Walter Jon Williams - Metropolitan

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1
A burning woman stalks along the streets. Ten stories tall, naked body a
whirling holocaust of fire. Terrified people on Bursary Street crumple into
carbon at her passing, leaving behind only black char curled into fetal
shapes. The heat she radiates is so powerful that structures burst into flame
as she passes. A storm of paper, sucked out of buildings by uncontrolled
drafts, spiral toward her and are consumed. Uncontrolled rivers of flame pour
from her fingertips. Windows blast inward at her keening, at the eerie,
nerve-scraping wail that pours from her insubstantial, fiery throat.
In a city that girdles the world, all-devouring fire is the worst thing
imaginable.
Aiah hears the sound first, a scream that raises the fine hairs on the back of
her neck. She gazes in shock out of the office lounge and sees the woman turn
the corner onto the Avenue of the Exchange; and for a moment she sees the
woman tripled, multiplied by the mirror glass of the Bursary Building and the
Old Intendancy, and for a horrified moment gazes into three burning faces,
three hollow sets of flaming eyes, three expressions of agonized torment in
which she can read the woman's last remnant of blasted humanity begging for
help, for an end to pain ...
Aiah turns to run and the window blows inward with a breath of wind that sears
Aiah's neck and flings her to the floor, and at the same moment she hears the
first shriek from Telia's baby and the foolish, urgent ring of the phone—
The burning woman's scream rises to Aiah's throat.
GRADE A PLASM LEAK IN FINANCIAL DISTRICT.
143 DEAD. 2000 INJURED.
PLASM AUTHORITY INVESTIGATION ANNOUNCED.
DETAILS ON THE WIRE.
As the escalator lifts Aiah from the blue passageways of the pneuma station
the liquid-silver words track across the sky, telling her things she regrets
she already knows. Between the worn metal treads of the escalator steps lie
drifts of ash, a percentage of which may be human. On the surface, a cold wind
blows black cinders between the sluicegates of buildings.
IS YOUR FAMILY SAFE? DO YOU CARRY ENOUGH INSURANCE?
More words, addressed in this instance to a more local audience, crawl in
mirrored image up the gold glass wall of the Bursary Building. Insurance
underwriters hawk their wares from hastily assembled booths on the sidewalk.
'You safe, lady?' one asks. 'You probably got a bunch of kids, right?'
Right. Barkazil women are supposed to spend their lives pregnant. Aiah hunches
deeper into her jacket and walks over to the new lottery seller at a new,
improvised kiosk.
Both the old lottery seller and his kiosk had been turned to charcoal. Aiah
had bought a ticket from him every working day for the last three years and
never known his name.
A police motorcycle glides by with an efficient turbine whine. Glass crunches
underfoot as Aiah walks across Exchange to the Plasm Authority Building with
its jagged crown of bronze horns and its gaping windows. There are white paint
circles on the pavement, each with a bit of soot in the center that marks a
casualty, a human being turned into a carbonized husk. The pigeons have
already scattered droppings on them.
She knows what waits in her office. Telia's crying baby, the smell of dirty
diapers, stale coffee in the stale-smelling lounge with its broken window now
covered by plastic. The inevitable message cylinder on her desk, because three
months ago, trying to score a few points with higher authority, she'd
volunteered for Emergency Response.
And then, after the message is answered, long hours in shivering cold, far
underground, searching for plasm that will never be hers.
More words track across the sky. Snap! The World Drink, followed by the
green-and-white Snap logo. The resources necessary to track all that across
the sky during shift change are staggering, more than she'll make in her life.
A silent aerocar crosses the sky between Aiah and the logo, rising from the
roof of the Exchange. It inverts so the driver can view the city below,
enjoying a view Aiah knows she'll never see.
In a city that girdles the world, what is the worst thing imaginable?
Not having anyplace to go.
THREE MORE INDICTED IN TRACKLINE SCANDAL INTENDANT PROMISES CLEANUP
The Plasm Authority Building is broad and high and powerful, built for the
creation, storage and transmission of plasm. It stands in careful relationship
to the other buildings of the financial/government district, relationships in
which weight, design and core construction are carefully balanced. The
carbon-steel supports form an intricate generation web insulated from the
exterior by white granite. Its thorny crown of transmission horns reaches into
the sky like grasping fingers. The outside bronze collection web, with its
roots deep in bedrock, curls over the granite in shining arabesques, brutally
functional ornamentation meant to attract, gather, and disperse any plasm
threatening to endanger the building itself - break any attack into fragments,
deprive it of will, then store it for use by the Authority's own heresiarchs.
