The room was only moderately crowded so far, and as I swung my head, looking for a sellers’ list, I saw a red shape floating in the air toward the middle of the room, filled with glyphs announcing that certain items would be auctioned at the end of the day shift. That explained why the crowd was still so small, more than the early hour: the important people, the real hard-hackers, wouldn’t bother showing up until the auction, when the good stuff went on sale. On the other hand, that should mean that the smaller items—the sort of thing I wanted—would be going for reasonable prices.
“So what exactly are we looking for?” Tai asked, and I shrugged.
“Sensor boxes, I think, anyway something I can modify to monitor the goddow. And, of course, anything useful for my fx.”
“If we can afford it,” Tai answered.
“Credit’s a wonderful thing,” I said, with more confidence than I really felt, and nodded toward the fourth aisle. “Let’s try down here.”
It actually didn’t take me very long to pick out the components I needed, first a sensor box that was still in good enough shape to work with—there were a lot of them available, and even though this one showed sand marks on the casing and blown vrower fuses, the interior boards were clean and unmarked. I could replace the fuses easily enough, especially with my Motosha discount to help me out, and a hundred wu was better than a reasonable price. In the next aisle, I found a trip recorder with a copy of the manager still in memory, and picked that up, too. With Fortune’s help, I should be able to connect them to each other and to the goddow’s internal wiring, and make sure that no one came in or out without our knowing it. The one thing I didn’t find was a visual sensor, or at least not one that I could afford, but I guessed—hoped—that Fortune would let me adapt one of the karakuri’s spare eyes. If she wouldn’t—well, that was what lines of credit were for, I thought, but I couldn’t help wincing.
I stopped at the end of the aisle and looked around for Tai. Her height and her hair made her easy to find, even across the room, and I cut around the tables and the knots of browsers to join her. She was rooting through a box of AIW 281 controllers, checking links, but looked up as I came up behind her.
“Anything?” I asked, and she shrugged.
“These look useful.”
“Ten each, or thirty wu for the box,” the woman running the table put in, and went back to her manga without waiting for an answer.
“Thanks,” Tai said anyway, and got a distracted nod.
It wasn’t a bad price, but it wasn’t great, either. At the end of the table, though, there was a familiar red-and-silver box, an Urban—or at least Urban-style, a local copy—audiot, an audio box for an fx. Most people don’t play audio from the fx, or use it just for effects, reinforcing the visuals, but I’d seen some clips from the Urban Worlds where fx had been used for harmony as well. It was probably too much to hope that this audiot would be in good shape, or if it was, it wouldn’t be affordable, but I stepped around Tai anyway, trying to disguise my interest. Even at first glance, I could see that most of the plug-ins were missing, and so was the bay cover, so that you could see into the interior. I tipped it up on end and tilted it toward the light, counting the leaves of circuits. Everything seemed to be there—everything seemed to be intact, except for a cracked power box, and I set it carefully back down.
“What do you want for this?” I asked, and hoped my voice sounded casual.
“Two-fifty,” the woman answered, still not looking up from her manga, and I caught my breath. That was a quarter of what it was worth, even without the plug-ins—hell, I could build them myself if I had to, or at worst collect them over time—and I reached into my pocket for my line of credit. It would just cover the box, and I closed my mind to the thought of the repairs.
“There’s a carry case with it,” the woman said. I couldn’t tell, from her expression, whether she knew what she had or not, or if there was something badly wrong with it that I’d missed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tai watching me, trying to pretend it wasn’t important, and I shook my doubts away.
“I’ll take it.” I held out my loc card, and the woman took it, fed it into a reader. She gestured against the shadowscreen, and I held my breath, even though I knew I had the room, and released it with a sigh when she turned the board toward me.
“Sig and seal here, please.”
I scrawled my name and codes in the flashing box, then plugged the tagmaker into the slot on the edge of the board. The final light flashed green, and the woman nodded, breaking the connection.
