CHAPTER 17

The scent of bowel hovers in Aiah’s nostrils as Telia changes Jayme’s diapers. “I can’t understand why you want to leave,” Telia complains. “Rohder’s a spent force in the Authority. He can’t get you anything.”

Aiah wraps the cord around her headset and places it on the hook for Mokel, who has this desk on service shift this week.

“Good for a change,” she says. “Maybe I’ll pick up some pointers.”

“Rohder got his whole department flushed,” Telia says. “How many pointers can he give?”

“Bye,” Aiah says.

“I’m going to be lonely!” Telia wails, and Aiah heads for the 106th floor.

Her nerves spark fire as the elevator rises. Rohder will be her passu, and through him, the Authority. Jaspeer’s most powerful force will be doing her bidding.

On arrival she finds Rohder seated in his big padded chair, one hand dropped casually on a copper t-grip, the other holding a cigaret to his lips. When Aiah enters, the cigaret points Shieldward in a gesture that tells her to wait.

Aiah waits for a few moments, then a few moments longer. The imperious Angels of Power gaze at her sidelong from their niches on the corner. She walks to one of the huge windows and looks out at the great city, the steep gray grid topped by water towers, roof gardens, cisterns and animal pens. A silver airship two blocks long drifts along the horizon, its belly bright with advertisements.

Rohder lights a new cigaret, smokes it, lights another. Aiah wanders away from the window, walks alongside a long shelf built against the back wall. Identical sets of thick volumes are laid along it, books bound in red plastic with gold lettering along the spines. Proceedings of the Research Division of the Jaspeeri Plasm Authority, it says. Fourteen volumes. Aiah picks one at random and leafs through it. Complex mathematical formulae swarm before her eyes.

“The Intendant found it overly abstruse, I’m afraid,” Rohder says. He’s finished his business and is walking around his huge rayed desk toward her. “But I felt I had to publish the proofs. If you look in the last volume, you’ll see our recommendations.”

Aiah closes the heavy volume and returns it. “Maybe you should have put the recommendations first,” she says.

Rohder blinks as if this is a startling new idea. “Perhaps.” He walks up alongside the shelf and runs his hand along the long row of volumes. “It took my department eight years to produce those books,” he says, “and I’ve always had the feeling that no one in the Authority ever read them.”

The law of the chonah is for the pascol to agree with the passu whenever possible. “That strikes me as fairly typical of the Authority,” Aiah says. “Spend years and a lot of money on an elite commission, then flush its recommendations the second they’re made.”

Rohder looks bemusedly at the shelf of books. “Would you like a set? I seem to have a few to spare.”

“I don’t think I’d understand them. But I’d like to borrow the last volume, if I may.”

“Of course.” His blue eyes gaze blankly at her for a long moment, and then he seems to remember why she’s here. “Terminal,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You think you can help me?”

“What I need you to do,” she says, “is call Compilation and Billing and tell them that I need to go through the records for that area for the last five years.” She speaks with care, suspecting that Rohder might not follow through unless she spells it out. “That means I need access to the belts, and someone to handle the belts for me, and a reader-computer. You need to insist that I be given access immediately, because otherwise they’ll just put me off forever.”

Rohder nods at each point, as if ticking them off mentally. “Very well. I’ll call Niden first, then have him call his underlings and give the orders.”

He heads back to his desk. Aiah follows. “How is your aerial search going?” she says.

“I’ve found some small-scale use that’s probably illegitimate, but nothing big enough to cause the Bursary Street flamer.”

“Let’s hope I can find something interesting for you.”

“Mmm.” Rohder’s look is already abstracted as he reaches for his headset.

*

All the data are kept in the nearest Authority station at Rocketman, a familiar trackline journey away. The station manager, at Niden’s bidding, gives her an alcove with an old Filbaq computer-reader in a room otherwise filled with people busy entering data. Aiah’s chosen assistant, Damusz, doesn’t seem happy to have drawn extra duty. Digging the old belt out of storage has striped his chest and thighs with grime. He silently and sullenly takes the belt from its case, loads the etching belt’s spool on the reader, then stretches the belt onto the secondary spool and tightens the continuous loop. “Thank you,” Aiah says, as nicely as she can, and adjusts the play head over the belt.

The Filbaq is an old model and has probably been sitting unused in this alcove for years. It’s still functional, fortunately, and ozone scents the air as its whining electric motor soon brings the belt up to speed. Dancing dust falls from the reader’s ornamental brass fins. The screen hasn’t been cleaned in ages, and Aiah swabs it with her wrist lace to no effect. She turns to ask Damusz to bring her a spray bottle of glass cleaner, but he’s already disappeared.

