Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  I rose to my feet—the movement seemed slow, but it was timed to match the usual applause—and the other two karakuri came forward, the silver holding out a folded black square. I gestured for them to bring the box and set it down at the edge of the stage, and they took up positions on either side of it. I unfolded the square into a full silk drape and tossed it over all three, so that the drape fell from the karakuris’ heads to the stage. I walked around them, displaying them standing there, then yanked away the drape. The gold karakuri stood between the silver and the bronze, fully restored, and we all took three steps forward to begin our bows.

  “George, end playback.”

  “Thank you,” the construct answered, precise as ever, and the image winked out as the pinlight behind it vanished. I stooped to pick up the drape from where I’d let it fall behind the karakuri, turning the illusion over in my mind. It was working the way it should, there was no doubt about that—and it still looked good—but, let’s face it, I was bored. I’d been ending the act with this illusion for almost a year, though I’d added other illusions in the earlier parts of the act; it was time I considered a new finale. I stood there behind the karakuri, drawing the drape through my fingers to fold it back into a neat package, and stared at the backs of the three karakuri. The houselights gleamed off the metal, three shades, bronze, gold, and silver, three backs carved with the suggestion of human muscles, the trace of a spine and the solid rounds of buttocks. The next one I built would be copper, I decided, the soft pink of new copper or rose-gold.

  The three were very similar to look at—humaniform, female, their faces modeled loosely on my own by a hard-hacker near Cavemouth, a man named John Desembaa, who did all my heavy manufacturing—except for the gold, which was the center of the Compression illusion as well as Vanishment. Its skin was studded with delicate struts and wires, creating a network raised a hand’s-width—9.8 centimeters—above the polished metal, so that when the light hit it right it looked as though it was caught in a metal spiderweb. It was one of the deliberately disconcerting things about that karakuri, which in Compression is crushed in a giant vise and then restored. The web looked at once ethereal and potentially painful, and a lot of the audience doesn’t quite know how they want to react. The gold blended smoothly with the bronze and the silver; the rose-copper would have to be chosen carefully, if it wasn’t to clash.

  For some reason, that thought, and the sight of the motionless karakuri standing hand in hand, sparked an idea, and I stood with the black drape half-folded, trying to capture it whole. The three were already somewhat interchangeable—the illusion called Disassembly relies on that—and the new one would probably be built to the same pattern. But suppose I built another new karakuri, not humaniform but a transformer frame, so that it would first absorb and then unfold each of the other karakuri—better still, it would begin small, and grow as it absorbed the three current karakuri, beginning to take in the next before it had finished the previous one, so that there would be moments when it looked like conjoined twins or triplets. Then it would reverse the process, disgorging not three, but four karakuri from an apparently too-small space.

  I pulled the silk back through my fingers, mechanically finishing the job at hand. Yes, the new idea would work—I’d have to be careful to make everything perfect, every movement delicately refined, to keep the beauty in balance with the grotesquerie, but that was a language I knew I could handle. As for the technical problems, well, they’d be considerable, but hardly insoluble. The only problem was, it wasn’t really an illusion. Oh, I suppose that producing a fourth karakuri out of a space that should only hold three counted as such, but it wasn’t big enough to close the show. And I wanted to end with this image, the metal bodies joining, melding, then flowering into four.

  I smiled at that, and could feel the expression twist. Anyone in my family, maybe even Fanning—maybe especially Fanning, we’d never minced words with each other—would have something to say about this. I had been born a conjoined twin myself; my twin, the first Celeste, had not survived our division, and the ribs and left arm I had not been born with were hers. The circumstances of my sister’s death, and my life, were still a matter of contention in my family—I have not forgiven my parents for giving my second sister Celeste’s name—and they were sure to see this as a slap at them. And maybe I should run with that—after all, what did it matter if it was true, as long as it made for a spectacular illusion? I would produce the four karakuri from the transformer, then vanish one—no, I’d vanish myself, and reappear from the transformer-karakuri itself.

  The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. Not only would it straddle that fine line between the grotesque and the exquisite, but it would remind people at least obliquely of the potential kinship between man and machine, between innate and artificial intelligence. And right now, with Realpeace calling so stridently for human rights alone, human rights over the machine—and willing to kill for it, I remembered, and shoved the thought away—it would be good to remind people of what could, must, happen if anyone achieved true AI.

  I finished folding the silk and automatically checked the karakuri’s positions against the marker lights. Nothing had changed, but before I could open my mouth to have Aeris bring them back to their racks, a door opened at the back of the hall, a bright rectangle against the darkness. I frowned—no one is supposed to have access when I’m rehearsing, not without my permission—and overhead George made a noise like throat-clearing.

  “Access granted to Binaifer Muthana, as the rehearsal is finished. Thank you.”

  I sighed, and heard Muthana’s voice, his silhouette stark against the light. “Celinde? Sorry to disturb you.”

  “You’re not,” I said. If he had been disturbing me, even his clearance wouldn’t have gotten him in without an override. Terez could not officially approve, but she’d never deleted that command.

