Deathworld Read online

  ” ‘Still’? Why aren’t all of them here permanently?” “Oh, all of them spend a little time here,” Bane said. “Mostly the part of their lives called ‘your childhood.’ “

  Nick shot the virtstar a look.

  Bane raised his eyebrows. “Anyway, the ones who stay,” Bane said, “the really hard cases, are mostly down on six. With the other violent types. A few manage to get farther down … you ever get that far, you’ll see.” He shook his head, smiled again, touched Camiun’s strings, and played a little minor-key imitation of an ambulance siren. “Gets tough down there,” Bane said. “Don’t know if you’re really interested in going down that deep anyway, a nice kid like you… .”

  “Won’t be any time soon for me,” Nick said, “at the rate I’m going.” He thought he might as well tell the truth, even though it was embarrassing.

  Bane looked at him. “Huh,” he said. “Well, guess what, you’ve lucked into today’s special offer. Every day we pick a few people for an upgrade. So come on down!”

  To Nick’s absolute astonishment, the earth started to rumble. Joey Bane got up, holding Camiun by the neck, and laid it over his shoulder, turning his back on the cold gray river. “You want to stand back, now,” Bane said, stepping away from the rock. “You fall down the hole and land on your head, we won’t be responsible… .”

  The earth shuddered harder, and from the air all around them came an upscaling moan that turned into a screech, as if the ground itself was in torment. It split open before them, raggedly, with a terrible sound of ripping stone, and the chasm went stitching and stretching itself away for what looked like half a mile to either side before it stopped, and the rumbling settled back into silence. A fearsome red glow came boiling up out of it, as if light could be made liquid: a seething light, full of screams and howls of desperation and anguish.

  “Hey, spaz,” Nick said softly, in complete admiration.

  Bane stood there tapping his foot for a moment, then shook his head. “And am I supposed to climb down there?” he said to the air in extreme annoyance. “Hey! Tech!!”

  An escalator appeared in front of them, leading down into the Pit.

  “You can’t get good help anymore,” Bane muttered, heading for the escalator, “I’m telling you. Stinking road- ies, I should never have let them unionize. Come on.”

  The two of them got onto the escalator and started trun- dling down into the sulfur-smelling depths, past the thick layer of stone that made up the “floor” of the first level. Nick was glad to see it drop away behind him, for it really was rather boring, full of nothing but “screamers” and clueless Guest Dead wandering around trying to figure out what made this place so cool. This way of leaving the level was easier and less trouble than finding the rope ladder that was the usual way down onto the next level, the Second Floor.

  They passed the last of the first rock floor, now a ceiling, and came down past that second level. The view was better from this clear space in the middle of everything than it would be on that level itself, for the weather in there was really foul. Right across that cratery, mud-colored landscape a terrible hurricane of a wind was endlessly screaming, full of dirt and garbage, blowing wildly assorted junk past you all the time-drink cans and snack wrappers, torn, dirty paper and old shopping bags and small showers of gravel and stones, all borne along with a grimy near-horizontal rain. Various people were blown along there, too, or what remained of them. Until you saw their expressions, it was hard to tell whether they were chasing each other or actually fastened to each other somehow, so that where one went the other had to go, too. Their faces, though, when you caught a glimpse of them through the murk, were furious. They snatched and grasped at the person to whom they were bound, tearing flesh as they rolled and tumbled along around the great second-level circle, blown irresistibly by that wind.

  “Ah, love,” Bane said, “ain’t it grand… .” He watched one particularly entangled couple go blowing by, clutching and scratching at each other, shrieking in pain and rage. “You’ve been through here, of course… .9 9

  “Didn’t think much of it,” Nick said, somewhat bemused for the moment by the sight of someone else being blown by on that wind-a thin, middle-aged, hostile-looking woman, pedaling a bicycle. A faint yapping was coming from the bike’s basket, but it was drowned by the howl of the wind almost instantly as the woman was swept away out of sight. Where had he seen that image before?

