Deathworld Read online

Over everything ran the savage rhythms of the new “unpublished” tracks from Forlorn Voices; right now it was “Slasher’s Surprise” playing, with Joey Bane’s voice unusually soft in the leadup to the second verse, almost as if enticing you to lean in close and have your brain fried when the chorus began screaming in your ears.

  “It never seems to have occurred to you that if I cut you you would bleed… .

  but then it also never seems to have occurred that I might follow your own nasty lead:

  Might get the strop out, might hone the edge down, might put the blade in deep:

  maybe tonight’s little pain will teach you to look before you leap!”

  And then the shriek of sound, Cimiun singing out like both tormented and tormentor alternately, and Joey Bane’s sardonic scream:

  “Surprise, surprise, see the blood flow, Mister Do-unto-others-and-run!

  Hey, what’s the hurry, don’t leave, don’t go, I’m up for more of your kind of fun-”

  spot he might have missed. He was getting ready to move on shortly, though, for he thought he had all the clues he needed. And Six was getting old, anyway. At first Six had seemed “seriously cool,” to use his dad’s ancient and hoary term. But now it had palled. In fact, at first Nick had been surprised to see how soon he had gotten used to it, how very soon it had all seemed slightly passe… . and more, things had not happened in the order he had expected. He had thought that once he hit Six, the Keep of the Dark Artificer would be waiting for him. But when he reached the spot in the Ashen Plain where rumor said it was supposed to stand, he had found nothing but a big rough sign spray-painted on permanently smoldering plywood, and stuck in the ground: GONE FISHING ON LEVEL 8. SUCKER!

  At first Nick had been absolutely outraged at this, and had turned to leave, infuriated at the waste of time and money. But then he thought again, distracted for the moment by the initial sight of the lake, and the smell of it-horrifying enough, to a nose not used to it, to strike almost anyone still, or sick. He had controlled his heaves, and his initial reaction, and then it occurred to him: Of course. It’s a test. If everything stinks, why shouldn’t everything stink here, too? Joey never said it would be otherwise.

  So Nick had sighed, and coughed, and started hiking around the shallow lake, looking for clues as to what was the best way down to Eight. This took him a long while, since the only source of clues was those people trapped in the blood, being pushed into it or scrambling out again. You had to talk to them, find out who they were and what they were doing here, and try to draw them out on the subject … not that they would necessarily cooperate. Not all of them would stand near the edge of the lake and talk to you, either. There were big gaggles and parties of them out in the hotter part of the lake, and they would stand or float there, alternately screaming and looking back toward shore, scornfully, like people at a cocktail party who’re in with the crowd that really matters and have no inclination to move around and meet anyone less important.

  Nick had spent a long time wandering around the edges of the lake, trying to overhear something that would be useful to him. This had made him pretty annoyed after a little while. It feels like my life, he had thought. I’m supposed to be here escaping from reality, not getting stuck with more of the same!

  But there was no choice, for the only other sources of clues were the other players-and they were a closemouthed bunch. None of them that Nick approached would talk to him, and finally he gave up trying. Probably they figure they’ve spent good money to find out what they know so far, Nick thought, and they’re not going to give it away to anyone for free. Realizing this didn’t make Nick feel any better, though, and eventually, after he had spent something like eight hours of “peak time” without any result, he had sat down with his back against a sullenly hot boulder and taken what he considered would be his last long look at the place.

  Then-when he was off his guard, lost in his fury and unfocused-he saw the answer. He saw one of the game-players, not a demon, look over her shoulder as if concerned that she was being watched, and then after a moment of apparently seeing no one nearby, actually wade into the boiling blood and head out toward one particular group. And Nick’s mouth dropped right open.

  If she can do that, I can do that!

  Nick got up and made for the edge of the lake. There for a moment he hesitated, for the stuff looked deadly. But she did it!