  The door swung closed, its brilliance replaced by the paler light of a handlamp that bobbed closer until I could see Muthana at the foot of the center aisle. I threaded my way through the beams of light and squatted at the edge of the stage.

  “Bad news,” he said, and I blinked a little at his bluntness. “The Empires are closed for another week.”

  “You said Security promised we could reopen.”

  Muthana made a face. “They said they only promised it for the small clubs. The ones, according to them, who are really being hurt.”

  “What the fuck do they think the Empires live on?” I demanded, and Muthana spread his hands.

  “I know. And they’re more likely to get trouble from the small clubs, in my opinion, not the Empires, but they just see audience size. And nobody’s asking my opinion, anyway.”

  “Damn it.” I swallowed anything else I might have said—there weren’t curses really effective enough for the occasion. “So where does that leave us—the nightshow acts?”

  “Your contract is clear,” Muthana answered. “And so are the other big acts. As for the smaller acts…” He paused. “There’s no good way to say it. I’ve spoken to the shareholders, asked them to authorize extracontractual stipends—in the interests of keeping the best acts at Tin Hau—but they’re not interested. They did say the other acts are welcome to try the club circuit, though.”

  “How generous,” I said. “Let them find work, if they can, when everyone else who’d played the Empires is doing the same thing, so that the general booking fee goes right down the tubes—how many of the shareholders have a piece of the club action, too, Binnie?”

  “That’s not fair, Celinde.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Muthana looked away. “I thought you’d appreciate the information.”

  “You wanted me to do your dirty work, tell Fanning for you.”

  “No.” Muthana looked back at me, and this time I believed him. “But I wanted you to know so that your cousin doesn’t think I’m keeping secrets. And so that you don’t, either.”

  I nodded. “Sorry. It
’s not a good situation, Binnie.”

  “It’s not good for anybody,” he answered. “And not just performers.”

  I had forgotten, until then, that he lived in Western Phoenix, up in Heaven with the rest of the cast and crew. Usually someone of his caste and station lived in the midworld, or at least in one of the townships closer to the Zodiac. “How’s your family doing?”

  “All right.” He shrugged. “I’m thinking about sending the boys to my mother’s until all this blows over—she’s down in Li Po. The boys don’t need their schooling interrupted.”

  His two sons were both low-teens, in their last years of base school. If they followed the usual midworld pattern, they would be sitting for the first of their placement exams some time in the next six months: no wonder Muthana wanted them well out of the way. “Not a bad thought,” I said, and he made a wry face.

  “The only trouble will be making them go. They’re kids, they want to be where the action is. And my wife’s family is up here, I think she’d like to keep them close to home.” He shrugged then. “Ah, well, with luck they’ll catch the bastards who planted that bomb, and then we can all get back to normal.”

  “So you believe Realpeace?” I asked.

  “When they say they didn’t do this one?” Muthana smiled. “It wouldn’t make sense if they did.”

  “So who did plant it?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not paid enough to have that kind of opinion, Fortune. Not in Heaven.”

  I blinked at him, a tall man, mostly in shadow, the light from his lamp puddled at his feet. “You think it’s that serious?”

  “Yes.” The lamp bobbed as he nodded, reinforcing his words. “And you’d be wise to do the same.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and knew it came out more sour than I meant. Muthana waved his handlamp, ambiguous farewell and dismissal, and started back up the aisle. If Binnie wasn’t prepared to speculate, indulge in the kind of political gossip that usually filled the Empire, then maybe things were more serious than I’d realized. I watched him go for a little, then shook myself and began dismantling my illusions. More than ever, now, I wanted to do the new illusion, wanted to end the act with that image, machine and flesh not quite merged, not quite separate, but possibly interchanged.

  It took me most of the next half-week to work out the illusion, and sketch rough plans for the transformer and the new karakuri. John Desembaa, who had made the last three, was really the only choice for this project as well, and I was lucky enough to catch him between jobs. He had a workshop at the eastern end of Broad-hi, about halfway between Monark and Charretse West Change, in a multi-use warehouse; I loaded the plans into a handful of datablocks, not wanting to trust the connections, and took the electrobus out toward Charretse. It was running late, and there was more Security visible along the platforms, but the tightbeam transmissions stayed normal, updating the delays, and I guessed it was fallout from the bombing.

  Desembaa was waiting for me outside the warehouse entrance, sitting on a black-padded bollard in the shade of the entranceway. A massive long-hauler poked its nose out of the bay beside him, and enormous manipulators slid and danced along the frame of the mobilator web that was unloading its cargo, their stately motion controlled by the blank-helmeted figure that hung motionless at the center of the web. The mobilator was another good model for the transformer—I’d been thinking assembly machines, welding frames, but this had possibilities, too—and I stared for a moment until Desembaa said, “Did you have any trouble getting here?”

  “No, not really, just the ‘buses running late. Sorry.”

  He matched my tentative smile, twisting his neck to look up at me. Sometime in the course of his career, he’d broken his back, and it had healed badly—or maybe he’d been born that way, with the hunched shoulder that tilted his head awkwardly to the side, but the metal fingers on his right hand made me think there had been an accident. “No problem. There’s been a lot of Security around, that’s why I asked. Come on back.”

