Metal Sky

by Jay Caselberg

  Molly’s sat diagonally across from the shuttle stop and he and Billie walked across, the lightness still present in her steps. Funny, Jack thought as he stepped through the door into the slightly cooler temperature of the store itself, he’d even become used to the taste of Molly’s. There was a time when he wouldn’t go near it to save his life. It was some vague principle thing. He’d always objected, for some reason, to the prepackaged synthetic muck, but now . . . now, he seemed to eat the stuff more often than not. He wasn’t the only one doing the influencing in this partnership. Billie was influencing him in her own, sometimes less than subtle, way.

  They ordered—Billie her standard Mollyburger and fries, and Jack the fried onion rings and a salad as well as a burger, a couple of drinks—and headed for a table by the front window. Jack picked slowly at his fries.

  “Tell me, Billie. What was it about Bridgett Farrell that you didn’t like?”

  She shrugged, taking a big mouthful and chewing enthusiastically, swinging her legs back and forth under the table. She reached for her drink.

  Jack watched her. “Listen, I’m curious. What was it?”

  “I dunno. She was fake. I could tell as soon as she walked in. That fake voice. The fake way she held herself. It wasn’t real. I don’t like people like that. You can’t trust them.” She shrugged again, more interested in the food in front of her than pursuing Jack’s line of thinking.

  Jack thought that over. Okay, he knew that, but Billie seemed to have made the decision in an instant. She would have taken the Farrell woman into the office and left her as quickly as possible. What was it? He’d never really worked out whether that sense she had was innate, something similar to Jack’s own talents, or something born of experience gathered in the life she’d led down in Old back at the Locality. Could you learn survival sense or did you have to have it in the first place? Because that was what it was all about—survival.

  “Ever since I’ve known you,” he said, “you’ve been quick to make up your mind about people, haven’t you? Was it always like that? Before, I mean.”

  She shrugged again, reaching for her fries.

  “No, come on, Billie. I’m trying to work something out here.”

  She stopped with a fry halfway to her mouth and stared at him. “What for?”

  “Just an idea I’m working with.”

  She finished the action, popping the fry into her mouth and reaching for another. He sat waiting for her to answer, but the answer never came. He knew better than to push her if she didn’t want to talk about something. Maybe he’d try again later. He speared a forkful of salad and lifted it to his mouth, inspecting it before popping it in. The salad was merely a reaction to their constant diet of processed pap. Fooling himself that he was making some attempt at being healthy. But then, Jack had always been pretty good at fooling himself.

  Clang. The sound reverberated around and through him, loud, sonorous. Clang. There it was again. He could feel it in his guts, in the back of his teeth. Slowly he opened his eyes. He was standing in the middle of a flat plain, dark gray, featureless. Clang. Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

  This was a dream. Had to be.

  Clang.

  Jack tried to pick out something, anything that would pin down where he was supposed to be. The surface upon which he stood was smooth and dark. Hard. He could sense the hardness through his feet. Above him there was . . . nothing. No, that wasn’t quite right. It too was gray and featureless, but if he concentrated, he could feel rather than see a roiling motion in the reaches far above.

  He willed himself larger.

  Clang.

  He was stuck. Too much inactivity. He was out of practice, knew he was. He bunched his will and tried again. This time it had an effect, but instead of growing in size, his feet left the surface he was standing on. Okay, so this was going to be a flying dream, was it? Gradually he floated upward, slowly picking up speed, heading . . . no, it wasn’t skyward . . . what was it?

  Clang.

  The sound seemed to propel him with greater speed, pushing him up into what was evident now as a swirling gray fog. His head, his body, eased into it. And then it was all around him. There was no feeling to the wafting nothingness, no taste, no smell. He had expected clammy dampness, but it was swirling nothingness. He could see shapes and patterns in the gray, but that wasn’t why he was here, he knew. He willed himself farther. In the midst of the blankness, he couldn’t tell if he was moving at all.

  Then, suddenly, his head was clear, then his shoulders, then the rest of his body. He floated in a between place. Below him was a cloudscape, dark, the color of thunderstorms and threatened energy. Above him . . . Jack narrowed his eyes, trying to work out exactly what it was that lay above him. It took a moment to make sense of it. It was like the slightly arched ceiling panels of Yorkstone, but instead of being clear, they were matte, dark gray. The roof space swept over him and off into the distance till it merged with the mist in one blurred continuous line. Behind him it was the same, and off to either side.

  Clang.

  Again he willed himself higher. He picked up speed, rushing toward the hard, flat surface above him—but no, it wasn’t flat. Now that he was closer, he could see there were marks on the vault’s underneath. Vast protrusions in curves and lines, spelling out incomprehensible symbols. They were hard, solid, and he was picking up speed. If he didn’t do something, he was going to crash into those ridges. He clamped his jaw tight, painfully willing himself to slow.

  Clang.

  The noise was coming from the surface above him, an echoing vibration pulsing down through the surrounding space. It was like that. It was like some giant metallic heartbeat. He was slowing; he could sense it.

