Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  “Maybe,” Jaantje agreed, but didn’t sound convinced. “Ah, here’s the one I saw before.”

  He touched the remote’s buttons, and four of the screens merged, centered on a midworld woman in the severe white cotton of the Medical Services. “—fire suppressant foam can be a topical irritant and should be flushed from the skin as soon as possible after contact. Plain pipe water will do; do not use soap until skin and hair have been thoroughly rinsed. If you experience chest pain, dizziness, or blurred vision, contact your local MedServe clinic or personal physician at once. If you experience skin irritation, shortness of breath, or hives, contact your local MedServe clinic or your personal physician.”

  She vanished, replaced by a newsreader I didn’t recognize, and Jaantje worked the remote again, splitting the screen back into four channels. “I saw that when I got in, and I felt a lot better once I got it off me.”

  I nodded, knowing he was right, and went on into the bathroom. The indicator on the wall by the shower controls glowed green: we still had nearly half a tank of hot water. I stood for a long time under the warm spray; the foam softened, turned thin and greasy-slick, and finally washed away. I washed my hair, too, then shut down the system, wrapped myself in the too-short yukata hanging on the wall—Tai’s, not mine, which made me worry all over again—just in case someone else had gotten back, and went into my bedroom to get dressed. The clothes I’d been wearing were a mess, the shirt beyond salvage. I’d bought it at a Summering right before the Manfred Riots, when Hati was topping the bill; I’d been part of Fire/Work for three months, and we thought we were hot because we could cover “Annoki”—I’d even bought a clip of the same vidi source Ajani Maxx had used for the fx part, and learned to make it dance. I left it hanging on my chair and went back into the main room.

  Jaantje was standing where I’d left him, frowning at the media wall, arms folded tight across his chest so that he was working the remote from the crook of his elbow.

  “Anything new?” I asked, and he shook his head.

  “Cartel Security is saying seventeen dead, but the FPG won’t confirm it. Nothing on Hati.”

  In the screen, six different faces spoke against a background of the Han-Lu Station, red-and-blue lights from Security and Fire floaters sliding across the blank doors. The armorglass had held even against the pressure of all the bodies; if there had been bodies, they’d been taken away, and the paving was blank and empty.

  “They ought to be here by now,” I said, and Jaantje glared at me.

  “All the interchanges are closed—the ‘bus lines, too. You said you had trouble, getting down here.”

  “Or maybe they didn’t hear me,” I said. “Shadha might have gone back to her place; Timi, too. Have you called there?”

  “I didn’t want to worry Timi’s folks.”

  I nodded—Timi’s parents were as desperately ambitious as any other Boatman coolies, here on Persephone where they actually could get somewhere, and they wanted Timi to be a line foreman like his older brother, not a starving musician—and said, “Haya, what about Shadha?”

  “Haya.” Jaantje took a deep breath, and pressed buttons on the remote. The Persephonet screen appeared, and he flashed it Shadha’s codes. There was a pause—longer than usual, no surprise, the lines were bound to be overloaded—and for a second I thought we’d get a bounce-back. But then the screen cleared, and Shadha’s house screen appeared. I knew she lived in a Dreampeace cooperative, but it was still a shock to see the image spring out on the black screen: Dreampeace’s anatomized man, half-human, half an antique computer chip, still standing in its circle, but now with its hands covering its eyes in stylized grief. Beneath it was a string of glyphs and a realprint banner: DREAMPEACE ABHORS THE DEATH OF HATI.

  “What’s it say?” Jaantje asked.

  “The same as the glyphs, this time,” I answered. Dreampeace was notorious for failing to match sign and word. “Why aren’t they answering?”

  Jaantje shook his head. “I don’t know—”

  The picture dissolved as he spoke, was replaced by a dark face. “Shadha—?”

  She broke off, seeing us, and Jaantje said, “We’re trying to find her. She isn’t there?”

  The dark woman shook her head, setting her earrings dancing. “You’re in her band, right?”

  I nodded.

  “She said she was going to the funeral with you,” the woman said. “Isn’t—didn’t she stay with you?”

