Metropolitan Read Online Free PDF Page A

it. Then she thought of Karlo, the greatest Barkazil hero, who had been offered the Ascendancy and refused it, and who had been walled off by the Shield along with everyone else; and of Chonah, who tricked her brilliant way through life until she lost everything and threw herself off a building, and in so doing got herself promoted to immortal in charge of hustlers; and of the Metropolitan Trocco, who got involved with Thymmah the prostitute and . . .
    Well. The point was made.
    Gil has no loser heroes. His role models all Ascended, or became Metropolitan of some district or other, or at the very least scored a winning goal in the last seconds of the big game. He read books on how to succeed by concentrating on the proper successful thoughts, and gave her solemn instruction in how it was all supposed to work.
    “The human mind generates its own plasm,” he said. “You just have to get it working for you.” It’s not what they taught her in her geomancy classes at the university, but she figured she didn’t have anything to lose by believing.
    Successful thoughts. She’d thought nothing but successful thoughts for months, and the bills still arrive on the commo almost daily.
    For a moment she considers asking her father for help. She’s only met him three times in her life — he’d left the family when she was two. A couple years ago, just after Aiah had started at the Authority, he’d called her, a voice on the phone she didn’t even remember, and asked if perhaps they might have dinner.
    She didn’t remember the face, either: he was a middle-aged stranger, plump and fairly well-off, the half-owner of a machine shop. After leaving Aiah’s mother he’d remarried and had another family; Aiah has a pair of half-brothers she’s never met. They managed to spend a pleasant hour together in the restaurant, and have met for dinner twice since and spoken every so often on the phone.
    No, she decides, she won’t ask her father for help. After all these years, she doesn’t want to feel she owes him anything.
    A yellow flash lights up the room. Aiah assumes it’s another advertisement until, a few seconds later, thunder rattles her black glass wall.
    On the video news, Mengene is leading a jumpsuit-clad team into some utility mains on Old Parade. Oeneme appears and makes reassuring sounds at the camera. Aiah can’t figure out why he looks different until she realizes that, for the video, he’s laced himself into a corset.
    Aiah’s eyes slide from the oval screen to the little door set into the wall by the apartment entrance. The door set into the dark grained polymer paneling, the door with its little silver lock that only Authority keys will open.
    Loeno Towers is set up to deliver plasm to each room, not huge amounts like Grand City, but enough to get a lot of things done. That was part of the fantasy once: when they got ahead financially, Aiah could resume her geomancy studies.
    Aiah thinks about what her cunning cousin told her about meters.
    She rises from the bed and drifts across the room. One lightning flash after another lights her way. As a member of the Emergency Response teams she has a passkey, just in case she has to cut off someone’s power. She opens the door, looks at the meter for a while. The Authority’s yellow-and-red seals look back at her.
    Her mouth is very dry.
    She could open the meter with the same key, observe the silent gears that haven’t moved since she’d bought the apartment. A couple substitutes placed just so, the gear ratio reversed, and her fortune is made. Aiah can bleed the plasm off into batteries, then sell it.
    But of course she’d get caught. Sooner or later someone would notice that the seals were broken on the gearbox. Sooner or later one of her clients, perhaps even a relative, would turn her in for the reward.
    And that would bring what remained of the dream to an end. The Authority would never employ anyone convicted of stealing plasm. The civil service would