Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  All the administrative offices are at the top of Tin Hau, tucked directly under the roof where it joins the cavern ceiling, with Muthana’s at the apex, beneath the peak of the front roof, and the others arranged in a descending pyramid, assigned according to midworld ideas of rank and precedence. The corridors are carpeted, not tiled, and if you look closely, you can see the shadow of the Tin Hau name glyph woven into the warm scarlet of the fabric. The same glyph is centered on the bosses that hide the hallway contact points, and painted above the names centered on the office doors: when Tin Hau was built, forty years ago, the shareholders wanted to be sure everyone knew it was the richest and the best of the Empires. As senior stage manager, Terez has an office one floor down from Muthana’s, directly opposite the house manager’s. I felt the system announce my presence, but knocked anyway, just to be polite.

  “Fortune.” Terez’s voice came from the speaker hidden beneath the name panel. “Come on in.”

  I pushed open the door, stepping from the warm red and gold of the corridor into a cooler, greener place. The flatscreens that passed for windows were showing a mirage scene, and a green-and-turquoise rug hid the standard carpeting. My shoes sank a little into it, and I caught myself wondering if it would be as soft on bare feet. Probably: she’d had similar rugs in her flat in Gamela, and they’d been as cool and springy as the turf in the mayor’s gardens down in Visant Vihar. Terez smiled at me, turning away from her massive console, but at least the look behind the smile was more curious than hostile.

  “So what’s up?”

  “I’m working on a new illusion,” I said, and shut the door firmly behind me.

  “Oh, yeh? Privacy, please, George.”

  “Thank you,” the construct said, prim as ever, and I felt a sudden absence as the house system sealed off the room transceivers. Terez waved vaguely toward the chairs that stood beneath the larger flatscreen and seated herself within easy reach of the console’s shadow board.

  I sat in what looked like the less cushioned of the chairs—still too soft—and leaned forward, elbows on my spread knees. “It’s only in the preliminary stages—I’ve commissioned hardware, and I’m investigating the wireware I’ll need, which is why I’m letting you know this far in advance.”

  “Oh?” Terez said again, her voice still mild, but I could see her attention sharpen.

  “Yeh. My builder’s telling me I’m going to need a major construct, Level Four or better, to manage the effects.”

  Terez’s eyebrows rose. “Must be one hell of an illusion. Got a disk for me?”

  I nodded, reached into my belt for the solid square. She didn’t need to tell me the problems with letting a Level Four construct play in the Tin Hau house systems, and I was glad she hadn’t tried, that she’d assumed I knew both the technical requirements of my own illusion and the limits of the stagehouse. But then, she’d been a conjurer herself, once upon a time. She took the disk, then stretched back to reach the shadow board, frowning thoughtfully at the mini-screen. I watched her work, the familiar tilt of her head and the easy competence of her hands on the shadow board’s all but invisible controls. We’d been pillow-friends for a year or so—well, more than that, at least by her reckoning, since the rule in the midworld is that sharing living space makes you something more than casual lovers—but that had been three or four years ago, and in that time she hadn’t changed much, if at all. She was maybe half a head taller than me, and heavier, but she had a presence that made her look bigger than she was. It had served her well onstage, made her sleight of hand and the delicate miniature mechanical illusions that were her specialty look even more amazing against her apparent solidity; it helped now when she had to deal with acts like the shadow puppeteers, who acted as though it was beneath them to deal with technical matters. The office lights drowned the rich red tones in her brown skin, made her look darker than she was, but the transfers across her forehead and down her bare arms—white leaves on gold vines, ending in a black-and-burgundy disk like a mandala or a stylized flower—glinted as she moved. They were fancy for the Empire, especially with the shows closed—even with the best of care, bodypaint doesn’t last—and I wondered what event they were left over from.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  She looked up, blank-eyed for a moment, then grinned. “Oh, the paint. I had a gig.”