If the burning woman had touched the building with her tendrils of flame, she
would have cried and trembled and vanished, her energies sucked into the
building's structure before being dispersed through the city grid.
But she hadn't touched the building, had in whatever was left of her reasoning
mind known that the bronze traceries meant danger. Instead the Jurisdiction
had to divert its resources to her destruction, had snuffed her by brute
force, a burst of power transmitted from the bronze transmission horns.
The building is less impressive when seen close up. Fifty other anonymous
employees enter with Aiah beneath the bronze-sheathed, grime-encrusted archway
mosaic that shows the Goddess of Transmission Dispensing Her Glory to the
People. With twenty of the new arrivals - she doesn't know one of them — she
experiences the peculiarly liquid motion of one of the building's hydraulic
elevators.
On the tenth floor the first thing Aiah hears is the wailing of Telia's baby.
The halls are covered by brown ribbed plastic runways intended to protect
crumbling floor tiles. The doors are of battered metal painted dull green. The
furniture is battered metal painted dull gray. The walls are green with a gray
stripe. The ceiling is tin and its holes reveal wiring. There are no windows.
Welcome to the civil service, she thinks. Welcome to a secure future.
'Hi,' Telia says. She's changing Jayme's diapers on the top of her desk.
Aiah wants to shout down to the insurance hawker: See? Jaspeeris do too have
kids!
Baby stool glints greenly in the fluorescents. 'Big meeting at ten,' Tella
says. I expected.'
'How's your neck?'
Aiah touches her scorched nape beneath pinned-up hair. 'All right.'
'At least you didn't get any glass cuts. Calla from Tabulation was looking
right at her window when it blew in. She almost lost an eye.'
'Which one's Calla?'
'Auburn hair. Married to Emtes from Billing.'
Aiah doesn't know him either. She looks down at her desk, the computer with
its glowing yellow dials, the scalar, the logbook.
Gil's picture in its gleaming wetsilver frame.
The baby gives another shriek. Telia smiles, half-apologetic. 'Healthy lungs,
huh?'
Telia hadn't wanted to leave her kid in the Authority's creche all day, looked
after by disinterested functionaries and subjected to every epidemic sweeping
Jaspeer. She'd asked Aiah if she minded her keeping Jayme in the office, and
Aiah had said it was all right.
She'd said it reluctantly. She had been raised in a big family, not only
siblings but cousins and nephew and nieces all jammed together in tiny
government apartments in a Barkazil neighborhood — it would suit her perfectly
well if she was never around small children again.
No less than three message cylinders sit in her wire basket. Aiah opens them,
finds they're all about the meeting, all from different supervisors.
Evidently there is chaos at the top.
Her computer's yellow dials glow at her.
She peels lace back from her wrist and pens a reply on each message, puts each
back in its cylinder, and looks on her plastic-covered list to double-check
each supervisor's pneumatic address. She dials each address on the little
gears on the end of each cylinder, then feeds them, one by one, into the
pneumatic message system. Each is tugged from her fingers by the hissing
suction of the tube, and she pictures them bulleting through darkness,
destination as fixed as that of passengers on the trackline shuttle.
In a city as big as the world, what is the worst thing?
To be twenty-five years old, and to know exactly how one will spend the rest
of one's life.
EARTHQUAKE IN PAJ1TAD.
40,000 BELIEVED DEAD!
DETAILS ON THE faTRE!
Aiah has learned to ignore the pain the heavy black ceramic headset inflicts
on her ears. At least the headset blots out the volume that comes from Jayme's
healthy lungs.
'09:34 hours, Horn Twelve reorientation to degrees 112.5. Ne?' The tabulator
on the other end of the line has anything but healthy lungs. There are gasps
between each word,, and a dry cough punctuates each phrase. Occasionally Aiah
can hear him suck on a cigaret.
'Da,' Aiah repeats. '09:34, Horn Twelve reorientation to degrees 122.5
confirmed.' 09:34 is about six minutes from now. She jots in her log as she
speaks, then dials the numbers into her computer. Inside the metal matte-black
console there are clicks and whirrs.
122.5 degrees. That would be Mage Towers.
'09=35> Horn Twelve transmit at 1800 mm. tfn. Ne?'
