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  Deathworld

  ( Net Force Explorers - 13 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Diane Duane

  When suicides are blamed on a punk/rock/morbo web site, Net Force Explorer Charlie Davis goes onto the site undercover — and unaware of its real danger…

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Diane Duane

  Deathworld

  Chapter 1

  Nick stood in front of the gateway, and looked up and up at the pillars of it, there in the dark and the silence.

  The polished basalt pillars were very tall. There was no seeing the top of them. They seemed to stretch forever up into the darkness. But in the empty black air between them, words hung burning in red. They read:

  ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

  Nick stood there in the silence for a few more moments, and then walked through the gates.

  The first thing to assault him was the music, but then that was what he had come for, what had brought him here in the first place. Nick was finding it difficult to believe that there had ever been a time when he hadn't known about that particular bass beat, pounding and insistent. It was such a contrast to the voice singing above it, starting out so calm and scaling over the course of almost every song into a completely abandoned shriek of cheerful rage. That was what had gotten Nick's attention the first time he'd seen a Joey Bane virteo: the cheerfulness. This man was angry, and enjoyed it, and didn't care who knew. The song that met you at the gateway was that first one he'd heard, the most famous of Bane's songs, and the one Nick liked the best: "Too Jagged Off to Care."

  Nick walked in through the darkness, and the music cycled up so that you could hardly hear the moans and wailing through or under it. The noise wasn't so bad up here, anyway. This was the Top Floor, a beginners' level, which, though it looked kind of impressive at first, was actually too dull and unshocking for any but the most hopeless types-mostly people who Nick thought must not get out a lot, or do anything much but answer their virtmail, too scared to venture out any further into virtuality. Nick had been just a little freaked by the concerted noise of human pain, the first time he had come in-but then the persistent welcoming beat of the Bane music had got him past that, and then after about fifteen or twenty minutes the landscape hadn't bothered Nick at all.

  It was a wasteland. Gray lowering sky, stunted dead trees, shattered boulders, the temperature warm enough to be stifling, no wind. It was desolate, a place that looked the way he felt at the moment, and with the background noise, the howling and wailing, it sounded the way he felt, too. Nick shuffled along through the sterile gray dust, his hands stuffed down in the pockets of his coverall, and made a depressed face. He could just hear what his mother would be saying now, if she could see him: "Do you have to slump like that? Stand up straight. Look at you, you'd think you had nothing to live for-though, then again, with that last report from school-"

  Nick frowned. He'd tried keeping his hands out of his pockets, as an experiment, for nearly a week. It didn't divert her from her usual themes in the slightest. School was her favorite subject right now. He was absolutely sick of hearing her go on and on about it. As if there aren't lots of terrific things to do besides college, Nick thought.

  And I'm passing everything, even if I'm not acing it. But his mom wouldn't listen to anything of the kind, and as for his dad, he didn't seem to care. That by itself should have been a positive thing. "Let the boy alone, Miriam," he would mutter as he headed for the back of the house and the implant suite. "He has enough problems." And Nick certainly did. But whatever his father was interested in hearing, Nick's problems weren't it. Nick had started to wonder what he would have to do to cause a little interest.

  Then he had found Deathworld.

  Not that the people who used the virtual domain called it that, though, among themselves. "The Circles" was one of their private names for it, or "Bane's Place" or "The Bottom Floors"-though none of the people Nick had met here so far had ever seen the bottom floors, reputed to be truly terrifying regions of torment and fear, and desperately cool. Nick was eager to find out whether these rumors were true or just hype. You had to expect a certain amount of hype in conjunction with a place like this. After all, it was run by the biggest name in "shadow jazz," a man who had made his first million by the time he was only four years older than Nick. Nick sighed. Now, there's a depressing thought… I wonder what Dad would think of that if I reminded him?

  Then again, probably it would be smarter not to. Neither Nick, in his wildest dreams, or his dad was going to be a millionaire any time soon. That was something of a sore point with his dad. His dad's job at the vid studio wasn't terribly secure at the moment-there had just been another round of cutbacks, and everybody was nervous. Nick supposed he should feel sorry for his dad, but his dad hadn't done a whole lot of feeling sorry for Nick's troubles lately. Nick shrugged. Let his dad deal with it.

  The old dry leafless tree that marked the near shore of the river was visible across the plain, and Nick made for it, kicking up the dust. If his dad was twitching over things at the moment, well, that was fine with Nick. When his dad had found out about Nick starting to spend time in Deathworld, when the bill for the household Net account came in last month, there had been trouble… more trouble than it merited, Nick had thought.

  "I don't like you giving my hard-earned money to that man," his father had said while eating his dinner, as Nick passed through the kitchen. "The guy's a wacko. The domain is full of unwholesome stuff. I saw something about it on the news a few days ago. And Joey Bane has enough money already without dumping ours on the pile, too. You just cut it out."

  Nick had muttered something noncommittal and escaped without making any statements about what he was going to do one way or another. But it was getting time for the new month's bill to come in, and his father would see the breakdown of the household's Net charges, and know where Nick had been.

