City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (9 page)

Aiah remembers watching Poppet during her own childhood. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange sends an eerie shiver up her spine.

“This place is called Aground,” Ethemark says, “because as the sea has receded the pontoons around us have settled on the bottom. I was born here.”

The lights of his childhood home glimmer in Ethemark’s big saucer eyes.

“Why is the sea receding?”

“People have found other things to do with the water.”

A stench floats toward the boat. Aiah shrinks from it. “The conditions ...” she begins, appalled. She had grown up poor in Jaspeer, but has never seen anything like this.

“Infant mortality is very high,” Ethemark says. “Sanitary conditions are not very good, though they’re better than one might expect, and everywhere there is poverty and neglect. The twisted often have special medical needs, and there is no medicine here in any case. Educational opportunities,” dryly, “tend to be limited.”

Aiah looks at him. It is the first hint of irony she has seen in him.

“I was the son of the boss,” he says, “so I got out. I was lucky.” He stands on tiptoe, points. "My cousin is the new boss, and lives there. We will visit him.”

Aiah’s courage quails at the thought. Ethemark’s large eyes turn to her.

“This place is illegal, of course. All the half-worlds are, but certain people are paid off, and others don’t care or find the people who live here useful ... and besides there is a need for places like this, so they exist. But any of these people could be driven out of here at any time, and all these homes dispersed or destroyed by any official inclined to do so. The population has no rights in the matter.”

He looks up at Aiah, and urgency enters his voice. “I said that your patron and mine have no
present
cause to disagree. I bring you to this place to show you where my loyalties truly lie. If anyone strikes at these people, tries to cut them off from what little they have, then I will owe your people no loyalty. Do you understand?”

Aiah shrinks from a cold drizzle that falls from some invisible drain high overhead. The boss’s house, covered in scaffolds and with red lights dangling overhead, floats nearer.

“
What of the bosses?” she asks. “These little gangsters you talk about, one of whom is your cousin. Are your loyalties to
them
?”

Ethemark’s thin lips draw back from his teeth, giving him a strange urgency.

“
Miss Aiah,” he says, “at this moment in time, the bosses are
necessary
. If these people were no longer driven to live here, the bosses would no longer exist. They would disappear of their own accord.”

Aiah lacks Ethemark’s optimism. She has never known gangsters to vanish of their own free will.

The boatman cuts the engine and the boat drifts up to a half-submerged landing. One of the children lashes the boat to an upright. From somewhere comes the surprising smell of coffee.

“This way.”

Ethemark reveals an unexpected agility as he springs from the boat, touches one boot to the half-submerged platform, then leaps to the rungs of a ladder that seems to be bolted together from bits of old pipe. Aiah is less graceful, and while Ethemark scurries up the ladder Aiah soaks her boots to the ankle as the platform sinks beneath her weight.

“Ethemark!” It’s a juvenile voice, but the sound comes from a mountainous shadow, dimly seen in the faint light on a catwalk above Aiah’s head.

“Hello, Craftig,” Ethemark says. “How’s the family?”

Craftig’s answer is expansive, enthusiastic, and full of digressions. Aiah climbs the improvised ladder to a narrow overhead catwalk that runs across several of the moored vessels. The bobbing shambles of Aground spreads out below her on either side like some strange half-lit blight spreading across the water. She can see grotesque faces flickering in the reflected light of gas stoves. The generator thuds at her ears, and the smell of fecal matter is overwhelming.

“Hi, lady,” the boy says.

Aiah’s attention snaps back to the two twisted. “Hello, Craftig," she says.

Craftig, not having got his growth, is about a head shorter than Aiah, but he is built on such a massive scale that he must outweigh her by at least a factor of three.

“This is Miss Aiah,” Ethemark says. “She’s my boss.”

“Nice to meet you,” Craftig says.

“We need to see Sergeant Lamarath,” Ethemark says.

“Great! This way!”

Craftig turns and scurries back along the catwalk. He has a bad limp— one knee folds under him at every step— but that doesn’t seem to slow him down. Now that Aiah is closer, she can see that something’s gone very wrong with his twisted genetics. Bone masses seem to have grown abnormally, and gray lumps of bone protrude through the skin in some places. Aiah’s stomach turns over, and she clenches her teeth and marches herself deeper into Aground.