  Jaantje’s mouth thinned. “We got separated—it was a bad time up there. I—we—thought she might have gone home.”

  “Better if she’d stayed home,” the woman said, bitterly. “No, she’s not here.”

  “We’ll call if she comes here,” I said, but she’d already cut the connection.

  “Bitch,” Jaantje said, to the static-filled screen, and put Persephonet on hold to look at me. “You still want to call Timin’s folks? Or Tai’s mother?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But I think we’d better.”

  Jaantje held out the remote. “Go ahead.”

  In the end, it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Timin’s uncle, who answered the call at the family compang, said Timi hadn’t been home, but on the whole took the news as calmly as anyone could. He had been working on the surface lines south of Sinliu, and had seen the smoke rising out of the ventilators; I think it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, except for Timin. Tai’s mother, Li Mahal, was harder to find—she was one of the electors for the Committee for Immigrants from the Western Provinces who managed the Unbroken Prosperity metroform—but once the last of the string of volunteer secretaries tracked her down she was quick to answer. She took it pretty well, too, just took a deep breath, answered my question, and began making her own plans to call hospitals and call in favors if necessary. She was a small woman, and still very pretty—much prettier than Tai, who was tall and rangy apparently like the father she’d never met—and I knew from Tai’s stories that she was as tough as the Whitesands Desert. She quizzed me about where we’d been relative to the bomb, how we’d gotten separated, how long it had taken me and Jaantje to get home and by what roads, then dismissed us, saying that she’d let us know if she found out anything. I switched off Persephonet, feeling obscurely a little better, and looked at Jaantje.

  “Should we be calling the hospitals, too, I wonder?”

  He shook his head. “They’re going to be swamped, and they’ll only be talking to relatives. Let Li Mahal call them.”

  That made sense, and I stared at the flashing screens. One of the images caught my eye, a long shot, from somewhere high, of the funeral procession as it wound toward Sinliu. I hadn’t realized how big the crowd had been, and touched keys to bring the picture onto a bigger screen.

  “—newsvideo taken from the outer balcony of Han-Lu Upper Station,” the newsreader’s voice said, and then fell silent, leaving the distant crowd noise the only sound. The river of people spilled out of the plaza, out of the lane of the Short-hi that had been blocked off for them; I could only just see the carrier, tiny at the head of the flood. I could almost make out the coffin, the people beside it, but then the carrier exploded in a ball of flame and smoke. The fire nozzles came on almost at once, the falling foam cutting off the camera’s view, but there was no mistaking the explosion for anything but what it was. Someone had planted a bomb on the carrier.

  “Elvis Christ,” I said.

  “Who the fuck would do that?” Jaantje demanded. “Realpeace—they’d have to be crazy to do something like that.”

  I thought they were just that crazy, myself, but I’m not a coolie, and there are things I can’t say even to the rest of the band. I took a breath, groping for safe words, and over the voice of the newsreader explaining what we’d seen we heard a chime as the courtyard door opened. Jaantje beat me to the door by half a step, and we shoved out together into the courtyard to see Shadha coming in the main door. She looked better than I’d expected, cleaner, her hair rebraided when I’d seen it down
, and Jaantje said, “Where the hell have you been?”

  She looked at him, and we both saw the shock in her eyes, the glaze of fear and grief not yet erased. “Christ, Shadha,” I said, and she let me hold her. An instant later, Jaantje wrapped his arms around us both.

  “We were worried,” he said, his voice muffled between our heads.

  Shadha gave a strangled laugh. “I stopped at a bath, I couldn’t stand the way the foam felt.” She took a deep breath, her ribs straining against my arm. “I’m all right, honest, it’s just… Where’s Timi and Tai?”

  “They’re not back yet,” Jaantje answered.

  “Shit.” Shadha pulled away from us. “What are the newschannels saying?”

  “Somebody put a bomb on the carrier,” I said. “Somebody got a clip of the explosion from the top of Han-Lu Upper Station. And the Cartel cops are saying seventeen dead, but the FPG won’t confirm it.”

