Deathworld Read online

  “I swear,” Mark muttered, “once we both get somewhere physical at the same time, I’m going to whack you a good one with something that can’t just be deleted. Here, put it on.”

  He helped Charlie into the jacket, a rather formal-looking one of the kind a gentleman might wear to dinner. To Charlie, it felt completely normal. “Nice material,” he said, patting it down.

  Mark stood back from him. “It should be,” he said, rather sourly, “considering what it would cost you per hour if someone, I should use the word loosely, ‘professional’ had built this for you.”

  “I feel like a waiter,” Charlie said. “Probably I look like one, too. So where’s the switch?”

  Mark sat on the Rolls and shook his head. ” ‘Switch’?” he said. “Please. And if you look like anything, you look like a doctor. And you’ll probably make a great one someday, as long as you don’t try understanding anything more complicated than a stethoscope, okay? … Look, there aren’t any switches. You just wear it into Deathworld. You wear it out again. Make sure you don’t take it off-not only because you won’t be able to record anything you’re perceiving, but because it’s set up to work only when it’s in circuit with your own virtual account and your own implant. I haven’t been able to implement a whole lot of fail-safes, partly because I still don’t completely understand how to subvert all their systems. But there’s a real good chance that if the jacket comes out of circuit with you, with your implant I mean, every alarm in that place will go off. This would be a bad thing, because immediately afterward, every security op associated with Joey Bane Enterprises, not to mention every lawyer they’ve got, thousands of them probably, will be chasing you down the labyrinthine ways. You’re getting all this?”

  “Uh, yes,” Charlie said. He was also enjoying it. It was always fun to get Mark annoyed about something. “Had a bad time getting the details worked out?” he asked.

  Mark glowered at him. “I spent the better part of five hours analyzing Deathworld’s security systems,” he said.

  “Oh, well, five hours,” Charlie said.

  “And if you think I enjoyed it, you’re-”

  Charlie started laughing. He couldn’t help it. “Of course you enjoyed it!” he said. “You’re a pirate at heart, Gridley. That’s why it drives you nuts to be your father’s son.” He laughed some more, unable to stop.

  Mark gave him a crooked smile. “Yeah, yeah, Mr. Psychoanalyst,” he said. “Well, you can’t help it, I guess, it’s your mom’s side of the family. Look, never mind that. Just don’t let this thing off your back, okay? You can wear a ‘seeming’ over it-in fact, probably it’d be smart if you did.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said.

  “I had to do some jury-rigging,” Mark said. “The security systems in Deathworld are really complex, and to keep the flow of information moving out of there and into your space, I had to do spectrum-fission on it, scatter it up and down several different kinds of in-Net communication then reweave it to `singleband’ throughput on the outside.”

  “I hope that wasn’t meant to make some kind of sense to me,” Charlie said, checking the jacket to see if it had an inside pocket. It did.

  “That’s data storage, in there,” Mark said. “Meanwhile, just think of the outbound signal as white light broken down to a spectrum, then ‘welded’ back to white again,” Mark said. “The important thing is, it worked when I tested it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Though the first couple of test cycles were interesting. What matters is that what you see and hear will go back to your site and store themselves there. One thing: When you’re done with the jacket, don’t leave it in your workspace. Leave it in mine.”

  “Oh? How come?”

  Mark gave him another of those endearing it’s-like-thisstupid expressions. “If something goes wrong,” he said, “or on the other hand, if something goes right, and in the unlikely event that someone gets cranky afterward about what’s been done-you want the Deathworld people to take you to court for theft of intellectual property and copyright violations, thus ruining your not-even-startedyet brilliant medical career for ever after? Or do you want them to come after me for it, and let me take the heat as the Brilliant But Slightly Unstable Genius Son of the Director of Net Force?”

  Phrased that way, the answer more or less made itself obvious. “Uh,” Charlie said.

  “Exactly, `uh,’ ” said Mark. “So I’ve left my space open for you, day and night. As soon as you’re done with a run, leave the jacket here. Over the desk. When you’ve done that and left, the logs at my end will wipe, leaving no ‘electron trail’ to your workspace. That much I managed with no trouble. But the rest of it remains technically a little fragile, so as I said, don’t lose that jacket, don’t take it off… .”

  “Right.”

  “As for the rest of it,” Mark said, “per our discussion about what you think’s going to start to happen later, I’ve `trip wired’ the outside of your own workspace. I think I can safely say that no one will be able to detect that trip wiring. The minute someone tries to hack into any of your accounts-either yours or your folks’ alarms will go off here in my space, and my system will start a traceback on whoever’s trying to get at your files. When that happens, your own space will alert you, if you’re in Death-world, through the links I’ve built into the jacket. For times when you’re not virtual, you’ll want to install some other alert method, to your home comms or whatever-I’ve left the ‘hot ends’ of the alert routines visible for you, in your space. Hook them up whatever wayyou like, then camouflage them. After that, we’ll have the information we need to send Net Force after whoever it is. And then you and I will be covered with glory.”

