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Over ninety percent of the budget, she remembers Con-stantine saying, in
maintaining that which is. Each executive in her little box, bored out of her
skull, waiting for someone above to die or move up so everyone can advance.
Like a dance in which every step takes ten years.
She remembers the mosaic in the Rocketman terminal, the bright new whitestone
city broadcasting rays of golden glory. The mosaic has become her mind's view
of Constan-tine's New City. A little dirtied and chipped perhaps, but worthy
of salvage.
Aiah turns to Telia, who is watching little Jayme scuttle about the floor on
his stomach. He isn't crawling properly yet, on hands and knees, he's just at
the insect stage.
'They don't know what they want,' Aiah says. 'The decorator says something,
and suddenly they're ripping out finished cabinets and rearranging everything.
And then / have to change all the access ports around.'
'At least you're getting paid for all your work,' Telia consoled. Her eyes
brighten. 'How's he getting along with Momo?'
'They're in love again.'
'Bad luck.'
'Won't last, though. I'll give it a week.'
Telia looks at the wall clock. 'Break time. You want to go first?'
Aiah shakes her head. 'Go ahead.'
Telia contacts the tabulator and tells her that she's offline for the next
fifteen minutes. Aiah smiles  she's invented a false Constantine, a false
Sorya, and all for Telia's benefit. She calls them Bobo and Momo. She's been
inventing details of their story relationship and inability to make decisions;
she's made them the most absurd couple imaginable, a family out of a
chromoplay comedy.
Such a couple wouldn't be up to anything illegal, would they?
Telia picks up Jayme, wipes drool from his chin, carries him away. Aiah
programs a broadcast into her computer, then sits for a long moment and
listens to the distant clicks of the gears.
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'May I come in?'
A man stands at the door dressed in a rumpled gray suit. Blue eyes peer at her
from a red, lined face, and a cigaret hangs carelessly from a corner of his
mouth. She's seen the man around, and perhaps she should know his name.
'Take a seat,' Aiah says. In order to hear him better she pulls back one
earpiece of her headset and places it against her mastoid.
The man enters and reaches for one of a pair of metal chairs standing against
the wall. 'Not those,' Aiah says. 'Broken - we reported them months ago, but
no help. Use my office-mate's chair, she's on break.'
The man nods and cigaret ash falls onto his chin lace. He moves Telia's chair
next to Aiah's desk and sits.
'I don't believe we've met, but Mr Mengene speaks well of you,' the man says.
He holds out a hand. 'I'm Rohder.'
Alarm sirens wail along the back-alleys of Aiah's nerves. This is the man who
snuffed the Bursary Street flamer, who saw with the enhanced eyes of his anima
the flamer's sourceline stretching to Terminal.
He's also the man whose phone she gimmicked, making her initial calls to
Constantine appear to come from his desk.
Aiah peels back the lace from her wrist and shakes Rohder's hand. 'Good that
you're out of the hospital,' she says, and hopes he can't see the pulse
leaping in her throat.
Rohder smiles. 'I got a little jangled,' he says. 'I wasn't expecting to have
to deal with a large-scale emergency at my age.'
'Everything's all right now?' Aiah wonders if her voice is too loud.
'Oh yes. Good as new.'
'14:40 hours,' says the voice on Aiah's headset, 'Horn Four reorientation to
degrees 033.3. Ne?'
'Ne,' Aiah says. 'Say again, please?' She looks apologetically at Rohder and
returns the speaker to her ear. The accustomed actions of programming her
computer, the simple movements of fingers and eyes, help her assemble for
herself a precarious state of serenity.
As she sets her dials she remembers that both Sorya and Khorsa, on first
meeting, had been able to tell she'd been working with plasm - though at least
Sorya had been pumping the well at the time. In the last two weeks Aiah has
used a thousand times more plasm than she had when she'd met Sorya. Rohder is
senior enough to have access to plasm - probably, at his age, using most of it
to extend his life and therefore seniority - and might be able to recognize a
fellow user.
And he used to be head of the Research Division, Aiah thinks, before he got
his funding pulled. So he's probably very good at what he does.
Lies flicker through her mind as her hand jacks the cable into the
transmission scalar. Aiah is a bit surprised at the facility of her invention.
Apparently deception improves with practice.
My temple lets me use plasm, she decides. In the rites. That's the one she'll
use.
'Yes?' she says, pulling back the earpiece once more. 'How can I help you?'
Rohder looks in vain for an ashtray, taps a long gray worm of ash into his
palm instead, then wipes the hand on his ash-gray slacks. 'You headed the
group that Mr Mengene sent east, toward Grand City.' Aiah shifts in her
chair, tries fiercely to will herself into a state of tranquility. 'That's
right,' she says.
'And you found nothing?'
i thought I'd found something promising. But it turned out there was nothing
in it.' And get that door bricked up now, she thinks.
Rohder leans toward her, a watery light in his bright blue eyes. Aiah wonders
how old he is  he seems surprisingly youthful in spite of the white hair and
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the network of creases around his eyes, but with regular plasm treatments he
could easily be over a hundred.
'And that something was?' he says.
Aiah takes a breath. 'There was an abandoned pneuma station called Terminal.
The access was right under a building where someone had been gimmicking the
meters, so I thought maybe they'd been tapping off some plasm from an unknown
structure. But my team searched the station thoroughly and didn't find
anything.' She shrugs. 'We took two days at it. So all it amounts to was that
someone was gimmicking the meters to hide some plasm use, and that was that.'
'What made you start in this particular neighborhood?'
Aiah decides not to mention the abandoned plastic plant she'd found on the
Rocketman transparency. She still has the original in her possession, and she
doubts there's another copy of the four-hundred-year-old eel in existence.
'The pneuma station seemed promising,' she says. 'And we had to start
somewhere. It wasn't as if there was more than one team working the whole
district.'
A flag snaps over on the scalar with an audible click, and Aiah jumps. A
transmission ending.
Rohder nods. 'I understand Oeneme thought that Old Parade was more promising,'
he says. He nods again. 'But nothing was found on Old Parade.'
'Nothing much,' Aiah corrects. 'A few leaks. But they could have built up to a
Grade A leak over time.' Rohder draws on his cigaret meditatively. The bright
line of flame, advancing up the length of the cigaret, touches his lips, but
he seems used to it. He draws the wet stub from his mouth, looks at it for an
uncertain moment, and then balances it precisely on the edge of Aiah's desk,
the burnt end overhanging the floor's plastic sheeting. He breathes out smoke,
looks at the cigaret butt, and frowns.
'I saw the thing's sourceline heading east,' he says. 'I was a little addled [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]