But it’s happening even in well-off neighborhoods like this one, a sign of how far the war has penetrated.
Suddenly the day seems less bright.
The boat slows and turns into a side canal. The long shining buildings fall behind, and here brown-brick apartments and warehouses crowd up close to the water, overhanging the canal and bridging it in places. The old, rusting bridges are encumbered with structures—shops and even small houses—that hang off them like barnacles. In these narrow watery corridors the turbines rumble loudly. Laundry floats overhead like faded artificial clouds, and swarms of noisy gulls circle. The White Horse and the Quadromark are displayed here as well, on pontoons crowded with other graffiti of a purely local interest.
Aiah sees two groups of Dalavan Militia, neither of them doing anything in particular, just drinking beer and strolling in packs along the quays. Each Militia member, Aiah sees, carries a staggering amount of firepower. An assault rifle over one shoulder, often with a sawtooth bayonet glinting in Shieldlight; a submachine gun under one arm; two or three pistols stuck into waistbands or holsters; knives big as short swords stuck into boots or jammed into cartridge belts.
Aiah can see her guards exchange looks of contempt. No serious soldier, she thinks, needs so many weapons, and no real policeman does either. All the weaponry is just to impress the neighbors, and each other.
Put these people up against the Provisional army and they’d fade into the mist.
The boat passes a stockyard and its adjacent slaughterhouse, pens packed with miniature beeves and sheep with wool the color of industrial grime. The smell is ghastly, but the swarms of gulls are thriving. Animal smells drench the air—wet wool, dung, blood, steam, offal, and a pungent chemical stench that probably has to do with how hides and wool are processed.
Aiah feels her gorge rise and turns away from the sight.
The Society of the Simple is nearby, still within smelling distance. It sits amid the grim old buildings on an ancient rust-streaked pontoon. The squat building is gray granite, with a leaded roof and a central bell-shaped dome of gleaming copper. The granite is overlaid with thousands of carvings woven together into an endless, complex knot that covers the whole building: vine leaves that turn into serpents, faces of pop-eyed demons and monsters leering out of the centers of flower blossoms… thorny brambles, ferns, trees with interwoven branches and bearing a dozen different kinds of fruit. Comic, grotesque figures hang out of carved buildings, waving papers or bottles or pigeon legs. Other buildings are ablaze, and little humans leap from the flames to their deaths. Half-hidden by the complex tracings, guns and armored vehicles can be seen. Dead women and babies hang on the bayonets of grinning soldiers, while tall, robed humans with faces of angelic serenity watch unmoved.
Everyone and everything woven together, unable to escape the vines, the brambles, the knots. It’s like one of their plasm displays carved into stone.
Aiah examines the exterior carefully as the boat approaches, but sees no figures that resemble those she has seen beyond the Shield.
A pier floats in the water on empty metal drums, and above it a rusting metal stair rises to the Dreaming Sisters’ home. A pair of Aiah’s guards bound up the stairs to check for sign of ambush, and find none. Aiah follows at a more sedate pace, still studying an intricate pattern of carved quincunxes…
The door, twice Aiah’s height, is of thick timbers with a trompe l’oeil relief of polished cast bronze stapled onto it, a relief in the shape of a door, and a young woman, seen from the rear, stepping through it. Superficially, tall and thin and with long hair in ringlets, the woman could be Aiah, or any of ten million other women. Above the relief are graven words, Entering the Gateway, in an old-fashioned, round-bellied script that Aiah has only seen in venerable inscriptions like this one.
There seems no doorbell or knocker, so Aiah finds a piece of the design—a border pattern of oak leaves—that curves conveniently in the form of a handhold, and gives the door a firm tug.
Although the door is heavy, it opens smoothly. Inside there is a bare room a half-dozen paces square—gray flags, gray stone walls, a groined arch overhead with a globular electric lamp dangling on an iron chain. Two simple arched doorways on either side lead to corridors. In an arched alcove in the back of the room a young woman lies on a mattress. She wears a simple gray knee-length shift and watches without expression as Aiah’s party enters.
Aiah’s nerves prickle as she realizes that the woman is wired to a plasm well. Even though there are no visible signs that the dreaming sister is working any magic here, she’s broadcasting signals of power perfectly recognizable to anyone who spends her days working with plasm.
Aiah’s guards are trained to recognize the signs as well, and fan into the room in case there’s any threat of violent sorcery. The three-man inspection team, suspecting nothing, follows Aiah through the door. Aiah approaches the woman, who—reluctantly, it seems—sits up to receive her. A wire trails out of her mouth, her connection to the plasm well. The woman—nun? postulant? Simple Person?—is copper-skinned and black-haired, with the hair kept severely short in a bowl-shaped bob. She’s thin and waiflike and looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare, and her leg and armpit hair are unshaven.
The dreaming sister removes the plasm connection from her mouth and holds it in her hand. The wire ends in a simple curved piece of copper metal, with a gleaming little copper ball on the end, an appliance like some people use for cleaning their tongues.
“May I help you?” the woman asks.
“My name is Aiah. I work with the ministry.” She shows her ID. “We’d like to examine your plasm meter.”
“It’s behind a door around back. The meter readers normally don’t bother us.”
Aiah looks over her shoulder at the inspection team, and their leader nods. “We’ll find it,” he says, and they push back out through the door.
Aiah turns back to the young woman. “Is there someone in charge I may speak to?” she says. “We’re here for more than a meter reading.”
The woman’s disinterested expression does not change. “May I ask what this concerns?”
“You’ve got a license for a plasm accumulator, and we’d like to see it. And there’s also… something more complex. Is there someone I can speak to?”
The woman’s lips give a little twitch of resignation. “Very well,” she says. Her brown eyes glance over each of the bodyguards in turn. Disdain enters her voice. “The gentlemen with the guns can wait here,” she says. Aiah sees her guards bristle, and she turns to them and tells them to stay.
If the Dreaming Sisters turn out to be defrauding the government of plasm, she realizes, she’ll need more than these few guards to deal with this place. A battalion may be more in order.
The dreaming sister, without looking back, has already drifted down one of the corridors, and Aiah is forced to hurry after her. The corridor follows a series of seemingly random curves, with other corridors intersecting at intervals, and the pathway rises and falls as well. The interior of the building, Aiah realizes, is as much a maze as the carved ornament outside. The dreaming sister walks without once looking back, as if she doesn’t care whether Aiah is following or not. Her bare feet don’t make a sound. Occasionally one of Aiah’s pumps skids out from under her—the flags beneath her feet have been polished slick by generations of bare feet.
The corridor is mostly plain gray stone, lit every so often by hanging globular electric lamps. At intervals there are arched alcoves, each equipped with a mattress, a bolster, and plasm connections. Some of the alcoves are empty, some have women lying in them, each with a copper connector in her mouth, eyes closed or dreamily half-closed. Each has hair cropped short and wears only a gray cotton shift; each looks surprisingly young—Aiah sees no one who looks over twenty. Sometimes the sisters share mattresses, in pairs or threes or more, a pile of dreamy bare limbs and cropped heads. The women strewn atop mattresses might suggest the languid aftermath of a particularly strenuous orgy, but somehow the effect is strangely sexless: even lying in piles the women do not seem particularly aware of one another, of their surroundings, or for that matter of Aiah and her guide walking past them down the corridor. It seems more as if they are all addicted to the same narcotic, the juice of poppies perhaps, and are being stored on shelves until it is time for another dose.