  Mark grinned. “Assuming,” he added, “that they don’t pitch eight kinds of fit when they find out what we’re doing.” He made a pointing-upward gesture that indicated the entire adult world in general, but specifically his father, and his mother, and Charlie’s mom and dad, and James Winters. “Because you haven’t told them …”

  Charlie made an unhappy face. “How did you know?”

  “The same way I know that I haven’t exactly told my dad about what we’re up to,” Mark said. “You know you’re being careful … I know you’re being careful. But they don’t understand, do they?”

  “I’m not sure they would,” Charlie said, “no.” The thought of what his father’s face would look like, if he told him what he was planning to do, had been haunting him the last day or so. And as for Mom … But haunting him more assiduously were the faces of Renee, and Malcolm, and Jeannine, and the rest of them. No one else was in the position to find out as much about what had happened to them as Charlie was. And more to the point, time was running out. There was only so much of the month left, at which time Charlie was sure that the person who he was sure had been stalking the “suicides,” and was somehow complicit in their deaths, might well go dormant again. A year would go by during which media and police attention to the suicides would wane, and then, Charlie was sure, there would be more of them.

  No more, he had thought last night, as he’d been going over his plans, and had started putting them into operation while scanning through some of the bleak-sounding messages left in the Deathworld “bulletin board” system. No more deaths. The image of the dim hallway, the peeling paint, a huddled form lying across the room from him, intruded itself again. No more.

  “Hey,” Mark said.

  Charlie looked up.

  Mark leaned back a little, let out a breath, looked the jacket up and down one more time. “Not that it’s not a good idea. But are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?”

  Charlie walked around slowly and waved his arms around a little in the jacket, getting the feel of it. There was a faint fizzing sensation associated with it, something like the sensation that came with a mouthful of soft drink before you swallowed it. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s partly that I know I can pull this off, solve this problem, without having to run to ‘the grown-ups’ for help. B
ut there’s also the time problem. If I waited to do this the way my folks or Winters would rather have me do it, it could get to be too late.” He shook his head. “So I don’t see that I have a choice. There are things more important than just ‘being careful.’ “

  “Yeah.” Mark let out a long breath.

  Charlie sighed as he came back and leaned against the Rolls. “Besides, for Winters at least, I’m going to need more solid evidence than I’ve currently got. What I’m sitting on right now won’t stand up.”

  “Well,” Mark said, “you’ll have some solid stuff pretty soon, if you’re right.” He leaned back on the Rolls’s hood. “But if you insist that it’s not going to be enough just to have proof that someone tried to hack into your workspace …”

  “It’s going to have to go a little further than that,” Charlie said. Meaning that I am going to have to stake myself out as bait, not just virtually … but physically. The prospect still made him nervous enough, though, that he was unwilling to say it out loud, even to Mark.

  “I could see where it might,” Mark said. “But the implementation’s gonna be tricky. How’s your research been coming?”

  “Oh, fine,” Charlie said. “There’s tons of stuff available on the subject on the Net.” He smiled, but the expression was grim. Suicide, even in these affluent times, was not something that was showing any tendency to go away. “I get depressed sometimes just reading it.”

  “That might be a good thing, under the circumstances. If one of the people you’re interested in finding actually comes across you, you’ll look more like you’re really likely to do something about it.”

  “Don’t even joke about it.” Charlie had spent the last couple of evenings, when he wasn’t busy with other things, studying the symptoms of impending suicide as carefully as if he was about to have a test on them … which, in a way, he was. If there was anything he knew about himself at the moment, it was that he wasn’t in the slightest suicidal, but the descriptions of the feelings of those who were filled Charlie with pity. And the idea of such people being ruthlessly taken advantage of by someone with another agenda besides pity, a deadly one, left him furious.

  Mark’s expression was somber. “I wasn’t joking … not really. But look … the minute you decide it’s enough, that you have the data you need …”

  “I’ll call.”

  “Call a minute early,” Mark said, “just to be safe. I won’t be far from my workspace anytime I’m not in school.”

  Charlie got up, dusted the jacket down again. “Cut it out!” Mark said. “It’s not like it can get dirty, or wrinkled.”

  “One less thing to worry about,” Charlie sighed. He looked up at the faraway ceiling of the VAB. A couple of buzzards peered down at him from the tops of their metal cliffs. “You get it to rain again?”

  Mark shook his head. “You can’t hurry nature,” he said, with a wry look. “Besides, I’m still analyzing the phe- nomenon… . There are some weird things about the humidity that have to be resolved… . When are you going to go in and try that out?”

  “Tonight,” Charlie said. “My folks are going out. I won’t be disturbed. And then again early in the morning, and late tomorrow night again, and early in the morning after that… .” He slid down off the hood of the Rolls. “Until we get a result.”

  “Assuming you do,” Mark said. “Well, just be careful. I’ll be keeping an eye on the jacket’s link to my space tonight, and whenever I’m in from now on. Yell if you need anything.”

  “Believe me, I will.” Charlie headed toward the door back into his workspace. “I’ll call you as soon as I go in, so you can check the link. Let me know if you find out you’re going to be elsewhere, though.”

