He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her, his head tipped forward a little, as always, so that his hair fell forward to obscure his face. “A change of plans.”
His voice was soft, but still clear above the constant seashell murmur of the Arcade. Jian looked warily at him, wondering if that was a new bruise along his jawline. “Problems?”
Red shook his head, but his eyes cut sideways in the same instant, and Jian leaned back to see the server approaching, the plate of griddle bread and the carafe of tea balanced on her tray. “Oh, damn,” she said, and the server—a coolie girl, plump and dark—looked startled. “No, sorry, not you, but can you package that? My friend here tells me we won’t be eating after all.”
“Haya,” the server said, her voice almost as soft as Red’s, and vanished again.
Jian looked at Red. “What do you mean, then, a change in plans?”
She saw his shoulders move, either a sigh or a shrug. “The guy I know, he changed his mind. Said to meet us at the Copper—the Copper Market, up in Madelen-Fet.”
That figured—Madelen-Fet was notoriously a hard-hacker’s paradise—but Jian waited anyway.
“Place called Motosha,” Red finished, after a moment.
“Haya,” Jian said. The server appeared again, the griddle bread neatly wrapped, the tea decanted into a paper package, and Jian took them from her, handed over a pair of cash cards in return. The girl processed them quickly, returned one, its color faded, and Jian looked back at Red. “Right. Madelen-Fet it is.”
They took the long way to Madelen-Fet, up Shaft Two to the Norway and the electrobus line that paralleled it, skirting the coolie neighborhoods in Gamela and the Prosperities without thought or comment. At Madhuban Main, they transferred to a local lift, and stood waiting in the glass-walled lobby for what seemed like a long time. Jian stared out past the barriers and the ticket kiosks—and the ubiquitous bank of Persephonet consoles—her attention caught in spite of herself by the brilliant advertising that filled the plaza. The air seemed to pulse with color, glyphs and banner-notes sparking from every surface, obscuring the people clustered around the shop displays. The broadbeam transmissions were restricted in the midworld plazas as a nuisance, and unusual even in the eastern part of the upperworld; she’d seen them only once before, in the Paderzhan Market in Charretse, where the sand-divers and the truckers sold their spare gear. She looked back at the lift doors, reaching for her suit controls to mute the display, and Red touched her arm, nodded toward the notice board: the lift was arriving, its signal drowned in the chaos from the plaza. Jian shook her head, and filed into the car behind a pair of giggling adolescents in wide-sleeved sand coats.
The Copper Market was more crowded than Madhuban Main, but its transmitters were all narrowbeam, and Jian allowed herself a sigh of relief as she pushed through the barrier into the market itself. Two long arcades ran the length of the space, but the original shops had been broken up into smaller dukkeri, and goods spilled out from their doors to collect in piles around the support pillars, extolled and guarded by sharp-eyed, sharp-voiced hawkers. Most of them were wearing sarangs, the patterns vivid against the pale stone, and Jian felt her attention sharpen. This was very much a coolie place, the air filled with their tonal dialect and the rise and fall of signing hands, but then she looked again, and saw yanqui clothes, yanqui faces, and sober midworld coats scattered through the crowd. A yanqui coffee-man shared a power point with a coolie fry-pot vendor, and the woman selling videomanga and band clips—probably pirated, Jian added silently, and just as probably authorized pirates—to the cluster of coolie girls in school uniforms was obviously a midworlder. That was good to see—these days, it paid to be careful, coming into Heaven, to avoid the strictly coolie neighborhoods—and she relaxed a little, scanning the crowd not for trouble but for the input from the narrowbeam transmitters scattered along the arcade.
Red touched her shoulder again. “This way.”
He nodded to the building at the end of the Market. It looked like a converted warehouse, Jian thought, or maybe light assembly, but the upper windows had been carefully bricked in, and only a single realprint word painted on the keystone identified the shop. Jian lifted an eyebrow at that: if Motosha really was the supplier for serious hard-hackers, she wouldn’t have expected it to advertise the fact so blatantly.
