by Tom Clancy
Nick needed somewhere with a little more room for what he had in mind, so he backtracked through the tunnels to where they widened out into a round cavern, something like fifty meters across, that Eighth-Circle Banies referred to as the Bubble. Only a few people were there at the moment, passing across the empty stone space on their way to somewhere else. When they were gone, Nick said, “Sound management system …”
“Ready.”
“Access lift library.”
“Got it.”
“Play `Strings5.’ “
Music and image faded in, and suddenly Joey Bane was there some meters away, alone and spotlighted in the darkness, sitting on the four-legged bar stool he used for these performances one of many. It, like every other inanimate object onstage but Camiun, always wound up getting broken at the end of “Cut the Strings.” It was last summer’s concert in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, and Joey was sweating. Even the Bowl’s slightly cooler position in the mountains was no defense against the heat wave the L. A. basin had been suffering that week. Joey was looking out at the crowd with half a smile, letting them settle, and finally he touched Camiun’s strings and sang:
“I ran into Astraea with her veil on, sneaking out the party’s back door: I stopped her right there and I got her a chair, asking what she was leaving for:
`The party’s just getting started, my lady; what’s the rush to leave us today?’
And the goddess she looked at me and she said, `There’s nowhere left for me to stay …’ “
Quietly the rest of the band came in, in that deceptively soft and easygoing introduction, as the Goddess of Virtue explains that the day she’s feared has come, the day when the human race is at last entirely wicked, when she must finally hide her face and leave the world to its fate forever, and Joey responded to the news”… Nothing left to live for, nothing left to give for, nothing left to care about:
Nothing left to cherish, all hopes left to perish, Nowhere to go but out!
No one left to bring to, no pure heart to sing to, What’s the point of hanging on?
When the reason in the rhyme’s all been eaten by crime, when the last joy’s finally gone?”
and then the great chorus of rage and desperation, crashing down in chord after chord as Camiun and Joey Bane together, full-throated, shouted down the blasting band behind them:
“Then cut the strings-let’s be done with it. If the last night’s here, then let’s be one with it.
If the songs all die, if the music’s all gone, If the night’s come crashing on the last free dawn, what possible point is there in carrying on? Cut-the-strings!”
Nick stood listening for enjoyment’s sake, but his mind was on the lyrics, especially the very first verse, which he was now sure was not the usual one. Joey would sometimes play with the middle verses, inserting something cruelly topical that suited the venue or the world situation of the day, but Nick had never heard him vary the first verse. Now he glanced over his shoulder for a second, thinking of the “front hall” upstairs, before you ever got into the Maze, ever came close to the tunnels or the Stairways to Nowhere-and Nick started to wonder about a faint noise that he’d heard from behind one of those doors that led off the front hall… .
The sound of the audience’s upscaling howl of excitement brought Nick around again. Bane had stood up at the first chorus-no one could sing that sitting down, not and do it justice-but now, two choruses further along, he turned around, and as always, Camiun was gone. None of the concert virteos, no matter how you studied them, ever shed much light on how that happened. Maybe it was an illusionist’s brand of magic, maybe it was something more obscure. But speculation always got lost in the wake of what always happened next, which was Joey Bane snatching yet another of Wil Kersten’s unfortunate guitars out of his hands and smashing it to smithereens on the floor, or on some other piece of equipment that happened to be at hand. Off he went on his expected rampage, the crowd screaming noisy approval in the background, and the concert dissolved in a shriek of tortured amplification equipment and other shattered impedimenta.
Nick let it play itself out, and when the clip finally faded into darkness, he stood there a moment later in the Bubble, with the torches flickering around him from their iron grips in the wall, and considered what to do next.
Upstairs. I want to check that door. I don’t want to stay too long … gotta save a little time on this commcard for later in the week.
But first let’s see if I can find Charlie … !
