Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  The car slid into motion then, and Vaughn dropped into the seat beside her, stretching his legs to rest his feet on the opposite cushion. Jian saw Red’s eyes flicker, registering the other man’s presence, but he made no other move. She looked past him and blinked as the tunnel doors slid open, letting in a wash of white light. The sunfilm covering the windows darkened automatically, but the brilliance was still almost painful. She blinked again, wanting to see, and stared at the intricate maze of the runways, dark lines shivering like water against the pale sand. They were all but empty—not even cargo haulers worked this late without serious overtime—and only a single shuttle lay in the cradles, not yet angled up for liftoff. Beyond it, the mountains that defined the Daymare Basin rose dark against the white and hazy sky, and she slid sideways so that she could rest her head against the warm glass. Ahead, toward Landage, the sides of the mountain were sculpted to tidy planes, calculated angles, the rock itself coated in thermal film, white now, to reflect the daytime heat. Light glittered from the tips of the sun-traps that channeled free light to Heaven, the city’s poorest levels; by contrast, the cooling hoods and condensers were dark against the painted stone.

  “So, Reverdy.” Vaughn leaned forward, pitching his voice so it was just audible above the hum of the motors and the ventilation.

  “Yeh?” Jian lifted her head off the now-hot glass, and her cheek glowed faintly, as though with fever.

  “So what’s up?”

  “I’m thinking of selling my Spelvin construct,” Jian said, and kept her tone even, daring him to say anything.

  “Elvis Christ, not again.” Vaughn glared at her, and Jian shook her head.

  “It’s not your business, Imre.”

  “Like hell.” His voice had risen, and he caught himself, glanced over his shoulder at the still-sleeping workers, before going on, more softly. “Look, what is this, the fifth construct you’ve had since we got back to work? What’s wrong with this one, anyway?”

  “I don’t like it,” Jian said.

  “So what?” Vaughn’s hands closed over the edge of the cushion, and he loosened them with a visible effort. “You don’t have to like it, all you got to do is work with it.”

  “If I have to work with it, I want to like it,” Jian said. She leaned forward then, tapped the redhead once on the knee. He opened his eyes warily, and Jian smiled. “Red. The guy you got this one from. Does he have others?”

  Red looked up, his thick hair falling back from the planes of his face, and Jian caught her breath again at his astonishing beauty. Even knowing him as long as she had, even expecting to see it, the ivory perfection of his face sometimes surprised her.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can ask.”

  “Elvis Christ,” Vaughn said, and to her surprise bit back his temper. “Look, if you’re going to sell this one, too, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t get Red involved.”

  Beside him, Red stirred, and for a second Jian thought he was going to speak again, but then he dropped his eyelids, waiting.

  “I need his help,” Jian said. “You know what Spelvins cost.”

  “They wouldn’t cost so much if you didn’t keep selling them,” Vaughn muttered.

  “I wouldn’t keep selling them if I could find the right one,” Jian answered.

  “The problem is, you think every fucking one of them’s another Manfred,” Vaughn said, and kept his own voice low with an effort. “That’s not what’s happening.”

  “One of these days, it will be,” Jian answered. “Or it’ll be the real thing. Real Al, Imre. What’re you going to do then?”

  Vaughn didn’t respond, his eyes hot and angry, and at his side Red lifted his eyes.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Jian nodded, well aware of Vaughn’s fulminating disapproval, and leaned back in her seat again. She could remember perfectly well what Manfred had felt like, even five years on, that plausible, all-but-human presence; could remember, too, what it had felt like to realize first that it had tried to kill her, and then to realize that there was nothing personal—no person at all—behind that decision. The trouble was, since Manfred, every Spelvin construct had felt to her like AI, or like Manfred’s pseudo-AI, and this latest construct had been the worst yet. To do her job, to take any ship through hyperspace, she needed a Spelvin construct to manage the datastream, but when all of them felt like Manfred, she found herself watching them as though they, too, would eventually try to kill her. And she was not prepared to tolerate that threat.