“It’s all yours.” She reached under the table, brought out a worn-looking carryweb, already looking at Tai. “You interested in those controllers, bi’?”
Tai shook her head. “Not today, thanks.”
It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to fit the audiot into the webbing cradle, but I’d worked it out and was fastening the last ring when I heard a familiar voice behind me.
“Oh, good, you found it. We just tried to call you.”
“Hey, Mosi,” I said, and slung the box over my shoulder. Meonothai was with him, looking battered, one eye black and swollen.
“What the hell happened to you?”
He rolled his good eye, and Mosi grinned. “Fist magnet.”
There’s one in every band, though we haven’t found out who it is for Fire/Work yet. I think it’s Timin, just like I think it’s Shadha who’ll start the fight, but mostly I hope it isn’t me.
“You look awful,” Tai said, and Mosi’s smile widened.
“It’s not that bad,” Meonothai answered. “We had some trouble at the Rainbow Angel.”
“Realpeace?” Tai asked, sharply, and Mosi glanced at her.
“Why?”
“We’ve had some problems of our own,” she said.
“It wasn’t serious,” Meonothai said, “and it wasn’t even Realpeace, or the metalheads, not directly. There were some kids, coolie kids, and one of them was throwing stuff. It started out as a joke, and then we got pissed, and they got pissed, and they were hanging around when we were loading out, and one of them said something, and Mosi said something, and he hit me—one of the kids, I mean, not Mosi.”
“Mosi said something, and you got hit,” I repeated. Meonothai shrugged, and Mosi grinned again.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, but—oh, well.” His grin vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “What kind of problems?”
“We’ve been getting anonymous messages,” I said. “On the connections—Persephonet in particular. We haven’t been able to trace them, which is part of what I’m here trying to fix.”
“Somebody’s been threatening to treat us like Hati,” Tai said.
Mosi’s eyes narrowed, and Meonothai said, “Have you talked to Security?”
I nodded. “Nothing there yet, though. They said other people had reported the same thing, and nothing’s actually been done, which I guess is a consolation.”
“We got a couple of calls after we opened for Cathayann at the Upperground,” Meonothai said. “Apparently somebody didn’t appreciate that.”
Cathayann was a coolie band, but their sound was djensi influenced. “You’d’ve been a good match,” I said, and Mosi snorted.
“Too good, apparently.”
“We haven’t gotten any repeat bookings,” Meonothai said, “and we haven’t been looking real hard, either. We’ve got enough gigs in our own neighborhoods, and around the Zodiac, to keep us going—this gig at the Rainbow is our last in Heaven.”
Mosi made a soft sound, agreement and then some, and there was a look in his eyes I didn’t like. He’d never taken threats well—not that I blamed him, but one thing I’d learned, living in Ironyards, was that there were times when it was better to back down. Meonothai said quickly, “So you got the audiot?”
I nodded. “It looks all right, too. I was heading over to Fortune’s anyway, so I can maybe get it running again.”
“Speaking of Fortune,” Meon
othai said, “what was it you were going to tell me?”
“She—” I stopped, shaking my head. The last thing I wanted was to try to explain about the new illusion, and the new Celestes. “It’s really complicated, Meo, even for Fortune. Let me call you?”
“Haya.” He looked wary behind the bruises. “But make it soon, will you? Aunt Gracia’s been at me again.”
“I will,” I said, and hoped I was telling the truth.
I left Tai at Madelen-Main, and rode the ‘bus across Short-hi into Angelitos. Fortune was expecting me: the door opened at my signal, and Celeste’s voice spoke from the ceiling boss.
“Fortune says, come on in.”
The mechanical voice was a perfect echo of Fortune’s inflections. The lights came up as I moved down the narrow hall, then Fortune appeared in the doorway at the end, silhouetted against the brighter lights of the workshop. The worktable was lit behind her, a holodisplay glowing blue-white on top of it.
“So, did you get what you wanted?”
