Deathworld Read online

  Nick could hardly bear the thought of not hearing that new music before everybody else did. “Why did you bring me just here and tell me all this stuff, and then just walk away?” he yelled. “Just to make me crazy, or what?”

  “You figure it out!” Joey Bane yelled back, still walking away through the gathering darkness, as behind him a demon-giant in an old-fashioned Mets uniform chased a hapless mother and father across the circle with a baseball bat. Nick caught a glance at the back of the uniform shirt as the demon passed. The name was hard to make out, but its number was 666. Nice touch, that. “But haven’t I been telling you life stinks?” Bane said. “Don’t you even listen to the lyrics? Bye bye, stinker… .”

  And he vanished into the darkness, laughing.

  Nick stood there, heart pounding, not knowing whether to be delighted or furious. Finally he decided on furious … but it was a cheerful kind of fury, one that left him determined. “I’ll be back!” he yelled at the darkness. “I’ll do it, however much time it takes! I’ll be back, and I’ll meet you down on Six … and deeper than that!”

  Only the faint sound of mocking laughter came floating back to him from the walls of the Keep, and a glint of silver and black as from away up high there, Camiun trilled once, amused.

  It took a long while to get the lion man and the tiger woman to stop fighting and talk to him, but finally they showed him the way back up to Four, through a door, and up a stairway hidden in the stone of the cliffs, and the tiger woman dropped a line about a “golden key” that Nick was sure was a hint that had to do with how you were supposed to get into the Keep. Nick headed upward in a much improved mood, but there was still an edge of anger on his determination to come back here and show everybody that he hadn’t hit his level, that he didn’t need any more favors, that he was enough of a Banie to succeed down here no matter how the program tried to get under his skin, and no matter how long it took to do it. His dad was probably going to have a spasm when he saw the Net bill, but Nick was more certain than ever that he didn’t care … this was worth it.

  In the gateway the abandon-hope words were still burning red when he got back up there, but as Nick approached them, they twisted and curled in the air like burning red worms and formed themselves into new words. These said:

  THE TIGER WOMAN IS A LIAR

  He stopped and looked at that. It’s not completely true, Nick thought. She did tell me how to get back up to Four… .

  Then he paused just on the inside of the gateway, wondering. She and the lion man had interrupted each other constantly once he got them to stop ripping each other up, and now he wasn’t at all sure just which of them had told him about the way back up to Four. But he definitely remembered her telling him about the key.

  So is it a false lead? Or is this a lie itself?

  Nick let out a long breath. He wasgoing to have to come back as soon as he could and start working out how to get from Three to Four, so that he could test the situation and see what the real story was. One thing you have to give this place, Nick thought. It keeps you coming back… .

  There was no point in lingering any longer, though. He had stuff to do at home. Nick passed through the gateway, and as usual, that big red asterisk appeared in the floor under his feet, burning like lava. Just for amusement, he stepped on it.

  Instantly a vast carpet of glowing small print appeared beneath his feet, laid out and vanishing away into the virtual middle distance like the crawl in some old-fashioned space movie. It said:

  c JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES 2018-2025. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS VIRTUAL DOMAIN IS A WORK OF FICTION. ANY RESEMBLANCE OF ANY MANIFESTATION TO PERSONS ALIVE OR DEAD IS COINCIDENTAL. THIS SITE IS TO BE USED FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. YOU MUST BE SIXTEEN YEARS OF AGE TO ENTER. BY ENTERING THIS VIRTUAL DOMAIN YOU STATE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE OF THIS FACILITY. YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU INDEMNIFY AND HOLD BLAMELESS JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEES FOR ANY ADVERSE AFFECT WHATSOEVER WHICH MAY BE INCURRED BY THE USE OF THIS FACILITY, AND JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEES ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR SUCH EFFECTS… .

  Nick walked on down the carpet of words with his hands stuffed in his pockets, amused, half wishing his mom could see him, half dreading her reaction, now minutes away, when she found out where he’d been. Well, it doesn’t have to happen right this second… .