Charlie made his way home to find the house empty again-his mom wasn’t back from the hospital yet-and, waiting for him in his workspace, bobbing gently up and down in the air, was the virtmail message he’d been hoping for. He made his way down the stairs of the lecture hall to it, and looked the little glowing sphere’s exterior shell over to see if it was “canned” or “live”-some mails, when touched, would link live to the person who had sent them if he or she was available online.
No use taking chances, Charlie thought, even though he couldn’t see anything to suggest a live linkage. “Workspace management,” he said.
“Here, Charlie.”
“Implement stealth routine one.”
The interior of the Royal Society’s lecture room went away, to be replaced by a plain white plain with blue “sky,” a mimicry of a public-access space. Charlie looked at his hands and arms and saw that his workspace had settled a copy of his “Manta” seeming about him. He could see it, thinly, over his skin, transparent.
Satisfied, he reached out and touched the mail. A moment later Shade was standing in front of him, surrounded by a little halo of darkness. The message had been sent from somewhere in Deathworld.
“Manta,” she said, “I got in touch with Kalki. He’ll be in the World tonight around ten eastern. He really wants to see you and talk to you. Let me know if you can make it.”
The image paused, waiting for Charlie to activate the reply function. For a moment he stood there looking at her earnest face, and chewed his lip.
Mark did say to give it a rest for a day or two… . Yet at the same time, the thought kept coming up in the back of his head: It’s May. Early in May … And every day lost meant the chance that someone else might die. If one of these people are involved with the “suicides,” and I lose the chance to get close to them while Mark’s playing with his programming…
Still. He was pretty definite.
Charlie sighed. “Start reply.”
“Ready.”
“Shade, thanks, but listen, I-” He stopped himself in the middle of saying “I can’t make it.” Do you dare not take the chance? The risk was just too great. In his mind’s eye Charlie could just see the blurred look on some innocent kid’s face as the drug took them, left them defenseless-“I might be a little late,” he said, “but I’ll be there. Thanks for letting me know. End.”
The workspace collapsed the message down into a smaller sphere. “Ready to send?” it said.
“Send.”
It vanished. Charlie looked at the empty air where it had been. Then, “Restore normal environment,” he said.
The lecture hall came back. Charlie glanced around it, and at the six sets of images which had been restored to their original locations, and then headed off for Mark’s workspace to collect the Magic Jacket.
Some hours later he was standing by the front doors of the Dark Artificer’s Keep, waiting. There was a fairly steady stream of Banies coming in and going out, and demons stood by the doors on either side, at attention, looking like doormen at some expensive apartment building. Manta stood there off to one side in his floppy shirt and old worn black slicktites, twitching slightly, looking nervously around him. None of the Banies paid him the slightest attention.
“Waiting long?”
He didn’t have to fake being startled. Manta turned hurriedly and saw a tall shape looming over him, somewhat indistinct in the darkness.
“You Manta?” he said.
“Uh, yeah. I do
n’t-”
“I’m Kalki,” the guy said. “Come on. Who can see anything here? Let’s get a little closer to the doors.” He took Manta’s shoulder in a friendly way and guided him over that way.
Manta shivered a little. Allowing people he didn’t know well to touch him had always come hard to him. It was something left over from his distant childhood he didn’t readily discuss. As they got closer to the doors, and the light of the great chandelier spilling out of them, he got a better sense of what Kalki looked like. He was slender, about eighteen, and not wearing a seeming-or at least not an unusual one. He wore street clothes, just neos, a slipshirt, and a “bomber” jacket. His face was unusually handsome, with high cheekbones and eyes that drooped down at the corners a little, a look that would have been humorous if it wasn’t so sad. A seeming after all? Manta thought. Or am I just unusually paranoid?
“Shade couldn’t make it,” Kalki said. “Some family thing came up, she said. She told me about you… .” “Not too much, I hope,” Manta said.
Kalki looked at him thoughtfully. “Come on,” he said, “we can go in here and talk.”
