Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  “What about it?” asked Eris. “I didn’t say anything I didn’t want you to hear, child.”

  Cerice’s cheeks reddened as though she’d been slapped. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Shara and Melchior ducking under a table. I wished I could join them.

  “He is a power,” said Eris. “You are not. The relationship is a risk to you both. Besides, as Tisiphone pointed out so succinctly, you haven’t got a claim.”

  “Is that why you were nibbling on his ear?” snapped Cerice. “Because I haven’t got a claim? Or is it just that you’re an unmitigated bitch?”

  “Oh, the latter definitely. I’m really only interested in romance as far as it generates outbursts like your current one. Tisiphone, on the other hand, has had quite a sweet spot for the boy since she met him.”

  “Oh, she has, has she?” Cerice whirled to glare at me. “And why haven’t you mentioned this before? Who else is sweet on you? Persephone? She certainly went out of her way to help you out.”

  I’d about had it. “Cerice, I love you, and I owe you my life several times over, but I really don’t like you very much at the moment.” Melchior hissed under the table. “I don’t think I’ve ever given you any reason to doubt my affections. Shit, I just went to Hades and back for the sake of your thesis.”

  That wasn’t entirely the case, since my friendship with Shara had played at least as big a role, but her “no one’s lady” comment had hurt, and I was tired of being fair.

  “Despite all of that,” I continued, “you won’t, as Tisiphone put it, admit a claim. So why the hell do you feel you have the right to get mad at me when some other woman expresses interest in me?” I was yelling now. “Especially when I haven’t done anything to encourage it?”

  “I—” Cerice’s voice started loud, but sank quickly to a whisper. “I—I don’t have that right, do I? Not really. Eris is probably right about Tisiphone, too.” She closed her eyes and fisted her hands for a long moment. “She certainly couldn’t be any worse for you than I’ve been lately. I’m sorry.”

  Without another word, she went out the door. I started after her, but Shara caught the cuff of my leathers.

  “Let her be. She’s earned some wallowing time.”

  “I—” I stopped, and faced Shara. “What do you mean?”

  “That she’s been dumping shit all over you since the day I got back.” She took a shaky breath. “I love Cerice. She’s my best friend, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to her faults. The way she’s been treating you lately is a big one. If you two are ever going to work things out, Cerice is going to have to face that. She won’t do it if you keep apologizing every time she has a hissy fit.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, looking after Cerice. It was hard not to follow her, hard to see her hurting even if she’d brought it on herself.

  Shara nodded, then turned away. “Unpleasant truths have to be faced sooner or later.” The words were almost a whisper, and I didn’t think she was really talking to me. “You can’t get away from yourself, no matter how fast you run.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went to join Eris at the server rack. “When do you want to start?”

  “Now works for me.” She opened her hands. Each held a slender athame, its cable extending into one of the golden apple servers.

  “I think I’ll use mine and jack in via Melchior if possible.”

  “Good enough,” said Eris. The athame in her left hand vanished, leaving only the cable with its network connector.

  “Melchior, you up for this?”

  He glanced at Shara, who had returned to a place under the table, where she sat with her back against the wall and her chin resting on her drawn-up knees. She made a vague shooing gesture, and Melchior joined us, hopping up onto the low table beside the rack. He gave Eris a sidelong glance.

  “What will your role be?”

  “Support,” said the goddess. “I’ve already had a couple of goes without any success. I, and Grendel here”—she patted the rack—“are just here to provide computing muscle.”

  “All right, then let’s do it.” Melchior melted quickly into his laptop shape. Whenever you’re ready.

  I plugged Eris’s cable into one of his networking ports, then pulled out my athame and attached its cable to a second port in his side. I studied that slender blade for a long moment, holding it point down above my palm and thinking about what it meant.

  For jacking in, a hard connection from body to computer still remained the best way. A wireless hookup didn’t have the same resonance with the life thread, or the silver cord, as it was sometimes referred to in fluffy New Age circles. Whatever you called it, the strand that Clotho spun for you at your birth embodied the vital essence of your soul, your anima. The house of the anima in the body was the bloodstream, the internal network that pumped life with every heartbeat. The athame and the cable attached to it provided a symbolic and sorcerous link to a node on the mweb, in this case Melchior, and through him to the network that connected the infinity of possible worlds.

  Of course, all of that was just a way of keeping my mind on something other than how much the whole process hurt. It didn’t really help much. With a sigh and a grimace, I stabbed the blade through my hand, then surfed the bitter wave of pain into the world of the mweb.

  I arrived in a small room wallpapered with pebbled blue leather. There was only one exit, a wide-open and jagged-framed window overlooking an orchard. Stepping close to the window, I could see a thousand identically rendered trees standing in neat geometric rows. Each tree had a set of six hexalaterally symmetric branches dripping with golden apples. The symmetry repeated itself in the roots and the placement of the fruit.

