Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

In that time I must descend eight heavily guarded floors of the Colhari Palace and lose myself in the crowds of Ankhana’s Old Town—all while carrying the head of the Prince-Regent. The alarm’s been raised, and I’m probably bleeding to death, but that’s no reason to leave him behind; without the head, I don’t get paid, and besides, carrying a severed head won’t make me any more conspicuous than I already am. With blood running down my legs, I can’t bluff, I can’t hide, and I’ll leave a trail behind wherever I go. Now I can hear the pounding of booted feet approaching at a run.

  The red Exit Square is back at the upper left corner of my field of vision, flashing on and off.

  Yeah, all right. Time to go.

  I get the rhythm of it and start triggering my blink reflex in synch with the flashing. The service passage and the dying men around me fade into nonexistence.

  2

  HARI MICHAELSON’S EYES ratcheted open when the Motorola rep swung back the helmet, and he ground his teeth against the sliding non-pain of the IV needle that the rep’s assistant slowly drew out of his neck. He lifted his hand and hacked a cough against the thick callus that ridged his knuckles, and the Motorola rep hastily produced a paper cup for him to spit into. He stretched slowly, with much creaking and joint popping, and sat forward in the simichair, elbows to knees. His straight black hair was glossy with sweat, and his eyes of the same color were rimmed in red; he turned away from the reps and rested his face on his hands.

  The Motorola girl and her assistant both looked at him with the kind of hopeful puppy-dog eyes that sickened him.

  From the depths of an immense, genuine calf-leather lounger, Marc Vilo asked, “Well? How was it, Hari? What do you think?”

  Hari took a deep breath, sighed it out, scratched his beard, rubbed the sallow scar that crossed the bridge of his crooked, twice-broken nose, and tried to find the energy to speak. He called this, privately, his post-Caine shits: a shattering cocaine-crash depression that hit him every time he came back to Earth and had to be Hari Michaelson again. Even today—not even a real Adventure, only a three-year-old recording—had been enough to trigger it.

  And let’s be honest: There was more going on here than post-Caine shits. There was a sizzling hole in his guts—like he’d swallowed acid and it had burned its way out through the skin, right alongside the scar Smartguard’s broadsword had left on his liver. Why this cube, out of all Caine’s Adventures? What in Christ’s name was Vilo thinking?

  To bring him here and put him through part of A Servant of the Empire again—even a small part—was an exquisite refinement of cruelty, a lemon squeezed into an already-salted wound. It chewed at him, gnawed that hole in his guts like a little fucking rat.

  Most of the time, he could kid himself along, pretend that he wasn’t really hurt, pretend that this empty burning ache that took over his chest whenever he thought of Shanna was just indigestion, just an ulcer. Most of the time, he could pretend the pain came from a hole in his guts, instead of the hole in his life. He’d gotten good at kidding himself: for months now, he’d had himself believing he was getting over her.

  What the fuck, huh? Practice makes perfect.

  “Hari?” Vilo leaned forward in his lounger, an edge of dangerous impatience sharpening his voice. “Everybody’s waiting on you, kid. Let’s have it.”

  Slowly, Hari managed to force words from his throat. “It’s illegal, Biz’man. This is illegal tech.”

  The Motorola rep gasped like a Leisurewoman meeting a flasher. “I assure you, I personally assure both of you, this technology was developed entirely indepen—”

  Vilo cut her off with a smoke-trailing shut up wave of his cigar, a thick black ConCristo almost as big as he was. “I know it’s illegal, Hari, shit. Am I an idiot? I just want to know if it’s any good.”

  Mark Vilo was a little salty-haired fighting cock, a self-upcasted Businessman pushing sixty from the far side, a swaggering bowlegged bastard who was the majority stockholder in Vilo Intercontinental—ostensibly a worldwide transport firm. He was the lord and master of this sprawling estate in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, and was the Business Patron of the superstar Actor whom everyone called Caine.

  “Good?” Hari shrugged, sighing. Why argue? “Yeah, you better believe it. Next best thing to being there.” He turned to the Motorola rep. “Your neurochem feed—that’s a fake, isn’t it?”