  Right then, he knew, he reminded himself. This was a dream. Things could happen to him in a dream. He could slam against that solid surface and wake, shaken, but undamaged. But that was logic, and dreams weren’t always logical. With another effort of will, he forced his passage slower, feeling a rising sense of panic.

  Success.

  He was hovering now, floating just below the vast surface. There was no feeling of height. It was natural just to float here. No fear of falling.

  Clang.

  The vibration shook him. It rattled his teeth, his bones.

  He tried to make out the symbols, but they were too big. They stretched away on either side, far too large to see the sense of the shapes. He was too close.

  And then darkness was replaced by light.

  Jack opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling—his bedroom ceiling.

  “Arghh,” he groaned to himself. He wasn’t finished yet. He needed to get back into the dream and work out what it was telling him.

  He closed his eyes again, trying to force himself back into the dreamstate, but it was gone. He could feel the last vestiges trickling away.

  He groaned again and rolled over onto his side.

  Just before he’d surfaced, there’d been light, bright and blue-white. Illumination in the distance. Traceries, almost spiderwebs of light. That had meant something. It was almost as if that huge, stretching surface had been like a sky, but a sky that was solid, stretching out to eternity. The growing light—it was almost like a sunrise, shafts of blue-white shooting across the surface, casting shadows in the distance.

  No, he didn’t have enough. There was nothing there yet. Not anything he could hold on to.

  Four

  Jack was puttering around in the kitchen when Billie finally arose. She appeared in the kitchen doorway rubbing her hand through a tangle of blond hair, eyes half shut, stifling a yawn.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hmmmmph.”

  “How long do you think it will take to get something on this Talbot guy?” He could start the work himself, but Billie was so much better, so much quicker than he was, and he didn’t want to waste any time. Since they’d been in Yorkstone, she’d gotten even better. It seemed to take her mere moments to make connections, draw the
references that would lead her down a path, mining information like she was almost scenting it. She seemed to sense patterns innately. But not in the morning.

  She screwed up her face and looked at him blearily through narrowed eyes. She wasn’t very good in the mornings, but then neither was he. Not that Jack ever had any proper sense of what time of day it was. Living in and out of dreamstate did that to you. There was no defined sleep pattern, no regular hours of unconsciousness to order or organize his life. With Billie, it was just morning.

  “Okay, take your time,” he said. “But I need to get moving on this pretty quickly. If we’re not careful, Talbot will skip, if he hasn’t done so already.”

  She waved a hand at him and headed for the freezer, looking for the boxed synthetic milk.

  “Okay,” he said. Better to leave her to struggle into consciousness in her own time. Half an hour either way wasn’t going to kill it. He poured another mug of coffee and headed for the living room, leaving Billie to clatter and fumble around in the kitchen behind him. He placed his coffee down and leaned forward. “Last image,” he said.

  The sketched object took shape in the wall and he stared at it, chewing at his bottom lip. The Farrell woman had said it was dark gray, metal. That certainly coincided with his dream image from last night. And those squiggles she’d drawn on the upper surface could have been the vast shapes above him while he’d floated just beneath the endless ceiling. It was only a rude sketch, and there was not enough detail to tell whether there was anything to indicate light, or a sun, or something like that. This thing was a chunk of metal. It wasn’t particularly big, and it certainly didn’t look like it was a part of something larger. The designs along the side edges meant that it hadn’t been broken off from something else along those sides, but he didn’t know what was on the other edges at either end. For all he knew they could be rough and unmarked, meaning the thing could have been snapped off from something, anything, larger.

  Billie stumbled past, heading for her room and the shower. Jack closed his eyes, holding on to the sketch, trying to give it solidity and shape. Nothing there. Nothing sparking inside his head or in his guts. He grimaced and opened his eyes again. Really, he’d seen nothing quite like the object before, but as far as he could tell, there wasn’t anything about it that would make it particularly valuable. There was no accounting for the taste of people who collected things though. Rarity, age, all gave objects value. As far as Jack was concerned, the real value lay in the energies that objects accumulated over the years, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere near those from a simple hand-rendered sketch.

  Billie reappeared, dressed in pale, loose, comfortable clothes. Her hair was as messed up as it had been before she went for her shower. She moved over to the couch and shoved Jack out of the way.

  “Hey!”

  She gave him a dismissive look. “Well, do you want me to do this stuff or don’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay, I’m going for a walk and leave you to it.” He had no other option really. He could go back into the office, but he’d only end up playing with the furniture or the window displays again, or simply staring at his empty diary. He had far too little to occupy himself with. What a life.

  He actually ended up getting on the shuttle and heading into one of the shopping districts, to wander among the storefronts and the people. Large department stores clustered together, one on top of the other. In between lay cafés, bars, and restaurants. He wandered for a while, browsing along the catalog boards inside the stores, randomly flicking from page to page, watching as the images formed and re-formed in front of him. He tapped at them randomly, not looking for anything in particular, just seeing what there was to see. Appliances, new media toys, top-of-the-range handipads that put his own to shame. They were there, page after page. You could do all of this from the comfort of your own personal wallscreen, but there was something about the ritual of “going shopping” that people still clung to, regardless. He wandered out of the store and into the next one.