  It all had the eerie unreal feel of a poorly thought-out video game. You know the kind, where the programmer rendered one side of one tree, then got bored with the process and just duplicated that single side over and over again in a total failure of imagination. An average three-year-old with the most rudimentary of computer skills would have done better. It seemed utterly unlike anything Eris could have had a hand in, yet I knew I stood on the threshold of her server farm.

  With deep misgivings I said, “Melchior, Red Carpet. Please.”

  The window opened even wider, and a long roll of lush carpeting appeared in front of me. It quickly unrolled itself, forming a bridge to the orchard, a bridge whose far end opened in a split like a snake’s forked tongue. As I started across, I paused a moment to look back. Melchior’s head towered above me, his tongue providing the carpet I now walked.

  “Show-off,” I whispered. The giant face winked an eye at me.

  When I reached the end of the carpet, I extended a foot above the flat green field that stretched between the trees. It looked more like a fuzzy bath mat than a lawn. At least it did until I stepped onto it. At that moment many things happened all at once.

  The green sheet began to bubble and eddy like antifreeze in an overheated car. To the touch it remained solid. I could feel the occasional bubble press against the bottom of my booted feet, like a rock suddenly growing beneath me—but to all outward appearances it had become a liquid.

  The trees started a slow and chaotic dance, slipping from their rigid positioning into an ever-changing geometric relationship that owed very little to the simple shapes of Euclid’s imagination. They also lost their symmetry, twisting and growing into gnarled forms straight out of some cautionary Grimmsian fairy tale. The apples themselves became detached from the branches, though they remained clustered around the trees in thick clouds, glowing now like a swarm of mating fireflies.

  “Like it?” a voice whispered in my ear.

  I jumped a good thirty feet into the air, unbound as I was by physical restraints. Turning, I flew back down to land beside Eris, who now wore a black-and-gold dress with a huge train that twisted off between the trees.

  “Don’t do that! You just about scared me out of my skin.”

  “I was hoping that I might,” she said, wit
h a wicked smile. “I thought it might prove enlightening. Or failing that, entertaining. Sso, sshall we be going?” she asked, her voice taking on a sort of hissing undertone.

  “I thought you were just providing backup.”

  “That, and transsportation.” She twisted suddenly, and a portion of the train of her dress slid around in an s-curve, bumping against my calf.

  It felt a lot more substantial than any dress should have, and I looked down to find that the portion touching my leg had a saddle straddling it. Only in that instant did I realize it wasn’t a dress. An enormous snake’s body descended from Eris’s torso and trailed out behind her.

  “You’re not serious,” I said. “A lamia?”

  “You’re going on a quest. That means you need a loyal steed, and this sounded like more fun than a sphinx. Hop on, and we can get going.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Oh come on, it’ll be fun. How often are you going to get the chance to ride a goddess? Barring coming to your senses about Tisiphone, that is.” She licked her lips with her now-forked tongue. “Look, you can argue all you want. In fact, I’d enjoy it. I live to argue. But this is the best way for me to accompany you. We both know you’re going to get in that saddle eventually, so why not just admit it and enjoy the ride.”

  “All right. Melchior?”

  “Here, Boss.” A tiny blue bat with Melchior’s head on its shoulders landed on my wrist. It wasn’t the real Melchior, of course, just an icon representing his attention.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said, swinging a leg over Eris’s elongated body.

  Instead of sinking into the seat as I’d intended, the saddle rose up to meet me, and stirrups slid out to catch and cradle my feet. That’s when I noticed that the saddle was actually grafted onto her body.

  “Hi ho, nutjob, away,” I said very quietly, and we suddenly shot forward.

  I had to throw my arms around Eris’s waist to stay on. Her flesh was warm and soft and very feminine. I tried not to think about it. We left the orchard shortly thereafter through a fat pipe that represented one of the remaining lines of the damaged mweb.

  “So where are the reins?” I asked eventually. We were still sliding along an essentially unbroken tunnel, but I knew I’d want more control at some point.

  “Steer with your knees, my dear. I can be very responsive.”

  “Yeah, it’s that ‘can be’ part I’m worried about.”

  “Support and transport and nothing more,” replied Eris. “Isn’t that what we agreed?”

  I sighed but nodded and looked ahead. A light quickly grew until the walls opened out around us. Eris stopped then, leaving most of her long body in the tunnel behind, and reared up like a cobra preparing to strike. We had emerged high up on a mountain with the core server architecture of the mweb lying like an endless gem-studded plain below.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” said Eris.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But this is all on the public side and not much use for finding out what’s wrong. For that, we’ll have to dig deeper.”

  “Wait a second,” I said.

