Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

powerful it may just blow on its own, cause another catastrophe for which she’ll be responsible.
    She can’t even imagine his reaction. Whatever it would be, she knows, it would be utterly reasonable. He would break the situation down, make a list of logical steps. Is it too late to turn back? he’d wonder. Probably he’d want her to find a lawyer, follow his advice. Or maybe just find a psychiatrist, who knew?
    Aiah picks up the alarm clock, sets the wake-up time fifteen minutes early. She’ll tell him she’s working on proper visualization of her successful thoughts.
    *
    Aiah dreams of the burning woman, of her terrifying progress down Bursary Street, her passage leaving a river of fire. She hears the screams of the woman’s victims, cries echoed by the woman’s own wailing cry. And then the burning woman turns onto the Avenue of the Exchange, and Aiah relives the moment when she sees her standing there, flame pouring from her fingertips, the central figure mirrored and re-mirrored by the glass walls on either side of her, three views of the burning face, the hollow eyes, the lips parted in a scream that never ends . . .
    The face is Aiah’s own.
    The woman’s scream rises from Aiah’s throat as she wakes.
    The room is silent around her. The building, its vast webbed structure built for the generation and containment of plasm, broods silently, gathering power.
    The three batteries sit waiting on the table, awaiting their fate.
    *
    The connection to Gerad is bad, full of other voices, half-heard conversations that act as a chorus to Aiah’s words. But her heart aches even at a distorted version of Gil’s voice, a voice fogged with sleep and weariness, and Aiah doesn’t dare look up at the kitchen table with its tote and plasm batteries, reminders of what she’s planning.
    “I’m sorry I missed you,” Aiah says. “I was working.” She tells him about the plasm blow out, the fact she’s working shifts-and-a-half underground.
    “Did you catch the part of my message about the apartment lease? The bed money thing?”
    “Yes.”
    “I can’t send you as much this month. I hope that’s all right.”
    She can feel the anger entering her voice and can’t quite hide it. “It’s fine with me, Gil. But the people we owe money to might think otherwise.”
    “Who do we owe money to?”
    She can’t believe he has to ask. She gives him the short list, then hears a brief silence broken only by a stray voice, one from another conversation, saying What in the prophet’s name?
    “There’s got to be something wrong,” Gil says finally.
    “Yes. We could barely afford this place before you left. Now we can’t afford it at all.”
    Gil’s tone was patient. “We worked out a budget.”
    The heavy plastic-and-metal headset is hammering her skull, pounding places already chafed by her hardhat. “Yes, we did,” Aiah says. “Based on you sending me a certain amount every month, which you have not done.”
    “ You’re saying it’s my fault now? How is it my fault that I’ve had all these expenses?”
    Aiah has to take a breath or two. “I’m not laying blame,” she said. “I’m just telling you how things are.”
    “Things are expensive in Gerad,” Gil says. “You should see the place I’m living in — it’s pathetic, maybe three mattresses wide, but Havell got it for me and I’m stuck with it. And I’m obliged to take all these other people out, buy them drinks, and the prices are rigged in the places catering to executives, because they’re all owned by the Operation, so . . .”
    “You have to take people out?”
    “That’s how business is done here. It’s all done over meals and at clubs. And the company only reimburses part of it, and . ..”
    “I think you need to stop doing that kind of business, Gil.”
    “The quicker I get it all done, the quicker I get home.”
    “We’re going bankrupt,” Aiah says.
    There’s another silence. Banshug wouldn’t do that! says a voice on the