Dreaming Metal Read online

  DREAMING METAL

  By Melissa Scott

  A Mystique Press Production

  Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2016 Melissa Scott

  Copy-edited by: Lauren Wallace

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her Ph.D. .in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than twenty science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her most recent novel, Steel Blues, written with Jo Graham, was published by Crossroad Press in 2013. She can be found on LiveJournal at mescott.livejournal.com.

  Book List

  A Choice of Destinies

  Burning Bright

  Dreamships

  Dreaming Metal

  Lost Things

  Mighty Good Road

  Night Sky Mine

  Point of Dreams (with Lisa A. Barnett)

  Point of Hoops (with Lisa A. Barnett)

  Shadow Man

  The Armor of Light (with Lisa A. Barnett)

  The Game Beyond

  The Jazz

  The Kindly Ones

  The Roads of Heaven Trilogy Bk 1: Five-Twelfths of Heaven

  The Roads of Heaven Trilogy Bk 2: Silence in Solitude

  The Roads of Heaven Trilogy Bk 3: The Empress of Earth

  The Shapes of Their Hearts

  Trouble and Her Friends

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  DREAMING METAL

  PERSEPHONE (PERSEPHONEAN, PERSPHONEANS): only inhabited planet of Hades, Midsector III Catalogue listing 1390161.f. CPC#A3B/G6171/884G(3). Surface gravity = 1.01 Earth. Astronomical year = 1.38 standard years; local year = (Conglomerate) standard year. Astronomical day = 80 standard hours; local day = 24 local hours/24 standard hours. Chronometric correction (standard) ATS 0.0. Climate: Persephone is officially classified as a warm planet, with average temperatures of 32°C; seasonal variation is minor, but travelers are advised that high/low extremes are common, and should consult local met. offices before traveling on the surface.

  Discovered 998 PoDr. by CMS Pentateuch (Freya registry) while on extended materials survey. The Freyan government proving unable to exploit the planetary resources, Persephone was leased to the multiplanetary Shipyards Cartel, formed specifically to settle and exploit the planet. Opened for full settlement PoDr. 1079 as mixed Freyan/corporate colony. Provisional Conglomerate membership granted PoDr. 1277 as a result of the Fifth Freyan Revolution.

  CAUTION: Persephone has been placed on the Travelers Index as of 22/10 PoDr. 1371, following riots pitting Freyan contract labor against machine-rights activists supporting a Spelvin construct known as Manfred. Although Manfred was proved not to be true AI, and therefore ineligible for machine rights, the Index believes that continuing tension between full Cartel employees and contract laborers warrants a continued listing. Travelers are advised to monitor news outlets before and during their time on Persephone, and to avoid areas with predominantly coolie populations (Heaven in Landage, civilian settlements at Mirror-Bright/Whitesands).

  Persephone has also been placed on the World Watch Question List for: machine rights, human rights.

  No indigenous animal life. Primary city: Landage (dos 1079 PoDr., starport). Primary export products: starships; AI constructs; VWS software, limberware, bioware; IPU mecha, wireware, biofitting.

  Government: day-to-day government is handled by the Managing Board of the Shipyards Cartel, whose members employ 82% of the population; however, Freya maintains a competing Colonial Office onplanet, which controls Persephone’s noncommercial foreign relations and to which the population may appeal decisions of the Managing Board. Disputes between the two are settled in the Conglomerate courts. Language Group: Urban dialect of Freya (index of variation MS3/5.200935); Urban primary (index of variation MS3/ 0.002014).

  Persephone is a barren planet, settled only because of the vast resources available both on the planet and in the system’s two asteroid belts. Because of the unpleasant climate, settlement has gone underground, or into natural and artificial caverns, and is largely confined to the Daymare Basin. Ninety-seven percent of Persephone’s population is permanently resident in Landage or its suburbs; of that group, approximately 20% are periodically resident in the assembly complexes at Mirror-Bright (Whitesands) or the Rutland Seas. Travelers are advised to consult the local authorities and to employ local transport and/or guides if their business takes them outside the Daymare Basin. The Peacekeepers maintain a Class II Traffic Control base on Cerberus in the outer asteroid ring. The base is restricted; landing by permit only.

  Prologue

  Interweave beat and shuttle, image + max-thrust 10.2, cross sine wave 1, 2, 3, homeclick/selfcheck home. Query: sleep? Strike one. Input channeled bigrave, image shift, display format AKW19X8: voice active, pattern three. #System# downshift catchbeat #check# throughput data biostance + visual via set main+special1 #complete.# Two. Command input, line code one, cascade charm quicken and close. Response: dream. Shutdown.

