Metropolitan (26 page)

Aiah shakes with laughter. “Why are we bothering?”

“Because the other option,” Constantine says, “is a surprise attack against the combat platform with everything we’ve got. And that would kill hundreds, maybe thousands of people who I would just as soon not send to the Shield.”

Aiah’s laughter dies away into a long moment of cold silence. She sits up, shakes her head. Not a laughing matter, she thinks, after all. “All right, Metropolitan,” she says. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you, Miss Aiah.” Constantine takes her hand, leans over her, kisses her lips. She looks at him, wine burning in her cheeks. He stands.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Breakfast on the terrace?”

“Certainly.”

He glides to the door and presses the handle down. “Have you ever been on a powerboat?” he asks.

“
I’ve never been on
any
kind of boat.”

“I think you will enjoy it. Sleep well.”

“Thank you, Metropolitan.”

Constantine closes the door silently behind him. Through the wall Aiah hears Constantine’s deep voice, Sorya’s trilling laugh, then silence.

She closes her eyes and thinks of floating out with Constantine on a long, slim powerboat, soaring across an endless quicksilver sea, a fantastic body of open water smooth and reflective as a mirror, heading toward a blue horizon such as does not exist anywhere in the world.

*

The halogen lights of Constantine’s speedboat carve a bright tunnel in the darkness beneath the city of Caraqui. Marine engines echo loud in the hollow concrete cavern. Aiah can taste salt in the wind.

The Metropolis of Caraqui forms a skin across the sea like a giant lily pad spread across a pond. Huge pontoons of concrete, linked by hawsers thicker than tree trunks, are spaced across the open water, with buildings atop them. Bridges carry most transportation and utility connections, and the larger bridges have people living on them, urban accretions so much larger than the bridges themselves that it’s sometimes difficult to detect the bridges’ original purpose. Public transport travels high above the water, and sometimes far below.

There are wide, aquatic thoroughfares here; most commerce moves by water. But the majority of the watery paths are narrow and dark, crowded and overshadowed by the vast slablike sides of the pontoons, the overhanging buildings constructed above, and the overgrown bridges and causeways. Trash bobs listlessly in the dark water. Clusters of barnacles stretch down from the pontoons’ waterline, and rusting iron ladders lead upwards at intervals, presumably for the salvation of anyone unlucky enough to tumble into the unwholesome waters.

Coming across the border from Barchab offers no problem. There are hundreds of these watery thoroughfares, and it’s impossible to police them all. Brightness appears ahead, grows larger. The boat shoots out onto a wide watery canal, turns left. The bodyguards’ boat, disciplined, follows a mere half-second behind. The water is a bright green carpet of algae broken only by floating trash. Scabrous-looking waterfowl paddle in the green water. The boulevards on either side are lined with trees. Tall glass-walled apartment buildings and towered temples gaze down at the verdant water. A wealthy district, clear enough, with only a few people in the streets and no commercial traffic on the water except for a few small barges.

“The Martyrs’ Canal,” Constantine says. “The Avians used to tie Delavites together and throw them in.”

Aiah stands in the boat with her face above the windshield, enjoying the flood of wind on her face. She looks for the famous Aerial Palace but can’t find it. She looks to her left and sees Constantine standing next to her, the collar of his blue jacket raised against the wind, his black profile cutting the air, hands on the wheel controlling the boat with a light, effortless touch despite the intensity of his expression, as if he were involved wholly with the boat, the water, the very concept of motion, arrowing from one place to another, every second a journey, a transit, from one state to another. The School of Radritha, she suspects, for all that Constantine seems to scorn it now, has nevertheless left its mark, has enabled Constantine to approach everything he does with that same level of intensity, of involvement.

Or maybe it’s just being hooked into plasm long enough. Who knows?

Kherzaki’s scowling face leaps into existence in the sky above. Another ad for
Lords of the New City
.

Constantine throttles down, his eyes scanning the faded numbers painted on the vast pontoons, the rust-pitted signs hanging beneath the low bridges. He finds what he’s looking for, turns right into a cool narrow cavern, the local equivalent of a dark alley. A flock of swallows explodes from nests constructed amid arching girders and streams toward the light. Constantine doesn’t increase speed much; his eyes still scan the walls in the vivid illumination of his halogen lights, looking for landmarks. The Shield is a thin bright strip overhead, like a distant fluorescent tube. Engine noise booms off the concrete walls.

