Dreaming Metal Read online

  I had the repairs finished by ten—Persephone keeps a twenty-four-hour day regardless of planetary time—then left it running through its basic modes while I sat in a chair at the end of the worktable and watched, wondering how I should present it. I’d used music with it as a street show, and improvised a talk about the old days in the Urban Worlds, but I’d long ago used the playdeck in other things, and the speech hadn’t been very good to begin with. Music was no problem—I had other decks and a good library of clips, one advantage of having a musician cousin—but a presentation was more complicated. The persona I used in my main show wouldn’t go over well at all for a matinee lobby show, but with the lobby opening at noon there wasn’t much time to develop something suitable. Probably the best thing was to fall back on the old standby of silent conjurers, a hooded, oversize desert wrap, and stand quiet, letting the karakuri do its work. In fact, if I said absolutely nothing, pretended not to see or hear the crowd—and if Muthana would cordon off my space and loan me a couple of his minders to make sure it stayed clear—there was a good chance that people watching wouldn’t be sure if I was human or a karakuri myself, and they’d go crazy looking for the “real” controller in the crowd around them. Particularly if Muthana made sure my name was prominently displayed as the maker of the illusion: my night-show illusions are known for using karakuri that look very much like me.

  “Peri, display music library file menu.”

  The list formed against the shadowed wall, the strings of realprint brightening as the system compensated for the lighting. I found the file I wanted, reached into the illusion to select the right subgroup of clips—Urban plainwork, mostly drums and synthflute, not so good as to call attention to itself, but loud enough to hide any noise from the cabinet, and, more important, my suspicious silence--then pulled the menu out of my line of sight.

  “Peri, display timing chart for Street Show.”

  “I’m sorry, that chart is not on main file.”

  “Peri, check the archive files.”

  “Checking archives.” There was a moment of silence. “A chart for Street Show does not appear to be in the archives. However, I find a chart for Cabinet Street Show—”

  “Peri, display timing chart for Cabinet Street Show.” There is no point in getting annoyed with even the most sophisticated constructs—the whole Manfred incident proved that it’s pointless—but it’s hard sometimes not to blame them rather than your own lack of clarity.

  The chart appeared, and I checked it against the music until I found a clip that matched. I pulled that into the control space, and said, “Peri, copy to disk and cue up playdeck.”

  “Confirmed,” the construct answered, and I turned my attention back to the cabinet.

  On it, the slack-rope dancer walked up her rope, one of my favorite effects, because you can see that the rope is real, even swaying a little, and that there aren’t any hooks on her feet—or at least you think you can. At the platform, she turned and sank into a graceful crouch, gesturing to the magician, who until then had stood still, hooded head bowed over her table and its discarded toys. At the dancer’s gesture, she looked up, the hood sliding back just enough so that if you looked closely you could see that her face looked like mine—the first of my machine twins—and then she began to go through the old cup-and-ball routine. When I’d originally built the cabinet, the little magician had actually played the crowd directly—under my control, of course—but this time, I decided, she would just do the trick a few times, then make the ball disappear completely, and reappear in my hand. I’ve kept in practice, and in any case it wasn’t a complicated trick; after one false try, the magician figure looked at me, and I opened my hand to reveal the ball. I let the ball—it was heavy crystal, with a glimlight in it to make it easier to see—run back and forth across my palm, then turned my hand over. The ball disappeared, and the magician lifted the stack of cups—just shown empty—to find it sitting there. Even if the crowd realized I was the conjurer and not a painted karakuri, it would work, but it would be even more effective if the audience thought I was a machine. If you think about it, you’ll see how it’s done, but I don’t intend to explain it, or anything else in my act. The slack-rope dancer stood up, and walked back down her line, to begin the cycle again. It was simple—and, as I’ve said, not too hard to figure out—but it would be effective enough for a matinee audience.

  “The clip is copied, and cued to playdeck,” Peri announced.

