Free Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams

her husband Nikov was a member of the Operation who got assassinated, and the Operation has an excellent insurance plan that’s been taking care of Elda and her kids ever since.
    Aiah and many of the family wrote off Elda when she married. After what had happened to Henley, Aiah couldn’t believe Elda could marry someone like Nikov. But now that Nikov’s ashes are safe in their little cement cubicle far underground, certain elements of the past can be buried with him. If Henley could forgive, Aiah supposed that she could as well.
    Aiah can hear the high pitch of conversation and the throb of music as soon as she steps off the elevator. She enters through Elda’s open door and is swept up in a whirlwind of embraces. Small children clasp her knees. She greets them all and manages to drop the heavy tote behind the sofa where it won’t attract attention.
    And then she encounters Gurrah, her mother, the only person who greets her with a frown. “You didn’t come see me the other day,” Gurrah says in her thick-tongued Barkazil accent; and then she makes a show of reluctantly embracing her daughter.
    “ Mother,” Aiah says, “I was working . I wasn’t up here for a social call.”
    Gurrah sniffs. “Landro told me what you were working at. Looking for ways to put your people in prison.”
    “I was looking for ways to keep someone from blowing up Bursary Street again.”
    “Were you there when it happened?” asks her sister Henley, and Aiah gratefully turns to her. Henley is as tall as Aiah, a year older, and carries herself with an uncommon grace of movement that Aiah has always envied. Henley is pregnant again, Aiah knows. At least, she thinks, Henley’s husband is a reliable sort.
    “Yes,” Aiah says, “the flamer blew out the window of the room I was in.”
    Henley gasps, puts a hand to her throat. The hand is swollen and deformed with arthritis.
    The keen edge of a useless anger touches Aiah’s throat at the sight. “I had my hair pinned up,” she says, “and it burned the back of my neck. Got a few glass cuts, too.”
    She lifts her hair to demonstrate. Suddenly Gurrah is a model of concern.
    “You didn’t tell me,” she complains, and insists on Aiah bending over so that the neck can be examined. The last thing Aiah sees, before she bends over, is the amusement in Henley’s eyes.
    Aiah can’t remember ever taking Gurrah seriously. Aiah is the fifth of seven children, and followed the older sibs in treating her mother lightly. Gurrah is an expert on dramatics, alternately devastated or exalted according to circumstance; but none of the drama ever seems to be about anything in particular, though it revolves round the necessity of Gurrah being the center of attention at all times.
    Gurrah’s fingers pinch vertebrae. “You need to eat more,” she says. “You’re all bones.”
    “I eat plenty.” Aiah straightens and tosses back her hair.
    “Aiah!” It’s one of her cousins, age six or so, waving from the scaffolding overlooking the street. “Come see! It’s the Lynxoid Brothers!”
    Aiah gratefully steps out onto the scaffolding and watches the orange-skinned Lynxoids dance along the street below, passing out packets of candy to the children. Plasm displays sweep the sky overhead, hyping liquor, tobacco, entertainment. A leaf drops onto her cousin’s hair, and Aiah brushes it off. The roof of this building is covered with mulberry trees because the landlord raises silkworms.
    The first parade goes by, the Warriors, ranks of marchers in paint and sequins and nodding foam plastic plumes, some in marching bands, others carrying toy weapons made from the iron that, in the Barkazil tradition, Karlo gave to Senko in order to defeat the Lord of the Trees.
    Aiah leans on the metal rail and scans her relatives discreetly as they watch the Warriors below. Some of them would know of a place to sell her plasm — the question is who, and how discreetly? She likes Elda — now that she’s a widow,