Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  The campong was pleasant, a low-ceilinged, oval cavern lined with two-story poured-stone buildings. They were pretty ordinary, the square shape that had been the fabricators’ standard fifty years ago, but at some point one of the family had added woven-iron balconies to each of the housefronts, and those balconies were filled with plants, mostly vines that cascaded almost to the cavern floor. Some of the day-lights had been replaced with the expensive full-spectrum tubing, and the air smelled of the plants and moisture: a pleasant place, and a place where we could forget our problems for a while.

  After the meal—we all ate twice as much as was polite, but the uncle who did the cooking pretended he was flattered by our appetite—we sat in the courtyard by the main support pillar, enjoying the draft from the ventilators. A handful of older women, Timin’s aunts or great-aunts, probably, watched us from an upper balcony: the family was Boatmen enough to want to observe Freyan proprieties, especially with Tai and Shadha, but Persephonean enough to do it discreetly. After everything I’d eaten, I really didn’t care who was watching; I leaned back against the pillar, closing my eyes, and Shadha kicked me.

  “We really ought to talk about what we’re going to do.”

  “So let’s talk,” I said, and she kicked me again.

  “You think better when you’re awake.”

  I opened my eyes, reluctantly, and Timin said, “Not necessarily.”

  I looked around for something to throw at him, but the campong floor was barely even dusty. Tai said, “So where do we stand with bookings?”

  Jaantje shrugged. “It’s not good. Ino’s still wants us, but that’s about it.”

  “Great,” I said. If we were going to have more trouble at a gig, Ino’s was the place for it: it was in Jamuna, a mixed township to begin with, a lot of low-level coolie line-workers living piled on top of sand-divers and long-haul drivers and midworlders who thought they should be doing better than linework, and it was close enough to the Spiral that the gangs from Li Chum sometimes came down to drink on relatively neutral territory.

  “Corrad pays all right,” Shadha said.

  “I heard Realpeace was planning to make a big recruiting push in Jamuna,” Tai said.

  Jaantje sighed. “Corrad didn’t mention that when he called—but then he wouldn’t.”

  Corrad Ban, Ino’s owner and manager, was never averse to a fight, as long as Ino’s got the publicity.

  Timin said, “They’d probably do well there, too.”

  Tai nodded.

  “Why?” I asked. “Jamuna—at least the neighborhood around Ino’s—never struck me as real political.”

  Timin made a face. “Why does anyone go for Realpeace? Stupidity, mostly—naiveté, at best.”

  “That’s not true,” Tai said. “The people I know—look, Realpeace does, or they did do, a lot of useful things. They’re responsible for getting databanks into a lot of Heaven, especially West-of-Four, when nobody else would, got financing for the co-ops, too, and stood up for people who had contract trouble, things like that. There are a lot of people I know who say Realpeace is all right, it’s just the radicals who are doing bad things.”

  People—yanqui people—had said that about Dreampeace, too, after the Manfred Riots.

  Timin said, “Realpeace wants to be the next Provisional Government, and that’s all they care about. That’s the only reason they’re doing any of this.”

  Tai sighed. “The new triumvirate, they’re the ones who started it all.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that—not anything good, anyway, nothing that wouldn’t start a fight—and I said, “Still nothing on the Zodiac, then?”

  “Nothing,” Jaantje said.

  “Which is a shame, with the new stuff sounding this good,” Shadha said.

  I took a deep breath. “Maybe we should think about putting out a new clip.”

  “We don’t have the money,” Timin said.

  Jaantje shrugged. “It would sell, though—we could do it on credit, pay off the costs once the clip was out there.”

  “If we do that,” Tai said, “I think it should just be the new songs. The old stuff just doesn’t fit with them.” She smiled. “You know, it’s not a bad idea.”

  “Credit’s expensive,” Timin said.

  “Muthana would back us,” Shadha said, and Timi scowled.

  “Yeh, for a fat chunk of the profits.”

  “Which is better than what we’re getting right now,” Tai said. “As I see it, the real problem is we don’t have enough new stuff to fill a regular clip.”

  “Not yet,” Shadha said. “Or we could put out a half-time.”

  “That’s for new bands,” Timin said.

  Jaantje shook his head at the same moment. “And it doesn’t save us enough money. What about a live clip? We’re still ragged on some of the songs, I think we’re better live than we would be in a studio—and maybe we could get George to film it for us, at the Tin Hau.”

  “Then they really would want a percentage,” Tai said, and shrugged. “Though they promise they can keep the pirates off.”

  That was an old and not very profitable argument, and I settled myself more comfortably against the rough plaster coating the support pillar. The new songs were different from anything else we’d done, but the imagery was consistent, hung together in a way that nothing else we’d ever done had. That was why we finished our show with them, building to a climax. I said, “I know what you think of them, Tai, but the way the songs work with each other, this would make a hell of a theme clip.”