As she passed through the open arch of the doorway, however, she felt the sting of a tightbeam transmission, a standard ID query that her suit answered before she could decide whether or not to squelch the output. Typical hard-hacker arrogance, she thought, and looked around for the source. Sure enough, a flat black box the size of her hand was set into the top of the arch—and it’s interesting, she added silently, that they don’t bother hiding it. Or is that the message? Certainly the space was empty, without the casual browsers or the thrill-seeking adolescents she’d seen in similar places in the midworld, except for the silent machines. Maybe a dozen large pieces stood on their own display pallets in the center of the room—she recognized one as a pump assembly for a standard life-support system—and still more smaller items, some obviously only parts, some apparently complete but unidentifiable, hung from the side walls and filled the low shelves beside the service counter. In front of it, a brightly polished machine stood motionless, the flags at the top of its central pyramid drooping lifelessly. It was obviously supposed to do something, Jian knew, but she couldn’t begin to guess what. She looked curiously at it anyway—there was a little car as well, that ran on tracks around the base of the pyramid, and something that looked like an arm protruding from the pyramid’s tip—and then followed Red toward the counter. She felt an invisible thread part as she passed a hidden sensor—the suit translating the signal pulse as the flick of thread against her skin—and was not surprised when a door opened in the back wall.
“Yeh, can I help you?” The speaker was a tall, skinny yanqui, his sandstone-colored hair drawn back into an untidy queue. He stopped abruptly, seeing Red, the display glasses sliding down his nose, a startled look on his face, but before he could say anything more, the door opened again.
“Haya, Fanning, I’ll take this one.” She was a yanqui, too, older and thicker-bodied, her hands and arms covered with blue-and-gold bodypaint like gloves.
The younger yanqui hesitated, his eyes, still on Red, but then seemed to come to himself, and stepped back toward the door. “Haya,” he said, drawing the word out, and let the door close slowly behind him.
The woman looked at Red. “Is she with you?”
Red nodded, and the woman showed teeth in the beginning of a smile.
“Newcat’s out back, then. You know the way.”
“Yes,” Red said, without inflection, and lifted a section of counter. Jian saw the woman’s fingers move, working a hidden remote, and a second door popped free of the wall, its outline hidden by the pattern carved into the whitewash. She followed Red through it and into a narrow hall lit only by yellow emergency lights, and couldn’t help flinching a little when the door flipped shut again behind them.
“That guy,” she said, more to hear her own voice than because she really cared. “You know him?”
For a minute, she thought the technician wasn’t going to answer, but then his eyes slid sideways. “No. Not anymore.”
She blinked at that—Red’s former friends were sometimes much more interesting, and dangerous, than his present ones—but before she could say anything else, a second door popped open, spilling a brighter light into the corridor. This was altogether too much like the way she’d acquired Manfred, five years back, and she took a deep breath, swallowing unexpected bile. The construct in her carryall was too much like it anyway; this added echo was nothing she needed.
She shook herself, made herself follow Red into the fan of clear light, and couldn’t help wrinkling her nose as the smell hit her. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, a strange, musky scent, and then she spotted the incense burner sitting on the top of what looked like an old Kagami DETAC
console. A stocky man, his cheeks scarred where neither his beard nor goggles had protected him from blowing sand, rose from his seat on a dented mobilator pod.
“Hey, Red. What you got for me?”
Red tipped his head sideways, his hair shifting color slightly under the lights. “She has it.”
“And who’s she when she’s at home?” The stocky man didn’t look at her, but Jian knew better than to let herself be annoyed.
“Reverdy Jian,” Red said, his voice still without inflection. “I work with her.”
The stocky man made a soft hissing sound between his teeth, dark eyes darting over her. “My apologies, bi’ Jian. I’m Newcat Garay.” He held out his hand, yanqui style, and Jian took it warily, matching his grip.
“Ba’ Garay.”
“I understand you have a construct to sell,” Garay said, and settled himself again on the mobilator pod. The dents fit his buttocks perfectly, Jian saw.
