Metropolitan Read Online Free PDF

close, and she couldn’t imagine anyone else hiring her either. Then it would be back to her old neighborhood, to be surrounded by her family, a new child every year or so, the check from the government every two weeks . . . Her loser heritage fulfilled.
    Maybe it was inevitable. At least then, one way or another, it would be over.
    She closes the little door, goes back to bed, and tries to summon cunning thoughts.
    None appear.
     
    ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT!
    METROPOLITAN LODAG III ESCAPES INJURY
    NEW PURGE OF GOVERNMENT!
    DETAILS ON THE WIRE.
     
    There’s a deep subsonic rumble as the pneuma’s hidden machinery inhales, a sound like the breath of a god, and then something kicks Aiah in the spine and the car is fired along its tube like a message cylinder through the Authority’s mail system.
    Aiah rubs sleep from her eyes. She’s up early in hopes another look through her maps and transparencies might provide an answer.
    She started with the earliest of the transparencies, one that showed a perfect rectangle of new apartment and office buildings going up four hundred years ago. And then it occurred to her to wonder what was on the site before . What was it that could have occupied that perfect six-block rectangle between 1189th and 1193rd Streets?
    An old factory? A government building? Industrial park? Whatever it was, there had to be remnants, old foundations, utility connections, piers, rebar ... a lot of mass for which there was no longer any real record.
    Then she checked her largest-scale map with her dividers, marching them across the jigsawed chromograph sections, and found that the site was exactly 144 radii from Bursary Street, where the flaming woman first appeared. One hundred and forty-four, twelve squared. One of the Great Squares. A flamer’s sourceline, its umbilical cord to its energy source, might have fallen into that ratio naturally. A Grand Square like 81 would have been better, a square of a square, but she couldn’t hope for everything.
    The discovery set a little signal humming through her nerves. Now she’d check the archives and see if she could find out what had been on that site before the housing went up.
    Her ears pop as the pneuma dives under an obstruction, a deep structure or subterranean river. On the front of the car is a video screen, a wide bright oval intended to keep the passengers tranquilized. It’s covered with a slab of bulletproof glass and fixed to the car with heavy stainless steel bolts just in case anyone has a notion to remove it.
    The car’s speakers are wretched and buzz insistently. Aiah can’t hear any of the dialogue, but it doesn’t matter. She knows the story by heart. There’s the winsome blond apprentice with her white even teeth and innocent heart. There’s the old master with snowy eyebrows like pigeon’s wings, his manner gruff but his heart of purest hammered gold. The master answers the apprentice’s every naive question, imparts vaguely optimistic philosophy, explains the ways of geomancy, and offers brusque advice on the winning of the hero, who as the son of the Metropolitan is about a thousand social strata higher than the heroine but who, luckily for the apprentice, is in deep trouble.
    At the story’s climax the apprentice climbs into the hot seat in some Transmission Control office, takes a copper transference grip in each hand, and screams, “No time to explain! Give me full power now!” And the next thing you know the villain is thwarted, the Metropolitan’s ass is saved once again, and the apprentice and the hero are wrapped in a clinch in his rooftop arboretum. Fade to black. The end.
    Aiah’s seen the film a hundred times, and during her adolescence probably read a thousand books with a similar plot. And all she can think when she sees one now is, If only it were that easy.
    If only there were really these kindly old masters to explain everything, to predict the future unerringly, and guide you through life with a few homespun