by Tom Clancy
Now all Charlie needed was to re-create the initial part of the setup, without becoming a statistic himself.
To this end, the walk-through which Nick had given him had been extremely comprehensive, not as error-ridden as Nick had feared, and Nick himself had also appended some material to it as notes which Charlie had found very useful. He sat down on the sofa across from the implant chair in the den, finishing his glass of milk, and thinking about his next moves, the ones he would begin tonight after school. Charlie had been able to get down to Eight in fairly short order. I wonder if the system notices things like that… Charlie thought. But then lots of people must tell their friends how to get through- it quickly, how to meet them places… It probably all averages out in the end.
Either way, I have to follow up this contact with Shade, and keep looking to see whatever else turns up. No way I'm going to sit around and let this happen to someone else. It's still May…
Charlie sighed, put the milk glass aside, and sat down in the implant chair-he still had about half an hour before he had to leave for school, and this was the best time to catch people. He closed his eyes, triggered his implant on again, and glanced around the lowest level of his workspace, where the 3-D and 4-D images still stood. "Workspace management," he said.
"Here, Charlie."
"Is Nick Melchior available?"
"Checking that for you now. But this time does not match his usual online times for the past two weeks. Not available."
"Okay, what about Mark?"
"Mark's workspace is available as usual, and he is in residence."
"Good." Charlie went over to the usual access door, opened it. The VAB's lights were on. It was early enough at the Cape that not much light was getting in. Charlie wandered across the floor, where he could see the RollsSkoda, its hood still up, and a pair of legs still visible.
"That thing giving you trouble?"
"Please," said Mark, sounding tired. "If you see the man who invented technology, send him up. I have something for him." He stood up from under the hood and made an eloquent fist. "I just can't get this thing's armor to stay solid when it should." He sighed, straightened up. "There's always the possibility that I've found a bug in the programming language itself… but I really don't want to believe that. It would be big trouble… "
The desk wasn't too far away, and Charlie saw the Magic Jacket lying over it as he had left it much earlier. "Is it okay?" he said.
"It was fine," Mark said. "I 'looked' in on you five or six times, just to check on it. No problems." He looked at Charlie, with a rather challenging expression. "Except with you. You didn't seem terribly comfortable down there."
"I hate it, the whole fake-seeming business," Charlie said. "Skulking and acting… I don't like not being me. Being me is hard enough, without having to fake being someone else as well." He let out a long breath. "But I guess this is in a good cause."
"You'd better believe it is," Mark said, "because you've had a trip."
Charlie swallowed. "What? Already? When?"
"Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, actually. Someone unauthorized was trying to get into your space. I tried to get hold of you, but you were offline."
"Whew," Charlie said. "I wasn't expecting anything that fast." He thought for a moment. "Mark, that means that whoever tripped the 'wire' has definitely been reading the message boards in Deathworld. I didn't actually talk to anybody until this morning, real early, before school."
"How many people have you talked to?"
"Uh, six or seven. A couple have seemed interested in me… but I'm not entirely sure yet that it's more than casual. I should get a better idea later."
"Okay. Well, you're recording everything… "
"I never take off the magic jacket… no matter how much it itches."
"It doesn't itch!"
"It does. It fizzes. I feel like I'm wearing a can of soda." "Must be feedback through the implant," Mark said, thoughtful.
"Can't you do something about it?"
"Not while you're wearing it," Mark said. "Let me play with it today if I have some time. I'll leave it in your space when I'm done with it."
"Yeah, fine. But Mark, who tripped the wire?!" "I don't know."
"You don't know? I thought you put a trace on the trip wire routine!"
"I did," Mark said, sounding extremely annoyed now, "but unfortunately, your pigeon was using an anonymizer to conceal the server of origin. They're perfectly legal. I thought the routine I had running would beat it… but this `anonner' is a new one, just opened up. Among the identification routines it's been built to defeat is the one I was using. Dammit."
"But can't you use something… you know… from Net Force?"