  The window darkened abruptly, and she glanced up to see the shuttle entering Tunnelmouth. She reached for her carryall, dragging her legs under her, and saw the foremen at the head of the car wake with the ease of people who made this trip routinely. The taller of the two stretched, then shook out his coat before shrugging it up over his shoulders. Not a company coat at all, Jian realized, but the bright quick-printed cotton sold in the coolie night markets, each wide sleeve badged with the stylized heart glyph and the five faces that were the fusion band Hati. One of the faces was ringed with black—Mick Tantai’s of course—and even as she realized it the foreman met and matched her stare. She hadn’t meant to challenge, smiled instead, and looked away as the land shuttle eased to a stop, the soft sand tires hissing on the floor of the bay. The couple from Prejani were still asleep, the man with his head on the woman’s shoulder, and as she passed them she tapped his foot with her own. He came awake instantly, blinking in confusion, and Jian nodded to the door.

  “Tunnelmouth, ba’. End of the line.”

  “Haya, bi’—and thanks,” the man stammered, and turned to wake his companion.

  Jian stepped past him into the hot wind that poured in through the direct-exhaust vents. Despite the filters, the air was full of fine sand, and she narrowed her eyes against its sting. The bay smelled of oil and the engine fumes, and the sharp metal tang of the mending torches. Only a single tender was on duty, and she could see him yawning behind the thin fiberfelt mask he wore against the constant sand. He waved them through into the lobby, past the door pole that glowed with cabbies’ glyphs, and Jian turned automatically for the slidewalk that ran to the lift station at Charretse Main.

  “Reverdy! Imre! Over here.”

  Jian turned, startled, to see a familiar figure standing at the base of the ramp that led up to the turnaround at the end of Broad-hi. “Peace? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Not that we’re not grateful, of course,” Vaughn added, at her shoulder, “but I thought turnover wasn’t until tomorrow.”

  “It’s not.” Peace Malindy met their stares unsmiling, hands deep in the pockets of his one-piece suit. He was a small man, his head barely topping Jian’s shoulder, but he’d been managing the pilots’ cooperative for as long as she’d been a member, and she knew better than to be fooled by his size or his deceptively upperworld clothes. “I didn’t know if you’d heard the news, and I thought you might be better off riding back to Dzi-Gin with me.”

  Vaughn started to say something, and Jian overrode him ruthlessly, responding to the look in Malindy’s eyes. Dzi-Gin was the biggest of the upperworld interchanges, the gateway to the midworld, where she and Vaughn both lived. If Malindy was offering them transport, something was going wrong in Heaven. “What news, Peace?”

  “Micki Tantai’s been shot—”

  “We heard that,” Vaughn muttered, and Malindy ignored him.

  “—and there’s been a lot of talk that Realpeace was behind it. They’re denying it, but there’s been sporadic trouble, mostly coolies and yanquis down by the Zodiac, but one-gen against three-gen up here in Heaven.” Malindy looked at Jian, his mouth curving into an ironic smile. “You three are likely to attract attention just on looks alone, and I didn’t want you getting into trouble before the handover.”

  Jian grinned back, but had to admit the justice of the things he’d left unsaid. Vaughn was known to friends and enemies as Crazy Imre, and he was her partner and Red’s lover; even knowing
what was going on, it was unlikely he—or she—would have backed down from a challenge.

  “Besides,” Malindy went on, “some people may still remember you from the Manfred Riots. You don’t want that connection made right now.”

  “And what do you suggest we do about it?” Vaughn asked. “Spend the rest of our lives, or however long it takes to deal with fucking Realpeace, locked up somewhere?”

  “It’s that bad,” Jian said, her eyes fixed on Malindy, and the small man nodded.

  “The funeral’s tomorrow. After that, things should be better.”

  Jian nodded, settling her carryall more comfortably on her shoulder. “Thanks for the ride then.”

  “And welcome home,” Vaughn muttered, but Jian ignored him, following Malindy up the ramp toward the parking bays. If Malindy said things were bad, they were bad; better to stay out of sight, out of memory, until after the funeral.