  “Ah, you’ve never been in love, then,” Joey Bane said. “Excuse me. Lust. Well, give it a few years. You’ll be grabbing at some obscure object of desire and trying to pull all the best chunks out of it whether it wants you to or not, just like everybody else. And it’ll stink. But then, doesn’t everything?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said with some pleasure, though he tried to sound casual about it, as they dropped past the floor of that level and toward the next one. It was not a sentiment he would have gotten very far with at home. That was one of the things that made Deathworld such a trip.

  “Intelligent young guy,” said Joey Bane. “You’ll go far. Well, down a few, anyway.” And Nick had to grin. He knew this was all automatic, he wasn’t as stupid as some of the people who insisted that all these virtreps of Bane were actually the man himself, “slumming” in his Net domain … though there were rumors that sometimes, down in the deepest levels, you might run across one that actually was Joey Bane, rewarding some unusually persistent or talented Banie with a personal audience. For his own part, while he was still up in these levels, Nick knew perfectly well that the master site computer had been recording his preferences since he started coming here that it knew where he’d been and whom he’d talked to and what he’d said, and was tailoring his experience second by second to fit his needs and keep him coming back. It was probably reading Nick’s body information through the implant chair right now, brainwaves and pulse and blood pressure and whatever, to make sure the things hap pening around him went in ways that he would like, that would make him keep coming back. But that was no big deal. Marketing computers all over the Net did that. And at the same time, it was fun. It was neat to talk to some- thing that Bane himself had helped program to sound and react exactly the way he would… .

  They slid on past the level of the winds and the storm-borne couples. “Idiotic behavior, really,” Joey was saying as he turned away from the view, “claiming they can’t control themselves, that love made them do it. Poor excuse. So now they really can’t control themselves.” He gave Nick a narrow-eyed look that might have had a wink associated with it, but the light changed again as they plunged down past the next level of floor/ceiling and down into Floor Three, and Nick couldn’t be sure what he had seen. “You wouldn’t ever try a weak excuse like that, though… .”

  “Uh, no,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, right,” Joey Bane said, and didn’t quite snicker. “Third floor, gluttony, excess, and general overindulgence …”

  If the weather had seemed bad on the level above, it was worse down here. Dirty sleet and freezing rain fell endlessly from blackness, and people both too fat and too thin ran along under it as if being scourged by whips, while behind them came a monstrous black-pelted shape, howling and snarling and grabbing them up in its jaws … grabbing them up and chewing on them like newly caught rats, times three. It had three sets of jaws, three heads-huge, ugly ones like those of pit bulls-and six burning eyes. At least Nick thought he counted six. This was an image he had been careful to keep his distance from, the couple times he’d been down here. If the Dog caught you, it could strip you of half your “time” credits in the domain and make you do the last couple of levels over again, which would get real boring real fast. Besides, it had been eating people when he had been here last, and the view had not been pretty. Nick’s feeling at the time was that this was an aspect of “the truth” that it was going to take him a while to get used to.

  The monster bounded to the edge of the floor of that circle and began barking and slavering furiously at the two of
them as they passed. “Bad dog,” Joey Bane yelled at it, “bad dog! Shut your mouths, it’s me! The neighbors are gonna start complaining again!”

  The monster kept right on barking as they passed. “Obedience school for that one was a waste of time,” Joey muttered as the escalator took them by. “I tell you, this is the last time I let my sister pass off the runt of the litter on me. The poor guy’s damaged. And he never gets enough to eat, either. He bolts his food and then he can’t hold it down, and he … Oh, look at that.” Bane turned his head and yelled over the railing of the escalator, “Tech! You better get somebody over here to clean that up! If he slips in that and hurts himself, the vet bills are coming out of your pay-”

  Nick wasn’t looking, and was trying not to look like he wasn’t looking, as the hound went bounding off after another trio of running, shrieking prey. “The stomach acid eats the flooring,” Joey Bane said. “Not the dog’s fault, it’s his diet. Fad dieters and runaway gourmets, what do you expect? They’re so hung up on eating, or not eating, that they don’t care what it does to them, or how many millions of people they starve in the process of feeding just a few a ton more than they need, or making special foods for themselves with no calories to speak of… .”