  1

  Celinde Fortune

  My mother loved the Empires, all nine of them, from Queen-Iron in the west to New Phoenix in the east. This was unusual in a yanqui—the Empires cater mostly to the coolie trade—but a permissible eccentricity in a Catlee, and better than a lot of the things her side of the family was known to do. She worked in Water Supply like most of the Catlees and Vaughns and Joneses, and as a result of being an essential worker, she had a full day off on Fifth-day, not a half-day like nearly everyone else. This meant that she could get to the Empires early and queue up for the half-price tickets to the matinee, and from the time I was old enough to sit through the show—five, I think, though I might have been younger—I went with her. We stopped going to the Queen-Iron pretty early on,
when West-of-Four got really bad, but we visited most of the others over the course of a calendar year. But Tin Hau was the nearest, and that was where we went most often.

  When most people think of the Tin Hau Empire, they think of it under the night-lights: a massive cube eight stories tall from the plaza level, the cap and peak of the stagehouse carved from the cavern’s ceiling, fixing the stones in place, its fieldstone pale against the darker castings that form the main part of the house. There is multicolored light tubing slung on every possible cornice, and some improbable ones, and more of it winds up the stagehouse columns, picking them out in coils of blue and red and gold. The main entrance glows good-luck red, welcome glyphs running up and down the columns; above them, holopuppet dancers eight times life-size posture in the glass of the display arch. It’s all so bright that you can see the rock of the cavern ceiling with perfect clarity, and each rough hollow is filled with colored light. The Empire completely dwarfs the Tin Hau Interlink, and a person standing between the stagehouse columns—I’ve tried it—casts a shadow on everything from the east plaza to the doors of the lift station. But my first sights of Tin Hau were under the day-lights, and I’ve preferred it that way ever since. Up here so close to Heaven, the lights are supplemented with sun-traps during the planetary day, and that’s my favorite time of all. The doubled light, natural and artificial, strips the color from the cured stone, makes the light tubing irrelevant, and adds an extra shadow to bring each carving, each crack and column and settled, out-of-line block into clear relief, and yet the place looks somehow bigger and more massive—more alive—than it does under the gaudy night-lights. Without the lights to break up the surface, you can see the way the stone soars above the tiny lobby windows, a perfect setting for the black glass of the arch—blank in the day-lights, not to waste money on the matinee crowd. It looked like a fort, or a castle, but to keep secrets in, not invaders out, and calling it an empire doesn’t seem that strange after all. The light from the sun-traps falls like spotlights over the stone, bouncing back milder to the plaza floor, and it looks old enough, used enough, to deliver what it promises.

  Which, of course, is magic, not just like mine, though I’m not the only conjurer working the Empires, but the magic of escape and glamour and impossible beauty and mysteries that you don’t want to unravel, all neatly packaged for a 120-minute run time with no bad surprises. By the time I was six, I understood the forms of all the acts, knew that the vanished assistants would reappear just as certainly as the bands would all perform a final clip after they’d said they were done. By the time I was eight, I was bored with the form, and was already looking forward to being old enough to come to the night shows, where some of the surprises weren’t so pleasant.

  When I was nine, my second sister Celeste—not my second sister, I’ve only got one, but the second sister to be given the name—was born, and we stopped going to the Empires on Fifth-day. She was too young at first, of course, and by the time she was old enough I was too old to be happy with the matinees, where I could have seen the night shows. Besides, Celeste and I never got along—reasonably or not, I suspected she’d taken a lot more than just the trips to the Empires and my dead twin’s name, and she resented having a difficult elder sister instead of the devoted ayah her agemates made of their sibs—and any joint venture, much less something I actually liked as much as the matinees, tended to bring out the worst in us. It was a great relief to everyone when I moved in with my mother’s Vaughn cousins, ostensibly to be closer to the vo-tech so I could be in the running for a lycee scholarship, and, though my mother mentioned it once or twice afterward, we never went to an Empire matinee again.

  All of which is a roundabout way of saying I have fond memories of the matinees. Which is why I was at the Empire at all when Micki Tantai was murdered.

  Normally, if an act isn’t completely reliable, it doesn’t get as far as the Empires: Binaifer Muthana, who manages Tin Hau for the underworld consortium—all perfectly respectable Cartel investors, of course; this is Persephone, and not everything means what you think—that owns all the Empires, is nobody’s fool, and wouldn’t put up with unprofessional acts even if the accountants didn’t come by twice a week to make sure his profits remain acceptable. But when things go wrong, they tend to go wrong in clusters, which is why I woke to the buzz of my media wall three hours before I usually get up, with my construct Aeris calling me from the speakers. It went silent when I opened my eyes, but the Persphonet console kept buzzing. I sat up, brought up the lights with a gesture—oh, yes, I’m wired; I got that scholarship, and my skinsuit with it, so my time with the Vaughns wasn’t wasted—and then got out of bed to deal with the caller.