  Theme clips had been big about five, six years ago, when Hati was hot, before the Manfred Riots. Since then, they’d fallen out of favor, but I’d always liked them, liked the way Hati in particular, and one or two other bands, like PWC and Short Haul, had managed to make the visuals, the fx line and the short surreal filmees that traditionally go with a clip, into something that was as coherent as a videomanga. It was really easy to do them badly, which was part of why nobody much did them anymore, but when they were good, there was nothing like them.

  “If we could do it right,” Jaantje said, slowly, and Tai made a noise through her teeth.

  “If.”

  “It could be good,” Jaantje said, still mildly, as though she hadn’t spoken. “The songs do fit.”

  Tai lifted her hand, counting on her fingers. “One, we need a lot more songs, and songs like these, if we’re going to do a theme clip. Two, unless we get a really good director, somebody like Chaandi, even, we’re just going to get anti-Realpeace propaganda. Three, no matter what the clip looks like, Realpeace is going to treat it as an attack.”

  She was right about all of it, but I had to swallow my disappointment before I could say anything. To my surprise, Timin spoke first.

  “We all agreed, we needed more songs. I mean, you’re right, right now, but if we can add to it, a theme clip could really work for us. It could be big, Tai. With these songs, and more like them, it could be big.”

  “Realpeace is going to take anything we do as an attack,” Shadha said. “We might as well do what we want.”

  Tai sighed. “I’ll think about it.”

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas,” Timin began, but he was cut off by a shout from one of the doorways to our left. We all looked, in spite of manners, and saw a low-teen boy glaring at a woman—probably his mother—standing hands on hips in the doorway.

  “I won’t have that filth in my house,” she shouted. “Go on, get rid of it—put it in the trash this second. Don’t you dare think you can bring that in here.”

  The boy turned away, came sulking across the courtyard past us, heading for the green door of the campong’s waste system. As he went by, I could see that he had a Realpeace pin on his loose shirt.

  “Go on,” his mother called after him. “Put it in the trash now.”

  He did as he was told, slamming the door hard enough to make the women on the balcony shake their heads and murmur, came back toward home scuffling his feet on
the stones. As he passed us again, he looked at Timin and said, “Farang shit.”

  “Watch it, cousin,” Timin said, and the boy spat on the pavement in answer. His mother saw that, came charging after him, and caught him by the collar.

  “You disgrace us,” she said, and shook him. “You shame me and the family and yourself.” The boy shrugged, his expression mulish, and she shook him again. “Timin, I apologize to you and to your friends. As for you, Anton—” She closed her mouth tight over whatever else she might have said, groping for her dignity, and turned on her heel, dragging the boy back with her toward the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Timin said after a moment, and Jaantje tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Hey, not your problem.”

  Timin grimaced. “It’s my cousin.”

  “You don’t pick your relatives,” Shadha said, and there was a strained silence.

  “We ought to be going,” I said at last, and wasn’t surprised to see the relief in Timin’s face.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “The rest of the family’s not like that—and even Anton’s basically not bad, he’s just fourteen.”

  He let us out the campong’s service door—we’d borrowed a small carrier from Jaantje’s father even though we couldn’t really afford the fuel, thinking it might be safer than the ‘bus lines, especially West-of-Four—and we climbed into the cramped passenger compartment. We dropped Shadha at the co-op she shared with a dozen other nominal Dreampeacers, where extra security flared in the real as well as the virtual, outlining the doors and windows—a necessary expense, Shadha said, but it couldn’t have come at a less convenient time. Luckily, that made it easy to turn back down Broad-hi to Arii, so that we only had to fight the swarms of piki-bikes that filled Wireworks for about five minutes before we could turn off into the service alley that paralleled the goddow. The parking was secure there, too, but Jaantje spent several minutes setting locks and alarms before we finally got back to the flat.

  The message light was flashing on the media wall, and I reached for the remote. Tai found it first, however, and touched the keys. A series of glyphs flashed in the Persephonet screen—something for me from Fortune, a massmail from the Empire, a couple of schedule cards from bands we knew, a few messages for Tai and Jaantje from addresses I didn’t recognize, and finally a system glyph, signaling an incomplete transmission. I rolled my eyes at that, and heard Tai groan: that particular symbol almost guaranteed a half-week’s work straightening out the lost message.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Jaantje said, and Tai touched the remote to select it.

  The screen lit, revealing the familiar static-fuzzed images of a faulty transbust, but the audio was clear enough to make the message plain. “Farang-garai, get off the stage, nobody wants your bastard trash. Get off before—”

  Tai hit the stop button, and we stared at each other. The voice had sounded coolie—sounded deaf, blurred and too loud, like I sounded without my ear.

  “Play the rest of it,” Jaantje said. His voice was tight and angry.

  “Why?” Tai looked at him. “We should just get rid of it.”

  “No,” Jaantje said. “Look, after what happened at the Oasis—after what happened to Hati—you think we can just ignore it?”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Tai said, and now her voice sounded strange, high and scared like I’d never heard it before. “We used to get calls like that all the time, Mama did, and the only thing you can do is ignore them.”

  “What do you mean?” Jaantje asked.