  “Yeh?” In spite of knowing better, I felt my heart race. Terez was good, and had been really good; if she was getting back into performance, rather than just building small illusions for other conjurers—

  She shook her head, her smile going a little crooked. “Not like that. You know Suleima Chaandi?”

  “Not personally.” Everyone knew of Chaandi, though: she was one of the best videomanga makers in Landage, probably on the planet. She’d been active in coolie politics, I remembered suddenly, and wondered if she was in Realpeace now.

  “She wanted some sleight of hand for transitions in her latest manga—it’s kind of neat, card tricks that signal the scene changes, the scene order, and then some dancing-dolly tricks. I said I’d do it, and she threw in the paint as part of the fee.” She stretched her left hand complacently, the transfer catching the light.

  The fee for being a living cartoon. I swallowed the words along with my disappointment—Terez belonged onstage, she was too good to waste her talents on stage tech—and she looked back at her screen, but not before I thought I caught I glimmer of anger in her face. She didn’t say anything, though, and I didn’t pursue it, took a slow, deep breath and let the feeling drain away. It wasn’t my business, had never been my business, if you listened to Terez, and whatever the truth had been, there was nothing I could do about it now.

  “Haya,” she said at last, and popped the disk out of the board. “It’s going to be impressive, Fortune, that’s for sure. I’ll need some cutouts between your construct and the house systems—”

  “Fuses?” I asked.

  “I’d really prefer cutouts,” Terez answered, still mildly. “You know what a blown fuse would do to the house system.”

  “I’m closing the show,” I said. “It’s not like anybody has to follow me, and cutouts are expensive, not to mention hard to set up.”

  “The only reason I’d even consider fuses is that you’re closing,” Terez said. “But I don’t like them.”

  And I was behaving badly—worse than that, I was being stupid. “Sorry, Rez. Cutouts it is. Do you have specs?”

  She nodded. “And I’d like it if you’d use George as the show backup, as well as me.”

  “You mean give George a copy of the act programming?” In spite of my resolution to behave, I heard my voice rise, and controlled it with an effort. “Rez, that’s like giving the program to anybody. I mean, George is relatively secure, but it’s still a construct, and there are, what, a dozen people with access codes good enough to pry my programming out of it—”

  She lifted her hand, and I stopped. “Six people, Fortune, and you and me and Binnie are half of them.”

  “Sorry.”

  Terez went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “I understand your concern, but I want to have machine backup as well as mine, for the Empire’s sake if you don’t care about your own safety. People just aren’t fast enough, if something goes really wrong in the system.”

  She was right, too, and I looked at the carpet, covering my embarrassment with a sigh. I don’t know why I still can’t discuss things civilly with Terez, after all this time. “Sorry, Rez, I know you’re right. Can I give you a rough schema, enough for George to shut down safely if there’s a problem? I am worried about losing the details.”

  Terez nodded, and I saw her shoulders relax just a little. “That would work. As long as you don’t mind stopping the act, that is.”

  “If George has to take over,” I said, “things will be going too wrong not to stop.”

  Terez smiled. “True enough,” she said, and pushed herself to her feet.

  I copied her, the carpet giving under
my feet. “I’ll get you the cutouts and the schema as soon as I have them.”

  “Thanks,” Terez said, but her attention was already on the console’s larger screens. “Good to see you, Fortune.”

  “And you,” I answered, but I wasn’t fully sure I meant it. She gave me a preoccupied smile and reached for the shadow board. I let myself out into the corridor and started back down the maze of stairs toward the plaza and home.

  6

  Reverdy Jian

  Jian dreamed.