After a few moments Constantine throttles down. There’s no light visible overhead: the pontoons above have been completely built over, turned into components of a raft. Constantine turns on underwater spotlights. The boat planes on briefly, slows, drifts toward one of the slablike pontoons. The water below is a milky soup in the halogen light. Constantine springs to the foredeck, reaches for a coil of rope, ties it to a rung of one of the ladders placed at intervals along the pontoon. The bodyguards’ boat, still under power, comes up slowly and lashes itself alongside.

“Put the sled in the water,” Constantine tells the guards. He turns to Aiah. “We may as well get ready.”

The bodyguards manhandle the big underwater sled off the back of their boat and into the water. It lands with a slap, scattering spray. Aiah pulls off her sweater and baggy wool pants.

“We’ve timed this for slack tide,” Constantine says. “The tide can cause swells, currents, tidal waves rolling up between the pontoons. Sometimes people surf the waves on boards.”

“
I saw that on video once,” Aiah says. On the
Oddities of the World
program she used to enjoy when she was little.

Tides are evidence of a universe outside the Shield — Aiah was taught that in school. Because once the sky was supposed to have been dark, except there was something in it called a Sun, and another thing called the Moon, and they both fluoresced or something to make the sky light up, like plasm adverts broadcasting from outside the atmosphere, and their gravity was responsible for the tides — so they weren’t plasm, anyway, but matter, because plasm didn’t have gravity. Aiah had always pictured them as big neon tubes twisted into circles.

And now the Shield stands in the way of anyone seeing them, but the Sun and Moon are presumed still to be out there, causing tides. Because so far as anyone knew, gravity was the only force that could get through the Shield.

Aiah supposed she could believe in the existence of a Sun and Moon that predated the Shield and were still in existence somewhere, but some other traditional details of the Premetropolitan world were harder to credit. It was said, for example, that different parts of the world somehow existed in different times. Aiah couldn’t understand that part at all, how you could move into the future or past simply by going from one part of the globe to another.

And if you could travel from the present to the past simply by moving, for example, from Jaspeer to Caraqui, then could you alter your present by going back in time somewhere else and changing things? The whole business was, somehow, counterintuitive.

The damp chill makes gooseflesh prickle beneath Aiah’s bathing costume. Shivering, she begins to drag on the awkward diving suit. The foam plastic clings to her skin like wet towels, making every move a struggle. Despite the chill air she can feel sweat breaking out on her forehead. By the time she zips the jacket up to her chin, she feels like an object securely swathed for mailing.

“Greetings to the glorious and immortal Metropolitan Constantine.” Aiah’s nape hairs crawl as the eerie disembodied voice rises from behind the boat’s counter. The hard first consonant of Constantine’s name is pronounced as an inhaled click.

Constantine walks to the stern counter and peers over. His burly upper body is bare, with his diving suit jacket dangling from his waist, but still he carries himself with a strangely formal dignity.

“Felicitations, Prince Aranax,” he says. “Your Illumination expresses a magnificent sense of condescension in deigning to speak to me without an intermediary.”

There is a splash from behind the boat. The voice, Aiah concludes, can’t be anything human. “It is best to undertake certain tasks in person,” the voice says, “in order that certain matters may be communicated in such a manner as to facilitate perfect understanding. We must speak, thus-and-so, concerning this-and-that, and without misapprehension.”

“Your illumination’s wisdom surpasses that of the immortals,” Constantine says gravely. “Surely your brilliance and enlightenment will not be exceeded in ten thousand decades.”

“My pitiful understanding is but a reflection of the glory and the wisdom of Constantine,” the voice says. “The radiance of your genius illuminates the world as an incandescent ball irradiates the darkness beneath the water, attracting to its magnificent light such unworthy beings as myself.”

“The courtesy that Your Illumination displays in affording me such a description is exceeded only by your greatness.” Constantine straightens, looks at Aiah. “Please allow me to introduce to Your Illumination my colleague, Miss Aiah, whose consummate knowledge shall guide us to our inevitable success.”