“Or to trade,” she answered, and swung the carryall forward on her hip. Garay reached sideways and pulled a flimsy-looking table out from between a pair of mobile arms.
“Let’s have a look.”
Jian touched the thumblock, releasing the lid, and set the carryall on the table, sliding the fabric down to reveal the headbox. Garay hummed to himself, reaching into his pocket for a cable, and plugged it into the test port on the side of the box. The other end, Jian saw without surprise, was already plugged into an interface box slung from his shoulder. The box in turn would be connected to his skinsuit either through a beamlink or, more likely, through a hardlink somewhere on his body: only the most serious hard-hackers could afford that level of connection.
Garay blinked then, eyes refocusing on the box in front of him, and twitched the cable free of the test port. “So. The SHYmate 294—has it got a name?”
Jian shook her head. She’d stopped naming her constructs two years ago, when she’d realized that the problem wasn’t linked to a single system.
“Haya. Hot Blue makes a good Spelvin matrix, and this one’s been optimized for FTL management,” Garay said. “Why do you want to get rid of it?”
“I don’t like it,” Jian said, and heard her voice as flat as Red’s had been.
Garay smiled. “You’re lucky that I do.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Jian saw Red lift his head at that, a sudden concentration of attention. “Really,” she said, and kept her voice just this side of boredom.
“Yeh. You prefer cash or trade?”
“I want something to replace it,” Jian said. “Either way works for me.”
“I’ve got a construct here,” Garay said. “Kagami Bettalin, Level Four/Five, fitted for FTL and VWS management.”
“I heard the Bettalins were really buggy,” Jian said. “I don’t need to deal with that.”
“All the fixes are already installed,” Garay answered, “and it’s got a valid service number attached.”
“Not hot?” Red murmured, and Garay looked offended.
“Not even lukewarm. I can give you chapter and verse on it.”
“I’ll take a look at it,” Jian said.
“Help yourself,” Garay answered, and reached behind the pod to produce a second headbox.
Jian touched the keypad, setting it for tightbeam output, and fixed her eyes on the pinlight transmitter. It lit an instant later, and her ‘vision filled with a cascade of gold and green. She blinked, stabilizing the system, let the glyphs and numbers wash over her, probing for the feel of the machine. Here in the headbox, it was almost impossible to tell what the construct would be like once it was loose in a true VWS network, when the personality matrix could expand and take full play. She took a deep breath, trying to decide if she felt anything more than the play of light and her own uncertainty, but the glyphs were as flat and lifeless as images on a media wall. The SHYmate had been different, she told herself, she had felt it in the headbox, felt what was wrong with it, the weird half presence, like a sleeper, or someone lost in daydreams.
“Haya,” she said, slowly, and looked away from the transmitter. “It’s all right.”
“It’s a fair trade,” Garay said. “I’ll go evens—construct for construct, and you get all my papers.”
It was a better offer than she’d been expecting, and for an instant she wondered what she was doing wrong. Jian glanced at Red, expecting him to reject it, saw instead the fractional nod of his head. “Agreed,” she said aloud, and slid the SHYmate toward Garay. The feeling of the headbox’s warm metal under her fingertips reminded her again of the way the construct had felt around her, creating the world she used to manipulate the hyperdrive—reminded her, too, of Manfred, its deceptive calm—and she shook those memories away. The Bettalin would be different—had to be different; she could not allow it to be anything else.
5
Celinde Fortune
I called Fanning the day after the funeral, of course, more than a little afraid of what I’d find, and I had trouble getting the story out of him at first. But he was all right, beyond of course being bruised and frightened, and I left it it that: I was pretty heavily into rehearsal at that point, and with the Empires now closed until the start of the next ten-day week, I could have the stage to myself more or less when I wanted it. My act is a lot more physically challenging than it looks—that’s part of why it looks as good as it does—and I prefer to run through it at least three days out of time when I’m not performing. And there are the karakuri to maintain as well, which takes a few hours every third day, so I was scrambling a little to get the act back into shape. Muthana swore the date for reopening was firm, so I had a little less than ten days to get everything perfect again.