  Gonna be noise…

  Yet Nick was peculiarly satisfied at the prospect. Whatever ruckus his dad kicked up, in Nick's personal life there was too much advantage to be derived from being here, and he wasn't going to give it up. Nick was not an outstanding student, not great at sports, no huge success with the girls, but he was in here, and few enough kids at school or outside of it had been able to get in. There was a waiting list, and you could sit on it for weeks or months without result.

  No one was sure what made the Bane computers pick you as one of the lucky ones to be let in. The assumption at school was that there was some kind of obscure "coolness" rating that no one understood. But being able to get access to the Circles at all, with a chance to see the dangerous stuff that was rumored to be down in those lowest levels, carried its own cachet. There were rumors about what had happened to people who had ventured down into those levels thinking they were tough enough… and discovering differently. There had been stories of some hos pitalizations… and everyone had heard about the suicides.

  They didn't worry Nick. And as he thought about his father's reaction to his access to Deathworld, they worried him even less. His dad's annoyance pleased him somehow. If Mom and I are supposed to make your life all nice and smooth for you, he thought, well, it's not gonna be that way. You haven't exactly made it that way for us. Mom can do what she wants-but for me, I'm going to enjoy myself a little. If it bothers you… tough. When I do what you want, it doesn't make any difference. Let's just see how it goes when I don't snap to attention every time you open your mouth. Right!

  And Nick grinned. It felt good to even have a chance to think such things, away from the little house where everything was always the same, and nothing ever seemed to change except for the worse
, no matter what he did to try to make things better.

  The Tree was closer, and Nick thought he could hear the cold sound of water flowing. Away across the dusty plain, he could see various people moving around-some of them in modern clothing, and real, or possibly so, many more of them in clothes from other times and places, decades old, centuries or millennia old, wandering around and lamenting their fates in a hundred languages and (as the song said) "a hundred shades of scream." It was noisy, but once you got past that, you noticed something. The screams tended to repeat themselves after a while, up here. Eventually you could start to work out, just by the sound, without trying to have any conversations, which of these figures were genuine people-other virtual visitors to Deathworld, the "Guest Dead" who stopped in, as Nick did, to make some noise of their own where it was safe to do so, and to remind themselves how pointless life was. Not that Nick was all that interested in the Guest Dead up at this level, especially since he didn't need them anymore. There was much more exciting business farther down, everybody said… people far more dangerous, more interesting… and more isolated from the real world. Nick was so tired of the real world.

  After he had beaten the first level, the screams and shrieks that went up on the smoky air from the tortured souls all around him stopped making much difference to Nick. Indeed, you got used to them after a while, and needed something a little more immediate, something newer and scarier, to shake you up. Though you couldn't just go and get it, for the system in Deathworld wouldn't let you down into the deeper circles until you had spent a certain amount of time in the upper ones, talking to the people you met there. When you met enough real people, and pooled with them what information you had about the level you were working on at the moment, your reward was to be allowed to progress deeper into the site, to the lower circles, where the virtual experiences got more vivid, more out-of-control.

  Bane's voice sang through the darkness:

  "The world gets more real, and things just get worse: run as fast as you like, you can't outrun the hearse.

  Nick kicked the dust up, approaching the Tree, and idly eyed the distant forms. In the beginning he had been surprised by the way the other people he saw had always seemed to be at a distance, no matter how long he walked toward them. Then he had discovered that this distancing was part of the domain's "idiom," and that it took an act of will to overcome it, not just the act of walking in a given direction. You had to go out of your way to actually talk to someone, had to strain against the fabric of this dark universe to break through. With some people you could strain against it all day and never get anywhere the -

  twouldn't hear you or see you. They stayed shut up in their own private little worlds. It was one of the games Bane's Place played with you, either personally or at one remove, through the domain itself. For if the Circles had a motto other than the one hanging back there between the gates, it was "People stink. Life stinks. Everything stinks. Even this."

  The music doesn't stink, though, Nick thought as he got closer to the Tree, noticing for the first time it not only had no leaves, but also no bark. Something seemed to have bitten it off. The music was one of the best things about this place, and Nick had no time for people who suggested it was all variations on the theme of "You're Going to Die Anyway, So You Might as Well Get Really Mad First."

  There's a lot more to it than that… Nick would know, for he had all the officially released song collections, and even a few of the "pirate" segments supposedly extracted from the depths of this very domain. Beyond getting far enough down to see if those pirate "lifts" were genuine, Nick's other great dream was to see one of the live Bane concerts some day. It wouldn't happen any time soon, for those concerts were much too expensive, the price of the tickets having to cover the (nowadays) extortionate price of actually taking a physical concert on the road. It was something few rock stars bothered to do anymore, in a time when the audience's experience could be arranged and controlled much more completely in a Net-based venue than anywhere in the real world. But Joey Bane did it, saying, "I'm just old-fashioned that way."

