Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  “Can you play that again?” Tai said abruptly, lifting her voice to be heard over the music. “Celeste?”

  The scales stopped. “This?” Celeste asked at last, and played the first few notes of “Piece of the Grave.” It sounded flat and odd in the wood-flute voice, and she repeated it in the voice she’d used before.

  “That one,” Tai said.

  “Why?”

  Tai gave a strangled laugh. “Because—because I’d like to play it with you. I want to learn—”

  “You want to jam,” I said, and she laughed again.

  “Me too,” Jaantje said.

  There was another little pause, seeming longer because it was Celeste who was considering, Celeste whose processing time was so much faster than any of ours, then at last she said, “Very well.”

  “Thanks,” Tai said, and turned toward her room. Jaantje shook his head in disbelief, and started to follow her, but turned back as music—the wood-flute voice again—rose from the box’s speakers.

  “What—?”

  Celeste stopped. “I don’t get to play this instrument much. I don’t want to waste the opportunity.”

  “You won’t forget what you were doing, will you?” Jaantje asked, then shook his head as the incongruity of the question hit him.

  “I have it in memory,” Celeste said. “I’ll move it to permanent storage if you’d prefer.”

  “Yes,” I said. Whatever else happened, I wanted a copy of that variation. I looked for the remote, and Jaantje pressed it into my hand, the same eagerness in his eyes. I touched the buttons as he disappeared into his room, opening one of the household’s protected volumes for Celeste. “You can use that if you want.”

  “Thank you,” she answered, and a moment later glyphs flickered as she transferred the data—the variation, her variation—into the system. Almost in the same instant, the wood-flute voice broke from the audio box again, an odd, not quite pleasant melody that didn’t seem entirely in tune.

  It didn’t take long for Tai and Jaantje to get set up, Tai with her practice rig, Jaantje with his second-best hollow-body, and Celeste paused in her playing as Tai checked her tuning. It seemed almost as though she was listening—she would have heard us before, I realized, at the Empire, but she probably wouldn’t have seen us, would never have identified who, or what, made which sounds. For a second, I wished I had my fx, but I didn’t want to interrupt her, and I looked at Fortune instead. She was smiling, her wry expression for once unguarded, but then she saw me looking, and looked away. I moved to join her anyway.

  “Impressive.”

  “I suppose.” She snorted then, more annoyed with herself than with me or even Celeste. “I don’t know what to do about her, Fan.”

  I didn’t either, but at least I was spared answering as Tai struck a few chords. “Haya, Celeste,” she said. “Let’s play it through straight once.”

  “As I found it?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Very well.” Sound spilled again from the box, familiar, note-perfect: the keyboard part to “Piece of the Grave” played exactly as it sounded on the Hati clip.

  “Hold it,” Tai said.

  The music stopped as abruptly as it had begun. “You said as I found it.”

  Tai frowned, considering. “Can you play that, but with the voice you were using before?”

  “Very well,” Celeste said again. There was the slightest of hesitations, not nearly enough for even the first count, and the song started over. I saw Jaantje scowl, but Tai ignored him, came in on the second measure, and he followed a heartbeat later. For a second, the rhythm faltered, Celeste unwilling—unable?—to compensate, but then they adapted to her, to the clip-precise beat, and the song swirled up around them. In spite of myself, I found myself signing, mouthing the words at the same time.

  *Sand in my pocket, another piece of the grave …*

  Tai smiled at me, mouth tight and eager, and then she and Celeste soared together into the solo. For a few bars, they played together, but then Tai shook her head, dropping back to match Jaantje’s rhythm, and Celeste finished alone. It wasn’t triumphant, it was too close to the clip for that, for much of her emotion to show through, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something smug about her playing.

  They were coming to the end now, and Tai looked up from her fingerboard, letting herself ease out of the complex figures, fixing her eyes on the headbox as though she was watching one of us. “Haya,” she said, lifting her voice to carry. “Go to what you were doing, Celeste. In three.”