My contract guarantees me rehearsal space and time, but not the presence of live crew. By and large, that’s not a problem—I like the silence of the empty house, the particular quality of sound when there aren’t any bodies to absorb it, and the house systems are supervised by a Spelvin construct called George that’s more than competent to run lights and sound and anything else I need. It also means that it’s easy to keep the backstage clear—something I insist on, to keep the mechanisms of the various illusions secret, and Terez, who used to be a conjurer herself, backs me up on this—and so I was able to run through the complete show in peace. When I’d finished, I mimed the bows—it’s better for the karakuri and Aeris, the Spelvin construct that manages them, to go through the full routine, and maximizes the chance that I’ll spot any small problems. The music kept playing as I straightened, the five-bar loop I use to cover the end of the show, and I lifted a hand into the upper layer of the web of virtual light that covered the stage.
“Haya, George, kill the music.”
“Thank you.” The last word had George’s perpetual rising inflection, its words always bitten off too short. Its current fussy voice was copied from a killer construct in one of Suleima Chaandi’s best videomanga, the one that had come out a year after the Manfred Riots. Rumor said she’d been involved in that somehow, that she’d even met the renegade construct, the pseudo-Al, and had composed the manga to deal with it; it was still on the racks in every jobshop in Landage, and one of the tech staff had thought it was funny to give George that voice.
The tape ended, and I looked to my left, where the three karakuri stood patiently in line, metal hands still linked, waiting for the next command. Two of them weren’t a major part of the final illusion, but I liked to have them take a bow—it tended to disconcert the audience, make them wonder, just a little. All around me, on my skin and under it, I could feel the low-level feedback from Aeris, a fizz more of sensation than of any particular feeling, confirmation that everything was working. The lines of light were solid, placed and interwoven precisely as they should be, so that any gesture could be potent as well as theatrical, but for some reason I wasn’t satisfied. My final illusion is a good one, a Vanishing Lady variation, a nice combination of old and new tech, and it had gone perfectly, but I didn’t feel quite right about it, or
, more precisely, I didn’t feel quite right about ending the show there.
“Aeris, stand down,” I said, and felt the confirmation pulse through me, a sense of pleasure that faded as instantly as it appeared. The light-web winked out, leaving only the seven major cross lines glowing red—the karakuri take their position cues from those, so they have to remain in place until the machines are put away—and I ducked out of their embrace. “George. Were the house recorders running?”
“Of course.” The construct sounded almost affronted: of all the Spelvin constructs I’ve worked with, and I’ve owned five myself, the Tin Hau house system sounds most like a person, probably because its personality matrix has been absorbing actors’ inflections for the last ten years.
“Playback Vanishment.”
“One moment.”
We were under working lights; the direct-line pinpoint that blossomed between the footlights was impossible to miss. I stepped into its transmission line, blocking either Aeris or the karakuri from accidentally picking up the signal, and a fuzzy pale grey rectangle appeared in front of my eyes, surprisingly bright against the darkened auditorium.
“Ready for playback,” George said.
“Go ahead.”
The grey rectangle vanished, was replaced by an image of the stage. It was shot from the central control box—George’s point of view, roughly—and partly corrected to an audience perspective. Some of the angles were a little off, but it was readable. And even without the costumes and the proper lighting, it looked good: I straightened from my bow, gestured to the golden karakuri, the one who looked most like me, and the others backed obediently away into what would be shadow. The golden karakuri came forward, while the bronze and the silver slipped offstage, their departure normally covered by the shadow and the attention I focused on the gold. The silver karakuri returned with a gauzy red yukata, and at my gesture the gold held out its arms, allowed the other to slide the yukata up onto its shoulders. The bronze reentered then, an enormous sheet of scarlet silk draped over its outstretched arms. I took it, flourished it once or twice as the bronze and the silver retreated, and then draped it over the gold. The scarlet silk covered it from head to foot and spilled out over the stage, but you could still see the shape of the karakuri under it. I knelt, gathered the silk in my hand, then flung my arms wide. Silk and karakuri vanished, leaving only a red-laquered cube in their place.
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