  There was a hope that Nick might be able to afford one of the virtual concerts, this year or early next. Assuming Dad doesn't blow his top when he sees the next Net access bill and ground me. But Nick had been squirreling away his allowance for a long time now, even diverting what should have been lunch money at school, happy to go hungry when he considered the alternative. Soon he would have enough to see The Man Himself in concert, hear in a live performance that great legendary scream of rage and despair at the end of "Lady Macbeth," see for himself the onstage carnage as Bane destroyed yet another tenthousand-dollar electric lute and the instruments of everybody else in his band at the end of "Cut the Strings." That would be worth any amount of grief from his dad and mom. Just a couple of hours of freedom, Nick thought. In the company of someone who knows what the world's really like, who doesn't pull his punches, who tells the truth about how awful everything is… The dream had kept him going for a long while.

  It wasn't so bad to hear that everything stank, after all. As long as you knew that there were lots of people who agreed with you that, painful though it might be, the truth was best. Someday, when I move out, when I'm on my own, I'll spend as Inuch time in Bane's Place as I want… and in other places, places on the edge, the scary stuff, the stuff my folks and all the deluded others don't want me to know about. They can wrap themselves up in their nicey-nice world if they like and pretend not to notice how awful things are. I'm going out where things are real. I'm strong enough to take it…

  Nick was humming the first verse of "Nicey-Nice" as he came up to the Tree, and the air around him was beginning to mimic him with the backbeat of the song, and he could see the cold smoke coming up from the river, when he saw something that hadn't been there the last time he came. A rock. And sitting on the rock was a figure wearing the most tightly tailored black slicktite possible, with what at first glimpse looked like a big black egg cradled in his lap. As Nick got closer, he saw it better, and caught his breath; for even in this dreary light the "egg" shone and glinted as if it lay under an invisible spotlight. It was a smooth, rounded shape, not really black but a brown so dark as to be mistaken for black, with a short neck-an electric lute with an ebony body, all inlaid with a spidery platinum webwork-that most famous of instruments in dark jazz, Camiun. There were people who claimed that Camiun must be a little bit alive, or else haunted, since no mere man could make an instrument sound like that-like a soul in torment, or one just escaped from it. Joey Bane had said that on the day he discovered that the world was completely and irreversibly wicked, he would cut Camiun's strings, five minutes before he killed himself…

  He's only virtual, Nick thought, stopping by the stone. But the slender, muscular, dark-clad figure gazing down into the icy gray water flowing by now shook his longish hair back and glanced up at Nick sidewise… and Nick gulped. He had talked to people here who'd claimed to have met this particular apparition. Half the time he'd figured they'd been making it up. But here he was, or rather one of the virtual representations of him: Joey Bane himself-the singer in his guise as Dark Poet from his second song collection, Discourse with Spirits, looking out across the unrelieved darkness of the landscape behind him with an expression both morose and amused. The lute in his lap hummed softly to itself, because its master's fingers were presently motionless on the strings.

  "Hey, Joey," Nick said.

  That ironic smile curved itself up a little harder. Hard was the best word to describe it; it sat oddly on what would otherwise have been a young and innocent face.

  "Nick," Joey said. "How goes the world?"

  The domain's computer knew who Nick was, of course… but for a moment all he could do was shake his head. There were few enough, places like this in the Net. Mostly big celebrities didn't bother going to the trouble to personalize their domains-there was usually just an introduction when you came in. In this case, whoever designed the domain had gone to some tro
uble to customize the output for the users. That was probably one of the reasons it was so popular. You got the chance to really talk to the star, or at least to the Net-encoded version of his personality.

  "Badly. As usual," Nick said. That was the customary response, the answer that the audiences shouted back to The Man Himself at his concerts, live or visual, when he asked the question. The virtual Joey Bane smiled a little more grimly and put his hand over Camiun's strings to still the lute. It argued the point a little, fizzing and mut- tering under his touch.

  "Yeah, yeah, everybody wants it their way," Joey growled at the lute, and then looked up again. "You just on your way in?" Bane's simulacrum said. "Can't see you hanging around this level after you've solved it. Unless it's the music." He looked bored at this possibility.

  "No," Nick said, "I'm ready for something new."

  "Bet you are," Bane said. "Been stuck on three for a couple of weeks now. Hit your level?"

  It was, among Banies, a rude question, suggesting you were incapable of taking the hard stuff, the real world, the truth… or that you were just dim. Had someone Nick's age said something like this to him, the circumstances might have become violent. But this was Joey Bane, and that ironic look was dwelling on Nick, watching to see how he reacted.

  "Don't know yet," Nick said, in a sudden burst of humility.

  Bane looked at him darkly for a moment, and then laughed. "Nothing wrong with not knowing," he said. "You look pretty down, though."

  "Aaah…" The implant had to be feeding the Bane-domain computer his EEG and other information that would have betrayed that fact. But the thin, hard face was also kindly, in a strange way, and Nick said, after a moment, "It's just my folks."

  "Aha," Joey Bane said. He stroked a dark, dissonant spatter of notes out of Camiun. "The eternal problem. Can't choose 'em, can't get rid of 'em, can't do 'em without messing up the rug." He snickered softly. "We've still got a fair bunch of 'em down here, though. Fifth and sixth floor down, mostly."