  I called Muthana back, gave him the details and what I needed from him, and arranged for a carrier to come and get me and the machine. They were as prompt as I’d known they would be, and we were in the lobby with everything installed by eleven. I borrowed a desert wrap from General Wardrobe, put it on, and practiced my part of the illusion a few dozen more times to make sure I could manage it. I had a demi-alcove toward the back of the lobby, where the left grand staircase led up to the balconies. The lights were good there, soft but clear, and people could watch from the lower steps if they couldn’t see from the lobby itself. Muthana had made up a poster and a virtual placard, both with the glyph for my surname—fortune—and my given name spelled out in realprint below it, and the glyphs that meant special show and puppet backed with an old publicity print of the street show that I’d given him from my files. It looked good, especially considering the short notice he’d had. Binnie set up the ropes around the alcove and introduced the minders—one in house livery, two not—and then all I had to do was wait. It had been a while since I’d done this small a show, and I tried to tell myself the flutter of nerves was good for me.

  There were already a dozen placards glowing in the air along the sides of the lobby, their rainbow brilliance making the printed posters look pallid by comparison. I didn’t recognize that many of the glyphs—because of our schedules, I don’t often cross paths with the lobby-show acts—but a few of the realprint names that went with them were familiar from other venues or the trade listings. The lottery-reader—there was always one, pulling numbers and plastic carta tokens from a glittering ball filled with multicolored tinsel—was a complete stranger, but the woman screwing together lengths of support frame in the space next to her was my cousin Fanning’s bandmate. They were the last people I’d expected to see—Fire/Work is almost as unsuitable for a matinee as I am—but even as I thought that, she straightened and looked over her shoulder at a slim coolie woman that I recognized as one of Tigridi’s hand-drummers. Since Tigridi had caused part of the problem, it seemed reasonable that some of them should work the lobby show—though I didn’t envy the minders when the low-teens realized who was among them—but I didn’t quite understand what Shadha Catayong was doing there.

  She saw me looking and smiled, but went on talking to the other drummer. Finally that woman nodded, and Catayong came to join me, shaking her head so that the beads at the tips of her oiled braids rattled together. Fanning had said once that she was a Dreampeacer, and as she came up to me I looked for any of their tokens among the hanks of charm-necklaces but didn’t see their anatomized man/machine anywhere among the dangling beads.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here,” she said.

  “I didn’t expect to be here,” I answered, and that got a grin. “Are you playing?”

  She shook her head, making the beads clash again. “Not us. But I said I’d loan Faraji one of my tap-drums and help her set up.”

  From her tone, she was wishing she hadn’t. I said, “That was nice of you.”

  Catayong made a face. “Binnie didn’t leave us a lot of choice. We’re not really flavor-of-the-month right now.”

  Fire/Work was a fusion band, in the style of Hati, the first and still the greatest of the djensi-fx bands that had been really popular about five years ago, just before the Manfred Riots. Hati itself had broken up in the aftermath—something else to blame on Dreampeace, on the whole AI debate—and the style wasn’t nearly as popular as it had been. Partly, it was the usual change in taste, but mostly it was that the idea of
coolies and poor yanquis and the rest of the upperworld cooperating on anything—least of all music that managed to combine old-fashioned djensi guitars and coolie fxes—just didn’t have the same resonance that it had had before Manfred. I had liked Hati, myself, but Fanning, and I gathered the rest of Fire/Work, had worshiped them. Fire/Work still had a following, and a contract, but I could see that they might be feeling vulnerable.

  Catayong glanced over her shoulder agan, studying the other drummer’s setup. “I don’t know what Binnie’s thinking of, the low-teens are going to be all over her, and if they crack my drum—” Before she could finish, someone called her name from the top of the stairs, and there was a note in the voice that made me turn to look. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Catayong’s frown deepen.

  “Tai?”

  The woman coming down the stairs was tall for a coolie, but otherwise unmistakable, bronze skin and broad cheekbones and coarse black hair cut short as a line-worker’s. Niantai Li was one of Fire/Work’s two guitarists—the other one was coolie, too, unusually, just as it was unusual that my yanqui cousin should be their fx player.