  “They wouldn’t,” Shadha muttered, and shook her head. “There’s going to be more dead than that. God, why did they close the doors at Han-Lu?”

  “Standard procedure when a coolie crowd goes amok,” Jaantje answered, and gave a bitter grin. “They’re after property, got to keep them out of the midworld.”

  “They were on my left,” I said, slowly. “The station side.”

  “I think I was closer to the station than them,” Jaantje said, but he didn’t sound as convinced as I had hoped he would.

  “I know I was,” Shadha said, and turned her hands out, showing the palms skinned and red. She wouldn’t be drumming for a day or two, and I winced in sympathy. “I got that pulling myself over one of those damn ventilator boxes.”

  “Too close,” Jaantje said, and Shadha nodded.

  “Too fucking close.”

  I looked back at the media wall, but didn’t see anything new, just the same paired images, Han-Lu now and Han-Lu jammed with people just before the explosion. Everyone seemed to be showing that clip now, and I looked away, not wanting to see it again.

  “Do you think they’re all right?” Shadha asked, and Jaantje shrugged.

  “It’s too soon to tell.”

  Then, inside, the Persephonet unit sounded. I was closest, got through the door first and slapped the response button before the preset routine could take over. The screen lit and windowed, and I saw Tai’s familiar face. She looked like hell—a black eye, but more than that the same awful blank look that I’d seen on Shadha’s face—but she was unmistakably alive.

  “Thanks be,” I heard Shadha say behind me, and Jaantje gave a wordless yelp of joy.

  “You’re all right,” I said, and Tai managed a thin, tired smile.

  “Yeh, I’m all right.”

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Is Timi with you?”

  She nodded, and it was as though someone had rolled a stone off me; I took a deep breath, and Jaantje repeated, “So where are you?”

  “Western Phoenix, the main public clinic,” Tai answered. “Don’t worry, we’re both all right, but Timi’s got a broken foot. We had to wait forever before they could see him, there were so many people hurt, and some of them really bad”—she shuddered, shook away memory—“but they’re finishing up with him now. The doctor said we could leave once he fits the cast. I’m going to take him back to his place, then I’m coming home.”

  “Thank God,” I said again. “How are you?”

  “Sore.” Tai glanced over her shoulder. “Look, I’ve got to go—there’s only one console for this whole ward, and there’s people waiting for it. Will you call my mother, let her know I’m all right?”

  I nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and the picture winked out.

  There wasn’t much we could do after that. I called Li Mahal, who took the good news pretty much the same as she’d taken the bad, and then Timin’s family, who were loudly relieved and furious all at once. Tai got back to the goddow a little after the end of the day shift. She’d left Timi at his place, well and truly zoned on the painkillers—and well and truly fussed over by mother, aunt, and sisters—but she said he’d roused himself enough to say he’d be over tomorrow.

  “Which I doubt,” Tai said, “given how sore he was, but he’ll probably try it. Gods above, couldn’t they let Micki Tantai rest in peace?”

  I gave her a startled look—I hadn’t thought of it that way, for some reason, no credit to me—and her lips curved into the kind of smile you give when you’re trying to keep from crying.

  “Didn’t you hear? The bomb was in the coffin.”

  “Fucking bastards,” Jaantje said. “Fucking, fucking bastards.”

  “And there’s still no word on any of the rest of Hati,” Shadha said, from her place by the media wall.

  “They’re dead,” Tai said, and her voice cracked on the word. “They’re going to be dead.”