They went in through the Front Hall, and Manta looked up at the great black and gray chandelier, casting its cold light. “It gives me the creeps,” he said softly.
Kalki chuckled. “You want creepy, you should try Nine,” he said. “That’ll raise the hair on your head, all right.”
“You’ve been down to Nine?”
They headed off to the side of the huge space, where there were some benches faired into the stone of the massive walls. “I’ve been through the gates,” Kalki said, sounding bored. “It looked so much like the beginning of Eight, to me, that I decided not to bother. They’ve gone to so much trouble, hiding the lifts down there, I wonder whether they’re worth it … after all, the stuff I’ve found on Eight so far hasn’t been so great. Sometimes I think it’s just a ploy by the management to get everyone real excited about substandard stuff.”
“The more I see of down here,” Manta muttered, “the less excited I am about it.”
“Yeah?” They sat down on one of the carved benches, watching people come and go through the great doors. “Shade told me,” Kalki said, “that you were pretty sad about things. I see she wasn’t exaggerating… .”
“Yeah.” Manta looked out into the darkness, and then after a moment said, “She said you’d felt this way… .”
Kalki nodded. “A while ago now,” he said. “It can be pretty tough when you’re right down in the middle of it.”
“I left some messages in the ‘board’ area,” Manta said softly. “Just to try to get someone to talk to me. No one answered.”
“Hey,” Kalki said, “life does stink, doesn’t it? The trouble is that people bring the outside reality in here with them. Here, you can change things … but out there, no one does anything about the nature of reality, the way people interact with each other. Or don’t. No one listens to anything Joey’s saying. And why should they? To do that, they’d have to admit the world stinks, in the first place.”
“I don’t have any trouble admitting that,” Manta said. “It’s been a waste of my time since I first started noticing things. Now …” He shook his head. “It’s like every breath hurts. I’m tired of breathing:”
Kalki let out a long breath. “You have folks?” he said.
This was the painful part, the lying. “My mom,” he said. “But she’s a druggie. The guy she’s seeing …” He shook his head. “We don’t see eye to eye. And they’re a long-term thing. I’m gonna be ‘phased out.’ I can see it coming. She’s gonna farm me out to some cousin of hers.” Manta bowed his head, unable, unwilling to look up to see how Kalki was taking this.
“Sounds rough,” Kalki said. “Look, Manta … you’ve got to believe it. It can get better. Without warning, sometimes.”
Manta’s laughwas bitter. “Is that the best you can come up with? That just maybe things might get better? The only way that’s going to happen to me is if all this stops, if the hurting, and the yelling, and the pushing around, if it all just stops. I’ve had it. I don’t mind being worthless, being in everybody’s way, no use for anything, I can deal with that if I’m just left alone. But when they make you that way, and then they yell at you for it, when they take everything away from you and then scream at you for not acting normal, for letting them down-” The words choked off. “I couldn’t even give stuff away, gave some of my stuff to the kids at school, the few things I had. They even yelled at me for that.” He laughed, that harsh sound again. “It doesn’t matter. Those things are safe now.”
“You gave stuff away?”
Manta was silent for a moment. “When I realized my mom was going to send me off to Philly or wherever it is her cousin lives,” he said, “and I wasn’t going to be able to see my friends anymore …” He trailed off. “I knew she was gonna just throw all my stuff away… .”
He listened hard to Kalki’s silence. His mom had been pretty clear that suicidal people sometimes gave personal possessions away to friends in anticipation of the act itself.
Kalki shifted, and as Manta glanced back at him, he thought Kalki looked uncomfortable. “Look, Manta,” Kalki said at last, “this isn’t the best place to be having this conversation. You’re talking about the most real thing there is … your own existence. But places like this are instead of reality. They can be really attractive, or interesting, but they’re not real contact, with real people.” He shook his head, glancing around them. “So much of the uncertainty in the world, the pain … I think it comes of there not being enough genuine contact.”