'Da. 09:35, Horn Twelve transmit at 1800 mm. Till further notice. Confirmed.'
1800 megamehrs. That was a lot of demand even for Mage Towers. Who wants so
much? she wonders.
She wonders if it's Constantine.
Aiah writes the numbers into her log, and notes that column six of her
transmission scalar is free. She dials column six into her computer, then
slides the algorithmic scale on the scalar until it points to 1800. She pulls
an insulated cable from her cable bank and plugs it through the scale into
the socket behind, pinning the scalar in place and completing an electronic
circuit.
There are no more calls for power until 09:34. Aiah fidgets with her lace and
feels the back of her neck burn. To avoid thinking about the burning woman she
looks at the picture of Gil in its frame.
09:33. Computer gears whirr. A little mechanical flag at the top of column six
clicks over from white to white-and-red. Atop the building, the huge bronze
transmission horn shifts slightly to 122.5 degrees.
A minute passes. The flag clicks over to all red and the electric circuit on
the scalar goes live, triggering another, far bigger plasm circuit within the
webbed steel skeleton of the building. Power pours from the transgression
horn. Mage Towers begins reception of the colossal charge of plasm.
Tfn. Till further notice. Enough plasm to fly Mage Towers halfway to the
Shield.
Aiah reaches out her hand, touches the face of the scalar, hoping to get a
taste of power, light a glowing candle in her backbrain, charge her nerves
with a taste of reality ... and of course nothing happens, nothing, because
the plasm isn't hers, because she lives in a building filled with the stuff
and she can't have any of it.
She wonders if it's Constantine on the other end of the circuit.
Probably not. Probably this is another sizzling salute to consumerism, a
thundering display for a soft drink or a new brand of shoe.
What's the worst thing in a city that covers the world?
To live forever with the object of desire, and not to possess it. 2
LIFE: YOURS, MINE," OURS ZIOO, CHANNEL 2
All leaves are cancelled: everyone's going to be working shifts-and-a-half.
Mengene has the meeting only vaguely under control: panic's infected everyone
from the Inten-dant down and there's a lot of shouting. Aiah, far too junior
to shout, sits across the shining glass conference table from Niden, the only
other brown Barkazil face in the room. She was hoping for comfort but it turns
out he has a streaming cold, and she winces every time he coughs or sneezes,
mentally willing the viruses to the nasal membranes of upper management.
Visible through the wall behind Mengene, a floating billboard drifts past. Why
so tense? it asks.
Sometimes advertisers have a sense of humor.
'Oeneme thinks it has to do with the new construction of Old Parade,' Mengene
says. He touches his little blond mustache. 'The Unity Hospital is being
demolished, there's an office building going up one and a half radii away, and
there's an excavation for a new trackline station right in the middle of the
street. The configuration is a little irregular—'
'Irregular? There's a map, isn't there?' Denselle booms. He's a fat man who
loves his own voice. Fat blooms of lace spill from his jacket cuffs.
'Not yet.'
'Why the hell not?'
Mengene sighs. 'Because Oeneme's office didn't send one.' 'Couldn't you get
one yourself?'
Mengene ignores him and begins giving out assignments, work team numbers. Aiah
begins to realize that her own name hasn't been mentioned. She holds up a
hand, is ignored, finally raises her voice. 'Mr Mengene!'
There is a moment of silence.
i haven't been given a job,' Aiah says.
Mengene looks at her. 'I know,' he says.
'Then why am I here?'
Mengene is annoyed. 'I was getting to you. You've got a special assignment.'
Her heart leaps, but she sees daggers in others' eyes. What right has she to a
special assignment?
Mengene can see the daggers as well as anyone else, it's Rohder's idea,' he
says, and the others instantly lose interest. Aiah's hope fades. Rohder is a
cobwebbed relic of the old Research Division, far gone in abstruse speculation
and philosophy, but with too much seniority to fire.
The others receive their briefings. The boardroom chairs are big, heavily
padded, with fan-shaped backs adorned with a huge gold chrysanthemum. They
make it far too easy to feel drowsy. Aiah closes her eyes, finds herself
thinking of Gil, of his short-fingered, powerful hands, the way they touch
her.