Squinting through the smeared lens, Aiah presses worn steel keys, finds Kremag and Associates in the directory, and calls up the data. Disappointingly, it’s all perfectly reasonable: the firm is twelve years old, is alleged to offer “ business consulting”, and hasn’t used an iota of plasm in all that time. Business consultants wouldn’t, would they? They just let it flow through the meters.

She needs to come up with a plausible reason why she hands Kremag to Rohder. None seems to be available from the data.

The most likely tampering would come with the matter of dates and names. She asks the reader to search the entire belt for other businesses at that address, a job that will probably take some time. While the read head whines over the long strands of data, Aiah provides herself with some coffee in a cardboard cup and finds a spray bottle of glass cleaner. She cleans the screen and drinks half the coffee by the time the reader comes up with the information she needs: no less than three other businesses occupied Kremag’s offices during the years Kremag has supposedly been there. And their plasm use is identical to Kremag’s, down to the last millimehr — it seems that whoever retroactively inserted Kremag and Associates onto this belt simply hijacked the earlier firms’ data.

It’s all suspicious as hell, but still it won’t provide Aiah with a reason why she chose this particular address in the first place. Aiah gnaws a thumbnail and stares at the screen and wonders if Rohder will even ask.

Possibly he won’t, but at this point she’s not willing to take a chance.

If the data were inserted retroactively onto this belt, she reasons, they might not be inserted sequentially with the rest. The idea excites her. She leans forward as her ringers hammer the clacking metal keys.

Yes! she thinks. Triumph skips along her nerves. When data are entered on a belt in the normal fashion, it’s done more or less sequentially, one month’s string after the next. But Kremag’s data for the first years of its existence were layered in separately and lie on the etching belt years out of sequence. Whoever entered the false information should have overwritten the data from the earlier occupants of the office, but either it hadn’t occurred to him or he lacked the necessary programming skill.

Aiah leans back in her chair and smiles, and then it occurs to her that, if this particular programmer used this method more than once, she might well be able to find more examples of his handiwork.

She writes down the Kremag data, then starts slowly scanning the data on the belt, looking for data added out of sequence. There’s a fair amount of it, mostly gibberish, fragments of information slotted into empty or erased channels, but some of it is laid in whole, months and years out of sequence. Aiah jots these down as well.

The shift is almost over when she remembers that she forgot to eat lunch. Aiah calls Rohder and asks him to wait past shift change, as she’s found some important information.

“I was going to stay second shift anyway,” he says. Aiah wonders if he ever leaves.

Then she calls Constantine’s accommodation number and tells Dr. Chandros that she will be late, but will have important information when she arrives.

She gets onto the trackline just in time for shift change. The mass of bodies, swaddled close around her, keeps her from losing her footing on the long, jolting journey back to the Authority.

No one works through second shift but Tabulation, Transmission, and the odd emergency crew on standby, and the Authority building is almost deserted; whole decades of stories are vacant. She can’t remember the last time she was alone in the building’s elevators, let alone for a journey of over a hundred stories.

When Aiah enters Rohder’s office she finds him standing in front of his desk, a slight frown on his face as if he can’t quite remember how he came to be there. “Sir,” she says. “I have a list of possibilities and this one,” she points to Kremag, “this one is the most promising.”

She explains that she acquired the knowledge by searching for data strings laid out of sequence on the continuous belts. Rohder absorbs the information without comment, his pale blue eyes gazing at her unwinkingly. Finally he nods, his knob-wristed hand rising to stroke his chin.

“Do you think you could find others in this fashion?”

“Certainly. If whoever created the fake accounts made the same mistake.”

He nods and mutters something to himself, then says, “Perhaps I will be able to give you further employment. Your supervisor doesn’t mind?”

“I’m sure Mr. Mengene would be happy to assign me here. My job is pointless anyway — I’m just holding down a place in the promotion queue until a real job comes along.”

Rohder considers this. “I’ve observed,” he says, “that here at the Authority the jobs never seem to get that real.”

When she leaves, a few minutes later, she carries Volume Fourteen of the Proceedings with her.

*

There’s no car waiting for her at the corner, but it doesn’t dampen her glow of accomplishment. She happily takes a cab to Terminal and reads Rohder’s book along the way.

We therefore recommend the complete reformation of human infrastructure along the following lines . . .

Aiah’s eyebrows lift. You had to give Rohder credit for ambition.

Complete reformation of human infrastructure . . .

No wonder no one took him seriously. It cost a fortune just to lay a new sewer pipe, never mind anything more ambitious than that.

