Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  It was a weird time, the days moving very slowly for me. I had a lot of ideas, even managed to get some of them down on a databutton, but I didn’t have anything to tie them to: fx alone can’t make a song, and I couldn’t seem to find either the words or the music to go with the pictures. They were angry images, flames and the explosion, of course—I was still dreaming about the stampeding crowd and the smell of smoke and foam—but also the stark heat of the desert and the false shimmer of water on pavement, that vanishes when you approach it. Against that desertscape I layered engines of my own imagining, brown iron and blue steel and whitewashed cement, a track like the monster Kagami assembler out in Whitesands, with arc welders flashing like meteors against a white sky. There was a machine on the line, the shape you’d get if you tried to cobble a giant out of the bits and pieces of a starship, and at the end of the clip it rose and danced against the white sky. It was the best thing I’d done in a while, even if it wasn’t close to finished and didn’t have a song to go with it, but I showed it to the band anyway at our next practice.

  We rented a practice room in the lower levels of the Tin Hau Empire—we were sharing it with the Commandos right now, to cut costs—and I ran the tape on my main projection pad. After it was finished we sat there with the light from the flatscreens turning the dust to gold while I waited for somebody to say something. At least everyone was looking neutral; even Timin was nodding a little to himself, not showing the dead-lizard stare with which he greets stupid ideas. Then Shadha banged her hands against her thighs, a quick patter of sound and movement.

  “I like it, Fan, but where’s the song?”

  She’d put her finger on the problem, of course, and I had to grin. “I wish I knew.”

  “I’ve got some ideas,” Tai said, slowly. “There’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about, and I think it fits.”

  “Can we hear?” Timin said, after a moment.

  She shook her head. “Give me a couple of days. It’s not ready. But thanks, Fan. I like that.”

  “So do I,” Jaantje said.

  Tai actually had her song ready the next time we practiced. It was right at the end of the eve shift, at planetary sundown—not our usual time for practice, but we didn’t have a gig, and all of us had picked up day jobs again—and the light from the flatscreens was dulled and ruddy, like an old star. The channel was showing one of the cheapest subscriber environments—the Empire didn’t spend a lot on the lower-rent rooms—based on what looked like a near-surface factory over in Trifon. The night-lights weren’t on yet in the image, and the red light filled the room, too weak for shadows. Tai glared at us—she always glared, showing something new, daring us to hate it—and toed on her amp. She plays a variable guitar, one of the old-fashioned ones that uses virtual pickups, lets you set their position and type and all the other parameters through a control board linked to the amp, and she’d done something strange with the settings. She touched the strings, and the room seemed to fill with sound that was as thick as the light. I could feel it through the floor, could feel a buzzing in my skull that meant she was pushing the limits of my ear, and then she hit the first hard chord, and I forgot everything except the sound. Over it all, her voice rose, controlled, clear, without words half the time—words always came last, with her—but the words that were there were right, singing about someone gone who’d left too much behind.

  She meant Micki Tantai, of course, but more than him, and when she’d finished I caught my breath and felt like I’d finally remembered to breathe.

  “I second that,” Timin said, and it was the first time we’d agreed on anything in days.

  Jaantje looked at Tai. “Can you do it again?”

  Tai smiled, the expression at once rueful and a challenge. “I don’t know. Can you?”

  We couldn’t do it at all, of course, not at first, but we hacked through it a few times, and more at the next practice, and we could see what it was going to become. Then Jaanjte showed up with a song, too short, but hard and hot as steel, and when I put my assembly-line clip to it, he and Tai produced a pair of solos that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. The words—the right words, the ones he had were placeholders—would come later, but the music was there. And then Timin brought in two songs of his own, angry and grieving, Hati all muddled up with the girl who’d dumped him not quite three months ago, and I found the right face in my image files to set against it, serene and unyielding against the anger. The second song, the slower one, was harder to get right, but finally we changed the mode, moving it down to dorian, and that got the distance it needed.

  That made four new songs, a lot for us to be bringing in at once, and none of them were easy to master, either technically or emotionally. We played them in the club gigs first, especially at the places where people came to hear us because of Hati, and then we put them in at the Empire, but it was still a night-to-night thing whether we’d get them right. Nobody said anything directly—Muthana even said he liked the new stuff—but at the Empire you could tell by the silence when we’d gotten it right. We started getting calls from fusion clubs, places where Hati used to play, where the people who hated Realpeace went now, and they went crazy for those songs even when we didn’t get them right, so we took to closing our show with them, all four together. And then we got a call from the Middle Oasis. It was one of the oldest clubs on the Zodiac, and one of the best-known, mostly djensi, but pulling in a broad enough crowd to take some chances. Hati had gotten its start there, along with a dozen other bands: this was as big a step for us as getting the Empire gig; we couldn’t afford to screw it up, and there wouldn’t be anyone except us to blame if we did.