  Gingerly he put a foot in. He didn’t feel anything. Confused, Nick bent down and held his hand over the boiling blood. He could feel the heat, and it felt bad. But after a moment’s hesitation he stuck his finger in

  To his astonishment, it didn’t particularly hurt. The “boiling blood” was only about as hot as a really hot bath. And he alternately laughed and cursed himself all the way across the lake as he got right in and waded or swam toward one of the big “get-togethers” in the middle of the lava, a whole bunch of scalded, burnt people-or former people, all of whom looked as if they had been guests at a particularly interactive barbecue-who were standing around and laughing more than they were screaming. Nick felt dumb, in retrospect. He knew perfectly well that you couldn’t suffer pain in a Net-based experience, or at least not pain bad enough to hurt you. The implant embedded in you was designed specifically to filter that kind of thing out. And it didn’t necessarily follow that what hurt the Damned would necessarily hurt you. After all, they were supposed to suffer here. It struck Nick as likely enough that even in a real Hell, the torments wouldn’t hurt someone who wasn’t entitled to them.

  Possibly there’s a message there somewhere. In any case, Nick had learned to stop taking the physical images of things here at face value, as he would have in the real world. Maybe that’s the message, too. That nothing is what it seems. That nothing can really be trusted.

  It was a message that sank in deep. Nick put it aside for that moment, though, and got busy talking to the people out in the lake. In between torments he found them a voluble enough bunch. In fact it was hard to get them to stop talking, especially about their favorite topic, themselves. What was harder still was to get them to say anything about Deathworld itself, its structure and the way around it. Not that they seemed to be inhibited against this, specifically. They were just so utterly self-centered that even the torment of the boiling blood served only as a momentary distraction from their recitations of the important things they’d done, all the books they’d written and the money they’d made, the millions of people they’d influenced, the trends they’d set. Nick started to find this very choice when he paired their endless effusions against the fact that he only knew who a few of them were, out of hundreds he talked to. That week he did get a very thorough grounding in the faded pop culture of the last fifty years, and an increasingly clear sense of how very little of human endeavor lasts for any real length of time, whether it’s worthwhile or not.

  Finally, though, Nick learned by observation that if you asked questions while the demons were actually torturing the Damned, or when they’d just been splashed by the boiling blood, you could get straight answers for a few seconds. The pain, it seemed, cleared their minds and turned them away from themselves, however briefly. Nick quickly established a short list of questions to fire at them while it wasn’t in their power to give him anything but a straight answer. And after many hours of this, and a lot of slogging around, now Nick had the information he needed. The exit to Seven was actually down in that lake of blood itself, right down at the bottom of it-that being how the Power that ran this place kept the Damned from escaping it. For while wholly immersed in the lava-blood, then and only then were their minds cleared to the truth of how little difference they had made in the world when they were still breathing, and how in the present time, so soon after their deaths, they were either completely forgotten or about to be so. Indeed, it was an irony which hadn’t escaped Nick’s notice that only here, in this virtual torment, were any of these people still even slightly famous anymore. Only the users of Deathworld, working their way down through this
level, were impelled to say, “Just who was that guy?” … and go check the history sources on the Net to find out. One of the very few exceptions to this rule, and a deeper irony still, was the image of the old, old newscaster who had been alive until very recently, but while still alive had as a joke privately given the Deathworld designers permission to place him here among so many of his lesser contemporaries. He did not deserve to be here, and as a result he sat in something of a place of honor, off in his own little hot tub full of the burning lava of Truth, looking like a wrinkled old Buddha with his mustache on fire, and refusing to say anything to anyone except, with a grin, “That’s the way it is… .”

  Nick had been lost in admiration when he got the joke. This is a great place, Nick thought. Better than anyplace else on the Net. 1 don’t care how long it takes, or how much it costs. I’m going to solve it. And indeed he had been in here every day, for every waking hour he could, for days now. It was a lot of use, he knew, a lot of time when he should have been doing other things, maybe. Schoolwork, or stuff around the house … But those images seemed to have less power than usual to bother him, which suited Nick fine. Because they’re not important. They can wait. This matters more. And if anyone doesn’t like it, well, the world stinks, doesn’t it? Let them just get used to it… .