She pays her driver, knocks at the factory door, is recognized and allowed to enter. The factory looks like a military installation now, the windows painted black and covered with tape from the inside, an iron-braced corrugated roof over the accumulators and contacts, the control switches and consoles for plasm sandbagged, a half-dozen guards pacing up and down. Even though, given the threat from Rohder, no one uses plasm outside the factory or in Caraqui, there are still a pair of mages at the consoles, warding the factory itself against intrusion.

Aiah hears raised voices, Constantine’s voice booming over all. He’s in the factory office, raging up and down, arms slashing the air. Sorya, Martinus and Geymard are with him, and two others that make Aiah’s skin crawl.

They are twisted: one is small, hairless, with a moist and glabrous skin and huge black eyes each the size of a fist — all pupil, no whites. The other is short, stocky and powerful, with arms like iron conduits that hang to his knees. It looks as if all of Martinus’s mass is jammed into a body two heads shorter.

Allies, Aiah thinks, but cannot repress a shudder. She slips into the office and stands in the back, as far from the twisted as she can get — fortunately they seem to have no foul odor — and then she waits to see what the upset is about.

The factory office has been made into a kind of headquarters for the coup: there are maps of Caraqui with pins stuck in them, photographs and room plans of target buildings, tables of organization for military units and their commanders, long lists of officers with checkmarks and handwritten notes next to each, detailing whether he was approached, who approached him, his response, and the judgment of the recruiting officer concerning his degree of loyalty to the cause. But something has happened to upset all this careful organization. Constantine argues for launching the attack now, within the next twenty-four hours; but Sorya and Geymard speak against it.

Constantine’s booming voice rattles the office windows. “We daren’t give the Specials time to pick our conspiracy apart!”

“Wait,” Geymard says, and frowns at the map.

“Two arrests only,” Sorya says, “and little folk at that, junior officers who know nothing of the larger picture.”

“And their recruiters are safe, we’ve got ’em out, and they’re sheltering with our friends,” Geymard adds, nodding toward the twisted. “So the Specials cannot follow the chain upward to people more central to our plans.”

Aiah’s breath grows short at the thought of sheltering with the twisted, even if they’re friendly, living in their dark warrens, eating their food, surrounded by their odor.

“Someone must have betrayed them,” Constantine insists. “Someone in our organization.”

“Their own tongues betrayed them, most like,” Geymard says. “Drunk and boasting of the end of the Keremaths within hearing of some informer.”

“Strike now!” Constantine shouts, and throws up his hands. “Why not? Everything’s in place, awaiting only the word. . . .”

Geymard gives a little shake of the head. “There are hundreds in this conspiracy by now,” he says; “it will take longer than that to alert them all.”

“I cannot guarantee that it will be possible to alert all our people in the given time,” says the smaller of the twisted. His voice is high, gentle, with oddly formal cadences.

“And we can’t be assured of the reliability of our plasm supply,” Sorya says, and her green eyes flicker to Aiah, zeroing in like gunsights. “If you had let me arrange an accident as I wished, perhaps the Authority would no longer be a danger to us.”

Aiah watches the eyes of the conspirators turn to her. She can see an impatient muscle twitch along Constantine’s big jaw. Aiah straightens her spine and brings a smile to her lips.

“I’ve fed Kremag and Associates to the Authority,” she says. “They’ll move soon, I think. And once they’re done with Kremag, they’ll start looking into a half-dozen other addresses I’ve given them. Whatever they’ll be doing in the next week, they won’t be looking for us.”

“When will the Authority move against Kremag?” Constantine demands.

“I’ve given them enough evidence to move immediately,” Aiah says. “But they might wish to double-check. Perhaps they won’t be able to locate a prosecuting judge willing to sign the warrants on the off-shift, and perhaps the creepers from the Investigative Division can’t organize a raid on such short notice. So I wouldn’t expect anything till tomorrow.”

Constantine looks at her coldly, then spins on his heel and marches toward the map. Aiah’s heart gives a little cry at the sign of his displeasure. Constantine puts his big hand over the center of Caraqui, covering the Aerial Palace and the state buildings with his palm. He leans into the map, putting weight onto it as if he can somehow bring his impatient power to bear against his targets. “I can feel it slipping away,” he says. “We had momentum on our side till now. Now we’re at a standstill, waiting on events. Any little accident can bring an end to our schemes.”

“That was true all along,” Geymard says levelly. “And we’re safe enough, whatever happens. It’s Drumbeth who’s taking all the chances, not us.”

“The Specials could be arresting our people now.”

“And what could we do to prevent it?” Sorya says. “Besides, if they do, what will they find? Contradiction, rumor, speculation. Most of the recruits were told what they wanted to hear, which was not necessarily the truth. Their role in the scheme is small, and they know nothing else but their own part. There are very few people who know the full scope of the coup, and they are here in this room.” She looks up at Constantine. “There are some things even Drumbeth does not know, and the coup is his conception. The fact that you armed the dolphins, for example.”

