City on Fire

moment before she drinks. Constantine’s lips, tasted next, are afire with brandy.

Desire has its way. Neither is in a hurry, and both in a mood to prolong this banquet of pleasure as long as possible: there are hors d’oeuvres on the sofa, soups and salads sampled on the bed, and then the main course, served with a full range of tangy condiments.

Aiah pushes Constantine onto his back and captures him between her legs, gazing down at his supine body, the broad cords of muscle that cross his massive shoulders and barrel chest. Her breath hisses between her teeth as she rides him. He regards her with a lazy, catlike smile, indolent eyes half-closed. His big hands set her skin afire where he touches her. She bends to lick his scent from him, covering his chest with a waterfall of her dark hair.

“I adore you utterly, Miss Aiah,” he says, baritone voice a resonant murmur in her ear, like the deep bedrock far below whispering a secret to her; and the words set her plasm-charged nerves alight, firing her flesh, melting her groin, and suddenly she finds herself peaking, the climax coming all unexpected, and from the words alone…

Breathless, she grabs fistfuls of his pectorals and pushes herself upright, arching her back, looking down at him through the skein of her hair.

That was fun, she thinks. And fortunately, she adds to herself, there are plenty more where that one came from.

She has yet to purchase any sleepwear, so afterward she pulls an undershirt over her head so that she and Constantine won’t stick together. He smiles at the sight.

“I should buy you some dainties,” he says, “satins and lace.” He smiles. “I need recreation, a break from my official worries. It will be good for me to exercise my imagination in this regard.”

“You gave me that lovely negligee of gold silk,” Aiah recalls, “but I had to leave it behind in Jaspeer.”

“I will replace it with a better,” Constantine says. He throws his arms over his head and brings his body to full stretch, arching on the bed as he brings slumbering muscle awake. “What now?” he says. “Shall I fetch the brandy bottle, and we toast each other till end of sleep shift?”

“I had in mind a more literary pursuit.”

She reaches to the bedside table, takes Volume Fourteen of the Proceedings, then returns to the bed and depolarizes the window to let in a little illumination.

Constantine screws up his eyes against the light. “You’ve trapped me, by the immortals,” he murmurs. “Trapped, deprived of my strength, and no hope but to attend.”

“Exactly,” Aiah says, “it was an ambush all along.” She joins him on the bed and props the heavy volume on her sternum. “Now listen, and I promise you will not be bored.”

He bolsters his head on his arm. Aiah turns pages, tries to find the choicest place to start. “We therefore recommend the complete reformation of human infrastructure along the following lines,” she begins, and hears Constantine puff disbelief.

“Give the fellow credit for ambition.”

“You’ll be giving him credit for more in a moment.”

She reads on, spicing abstruse comments about building codes and social foundations with her own footnotes. Rohder’s Research Division had uncovered what they called “fractionate intervals,” a distance at which plasm generation could be multiplied that was smaller than the smallest accepted unit, the radius. The results, all things being perfect, would be at most a 20 percent increase in the generation of plasm……

“Let me see that,” Constantine says, and reaches over her to pluck the book from her hands.

Aiah watches Constantine’s constant scowl as he reads, snorts, flips to another page, reads again. At the point where he reads three consecutive pages, she snatches the book from his hands and throws it over her shoulder to the floor. He looks at her in surprise.

“Why did you do that?”

“What do you think?” she asks.

He frowns critically. “Badly written,” he says, “the worst of scholastic- and specialist-prose, never to the point, fogged with obscurities and solipsisms. And the matter, these fractionate intervals, is either the greatest delusion in the world, or—”

“Or Rohder is a genius,” Aiah says, “though maybe not in writing reports.” She looks at him. “Remember that I told you no one in the Authority ever talked to anyone else? They had a way of augmenting plasm, but they never realized it.”

“If all this is true, then you may have saved the revolution, and perhaps the world.” He reaches across her. “Give me that book again.”

Aiah puts a hand on his shoulder and firmly pushes him back to the mattress. “If I have just saved the world,” she says, “don’t I deserve to have your undivided attention for the next few hours?”

Constantine’s look softens. One hand enfolds her shoulder, the massive instrument, made for smashing bricks or bending iron, now gentle as the warmth in his eyes.

“Very well,” he says. “You shall have it.”

Aiah can sense, in the taste of his lips, the tangy flavor of possibility. You may have saved the revolution… She is, then, more than the mistress of a powerful man promoted above her abilities: she has seen something no one else has, and will now arrange to bring it before the world.

It is as if the future has her name written on it. She wonders if this is how Constantine feels all the time, if he looks on the future as something he owns, has nestled in the palm of one of his giant hands.

Maybe so. But for now, Aiah is content with her triumph, and with her place in things to come.

FIVE

“Here is our secure room, for our sensitive files.”

The triumvirate and their entourage look into the bronze-lined room with polite disinterest. They have seen secure rooms before, and this one is no different. The bronze sheathing and the bronze-barred door are designed to keep plasm out, and there is a guard and a pass system that allows only authorized people inside.

The shelves are mostly empty. Drumbeth looks at them with a military eye.

“How soon do you anticipate being able to commence operations?” he asks.

“We’ve already commenced,” Aiah says. “Though our operations at present are directed at gathering intelligence.”

“You would seem not to have gathered much,” says Gen-tri, observing the empty shelves. He is the Minister of Public Security, head among other things of the police, and no friend to the Plasm Enforcement Division. He is a balding man in wine-colored velvet, and he looks about with obvious disdain as he strokes his graying mustache with his right index finger.

“It’s early days,” Aiah says. “We’re not up to strength yet.”

“I meant active operations,” says Drumbeth.

She looks down at him—he is half a head shorter than she.

“That’s a policy decision,” Aiah says. “We can start arresting people right away, of course, but there are still some weeks to go in the amnesty, and I’d rather keep gathering information for the present.”

She’s making a deliberate hedge. The triumvirate are traveling with a large entourage, and she doesn’t know how many of them might be conduits to the Silver Hand.

“Can you give me a date?” Drumbeth presses.

Aiah clenches her teeth. “I’d… rather not, sir. May I show you our ops room? It is just down the hall.”

Hilthi gives her an accusing look. He is another triumvir, the former journalist whose opposition to the Keremaths became a byword. A tall man with tilted, supercilious eyes, he jots in a notebook with a golden pen as he speaks.

“You are not prepared to arrest these criminals? The problem of stolen plasm is vast and requires immediate remedy.” He frowns at her. “Totalitarian governments always find their chief allies within the criminal classes. Though the last government is gone, their allies still remain, causing untold suffering among the population.”