Mengene finishes. Aiah waits for the others to file out and for Mengene to
light another cigaret. Mengene sits, blows smoke, gestures for her to join him
at the head of the table. She gets out of her chair, walks up the room. Sees
her reflection in the wall's gold-plated crysanthemums, automatically pats her
hair.
it was Rohder who snuffed the flamer,' Mengene says. 'He was inside
Transmission Control when it happened, saw the thing coming on an exterior
monitor and dropped his butt in the hot seat. He'll get commended, but
handling that much plasm at his age put him in the hospital.' He shakes a
cigaret partway out of his pack, offers it to her. 'Smoke?'
'No thanks.' She sits down next to him. Behind him a peregrine dives past,
squab in its sights. If she'd blinked she would have missed it.
'Rohder called me an hour ago from the hospital. He says that when he dropped
the shoe on our flamer, he got an impression of her sourceline. He* says he
got a fairly clear impression the transmission was coming from the east.'
'Old Parade is not east,' Aiah says.
'The sourceline dropped below the horizon somewhere this side of Grand City.
He says he saw it.'
'From inside Transmission Control?'
Mengene looks uncomfortable. 'That's what he says.'
'On an exterior monitor?'
Mengene gazes fixedly at the tip of his cigaret. 'In his mind's eye.'
Futility wails in Aiah's nerves. She's going to spend days underground
searching for an old man's hallucination.
'Rohder's good, you know,' Mengene says. 'He's solid, a real wizard. I worked
with him, back when he set up Research. Bailed out before the whole department
crashed. But the crash wasn't Rohder's fault—too much interference from above.
You can't come up with a new field-tested theory of plasm use in a few
months.'
'If this is so solid,' Aiah says, 'why are you sending only me on it?'
'Because I don't work for Rohder, I work for Oeneme, and Oeneme thinks the
problem's on Old Parade.' Mengene drives his cigaret like a nail into the
titanium ashtray. It spins lazily from the momentum. Aiah wonders if Mengene's
just set up Oeneme to take a fall, perhaps on behalf of the Intendant. And
whose fault will it be if Mengene's little plot doesn't work?
The scheming Barkazil, of course. Everyone knows they're always looking for
advantage, scheming, setting up a chonah or two. Aiah knows the situation well
enough to know that she has no allies.
'The credit will be entirely yours,' Mengene says.
Escaping the credit is clearly something she needs to think about.
Mengene swabs away cigaret ash with his lace cuff. 'I've drawn you a two-man
support team,' Mengene says. 'They'll be available right after midbreak. I
know you're inexperienced with source-finding, but they might be able to guide
you through—'
Til want an overflight with transparencies, densities, and patterns.'
'Of course. I'll call down to Records for you.'
'Our maps aren't always current if they're not our district. I'll want a map
from— what's the substation between here and Grand City? Rocketman?'
Mengene looks surprised. 'I think so. I'll call Rocketman, if that's what you
want.'
Sometimes, she's learned, Jaspeeris are amazed when something intelligent
comes from her lips. She's learned to cope with the phenomenon.
Still, she can't ask any questions she truly needs the answers to.
Special assignment. What joy.
Speech is human, silence is divine
— a thought-message from His Perfection, the Prophet of Ajas
A few hours later, wearing an official yellow jumpsuit and hardhat, Aiah
climbs out of a trackline car at Rocketman Station. She's followed everywhere
by her two assistants: Lastene, a young kid with pimples, and Grandshuk, a
grizzled man so short and squat and powerfully built that she suspects some
ancestor may have had his genes twisted. Rocketman Station, the station run by
the Trackline Authority, has the same name as Rocketman Substation, the
Authority plasm station. No clue as to why either is called 'Rocketman' - most
of the names for these neighborhoods are so old they've lost all meaning.
The trackline station is ancient and deep below the surface. An old mosaic on
the platform, once-bright colors grimy and chipped, shows how the aboveground
must have looked at one time, bright whitestone buildings shining under the
gray Shield, some with odd ball-topped antennae broadcasting plasm in the form
of shining gold zigzag rays.
No rockets in the mosaic, though.
The tunnel to the substation isn't properly walled, just screened off with
steel mesh. Aiah's boots boom on temporary flooring that was probably
installed decades ago. She ascends past layers of human strata, all visible
through steel mesh: old brickwork, scrolled iron stanchions, water pipes,
brown stone, concrete, sewer pipe glistening with condensation, gray bricks,
red stone, white stone.
Everything a generator of plasm, of geomantic power.