  From where Nick stood now, looking out over the lake and up at the cliffs, he saw something which he had missed in earlier visits, but which he had now learned to enjoy, since it never happened the same way twice. One of the demons, a little batwinged guy who reminded him strangely of his science teacher from seventh grade-a round, small, jolly man-materialized up at the top of the highest of the cliffs around the lake. It had a long, long projection of stone sticking out of it over the lake, that cliff, and sometimes this narrow fingerlike projection was almost completely hidden in the miasma of brown-black smoke that rose from the lake. For the moment it was clear, though, and the little dumpy figure walked out to the very end of that narrow pier of stone, held its arms out in front of it, yelled “Geronim0000000!” and jumped off. It twisted and turned any number of times as it fell through what seemed about a mile of air from that high promontory, tumbling, straightening again, spinning, finally tucking itself into a cannonball shape, then straightening out and hitting the surface in a perfect dive, striking into it like a spear and vanishing in a tremendous splash that threw burning, smoking liquid in every direction. All around, the Damned who were hit by the splash screamed in anguish. From the side of the lake a group of six demons who had been sitting and watching the dive now stood up and held up little pairs of cards with numbers on them, one card in each claw: 5.4, 5.2, 5.1, 5.2, 4.8, 5.9. Then five out of six of them dropped their cards to the ground and started whapping the demon who had given the diver a 4.8 over his head.

  I really have to find out who the heck “Geronimo” is, Nick thought. It might be a clue.

  He stood there for a moment more, and then thought, Okay. No use putting it off any longer. Let’s put this to the test, and see if I’m right.

  He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone real, any of the gameplayers, were nearby to see what he was doing. It was a relatively quiet time. Nobody was nearby. Nick stepped off the edge of the lakeshore and started wading through the lake.

  The Damned drew away from Nick a little, and some of them stopped laughing, as they saw where he was headed-that deepest part, where none of them went by choice. “Surprise, surprise,” he sang softly in chorus with the great cry of rage filling the air above him, “Never thought it’d happen, Never thought you’d be the one!

  “Surprise, surprise, ‘Cause here comes the moment, I’ll shave you to the bone ‘fore we’re done! Surprise, surprise-”

  Nick knew he was on the verge of the deepest place. He ducked under the lava-

  And everything went black.

  And in the darkness there burned nothing but two great words written in blazing red fire:

  SERVICE SUSPENDED

  “WHAT?!” Nick screamed.

  He blinked, blinked hard. There was light again, now, but it was just daylight, easing out of afternoon toward evening. It was the light that came through the translucence of the shades in the spare bedroom of the apartment where he lived with his folks, the room where the implant chair sat.

  And his father standing there with the hand commlink in his hand. “Yes,” he was saying . To someone at the other end. “Thanks, it just went on. Yeah. Thanks.”

  His father folded up the hand phone and looked at Nick with an expression too flat and controlled to bode well for anyone.

  “Well?” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Nick cried. “What happened? Call the provider, something’s wrong with the Net link!”

  “I’ve just been talking with the provider,” Nick’s father said, in a voice carefully kept as expressionless as his face, “and there’s nothing wrong with the link … not that hasn’t just been fixed, anyway.”

  “But it went off while I was in the middle of-” Uhoh. “-something important-”

  His father held out an envelope for him to look at. It had their Net service provider’s logo on it. In the spare room doorway his mother suddenly materialized, looking grim.

  “I thought I told you,” his father said, “to stay out of that Deathworld place.”

  Nick realized that this was not a time to attempt explanations. He said nothing.

  “I thought we discussed it rationally,” his father said. “You agreed to do as I said. Didn’t you?”

