He laughed in my face, an ugly grunting sound that had no humor in it. "I had a great childhood. Where do you think I learned how to fight? By the time I was eight, I knew: Every fight is a fight to the death. That's what makes it fun. You still don't get it, and you probably won't. You won't live long enough. And I'm sorry about that, because I kind of started to like you."
"All right, fine." I felt the singing surge of my temper as I stripped off my armor. "You've a fine taste for melodrama, Hari. It's a pity you're so full of shit."
"Eh?''
"This I'm-so-worldly-wise-and-you're-just-a-babe-in-the-woods act. Give me a break. I've seen it done better; my father has it down to a science."'
"Yeah, whatever." He gathered up the pieces of his armor and bundled them together. "Been all right working out with you, Hansen, but now I gotta go."
"Why don't you try coming over to play in my yard?" I put a sneering edge of contempt in my voice that stopped him in his tracks. Maybe I didn't understand him completely, but I knew there was no way he'd take that tone from some upcaste boy of questionable masculinity. He looked at me over his shoulder.
"Your yard?"
My heart pounded, and I fought to keep the tremors out of my voice. "Yeah, tough guy." I flipped Chandra's access card between my fingers like a stage magician. "You're so damn tough in your specialty, come try mine."
"What's that you've got there?"
"It's an access card that'll get me into the Virtual Acting suite after hours."
A flame of interest kindled within his eyes. "Y'know, I start Virtual Acting a week from Friday ..."
I shrugged. "Here's the difference between us. This Conservatory is loaded with Combat students who can stomp you without raising a sweat—"
"You think so?"
I ignored him and went on. "—but there is no one, no one, who can beat me in a VA suit. I'm the best there is. Check the records, if you want: I'm the best there has ever been. You dish it easily enough, Michaelson. Can you take it?"
Hari, I hoped, was that one kid in every neighborhood who'll take any dare, no matter how dangerous, the one who never runs from a fight, especially when the odds are against him. And I really thought that with my coaching, he might pace through Virtual Acting with high enough marks to push him over the top for graduation. I gave him a grin that lied: it said I didn't really care one way or the other. It was a grin that dared him to take me up on it, and it was a grin that dared him to back down. It was a grin that kept him from noticing I was holding my breath.
My future teetered on his answer.
He squinted at me like he could read my mind. Then he said, "After hours, huh? Like when would that be?"
"Say, 2200?"
"I'll be there?'
He walked out of the hand-to-hand room without a backward glance, so he didn't see me fall to my knees and thank the gods for my deliverance.
7
I rubbed my stinging eyes as I threaded through the departing Combat students toward the VA suite. I'd been pushing a ragged edge of exhaustion; in addition to healing from my surgeries, recovering from the workouts I'd had with Hari, and constant worry over my future, I had course work of my own to complete. My extra term consisted of studies in the history and culture of the First Folk, not to mention their hideously elliptical, metaphoric, and inflected language. To make it worse, they had no written histories, since all First Folk have flawless eidetic memories and no Actor had successfully infiltrated their society; all I had to study from was second- and thirdhand accounts full of cultural references that I didn't understand and couldn't look up. Like the Actors who had gone before me, I'd be playing an elf who has—for one reason or another—chosen to move through the human world, but still it frustrated me until my head spun.
So I was in no mood for neanderthal crap. The departing Combat students laughed and joked among themselves as they lumbered along the hall like elephants, but less gracefully; I did my best to dodge between the swinging elbows of these two-meter behemoths.
They were all heading for their dorms, or for the venerable rathskeller—except for one, an enormous one with shoulders like wrecking balls. His back was to me, and he seemed to be shaking his fist at someone I couldn't see around his titanic chest. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me it was probably Hari.
The enmity between the Conservatory's Combat and Magick students is, I think, part of a long historical tradition, stretching all the way back to at least the nineteenth century's rivalry between student athletes and student scholars. They see us as effeminate bookworms, and we regard them as meatheaded apes who think with their pectorals. The situation here is a bit different, though. Most of what we study here prepares us, in one way or another, to kill people.