Mark's voice got, if possible, even more annoyed. "The `industrial strength' identification routines at Net Force are locked down tight, Charlie… to get permission to use the 'Drano' utilities, you have to have a court order and ID as a senior Net Force supervisor. Which I am not… yet. And I can't exactly ask any of them, either. So I'm winging it, using routines that have a lot less oomph. If I want to upgrade one of those to industrial strength I'm going to have to do that myself. In fact that's what I'll have to do after school today go check out this new anonymizer, find out which protocols it's using, figure out how to defeat them. Probably take me a day or so. You better sit the next couple dances out until I can sensitize the 'trip wire' to backtrack the next hit correctly."
Charlie was fuming. "You don't know anything about where the 'trip' came from?"
"Not a thing," Mark said, sounding just as annoyed. "Could have been next door to you, or in Ulan Bator."
Charlie sighed. "Okay," he said. "Let me know when you get the new routine up again."
"I will. But look, Charlie, just give it all a rest for the moment. A day or so won't make any difference."
"Yeah…" Charlie headed out of the VAB and back to his own space, beginning now to be actively nervous. A day or so… But no matter what Mark said, Charlie couldn't get rid of the idea that it could matter. It most definitely could…
Chapter 8
Nick looked for Charlie at school that day but missed him at lunch again, and wasn't able to track him down between classes. He had things on his mind, and he really wanted to talk to Charlie about them.
His last-period class had been canceled, so Nick stopped by the wing of the school where he knew Charlie sometimes had a late upper-level biology class. But it had been relocated or rescheduled-the room was locked and empty. Nick let out an exasperated breath and started to walk home.
His path took him by the NetAccess center as usual, and there Nick paused by the door and took out the last commcard he had left, the one he had fished out of his bottom drawer in his bedroom several days earlier, having forgotten that it was there in the first place. Nick looked at the card and sighed. He was woefully short of cash, now there wouldn't be any more allowance money until Friday, and this was only Tuesday. Yet at the same time he wanted to give Charlie the opportunity to walk through Deathworld with a friend at his side, not only for enjoyment, but now, after his conversation with Khasm and Spile, for security as well.
And there were other matters on his mind. A random thought, something about the various lifts he had brought back from Deathworld with him, had been obsessing Nick for the past couple of days. The Eighth Circle was proving difficult to crack-and it's gonna be impossible, without some more money to spend some more time there, Nick thought. But he was noticing that the hints and whispers he had been expecting from "plants" in the Circle had been very few. He had been wandering around in those stony tunnels and up and down the Escheresque stairways for days now and had come up against-he smiled wryly at the expression-a stone wall.
Yet there had been more lifts available than usual, so many that his pocket lift carrier couldn't handle them all anymore, and Nick had to load them in and out of the storage area in his public server. Most of them were different versions of songs Nick already had lifts of. Only a co
llector, an aficionado, or a raving completist would feel the need to have them all. But Nick certainly fitted into the last category, at least, and it was while he was listening to some of the "alternate" versions in bed a few nights ago that he had noticed some of the lifts were alternates in other ways as well. They had lyrics that other versions of the songs didn't have-
He shook his head and went into the access center. "Hey, Nick," the guy behind the front counter said. "Early today-"
"Yeah, well, you might not see me for a few days," Nick said. "Running out of green…" He slapped the commcard up onto the reader plate.
"You're okay," said Dilish, the guy behind the counter. "Got a couple of hours left on that one."
"That much? Super! My usual one open?"
"No, there's someone in there, take Eight… I'll reroute your server info over there."
Nick went back to the booth and closed himself in, locking the sliding door and sitting down in the implant chair. A moment later he was standing in the usual white space, and he got up and reached into his pocket, coming up with the key that "remembered" his location from the last visit.
"Deathworld access," Nick said. The door in the air opened, a black rectangle in all that whiteness, and the copyright notice began rolling by. Is it an illusion, he wondered, or does that thing actually get longer every time? Finally it vanished, and Nick went through into the dimness of the Dark Artificer's Keep, entering into the dark stone corridor where he had been standing when he last exited.
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 don'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?