Metropolitan Read Free

Research. Bailed out before the whole department crashed. But the crash wasn’t Rohder’s fault—too much interference from above. You can’t come up with a new field-tested theory of plasm use in a few months.”
    “If this is so solid,” Aiah says, “why are you sending only me on it?”
    “Because I don’t work for Rohder, I work for Oeneme, and Oeneme thinks the problem’s on Old Parade.” Mengene drives his cigaret like a nail into the titanium ashtray. It spins lazily from the momentum. Aiah wonders if Mengene’s just set up Oeneme to take a fall, perhaps on behalf of the Intendant. And whose fault will it be if Mengene’s little plot doesn’t work?
    The scheming Barkazil, of course. Everyone knows they’re always looking for advantage, scheming, setting up a chonah or two. Aiah knows the situation well enough to know that she has no allies.
    “The credit will be entirely yours,” Mengene says.
    Escaping the credit is clearly something she needs to think about.
    Mengene swabs away cigaret ash with his lace cuff. “I’ve drawn you a two-man support team,” Mengene says. “They’ll be available right after midbreak. I know you’re inexperienced with source-finding, but they might be able to guide you through—”
    “I’ll want an overflight with transparencies, densities, and patterns.”
    “Of course. I’ll call down to Records for you.”
    “Our maps aren’t always current if they’re not our district. I’ll want a map from— what’s the substation between here and Grand City? Rocketman?”
    Mengene looks surprised. “I think so. I’ll call Rocketman, if that’s what you
want.”
    Sometimes, she’s learned, Jaspeeris are amazed when something intelligent comes from her lips. She’s learned to cope with the phenomenon.
    Still, she can’t ask any questions she truly needs the answers to.
    Special assignment. What joy.
    *
    Speech is human, silence is divine —
    a thought-message from His Perfection, the Prophet of Ajas
*
    A few hours later, wearing an official yellow jumpsuit and hardhat, Aiah climbs out of a trackline car at Rocketman Station. She’s followed everywhere by her two assistants: Lastene, a young kid with pimples, and Grandshuk, a grizzled man so short and squat and powerfully built that she suspects some ancestor may have had his genes twisted.
    Rocketman Station, the station run by the Trackline Authority, has the same name as Rocketman Substation, the Authority plasm station. No clue as to why either is called “Rocketman” — most of the names for these neighborhoods are so old they’ve lost all meaning.
    The trackline station is ancient and deep below the surface. An old mosaic on the platform, once-bright colors grimy and chipped, shows how the aboveground must have looked at one time, bright whitestone buildings shining under the gray Shield, some with odd ball-topped antennae broadcasting plasm in the form of shining gold zigzag rays.
    No rockets in the mosaic, though.
    The tunnel to the substation isn’t properly walled, just screened off with steel mesh. Aiah’s boots boom on temporary flooring that was probably installed decades ago. She ascends past layers of human strata, all visible through steel mesh: old brickwork, scrolled iron stanchions, water pipes, brown stone, concrete, sewer pipe glistening with condensation, gray bricks, red stone, white stone.
    Everything a generator of plasm, of geomantic power.
    Mass creates its own energies— for that matter is energy, albeit in another form. The disordered pile that is the world-city, the structures of iron and brick and rock and concrete, generates its own intrinsic power. The power accumulates slowly within the structures themselves, fills them like rising water entering every crevice, and lies latent unless tapped. Geomantic relationships have been shown to matter more than mass itself— the design of a building, or the relationship of buildings to one another can multiply power generation,