  Celeste didn’t answer, but then, as Tai made the turnaround and repeated the first notes of the song, the bottom seemed to drop out of the room. Celeste’s variation roared in the air around us, the bass too heavy, a living painful pressure on our skin. Jaantje’s guitar was completely drowned, and Tai’s sounded thin, feeble; my ear buzzed, warning of overload.

  “Cut the subsonics, Celeste,” Fortune shouted, and the pressure vanished, the sound thinning again to something bearable. I saw Jaantje mouth a curse, and Tai shook her head at him, scowling.

  “Keep it going.”

  Celeste seemed oblivious to everything but the sounds she—they—were making. With Tai to fill in the melody and Jaantje to keep the beat, she let herself go, filling the air with the weird metallic riffs we’d heard before. They hung between Tai’s wailing lead and Jaantje’s rhythm that right now was little more than a pulse in the air, almost drowned by the others’ playing, thick and complex, filled with grace notes that passed so quickly I could barely hear them. Then she dropped to half time, pulling against the other lines—Tai looked at Jaantje, silent question, but he shook his head, kept his beat—and suddenly each of those grace notes became another of the little riffs, each of which was filled in turn with slurs and grace notes. The notes clashed and battered against Tai’s melody, only occasionally in tune now, but even as I thought it the dissonance dissolved as Tai held the chorus to match Celeste. Celeste slowed even farther then, any hint of the original melody disappearing in a flurry of sound that seemed completely made of slurred and bent notes. It was hard to tell within the cascade of notes where any one figure began and where it wound back into itself and into the next, but I thought I could still make out the broken metal of her riffs, piling helter-skelter onto each other. It was like fractals, I realized suddenly, each individual riff made up of “notes” that were really a faster version of the same riff, while each thing that I was hearing as a riff was itself a “note” in some larger, slower version. Somehow she’d taken “Piece of the Grave” and boiled it down to this riff—was that what she heard as its essence, the crucial part?—and then taken that riff and made something new that was, like a fractal, essentially everywhere the same. I shook my head, wishing I had my fx—wishing Shadha was there, and Timin—and there was a pop, almost drowned by the music, and a puff of smoke from Tai’s amp.

  She leaned back, swearing, and kicked the cutout. I looked around for the kitchen extinguisher, just in case, but the damper had already cut in. Celeste’s music roared for a second longer, then stopped.

  “Goddamn,” said Jaantje, and then again, softer, “Goddamn it.”

  “Why—what’s happened?” Celeste asked.

  “Blew a fucking fuse,” Tai answered. She was already crouching by the open access panel, waving away the last wisp of smoke. I leaned over her shoulder, and made a face at the damage. All three fuses had gone, saving the main components, but the controller had gone from healthy green to black: not an expensive or difficult repair, but one that would take a little time.

  “Got spares?” Jaantje asked, curling himself protectively over his guitar, and Fortune pulled herself away from the media wall.

  “Sorry that happened, Tai, but I’d’ve had to interrupt anyway. We need to get back to the theater.”

  I glanced at the nearest time display: not quite fifteen, hours before we really needed to think about getting ready. Fortune saw the look, and her frown deepened.

 
“We have work to do—right, Celeste?”

  There was a heartbeat pause before the construct answered. “Very well.”

  “Haya,” I said, and stooped to help collect the cables. The lights faded from the audiot and the media wall, clustered again on the headbox. Fortune lifted it back into the carrier web, still frowning, and I said, carefully, “It would be fun to do this again, Fortune.”

  She was already moving toward the door, and I followed her, wondering if I should push it any farther, feeling Tai’s eyes on me from where she crouched beside the amp. I willed her to keep silent, not wanting her to spoil it, waited for Fortune to say something. She touched the latch, letting in the late sunlight, and I thought for a second that she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard. Then she looked back at me, still frowning slightly, pale eyes meeting mine.

  “I need her too much, Fan.”

  “But—”

  She shook her head, the frown easing to a bitter smile. “She’s part of the act, and I can’t afford to replace her, not anytime soon. Maybe you guys can jam again sometime, but I really need her mind on the act. Not on this.”

  There was truth to that—to all of it—but I didn’t think it was what she’d meant. I let the door close behind her, and turned back to the others.