Mass creates its own energies — for that matter is energy, albeit in another
form. The disordered pile that is the world-city, the structures of iron and
brick and rock and concrete, generates its own intrinsic power. The power
accumulates slowly within the structures themselves, fills them like rising
water entering every crevice, and lies latent unless tapped. Geomantic
relationships have been shown to matter more than mass itself — the design of
a building, or the relationship of buildings to one another can multiply power
generation, concentrate or direct it to one place or another. The metal
structures of buildings, reaching down into bedrock and up toward the Shield,
gather and concentrate that power, make it available for use and broadcast.
And the power - plasm - resonates within the human mind. It is susceptible to
control by the odd little particules of human will, and once controlled, can
do almost anything - on the small, microcosmic end, plasm can cure illness,
alter genes, halt or reverse aging, create precious metals from base matter
and radioisotopes from precious metals. On the macrocosmic end plasm can
create life, any kind of life a person can think of, can invade a target mind,
destroy a person's will and make him a puppet for the manipulator, can burn
out nerves or turn living bones to carbon ash, turn hatred to love or love to
hate, can wreak death in any number of obscene forms, can fling missiles or
bombs or people anywhere in the world, all in a snap of the fingers. Can blow
buildings down in a tornado wind, carry skyscrapers through the air for a
thousand miles and set them down feather-light at the point of destination,
create earthquakes to shiver a hundred structures to the ground, can grant
earthly power beyond the wildest dreams, can do anything except punch a hole
through the Shield that the Ascended Ones set between the world and whatever
exists outside of it.
But you have to get the stuff first. And it's collected, distributed, metered,
taxed. There's never enough. Governments require colossal amounts of plasm as
a foundation for their own power. Complexes like Mage Towers or Grand City
charge their tenants horrific sums, all because their buildings are
constructed so as to concentrate and transmit plasm efficiently, and the
tenants — geomancers of astounding wealth and power — live there because they
can afford it. Because they can afford to call for power tfn, to let the
meters run.
Never enough. But buildings are always going up, or tearing down, or going
higher, or remodeling, and the configurations are always changing, mass
achieving new balances with mass, producing new potentials. That's why plasm
divers burrow through the foundations of the world, through abandoned cellars
and long-forgotten utility mains and rubble-filled inspection tunnels, all in
hope of finding a source that's off the circuit, that hasn't been metered yet,
a source of plasm that can be tapped or sold or used to fulfill the diver's
uttermost dreams.
And if it goes wrong, Aiah thinks, if the diver takes on more power than she's
trained to handle, maybe you have hundred-foot-tall flaming women wailing down
the street, burning off a hundred years' chance accumulation of plasm in one
horrifying, burning instant.
At Rocketman Plasm Station it takes a while to establish Aiah's credentials,
since Mengene never made the promised call. The archives are kept in a room
below street level, and are reached through the wide Battery Room where the
station's power is contained in huge plasm accumulators and capacitors, three
times human-height, gleaming copper and brass layers with shining black
ceramic. Controlling them is a black metal wall filled with switches, dials,
and levers that monitor and control the vast power stored here, that cause it
to flow and surge at the drop of a contact. In the corner, near the control
bank, is an icon to Tangid, the two-faced Lord of Power.
The two controllers sit in comfortable chairs in front of the control board
and spend their days reading magazines. Their job is almost entirely
automated, but the union insists they have to stay here in case of an
emergency, and their contract even gets them hazard pay, just in case
terrorists burst in the door waving machine-guns and demanding a dose of
power.
Aiah is escorted to the archives. Lastene and Grandshuk follow like obedient
hounds. She's back in the Battery Room a few minutes later, she and her team
carrying bundles of maps, transparencies, and updates, all wrapped in official
orange Authority strapping. She sits at a table near the controllers and drags
them open.
The overflight maps are chromographs taken by aircraft, jigsawed carefully
together, and carefully scaled to give an idea of relationships. Transparent
celluloid overlays are supposed to show what's underneath. Some of the eels
are so old that they've yellowed or deteriorated. Anything that can alter
plasm generation is supposed to be in the overlays or the updates. It's all
pleasant fiction.
It's easier to let entrepreneurs do the work — that and greed. The Authority
knows that the total of plasm stolen is enormous, impossible to keep up with.
But if a plasm diver finds anything new, sooner or later someone will turn him
in for the reward and the Authority will find the source and wire it into the
circuit.