“Yeh.” I followed her inside. Fortune’s flat was one of the biggest I’d ever been in—I don’t think I’d ever been in a bigger space that was owned by just one person—and it looked bigger because there weren’t any interior walls, just the pools of light to separate one area from another. There weren’t any wallscreens, either, except for the media wall, which added to the effect. At that moment, all the light was concentrated on the work area, with the table at its center and the karakuri parts racked along the walls like oversize milagros. I could see the shadow of a couch, and a green light in the distance that was probably either the kitchen or something in her bedroom, but I ignored them and unslung the heavy carrier and my pack. “Can I put them on the table?”
“Go ahead.”
Fortune stepped aside, and I hoisted the audiot onto the table’s durafelt surface. I unsnapped the first rings, and she leaned both elbows on the table across from me.
“That’s not surveillance gear.”
“No.” I grinned in spite of myself. “It’s an audiot—an fx component. You can add harmonies with it, or melody, too, I suppose.” I had it out of the carrier now and was unfastening the various covers. Fortune leaned close to see into the bay, and we grimaced at the same moment, seeing the scorched input.
“I hope you didn’t pay a lot for it,” she said, and I shrugged, trying to hide the disappoinment.”
“Maybe a quarter of what it’s worth.”
“Good.” Fortune reached for a tool wrapper, unrolled it with a flourish to reveal a row of gleaming picks and spot fastenings. “Well, let’s get the rest of it open, see if the whole box is gone.”
I nodded and grabbed the nearest driver I thought would fit. It was too big, but the next one engaged the clamps perfectly, and together we lifted the casing off.
“Ah, now,” Fortune said, with satisfaction, and I allowed myself a sigh of relief. The scorching hadn’t reached beyond the patch bay; the internal fuse was blown, but it had done its job, protected the delicate heart of the audiot.
“It looks to me like it’s just the fuse,” I said, and she nodded, reaching for one of her monitors.
“Let me check it out first,” she said, “but if that’s all it is, I’m pretty sure I’ve got that size fuse in stock.”
“Haya.” Even without extra patches and plug-ins, just with whatever was hardwired into the main memory, it would be worth hearing what the audiot sounded like. I saw the monitor lights turn green one by one, and Fortune nodded again.
“Looks like you got a deal, Fan. Let me see what I have.” She looked up at the ceiling, and I followed her gaze, saw another sensor box hanging there, a pinlight glowing red. As my lenses locked onto it, I saw a copper face—Fortune’s face, the karakuri’s face—hanging against the shadows.
“Celeste,” Fortune said. “Check my inventory. Do I have a GNV18 fuse in stock, and where is it if I do?”
The face wavered, and the machine voice said sweetly, “You have five GNV18 fuses in stock, as well as two GNX8A fuses. They are all in the cabinet labeled C, drawer 22.”
“Thanks,” Fortune said, and headed for the cabinets that stood against the far wall. She opened the big doors, and stood for a second staring at the drawers and shelves before she found the one she wanted. Over her shoulder, I could see a set of karakuri hands, one complete, one a metal skeleton, sitting on the top shelf next to a heavy-looking cylinder. It was as creepy as anything in her act—as the metallic ghost floating nearly at the ceiling—and I looked away, refusing to meet the pinlight.
“There it is,” Fortune said, and came back to the worktable with the little disk. She popped out the old fuse and slipped the new one into place, then reached for a power feed. “What’s the rating?”
I checked the casing, reading the numbers with difficulty through the scratched paint. “It’s a Class-Two device, standard power.”
Fortune nodded, touching buttons to lock in the setting. “Ready.”
“Let’s put the casing back on,” I said. We refastened the clamps, and I flipped the power switch. A light glowed green on the display plate, but nothing else happened.
“Is that it?” Fortune asked, after a moment.
“I think it needs—” I saw what I was looking for even as I spoke, the five buttons arranged in a rough pyramid. “Those should be the onboard data triggers.”