  This one was a fashion chain, and Jack, realizing where he was, glanced down at his old long coat. It had lasted for years, but it wouldn’t survive for years more. Maybe it was about time he did something about it. He headed for the relevant department on one of the upper floors, all the while watching. People browsed, calmly, unhurriedly. There was a pace of life here. Where was the edge?

  He wandered over to the coat section and scanned the boards, feeling slightly foolish. Nothing really grabbed him. He liked his old coat. He ran his finger down the displays and tapped on something vaguely similar. An image of Jack Stein sprang into being in front of him, wearing the coat in the catalog. The store system had automatically mapped him as soon as he’d started browsing the displays. He walked around the image of himself, considering, casting a semicritical gaze. It was slightly disconcerting to be standing behind yourself, seeing yourself from the back as others saw you. He reached up a hand to smooth down the back of his hair. Maybe he needed a change. He crossed back to the board and changed the color, watching as dark brown bled into gray-black. Yeah, maybe. The problem with these images was that you couldn’t adjust things like lifting the collar. They were set for optimum display, but optimum in the mind of the marketing functions. He glanced at the price, then shook his head.

  “Forget it, Stein.”

  A voice came from the board. “Can we be of further assistance?”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said, tapping at the board to kill the display.

  “May we suggest the latest seasonal line?” Images flashed in quick succession across what had been, moments before, a straightforward catalog display. All of them were Jack, dressed in a range of different coats and outfits. The yellow, as it flashed past, was just simply obnoxious. He thought he’d killed the display.

  “No, that’s fine,” he said a bit more forcefully, and headed for the exit shaking his head.

  He found himself out on the street a few moments later, suddenly realizing that without even thinking about it he had come to a section quite close to the upper end of Yorkstone. Not too far away sat the Excelsior. He glanced about, establishing his bearings. The hotel was about two blocks virtual north. The problem with living in any of the urban structures, such as Yorkstone or the Locality, was that direction was transitory. As the cities crawled across the landscape, seeking the replenishing materials, constantly renewing themselves and their structures, they changed direction, driven by the autoprogrammed sensors built into their leading edges. This meant they often moved in vast arcs, shifting their compass bearing as they traveled. But city maps were still city maps, and the top of the map was north, whichever way they were facing. So Jack turned “north” and started walking. It was close enough that he didn’t need to hop a shuttle.

  There was no mistaking the Excelsior. The gold and glass entrance portico shone in the middle of its block, stylized with pillars and rotating doors reminiscent of a bygone style. He stood, hands on hips, looking at it, just appreciating it for what it was for a few moments before heading to the front doors. He was here; he might as well visit Bridgett Farrell and see if he could work out what she was hiding.

  The large glass doors whooshed open to allow him entrance, and he walked into a wide polished space—shining marble, bronze pots, plants, and real people. There was a front desk, wide and richly polished, looking like it was made of granite. He knew it couldn’t be the case, but the effect would have taken some programming. He’d never been inside the Excelsior before, and despite himself, Jack was impressed. He wandered over to the desk, wondering what he was supposed to do for attention. A smiling person, crisply uniformed, was instantly in front of him.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  Jack ignored the slight flicker in the man’s eyes, the unspoken And what precisely do you want here? You don’t really belong, do you?

  “I’d like to speak to one of your guests.”

  “Certainly, sir. The guest’s name?”

  “M
s. Farrell. Ms. Bridgett Farrell.”

  The clerk fiddled with something on the desk’s surface, and a scrolling list appeared. He tapped once or twice and then nodded. “I’m afraid Ms. Farrell is not in.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, quite certain, sir. If you’d like to leave a message, perhaps . . .”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll catch up with her later.”

  So, a wasted journey. Well, not entirely wasted. He had the confirmation that she could afford his services. Anyone who stayed in a place like this had to be able to afford someone like Jack Stein.

  As he walked away from the front desk, he could feel the clerk watching him. But that was not all he could feel. Someone else was watching him too. He knew that feeling of old. Slowing his pace a little, he glanced around the lobby, trying to make it not too obvious. There. Over to one side, on one of the large, comfortable pseudo-leather lounges, sat a small man. He caught Jack’s look and quickly averted his gaze. The observation had been more than casual. Jack was sure of it. Behind him, the clerk was saying something to a coworker. Sound carried well across this lobby, and he could almost make out every syllable. Jack moved over to one of the information displays and started scrolling through, keeping one eye on the guy on the couch.

  Was it the Farrell name that had drawn the attention, or was it something else? Something was sparking inside him, telling him, a knotted expectation nestled in his abdomen. The man was round-faced, dark mousey hair, dark eyes. He was dressed nondescriptly, a plain jacket and trousers and a casual shirt. Right now, he was studiously not making eye contact with Jack’s carefully undirected gaze. Pretending that he had found what he was looking for, Jack headed for the entrance. As the doors swung open with his approach, he turned, looking back over his shoulder. The guy was watching him all right, and he quickly looked away again. Nodding to himself, Jack stepped out of the lobby and into the street. All right, that had been strange.