Deathworld Read online

  I could ask Captain Winters… . But the information Charlie needed was medical. If it was in the Net Force files at all-which it might not be-it was almost certainly inaccessible under seal of confidentiality.

  If there were some other way to get at it …

  He thought about that. Violating confidentiality … But that’s not what I would be doing if I just looked at data like that illegally, Charlie thought. If I told anyone else about what I found, yes, then it would be. But this isn’t about spreading the information around. It’s about finding out what really happened. Because I don’t think anyone else has yet… .

  Charlie sat down on one of the “ringside” benches and looked across at the frozen image of Joey Bane. And if someone doesn’t find out what did happen, it leaves us wide open for it to happen all over again… .

  He swallowed, thinking of Nick. Granted, Nick wasn’t showing any signs of being suicidal that Charlie could detect… .

  But then neither were these other kids, he thought. He got up and walked over to the various windows shoWing the excerpted stories of the earlier suicides, hanging there in the air. He poked a finger into one window, then another, starting their text scrolling by. The second one had a history of depression. But all the rest of them seemed to take everybody by surprise… .

  “News alert.”

  Charlie glanced up at that. “Whatcha got?” he said to the workspace management system.

  “You asked to be alerted of any news story containing the following term: Deathworld.”

  “Got something new? Yeah, play it.”

  Off to one side, in the few open spaces of floor left down in the “pit” at the moment, a newsman sitting behind a desk appeared, with his mouth open, frozen. “Playing content,” the program said. “Source: FTNet nightly Net-business news bulletin, today, 1810 GMT-”

  The clip started moving. “-ther news, Net host provider SourceStream today published weekly stats which are good news for shareholders, if a little on the macabre side,” said the newsman. “Net access and revenue figures for the controversial Net environment `Deathworld,’ which hosts at SourceStream, are up nearly twenty percent from the last half-month reporting period. SourceStream spokesperson Wik Nellis declined to speculate on the sudden leap in the site’s popularity, but other industry sources suspect that the cause is the spate of recent suicides which have attracted unwelcome attention from Net-content watchdog groups and law-enforcement agencies in various jurisdictions. Walk-throughs at the `morbo-jazz’ site are up sharply, with SourceStream again declining to confirm the exact numbers, but industry rivals suggest that the publicity may have attracted as many as five million new users to the site, with a potential revenue injection of as much as twenty million dollars in the past two weeks. Meanwhile, the merger of BBC with WOLTime has been-”

  The clip froze again. Charlie stood there looking at it, slightly disgusted. “Sick,” he said softly. That these people should be making more money off the fact that their users had been killing themselves-

  Charlie made a face. Then he sighed. It probably wasn’t their fault. But it annoyed him nonetheless.

  “Save that,” he said to the computer.

  “Done,” it said as he turned his back on the clip and looked at the other pieces of information littering the place, and strolled among them, trying to think. But a most paranoid idea occurred to Charlie suddenly, so awful that it stopped him dead in his tracks. Supposing that peo- ple at Deathworld were causing people to kill themselves in order to drive the user stats and revenue up?

  He shivered. Oh, that’s a sick idea. This is making me morbid.

  Besides, you would need evidence that they were able to make people do something like that … and you don’t have any.

  Charlie sighed. Just paranoia, he thought, and walked among the “exhibits” for a few moments more. Too many clues … not enough hard data for a real theory. For any kind of theory.

  I need harder data. I need those autopsy reports.

  He sat down on one of the benches and looked out across the Pit.

  But how am I going to get them?

  He sat there thinking for a long time, while outside, eighteenth-century London started (finally) to go to bed, and the sky showing high up in the Royal Society’s windows started to pale toward dawn.

  And suddenly Charlie sat up straight. Mark!

  “Time check,” Charlie said.

  “Twenty twenty-nine.”

  “I want to make a virtcall,” he said. “Mark Gridley.” “Trying that connection for you now …”

  In another part of the virtual realm entirely, it was raining fire, and Nick was standing under an asbestos golf umbrella and wondering just where to go from here.

  The patter of ash and live cinder on the umbrella over his head would have been strangely soothing had it not been for the brimstone smell in the air and the shrieks and wails of those in torment. All the cries were wordless, here. The Damned in this circle had been deprived of the only thing that had marked them as human while they lived on earth, the gift of speech. In all other ways that mattered they were judged to have abandoned their humanity, and so they ran forever under the fiery rain, with demons scourging them through the black, blasted, ash-strewn landscape. In the distance, on the lowering horizon, a volcano was erupting, belching ash and fumes and fountains of lava into the air, and the ground rumbled constantly, crevasses always ready to open up and swallow the Damned as they ran.

  Nick started forward cautiously. It was difficult to see where you were going, and those crevasses were very much on his mind-naturally you couldn’t really get hurt down here, but until you knew what the crevasses entailed in terms of gameplay, it was wise to be cautious.

  “Going somewhere?” someone said from behind him.

  Nick turned and saw a shadow of someone about his height standing there and watching him, with folded arms. At least he thought they were folded. She was more a silhouette against the deeper darkness than anything else, apparently wearing a long dark “shellcoat” with its three draped layers-though the hood was pushed back to show a head with shoulder-length hair, held at what looked like a somewhat arrogant angle. She was eyeing him, finding him amusing.

