by Tom Clancy
But Charlie rather thought it was clinched already. It would only be a matter of taking all this information home, sitting down with it and comparing everything very carefully. All he needed was the data from their last stop, the coroner's clerk's office in Forestville, Maryland. There the security was almost as nonexistent as it had been in Atlanta, and there Charlie picked up and copied the set of records belonging to the second kid involved in the recent "double" suicide. They were nowhere near as complete as the New York records had been, but they would have to do. The final raid took them fifteen minutes. At fifteen minutes and ten seconds they were standing in Mark's workspace again, with the forest of light sinking into the virtual floor under their feet. Mark let out a long breath of relief.
"Mark," Charlie said, "you're a hero."
"I'm modest, too," Mark said, wiping his forehead. "Ask me about it sometime." He plopped down in one of the chairs. "Lights!" he said to his workspace, and the VAB reasserted itself, the angle of the sun having changed slightly, but everything else as it had been before. From high up in the air, the creaky voices of buzzards could be heard, and beside Charlie, piled up on the floor, was a stack of manila files nearly as tall as he was. "It's all there," Mark said. "I'll keep copies secure for you, if you like."
"I'd appreciate it," Charlie said.
"No problem. But just what was that you found back in New York?"
Charlie shook his head. "Bad stuff," he said softly. "Ask me later."
"Mark?" a man's voice said from out of the air around them.
"Ohmigosh, get out of here, it's my dad," Mark said hurriedly. "Probably with a brain full of bait." He leaped for the pile of files, scooped them up and started stuffing them into one of his desk drawers. "These are encrypting. But I need to wipe my logs of these, and you, before he comes in. Go on, blast out of here!"
Charlie hurriedly headed for his doorway into Mark's space, which appeared a few feet away. "Mark-thanks!"
"Yeah, yeah, thank me later. When I get back, gimme a shout and tell me what you find!"
"I will!"
Mark vanished. Charlie was left standing in his workspace with a pile of files.
"Son," he heard his father say from outside in the real world. "You've been in there for an elephant's age. Want a sandwich?"
"Absolutely," Charlie muttered. He checked to make sure that the files were saved, and then closed down his workspace and returned to the real world, where his stomach was growling fiercely… but not so much so that it drowned out the nervous muttering in his head.
Scorbutal hydrobromate.
Were these really suicides…?
Late the next afternoon Nick stood out in the softly falling ash, and held very still, listening for something beside the screams of the Damned. He didn't immediately hear the sound he was waiting for, but he was willing to wait for a good while. If there was anything he had been learning in the last couple of days, it was patience.
He was in no hurry to get back to the spot he had finally reached during the session before last, the first "subbasement" of the Dark Artificer's Keep… even though his money was getting close to running out, even though his folks were getting increasingly interested in "sitting down and having a talk" with him. Nick had the secrets of the Eighth Circle seriously on his mind, for he was beginning to suspect that there was more to play for, a lot more, than just lifts of new songs and the possibility that you might meet one of the clone-Banes down here.
Nick had decided to follow a hunch. He had gone back to do what Shade told him she'd been doing: to talk to others he found wandering around the ashy wilderness on the far side of the Lake of Tears, and guide them through. At first he wondered whether this had been such a great idea, for the environment responded badly to it. It was as if the crevasses started to target Nick, going out of their way to stitch themselves straight at him as he made his way through the knee-deep ash. He had had a couple of extremely close calls over the first few hours, as the ground stubbornly, even maliciously, opened again and again under his feet. Once, if this had been reality, he would have left the skin of the palms of both hands on the jagged outcropping of rock that was all that kept him from plunging into the lava-filled abyss below. But Nick kept doing what he had decided to do. It was sheer stubbornness, at first. If the environment was going to target him, he was going to outlast it.
After five or six hours of this, things got a little better. The environment started getting less dangerous… or maybe Nick just got better at anticipating it. But he also stopped noticing quite so acutely what it was doing, for he started getting interested in the conversations he was having with the people he was guiding through. Their responses to the situation in which they suddenly found themselves varied from complete confusion to annoyance that they were no longer in control of their path through the darkness. But one way or another, they were all glad of the help, though some of them plainly would have choked rather than admit it. Some of them were wearing virtual "seemings" that were meant to make them look very impressive and self-sufficient indeed-tall shapes cowled in darkness, like the image of Joey Bane in the "front door" to the Orpheus, Don't Look Back! virteo collection, or barbarian heroes, or statuesque women wearing space-babe slicktights and toting projectile weapons the size of their upper bodies, or giant snarling beasts slinking along through the fiery night and trying to look independently deadly. Some of them protested at being saved from falling into a hole in the ground by a skinny high school kid in neodenims and a beat-up Mets batting helmet. Most of them "forgot" to thank him. But none of them, Nick noticed, told him to go away while he was actually helping them out.
At the end of his last session Nick had gone home exhausted and collapsed into bed too weary to even be annoyed with his mother, who had been waiting up for him. He had taken care of his homework before he'd left, so he wasn't sure why she was waiting, and she gave him an odd look as he passed through the front room on his way to bed.
"Honey," she said, in an unusually neutral tone of voice for her, "your friend Charlie called earlier."