  “Trouble,” she said, coming into earshot, and for an instant her voice trembled before she got it under control.

  “What is it?” Catayong asked, and I reached under the sleeve of my robe, found the spot between the bones of my forearm that controls my skinsuit, and pressed to bring up the control disk. It hardened almost instantly, and I ran the controls to high. Instantly, the lobby blazed with light, a web of multicolored control bars and the hot pink dots of the tightbeam transmitters, and I swung in a full circle, seeing how the security beams blazed hotter orange than usual, too bright for normal use.

  “Something’s up,” I said, and Li made a funny noise.

  “What’s wrong?” Catayong said again, and this time the sound Li made was almost laughter.

  “Jaantje heard it on the newsnets on his way here. Micki Tantai’s been shot—”

  “What?” The sound of my own voice startled me, but Li went on as though I hadn’t spoken.

  “—maybe killed.”

  “By who?” Catayong asked. Over her shoulder, I saw the lottery-reader put down her tongs and edge closer, drawn by the magic name. Micki Tantai was—had been, maybe—Hati’s lead sign dancer, and their main face. He was also one of the few coolie supporters of machine rights—not Dreampeace, never that, but one of the few sane voices arguing that machine rights and coolie rights were two sides of the same coin. That was one of the reasons the band had split up, after the Riots, after Manfred was proved to be just another construct, a clever mimic of true AI, but Tantai and Hati kept the power of their names.

  “Guess,” Li answered, and the lottery-reader cleared her throat.

  “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help hearing. Did you say Micki Tantai was shot?”

  “That’s what I—actually my bandmate—heard,” Li said.

  “It wasn’t Realpeace,” Catayong said. “It couldn’t be.”

  “Who else?” Li asked, with real bitterness. She was a first-generation coolie herself, I remembered, came from Freya with her draftee mother when she was two or three. Realpeace claimed to speak for people like her, claimed to know what was best for them, and fusion—Hati and anyone like them—wasn’t it. It was no wonder she sounded angry.

  “Have they claimed it?” the lottery-reader asked.

  Li shook her head, visibly shaking herself back to something like normal. “You know them. The newsdogs are saying Realpeace, Jaantje said, but there wasn’t a claim. Nothing official.”

  Catayong looked at me. “Anything on the wires?”

  Because of my act, I had access to Tin Hau’s lower-grade security, but this was obviously something bigger. I fixed my eyes and IPUs on the nearest security node anyway, and wasn’t surprised when the pinlight refused to resolve into a shimmering veil of glyphs and real-print. “Probably,” I said, “but I can’t get at it. Security’s set high, though.” I looked around for Bixenta Terez, an old friend who was Tin Hau’s senior stage manager, then shook myself. She would be backstage already, setting up the matinee, not out here in the lobby.

  “Something’s not right,” the lottery-reader murmured, looking toward the doors. I looked with her, and saw house security gathering.

  “What exactly did Jaantje say happened?” I asked, and was careful to give his name its proper, coolie pronunciation.

  Li took a deep breath. “He said that Micki Tantai’d been shot, outside one of the Zodiac arcades. That was all he’d heard—”

  “Here he comes,” Catayong interrupted. I followed her gaze, and through the haze of lights and glyphs—there was a transmitter in my line of sight—saw the rest of Fire/Work coming down the stairs. Behind them, on the landing, I could see more of Muthana’s liveried security, gathering in twos and threes, big people in bright blue-and-gold vests. Tin Hau didn’t usually need security, at least not in large numbers: whatever had actually happened, Muthana wasn’t taking any chances.

  I touched the control disk, damping the visuals, and the faces around me came clear again. Fanning gave me a nod of greeting—he was whiter than ever, his tan like dirt over his pallid skin—and said, “Are you getting anything from the house? I’ve only got basic clearance.”

  He was wired, too, though only the essential skinsuit. “Nothing,” I answered, and Catayong spoke over me.

  “Jaantje, what the hell is going on?”