  “Are you real?” Nick said. Down here, it was a fair question.

  “I’m another Banie, if that’s what you mean,” she said, tossing her hair out of her eyes, flicking away a couple of burning ashes. “You just get here?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Come on, then, and I’ll get you oriented. You know where you’re going?”

  Nick pointed toward the only light he could see, the volcano.

  “Mount Glede,” she said, “that’s the spot. Come on . . it’s a bit of a walk.”

  She set out, and Nick went after her. “Not used to doing this with a friendly guide,” he said.

  “Don’t mistake me for anything friendly,” said the dark shape next to him, sounding annoyed. “I’d as soon leave you to your own devices. But that’s not how this . Circle works. We have to help each other.” The expression in thegirl’s eyes was sullen and bored, as if she thought Nick was a waste of her time.

  The opinion was mutual, but Nick had come far enough by now, and spent enough time and money in Deathworld, that he wasn’t going to let mere bad temper, hers or his, interfere with his conquest of this environment. “You never did tell me what to call you,” he said.

  She didn’t quite grit her teeth, and Nick could just hear her thinking, I didn’t intend to. But finally, “Call me Shade,” she said.

  He smiled slightly, though he turned away so she wouldn’t see it. Every Banie knew that Joey himself, or the surrogates of him which were part of the program, sometimes walked the circles in disguise, pretending to be just another Banie, and if you mistreated someone else who was working their way down, or went against the House Rules, the House could very well use it against you. Chances that might otherwise have been offered to you would be withheld; luck wouldn’t go your w
ay.

  “So what do we do now?” he said.

  “You didn’t tell me your name, either,” Shade said, eyeing him.

  “Nick,” he said. It was how the system knew him. He didn’t see any point in establishing a handle just now.

  “Well, Nick, mostly we head for the Mountain, and try to keep from getting distracted, or falling into any crevasses. That’s gonna be a full-time job, so stay close and don’t go running off after the inmates.”

  He followed her as she set off. It was difficult going until your eyes got used to it. The constant fall of ash produced an effect like black snow, a dead, soft, soot black with no highlights, no features you put your feet down without any real sense of when they would hit anything solid. The only light was that dim red glow from the volcano, the swift-fading glimmer of the flakes of burning ash as they fell, and the burning whips of the demons that chased the Damned across the plain through the shin-high, fluffy blackness.

  “Look,” Nick said as he struggled to keep up with her, “Shade, aren’t we supposed to ask these guys here any- thing?”

  She laughed at him. “Not much point in that,” Shade said. “They can’t do anything but scream. They could speak once, but it was taken away from them after they became murderers and wound up down here. According to Joey, they’re no better than animals.”

  Nick opened his mouth, but she flung her hand out to stop him. “There,” she said, and pointed right down in front of them. Slowly, softly, and silently, the earth was yawning open. He would have missed it until it was too late, and would already have been falling down into what he could just now make out as a dim, red, angry glare.

  “Uh,” Nick said, swallowing.

  “Yeah, `uh,’ ” Shade said, scornful. “Game over, if you fall into one of those. Big waste of time. No recall from that, either. No ‘save’ from a crevasse. So watch yourself.”

  Together they sidetracked a long way to their left to get to the point where the crevasse narrowed enough to be stepped over. “I was going to say,” Nick said, “if they can’t talk-what’s the point of them being here?”

  Shade looked at him with amusement. “It’s not like seeing the guilty get punished for murder isn’t worth something by itself. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Far away across the dark landscape, Nick thought he could hear something like an electrolute tuning up. His heart leaped. “That’s a new `lift’-”

  Shade sighed. “Yeah, it’s the warm-up for ‘Strange Fruit.’ Not a bad cut, that one.”

  ” ‘Strange Fruit’-”

  “It’s a cover,” Shade said. “Joey doesn’t do many covers. A lot of people down here think it’s a tribute to the Angels of the Pit.”

  Nick shook his head, confused.

  “You really haven’t talked to a lot of people down here, have you,” Shade said.

  “Uh, no.”

  There was another long sigh. “I guess it’s understandable,” she said, rather more softly, as they went forward. “The upper circles aren’t much about talking to real people. The ‘Angels of the Pit’ -those are the kids who died after being down here.”

  “The ones who committed suicide-”

  “We don’t usually put it that way,” Shade said, pausing again as another crevasse started to open up in front of them, and leading Nick off to the right this time. ” ‘Death wears many faces… .’ That’s what the song says. They left us before they were finished. Whatever made them do it, they’re gone now, but we remember them… .”

  This was so unlike what Nick had been thinking about the suicides that he was startled. “Didn’t any of them make it … you know … all the way down?”

  Shade shook her head. “No way. No one who’s ever made it down into the heart of the Ninth has done anything like that. There are things that happen down on Nine… .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Like what?” Nick was eager. He had almost never heard even a scrap of rumor about Nine before.