"Yeah?"
"He was asking about something called a 'walk-through.' Would you know what he wanted?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, I'll take care of it tomorrow." That caught Nick a little by surprise. Charlie wasn't much of a gamer, preferring to do "solid construction" sims, the more concrete kind of virtual experience. All the same, if he's getting interested…
Nick looked for Charlie the next day at school, but didn't see him. Either he'd had to swap his lunch periods to take care of some study commitment, or something else had happened to throw their schedules out of synch. Nick went through the day more or less on automatic, as he had done for the last couple of days, since things started to get really interesting back in Deathworld. That afternoon he headed back into the WorldBooths public Net-access center down at the Square in an unusually good mood, despite the fact that his money was getting so short. At the end of the week he would have some more allowance coming, and be able to really get back into the swing of Deathworld over the weekend. Nick had spent the day getting ahead of schedule on his homework, which his folks had been checking with unusual care. They'd have no excuse to bother him for two whole days.
And after that, when the money does run out… For two full days of gameplay would exhaust what he had.
Nick sighed, paid at the cashier's booth in front, took his recharged cash card, and headed back to his usual booth right at the rear, locking himself in and settling into the implant chair and slapping the card into it. Have to deal with that when it happens, Nick thought, and blinked his workspace into being around him.
It was still bare. He hadn't felt like spending the time to get his redecorating done. But off to one side, standing there, was a simulacrum of Charlie, in end-of-the-day shinesweats, arms folded, smiling that wry smile he wore sometimes, an expression that suggested he was feeling foolish about something.
"Go," Nick said to the simulacrum.
"Sorry I mis
sed you," it said immediately, in Charlie's voice. "I was up late last night doing some research.- Look, all work and no play, you know the drill… I was wondering if you had any walk-throughs of Deathworld. I wanted to have a look through, but I don't want to spend six weeks dragging around in the upper levels. You have something that can get me about halfway down? Give me a yell, or leave me a message."
The image froze again. Nick was caught between two impulses-to catch Charlie "live" right now, if possible, and take him down into Deathworld himself, or to leave him a message. The second impulse won.
"System," Nick said, "record reply…"
"Ready," the system said in its plain-vanilla voice. Nick raised his eyebrows. He really should get some Bane audio in here, if nothing else.
"Charlie. sorry I missed you, too," he said, getting up out of the "chair" on the virtual side and going over to the doorway where his files were stored at the moment. He opened it and looked in. "File access. Deathworld," he said, "press material, walk-through… Yeah, that one. Transfer to Charlie Davis's machine."
He turned back to the simulacrum of Charlie. "Here," he said. "This one came out of the 'Last Train Out' review environment about a month and a half ago… the data for the first three levels is still good, as far as I know. The company's been swapping in new material from about Four down, to defeat the older walk-throughs there out there, but this should still be a help. Let me know if you have any problems. I'll talk to you later… "
The simulacrum, having been answered, vanished. Nick breathed out, then closed the door and opened the second one, his automated login gateway to Deathworld.
He had implemented a "shortcut" entry that let him in to pick up where he had left off. The Deathworld system still showed him the copyright statement burning crimson in the air for a few seconds-there was no getting away from that, no matter how many times a day you might come in here and then Nick walked through into the darkness awaiting him on the other side.
Falling ash, the volcano in the distance… Nick reached up into the air and re-created the "asbestos" golf umbrella he normally carried, and then started making his way toward the keep, to see who he might meet along the way. As he looked around, he was a little surprised by how few players seemed to be around. This was an unusually quiet period for this time of day. Normally Death-world started to get noticeably busier around the time that high school and college classes let out in North America, though obviously there would have been plenty of Europeans and Asians in over the earlier part of the day.
Nick shrugged and made his way along through the black ash "snow," keeping an eye open for crevasses. For the moment they seemed to be avoiding him, though he saw what looked like a huge one opening away across the plain, and faintly he thought he heard some yells of surprise from that direction. It was a little too far for him to do any good. By the time he got there, everybody involved would either have saved themselves and each other, or fallen in.
He kept going, making for the Keep of the Dark Artificer. Shade's warning about the size of the place had been a useful one. Its interior was, Nick thought, probably bigger than the whole gigantic plain that surrounded it. This posed problems of topology that he didn't bother his head about, for the attraction of the Keep lay in the music that was in there, and also in the exploration of the countless dark rooms, deep caverns, and hidden towers associated with it, and (most important, Nick thought) the solution of the great Maze at the Keep's heart. He couldn't get rid of the feeling that the access to the fabled Ninth Circle had to do with that maze. Probably nothing so simple as just getting to the middle of it. Nick was sure you needed to do more than that, or have some specific piece of information once you arrived.
Nick skirted around the lake and headed for the doors of the Keep. The demons on guard there-little blackleather-skinned, batwinged guys about five feet tall, wearing ornate doormen's costumes and affable gargoyle faces-saw him coming and started pulling on the giant braided bronze ropes that opened the doors. He waved at them, in what was beginning to be a ritual. "Hey, there, boys," Nick said to the two nearest demons, "how're things going?"