  YOU ALSO WAIVE IN PERPETUITY YOUR RIGHT AND THE RIGHT OF YOUR HEIRS OR ASSIGNS OR ANY OTHER RESPONSIBLE PERSONS IN WHATEVER LEGAL RELATIONSHIP TO YOU TO MAKE ANY CLAIM WHATSOEVER AGAINST JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEEES IN ANY JURISDICTION NOW KNOWN OR ANY OTHER WHICH MAY HEREAFTER BE DISCOVERED, IN PERPETUITY. THIS AGREEMENT IS BINDING IN THIS FORM IN ALL U. S. JURISDICTIONS EXCEPT THE FOLLOWING: MD, NY, ME, VT. MARYLAND LAW REQUIRES THE FOLLOWING DISCLAIMER: THIS FACILITY MAY CONTAIN CONTENT INTENDED TO SHOCK OR DISTURB… .

  Nick snickered at that as he walked past it. He hadn’t been all that shocked. Maybe people in Maryland were just too delicate to live. But he was made of sterner stuff. ” `Nicey-nice,’ ” he sang under his breath as he walked down the long strip of text, as if down a red carpet, “wasting your time, smiling at folks without reason or rhyme: life is too short as it is; it’s a crime … only death’s certain to call… .”

  The music came up around him as he left, Joey Bane’s voice singing, with Camiun providing the growling harmony under the main line, and the pulse beat rhythm driving it all. There was supposed to be a new version of “Nicey-Nice” out now. Nick resolved to break a little of his saved-up ticket money loose for it right away.

  He turned off his implant, and vanished.

  In the virtual realm Deathworld suddenly accrued another sixteen dollars and fifty-three cents of credit.

  And in the real world, several hundred miles away, someone who had been in Deathworld only an hour before was found dead.

  Chapter 2

  Charlie Davis was sitting in his virtual workspace, wondering how to get the steam engine to work. He could have cheated and called up the software company’s help line, which would have sent him a helpful “ghost” of James Watt, but the prospect of doing so struck him as an admission of failure. So instead he sat on the floor of the workspace, staring at the pressure gauges all over the engine’s shining brass outsides, and wondered what the heck to do next.

  Charlie knew people whose workspaces were marvels of the “special effects” end of virtuality. One of his buddies in the Net Force Explorers kept her workspace on one of the moons of Saturn. Another one had built himself a perfect replica of Windsor Castle, which he had filled with expressions of his own hobby, model trains. Charlie had found that a little bizarre, especially the miniature train shed which Mikey had installed in St. George’s Chapel. “You should talk,” Mikey had retorted. “Your workspace used to be used for medical research the hard way-vivisection… .”

  That hadn’t been precisely true, but it wasn’t the kind of discussion that Charlie much felt like having with someone pointlessly argumentative as Mikey, and he’d let it pass. Charlie had built his workspace into a duplicate of the eighteenth-century operating theater of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It was a splendid if not very sterile space in which concentric circles of mahogany “bleachers” surrounded an oval area in which was set a scrubbed wood table on which some of the most important experiments in the medicine of that time had been done. The circulation of blood had been explored there, and the structure of human bone, and Pasteur had dropped by to lecture on germ theory. If the professors working there had occasionally gone a little loopy and tried things like transplanting the head of one dog onto the body of another, well, that was then, not now, and everybody was entitled to have a bad day, experimentally speaking. Meanwhile, Charlie loved the place, the warm wooden gleam and polished-brass shine of it. It was the birthplace of modern medicine, and Charlie was going to be a doctor one of these days … though he intended to become an operat
ive for Net Force as well. The only question was which of these goals he was going to manage first.

  Then Charlie sighed heavily. “Actually,” he muttered, “the only question is how I’m going to get this stupid thing in front of me to work.”

  It was, of course, not a real steam engine, just a mathematical simulation of one. If it _ was built properly, it would look and run like a real steam engine in the virtual world. Now, any workspace software worth its purchase price, if you told it to create such a thing out of nothing, would do just that and not bother you with the sordid details. But Charlie was learning how to write simulations in the programming language Caldera II, the language which virtual environments used to create things out of nothing so that they would behave real. And Caldera was desperately complex, difficult to control, easy to screw up, and otherwise just a major pain.

