Free Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams Page B

takes money from unhappy and desperate people and promises them miracles. How much more pascol can you get?”
    Aiah nods. During the course of Aiah’s girlhood her mother must have belonged to half a dozen tabernacles, all of them more or less the same. Somewhere along the way Aiah figured out why Gurrah was here, Gurrah and most of the others. They were people who were failures or bewildered or maybe just unhappy, and they didn’t understand life all that well, or reality; and they needed to feel magical, special somehow, because if they weren’t magical they weren’t anything . And being Barkazil made it worse, because Karlo’s children were supposed to be magical, supposed to be better than everyone else. The Cunning People. And if you were supposed to be cunning and weren’t, and brilliant and weren’t, and magical and weren’t, where did you go?
    The Wisdom Fortune Temple. Or something just like it.
    Aiah looks down at the street. How much more pascol can you get? Galaiah is, as usual, to the point.
    Galaiah is a survivor. When the old Metropolitan Fasta died and Barkazi went smash, Galaiah brought her children out of the wreckage and to Jaspeer while her husband was fighting street by street as a member of the Holy League of Karlo. While her husband spent six years in a Fastani prison; Galaiah brought up her children alone, in a strange metropolis. And when Aiah’s grandfather had finally been released on the collapse of the Fastani and the occupation of Barkazi by the Regional Federation, she nursed him painstakingly back to health, only to have him drop dead of influenza a few years later.
    Elda, indoors, sets down a tray of pastry, and Galaiah’s grandchildren begin to squirm. Galaiah lets them down and they dash for the sweets. Galaiah takes a long drink of wine and looks up at Aiah.
    “You in some kind of trouble?” she asks.
    Aiah blinks. “No,” she lies.
    “Those longnoses treating you all right at the Authority?”
    “As well as can be expected.”
    “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
    Aiah is surprised. “No,” she says. “ I haven’t even . . . it’s been months, Nana.”
    “Good. Plenty of time for babies later, when you’ve got a man from your own people.”
    Aiah smiles. “Yes,” she says, “of course.” Somehow even Galaiah’s bigotry seems so much more acceptable than that of other people, possibly because she never pretends to be anything other than bigoted.
    There’s a crash of drums from down the street, the amplified cry of the Barkazi fiddle. Children begin to shriek.
    The Transvestites Parade is next, men wearing giant false breasts and enormously wide flounced skirts, women with absurdly padded shoulders and yard-long phalloi. The scaffold balcony sways with the weight of the onlookers’ good spirits. Alcohol swirls in Aiah’s head. Maybe she should have eaten something before drinking.
    After the Transvestites come the Tree Spirits with their elaborate green hairstyles and giant satirical balloons, portraying all human endeavor as absurd, pointless or crazy. The balloons sway past, vast and round, just tantalizingly out of reach of the little children. Aiah finds herself looking at Khorsa, at the jeweled charms on her turban. The tiny woman has worked her way to the front of the balcony, and has propped one of Elda’s children on her hip so he can see better. Her eyes glitter with delight as the balloons parade by.
    Well, at least she’s good-humored, not like the slit-eyed, mask-faced members of the Operation, all merciless calculation, or the outrageously dramatic witches who offer to remove curses and intervene with the ancestors’ spirits for a few hundred dalders, and all without plasm.
    After the parade passes Aiah approaches Esmon, but he’s surrounded by admiring relatives and in no position to talk privately, and she sees Khorsa drifting toward a freezer chest of beer. Aiah approaches, takes another beer for herself. Khorsa fills her glass and smiles