  3

  Fanning Jones

  My cousin Fortune doesn’t really believe in politics—she says there’s no room for them in the Empires, which is partly true—so I was surprised when she called me the night before Micki Tantai’s funeral. I had the goddow to myself, for once—Jaantje and Tai and I share the place, half of twin flats off a dirt-floor cavern in Ironyards—so I wasn’t sorry for the company, just startled to see her broad face in the media screen. I flicked my ear back on and reached for the nearest chair, avoiding the lump where the webbing had been mended.

  “Hey, Fortune. What’s up?”

  “Hey, Fan.”

  It was good to hear a yanqui voice, now and then, and good to use the speech I’d grown up with. It was funny. I’d grown up only half a level down from Fortune’s family in the yanqui neighborhoods of Township Blackwell, just barely midworld by normal reckoning, filled with people in Maintenance and Air and Water, but we hadn’t really been friends then. Being family, we had had to be polite at the big gatherings for Easter and Transfiguration, but Fortune’s people didn’t go to services much except at the holidays, not like mine, so we didn’t see each other very often. Then she moved in with the Barra Vaughns over in Argonauts, and I didn’t really see her again until we ended up at the same vo-tech before I dropped out to join Fire/Work. That was when I’d gotten to know her—my employee discount at Motosha helped her out, and she’d helped me with some of the wiring for my fx—and now that we were on the same bill at Tin Hau we stayed close, for all that she lived way over in Angelitos now, on the far side of Tin Hau from Ironyards.

  “Are you going to the funeral?” she asked, and didn’t have to say which one.

  “Yeh.” I knew I sounded surprised and tried to moderate my tone. Of course we were going: if it wasn’t for Hati, we wouldn’t be a band. In particular, I wouldn’t be in a band—deaf musicians are mostly coolies, and they’re mostly sign dancers or fx players, and there’s not much call for either one in the yanqui music I grew up with. “We all are.”

  “I heard there was going to be a protest,” Fortune said. Behind her, I could see the bright lights of her workbench, and the pale silver shape of one of her karakuri laid out on it. It was one of the humaniform ones, one of the trio from her act that have her face, and it looked disconcertingly like a human being lying there, arms and legs sprawled like a sleeping child’s. The wires spilling from the open panel in its midsection only made the illusion more complete, and I wondered if she’d planned the effect.

  “I hadn’t heard that,” I said. “Hati—God, it still feels weird that Tantai’s dead—they’re asking that everybody stay calm.”

  “Like that’ll do any good.”

  “Come on, Fortune, it’s a funeral. Nobody’s going to cause real trouble there.”

  “Want to bet?” She gave me one of her dark smiles, the ones she’d perfected for her act, but then relented. “Seriously, that’s what I heard. Damiane Ye was saying she’d heard there was going to be a big anti-Realpeace protest.”

  Damiane Ye was one of the assistant stage managers. I frowned, trying to remember the posters I’d seen, jet-black glyphs on expensive pure white paper. “I don’t think so,” I said. “The band’s been really adamant about who’s speaking, and what it’s all about—it’s for Tantai, for Hati, not politics, this time. They got Tsuruyaga to put out a statement saying he’s just speaking as a friend, not as an ombi, and they didn’t want Derek Chang to speak at all.”

  “Well, he has to,” Fortune said. “He’s chairman of the Empire consortium, it wouldn’t be right if he wasn’t there.”

  “He’s also a major fusionist, he’s on record as hating Realpeace, and he’s a coolie, even if he is three-gen,” I said. “Don’t you watch the news?”

  Fortune grinned. “I work nights.”

  I shook my head. “Look, are you going? We could meet at Tin Hau Upper, you could walk with us.”

  The minute I’d said it, I regretted it—the funeral was a band thing, it was special to us, important to us as a band, and there shouldn’t be outsiders—and I was glad when Fortune shook her head.

  “I haven’t decided.” She smiled then, a real smile, wry and almost ugly, deepening a line like a scar at the side of her mouth. “Part of me feels like I ought to, and part of me doesn’t—feels like I wouldn’t belong, I guess. You know, their music wasn’t my style—no offense, Fan, but I like what you do better—but they were important. It’s like when someone on your street dies, you want to show up with food for the wake—but I don’t know what to bring.”