  Jaantje Dhao—he was the biggest of the band, a broad-shouldered, kinky-haired three-gen coolie from one of the pocket metroforms in Western Phoenix—gave her an odd look, his usual easy smile utterly vanished. “Didn’t Tai tell you?”

  “She said Micki Tantai’d been shot, but there’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “Why?” the third man asked, with a bitter smile that did nothing to hide how close he was to tears.

  “I caught it on the display outside the Shaft Three Station,” Dhao said, speaking now to all of us as well as Catayong. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the hand-drummer from Tigridi edging closer, hand over her mouth in a startlingly underworld gesture. One of the minders was listening, too, grim-faced, and I tried to catch his eye, wanting to ask what he’d heard. He looked away, but didn’t move out of earshot.

  “They were showing a vidi-clip,” Dhao went on. “There was a crowd outside the Belmara—”

  “Micki Tantai was supposed to be there,” Fanning interjected, and added, *supposed to sign dance.* He went on aloud. “It was a benefit for that girl who got beat up last half-week.”

  Dhao nodded. “And Tantai was arriving, came in a runabout with a guy, I think he’s in his new band, and when he got out, there was this swirl”—he mimed the crowd’s movement, big hands oddly helpless—“and this little guy jumps out of the crowd and Tantai goes down. Everything was confused, and the next thing you know the guy’s gone, and Tantai’s flat on the pavement. They ran the vidi-clip again in slow-time, and you could see the little guy had a gun.”

  “Did you hear the commentary?” I asked. There was no point in asking him about the realprint crawl line: I doubted he could read more than the standard glyphs.

  “No.” Dhao shook his head. “I was too far back. I saw the clip, and I headed in here. I thought maybe somebody else would have more news.”

  “All the newsdogs are saying is that Tantai was shot.” That was a new voice, the lurking minder, and we all turned to look at him. “They aren’t saying by who—though some of them are speculating—and they aren’t giving a condition.”

  “Elvis Christ,” Fanning said, under his breath, and the lottery-reader said, “The guy with the gun—it really was a gun?”

  We all looked at the minder again. Projectile weapons are restricted in Landage, mostly successfully so; if some maniac—some Realpeace crazy—had a gun, we would all feel a lot less safe tonight. The minder grimaced.

  “I don’t know. That’s what the newsdogs said, so we have to assume it, though.”


  That wasn’t the sort of thing the newsdogs got wrong. The lottery-reader shivered visibly, and the girl from Tigridi said, “Was he wearing a sarang?”

  There was a little silence. Five years ago, nobody wore the Freyan sarang anymore, not even the oldest coolies, but in the aftermath of the Manfred Riots, a lot of the political coolies had adopted them as a visible reminder of what Manfred had meant for them. If Manfred had been true AI, and if Dreampeace had succeeded in winning full rights for it—and it was an article of faith among the political coolies that they would have—then the coolies, most of whom were Freyan contract labor, not citizens at all, would have had fewer rights than the constructs. Realpeace especially had adopted the sarang as one of their badges—you never saw their triumvirate, the trio who always represented them on the newschannels, in anything but the sarang and traditional jacket—but for them it meant more than just coolie rights on Persephone, it meant opposition to the current Provisional Government and a return to the homeworld. It was a tricky question, especially from an obvious midworlder, and I wasn’t surprised when Dhao looked away.

  “I couldn’t see.”

  “What’s Binnie going to do about it?” I said to the minder, and he lifted both hands to ward off the question.

  “Don’t look at me. All I was told was to watch the lobby. Security’s been tightened, of course, but that’s all I know.”

  I looked at the nearest tightbeam transmitter, saw the web of light spring to life again, crisscrossing the lobby. I was locked out of the true discourse, but I could see a thicker cluster of lights around the entrances, red bars across each doorway and an orange haze enclosing each of the support pillars. Probably a detector field, I thought, and hoped it was discriminating enough to filter out the usual coolie tool kits. All we needed was for the matinee audience to get offended.

  More people than our little group had obviously heard the news.