  Charlie was not particularly interested in steam engines. What he really wanted to use Caldera for was to model the activity of neurons in the living human brain. But to create such models in any programming language, even Caldera, was an immensely subtle and difficult business-if you were interested in building models that actually worked like their counterparts in the real world, anyway, and suggested reasons for the way they behaved as they did. The steam engine was one of the “sample” simulations which came with the most current Caldera software package, and a good place (the software company said) to start practicing before going on to the more involved simulations. The program which the tutorial coached you in writing was one that described in maddening detail the way the virtual environment running it was supposed to act, so that you would put out your hand and feel hard cold brass or polished wood instead of air or fog that just looked like brass or wood, and so that the article you created in virtuality would act like a real thing, obeying real rules of science, and reacting appropriately to whatever you did to it.

  That was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Charlie had so far managed only a steam engine that looked like brass but felt like rubber, and which produced something that looked like steam, but was just cold vapor. He got up from the floor, walked around the engine, looked at it one more time.

  “Okay,” he said to the air. “Main program, routine five …”

  A “window” opened in the air near him, showing the first of the lines and lines of code he had written so far, coached by the tutorial. Somewhere in here there was a statement that was wrong that the debugging routine hadn’t found, and that the program thought was a genuine and valid instruction. And it would be, Charlie thought, annoyed, if people built rubber steam engines.

  “Scroll down three,” Charlie said. “Scroll down one. Scroll down one.” He stared for several moments at that particular screenful of text, chewing his lip. After a moment he said, “Line sixty. Change statement. Old statement: `vis 15 hardness 80 spong 12’. New statement: `vis 15 hardness 120 spong 12.’ “

  “What the heck is a spong?” someone said out of the air behind him.

  Charlie looked over his shoulder. Nick Melchior was there, one of his best friends from school, if not the best. There was something about Nick’s sense of humor that meshed well with Charlie’s, and besides, Nick seemed never to have seen anything even slightly funny about the idea that a kid from as painful and hopeless a background as Charlie’s should be unswervingly set on becoming a doctor. Charlie, for his own part, was always amazed that anyone from as unsettled and insecure a background as Nick’s should have been able to do as well at school and be as generally good-natured and good-tempered as he was, when at any moment his dad or the whole family might be uprooted and sent off to some distant foreign place to do virtcam work for one of the major news services.

  Nick leaned against the mahogany railing around the “operating floor” and stared at the engine.

  “I could try to explain what a spong is,” Charlie said, “but I’d just confuse myself. I’m not sure / know all of what it is yet. It has to do with the way this thing reflects light … or at least, that’s all I can make of it so far… .”

  Nick pushed away from the railing and walked around the sim, eyeing it. He was fair-haired, green-eyed, biggish across the shoulders, though not one of the taller kids in Charlie’s year-unusual when half the juniors in the class seemed to be shooting up like trees, having hit some weird kind of sympathetic growth spurt. Nick seemed stuck at about five four, and for Charlie, who was stuck at five two and was beginning to wonder morbidly whether he had some obscure glandular disorder, it was pleasant to have the company of someone who didn’t look down at him as if from a great height and inquire sardonically as to why he didn’t go out for basketball. “It looksgood,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, well, if you put some chest rub in it, it’d make somebody a great cold vaporizer,” Charlie muttered. “Go ahead, give it a kick.”

  “Huh?”

  “Go on, kick it. Hard as you can.”

  The steam engine had four handsome brass-trimmed wheels with iron tires. Nick walked over to one of them, looked it over, and kicked it, hard. Then he started jumping around. “Ow! Sonofa-Wha’d you tell me to do that for?”

  Charlie stared, dumbfounded. “Buddha on a bike,” he said, “did I fix it?” He went over to the next wheel and kicked it too, quite hard, disbelieving-then joined Nick briefly in the dance. “Oh, crud!”

  “Thanks loads, Charlie, like I don’t have enough problems today, now I’m lamed for life, too!” Nick was now holding the injured foot and staring at it as if he could see through his boot to tell if something was broken.