Constantine doesn’t reply, turns to Geymard. “I want to see your people,” he says, “I want to know they’re ready to move the instant we give the word.”

A hint of exasperation twitches at the corners of Geymard’s slitted eyes.

“Very well,” he says. “Shall we take my aerocar?”

“Yes. At once, if you please ...”

Constantine launches himself from the office like a hound off the leash, Geymard and Martinus following at a more dignified pace. Aiah’s heart sinks — she’s abandoned here, with Sorya and the twisted. Sorya watches Constantine go, one brow arched.

“Despite being an initiate of the School of Radritha,” she says, “Constantine has never quite mastered the value of simply waiting on events.” She turns to her two allies. “My apologies for his rudeness. He is not himself now, but come the event itself, he will do well indeed. Surpass himself, I suspect.”

“We understand,” says the larger of the twisted, and surprise wells in Aiah at the realization that this massive figure is female.

“We comprehend this is a critical time for all of us,” the other adds in his dancing high-pitched voice.

“I don’t believe you have all been introduced,” Sorya continues. “Miss Aiah, these are our allies Adaveth —” the small, half-amphibian one “— and Myhorn.” The larger. Sorya looks at them and adds, “Miss Aiah is one of our most valued agents here in Jaspeer.”

Is that what I am? Aiah wonders, and nods at the pair. “Pleased to meet you,” she says, and tries not to flinch as Adaveth’s huge black liquid eyes turn to gaze at her.

“Honored,” Adaveth says simply, and then turns back to Sorya. “Am I to understand the conference is over? Shall we return to Caraqui?”

Sorya considers this. “You are welcome to remain, if you desire,” she says, “but it does not seem possible to make any decisions at this point. We will contact you within three shifts in any case.”

“Then we will return to our homes,” Adaveth says. “There are always preparations to make.” They shake hands with Sorya, and then with Aiah. Aiah summons her courage, reaches out, and touches Adaveth’s moist flesh.

The two twisted take their leave, and Aiah feels herself breathe easier. Sorya escorts them to the door of the office, then closes the door and looks after them through its glass pane.

“They are the Keremaths’ great mistake,” she says, “and our opportunity.” A smile touches her lips. “The old Avian rulers of Caraqui, twisted themselves, created other twisted to serve them, all adapted for specific tasks. The Avians stratified their society, themselves on the top, their menial creations on the very bottom. And when the Avians were overthrown, the twisted remained on the bottom — but yet they are expected to perform important tasks, among them the maintenance of utility and plasm lines on those foolish great barges the Caraquis live in.” She looks at Aiah. “Who knows what they will do in exchange for a little dignity, a little honor? Astonishing how the Keremaths seem not to understand this. I would make of those workers an elite, with pride and esprit, as befits their responsibility.”

“I see,” Aiah says. She wonders why Sorya is being so cordial, perhaps it is merely today’s fancy to be pleasant, she thinks, and then remembers, The law of the chonah is to make friends with the passu, and she feels her mental guard rise into place.

“The consoles are all free,” Sorya says. “Make use of the plasm as you like — but don’t use any outside this building, or in a way that can be detected from outside. After that I will arrange a ride home for you, if you wish.”

“Thank you,” Aiah says.

Her console is a little sandbagged womb, with only herself and the monitors and the t-grip. She uses the plasm to burn away fatigue, then practices some of the exercises Constantine has taught her, visualizations, anima, sensory array. She floats her anima into the basement and strides about in the darkness, past the big iron braces that support the weight of the huge accumulators, the cables and stanchions that feed them power. Conduits for power and reality, and soon for revolution.

And none of it, Aiah thinks, without her.

There have already been deaths. And plots, and arrests, and movements of troops. Alliances made, murders plotted, lies crafted, deceptions practiced, and at least one bargain made, with a creature of purest evil, for the consumption of souls.

None of it without Aiah.

She had been horrified, once, by the thought of deaths laid to her account. But the horror has faded now, replaced only by a fading melancholy at the necessity of it all. What were those unfortunate lives against Caraqui, the New City, the scale of Constantine’s ambition?

Aiah smoothly absorbs more power from the t-grips, expands her anima, turning herself into a giant crouching under the brick arches of the basement room. Her sensorium grows, filling the huge empty space until it seems as if she feels the pressure of every mote of dust, hears the dry throb of every insect heart. Aiah calls light into being, illuminating the huge dark cavern with a blazing pulse of power, the flickering orange fire contrasting with the deep black shadows cast by the arches.

Aiah floats through the room like a beacon and realizes, with a cold and knowing joy, that she has become a burning woman indeed.