  Nick gulped. He was hanging on to his control as best he could, trying to stay cool, to look cool, like none of this bothered him. It may take me a while, he thought, I don’t care how much time I’m going to have to spend in here, but I’m going to learn to cope with it whatever I do. I am not going to look stupid in front of-

  “Fourth floor down,” Joey Bane said, looking over the rail of the escalator. “The Haves and the Throwaways. All gamblers, really, except some of them do it with stocks and bonds and margins and others do it at the gaming tables or in factories where they burn up resources that can’t ever be replaced… .” He made a gentle tsk, tsk noise as the two of them passed on by and downward. “This is an awfully underrated area. Hardly anyone spends more than the minimum time watching this bunch. It must be the suits.”

  Or the screams, Nick thought, or these were truly appalling. They came out of thick billowing darkness, and there were terrible crashing and crushing noises coming out of it as well, like a constant multicar accident being continually enacted in the gloom. Nick swallowed as another crash produced a chorus of screams. They did not sound like the kind of thing you would hear in a madefor-Net drama. They sounded real.

  “Accountants,” Joey Bane said idly as they went past one more thick rock floor/ceiling. “Not so quiet and colorless, are they? This is nothing, though. Wait till you see what happens to the lawyers. Oh, not all of them, by any means. Many of them are very nice people, but the ones we get down here- Ah, here we are. Five …”

  The music had been scaling up around them all the while. Now, as they came out on the floor of the fifth level, it crashed into the savage main chorus of “You Said You Weren’t Gonna Wait Up,” and just as Nick was about to start singing the next verse, the music started to fade away into silence. This was not one of those dark circles, and Nick swallowed when he saw what was there.

  Huge cliffs reared up in the distance on all sides, and beneath them strode and strutted gigantic parent-figures dressed absurdly in clothes dating to before the turn of the last century. Bizarre floppy sweats and backward hats, and even stranger, the non-“smart” jeans of the previous few decades, with T-shirts that hadn’t yet learned the art of molding themselves to the wearer’s body. They stalked around the dark rocky circle holding huge weapons in their hands-though they hadn’t started out as weapons, actually, but as hammers and ax handles, kitchen knives and rolled-up newspapers. Their eyes glowed with a ter rible light, and it wasn’t until one or another of them had passed you that you saw the demons’ wings, sinewed and fingered like those of bats, stunted and clawed. Among these awful figures, reaching no higher than their knees and running in all possible directions to get away from them, were adult figures in modern clothes, sliktites and leotites and new chitons, all terrified, all trying to get away … but they couldn’t. There was nowhere for them to run, no way out, no way to climb the slick cliffs that bounded the circle here. The giant parent-demons pursued the helpless adults and attacked them with the household implements they carried. Nick wanted to look away, but an awful fascination kept him watching. The punishment was deadly and endless. Broken heads resealed themselves, packing the brains tracelessly back in: broken bones reknit themselves, and bruises spread just long enough to go black, then paled back out of lividity to normal flesh again as the demons with the clubs and ax handles chased after the abusing parents and gave them back what they had given their own children.

  Next to Nick, Joey Bane was smiling slightly and singing what the lyric of the next verse would have been if the “outer” music had still been playing: “She hit it right on when she said it: ‘They only hit you till you cry…

  And the tormented ones were crying as they fled, yelling and howling as loudly as they could, but the demon-parents were all deaf, and couldn’t hear them, and just kept hitting. Around and around they went, the demons beating their victims while intoning phrases like “This hurts me more than it hurts you” and “You’ll thank me for this some day… .”

  Nick had heard that one often enough lately, about college. Though no one had hit him while saying it, he had been bruised enough by the words, by Mother’s absolute certainty that Nick would someday actually thank her for making him so miserable. Does she even listen to herself say these things? he wondered furiously, but she was suf fering from the same syndrome as the demons here were. She didn’t hear him… .