Ethemark and Aiah follow the boy down the platform, then along a swaying bridge made of scavenged cable. Below, Aiah can see faces turned up to watch her. She can’t tell whether they are curious or hostile, but the sea of glittering eyes gives her the shivers anyway.

“I apologize for the smell,” Ethemark says. “We have an agreement with the dolphins to keep the water clean. They provided us with the generator, and we power it with methane made from human waste. That way Aground gets electricity, the water doesn’t get fouled, and we can sell the residue for fertilizer, which is used to pay the people for bringing in their night soil.”

Aiah places her feet carefully on the swaying bridge. She’s incredulous at the thought that
this
water is considered clean. And the implications of Ethemark’s statement seize her attention.

“The dolphins? Do you— do the people here— deal with them on a regular basis?”

“Naturally. We have a number of issues in common— we are both exiles from the world above, and neither of us were high on the old government’s list of priorities. The dolphins have an interest in sanitation because they are susceptible to a wide range of human diseases, so they’ve made similar deals with most of the other half-worlds. I’ve heard it said that they are not a separate species at all, but humans adapted for an aquatic environment. Twisted genetics, just like ours.”

He turns, his unblinking eyes gazing at Aiah like spheres of polished black glass. "The dolphins turned against the Keremaths because of the water situation. Did you know that?”

Aiah shakes her head. The bridge sways uneasily beneath her feet, and droplets of condensation spatter on her hat.

“
The Keremaths allowed their waste disposal systems to deteriorate. Thousands of tons of waste were being dumped untreated into the water every day. The repair went out for bids, but there was the usual fiddling over the contracts, and the dumping went on for
twelve years.”
Fury sharpens Ethemark’s deep tones. “Once the fighting was over, Constantine sent in some military engineers to the waste plants, and they fixed the problem in two days.
Two days!”

“Hey, Ethemark!” Craftig’s voice calls through the darkness. “Did you forget the way? It’s over here!”

Ethemark turns abruptly and steps off the swaying bridge onto another platform. Aiah follows, placing her feet carefully. The only route down is a ladder, then a pair of planks spanning the gap from one craft to another.

At the end of the journey is a barge with a building constructed on its rusting deck plates. It’s an assemblage of parts thrown together almost randomly: the superstructure of some other vessel; a picture window out of a streetfront display; a large trailer, wheels removed. The whole thing is decorated with long strands of decorative red lights, giving it a misplaced holiday air.

Aiah feels her spine stiffen as she nears the building: there are some stonefaces waiting here, scarred visages atop huge, muscular bodies, obvious bodyguards. An assortment of people sit waiting: a mother with children overflowing her lap, an elderly woman holding a scabrous-looking chicken in a cage, a young gray-skinned embryo reading a book in the darkness with his large goggle eyes. Petitioners, Aiah assumes, here to ask the big man for favors.

Craftig speaks to one of the guards, and then Ethemark, and the guards look at Aiah before one of them disappears into the structure. Aiah stands for a long, uncomfortable moment, hating every second of this gangster ritual, and then the guard returns and gestures for Ethemark and Aiah to enter.

“See you later, Miss Aiah!” Craftig calls.

Aiah stops, turns to the boy, forces a smile onto her face. “Nice to meet you, Craftig. Thanks for showing us the way.”

The building is tidy inside, one small, whitewashed room after another. The boss meets Aiah in a comfortable office that features a battered metal desk, gunmetal file cabinets, and the strong smell of cigar smoke. Brass-rimmed portholes look out into the darkness, and the interior lights are dim: the big-eyed twisted probably have no problem seeing, but Aiah finds herself squinting. There are no straight lines in the architecture, or angles, but rounded corners and a barrel ceiling. It’s not a feature of nautical design, but defense: the room’s been wrapped in bronze mesh in a crude attempt to defend against plasm attack, then plastered and painted. Bits of the plaster have flaked off to reveal the mesh beneath.

High on one wall, something coiled hangs from a projection. At first, in the dim light, Aiah thinks it’s a canvas fire hose, and then she realizes it’s alive. A huge snake, or a monster created by plasm, kept as a pet. She shivers.