Aiah spends an hour looking at the maps. The area between the Exchange
District and Grand City is vast, hundreds of square radii. She sets her
dividers against the map scale and marches out the relationships between the
various structures, then puts down the transparencies one by one and tries to
add in their effects. The maps swim before her eyes.
It occurs to her that her job is impossible. Mengene, she decides, is up to
something. Maybe he wants her to fail.
Aiah decides she wants to think about that for a while.
She looks up at her crew, who are reading the controllers' magazines. 'You can
leave if you like. I'm going home.'
Grandshuk looks at his partner, then back at Aiah. 'We were sort of hoping to
draw some overtime.'
'I'm on salary,' Aiah says, 'I don't get overtime. But you can take yours in
the bar across the street if you want. I'll meet you here right at the
beginning of work shift tomorrow.'
Grandshuk looks at his partner again, then nods. 'If that's okay with you,
then.'
'Yeah, sure. Have fun.'
She looks down at the maps again, the yellowed transparencies that mark
utility mains, old tubeways, the foundations of buildings long since
demolished by wrecking ball or by earthquake. If she dove anywhere, anywhere,
she'd probably find some plasm. Make an announcement back at the office, hey,
problem solved. Get her pat on the back, go back to her yellow-eyed computer
and scalar and the wails of Telia's baby.
No, she decides. That's the sort of thing her brother Stonn might do. He'd
even think it was smart, at least until another Grade A screamer started
blowing out windows on Exchange.
There has to be a way around it, she thinks. A cunning way. A Barkazil way.
She's one of the Cunning People, she thinks. It's time to get those cunning
genes into action.
3 DRUG DEALERS TO HANG
2IOO, VIDEO SEVEN
LIVE FROM HAGGUL PENITENTIARY
Let Justice Be Served!
Her cousin Landro works in a hardware store in Old Shor-ings, the neighborhood
where Aiah spent her girlhood. That's an hour-and-a-half commute from
Rocketman, and in the wrong direction from where she lives at Loeno Towers.
Aiah tracklines out carrying a heavy satchel full of maps, wearing her
jumpsuit and hardhat - she is feeling unlovely and unloved by the time she
drags her feet up the broken escalator to the entrance tunnel, but as soon as
her feet touch the sidewalk she feels her heart begin to lift.
A vocal group sings somewhere, the sound floating out of an upper window. Aiah
finds herself smiling. A cold wind pours down the narrow corridor between
buildings of soiled red brick, all so old they lean over the street like old
women leaning on their sticks.
The street is narrow and closed to vehicle traffic. The buildings have shops
on the lower floor, apartments above. Most buildings have metal scaffolding
extending their fronts out over the sidewalk and into the street. Officially
speaking, the scaffolding is supposed to support the old brick walls, but the
scaffolds are all inhabited, divided up into cubicles where people sell
clothes or gadgets or toys, lucky charms or advice or vegetables raised in
roof gardens. Sometimes poor people live there, with plastic sheeting for
roofs and walls. It's all illegal, and the scaffolding and its contents will
turn into missiles in the next earthquake, but nobody in this part of the
Scope of Jaspeer has cared about building codes for a very long time.
Aiah did much of her growing up here, in public housing a few blocks away.
Cooking smells hang heavy in the air, familiar Barkazil spices. Hawkers smile
and offer homemade musical instruments, pigeon pies, incense, scarves, lucky
charms, handbags, and watches with phony labels. No end of music, music
everywhere, booming from amplifiers turned out the windows, slippery Barkazil
rhythms competing with the boom of plastic sheeting in the wind. Children play
football in the street. Old men drink beer on front stoops. Young men stand on
street corners to protect the neighborhood from whatever they think is
threatening it, presumably other young men.
At a scaffold shop she buys a meal of hot noodles with chilies and onions and
a bit of meat for seasoning. She has to put down a five-clink deposit for the
cheap ceramic cup with a chip on its rim. It's the sort of meal her
grandmother was always warning her against: the meat is supposed to be chicken
grown in a vat or on someone's roof, but it might well be sewer rat.
Aiah doesn't care — it tastes wonderful.
摘要：

1Aburningwomanstalksalongthestreets.Tenstoriestall,nakedbodyawhirlingholocaustoffire.TerrifiedpeopleonBursaryStreetcrumpleintocarbonatherpassing,leavingbehindonlyblackcharcurledintofetalshapes.Theheatsheradiatesissopowerfulthatstructuresburstintoflameasshepasses.Astormofpaper,suckedoutofbuildingsbyu...

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