  “Nasty neighborhood,” Joey Bane said after a moment, lounging against a handy rock. “But thesepeople should have known better. They started smacking their kids around to keep them in line … forgetting how they’d been smacked for the same reasons when they were kids, and it hadn’t worked then, and it wasn’t going to work now… .” His eyes blazed. “Or screaming at their kids day after day, telling them how stupid they are … until the kids finally begin to believe it. There are worse things than that, but not many… .”

  Nick swallowed. “Do you think,” he said slowly, “that … somewhere … this really happens to people like that?”

  Joey Bane threw him a look. “I don’t know about somewhere,” he said. “But it sure happens here … and that’s enough for me.” He raised his eyebrows. “You?”

  Nick swallowed. “Yeah,” he said softly.

  “Right,” Joey said. “So listen … I’ve got places to be.” Over his shoulder Camiun muttered a few notes under its breath. “Have fun while you’re here … and take a good look around before you leave, so you can work out how to get down here on your own. The usual clues are here and there. Don’t forget, it’s not just child abusers who’re down here. We’ve got all kinds of violence on this level.”

  He started off across the circle. Suddenly, in the direction Bane was heading, Nick could see something that hadn’t been there before. Where there had only been tall cliffs, now he saw the towered and crenellated outlines of the ramparts and seven gateways of the Keep of the Dark Artificer. Nick was suddenly afire with excitement again. They said that once you got in there, you could hear music that had never been heard in concert … and with the music, said the rumors, went images of fury and violence and despair that were too wild and scary for anything of them ever to have been shown elsewhere in public. Gotta see that!

  Nick started after Joey Bane, already just imagining what the other kids in school would say when they heard that not only was he a regular in Bane’s Place, but that he’d gotten through the gates of the Keep and taken the Oath never to reveal what he had seen there. This is gonna be spat beyond belief …

  But Joey stopped and half-turned. “And where do you think you’re going?”

  “With you!”

  “Not today, pally,” Bane said.

  “But you said it was an upgrade-”

  “One-time,” Joey Bane’s vi
rtual self said. “And did I say sixth floor? Didn’t say a word about six. Two levels, that’s what you get today.”

  Nick glared at him.

  “What, you’re complaining?” Bane said, and chuckled. “What a little ingrate. You ought to be careful … this kind of thing can go on your permanent record.”

  The good-natured mockery was somehow disarming. Nick’s anger began to seep away. “Please,” he said. “I just want to see inside the Keep… .”

  “What, for free? Half the Banies on the planet want in there,” Bane said. “What makes you so special that you get it without working for it? Nobody gets in there until they solve all the higher levels and earn the points.. You know the drill.”

  Nick frowned. “This whole thing has just been a come-on, hasn’t it?” he said.

  “Hey, all of life is marketing these days,” Bane said. “Look … I’m in a good mood. You just spend the rest of the session walking around, getting to know some of these people. If people is the word we’re looking for.”

  Nick looked behind him to where the vanished escalator had been. “But how am I supposed to get out? I haven’t solved Four yet, I don’t know where the entrance to this level is.”

  “Oh, well,” Joey Bane said, “I guess that’s fair. Look, you see those two over there-” He pointed off to one side, by the base of one of the huge cliffs, where a man with a lion’s head and a woman with a tiger’s were tearing at each other with terrible claws. “They might tell you the way out if you can get them to stop fighting for a moment.” Bane looked at them and shook his head. “Songwriters,” he said softly. “You can get too hung up on whose name comes first in the credits… .”

  Nick looked at them dubiously. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Polite,” Joey said. “That’s what I like to hear. Guess I don’t have to cut the strings just yet.” He turned away again and started walking once more toward the gates of the Dark Artificer’s keep.

  “You’re gonna love Six!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Just wait’ 11 you see who we’ve got in the Lake of Boiling Blood. Not to mention the lifts from the new Wraiths of Wrath collection-”