I touched one, and a bright error glyph appeared. I touched two more without success, trying to remember the code sequences for Urban fx gear, and then pressed the three corners together. A new pattern appeared, one I didn’t recognize, and a tone sounded from the box. That I did know, the breathy note and weird overtones of the patch called vox humana, for all that it sounds like no human being ever born. The audiot ran through a scale, from a medium-low bass note up to a piercing treble. I saw Fortune wince, and reached to shut it off, but the test ended before I could reach the buttons.
“Well,” she said after a moment, and I nodded. I’d never played an audiot before, never contributed to the music, just the pure fx parts, light and image, and for a second I stared at the bright casing, wondering if I could learn to play it properly with only a mechanical ear. I shoved that thought aside—it was as much, maybe more, a question of whether I could persuade the rest of Fire/Work that the audiot belonged in our sound—and switched it off again, itching to get it back to the Empire, where I could try out my controllers. It even had an in-line transceiver, the machine equivalent of IPUs, so that I would be able to play it from the virtual.
“So,” Fortune said. “Did you get the security stuff?”
The question brought me back to what I was supposed to be doing, and I didn’t try to hide my sigh. “Parts, anyway.”
Fortune grinned. “Look, Fan, do you want me to do this for you?”
“I can’t ask you that,” I said. “If nothing else, I can’t afford you.”
“I owe you for getting me Celeste,” Fortune said, suddenly serious. “I mean it, Fanning. So, show me what you’ve got—what is it you want this to do, anyway?”
I pulled the components out of my pack, lining them up on the worktable’s thick surface. “What I want to do is make sure nobody can get into the goddow without setting off an alarm if we’re there, and at least leaving a record if we’re not. We’ve had some threats, over the connections, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. We think it’s Realpeace.”
“Bastards,” Fortune said, conversationally. She frowned at the line of parts. “Where’s your input device—I’m assuming you want visual, or were you looking for virtual?”
“Visual. I was coming to that.” I paused. “I was hoping I could buy a VisiD from you—there wasn’t anything at the sale that I could afford.”
“What makes you think you can afford my gear?” Fortune asked, but looked at the ceiling again. “Celeste, what Visi devices do I have in inventory?”
There was another little pause, longer than before, and then the construct answered, “Th
ree Kagami J-4 Visi devices, three Sobboy Z9s, and one Hot Blue Dianthe-2X. Two of the Kagami J-4 devices are mounted in eye-shells—”
“Haya, I’ve got it. Thanks.” Fortune looked back at me. “I’ll sell you the Dianthe, if you want it. For cost.”
“Remember this is the band money, not mine.”
“If it was just you, I’d charge you more.” She smiled to take the sting away. “I bought it used, cleaned it up, and decided I didn’t like it. It’s yours for seventy-five.”
VisiDs went for twice that new, and the best price I’d seen at the sale was a hundred. I nodded.
“The Hot Blue Dianthe-2X is in the D cabinet, second shelf,” Celeste said.
“Thanks,” Fortune answered, absently, and went to get it. The eye-shelled ones were also in that cabinet, and I could see them over her shoulder, suspended in a tall, gel-filled cylinder, looking for all the world like cloned prostheses. The gel was faintly pink—maybe that was just the light, a reflection from Fortune’s scarlet tunic, but I looked away.
“Fortune,” Celeste said.
Instinctively, I glanced toward the media wall, expecting a call from someone on Fortune’s hot list, but the multiscreens were all empty.
“Yeh?” Fortune set the VisiD on the worktable beside the sensor box and the trip recorder, reached under the surface for another roll of tools.
“I would like to play with this Gallant 28173SH101,” Celeste said. I blinked, and realized she meant the audiot.
Fortune frowned. “Fan’s audiot thing?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, and looked at Fortune. “Have you programmed her—?”
Fortune waved me to silence. “Don’t be stupid. Celeste. Why?”
Dreaming Metal Page 23