  The rep made protesting noises until Hari cut her off with a weary, “Ahh, shut up.”

  He was glad, really, that the Motorola rep was an idiot; it gave him something to think about beyond the cold hurt that lived in Shanna’s eyes whenever he pictured her face. It had been months since he’d been able to even imagine her with a smile.

  Keep your mind on fucking business, he snarled at himself.

  He turned to Vilo and tried to stretch some life back into his voice by flexing his aching shoulders. “Don’t let them shit you, Biz’man. This whole Exit Square business, what do they call that? Blink in Synch?”

  The Motorola rep offered a glassy, professional smile. “It’s only one of the cutting-edge features that make this unit the best value on the market today.”

  Hari ignored her. “So you trigger your blink reflex to exit the program,” he went on. “It’s not a mechanical trigger. It reads the impulse as feedback on the inducers; this is wholly owned Studio technology, and the Studio takes this kind of shit seriously. The neurochem feed is just camouflage. Nothing’s going through that line but the hypnotics—and not much of them, if you want to know: they pooched the feed. They’re playing all the sensation through the same kind of direct neural induction that the Studio uses in their first-hander chairs—and they’ve got it turned up too high. The smell, when I cut off Toa-Phelathon’s head? The real thing’s not that potent. And they had the adrenal level jazzed so high I could barely breathe. Finally, the sword in the guts, it hurt too much.”

  “But, but Entertainer Michaelson—” the rep sputtered, exchanging a quick worried glance with her assistant, “—we have to make it believable, you know, I mean—”

  Hari rose slowly; the post-Caine shits made him feel boneless, as if only extreme concentration kept his head on his shoulders—but a little bit of Caine’s edgy threat began to leak into his voice, into the cold darkness of his eyes.

  He lifted the hem of his tunic to expose the brown lines of the twin scars, front and back, on his left side below the short ribs, where Smartguard’s broadsword had pierced his liver just less than three years ago. “You see these? You want to touch them? So who should know better? You?”

  “Hari, Jesus Christ, don’t be such an asshole,” Vilo said. He waved his cigar dismissively at the rep. “Don’t mind him; it’s not personal, y’know. He’s like this with everybody.”

  “I’m telling you,” Hari said lifelessly, “they screwed it up. If that sword scraping my rib had hurt as much when it really happened as it did just now, I’d have spent a couple more seconds stunned. When something hurts that much, there’s not much you can do except moan or scream, writhe around, or pass right out. That poor bastard guard would have put his next thrust into my throat. All right?”

  He opened a hand toward Vilo and sighed. “You want to invest in proprietary tech, that’s your business. But I’d think you wouldn’t want to deal with idiots who can’t even tune an induction helmet.”

  Vilo grunted. “Invest, nothing. I’m just gonna buy the goddamn thing, Hari; this is a quote-unquote prototype. Not even a dinosaur like Motorola is gonna freemarket tech that pirates Studio effects. I just wanted to have one so I can go over cubes on my own time, without blowing a couple weeks on a first-hander berth.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Do what you want.”

  “Hari . . .” Vilo said mildly, returning his ConCristo to a corner of his mouth. “Attitude.”

  It was a mild chill that settled into the silence Vilo’s admonition left in its wake, just enough that the rep and her assistant exchanged a flickering glance—no one actually shiver
ed. Vilo blandly nodded toward the reps, indicating put on your company manners, son.

  Hari lowered his head sullenly. “Sorry, Biz’man,” he muttered. “I’m out of line. But I’ve got one more question—with your permission.”

  Vilo gave his lord-of-the-manor nod, and Hari turned to the woman from Motorola. “The cubes this chair plays—they’re not standard Studio-issue recordings. They can’t be; standard cubes don’t carry scent or touch/pain data, and I can’t believe your inducers can read off the neurochem channel and compensate for time lag and dosage and everything else. You’re getting bootleg masters from somewhere, aren’t you?”

