Read Online Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams - Free Book Online Page A

basement, lady?”
    “Yes.” She begins to shoulder her way through the group of men. Powerful shoulders and pendulous guts loom at her like sagging buildings. She tries not to flinch at the powerful smell of beer.
    “You find anything down there?” the super asks. Aiah stops, looks at him.
    “Why? You lose something?”
    A couple of the men snicker into their beer. The superintendent scowls.
    “I’m just looking after my building,” he said. “I don’t like having people wandering around.”
    Aiah shoulders past him, steps into the building foyer, turns to face the superintendent. She knows she doesn’t dare let him gain the upper hand, that she needs to put him in his place now. “You never stopped anyone wandering around before,” Aiah says. “There were people living down there.”
    The man shrugs. His friends watch in silence, their amusement gone, their eyes shifting from Aiah to the superintendent and back, charting the little shifts in power.
    “You weren’t controlling access,” Aiah says, “and you’ve got gimmicked meters in your building. Maybe you know where there’s a plasm source down below. Do you?”
    The superintendent looked into the street. “Those meters could’ve been cracked years ago, before I ever got this job. There hasn’t been an inspection in all the years I’ve been here.”
    Aiah’s heart is racing. Maybe she should quit now, before she provokes him into doing something she won’t like, like calling her superiors to complain.
    But something — instinct, maybe, or the euphoria of plasm — urges her to press on.
    “The building owners are going to get fined no matter when the meters were rigged,” she says. “They won’t be happy with you. And if you want me out of your basement, you can tell me where the extra plasm was coming from.”
    The superintendent stares fixedly at the street. “Don’t know nothing.”
    Aiah shrugs. “I get paid no matter what,” she says, and heads down to the pneuma.
    Now, she wonders, was that careful ?
    Not particularly, but it was necessary.
    Down below, beneath the iron and brick and concrete, Aiah can hear the plasm calling, a blaze of fire in the cold wet darkness.
    *
    A charge of plasm carries Aiah, rung by rusted rung, up the old air shaft. Subterranean rain pours off the corrugated channels of her hardhat. She’s decided to use an exit that won’t compel her to carry charged plasm batteries past a collection of resentful drunks.
    Aiah flexes her legs and raises a heavy iron grate she’d had Grandshuk loosen two days before. She unclips her safety line and emerges into the weak yellow light of a utility tunnel, a concrete-walled oval, below street level, lined with color-coded electricity, steam and communications pipes. A row of low-intensity bulbs, each glowing dimly in its metal cage, illuminates her crouching walk as she moves in what she calculates is the direction of the trackline station.
    She hears street noises above, finds steps molded into the curved concrete wall. She plants the toes of her boots into the concave steps and hoists herself up, then cautiously nudges the manhole cover over her head. She doesn’t want to drop a truck on herself, but she can’t hear any traffic noises or vibration, and she suspects the street is for pedestrians only.
    Aiah pushes up with both hands, carefully shoves the manhole cover out of its inset steel socket. Peering out of the oval crack, she sees furry socks on feet jammed into old carpet slippers. She pushes the cover a little more, sees an elderly male face peering down at her through thick bifocal lenses.
    “You like some help, lady?”
    “Thank you, yes.”
    He’s a retiree earning a little money by renting a piece of concrete in front of a crumbling, scaffold-draped brown-stone. His wares are displayed on an old gray metal door propped up on concrete blocks — a sad collection, timeworn kitchen utensils, battered children’s toys, a few yellowed books held together