  She is in hyperspace, on a ship that is Manfred’s Young Lord Byron crossed with the heavy prototype she just brought in, luxury incongruously mixed with the strictly practical, so that as she climbs from engine room to bridge she goes from plain utility paint to glass and gilt to padding pristine from newness, comes out at last into the Byron’s bridge, with its birdcage stairhead now mysteriously surrounding the pilot’s station. The controls are flaring red, not true emergency, she somehow knows, but she still can’t resist, can’t overcome training, and steps into the cage. The bars of light enclose her, she hears the SHYmate soft in her ear, pouring coordinates through her as the virtual world surrounds her, her familiar landscape turned suddenly to desert and storm. Her cues and landmarks are vanished, she gropes for sign and sound, trapped in a language she doesn’t speak. In her ear, the SHYmate speaks in coolie dialect, voice rising and falling, babbling nonsense that could save her if she only understood. Now Manfred laughs at her, and her skin burns, sears away as she reaches into the desertscape, groping for controls that are nowhere they should be. Her eyes fill with scalding tears, pain best/worst remembered in her dreams.

  She woke to the buzz of the Persephonet console, sat bolt upright, the adrenaline still running in her veins, not quite sure even then whether it was true adrenaline or a suit message. Then the console buzzed again, and she took a shaky breath.

  “Input, command: accept incoming audio, visual. Outgoing audio only.”

  The Persephonet screen, a dedicated window in the center of her rudimentary media wall, lit, the reflected light filling the room. Vaughn’s face looked out at her, drawn into his habitual scowl.

  “Reverdy. You seen the news?”

  “What news?” Jian looked sideways, blinked twice to call up the implanted chronometer. “Shit, Imre, it’s not yet six.”

  “Realpeace is talking up the AI question again,” Vaughn said. “And they’ve dug out some of the old Manfred footage.”

  “Shit,” Jian said again, and reached for the tunic she’d left draped over the chair beside her bed. She shrugged it on, and added, “Room, set outgoing visual to on.”

  “No thrill to me,” Vaughn said, but barely mustered a ghost of his usual malice. “I think this would be a good time to find another job—in fact, yesterday would have been better.”

  I’m not ready. Jian blinked at that thought, not sure where it had come from, frowned into the camera. “Are you sure things are this bad?”

  “Check out the newsnets,” Vaughn answered, “and you tell me.”

  “Hang on.” Jian fumbled for the room remote, worked the controls to light the media screen. She hadn’t bothered to set a preference; the screen filled with an ad for Hot Blue wireware, and she touched the keys to select the right channel. A moment later, a familiar trio appeared in the screen: the Realpeace triumvirate, old man, young woman, man in his middle years. All three were wearing the old-fashioned coolie jackets that Realpeace had brought back into fashion; the woman was wearing a white wrap-blouse, another coolie style, the stark color ugly against her skin.

  “—yanqui influence on the Cartel Companies that leads to the elevation of machine over man,” the younger of the two men was saying, “an influence which can only be countered by hiring people from a culture which is founded on the principle of human rights—of human responsibility to fellow humans. Freya has forgotten this principle, especially under the current government, and will not pressure the Cartel to change its ways, for fear of losing a single hundredth of the fees the Cartel pays for its acquiesence. Freya will—and can—do nothing. But here on Persephone, we who are originally of Freya have the chance to question this principle, to oppose its implementation, and eventually to force the Cartel to accede to our demands.”

  “What demands?” Jian said, looking at the Persphonet screen, and saw Vaughn shrug.

  “Elvis Christ, I don’t know. More jobs, I think—for coolies, that is—and a guarantee of no more AI research and no more Spelvin overseers on the assembly lines.”

  “I didn’t think anybody was doing AI work these days,” Jian said.

  Vaughn shrugged again. “Rumor is that either Kagami or Hot Blue had a project going.”

  “You hear the same story every six months,” Jian said, and looked back at the news screen. She didn’t have to ask why Realpeace had chosen to believe it this time: not only would their taking it seriously take a lot of coolies’ minds off the funeral bombing, but it was another wedge to drive between the Cartel and the FPG. The current Provisional Government had come to power with Cartel support after its predecessor had lost most of its popular support; Jian wondered suddenly if that was Realpeace’s true goal.