He looked down at Manta. “We should get together and have this out,” Kalki said. “Not here. Contact between human beings shouldn’t have to be mediated by electrons.” His voice was suddenly pained. “Or snatched in the few minutes between online experiences and virtual appointments… .”
“For what?” Manta said. “This is real enough. You don’t have anything to say that’s going to convince me. If you did, you’d have said it already.” He got up. “Thanks, but-the talking time’s over. I know what I need to do.”
He took off across the huge “front hall.”
“Manta, wait!” Kalki yelled after him, and came after, but Manta broke his connection to Deathworld, and vanished into the darkness.
A moment later Charlie was standing in his workspace again, slightly out of breath, not from any exertion, but from nerves. He glanced over at the readout connected to Mark’s “trip wire” routine: glowing letters and numbers hung in the air, zeroed out, showing no attempts to access his space in any way.
Okay, Charlie thought, the trap’s baited. Now let’s see what happens… .
The next morning he came down from the den, yawning, feeling somehow faintly disappointed. Despite the fact that people seemed to have been reading “Manta’s” messages on the Deathworld message facility, there were no answers to any of them. And no follow-through from Shade or Kalki. I wonder if I overreacted a little, he thought. Scared Kalki off…
This time his mother was in the kitchen, pouring coffee from a freshly filled pot, and the sound of the front door shutting told him that he had just missed his father. “You’re up early,” she said, turning as Charlie yawned again.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Want some?” his mom said.
“Uh, you don’t think it’ll stunt my growth?”
She gave him a look. “Nah. That’s just a matter of time. I doubt much of anything could do that at this point.”
From the cupboard she got down the mug with the double duck on it and the motto EIDER WAY UP, filled it and handed it to him.
“Thanks …” he said, and flopped into one of the kitchen chairs.
They both drank coffee in silence for a moment. Then, “A lot of late nights, the last week or so,” his mom said. “Yeah.”
“Dad says you’re still researching suicide.”
Charlie nodded.
His mother looked s
lightly resigned. “It has a kind of horrible fascination, I’ll admit,” she said. “Especially when life seems good, and it’s difficult to understand how anyone could want to end it.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, thinking of the six sets of images in his workspace, people he was not convinced had unanimously intended to end anything. “What’s your schedule like today?”
His mother raised her eyebrows at him, plainly noticing the change of subject, but declining for the moment to comment. “The usual day shift, barring emergencies.” She looked slightly relieved. “Though you know how it is trying to predict those. You?”
“School as usual,” Charlie said. “Nothing exciting.”
“Sounds wonderful,” his mom said, finishing her coffee. “Look, Dad picked up some ribs last night, I was thinking of doing that thing with the hot sauce again for dinner.”
“Yes, please!”
She grinned at him, rinsing out the coffee cup and leaving it to drain, then picking up her work-satchel from where it sat on one of the kitchen chairs. “Okay. Dinner around six, then. See you later, sweetie… .”
School went uneventfully. Charlie had left a message with Nick’s mom that he wanted to get together with him for lunch, but at lunchtime Nick was nowhere to be found. The most highly developed communications systern in history, Charlie thought ruefully as the afternoon went by, and we’re still playing Net Tag with each other. Oh, well … I could always drop by his place. It’s not that much out of my way home… .
He finished his afternoon bio class and headed home after hanging around a little while to see if Nick surfaced. There was no sign of him, so Charlie strolled in an absentminded way through the sweet spring-afternoon, considering neurotransmitter chemistry and the prospect of his mom’s hot and spicy ribs. There had been some discussion a week or so ago into exactly why the capsiacin molecule was able to fool mouth tissue into thinking it was injured, and trigger the release of endorphins. Charlie’s bio teacher had suggested that there might be some fake neurotransmitter “key” involved. Doesn’t sound genuine to me, Charlie thought. If it were, there would be a-