“Miss Aiah,” Ethemark says, “this is my cousin, Sergeant Lamarath.”

“
How do you do,” Aiah says, and offers her hand.
Pleased to meet you,
under the circumstances, would be a hopeless misrepresentation.

Lamarath takes her hand in his moist, nicotine-stained grip. “The ‘Sergeant’ isn’t official,” he says. “It’s just something that goes with the job.” His voice is husky with smoking.

He’s one of the small, gray-skinned, large-eyed twisted— as of course he would be, being a cousin of Ethemark’s— and is dressed casually in high-clipped boots and a pair of tan overalls. His expression, like all expressions here, is unreadable. Aiah realizes that if she has very many of these people in her department, she’s going to have a hard time telling them apart.

Lamarath picks up a small cigar from an overflowing ashtray and props it in the corner of his mouth. “Please sit down.”

"Thank you.”

The chairs are metal, with— incongruously bright— plastic-covered cushions. She sits.

“Congratulations on your appointment,” Lamarath says. “You must be very excited.”

“At the moment,” sitting, “I’m very overwhelmed.”

“Would you like something to eat? Drink?”

The journey has left her without an appetite. And gangster hospitality is something she could do without.

“No,” she says. “Thank you.”

He sits, inhales smoke, blows it out, then leans forward and props his elbows on his desk. “What do you think of our little community?”

“I think it could use some light,” Aiah says.

Nictitating membranes eclipse a third of the Sergeant’s eyes. “Has Ethemark told you of my proposition?”

Aiah looks at her deputy. “No. He hasn’t.”

“Simply this,” Lamarath says. “I want my people to be left alone until things change outside.”

So this visit is, perhaps inevitably, official. Aiah straightens her back, puts her feet flat on the floor, clasps her hands in her lap. The proper civil servant, ready to bargain.

“Change how?” she asks.

Lamarath jabs his cigar into the ashtray. “My people need a lot of things.”

“Housing, obviously. Medical care.”

Aiah looks at Ethemark, who shifts uneasily in his seat. “That isn’t our department,” she points out. “We’re strictly plasm hunters.”

“That plasm is all we’ve got,” Lamarath says. “That and the strength of our bodies. The plasm we steal doesn’t amount to much, and if we sometimes tap some electricity or fresh water, or steal some phone or video service, or even motor off with some equipment left lying around on the quays, well, that doesn’t add up to a great deal.”

“But the half-worlds are vulnerable,” Ethemark points out.

“
Yes.” Lamarath’s husky voice grates with anger. “If your superiors demand some cheap victories, the half-worlds are where you can find them on short notice. The cops can bust up ten half-worlds per day for weeks, and it will all look very good on video—
‘Dockyard thieves arrested. Underworld plasm theft ring broken up. Fifty suspects taken into custody. Vagrants dispersed from illegal, unsanitary settlement.
’— We know how this sort of thing works, you see.”

“It’s happened often enough,” Ethemark says. “The cops get enough complaints from their superiors, they’ll come after the easy targets instead of the real thieves. The real thieves can afford better payoffs.”

“If you disperse the people here,” Lamarath says, “there’s no housing for them, so they’ll have to find another half-world; and in the meantime you’ve taken everything they own and deprived them of protection. Our plasm is all that keeps the Silver Hand off our necks, not to mention the fact that we use it for doctoring and so on.” He turns and looks up at the huge snake hanging on the wall. “Right, Doc?”

The snake slowly raises its head. “Absolutely,” it says.

Cold terror floods Aiah’s veins. It isn’t a snake, it’s some kind of twisted human being— the thing’s bald head is that of an old man, with wizened features, deep brown skin, and glittering, yellow eyes. Writhing feathery tentacles circle the creature’s neck.

“This is Doctor Romus,” Lamarath adds. “He’s my advisor.”

“The title, like that of Sergeant, goes with the job,” Romus says, then adds, “Pleased to meet you.” His voice is high-pitched, with odd, reedlike overtones.

“Hello,” Aiah manages. Her nails dig into her thighs, a reminder not to run screaming from the room.