Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams Page B

pair of alligator clips, then after buying her usual one-dalder lottery ticket passes warily under the mosaic of the Goddess of Transmission. She wonders if anyone waits in her office. She changes in the Emergency Response Team locker room, puts on the suit and lace she’d worn the day before.
    She doesn’t even know how frightened she should be. She considers this fact and wonders if it is not pathetic.
    No one waits in her office, not even Telia and her baby, though the room has a faint odor of uric acid. She sits down at the scarred metal desk and throws her computer’s start switch, watches the yellow dials begin to glow. Promptly at 1300 she puts on her headset and tells the operator her station is open.
    It isn’t a very busy postbreak and she has a chance to make a few calls. Her authority as a member of Emergency Response goes unquestioned; she has some flimsies sent up in a pneumatic message cylinder with the account numbers of everyone at Mage Towers. Once she has Constantine’s account number she calls another department and has another set of flimsies sent up with his records. These are sufficiently thick that they have to come up by messenger, not by tube.
    When she isn’t monitoring the computer or setting up transmissions, she spends her time studying the patterns of Constantine’s plasm use.
    He doesn’t call for transmission very often, she finds; the normal plasm relays within Mage Towers are for the most part sufficient for his needs. But that’s only because he lives in a place like Mage Towers, where huge plasm connections are available: his weekly bill for plasm is greater than Aiah’s yearly salary, and he pays them on time.
    He has money, and apparently lots of it. Considering that he’d left a shattered Cheloki behind when he finally withdrew, a deserted pile of rubble only now beginning a recovery, Constantine seems to have come out of the deal with his bank balance to the good.
    So much the better, she thinks.
    Plasm, in Constantine’s system, is the foundation of a nation’s wealth as well as the guarantee of the people’s liberty. She wonders how much cold cash a glory hole like Terminal would be worth to him.
    Her phone rings — the outside line, not one of the Authority tabulators — and she unplugs her headset from one socket and into the other.
    “Da,” she says.
    “Aiah?” Her grandmother’s voice. “You were never home when I called.”
    Aiah’s heart gives a leap. “I’m working a lot of overtime,” she says. “Looking for that leak.”
    “Your mother is a fool,” Galaiah says, “but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong, ne? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
    Aiah tries to keep her voice level. “No,” she says. “No, I’m not.”
    “You can talk to me, you know. I won’t tell Gurrah. Or anyone else, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”
    Aiah hesitates, wanting badly to be able to tell Galaiah of her discovery, her plans, her terrors.
    Then the other line buzzes. “Excuse me, Nana,” she says. “There’s another call. I’ll be right back.”
    She shifts her headphone jack to the internal line, hears a familiar cigaret-husky voice call breathlessly for a ten-minute plasm transmission at 044 degrees.
    “Da,” she repeats. “15:30, Horn Five transmit 044 degrees at 08 mm, transmission to cease 15:40. Confirmed.”
    She programs the transmission into her computer and scalar, then shifts the headphone jack back to the outside line.
    “Nana?”
    “I’m still here.”
    Aiah takes a breath. One hand covers the flimsies on her desk, as if hiding them from her grandmother’s sight. “I’m not in any trouble,” she says, “and my only real problem is that Gil has been gone too long.”
    There is a little silence on the other end, and then, “If you’re certain.”
    “If I ever need help,” Aiah says, “you’ll be the one I call.”
    Best keep family out of it, she thinks. That way, if it all goes wrong, she’ll be the only one to pay