City on Fire

“But even after the hermetic transformations, all you get is more plasm. What do you plan to do with the surplus?”

“Plasm is wealth,” Constantine says, and then shrugs. “What does one do with wealth? Spend it, if you’re a fool—and most governments are foolish in the long run. Invest it, if you’re conservative, in such a way as to live off the dividends and never disturb the principal. But if you’re very wise, and possess a certain daring in your spirit, you use it to generate more and more wealth. The very existence of such a stockpile of wealth is transformational, especially in a place like Caraqui, which is so poor.”

Rohder leans back and contemplates Constantine from amid a cloud of cigaret smoke.

“You have a habit of not fully answering my questions,” he says. “Assuming all this comes to pass, and assuming you manage to keep your job, you will have an enormous reservoir of plasm, and you will be in charge of it—so what do you intend to do with it?”

Constantine holds out his hands, smiling gently. “Truly, I am not trying to be evasive,” he says. “The fact is that all actions have unforeseen consequences. It will be decades before this pool of plasm even exists, and in that time Caraqui will, I hope, have changed for the better. I can answer your question only in the most general terms.”

Rohder regards him from unblinking blue eyes.

“Very well,” Constantine says. “I will speak generally, then—I would use this fund to accomplish what the political transformation, by that time, had not. Sell plasm to provide education and housing and medicine for our population generally, clean and replenish this abused sea on which we sit, perform other work of…” He smiles. “Of an exploratory nature. Transformation is very difficult in our world—it takes tremendous resources to build anything new, because one must disrupt the life of the metropolis by settling everything and everyone that is displaced, and tear down the old thing and build the new. But with plasm—with enough plasm—all things can be done. And the geography of Caraqui makes it easy—slide an old barge out, a new barge in, and the disruption to life and the economy is all the less.” His face turns stern, like one of the Palace’s bronze eagles sniffing the wind. “I confess that my ambition is such that I will not leave the world in the same condition as I found it. Reading your Proceedings, I sensed a similar scale of thought. Will you not join me in uniting our dreams and bringing them to reality?”

“I will give it consideration,” Rohder says, and reaches in his pocket for another cigaret.

Constantine produces an envelope and slides it across the table. “This is my offer. I hope you will do me the courtesy to consider it.”

Rohder picks up the envelope and looks at it as if he does not know what it is. Then he crumples it absently, and puts the ball of paper in his pocket with one hand while he lights the cigaret with the other.

Constantine watches this, the gold-flecked eyes glittering with amusement. “If you have finished your meal,” he says, “perhaps you would like a tour of the city on my boat? You may see these barges for yourself, observe how you can transform our entire world with a few engineers, some cranes, and a handful of workmen…”

CRIME LORD DENOUNCES “NEW CITY TYRANNY”

Aiah says good-bye to Rohder and then watches as the man shambles to the waiting aerocar. Wind flutters Aiah’s chin-lace. Constantine leans close, speaks over the whine of turbines. “I hope I may be optimistic.”

“I hope so, too.”

She had enjoyed watching the two operate, Constantine seductive and manipulative, Rohder alternating intense interest with total, blank-eyed opacity. Aiah had found herself wondering if Rohder’s detachment, his total withdrawal from the world, was a strategy. A way of not acknowledging the things he didn’t want to deal with.

How would the Cunning People rate this? she wonders. Who is the passu, and who the pascol?

Turbines whine as they rotate in their pods. Suddenly there is the presence of plasm, crackling in the air like ozone, and Aiah’s nape hairs stand erect as the aerocar springs from the Palace’s pad and jets toward the Shield. The aerocar is a wink of silver in the distance before its trajectory begins to arc toward Jaspeer.

“Now,” she says, “we will find out how bored he truly is.”

Constantine looks at her. “Bored?”

“If he is bored enough in Jaspeer—if he is fed up enough with the pointlessness of his life there—he will come.” Her eyes follow the aerocar on its way across the world. “He only chased criminals with me because he was bored,” she says.

Constantine’s eyes narrow as he absorbs this. “I wish you had told me. It would have made it easier to deal with him.”

“I only realized it just now.”

“Ah.” There is an amused glint in his eye, and he puts an arm around her. His laugh comes low in her ear. “That is your gift, I think, to drive away the boredom of old men. Where was I before I met you? Stewing in my penthouse, occupying myself with trivialities—writing my memoirs over and over in my head, as old men do when there is nothing else to occupy them. And then”—he laughs again, a rumble she feels in her toes—“and then here was Miss Aiah, in the expensive new suit she’d bought just to impress me, with her plans to sell me a treasure trove of plasm she’d just happened to acquire, in hopes I would use it to make her rich and myself the master of the world…”

He pushes back the corkscrew ringlets of her hair and kisses her neck. “Thank you,” he murmurs as his arms go around her, “for giving me all this.”

She presses her body to his, hesitant because they are in public, an open landing pad with a dozen people standing by. But his lips find hers, and she shudders with sudden desire, all thought of the onlookers gone.

“Do you have an appointment now?” he asks.

“A thousand.”

“Cancel them.”

She smiles. “Yes, Minister.” With a sudden sweep of his arms he picks her up bodily—she laughs from the thrill of it, her gawky legs dangling—and carries her through the long public corridors of the Aerial Palace, past a hundred staring faces, and does not set her down until he reaches his suite, where he carries her into the bedroom and places her, delicately as if she were a piece of fine porcelain, upon the rose satin spread.

SEVEN

Perhaps Aiah should be grateful for the fact that Constantine cannot resist a gesture. After he carries her off through the corridors, things change.

It is hard to say exactly how. People react to Aiah differently—she catches a speculative look here, overhears an expression there, and sometimes she observes mere puzzlement, as if people are trying to understand just where she fits in, or what it is that Constantine sees in her.

She can’t blame them. It is not as if she has not speculated along these lines herself.

On occasion she finds the difference an unpleasant one. People condescend to her, assuming that she is merely Constantine’s plaything and knows nothing, or they try to use her as a conduit to reach him. Sometimes she has to administer a sharp correction.

Constantine himself is almost a daily presence: there are meetings, working lunches, reports commissioned and given. He drives and exhorts, setting an example of furious activity; he works on fifty things at once, somehow balancing them all, keeping them all filed within his capacious mind.

And yet, in their private moments together, he is somehow able to forget all business. He has learned from somewhere—the School of Radritha?—the art of relaxation. In her company he is happy to linger over a meal, or speculate about the implications of Rohder’s theories, or spin absurd theories about sorcery, society, or life beyond the Shield.

Every so often, sleep shift, she finds Constantine in the secure room, or discovers, looking at the log, that he was there the previous shift. Then she knows to avoid him, for when his thoughts are on Taikoen he is abrupt,