  “Peri, accept,” I told the smaller construct that managed my communications. “Outgoing voice only.”

  The screen on my side lit, though whoever was calling would still see the rainbow swirls of a blocked node—not proper etiquette, but whoever was calling me had started it by waking me.

  “Fortune?”

  It was Muthana, of course, tall and gaunt, his lined cheeks sunken into distinguished hollows, and I sighed.

  “Hang on a minute, Binnie.” I had left a yukata on a chair by the workbench, retrieved it, and shrugged it over my shoulders. “Peri, resume outgoing visual.”

  In the screen, I saw Muthana’s face ease, probably at seeing me alone. “I’m sorry to bother you, Fortune, but we have an emergency.”

  “We—?” I started to say, and then waved the word away. Muthana wouldn’t wake me without good reason—if nothing else, my current act was highly profitable, but mostly he wasn’t one to exaggerate. If he said “emergency,” the sirens were wailing, and the trucks were at the door. “What’s up?”

  “Two acts have canceled out of the matinee,” he answered. “The Time-Keys sketch, unprofessional little shits, and the Tigridi band’s face is sick—”

  “The low-teens will be devastated,” I said.

  The flicker of a grin crossed his face, but he wouldn’t be drawn.

  “—and it was a short show to begin with. I’m canvassing the night-show to fill in.”

  I waited. I didn’t need to tell him that my act was too farang, not nearly high-touch enough to please a matinee audience. The night-show crowds like the titillation, but the afternoon would hate it. I wondered what I’d’ve made of it myself if I’d seen it.

  “I remember you used to have a street show,” Muthana went on. “A box robot, a minikarakuri—an acrobat, or something like that? I wondered if you’d be willing to run it as part of the lobby displays. We’ll pay, of course.”

  “And pay well, too,” I said, but I think even he could hear that it was a token protest. I was still proud of the street show—not just the slack-rope dancer, but a tiny, mechanical conjurer who did tricks with cups and balls. I had called it “A Glimpse of the Past” and dressed them all in what I hoped were antique costumes, but when I’d built it I’d still been more interested in the mechanics than in the presentation. I’d come a long way since then, but people had always liked it. It might be interesting to bring it out again, see what an audience made of it now that I was a better showman myself—and besides, as I said at the beginning, I’ve always been fond of the matinees. “Let me make sure it still runs properly, Binnie, but if it does, I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Fortune,” he said, and I could see the relief on his face. “Remember, the lobby show starts at noon.”

  That took me back. I could almost smell the burnt sugar from the praline-sellers’ carts, could almost see the bright coolie sarangs surrounding me as we moved out of the light into the cool and welcoming shadows of the lobby, between the rows of booths. My mother always had to lift me, or at the end let me push my way to the front—the matinee crowds are tolerant of kids—to see the conjurers and their sleight of hand and the karakuri and the lottery-readers and whatever else had been hired to fill in the time. I shook the memory away, and said, “I’ll call you in an hour.”

&nbs
p; “Haya. And thanks again, Fortune,” Muthana said, and broke the connection.

  I had actually kept the street show pretty much intact—the parts are too small to be usable in any of my larger illusions, and besides, I was fond of it—but any karakuri’s mechanism deteriorates without use and care. I pulled it out of the storage cabinet, assembled the figures on the platform that housed the power supply and the brain-box that let it run on its own or under my unseen control, and then switched it on and let it warm up while I showered, dressed, and rummaged in my wall-kitchen for something to eat. By the time I’d finished, I could tell that the show would need some repairs, but I could also tell it wasn’t anything serious. I called Muthana and told him I’d be there, then settled down to the work at hand.

  Most of what needed to be replaced were trigger springs and the tiny belts that transferred power to the platform’s underlayer: I hadn’t been able to afford the quality of fiber that I would have liked, had even had to use rubber in a couple of places, but at least all the parts were standard. I had most of them in stock, and put in a call to Motosha over in the Copper Market on the border between Angelitos and Madelen-Fet. My cousin of sorts, Fanning Jones—anyone named Catlee, Jones, or Vaughn counted as some kind of kin to my mother—had worked there for three or four years before his band got a contract at Tin Hau, and I got a cousin’s discount. I told them what I needed, and agreed to pay the rush-delivery charge, then went back to the fiddling work of replacing the rest of the belts. A girl from Motosha, all big eyes and muscular legs from pumping the pedals of a piki-bike, arrived in forty minutes with the box of belts, better time than I’d expected; I paid for them plus the surcharge and a tip, and went back to work.