"They stink," said the demons nearest the doors, in the ritual answer. One of them, pausing from the work, wiped his forehead with a big smudgy hankie and added, "And the boss turned down the union's request for the pay raise."
Nick made tsk, tsk noises as he passed them by, walking in over the shiny dark pavement, which some beneficent agency kept clear of the ash that was always falling outside. "Keep working on it, fellas… " he said.
The doors closed behind him, and Nick paused there in the huge "front hall," looking around to see who else might be there. The Keep's vast entryway, lit by a huge crystal and onyx chandelier shaped like one more stalactite hanging from the great dome of the ceiling, routinely held a surprise or two. You might hear a snatch of music here that you hadn't caught elsewhere, or meet someone who would do your quest some good. At the moment, though, it was nearly as quiet inside as it had been outside. The place was practically empty. A slack period, Nick thought. Coincidence.
He walked on in, looking around at the bizarre portraiture that hung on the walls of the entryway. They were supposed to be images of gameplayers who had passed on successfully to Nine, Nick knew, normal people living in his own time. But the portraits made them all look like crazed royalty of two or three centuries back, in rococo clothes and wigs that looked like they might come alive and crawl off their wearers' heads. He wondered what his own portrait would wind up looking like if-When. When they did it.
Nick smiled slightly and headed in toward the doorway on the far side of the entry hall. Past that door was where things got interesting. Six staircases apparently designed by Escher led off toward the roof, and six more toward the basement, though none of them felt particularly like "up" or "down" when you were climbing them. Somewhere in this vast pile, in which none of the normal directions mattered, the Maze was hidden-a huge tangle of paths and walkways, arched and open, covering all six of the walls of a great cube of space somewhere in the Keep. Nick had actually found it accidentally, once, when he was first in here and just wandering around in the place trying to get a feel for it. Then he'd lost the Maze again while trying to work out how he'd found it to begin with. A whim of the system, he thought. Never mind. Over the weekend there'll be time to start doing some proper searching-
"Hey, Nick…"
He turned quickly at the sound of a slightly familiar voice. It was Shade again. In here she looked a little less like her name, but only a little less,justa young girl of maybe fifteen, in a long black outer coat, a short dark purple skirt, and a black sweater, dark purple hair, and eyes that shaded from violet to almost black depending on how much light there was. Those big dark eyes, and the somber set of her mouth, suggested some old sorrow hanging over her. She was pale. In this light, almost right under the great chandelier, Nick could see much better how frail she looked, how fragile. Not that Nick was so foolish as to be misled by appearances down here. As in most virtual environments, anyone could look like anything they pleased. For all he knew, up in the Real World, Shade was a six-foot-six, two hundred-and-eighty-pound football player. Somehow, though, Nick doubted it. There was a brittle feel to conversations with her that made him wonder if she was either a plant from Joey Bane Enterprises, someone used to see how players treated each other, or someone who wasn't really cut out for this particular virtual experience, but was just too stubborn to give it up.
"Hey, Shade," he said. "You doing okay?"
She sighed. Most of her conversations seemed to start with a sigh, or contain several of them. "I guess so," she said. "It's quiet today… you'd almost think everybody was scared off by something… "
Nick shrugged. "Not me." The whole business with the Angels of the Pit had rolled off his back pretty quickly once he got into the Keep and started working on the business of solving it.
"I don't know… " Shade said. "I wonder if maybe there's something to it."
<
br /> "To what?"
She shrugged, gazing up and about her. "What they did…" She turned those violet eyes on him. "I keep wondering if it's really so terrible. When everything's going wrong. "
The way she trailed off, Nick had a feeling that she was about to tell him how everything was wrong for her, if he didn't stop her. He shook his head. "Some people might think it isn't," he said slowly. "I guess there are times when everything really does seem to stink. But that's not where I am at the moment."
"Things are better for you, then, at home?"
"I don't know about better," Nick said. "A little quieter, maybe." Certainly his father had been letting him alone… whether he was unwilling to restart their fight, or not, Nick wasn't sure. Just the news that Nick had a job lined up for the summer seemed to have quieted things down somewhat. For the rest of it, it was as if his mother and father had declared a truce for the moment. The lightening of the atmosphere in the house had been noticeable. "I'm not thinking about that right now, Shade. I'm on my way to the Maze… "
"Aren't we all," Shade said, and laughed a little. "But I haven't finished exploring the Keep yet. There's still a lot of ground that I haven't covered yet… "
Nick laughed. "You sound like you enjoy rummaging around in here for its own sake. Not me! I want the music."
"Oh, I do, too… "
"Well, then, come on and help me find the Maze! That's the way down to Nine, and Nine's where the good music's supposed to be, the 'unknown' lifts. And Joey himself…"
Shade gave him an odd look, almost nervous. "Oh, I don't mind hanging around up here," she said. "Besides, they say that once you leave Eight for Nine, you can't come back."
That surprised him. "Who says?"
"Other people up here." Shade glanced around her, although those "other people" were not much in evidence right now. "All the time, in the Upper Circles, you see people from as far down as Eight wandering around. Slumming… helping the newbies, or torturing them with news of the lifts you can get down lower."