  4

  Reverdy Jian

  The newsbar next door was in full swing, voices blaring from the multiple screens—one hundred screens, the virtual banners over the door boasted, reinforced by painted fabric almost as bright, full access, all channels! Jian shifted in her seat, trying to find a position in which she was not accessing the bar’s tightbeam transmitters, but the lattice panels that defined the bar’s frontage seemed to be interlaced with them, and the glyphs filled her vision no matter where she looked. She sighed, reaching for the disk that controlled her suit, pressed until it hardened and kept holding it until the images brightened and then waned to an acceptable level. She could still see the glyphs from two of the screens, one repeating the names of the dead from the funeral fiasco, the other translating Realpeace’s official statement. Behind that one, the faces of the three speakers—two men and a woman, all coolies—were very sober, as befitted their mourning white. She didn’t need to read the glyphs to know what they were saying: the newschannels had been filled with nothing else for the last thirty hours. She’d even learned the names of Hati’s dead—Tantai, of course, and Alva Gabriel and Hesui Sha; the other two, Maxx and Littlekin, weren’t dead yet, but weren’t really expected to survive—and she looked down at the menu to break that train of thought. The last thing she needed right now was to be distracted by politics.

  The order glyph was flashing insistently beneath the tabletop, and a new set of glyphs had appeared beneath the menu, warning that these tables were for customers only. For a minute, she considered ignoring it, but suppressed that thought and selected tea and a plate of griddle bread from the cheaper half of the menu. That would last her a while, at least until Red got there with his friend. She felt a stab of guilt—Vaughn was not happy with her, and not happy with Red, either—and shifted her feet so that she could feel the shape of the headbox through the carryall’s thin sides. Vaughn wasn’t happy, but neither was she, and she wouldn’t be happy—wouldn’t be able to work comfortably—until she’d gotten rid of this construct. But he had called her the night before, and she knew him well enough to know what that had cost. He had been calling from the flat he and Red shared up in the Larrkin Rooks, barely a level below Heaven; she had seen the empty bed and the loft posts behind him, but there had been no sign of the technician.

  “I need to ask you something, Reverdy,” he had said, and she had tried to stop him.

  “If it’s about the construct, Imre, I need to do this.”

  “Fine.” Vaughn had scowled at the screen, and she hadn’t been sure if she’d seen the ghost of a bruise on his wrist as he reached across the camera eye to retrieve a mug from the kitchen ledge. “But don’t get Red involved in it. It’s important, Reverdy.”

  “Red has contacts,” Jian had answered. “I don’t—he’s a technician, for God’s sake. He can get a hell of a better price than I can.”

  “Red gets a good price because he knows a lot of people he shouldn’t,” Vaughn had said. “And all of them want favors returned.”

  “So? That’s the way things work, Imre.” The minute she’d said it, she’d regretted it, hearing he
r own anxiety in her voice, and she hadn’t been surprised to see Vaughn’s expression freeze.

  “Doing favors is how Red ended up in Whitesands, and doing more favors is why he never got time off for good behavior.”

  Jian had paused, not knowing what to say. “I didn’t know,” she’d said at last, and Vaughn made a face.

  “That’s why he can’t get better than tech-2 papers,” Vaughn said. “You get busted for hard-hacking, they permanently restrict your license.”

  “I need his help,” she had said again, and Vaughn’s scowl had deepened.

  “You’re being crazy about this construct thing, Reverdy.”

  “Well, who’d know better than you?” she had answered, and shut down the connection before he could ask her again not to involve Red.

  The memory still made her flinch a little—she had known Red had done time in Whitesands, had never asked why because she thought she had known—and she stared out across the bright tiles of the Dagon Arcade. Hard-hacking was illegal; it was also usually a yanqui game, and she’d never known just what Red was. There was a bodyshop directly opposite the cookshop—sorry, restaurant, she added, with an inward grin; the prices were too high to call this place anything else—and a hologram image posed in its window, a lanky, androgynous body dressed in nothing but bodypaint and a solid crotchpiece, both black swirled with a galaxy of painted stars. Chaandi had originated that design, had made it fashionable in one of her videomanga; it was interesting to see it copied here on Zodiac Main.

  A movement to her right caught her attention, made her look toward the Arcade entrance, where the discreet security bars fuzzed her view of the Zodiac itself. Red came through the bars, his hair momentarily vivid in the spotlights that defined the archway. He paused for an instant, thin and elegant against the curtain of light, and then he saw her and came toward her, long legs covering the ground with deceptive speed. He was alone, Jian realized, and her attention sharpened.

  “Hey, Red,” she said. “I thought you were bringing a friend.”