This colors your thinking—to put it mildly—and raises the stakes in any confrontation far beyond a little humiliation. From time to time, people get hurt—usually, the Magick students. We trainee adepts are mostly helpless without the differing laws of physics on the far side of the Winston Transfer. The Combat students train here in skills that work exactly the same on Earth as on Overworld.
And they're all huge.
So my heart stuttered a little as I approached. The crowd had thinned to emptiness, and the last of their voices faded down the hallway. Now I could hear what the neanderthal said.
It was that guy from the weight room, Ballinger. He hulked over Hari and jabbed at him with a finger the size of a sausage. "We'll see how funny you are, you little bastard. One of these days, when I catch you on the grounds. We'll see."
A strange, manic light shone in Hari's eyes that looked nothing like fear. "Fuck off, Ballinger. I'm busy. I'll kill you later."
Ballinger's ham-sized fist tangled itself in Hari's shirt and pinned him to the wall. "You want to say that again?"
I've seen this kind of confrontation before; a Magick student gets tired of the constant harassment and finally decides to fight back. This is the one where he gets hurt. Other times, I've hung back, to help the poor guy to the infirmary. Or if I saw the chance, sometimes I'd step between and try to defuse the situation. But this time
I caught Hari's eye and tipped him a wink ... then I got down on my hands and knees right behind Ballinger's ankles.
I don't know. Maybe it was from spending a week with Hari, fighting with him, breathing his air. Maybe he had infected me, somehow; maybe I was coming down with a bad case of Michaelson.
Hari got the biggest, most honestly happy grin I'd ever seen on his face. "What's the best season for a vacation, Ballinger?"
"Huh?"
"Fall, I think. Have a nice trip."
He rapped the inside of Ballinger's elbow to bend his arm, then pushed off from the wall. Ballinger went down over my back with the slow majesty of a toppling redwood. He hit whack-on his upper spine with a thunderous crash that shook the floor, and he lay there, stunned. Before I could get up, Hari skipped around me and kicked him with shocking force in the side of his head; Ballinger groaned and tried to cover, rolling weakly into a fetal position.
I got to Hari and shoved him off balance as he chambered for a kick at the back of Ballinger's neck. "Stop it, Hari! You'll kill him!"
He batted me aside. "Fucking right I will—"
Professional Hammet—the Virtual Acting instructor—came limping out the door on his mechanized legs just then and saved Ballinger's life. All he did was put himself in Hari's way until Hari got control of himself again; not even Hari would risk the consequences of striking an instructor.
Hammet was a retired Actor, an ex-swordsman who was far too bitter and generally crusty to tolerate any bullshit from anybody, especially not Ballinger when he tried to whine about Hari beating him up. Any Combat student who couldn't handle a couple Magick pussies wasn't worth his time. He wasn't interested in writing us up for fighting—too much goddamn trouble, filling out reports–but he also wasn't about to allow any crap to go on in the vicinity of his VA suite. He sent Ballinger one way and
us the other. Ballinger stumbled off, muttering under his breath and giving us murderous looks over his shoulder. I, on the other hand, flashed Chandra's access card.
Hammet didn't like the idea of letting anyone into the VA suite unsupervised, but he couldn't argue with Chandra. A quick screencall to the Chairman confirmed that I hadn't stolen the card, and Hammet reluctantly let us in. We slipped inside, and I closed the door behind us.
"Jesus, Hari' I said, leaning against the door. "That was too close. That was too scary. You could have killed him! Hari, your temper—that was frightening, seeing you that angry?'
Hari sighed; his shoulders slumped and he sank into a cross-legged tailor's seat on the floor. "What makes you think I was angry?" "Well, Jesus—"
"You should have let me kill him. It was my best chance. Next time I won't be able to catch him alone."
I stared, openmouthed.
