“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.
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
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?”
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.”
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
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?”