  The Motorola rep smiled her best corporate smile and said, “I’m afraid I can’t answer that. But, as guaranteed under the purchase contract, Biz’man Vilo will receive cubes appropriate for this equipment—”

  “That’s enough,” Hari said disgustedly. He turned back to Vilo. “Look, it’s like this. These idiots have another idiot inside the Studio processing labs who’s feeding them bootleg masters. First, that means that what you’ll get is gonna be, most likely, uncut. A two-week Adventure is going to run two weeks in that chair, just like if you were sitting in the Cavea in a first-hander berth, only worse. This chair doesn’t have twitch-response units, comfort hookups, or an internal food supply. Second, they’ll be feeding you a steady stream of these bootlegs. There’ll be records of regular delivery, that kind of thing, and one of these days, their idiot is gonna get caught. Then before they cyborg him and sell him for a Worker, the Studio cops will get enough out of him to roll up the whole network, which they’ll turn over to their friends in the government. And these won’t be friendly and courteous CID guys knocking on your door, because this isn’t just tech violation anymore. By now, it’s about intellectual property, and copyright infringement, and all of a sudden you’re looking at the Social Police. Even you, Businessman, do not want to get on the short end of the fuckstick with Soapy.”

  Vilo leaned back in his chair, snugging his head against its gelpack headrest. He puffed a couple rolling mushroom clouds of his stinking cigar smoke, then sat up again, a half grin wrinkling his crow’s-feet. “Hari, you still think like a criminal, you know that? Twenty years later, you’re still a street punk at heart.”

  Hari stretched his lips into a humorless smile in response; he didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, and he didn’t want to ask.

  Vilo went on, “Why’nt you go on up to the pond and have a drink while I wrap things down here, hey?”

  There was a time, Hari reflected dully, that to be dismissed like a child, like a little fucking kid, would have felt like a slap. Now, it produced only a blank amazement that he still seemed to be going about his business, going on with his life, as though it still had meaning.

  But it was an act, as hollow a pretense as was Caine himself.

  Without Shanna, the world was empty, and he couldn’t really manage to care about anything at all.

  He nodded. “Sure. See you there.”

  3

  HARI PROWLED THE sunlit rocks that surrounded the shimmering pond and the twin waterfalls that fed it. The pond was a beautiful piece of work: only the faint scent of chlorine and a sneaking conviction that nature wouldn’t have arranged stone and water with so much attention to human comforts betrayed its artificial origins.

  Hari paced back and forth, sat down, stood up. Once or twice he started out toward the scrub desert, into the gritty wind and barren mounds of slag and tailings from the surrounding mines. Each time, he stopped at the fringes of Vilo’s artificial oasis, came back, and started the cycle over again. He stared out at the toxic sludge of the barrens with a kind of wistfulness; he could imagine himself walking among the heaps, all the way up into the dead rock of the mountains. He wasn’t sure that tramping through the poisoned waste would make him feel any better, but he knew it couldn’t make him feel much worse.

  Take it easy, he told himself over and over again. It’s not like she’s dead. And each time, a dark whisper in his heart told him that maybe he’d be better off if she was. Or if he was.

  With her death, he could start to heal; with his, he’d be beyond pain.

  What the fuck was taking Vilo so goddamn long?

  Hari hated waiting, always had. Nothing to do but stand around and think—and there were too many things in his life that didn’t bear thinking about.

  He looked around for something, anything, he could use to distract himself. He even looked up the wall of the artificial cliffs down which the waterfalls streamed into the pond, thinking that maybe a fifty-meter free climb up a vertical water-slickened face might be just the thing to take his mind off Shanna.

  This had been his tactic ever since the separation: Keep busy. Divert the mind. Don’t think about it. And it was a good tactic, one that worked, day to day. Sometimes hours would pass, days, even a week, during which he barely thought of her.

  But he’d always been a better tactician than he was a strategist. He won every battle, but on days like today he couldn’t help realizing that he was losing the war.

  Even climbing the fucking waterfall wouldn’t help; his experienced eye picked out innumerable handholds and footholds that could only have been put there by intention. This cliff had been designed to be climbed, and he could go up it more easily than most men could climb a ladder.

  He shook his head disgustedly.

  “Hey, Caine!” called one of the girls who swam in the pond. “Want to come in and play?”

