Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams Page A

Aiah!” the old man calls. “You haven’t visited your old friend for years! Where have you been keeping yourself ?”
    “I graduated and got a job with the Plasm Authority,” Aiah calls up.
    “You live with a longnose lover, I hear. Is he rich?”
    Aiah smiles. Everyone in the neighborhood passes the time of day with Charduq, and he learns everything sooner or later. The hermit is supposed to be contemplating the All, but instead he’s become the most perfect gossip in the world.
    “No,” Aiah says, “he’s not rich.”
    “ Then what good is he?” Charduq pats the pillar next to him. “Come up here, dearie, take off your clothes and live with me. I’ve been preserving my potency for years. I can make you happier than any passu Jaspeeri!”
    The hermit giggles and makes the penis-and-vulva sign with his fingers. Aiah bursts into laughter. She takes a beer and puts it in the old man’s offering bucket.
    “You’ve been up on that pillar too long,” she says. “You want a girl, you’d better cut that beard and get a nice job.”
    “You’d be surprised how many girls want to stroke my beard,” Charduq winks. He hauls in the rope and the bucket zooms upward. He’s got another bucket for waste which he lowers twice a day; whoever’s the junior clerk at the Savings Institute gets to empty it for him to keep it from stinking up the sidewalk.
    Aiah waves goodbye and heads through the crowd. The Assassins are marching past, shadowed by fat, satisfied-looking balloons — all prominent celebrities or political figures — and all stuck with balloon daggers, arrows or hatchets. Tuphar, Aiah recognizes, Gullimath the footballer, Gargelius Enchuk, and Constantine, who looks surprised at the number of daggers buried in his back .
    Constantine , she thinks, stopping dead in mid-stride, and then, of course .
    She dances through the dense crowd, then, after the elevator fails to turn up, and up the stairs to Elda’s flat. By the end of the trip she’s dripping sweat and her lungs are pumping like a bellows. She takes one of the cold beers and holds it against her forehead and tries to absorb the welcome chill. Then she drinks it down.
    She steps out onto the scaffold balcony and finds herself standing behind her mother. The Assassins Parade is about half over. One of the balloons is sagging, losing hydrogen; it looks as if its phony dagger has actually punctured it.
    Gurrah turns, looks at Aiah over her shoulder. “You sell that plasm to the witch lady?” she asks.
    Aiah feels herself flush as other relatives turn to gaze at her. “You looked in my bag?” she says.
    Gurrah’s voice is loud in justification. “I thought there might be food in there. I didn’t want it to spoil.”
    “Yeah,” Aiah says. “I always put my food behind the couch.”
    “You sold the goods to Khorsa, ne?”
    “No. I’m not selling anything.”
    “Where’d you get it? You take it from work?
    Aiah tries to glare. “No,” she says. “I didn’t.”
    “ I hope you know what you’re doing, working a chonah like that. You get caught, bad things happen when you steal from the passu government.” Her mother’s voice is rising, carrying to everyone on the balcony. Aiah lowers her voice almost to a whisper and hopes her mother will follow her example.
    “It’s not a chonah. I’m just doing someone a favor. Don’t make a fuss.”
    Gurrah’s voice rises above the sound of the parade. “I shouldn’t make a fuss?” she demands. “My daughter finds out how to gimmick meters and starts selling plasm and I shouldn’t wonder about it? I—”
    “ Thank you,” Aiah rages, “for making everyone here think I’m a thief!”
    She turns, stalks away, drops onto the empty sofa. Her pulse throbs in her head like a runaway engine. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Gurrah draw herself up and look mortally offended, and then Aiah sees a trace of doubt enter her expression. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to her that her daughter