  “No chance of that tonight,” said Mark, “or in the next few. At least not till I can get this thing’s armor to stop going away without warning… .” He tapped the Skoda’s hood. It lifted itself smoothly up. A moment later Mark was half under it, nothing showing but his neodenimed legs. Charlie took in this view, smiled slightly, and headed back to his space.

  No one looked twice at the lone kid, small, kind of young looking, dressed in worn slicktites and a floppy striped “sagdown” shirt several years out of style, as he wandered around in the ash and darkness of the Eighth Circle. Banies came in all ages and sizes, and could look any way they pleased if they felt like going to the trouble of adopting a seeming, or could show themselves “as they were”- though if this was how this kid really looked, there were doubtless those who would have found him a little strange. His sense of style needed work, and the weary look on his face alone was enough to suggest that he probably was as depressing as a Joey Bane lyric himself.

  He had been here for a while now, looking around him like someone feeling slightly lost. Anyone interested enough to notice would have seen that he tended to avoid the other Banies in the area, by and large, though he spoke politely enough to them when they approached him. Almost always, after a little while, they went off and left him where he was, and he found himself alone again.

  And soon enough-though perhaps not soon enough for him-someone noticed.

  The boy was kicking through the ash of the outer reaches with his back to Mount Glede, while in the area through which he walked, nothing could be heard but one song, over and over again, repeating at his request to the environment: the final chorus from the Seattle concert version of “Cut the Strings,” with the six-minute instrument destruction sequence ending in the demolition of the venerable old King Dome, scheduled to be blown up anyway that year after the Quake of ‘22. For about the fifteenth time in a two-hour period, that vast crash and shriek of destruction filled the air, but the images accompanying it were being suppressed, and only darkness surrounded the boy who was listening, standing there, staring at the ash around his feet, like a dark statue… .

  When the girl approached him, seemingly melting out of the storm of black ash that was falling at the moment, the look he gave her was less than interested.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” the boy said, looking her over dully. Long dark coat, short purple skirt, black vee-neck top, purple hair, pale skin-she was taller than he was, maybe a year older, and she looked faintly annoyed. “What?” he said then, for she was staring at him.

  “Are you lost?” she said.

  “No.” He turned away.

  “Well, you look lost,” she said after a moment. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone more lost-looking than you in the last couple months.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, glowering. “I don’t recall asking you for your opinion.”

  He walked away from her … then stopped suddenly, staring down at the crevasse which had just opened up at his feet.

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” the girl said, sounding slightly amused. “Get very far on your own?”

  “Not really,” the boy muttered. “This place is an exercise in frustration.”

  “Life stinks… .” she said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “That you’re not going to get very close to the Keep without a guide,” she said. “Even the walk-throughs mention that. Unless you’ve got one of the newer ones… .”

  He backed away from the crevasse, angling a little away from the girl. “Maybe I don’t want a guide,” he said.

  “Maybe you should have brought a chair,” she said, “because you’re gonna be stuck here a good long while without someone to go ‘pathfinder’ for you.”

  He started away from her, and almost as if the environment had heard her, another crevasse came tearing along the ground and passed right in front of him. There it stopped, while black ash snowed down from the edges of it into the fiery depths, glittering in the hot light.

  He stared down into the crevasse, and his shoulders slumped. “It’s never gonna stop doing that, is it?” he said.

  “Nope,” she said. “But some of us get the hang of ‘anticipating it.”

  She tilte
d her head a little to one side, watching him. After a moment he turned, slow and reluctant. “All right,” he said. “What would you suggest?”

  “Telling me your name, for one thing,” she said. “Ch-Manta,” he said.

  “Manta. I’m Shade,” she said. “You’re pretty new around here, huh?”

  “Yeah. Well, no. I’ve been here awhile … but I don’t know the place real well as yet… .” He breathed out, then, turning again to look past the crevasses, across the dark plain toward Mount Glede. “I don’t know if I’m going to,” he said.

  “You got problems?” Shade said, sitting down beside him.

  “Huh?” Manta said, looking shocked. “Oh, no … everything’s fine.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Shade said. “You look sad.”

  “How can I look sad?” Manta said. “See, I’m smiling.” He produced a smile that even in the darkness was not terribly convincing.

  Shade laughed softly. It managed, somehow, to be a sorrowful laugh. “Yeah,” she said, “I see that. I know that smile … I’ve worn it, sometimes.”

  “Have you been here a long time?” Manta said.

  “A couple of years,” said Shade, “in and out. I know the place pretty well.”

  “What’re you doing here, then?” Manta said, studying the ground. “If you’ve been here that long, you should have solved the place by now… .”

  “Oh, there’s more to Deathworld than just solving it,” said Shade, pulling her feet up under her to sit cross-legged. “It’s about people as much as anything else… .”

  “Seeing them get punished,” Manta said bitterly, “yeah. That’s worth something.”

  “It’d be pretty dull around here without the Damned,” said Shade, glancing around her as a few of them ran by a few hundred meters away, pursued by demons. A couple of the Damned pitched straight down into a crevasse that opened before them, and the demons stood on the air above them and peered down, watching them fall. “Sounds like you’re enjoying it, though.”