Aiah looks at him darkly. “Landro’s Escaliers,” she says. Constantine’s expression is satisfied. “Indeed.”
SPIRITUAL RENEWAL PARTY
FOR VICTORY, FOR MORALITY, AND FOR THE HOLY, PARQ
Aiah’s computer terminal hums, and grinds, and wafts a scent of ozone; and then its oval screen displays the message:
SCAN NEGATIVE. INITIATE NEW SCAN?
The Dreaming Sisters are not to be found anywhere in the ministry’s plasm records, or anyway not as such—it’s not that there’s no record of them, but that they probably have some other, more official name used in the files. The Arch-Revered Order of Transcendental Plasm Suckers, or something…
Aiah shuts off her terminal, hearing that little disappointed whine of the gears cycling down, and then sets her receptionist, Anstine, to work on it. That, after all, is what he is for.
Half a shift later the file appears on Aiah’s desk. Society of the Simple, 100 Cold Canal. A modest name; a forbidding address.
Aiah opens the file, sees the totals, and frowns.
The huge aerial displays that Aiah has seen since her arrival in Caraqui used enough plasm to cost tens of thousands of dinars. Yet the Society’s bills are modest, a few hundred dinars each month.
Which leaves open two possibilities: either their building is so big that it generates all the plasm they need… or they’re stealing the stuff.
She presses the intercom button on her commo array and speaks a moment with Anstine, asking him if he’s sure… Oh yes, Aiah is assured, the Society of the Simple is every so often the subject of news and video reports—those big aerial displays attract public attention; all Anstine had to do was call up the information on the Interfact.
Aiah puts the headset over her ears and makes some more calls. A boat, a pilot, some bodyguards, and an inspection team.
“Tell the camera crew they may not come.”
If they’re plasm thieves, she’ll arrest the lot of them, whether they spend their days talking to the gods or not.
Parq’s spy, floating about her department, has not made her charitable toward the idea of religion.
If they’re not thieves, then maybe they’re something much more interesting.
LORDS OF THE NEW CITY MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER!
Travel has become less pleasurable in the days since Aiah became famous. Since Constantine wants to keep her constantly in the news, camera crews follow her everywhere, and—as most of her travel consists of walking from her apartment to her job at the start of the day, and then taking the reverse path ten or twelve or sixteen hours later—the ministry, through her press spokesman, exerts itself to find newsworthy things for her to do.
When she accepted Brigadier Ceison’s polite invitation to dine with him and his staff, the video cameras followed along, and the next day stories appeared in all the media concerning Aiah’s important meeting with Barkazil military leaders. When Alfeg’s embryonic relief organization turned up a few indigent Barkazils in neighboring districts and persuaded them to move to Caraqui in search of employment, Aiah appeared on video handing them their dole cards. When Khorsa’s sister Dhival, imported for the occasion from the Wisdom Fortune Temple in Jaspeer, conducted for any interested members of Karlo’s Brigade “a traditional Barkazil religious service”—there of course existing in reality no such thing, religion in Barkazi being as chaotic as it was in most places on the globe—Aiah was on hand to clap her hands to the beat of the drums and nod approvingly as spirits of the air and the afterlife communicated their wishes through Dhival.
The routine business of her life is suddenly invested with the kind of portentous and highly artificial significance that only comes with heavy media exposure. Her appearances at cabinet meetings become “vital reports on the critical war situation.” Her briefings of PED personnel and military cops prior to raids on plasm houses are now considered “transmitting vital instructions to highly trained strike teams.” And any of her meetings with Constantine—often on thoroughly routine subjects—are now “a discreet rendezvous conducted in the citadel of supreme power.”
At least she can kiss him in public now, a fact of which she takes intermittent advantage.
Grooming takes up an ever-larger slice of her life. Every day begins with the ritual visit of the hairdresser, manicurist, and cosmetician. She finds herself fretting over the work she’s missing.
“It’s your job to look interesting,” Aldemar tells her. “This is work.”
With the increased media exposure comes increased exposure to danger. She is given security briefings, cameras are set up outside her apartment, and she is forbidden to travel outside the Palace without bodyguards. The guards come from a pool available to all government employees above a certain grade—she has no regular guards, as Constantine does—but now she has to become accustomed to looking at the world through a screen of broad, besuited male backs.
Aiah checks out a boat from the vehicle pool, and after the guards declare it safe from bomb or hidden assassin, she ducks down into the cabin and lets the helmsman take the boat out of the immediate vicinity of the Palace, at which point her guards allow her to come out into the air.
It is best, Aiah has been told, to assume that all traffic entering or leaving the Palace is being monitored by someone hostile to the government. Aside from the likelihood that there are observation posts in the tall buildings surrounding the Palace, Aiah knows from personal experience that mages working surveillance can be very unobtrusive indeed.
But any enemy surveillance is limited. Anyone watching will grow tired and bored and soon be overwhelmed by the task. Hundreds of wheeled vehicles and watercraft enter or leave the Palace every day. If nothing intriguing is seen in the boat in the first few moments of its journey, it is unlikely that any observer will maintain interest, and will instead go look at something else.
After the boat has traveled a radius from the Palace, Aiah is allowed out of the shielded cabin. As hydrogen turbines whine, the boat speeds over bright green water through a residential district of elegant flats. The buildings, about three hundred years old, have sinuous fronts, silver-bright metal alternating with long rows of window glass, and each building is topped with a crystal-roofed arboretum; and Aiah’s heart gives a leap as she realizes she’s out of the Palace again, in a speeding boat, on a bright Shieldlit day, on an errand all her own and none that belongs to the war.
Elections slogans are everywhere. Vote New City… Dalavan Party for Peace, Virtue, and Victory… Mariath for the Assembly… New City NOW.
Then she notices other graffiti unconnected with the elections, painted on the slab sides of the pontoons that support the apartment buildings—could gangs be marking their turf even here?; but as she looks closely she sees that the graffiti consists of repetitions of geomantic foci, particularly the White Horse and the Quadromark, one believed to be a warding sign and the other a sign to attract good luck.
The people here are trying to keep the war away. Drop the shells somewhere else, the marks are saying. We’ve got too much luck to be in danger.
It’s all nonsense, of course, popular magic without foundation in the real world of plasm science. The marks are a sign of how superstition can swarm into the world in times of uncertainty.