  Tai shrugged, scowling. “Just what I said. When I was little—when Mama was first on the Housing Committee, before she was an elector, even, we used to get calls like that. People threatening her, because of my father—people who’d found out he was a Detainee. And then, when she wouldn’t give in, they threatened us.” A look of contempt crossed her face. “They never did anything, though. Mama said they wouldn’t have the nerve, and they didn’t.”

  Jaantje and I looked at her, then at each other, not knowing what to say. From some other things she’d said, and from the fact that Tai’s father had almost certainly died on Freya, in an FPG prison, I’d guessed that Li Mahal hadn’t always been the FPG’s choice for the CWISP offices. If anything, I’d admired her for it, for going from involuntary labor to someone who could actually make a difference for other draftees—but Tai had been two when they were sent here, with nobody to take care of her except Li Mahal. If I’d been her, I don’t know how I could have put my kid in danger, especially not as shaky as this one call made me feel.

  “These people have the nerve,” Jaantje said, as gently as he could, and Tai shuddered.

  “Yeh. I know. But I don’t want to hear it. I’m going outside.”

  “Haya,” Jaantje said, and the door closed behind her.

  I picked up the remote. “Ready?”

  “Yeh, go ahead.”

  I touched a button, restoring the playback.

  “—trash. Get off before someone gets rid of you, sends you to hell like Hati.”

  The voice cut off as abruptly as it had started, and the end-of-file glyph appeared. I touched buttons, asking the system to retrieve the routing, but wasn’t surprised when the trail ended at the district switcher. “So what do we do now?”

  “Talk to Security?” Jaantje said, doubtfully.

  That’s one thing yanquis and coolies have in common, an ingrained, and in the coolies’ case, at least, justified distrust of the security forces. “The block station’s Cartel,” I said.

  “Yeh.” Jaantje went to the door and tugged it open, letting the sunlight back into the room. “It’s finished, Tai.”

  “I’d rather go to them than the FPG,” I said.

  “You think Security’s going to do us any good?” Tai asked.

  “You got a better idea?”

  Jaantje said, “We could take it to Muthana. He always says, ‘Think of me as family.’ I think it’s time we took him up on it.”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “Talk about handing him an excuse to get rid of us—”

  “I like that better than Security,” Tai said.

  “Besides,” Jaantje said, “we might need to find another place to sleep for a while.”

  Of course, whoever called could get our location from the callcodes. We’d talked for a year or so about getting a sealed listing, since this was the band code as well as our own, but it hadn’t seemed worth the fees—we hadn’t been important enough to bother. “Maybe there’s something else we can do,” I said. “Some stuff I could hack, help keep the place secure.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Tai said, but sounded doubtful.

  “Or we can call Security,” I said.

  In the end, we did both, called the Cartel Security station that served our block, and Muthana. Mister Walker—that was the Aussy name for a local cop, but everyone used it now—took our codes and a copy of the call, but was less than optimistic about finding whoever had called us. There had been a lot of incidents like this, he told us; the best he could offer was that none of the threats had been carried out, so far. Muthana was pissed, but not at us, offered us sleeping space in the practice room, and told us not to worry about the gigs, we were still part of the show. That was the main thing I’d been worried about, and by then we’d all calmed down enough that we felt all right about staying at the goddow for now. Still, before I went to bed, I plugged myself into the connections and went looking for some hard-hacking boards I hadn’t frequented in a while. It took me a while just to find them—the owners moved them regularly, just in case—but I managed to find schematics for a better lock and for a couple of black-box alarms and trip systems that should warn us if anyone tried physically to get into the goddow. I also found an announcement for a scrap sale in Madelen-Fet Main, and with any luck I’d be able to get the parts cheap there. By this time, it was late enough that Fortune was back from the Tin Hau; I called her, and she agreed that I could use her workshop on one of her aft
ernoons at home. I went to bed feeling a little better about the situation.

  We got nearly a dozen more calls over the next two days, the first two pretty much the same as the first one we’d gotten. After that, we stopped listening, just forwarded them unread to the account Mister Walker had created for us. He suggested we change our codes, but this was the code all the clubs had; if anyone wanted to book us, we needed to hear from them. All we could do was ignore the broken icons and watch our backs. I was glad when it was finally Eighth-day and the scrap sale. Tai said she’d come with me—she was looking for spare processors for her guitar, she said—and I wasn’t sorry to have company.

  The sale started early; the shops of Madelen-Main were still shuttered, pinlights dark except for the security warn-offs, as we came out into the plaza. I looked around anyway, searching for the signs that the notice had promised, and saw live Security watching me from one of the farther doorways. There was nothing real, but I’d worn my display lenses, and I wasn’t surprised to see glyphs leap out at me from a sideline transmitter. We followed them decorously past Security, then down a couple of empty side streets, and finally to a long, low building that had probably once been some kind of factory. The side windows were all missing, but the lights were on inside—the first lights we’d seen since we’d left the lift station—and through them I could see row after row of tables, piled high with components and holoplate displays for the things that were too big to fit into the hall. It looked as though the sellers would have everything I wanted, and I had to suppress a grin as we signed in with the silent woman at the entrance table.