  It was a Tenth-day night, of course, the kind of lousy time the big clubs give you the first time to make sure you can pull some kind of a crowd, but even so I was almost sick with nerves as we walked through the side door from the service alley. The Oasis was a lot like the upperworld clubs, though, a long mid-ceilinged room with tables clustered around each of the support pillars and lined up along the back wall, and that steadied me a little. The only real difference was that they had live bar service as well as the machines, and the prices flashing on the light board were all double, one for the machines, and one for the bartenders. There were a few people there already—hard-core drinkers, some of them, plus a group of constructors clustered at a corner table with a two-liter jug of beer and half-empty binty-boxes from one of the cookshops nearby, and then a group in heavy bodypaint. Most of them were wearing ordinary patterns, at least for the midworld, stylized starfields or gardens or abstract swirls of color, but three of them were wearing a style I’d never seen before. Each of them had half their faces painted silver, shaded to suggest the sharp planes of a machine, and as one turned her head I could see a carefully drawn rivet line along her jaw. She was wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit, the kind line-workers wear under their sand suits, and her right arm was painted metal silver to match her face. Before I could say anything, however, a side door opened—the office door, I guessed, from the tone of the light that spilled out toward us—and a rail-thin woman came toward us. She was very tall, too, golden-skinned, unmistakably of the midworld, with a green-and-gold transfer pasted between her eyebrows and a short sheer skirt over a bodysuit that showed every bone and muscle in her wiry body. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tai’s stare fix on the woman’s erect nipples, and Jaantje cleared his throat.

  “Bi’ Tobu?”

  “That’s right.” That was another difference between the Oasis and the upperworld clubs: there the manager would have said, oh, call me Saadi. “Ba’ Dhao.”

  Jaantje nodded, wisely stopped himself from saying anything more.

  “You can go ahead and set up,” Tobu went on. “Power points are behind the lower panel and at the stage front, the door to the left there”—she pointed, and I saw that her nails were painted green-and-gold to match the transfer—“is private, and you can leave anything there you want. Drinks are on the house, but get them
from the bartenders.” She smiled then, and the expression briefly transformed her severe face. “Good to have you here.”

  “Thanks,” Jaantje said, but Tobu had already stopped smiling, turned on her heel, and was heading back to the office.

  “Haya,” Tai said, but softly, and Jaanjte shook his head.

  “Let’s go.”

  It took us about an hour to set up—my biggest problem was the sight lines for the fx, another difference from the upperworld clubs, but I put my biggest lightpad right down front and tucked the other four into the corners of the stage. I’d lose some definition, but at least I’d get a solid central image. I plugged in the last of the optics, settled down behind my boards to run some preliminary checks, and Shadha leaned out from behind her kit.

  “I see we’re getting the metalheads now.”

  “Who?” The minute she said it, it was obvious who she meant, and she gave me an incredulous look.

  “The people in the half-and-half paint. Christ, Fan.”

  “So who are they?” I asked, and tried to pretend that was what I’d meant all along.

  “You know, the people who want to be one with the machine.” She spoke the last words in a half chant, and I dredged up a vague memory.

  “Don’t they have something to do with Dreampeace?”

  “Dreampeace doesn’t want them,” Shadha said. “We just want everybody to have rights, not this mystical shit.”

  I nodded, and then Jaantje started the sound check, cutting off anything else we would have said. I finished my checks, and went to the bar to get a bottle of water—I’d learned a long time ago not to drink beer before a gig—and then went back into the backstage room to put in the display lenses that let me monitor the fx directly. Tai was there ahead of me, pacing and glaring, but she turned her back to keep from seeing the green flash as they popped into place. I blinked hard a couple of times, watching the test patterns, felt the signals sliding under my skin. My suit is rudimentary compared to Fortune’s, but it’s more than good enough for what I do. Shadha came in, stripping off her bracelets—she can’t play in them without risking breaking a drumhead—then put them back on again, finally took them all off and wrapped the bundle into a furoshiki.

  “You’re not going to leave that here,” Tai said, and Shadha shook her head.

  “It stays in my pocket the whole time.”

  Or underfoot, I thought, but didn’t say anything. The noise from the main room was getting louder, and I stuck my head out the door to see what the crowd was like. The room was maybe three-quarters full, better than I’d expected on a Tenth-day night, and Jaantje beckoned from the stage.

  “Time to go,” I said, and the three of us took our places for the final sound check. Everything was green on my boards, the control spaces neatly outlined in my lenses, the codes wavering in and out just below my line of sight, and I adjusted my ear to concert volume and flipped the toggle that switched on the glove programming. The wires in my hands seemed to heat up, wrapping each finger in tingling warmth, as though I’d dipped my hands in hot wax up to the wrist, and the lenses wrapped a red haze around them, warning me of an active system. Any gesture in the control spaces would trigger an effect now, and I was careful to keep my hands well below the virtual line as we ran through the last check. The crowd seemed to be mostly midworlders, not a surprise, here on the Zodiac, and the group of metalheads had grown to half a dozen or more, but when I looked closer I could see a few coolies and upperworld yanquis as well. There were actually a lot of yanquis, and even as I realized that, I saw Kebe Niall at the back of the room. He lifted a hand in greeting, and I nodded back, not daring to wave, and wondered if the rest of the Commandos were there. Seeing him made things feel a little more normal, and I checked my readings a final time. Bi’ Tobu beckoned Jaantje from the side of the stage, and he stepped down to speak to her. I craned my head, but couldn’t see her lips to follow the conversation. And then Jaantje was back grinning, and Tai flipped and locked the switch that made us live.