  Jaantje shook his head, still cradling his guitar, but Tai sat back on her heels beside the amp’s open panel. “Damn it, it wouldn’t’ve taken that long to change the fuses, we could’ve played some more…” She seemed to hear what she was saying then, and sighed. “Yeh, don’t tell me, that’s not the point, I guess. But she’s got no reason to be jealous.”

  “Especially not if it’s people,” Jaantje murmured.

  “I don’t know,” I said. There’s a letdown, always, after something that good, and it was on me hard. “Celeste’s her—” Her what? I thought, and didn’t have an answer even for myself. Her construct, at least originally, but if Celeste was more than just a Spelvin construct—and there wasn’t any point in pretending she wasn’t, and after hearing that I don’t think any of us could have pretended—she wouldn’t, couldn’t be merely property. Her sister, like the name implied? Her daughter? Best friend and lover? Certainly the other half of her act, right now, and that was more intimate than anything else I could think of.

  “Yeh,” Tai said, “her… something. Celeste is something, all right.”

  “Damn, that was good,” Jaantje said, and set down his guitar, looking around for the room remote. “Is that bit still in storage?”

  The remote was still in my hand, and I held it out. “Should be.”

  “Yeh.” He frowned thoughtfully at the screen. “There it is.” Tai pushed herself to her feet, leaving the panel open, started toward the cabinet where she kept her spares. “I want to play that. Play out with it. God, can’t you see what people will make of it?”

  I nodded.

  “All too easily,” Jaantje said. “We can’t use it, Tai. If we put it into the sets, we either have to tell everybody who wrote it—which is a bad move, for obvious reasons—or we end up cheating Celeste.”

  “But—” I began, and then what he’d said really registered. He was right, we couldn’t tell anyone that Celeste had written this, because that would mean Celeste was people, and that was the one thing nobody dared claim right now. But we couldn’t just play it, either, not if Celeste was people, because there was no way in hell we’d treat another musician that way. Another human musician. I felt myself blushing, and saw the same realization in Tai’s face.

  “Couldn’t we fake it somehow?” she asked. “Claim we got it from a person, I don’t know, somebody off-world?”

  Her voice trailed off, admitting the impossibility.

  “I think I understand what she was doing,” I said, slowly. “How she structured those riffs, and I’ve got the basic patch in memory. Maybe we could use some of that—it would really fit with the new stuff we’ve been doing.”

  Jaantje made a face. “It doesn’t seem all that different to me.”

  “It could help,” Tai said. “Help prove she’s people, which has to happen sometime, you know that. If we’ve been playing riffs we learned from her, if people like them—and you know damn well they will, and they’ll never know we didn’t write it until somebody tells them—then it’s proof. The best possible proof.”

  Jaantje hesitated, and I realized he wanted this just as badly as Tai and I did. The music, the new idea, was too good not to explore it. “Haya,” he said. “It could work.”

  It took me a couple of days to work out the kind of fractal riff that Celeste had been using, but by the time I finished the first one I thought I had a pretty good idea of the kinds of structures she used, and the way they worked within a song. They fit beautifully into the new songs we’d been doing, giving some extra depth and a dark edge to even the songs we’d been least happy with, and for the first time I could see how everything could fit together into a theme clip. We’d need more songs, certainly, but the new technique—new style—would take us in the right direction. I could already see the kinds of images I wanted, not that different from some of the ones I’d been using, machines and the white light of day and the heat ripple from pouring metal; better than that, I could finally see where to go with that bit of a song that had been lodged in my head since the abortive gig at the Middle Oasis.

  I played the various riffs for Jaantje and Tai, and then again for the rest of the band at the Tin Hau, at our next practice session, starting with Celeste’s version of “Piece of the Grave.” Timin listened in absolute silence, his head tipped a little to one side, face completely without expression. He had loved Hati—we all had, but more than any of us he wanted to be them—and I wondered what he’d make of what Celeste had done to the song. Shadha pretended not to listen, fiddling with her sticks and the bundle of her jewelry, but when the first clip ended, she threw her head back, setting her braids dancing across her shoulders.