  Shade laughed at him then. “You’re asking me?” she said. “You think I’ve been down there? As if I’d still be slumming around up here if I had… .” She sounded scornful again. “No, some of them just come back and help a few newbies before they go on. I’ve got a ways to go yet.”

  They went on in silence for a while, following the faint tune-up notes of Camiun across the darkling plain. It was hard to judge distances, but Nick thought it would have been something like a mile in the “real” world. A Damned person ran by them, howling, in battle fatigues, and behind him came a couple of winged demons, their whips aflame, every stroke burning a white-hot slit through the big burly man’s combat jacket as he fled from them. Nick slowed down to watch him go.

  “Some gangster,” Shade said, bored. “We get a lot of them down here. Little tin-pot dictators and their paramilitary hangers-on. While they’re in power they think they’re invulnerable, that they can kill anybody they like. But sooner or later it catches up with them. Their henchmen learn their bosses’ lesson too well, that you don’t have to treat anybody with pity, or compassion … and eventually the henchmen turn right around, shoot their bosses, and take their jobs. Not that they last long.” She chuckled.

  Ahead of them, the volcano seemed to be getting closer, and Nick squinted at it. There was something odd about the shadows at its base. He was distracted, though. The darkness, the ash and the screams, they all seemed to press in strangely, and Camiun’s tinkly tuning cadences seemed unusually distant. “Kind of depressing down here,” Nick said.

  Shade looked at him thoughtfully as she jumped over a small narrow crevasse that opened up in front of them. “You feel that way?” she said.

  Nick nodded. “Sometimes. But it’s worse up at home … a. whole ‘nother story.”

  “Problems?”

  Nick made a face. “The usual. My folks think I’m wasting money down here. Even some of my friends think I’m wasting time. None of them seem to think I’m capable of figuring out what I really want. ‘You’re too young to really know.’ You’ll get over this, it’s just a fad… .’ ” He sighed, glanced up at her. “What about you?”

  Shade laughed. “Yeah, I’ve heard the same kind of thing. I ignore it. And my folks and my friends don’t know anything about down here … so I ignore them, too. They’re all so concerned, like it’s going to affect my mind somehow. But, I mean, what’s down here that could possibly be more depressing than real life?” And she gave Nick a look that, even in this dim light, was extremely ironic. “Not enough money to do the things you want to, not enough time to do them if you had the money, not enough life to do everything you’d like to even if you had the time-what could be worse than that? This is just dark. And for us, not even painful … not as painful as the Real World.” She pronounced the words with profound disdain. “A day job you can never afford to give up until you’re too old to remember what you would have done with your days, if they’d been yours to spend, when you were young. What’s a little fire and brimstone to that?”

  She looked closely at Nick as they walked, almost as if there was some response she was expecting.

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “Life stinks, yeah, but I don’t know if it stinks that much-”

  “You are young yet,” Shade said. “Just wait awhile. You probably have all these great ideas about how wonderful it’ll be when you get out on your own, how you’ll have all this terrific freedom. Wait till you do it, and see how hard you have to work just to keep a roof over your head and enough food inside you to keep your stomach from waltzing with your backbone every night … while the people you’re interested in take themselves out of your life, one by one.” She laughed. “After too much life spent that way … I can understand why some people might want to … you know. Do what they did. The Pit Angels …”

  Nick had no immediate answer to that, for what Shade was saying had abruptly struck him with surprising fofce. It had never occurred to him that he wouldn’t find life better after he finally left home, that there might be a bad
side to freedom. But now, hearing it from someone down here, the possibility occurred to him that he might be making a mistake. Yet at the same time, if I don’t make that mistake, I’m trapped… . Trapped with an angry mom and dad, in an apartment that was too small and where they watched his every move to see whether they would approve of it. And if he kept going the way he had been going, before this most recent blowup, what would follow? College, but if he didn’t manage to get a scholarship to someplace far enough away that he would have to live on campus, it would just be the same thing all over again …

  but even more intolerable, because he would be college-age and still having to obey his parents’ dumb rules. Everyone would laugh at him, and the whole point of college, getting away and exercising some independence, would be lost.

  Yet Nick was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to be in line for any scholarships. His grades hadn’t been perfect. He was holding his own at Bradford, not in danger of failing … but the grades he had at the moment weren’t going to get him into anything but the state college or one of the community colleges in the area. He could just hear his folks. Why spend money on boarding at someplace that’s only twenty miles away? You’ll stay here with us.

  … Where they can keep me under their thumb.

  Suddenly it all seemed very hopeless, and Nick just stopped where he was and gazed ahead in the blackness as Shade kept going. Suddenly he could understand it. Not wanting to go on, not seeing the point. Past college, what would there be for him? He wasn’t even particularly sure what he wanted to do in the world. Or that there was anything for him to do in the world. For the past couple years now he had been surrounded by kids working hard, full of plans and goals, and he had laughed at them— busting their guts as if they were adults working at something that really counted. Now here he was, without any plans or goals, and suddenly Nick suspected that the other kids had, all along, known something he hadn’t. Now they were heading toward lives, busy lives full of interesting things to do, even if the work was hard. And here I am, Nick thought, with nothing. Nothing.