  “In the meantime—” That was the young woman speaking, her soft, deep voice at odds with her severe expression. “—we ask our members, and our many friends, to be vigilant in their awareness of the overuse of Spelvin constructs, and to report any and all appropriate incidents to their township press officers. We are compiling a ledger, which we will bring before the Cartel and any other relevant authority, and your evidence can only bolster our case.”

  “But we warn our members, and particularly our friends,” the older man said, “that AI and near-AI are dangerous, potentially deadly—Manfred was not AI, by all agreement, and yet it killed three people and nearly murdered many more. Do not trifle with AI, or its defenders—”

  That’s enough of that, Jian thought, and muted the sound with the touch of a button. “I don’t see what it has to do with us, Imre.”

  Vaughn laughed. “You missed the film clips, sunshine, all the old newsclips of you and me and the Mitexis—”

  “There wasn’t that much with us,” Jian said, flatly, “and we were—are—on their side. How does this get us into trouble?”

  “Tell that to fucking Realpeace,” Vaughn answered. “We brought it back, it was originally a Kagami project, we still work for Kagami now and then—and I’d like very much to find out how they got that bit of information—so we’re the bad guys.”

  Jian sighed, watching the silently mouthing faces on the media screen. Apparently the conference was finished: the triumvirate vanished abruptly, and were replaced by the polished prettiness of a newsreader. The contrast was jarring—it was no wonder, she thought, that the coolies believed in Realpeace. Chaandi would be furious at this latest development—as always, that name brought with it a complicated regret—especially since she’d been fighting for coolie rights since before Realpeace was a glyph on a tag poster, and had always argued that machine and human rights were inseparable. But not like this, not one instead of the other. She could almost see Chaandi’s hands signing it, the abrupt movements of distaste and anger, and sighed again at that memory. “So what are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting we call Peace, see what he’s got going that can get us out of the system for a month or so,” Vaughn answered.

  “Not going to happen.” Jian shook her head, feeling obscurely relieved. “We just had a good job, we’re at the bottom of the list.”

  “So we pull rank,” Vaughn said. “We’ve been there longer than anybody.”

  He was right, too, but Jian shook her head again anyway. “I don’t see the point, Imre. You know what people are like if you jump the line. We’ll just stay out of Heaven for a while.”

  “It’s not that simple.” Vaughn glanced over his shoulder, and the movement of his head was enough to reveal Red leaning against the wall behind him, eyes downcast.

>   “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—” Vaughn looked at Red, not bothering to hide his anger. “I mean that somebody’s been asking questions about that construct you sold off the other day. Asking about you, too.”

  “Asking what?” Jian looked from Vaughn’s scowling face to Red’s beauty half-hidden behind the curtain of his hair. “Give me the whole story for once, will you? It’s too early for these games.”

  Vaughn gave a snort of angry laughter, but Red looked up, fixing her with one of his slow stares. “Someone I used to know got in touch with me. He said Newcat told him I was back in business—”

  “Which he isn’t,” Vaughn interjected.

  “—and that I was dealing in wireware,” Red went on, as though the other hadn’t spoken. “He wanted to know what I’d sold to Newcat, and if I could get more like it.” He looked away. “I told him no.”

  “Shit,” Jian said.

  “I don’t know what it means,” Vaughn said, “but I fucking well think we ought to get off-planet.”

  Why would somebody want to buy the SHYmate? Jian wondered. I had a couple of extras, subroutines and stuff, added in, but nothing you couldn’t buy from any half-competent constructor. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, and Vaughn snorted again.

  “It makes sense if you were right about that construct being something special. Or even if somebody knows you thought it was something special. You, of anybody, are in a position to know it if a construct was pushing the Turing Barrier.”

  “I didn’t say anything to anybody but you,” Jian said. “You and Red.”

  “Newcat saw it,” Red said, softly. “That’s why he gave you the price he did.”