  “We’re Fire/Work,” Jaantje said, his voice suddenly amplified as he leaned into the sound wand.

  I reached into the control space, signed our name, and the gesture triggered my first effect. The glyphs that make up our name burst into sight, and began to fade, the fade timed to match the start of our first song—not the usual glyphs, but the ones that can also mean revolution. The crowd noise softened, attention starting to turn toward us, and Jaantje’s grin widened.

  “Let’s go,” he said, to us, and hit the first chord.

  Quite suddenly it was just another gig, or at least nothing scary. From the first notes, we were in the groove, right where we needed to be; if Tai reached a little too far, it’s something she only does when she feels good about a gig. The crowd was with us, even the metalheads; they wanted to go where we were taking them, and the coolie parts of our sound, the heavy redouble bass and the fx, didn’t seem to bother them at all. Of course, Hati had played here, and probably other coolie bands, but it felt good to see. At the end of the first set, even Timi was grinning, and Jaantje looked as though he could walk on air. Bi’ Tobu beckoned to him from the side of the hall, but his smile didn’t falter as he went across to talk to her. Shadha shook her thick braids, scattering sweat, and scooped up the bundle of her jewelry. I flipped off the gloves and turned my ear back to a nomal setting, blinking away the last afterimages, and went looking for Kebe.

  I found him in the back, where he and the rest of the band—and two people I didn’t know, but guessed might be the drummer’s girlfriends—had taken over most of a table. Meonothai slid over to make room for me, but there wasn’t a chair. I leaned on the table instead, letting my ear adjust to the new setting, and sorted out the greetings.

  “Sounding good,” Kebe said.

  “Thanks. How’s the fx looking?” I asked. “How’re the sight lines?”

  “Not bad.”

  Mosi said, “Some of the lower parts of the image are blocked. Fifteen, twenty centimeters, maybe.” He sketched the distance with both hands.

  You could always trust Mosi to give you the exact truth regardless of the situation. I sighed, wondering if there was anything I could do about it, and Kebe said, “It’s mostly the way this place is laid out. It wasn’t designed for fx. But all in all, you’re looking and sounding good.”

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  “So is it true Hati used to play here?” Meonothai asked.

  “Yeh.” I looked back toward the stage, automatically checking my gear, and saw the metalheads clustered around the most expensive bar machine. Somehow I didn’t think they were buying from the machines to save money, and I saw Kebe grin.

  “Strange people.”

  “I’ve never seen them before,” I said, and Mosi looked up at me from under his heavy eyebrows.

  “That’s because Realpeace would kick their ass if they came up to Heaven.”

  “It wouldn’t be Realpeace, not necessarily,” the drummer said. “You can’t blame them for every slipped gear that puts on one of their pins. Realpeace doesn’t condone violence.”

  “Do you really think Realpeace doesn’t know exactly what their fringe supporters are doing?” Mosi asked, and the drummer looked away. He was probably right, too, I thought—Mosi had an irritating habit of guessing right about politics, mostly because he never overestimated anyone’s goodwill or intelligence. The sweat was cooling on my chest and back, and I shivered suddenly.

  “Someone walking on your grave,” Mosi said, and smiled.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey,” Kebe said, “did you hear that Mays Littlekin’s supposed to be getting out of the rehab soon?”

  “I hadn’t,” I said. He and Ajani Maxx had both survived, but the newsdogs had stopped reporting on their condition, which I had taken as a bad sign.

  “It was on the M-T,” one of the women said, and gave a little shrug.

  I nodded—the M-T wasn’t one of the more reliable sources—and Keb
e said, “Anyway, it’s good news if it’s true.”

  “Yeh.” I would have said more, but Meonothai snapped his fingers.

  “This has nothing to do with anything, but I was supposed to ask, have you seen Fortune lately?”

  I blinked. “Not really. Who’s asking, anyway?”

  “Her mother. Aunt Gracia.”

  “Oh.” I tried very hard not to get involved with that side of the family.

  “And Celeste called me.”

  For a second, I thought he meant the karakuri, and then I realized that none of them knew about the new illusion. “Oh, Elvis Christ, there’s something I need to tell you—”

  “About Celeste?” Meonothai sounded so surprised that I almost laughed.

  “Not exactly,” I began, and out of the corner of my eye saw Jaantje step back up onto the stage platform. “Shit, I’ve got to go. Look, I’ll call you.”

  “Do that,” Meonothai said. “Please.”

  I signed vague acknowledgment—I had no idea what I should say about the karakuri—and headed back toward the stage. I had to pass the table with the metalheads, and as I passed one of them put out his silver-painted arm.

  “Nice to see coolies on our side.”

  Which side is that? I thought, but smiled and touched my ear, pretending I hadn’t heard. He dropped his arm, letting me past, but I could feel them watching me as I took my place behind my board.