He shrugged at me. "This thing between Ballinger and me, it's been building for a while."
"You provoked it," I said breathlessly. "You wanted that fight"
"Kris, it's him or me. If it'd been me on that floor, we wouldn't be having this little talk. Or any talk?'
"Drop the melodrama, Hari. So you've bumped chests with the guy once or twice, so what?"
He made a chopping motion with his hand. "You're Business, Kris. This is a Labor thing." He curled his fingers into a fist and stared at his knuckles like they were an unpaid invoice he couldn't cover. "Ballinger, he's from Philly's inner city. Him and me, we understand each other."
"I don't accept that. I can't accept that." But even as I said it, I found myself staring at his knuckles, too, which were mostly just knots of scar tissue like wads of old chewing gum.
"You don't have to. You're from a whole different world, Kris. That's why, once we get out of this toilet, I'm gonna be a famous Actor, and you're gonna be an elf-looking corpse."
He pushed himself to his feet. "I thought you were going to show me how you can whip shit on me in a VA suit."'
8
I spent a few minutes in the claustrophobic cubicle with Hari, helping him calibrate the inducers. The feedback suit is simple enough; it's mostly mechanical—it squeezes and pokes and shakes you or whatever. But the induction helmet takes some getting used to.
This is based on the same technology that allows first-handers in the Studio Adventure Rooms to share an Actor's sense/experience in real time. Calibration is really a pretty simple process, a matter of tuning the helmet to make a black dot coalesce on a white field, then stretch to a line, and spread into a well-focused version of the Studio logo; an analogous process takes white noise down to a pure tone, et cetera. It's easier in the VA suite than in the Studio, in fact the inducers here don't have to deal with scent, and the touch/pain data and kinesthesia is all handled by the feedback suit.
This kind of calibration is easy once you've done it a few times; it's practically second nature for anyone of a reasonable level of birth, but Hari was a Laborer, and so of course he'd never been inside a Studio and had never in his life adjusted an induction helmet. It made him edgy and snappish; he ended by slapping blindly at my hands—the induction helmets have eye shields to prevent actual vision from interfering with the neural stimulation—and telling me to get the fuck off him.
After I left his cubicle I went to the instructor's station, three broad curving banks of keys stacked like a steam organ. Four screens loomed over my head, where the VA computer would display multiple points of view for the benefit of the rows of empty seats in the Aud behind me.
I sank onto the bench, lowered my head onto arms folded across the lowest bank of keys, and gave myself over entirely to shaking.
I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step. I kept seeing the corridor ceiling, as though I had lain where Ballinger did; I couldn't stop thinking about how easily, almost carelessly, Hari could have taken his life. I saw myself on Overworld, walking along a city street: in the vision a man stepped out of an alley and drove a knife into my throat without a word—no demand for money, no snarl of threat, no chance to prepare myself.
No chance.
I've heard that your heels kick, that you convulse and shit on yourself when you die by violence. I felt it, again and again, feeling my own heels kick helplessly, far deeper than imagination, feeling it with the astonishing vividness of my flashes.
When I first started working with Hari, I'd felt like a lion tamer working with new cats. If I showed no fear, did nothing to trigger those predatory reflexes, I'd be safe. I'd felt even moderately heroic, kind of proud of myself, because I thought that by sheer force of character I could shove my life into shape. I could help Hari, I could beat Chandra, and I would sally forth into my vague and misty though certainly glorious Acting career.
But I sat there shaking because there is no safety.
Someday, you say the wrong thing to some random Hari Michaelson and an instant later you're on the floor choking out the last of your breath.
And it wasn't Hari that frightened me, even now; it was the world he lived in, the way I'd begun to see my life through his eyes. It was his intimate understanding of the fragility of my life, of his life, of anyone's and that he just didn't care.
And he wasn't unique; he wasn't even rare. Our Labor undercastes spawn endless Hari Michaelsons. Now, I began to understand what Hari meant when he said I "don't have it."
But did it matter? Without Overworld, did I want to live?