  “Ow, look, I’m sorry. I fixed it! I guess I must have fixed it, anyway. The train was soft, before, like rubber.” Charlie leaned against the railing near Nick, rubbing his own foot and then bearing weight on it gingerly. “Sorry!” He stared at the engine. “What the frack did I fix? I wasn’t working on the hardness… .”

  “You’re asking the wrong expert, expert. What you can do, 0 mighty medical talent, is tell me whether my foot’s going to be this sore when I come out of virt.”

  “Dummy,” Charlie said. “No. It won’t hurt long here, either; you know pain can’t be turned up even as high as in real life in here. Just as well. What’s your problem, anyway?”

  “My foot, clueless one, is-”

  “Your other problem. Whatever you were yapping about when you came in.”

  “Oh. Just my dad.”

  “Are they sending him somewhere weird again?” Char lie boosted himself up to sit on the railing, morosely studying the steam engine.

  “No. No, it’s just Net stuff.”

  Charlie blinked. “What?”

  “You remember Joey Bane’s domain?”

  “Oh, yeah. Death-o-rama or whatever.”

  “Deathworld.”

  “Yeah.” Charlie had been through one of its upper levels briefly with Nick a couple of months back, but hadn’t gone back. It was one of the more expensive domains to spend time in, and besides, he wasn’t a big shadow jazz fan. His musical tastes ran more to hopflight, because of the rhythms, and terzia rizz, which was experiencing something of a comeback after four centuries of neglect. “So what’s the problem?” Charlie said. “Bills getting too high?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not most of it. Mostly my mom and dad think it’s corrupting me or something.” Nick’s good-natured face was twisted somewhat out of its usual placid shape, and as he hoisted himself up beside Charlie, the look lingered.

  “You?” Charlie blew out an amused breath. “Nothing there to corrupt.”

  “Thanks loads, Dr. Genius. No, they’re just freaked out by the news stories.”

  “I missed the news today,” Charlie said. “It’s Saturday.

  This is the day I take off from the world, theoretically.” “To spend time on really important things.”

  “James Watt thought so,” Charlie said, he hoped not too sharply. “I like retrotech. So splash me. Meanwhile, what happened?”

  “Somebody killed himself.”

  “Someone w
ho’d been doing a lot of Deathworld?”

  “Something like that.” Nick rolled his eyes expressively, then paused, briefly distracted by the fresco on the ceiling, of the god Apollo receiving Aesculapius into heaven, while a lot of other gods in togas leaned in to observe, and possibly to pass private remarks on the newcorner’s snappy cane with the snakes wrapped around it. “Who are all those people?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time, if I can ever get you to stop interrupting yourself!”

  Nick rolled his eyes again. “Some guy in Iowa,” he said. “A seventh-circler, apparently. He hanged himself. At least that’s what the police were saying.”

  “Did they say anything else about whether he’d been depressed, or something like that?” Charlie said.

  Nick shook his head. “Not that I heard. From the story I heard, it sounded like they were in a hurry to get him buried.” He grimaced. “And as soon as my folks heard about it, they went completely voidside. They don’t want me going in there, blah, blah, blah… .”

  Charlie leaned back a little and looked over at his friend with some concern. He had heard about the other suicides, but he hadn’t really thought of them as anything significant. Oh, obviously they were tragic for the people involved, and the people left behind, but a certain number of people suicided every year due to misuse or overuse of virtual services of one kind or another, and mostly the psychiatrists figured that these were people who would have found some other reason to do away with themselves if the Net had not existed. Still … it was a little creepy. “This is how many suicides of people associated with Deathworld, now?”

  “Six, I think they said.”

  Charlie looked at the steam engine thoughtfully. “Seems like kind of a lot.”

  Nick plopped himself down on one of the front-row benches and shrugged a don’t-care kind of shrug. “Aw, c’mon, Charlie, don’t you side with them, too! You know the world is full of idiots looking for a chance to pop themselves off, and any excuse would do. It can’t be Deathworld’s fault that they found their way down there at one point or another. If it were, the government would have found out about it and shut them down.”