Free City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) by Walter Jon Williams Page B

is generated here, isn’t it?”
    The strung bulbs glow yellow in Ethemark’s saucerlike pupils. “Of course. The plasm-generating matter in the boats and rafts is insignificant, but some plasm is generated in resonance with the larger structures of the city around us, and additional plasm is ... acquired from one place or another.”
    “And what is done with it?”
    “The people here own it. They use it for their own purposes. The boss decides.”
    Aiah scowls. “Who picks the boss?”
    “They are self-appointed, most of them. One might consider them a type of gangster, though gangsters of a lower order. The Silver Hand lives on the population as a predator lives on prey: the bosses of the half-worlds live among their people in a kind of symbiosis. The bosses cannot afford too great a tyranny— people could always leave— and besides, in the end, the rafts are dangerous places, and a tyrannous boss would not survive them.”
    Aiah finds this assonance unconvincing. In her experience, a minor gangster is only a major gangster who hasn’t got the breaks. She hates them all.
    A huge barge looms to starboard, sides streaked with rust. Aiah looks up to see a horned head gazing at her with glittering eyes, and her heart skips a beat before she realizes it’s a goat in a pen, kept for milk or meat. Elsewhere on the barge a large video set, its oval screen set high, burns its images downward for an audience of twisted children. Poppet the Puppet sings a song about the alphabet, her image gleaming off the restless goggle eyes and corded muscle of her audience.
    Aiah remembers watching Poppet during her own childhood. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange sends an eerie shiver up her spine.
    “This place is called Aground,” Ethemark says, “because as the sea has receded the pontoons around us have settled on the bottom. I was born here.”
    The lights of his childhood home glimmer in Ethemark’s big saucer eyes.
    “Why is the sea receding?”
    “People have found other things to do with the water.”
    A stench floats toward the boat. Aiah shrinks from it. “The conditions ...” she begins, appalled. She had grown up poor in Jaspeer, but has never seen anything like this.
    “Infant mortality is very high,” Ethemark says. “Sanitary conditions are not very good, though they’re better than one might expect, and everywhere there is poverty and neglect. The twisted often have special medical needs, and there is no medicine here in any case. Educational opportunities,” dryly, “tend to be limited.”
    Aiah looks at him. It is the first hint of irony she has seen in him.
    “I was the son of the boss,” he says, “so I got out. I was lucky.” He stands on tiptoe, points. "My cousin is the new boss, and lives there. We will visit him.”
    Aiah’s courage quails at the thought. Ethemark’s large eyes turn to her.
    “This place is illegal, of course. All the half-worlds are, but certain people are paid off, and others don’t care or find the people who live here useful ... and besides there is a need for places like this, so they exist. But any of these people could be driven out of here at any time, and all these homes dispersed or destroyed by any official inclined to do so. The population has no rights in the matter.”
    He looks up at Aiah, and urgency enters his voice. “I said that your patron and mine have no present cause to disagree. I bring you to this place to show you where my loyalties truly lie. If anyone strikes at these people, tries to cut them off from what little they have, then I will owe your people no loyalty. Do you understand?”
    Aiah shrinks from a cold drizzle that falls from some invisible drain high overhead. The boss’s house, covered in scaffolds and with red lights dangling overhead, floats nearer.
    “ What of the bosses?” she asks. “These little gangsters you talk about, one of whom is your cousin. Are your loyalties to them ?”
    Ethemark’s thin lips draw