Aiah walks dry-mouthed to the stern of the boat. She feels huge as an airship in her thick porous suit, and as clumsy.

And Constantine of course had not prepared her for this. Another of his little surprises.

The dolphin sits in a pool of halogen light, regarding her with small dark pebble eyes sunk deep beneath a bulging forehead. His skin is a pinkish albino white, with scars and blotches and a few open running sores. He seems to be strongly hunchbacked. The nose has been shifted back to the top of the head. His lower jaw is prognathous, hard and beaklike, fixed in a cold, unkindly grin.

Once, she knows, the dolphins were the enemies of humanity, rulers of the world’s seas and the belligerents in a ferocious war for domination of the world. Since their defeat the dolphins have been confined to a diminishing role in the world’s affairs, and humanity has encroached on their world without hindrance.

The closest Aiah’s ever come to a dolphin is watching the Dolphins march in the Senko’s Day parade.

She glances at Constantine for support, then licks her lips. “I am,” she ventures, “awed by your presence, Your Illumination. Forgive my speechlessness at, ah, this encounter with your magnificence.”

The dolphin flutters a hand, long spatulate fingers stirring the water. “The companions of Constantine are beacons of wisdom in a sea of darkness and ignorance.”

Fortunately Constantine takes over the conversation from this point. The ludicrous flattery seems even more absurd in this space, from two exiles hiding from the light in a watery cellar.

Eventually the conversation floats on puffs of extravagant compliments to its termination, and Prince Aranax kicks his broad feet up high and submerges. Constantine and Aiah resume their preparations for their dive. Aiah puts on her buoyancy harness, which contains both pockets for lead weights and inflatable compartments to adjust her depth. Constantine helps her with the flat air tank curved to fit comfortably on her back. In her foam-plastic swaddling, Aiah can hear her heart pounding, the rasp of her panting breath. Just wrestling with all the unaccustomed gear is exhausting. By the time she pumps up her buoyancy, dons her fins and mask, and rolls off the boat into the water, she’s relieved simply to be getting underway.

The water tastes more strongly of salt than she expected — she’d done her two hours’ training in a freshwater tank. Her suit lets in an insulating layer of seawater, and it seems oily on her skin. She lets the buoyancy harness support her, tries to calm her heart, her breath. Panic doesn’t seem very far away.

Constantine follows her into the water, then swims to the sled and climbs aboard. He moves with the same powerful confidence he displays on land, and Aiah feels a stab of envy at his ability to be at home anywhere. Electric motors whine as he tests each propeller. Cavitation bubbles stream in halogen light. Then Constantine starts dumping ballast, air first hissing, then bubbling, from the valves. The raft settles in the water.

Aiah’s heart gives a leap as something white flashes beneath her feet. The dolphin.

Constantine looks at her. “Climb on board,” he says, “if you’re ready.”

Aiah concludes she’s as ready as she’s ever going to be. She kicks up alongside the sled, then wriggles up next to Constantine on the webbing stretched between the two motors. As long as she’s on the sled, she can use the raft’s air supply. Compressed air hisses as she tests one of the sled’s regulators, then puts it in her mouth. Salt sprays across her palate as she takes her first breath.

“Dump the air from your harness,” Constantine says. “We’ll use the sled to provide buoyancy.”

Aiah nods and reaches with clumsy gloved fingers for the pull-valve that will release air from her harness pockets. Constantine dons his mask and regulator, clears his ears, then begins again to submerge the sled. Escaping air sounds loud in the dark watery hollow.

The dolphin surfaces, breath snorting from his nostrils, and looks at the humans with his little eyes for a brief second before submerging once more. The bubbling water splashes up past Aiah’s face. Claustrophobia claws at her heart. She pinches her nostrils and tries to clear her ears.

Below the surface, the world is an eerie opalescent green. The barnacle-covered hulls of the pontoons stretch down into utter darkness below. Aranax flies in and out of the light, his pale hunched body soaring in its element. He’s got a fin on his back that Aiah hadn’t noticed before, and he’s wearing a sleek harness, with streamlined pockets that won’t ruin his hydrodynamics.