  “Dad, I-”

  “Or I thought you had. I see now that I was mistaken. Eight hundred dollars”-the hand with the envelope in it was shaking now-“eight hundred dollars in prime-service charges in the last two weeks alone. Son, are you nuts? Did you seriously think I wouldn’t find out about this? Didyou think it was just going to go away, or that it didn’t matter? Do you know what this is going to do to household finances for the next month, while we pay this off out of money that was intended for other things? Like spending money for our summer vacation?”

  Nick gulped and looked at the floor.

  His father stopped, too angry to say anything else for the moment. “Nicky, half your spending money is going to be docked weekly until you pay back this last bill,” Nick’s mother said. “It would be real smart for you to see about getting yourself some kind of part-time job for the summer, so you can get it paid off in less time. As-regards any further Net access, you’re grounded. If you want it, you can go down to the Square and rent a booth out of your own money, since you’ve proved you can’t be trusted to use the Net responsibly at home. After the bill’s paid off, we’ll look at whether you’re ready to have your own service restored.”

  Nick said nothing, just stood there with his ears burn- ing.

  “And assuming we give you your service back some day, if you ever pull a stunt like this again, we’re going to have the thing pulled out,” his father said. “I don’t care if you think you need it for school, or because all your friends have it, or whatever. You can get up off your butt and walk to the library to do your research, the way I did when dinosaurs walked the earth. It didn’t kill me. It won’t kill you, either. And what your friends think isn’t important compared to pulling your weight in this family and behaving like the money we work hard for actually means something, instead of you throwing it out the window in handfuls.”

  His father handed him the envelope and turned and went out. His mother stood there and looked at him for a moment, her expression not softening in the slightest.

  “I left you some supper in the ‘vector,’ ” she said. “Dad and I have to go out and run a couple of errands. Have your dinner and then get your homework done on the laptop. I had the provider copy all your school files to it before they blocked your workspace.”

  “Mom-”

  “Now’s not the time, Nicky,” she said, the anger showing in her voice for the first time. “You have a lot of apologies to make, but not now. It sounds too
easy now. Maybe in the next couple of days your dad and I can take what you have to say more seriously.”

  She went out. A moment later Nick heard the apartment door shut.

  He stood there with the envelope in his hands, trembling, first with embarrassment-Oh God, what will everybody say? What will they think? This is the end!— and then, with something more familiar, something peculiarly more bearable, more acceptable: rage.

  This stinks.

  But then everything stinks!

  He was right. Joey was absolutely right!

  The only question is-am I going to take this lying down … or am I going to let them see that I’m not going to just take what they dish out?

  There was only one possible answer to the question, for someone who had been down as far as Seven in Death-world … only one possibly answer for a Banie.

  ” ‘Surprise, surprise . . ” Nick sang softly, and headed out of the room to have his supper, and start laying his plans.

  Charlie came down the stairs from his bedroom early that Friday morning, still rubbing his eyes a little despite having been showered and dressed for half an hour now. He’d been up late putting final touches on a physics paper that was due today, and he was pleased with his efforts, even if he did feel like he wanted to turn right around and go straight back up the stairs to bed.

  Charlie headed for the coffeemaker and was astounded to find it empty. He opened the cupboard above it, got out another drip-pak, slapped it into the holder, filled the brewing reservoir again, and got the brew cycle started. The coffeemaker promptly began making the noise which both his father and mother referred to as “Cheyne-Stokes respirations,” a horrific gurgling gasp followed by a long “breath” outward that sounded more like a death rattle than anything else.

  “Urgh,” Charlie said to the coffeemaker, “you sound like I feel.”

  He went back to the table and glanced at the paper, which his dad had left there still folded. Charlie hit the “go” corner and it started to unfold itself in the usual manner, and at that point his dad came down the stairs with his white doctor’s overcoat on and his stethoscope doubled up around his neck. “Did you start the coffee?”