  “That was the construct?”

  “Yeh,” Jaantje said.

  “Well, I guess I was wrong.”

  Timin hunched one shoulder. “The thing can’t count.”

  For some reason, that struck me as funny—the idea that Celeste, herself a construct, inhabitant of a world that was built on timing cycles, couldn’t count—and I laughed.

  Timin scowled. “Well, it fucking can’t.”

  “I don’t like its timing either,” Shadha said. “Is it different live?”

  “We’re not necessarily going to play this, ‘Piece of the Grave,’” Jaantje said, patiently enough. “It’s the sound I want.”

  “So what do we do, get that construct—sorry, Celeste—to stand up on stage with us?” Shadha demanded.

  “No—” Tai began, and Timin spoke over her.

  “That would be insane right now, and you both, all three of you, know it. So what is it you actually have in mind?”

  “I’ve worked out a way to get that sound,” I said. “You can hear what it is, right, kind of like a fractal?”

  Tai nodded, slowly, but Shadha laughed. “Give me a break, Fan, I’ve only heard it once.”

  “Each riff is made up of repetitions of the same riff,” I said, “just speeded up each time until they sound like individual notes. That’s what makes it sound so slide-y.” I stumbled through the explanation, less sure I understood it—or at least that I could articulate it—with every word, but when I’d finished, Timin nodded.

  “I think I see. So you’ve worked out how to do this for the new songs?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Trust the person with machine ears to hear it,” Shadha said. “Hell, yes, let’s do it. What do we start with?”

  “‘Dry Season,’“ Jaantje answered. That was Timin’s slow song, not a perfect title, but the best we’d been able to agree on. “Then the assembly line, and Tai’s, then Timi’s other song. Play them straight through, see how they all sound—does that work for you, Fan?”

  “Sure,” I said, not certain
I meant it, and flipped the fx off standby. Tai gave us the beat, and we began.

  It wasn’t good, this first time through—basically, I wasn’t good, wasn’t used to controlling the audio as well as the images—but you could hear what it could be. We finished Timin’s last song, the serene face hanging above us as though buoyed up by the roar of sound, suspended on the cascading riff I’d built for it while Tai’s lead wailed beneath it, all angry loss. I matched the visual fade to the dying music, left the face hanging like a daytime moon for a heartbeat after the end before I blanked it. I was sweating, and I was all too aware of the missed notes, the ragged beat, half a dozen places where I’d make different choices next time, but beneath all of that was the solid certainty that this was the start of something good. I could see the same knowledge in everyone else’s faces, even Timin’s, and couldn’t suppress a smile.

  “Damn,” Tai said, and showed teeth in a grin that was almost a snarl. “I think we’ve got something here.”

  Jaantje reached for one of the water bottles, drank half of it in what seemed like a single swallow. “I think we should start looking for a director.”

  I blinked, and Tai’s grin widened. “And pricing studio time.”

  “We need more songs,” Timin said, but for once it wasn’t disagreement.

  “I have one in mind,” Tai said.

  “And so do I.” I hadn’t meant to mention it so soon, not until I had a little more to show, but the time seemed right.

  “I’ve got some things going,” Jaantje said, and Timin managed a reluctant smile.

  “Haya, this gives me some ideas, too. All right?”

  “I’m not surprised, somehow.” Tai smiled at him, but he ignored her.

  “You said director, Jaantje. You’re thinking a theme clip?”

  “Yeh.” Jaantje nodded. “It was Fanning’s idea, but I think it’s a good one.”

  “So what’s the theme?” Timin asked, and Jaantje looked at me.

  I hadn’t had anything specific in mind, just that the songs hung together, all flavored with bitter loss, grief and anger so tightly mixed that not even the writers knew which they really meant. I hesitated, knowing there was something there, remembering the way that Celeste’s fractal riffs rolled under the lead lines, and at last the image came clear in my mind, sudden and complete, like the best fx lines. Fire/Work stood onstage, our usual selves except for the audiot at the center of the group, and the ghost of the copper karakuri, Fortune’s younger sister, her metal twin, rose from it, not quite part of it, barely a foothold in our world.