  I followed him along the yellow-striped path that was—mostly—safe from traffic, and into the side corridor where the individual workshops were. It was hot there, despite the blue-toned cooltubes that hung from the ceiling, and sand grated underfoot, blown in from the trafficway. I glanced at Desembaa, and he rolled his eyes.

  “We’ve got to hire a new cleaner, and soon. But there’s no contamination in my shop.” He slapped the doorlock, and gestured for me to enter ahead of him.

  I knocked my sandals against the doorframe, a polite gesture that I’ve always suspected did as much harm as good, and realized as I did so that I was tapping my foot on the post of a static cleaner. “Nice,” I said, and looked back to see Desembaa grinning.

  “It works.”

  And it proved he was handling the problem, too. “Nice,” I said again, and went on into the shop.

  For the first time since I’d known him, the system was at standby, the various machines still, arms and appendages folded back against their bodies, the furnace cool. Desembaa’s throne—the control chair—sat empty, the cover newly patched, the extra cables coiled at its foot. The air was cleaner than usual, smelled only faintly of the carbon fiber he used for his sculpture. There was a new plaque on the wall, I saw, which might explain the silence, a face whiter than bone, white as the moon, rising from a stone matrix almost as black as slate. I couldn’t quite tell if it was a man or a woman—a man, I think, but that’s mostly because I knew John—but it was classically beautiful, the finely sculpted planes of the face a contrast to the demurely lowered eyelids, the perfect mouth as perfectly in repose. I caught my breath, seeing it, and Desembaa said, “No.”

  “I don’t want to buy it, John,” I said, and he shook his head.

  “And I won’t make karakuri from it, either, Fortune. That one’s—personal.”

  When he takes that tone, there’s no point in bargaining. “Haya,” I said, and there was real regret in my voice. “It’s beautiful, John.”

  He smiled, a tight smile, not without pain. “Someone I used to know.” A lover, I guessed, from his tone, or maybe someone he’d wanted badly. “So, what’s the job this time?”

  I reached for my datablocks. “I’m working on a new illusion. I’m going to need two new karakuri, one pretty much like the others, the other a transformer frame. I’ve made some sketches, but I’m more than open to suggestions.”

  “Put them on the player,” Desembaa said.

  I fed the blocks into the carousel-reader that squatted in the corner by the door, and Desembaa reached for his helmet, settled it over his face. Blind in the real world, he slipped his hands into the control gloves, tightening them methodically onto his fingers. I’d used the helmet interface at vo-tech and again when I was building my own machines on the lease-frames; I’d never managed to get used to the helmet’s too-warm jelly molding itself to my face, but Desembaa—and God knows how many others—didn’t seem to mind. Desembaa waved his hands, gestures his room could read, and a network of control beams sprang to life around me. I froze, not wanting to signal anything inadvertently, and Desembaa quickly muted the colors.

  “Sorry. I forgot I had everything turned up so high. You can use the goggles on the table.”

  I ducked under the thickest of the beams and picked up the goggles, peered into and through them into Desembaa’s virtual workshop. It was nothing like the real one, all greyed light and silvered shadows, with a huge window that admitted more grey light and at the same time showed a sky so filled with cloud as to seem to have lowered itself to touching distance. A stand of trees with leaves like old copper coins stood in the middle distance, and beyond that white flecks came and went on a dark grey plain that had to be a sea. There was a steady pulse of sound in the air, an ebb and flow like a heartbeat.

  Desembaa’s virtual self stood at his virtual worktable—straightbacked, all his fingers flesh and blood—already examining the image that floated in the air in front of him. I lifted a finger and my point o
f view drifted toward him, stopped at my gesture when I hung at his side.

  #So you want your first three karakuri to fold into the transformer,# Desembaa said. #And then four of them, the original three plus the new one of that kind, to come out of it?#

  #That’s right.#

  #Huh.# Desembaa stared at the rough plan I’d drawn.

  #So you’ll need to have some sort of secret compartment in this—?#

  #Or else the fourth karakuri is concealed as part of the transformer,# I said. #But it has to look as though that’s impossible.#

  #Haya.# Desembaa’s icon-self couldn’t smile, but I could hear the wry amusement in his voice. #And at the same time you have to be able to appear from it.#

  #That’s right,# I said. On the worktable, my sketches, crude wireframe animations, went jerkily through their paces. They didn’t look like much, nothing like the effect I wanted when the illusion was in place, and I slanted a glance at Desembaa’s icon, wishing I could see his face. More than any other hard-hacker I’d ever worked with, I trusted him to see what was beneath the drawings, but I still found myself holding my breath. The animation ended, and Desembaa’s icon signaled repeat, watched intently until it finished again.

  #I like it,# he said at last. #I like it a lot. Let’s talk.#

  That was the signal to leave the virtual workshop, to go back to the real one to talk money, and I slipped off the goggles to find myself back beside the worktable’s glowing top. Desembaa blinked at me from the center of the room, his helmet in his still-gloved hands.

  “The copper karakuri’s no problem, and I can certainly build the kind of transformer you’ve sketched here,” he said. “The key is going to be how you manage your appearance. What were you planning?”