  I nodded. That was one of the reasons I liked talking to Fortune: we had all that past in common, memories of going with covered trays to the neighbors, or of standing in the door to accept them, the smell of hot food and the taste of grief always inextricably mixed. The rest of Fire/Work thought of funerals and smelled beer and gunpowder, heard rattling bangs and saw the streets drifted with black paper from the strings of the funeral crackers. I wanted someone to feed me, and grinned at the thought. “You can take me to lunch afterward.”

  Fortune laughed silently. “I’m not sure that was what I had in mind, but I’ll take you up on it. If I go.”

  “You might feel better,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ll buy you lunch sometime anyway.” She glanced over her shoulder at the karakuri, and I wondered if she was regretting the call.

  “Give me a call if you change your mind,” I said, “otherwise, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Sounds good. Later, Fan.” She cut the connection with a gesture—Fortune has a full skinsuit, not the skeleton wires that I’m still paying for, and only got to keep because they weren’t worth repossessing—and the wall went blank except for the charges that flickered across the bottom of the screen. Through the open door the air in the yard looked as though it had dimmed. I knew it was an illusion—we were still almost twenty-four hours from planetary sunset—but I went out anyway, the dirt soft and warm under my bare feet, wondering if the air felt cooler. Coolies burn their dead, which means a daylight funeral, to keep things as cool as possible; when my cousin Jonas was killed on the Stoneman Assembly, it had been a night burial, shivering under the floodlights that were as cold as the crescent moon. I’d never been to a cremation before, was glad the band would be there to steer me right.

  Tai and Jaantje and I took the ‘bus together to Han-Lu, where the procession was supposed to start. It was crowded even as far east as the Prosperities, and by the time we passed Shaft Three at Tin Hau, the car was so full that I was pressed face-to-face with Tai, both of us trying to pretend our bodies weren’t touching. I could feel her breasts flattened against my chest, and tried not to think what she could feel of me. She stared expressionless over my shoulder, not meeting my eyes, and I knew my face was as red as if I’d been in the sun. At Han-Lu Main, we had to change to Shaft Four to go up the last two levels to Han-Lu Upper, and we shuffled through the station in lockstep like midworld commuters on a First-day morning. There were extra workers in Public Transport livery ve
sts at every entrance, making sure the weight limits were observed, and it took us almost half an hour just to get on a car. But finally we made it to Han-Lu Upper, and filed through the last set of turnstiles into the main station, where the crowd was less tightly packed. Beyond the glass front wall, I could see still more people waiting in the interlink plaza itself, and over the dull roar of voices I could already hear the snapping of the first strings of crackers. Security in full armor guarded each of the doors—Cartel Security, I saw with some relief, not FPG—and we pushed past them into the plaza.

  It was hot here, directly under the cavern ceiling, and the light pouring though the sun-traps only added to the heat. I was sweating already under the light cotton of my shirt—a Hati blockprint, faded in spite of careful washing—and guessed that it was going to be a long walk to the crematorium. We had agreed to meet beside the plaza statue, a sweep of dark gold metal that vaguely suggested a female figure, arms outstretched to the sky, and I was relieved to see Timin Marleveld sitting on a pylon at its base. He lifted a hand in greeting, then, as we got closer, hauled himself up off the pylon and came to meet us. His lips moved, but the noise around me overloaded my ear, making it hard to pick words out of the general thunder. Drifts of shredded black paper covered the paving already, and Tai shied into me as another string of crackers went off less than two meters from her elbow.

  “Where’s Shadha?” Jaantje asked, and by some freak his words came clear.

  “There,” Timin answered, pointing, and I looked to see her coming toward us from the other side of the plaza. She was wearing a Hati wrap-jacket, and a couple of the concert pins clipped to her collar—nearly everyone I could see who wasn’t obviously a coolie was wearing some kind of Hati badge, I realized. “She went to get a schedule.”

  As though she’d heard him, Shadha held up a square white card. Even from here, I could recognize the stylized mourning glyph slashed across the front, and couldn’t help wondering how much it had cost to print them. Hati had been big five years ago, but none of them had been as successful since.