Metropolitan Read Free Page B

and updates, all wrapped in official orange Authority strapping. She sits at a table near the controllers and drags them open.
    The overflight maps are chromographs taken by aircraft, jigsawed carefully together, and carefully scaled to give an idea of relationships. Transparent celluloid overlays are supposed to show what’s underneath. Some of the cels are so old that they’ve yellowed or deteriorated. Anything that can alter plasm generation is supposed to be in the overlays or the updates. It’s all a pleasant fiction.
    It’s easier to let entrepreneurs do the work — that and greed. The Authority knows that the total of plasm stolen is enormous, impossible to keep up with. But if a plasm diver finds anything new, sooner or later someone will turn him in for the reward and the Authority will find the source and wire it into the circuit.
    Aiah spends an hour looking at the maps. The area between the Exchange District and Grand City is vast, hundreds of square radii. She sets her dividers against the map scale and marches out the relationships between the various structures, then puts down the transparencies one by one and tries to add in their effects. The maps swim before her eyes.
    It occurs to her that her job is impossible. Mengene, she decides, is up to something. Maybe he wants her to fail.
    Aiah decides she wants to think about that for a while.
    She looks up at her crew, who are reading the controllers’ magazines. “You can leave if you like. I’m going home.”
    Grandshuk looks at his partner, then back at Aiah. “We were sort of hoping to draw some overtime.”
    “I’m on salary,” Aiah says, “I don’t get overtime. But you can take yours in the bar across the street if you want. I’ll meet you here right at the beginning of work shift tomorrow.”
    Grandshuk looks at his partner again, then nods. “If that’s okay with you, then.”
    “Yeah, sure. Have fun.”
    She looks down at the maps again, the yellowed transparencies that mark utility mains, old tubeways, the foundations of buildings long since demolished by wrecking ball or by earthquake. If she dove anywhere, anywhere , she’d probably find some plasm. Make an announcement back at the office, hey, problem solved. Get her pat on the back, go back to her yellow-eyed computer and scalar and the wails of Telia’s baby.
    No, she decides. That’s the sort of thing her brother Stonn might do. He’d even think it was smart, at least until another Grade A screamer started blowing out windows on Exchange.
    There has to be a way around it, she thinks. A cunning way.
    A Barkazil way.
    She’s one of the Cunning People, she thinks. It’s time to get those cunning genes into action.
     
    3 DRUG DEALERS TO HANG
    21:00 VIDEO SEVEN
    LIVE FROM HAGGUL PENITENTIARY!
    Let Justice Be Served!
     
    Her cousin Landro works in a hardware store in Old Shorings, the neighborhood where Aiah spent her girlhood. That’s an hour-and-a-half commute from Rocketman, and in the wrong direction from where she lives at Loeno Towers. Aiah tracklines out carrying a heavy satchel full of maps, wearing her jumpsuit and hardhat — she is feeling unlovely and unloved by the time she drags her feet up the broken escalator to the entrance tunnel, but as soon as her feet touch the sidewalk she feels her heart begin to lift.
    A vocal group sings somewhere, the sound floating out of an upper window. Aiah finds herself smiling. A cold wind pours down the narrow corridor between buildings of soiled red brick, all so old they lean over the street like old women leaning on their sticks.
    The street is narrow and closed to vehicle traffic. The buildings have shops on the lower floor, apartments above. Most buildings have metal scaffolding extending their fronts out over the sidewalk and into the street. Officially speaking, the scaffolding is supposed to support the old brick walls, but the scaffolds are all inhabited, divided up into cubicles where people sell clothes or gadgets or