random, and farther in are rafts, barges, a listing old tug… everything strung together by planks, rope or cable bridges, scaffolding, ladders, a structure of arcane complexity… Cooking smells float in the thick air, along with the odor of fecal matter, of ooze and rich salt ocean. And, dimly seen in the light of the strung bulbs, the twisted: hulking shapes like the boatman, moving massively in the darkness like moving walls; lithe small forms like Ethemark that scamper over the scaffolding; and other, rarer figures, fantastic things in nightmare shapes, things with horns and claws, with extra limbs or no limbs, with serpent scales or green-glowing lamp eyes that turn to follow Aiah as the boat moves deeper into the darkness.
“There are hundreds of these places,” Ethemark says, his voice a deep counterpoint to the high-pitched bang of the engine. “Perhaps thousands. No one has ever counted them. No one knows how many people live in them, but there must be many millions. They are called half-worlds, and those who live in them are accounted half- human.”
There is a splash ahead in the water, and Aiah’s heart leaps. Whatever it was has disappeared, leaving a ring of oily ripples. She puts a hand to her throat, looks at Ethemark.
“Plasm is generated here, isn’t it?”
The strung bulbs glow yellow in Ethemark’s saucerlike pupils. “Of course. The plasm-generating matter in the boats and rafts is insignificant, but some plasm is generated in resonance with the larger structures of the city around us, and additional plasm is… acquired from one place or another.”
“And what is done with it?”
“The people here own it. They use it for their own purposes. The boss decides.”
Aiah scowls. “Who picks the boss?”
“They are self-appointed, most of them. One might consider them a type of gangster, though gangsters of a lower order. The Silver Hand lives on the population as a predator lives on prey: the bosses of the half-worlds live among their people in a kind of symbiosis. The bosses cannot afford too great a tyranny—people could always leave—and besides, in the end, the rafts are dangerous places, and a tyrannous boss would not survive them.”
Aiah finds this assonance unconvincing. In her experience, a minor gangster is only a major gangster who hasn’t got the breaks. She hates them all.
A huge barge looms to starboard, sides streaked with rust. Aiah looks up to see a horned head gazing at her with glittering eyes, and her heart skips a beat before she realizes it’s a goat in a pen, kept for milk or meat. Elsewhere on the barge a large video set, its oval screen set high, burns its images downward for an audience of twisted children. Poppet the Puppet sings a song about the alphabet, her image gleaming off the restless goggle eyes and corded muscle of her audience.
Aiah remembers watching Poppet during her own childhood. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange sends an eerie shiver up her spine.
“This place is called Aground,” Ethemark says, “because as the sea has receded the pontoons around us have settled on the bottom. I was born here.”
The lights of his childhood home glimmer in Ethemark’s big saucer eyes.
“Why is the sea receding?”
“People have found other things to do with the water.”
A stench floats toward the boat. Aiah shrinks from it. “The conditions…,” she begins, appalled. She had grown up poor in Jaspeer, but has never seen anything like this.
“Infant mortality is very high,” Ethemark says. “Sanitary conditions are not very good, though they’re better than one might expect, and everywhere there is poverty and neglect. The twisted often have special medical needs, and there is no medicine here in any case. Educational opportunities,” dryly, “tend to be limited.”
Aiah looks at him. It is the first hint of irony she has seen in him.
“I was the son of the boss,” he says, “so I got out. I was lucky.” He stands on tiptoe, points. “My cousin is the new boss, and lives there. We will visit him.”
Aiah’s courage quails at the thought. Ethemark’s large eyes turn to her.
“This place is illegal, of course. All the half-worlds are, but certain people are paid off, and others don’t care or find the people who live here useful… and besides there is a need for places like this, so they exist. But any of these people could be driven out of here at any time, and all these homes dispersed or destroyed by any official