  But my protest fell on seemingly deaf ears as we slithered down the mountainside. Before I had time even to frame my argument, we were among the jewel-toned shapes that represented the many, many cores of the mweb mainframes. We didn’t stop until we’d reached a huge ebony sphere, like some massive pearl—one of Necessity’s black boxes. Remembering my last encounter with the goddess’s security, I squeezed Eris’s sides hard with my knees.

  “Whoa there. I almost got fried the first time I messed with one of these. We should take it slow.” I quickly described my experience with trying to crack Necessity.

  Eris shrugged. “Last time you didn’t have me along to play crowbar.”

  Then she slid to the left of the sphere and circled back until she’d met herself on the other side. She did this again and again until she’d looped three coils of herself around the huge black globe. She must have been elongating herself as she went, because I was pretty sure the Eris I’d first mounted couldn’t have managed the feat.

  “I thought I was in charge,” I said.

  “You are.”

  “Then tell me you aren’t about to crush that thing in your coils.”

  “All right. I’m not going to crush that thing in my coils.” She grinned. “But I’m sure as hell going to try.”

  With that, she squeezed. The black fire that had destroyed my code weasel broke out over the entire surface of the processor core, and the world filled with blinding sparks and the smell of burning snake.

  “Sssshiiittt!” and whether it was Discord’s voice or mine doing the screaming, I couldn’t say.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The sound of shattering glass filled the universe, and it was both Eris’s laugh and the cracking of the great ebony sphere. The dark fires faded as the black globe fell to ruin around us. Exposed within was another pearl, this one with all the rainbow highlights of the real thing. Eris’s coils clutched tighter, catching this new sphere within them. But there was no resistance. It was like squeezing Jell-O, and together we sank into the core’s surface.

  So this was how the great powers played the hacking game. Smashing aside barriers that I would have been hard-pressed to finesse. I didn’t like the style much, though it obviously had its strong points—effectiveness for example. I had just a moment to enjoy the idea that we’d beaten the system before I noticed the shards of blackness springing back into place behind us. We were in all right, but I suddenly had doubts about getting back out. Then the spheres were gone, and we arrived in a new frame of reference.

  We were in the open, though mist, swirling gray and pearlescent, provided the illusion of boundaries. Beneath us lay harsh black volcanic rock, and I could hear waves breaking somewhere not too far away. Perhaps because of the way the ocean sounds came to me, or perhaps for some other reason, I felt certain that we were on a small island. I was about to share my thoughts with Eris when I noticed the guardian, or really, her foot.

  It was a big foot, one that rearranged my sense of perspective. Now instead of a knight-errant riding a serpent of epic proportions, I felt like an action figure strapped to the back of a garter snake. A garter snake in very real danger of being stepped on. The foot, definitely feminine and a scant ten feet away, appeared to be formed of living purple-veined marble, hard and cold yet still alive and vital. My eyes traced upward, drawn to follow the living-stone column of the ankle up into the mist. As if on cue, the gray curtain parted, and I found myself staring past a curvy body into an enormous veiled face.

  “We should have just stayed in Hades,” said the bat-shaped Melchior. “It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

  He had a point. In addition to her veil, the giantess also wore the world’s biggest mirror shades. That was all to the good. It prevented me from meeting her gaze, a circumstance that would have resulted in my getting stoned, and I don’t mean blissed-out. But circumstances could change at any moment, and that would mean game over, because I wasn’t the only one in the company of snakes. The enormous guardian had seen my serpentine steed and raised me about a hundredfold. Her hair was alive, and it was looking at me. I had just found the world’s biggest gorgon, and every single strand of her hair appeared ready to strike.

  “Who?” asked the guardian in a female voice both strange and strangely familiar.

  “Discord and Raven, on errand from Necessity herself,” answered Eris. Which was good, since I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I was too busy panicking.

  Long seconds dripped past as the great presence loomed above us. An internal struggle seemed to take hold of the gorgon, manifested in the wild twisting and hissing of her hair. It had been relatively still before. Now it was self-braiding.

  Finally, the snakes subsided, and the voice spoke again. “Pass.” It sounded oddly constricted, as though it were acting against its own will.

  My spine turned int
o liquid from sheer relief and flowed away through a tailbone gone suddenly hollow. At least, that’s what it felt like. The mist closed once again and the life seemed to leach out of the marble, transforming active guardian into passive statue.

  “Are you totally insane?” I snapped at Eris. “I told you what happened to me last time I got near one of Necessity’s black boxes, and now you just bull your way in? I thought I was supposed to be running this show.”

  “You are, and you will from here on out,” said Eris. “But your last encounter with Necessity’s security is exactly why I pushed things now. I knew you’d take forever and a day to get to the point of the matter, and that’s not why we’re here. Necessity and her security aren’t the problem. Whatever’s eating the mweb is, and we needed to get on to finding it. Besides, last time you weren’t acting at the express request of Necessity herself, as delivered by her handmaidens. I figured we’d be golden on cracking our way in here on that count alone.”