  In the pond a couple of the ubiquitous Vilo Intercontinental party girls had been swimming and splashing and dunking each other. Long-limbed, lean, athletic, with perfect teeth and breasts that were better yet, their job was to be available to Businessman Vilo’s guests. They both were staggeringly beautiful. Surgical glamour was part of their bonus for their five years’ service, at the end of which they’d be released to seek their leggy fortunes elsewhere. They were playing up for him now, arranging lovely flashes of thigh and butt, the graceful arc of a well-toned back thrusting a nipple toward the sky; if it hadn’t been so deliberate it might’ve been appealing.

  Now the one who had called to him slid behind the other and drew her into an embrace; one hand cupped her breast while the other slid below the water’s surface toward her crotch. She bent her graceful neck to kiss her partner’s shoulder, all the while inviting him with her eyes.

  Hari sighed. He supposed he might as well jump in; at least fucking a couple party girls would have a certain honesty. Unlike the celebrity-hungry women who put themselves in his way wherever he went, these girls were professionals. There wouldn’t be any pretense that they cared about him, or he about them.

  A few years ago, sure, he would have done it. But now, so late in his life, after he had finally found someone who had loved him, whom he had loved, who had made truth of the ancient euphemism making love, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even get interested. Fucking those girls would be like sticking his dick in a knothole: a complicated, slightly painful way to masturbate.

  A waistcoat-and-cummerbund servant slid silently up beside Hari and offered a tray with a snifter of scotch.

  “Laphroaig, right?”

  Hari nodded and took it.

  “Uh, Caine?”

  Hari sighed. “Call me Hari, all right? Everybody forgets I have a name.”

  “Oh, okay, uh, Hari. I just wanted to say, y’know, I’m a big fan of yours, I even, well, y’know . . . ah, never mind.”

  “All right.”

  But the servant—Andre, Hari thought his name might be—still hovered expectantly at his elbow. Hari took a slow pull from the snifter and watched the girls swim.

  The servant coughed and said, “I only get cubes of your stuff, of course. I only been a first-hander once, a few years ago when Biz’man Vilo took a bunch of us for vacation. It was kinda wild, because, y’know, we didn’t first-hand you—that’s really expensive—but the guy we did, he was Yoturei the Ghost. You remember him?”

&nb
sp; “Should I?” Hari said, bored. Why do people think that all Actors know each other?

  “Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t know. You killed me—I mean him. In the Warrens in Ankhana.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Hari shrugged, remembering now the ruckus at the Studio when he’d transferred back after that Adventure. “He tracked me for a day or two before I caught him. Hell, how’m I supposed to know the kid’s an Actor? He should’ve had enough brights to stay out of my way.”

  “You didn’t even remember?”

  “I kill a lot of people.”

  “Jeez.” The servant leaned closer, conspiratorially, offering a whiff of the red wine that was giving him the balls to keep talking. “Y’know, sometimes I even dream of being you . . . being Caine, y’know?”

  Hari grunted a laugh. “Yeah, sometimes I do, too.”

  The servant frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  Hari took another pull from the snifter, warming to the conversation. Even empty chatter with a fan was better than standing alone with his thoughts.

  “Caine and I, we’re not the same person, all right? I grew up in a San Francisco Labor slum; Caine’s an Overworld foundling. He was raised by a Pathquan freedman, a farrier and blacksmith. By the time I was twelve I was a sneakthief because I wasn’t big enough to be a mugger; when Caine was twelve, he was sold to a Lipkan slaver because the whole family was starving to death in the Blood Famine.”

  “But that’s all, like, pretend, right?”

  Hari shrugged and sat down on the rocks, making himself comfortable. “When I’m on Overworld, being Caine, it seems real enough to me. You train yourself to believe it. Overworld is a different place, kid. Caine can do things I can’t; I mean, he’s not a spellcaster, but the principle’s the same. He’s faster, stronger, more ruthless, maybe not as bright. It’s like magick, I guess. It’s imagination, and willpower: you make yourself believe.”

  “That’s how the magick works? I mean, I don’t really get it, magick, but you—”

  “I don’t really get it, either,” Hari said sourly. “Spellcasters are crazy. They, sort of, hallucinate on command . . . Ah, I don’t know. First-hand one sometime. They’re all fucking bughouse nuts.”