I keyed the default setting, then entered my own cubicle and quickly dressed. I needed no calibration; the computer recognized my neural field as soon as I keyed my helmet, and it automatically loaded my file.
The Meadow took shape around me, gently rolling grassy waves that stretched to the horizon in all directions. The sky above was cloudless and startlingly blue, and the sun hung motionless. This is the most basic level, often used for "duels" and magickal practice of all sorts. I had spent a lot of hours in this meadow. The soft ground is forgiving to knees bent in meditation, and no cloud ever passes before the sun.
The generic-featured manikin that represented Hari stood about four meters away. He stepped toward me, then stopped and looked around; suddenly he knelt and ran his fingers through the grass. "Wow."
"Yes, I know. Impressive, huh?"
"Wild. Hard-core wild." His planar features showed no expression, but I could hear the grin in his voice. "You look kind of faggy."
I shrugged with a sigh. I'd programmed my file to bring up features that looked more or less the way I would after my surgeries were completed: thick, close-cropped hair of platinum, elegantly delicate bone structure around large golden eyes, extravagantly pointed ears like a lynx. Maybe I'd overdone it a little.
He came closer. "You know, I've never seen you without that white mask on. Is this what you look like?"
"I might, eventually," I told him. "I'm not sure. I won't find out for another ten weeks."
He nodded. Suddenly I wished I could see his expression. "All right," he said. "What now?"
I took a deep breath. I'd been working for a solid week to bring him to this point; now that we were here, I had butterflies, a twinge of ... I don't know. Stage fright, maybe.
Maybe I was afraid he could beat me at this, too.
"No spells for this one," I said. "I'm going to take it easy on you. I should be able to whip you just fine using only Flow. Bring yourself to mindview. The computer will sense the pattern in your neural field and start to show you simulated Flow currents. You should also see my Shell."'
His manikin closed its eyes, and its thumbs and first two fingers of each hand came together. I, of course, no longer needed the Three Finger technique to shift to mindview—breath control and a simple act of will tuned my consciousness to the proper level. It worried me that Hari, ten days from his VA seminar, still needed physical cues.
The worry vanished in mindview; while w
orking magick, it's impossible to worry. The function of the advanced meditative techniques taught at the Conservatory is to focus the whole mind, even beyond the surface of consciousness, fully and without distraction upon the desired magickal effect. After two years of practice I could tune my mind like a surgical laser.
I've heard it said that every mage sees the Flow in terms of his or her own personal metaphor: as streams of light or a ghostly river, as long glowing strings coiling and uncoiling as they twist through the air, as floating globes of energy like ball lightning; I won't find out what mine will look like until I get to Overworld. The VA suite simulates Flow as shimmering lattices of force, over which scroll pulses of greater brightness or differing colors in the direction of the current.
His Shell looked pretty standard: an auralike netting of lines. It pulsed subtly in time with his heart and flickered like heat lightning around his hands and feet. I watched the Flow, waiting for him to start pulling.
His eyes opened, and he murmured reverentially, "I see it."
I let out a slow, whistling breath that I hadn't realized I'd been holding. "All right. I know this is new to you. I'll give you ten seconds to pull enough current to defend yourself."'
He stretched out his hand, upward toward the thickest part of the current, and his Shell extended a slow-moving pseudopod that touched the shimmering net and opened itself to power. The Flow swirled toward him, its stream deepening as it whirlpooled energy into Hari's Shell. His gesture indicated a future problem: an adept who needs his hands to pull is easily disabled—but this could be ignored today.
I counted a slow ten to myself, then another five, while I watched Hari's Shell spin up into ever-higher levels, brighter and brighter and scaling up the spectrum toward violet. He'd feed energy into his Shell until he could hold no more, then lash out at me with undifferentiated power. This is the crudest and least dangerous form of magickal combat, rather like fencing with foam-rubber paddles, but it's a pretty good place to start.
Blade of Tyshalle Page 3