Deathworld

Chapter 1

Nick stood in front of the gateway, and looked up and up at the pillars of it, there in the dark and the silence.

The polished basalt pillars were very tall. There was no seeing the top of them. They seemed to stretch forever up into the darkness. But in the empty black air between them, words hung burning in red. They read:

Nick stood there in the silence for a few more moments, and then walked through the gates.

The first thing to assault him was the music, but then that was what he had come for, what had brought him here in the first place. Nick was finding it difficult to believe that there had ever been a time when he hadn't known about that particular bass beat, pounding and insistent. It was such a contrast to the voice singing above it, starting out so calm and scaling over the course of almost every song into a completely abandoned shriek of cheerful rage. That was what had gotten Nick's attention the first time he'd seen a Joey Bane virteo: the cheerfulness. This man was angry, and enjoyed it, and didn't care who knew. The song that met you at the gateway was that first one he'd heard, the most famous of Bane's songs, and the one Nick liked the best: "Too Jagged Off to Care."

Nick walked in through the darkness, and the music cycled up so that you could hardly hear the moans and wailing through or under it. The noise wasn't so bad up here, anyway. This was the Top Floor, a beginners' level, which, though it looked kind of impressive at first, was actually too dull and unshocking for any but the most hopeless types-mostly people who Nick thought must not get out a lot, or do anything much but answer their virtmail, too scared to venture out any further into virtuality. Nick had been just a little freaked by the concerted noise of human pain, the first time he had come in-but then the persistent welcoming beat of the Bane music had got him past that, and then after about fifteen or twenty minutes the landscape hadn't bothered Nick at all.

It was a wasteland. Gray lowering sky, stunted dead trees, shattered boulders, the temperature warm enough to be stifling, no wind. It was desolate, a place that looked the way he felt at the moment, and with the background noise, the howling and wailing, it sounded the way he felt, too. Nick shuffled along through the sterile gray dust, his hands stuffed down in the pockets of his coverall, and made a depressed face. He could just hear what his mother would be saying now, if she could see him: "Do you have to slump like that? Stand up straight. Look at you, you'd think you had nothing to live for-though, then again, with that last report from school-"

Nick frowned. He'd tried keeping his hands out of his pockets, as an experiment, for nearly a week. It didn't divert her from her usual themes in the slightest. School was her favorite subject right now. He was absolutely sick of hearing her go on and on about it. As if there aren't lots of terrific things to do besides college, Nick thought.

And I'm passing everything, even if I'm not acing it. But his mom wouldn't listen to anything of the kind, and as for his dad, he didn't seem to care. That by itself should have been a positive thing. "Let the boy alone, Miriam," he would mutter as he headed for the back of the house and the implant suite. "He has enough problems." And Nick certainly did. But whatever his father was interested in hearing, Nick's problems weren't it. Nick had started to wonder what he would have to do to cause a little interest.

Then he had found Deathworld.

Not that the people who used the virtual domain called it that, though, among themselves. "The Circles" was one of their private names for it, or "Bane's Place" or "The Bottom Floors"-though none of the people Nick had met here so far had ever seen the bottom floors, reputed to be truly terrifying regions of torment and fear, and desperately cool. Nick was eager to find out whether these rumors were true or just hype. You had to expect a certain amount of hype in conjunction with a place like this. After all, it was run by the biggest name in "shadow jazz," a man who had made his first million by the time he was only four years older than Nick. Nick sighed. Now, there's a depressing thought… I wonder what Dad would think of that if I reminded him?

Then again, probably it would be smarter not to. Neither Nick, in his wildest dreams, or his dad was going to be a millionaire any time soon. That was something of a sore point with his dad. His dad's job at the vid studio wasn't terribly secure at the moment-there had just been another round of cutbacks, and everybody was nervous. Nick supposed he should feel sorry for his dad, but his dad hadn't done a whole lot of feeling sorry for Nick's troubles lately. Nick shrugged. Let his dad deal with it.

The old dry leafless tree that marked the near shore of the river was visible across the plain, and Nick made for it, kicking up the dust. If his dad was twitching over things at the moment, well, that was fine with Nick. When his dad had found out about Nick starting to spend time in Deathworld, when the bill for the household Net account came in last month, there had been trouble… more trouble than it merited, Nick had thought.

"I don't like you giving my hard-earned money to that man," his father had said while eating his dinner, as Nick passed through the kitchen. "The guy's a wacko. The domain is full of unwholesome stuff. I saw something about it on the news a few days ago. And Joey Bane has enough money already without dumping ours on the pile, too. You just cut it out."

Nick had muttered something noncommittal and escaped without making any statements about what he was going to do one way or another. But it was getting time for the new month's bill to come in, and his father would see the breakdown of the household's Net charges, and know where Nick had been.

Gonna be noise…

Yet Nick was peculiarly satisfied at the prospect. Whatever ruckus his dad kicked up, in Nick's personal life there was too much advantage to be derived from being here, and he wasn't going to give it up. Nick was not an outstanding student, not great at sports, no huge success with the girls, but he was in here, and few enough kids at school or outside of it had been able to get in. There was a waiting list, and you could sit on it for weeks or months without result.

No one was sure what made the Bane computers pick you as one of the lucky ones to be let in. The assumption at school was that there was some kind of obscure "coolness" rating that no one understood. But being able to get access to the Circles at all, with a chance to see the dangerous stuff that was rumored to be down in those lowest levels, carried its own cachet. There were rumors about what had happened to people who had ventured down into those levels thinking they were tough enough… and discovering differently. There had been stories of some hos pitalizations… and everyone had heard about the suicides.

They didn't worry Nick. And as he thought about his father's reaction to his access to Deathworld, they worried him even less. His dad's annoyance pleased him somehow. If Mom and I are supposed to make your life all nice and smooth for you, he thought, well, it's not gonna be that way. You haven't exactly made it that way for us. Mom can do what she wants-but for me, I'm going to enjoy myself a little. If it bothers you… tough. When I do what you want, it doesn't make any difference. Let's just see how it goes when I don't snap to attention every time you open your mouth. Right!

And Nick grinned. It felt good to even have a chance to think such things, away from the little house where everything was always the same, and nothing ever seemed to change except for the worse, no matter what he did to try to make things better.

The Tree was closer, and Nick thought he could hear the cold sound of water flowing. Away across the dusty plain, he could see various people moving around-some of them in modern clothing, and real, or possibly so, many more of them in clothes from other times and places, decades old, centuries or millennia old, wandering around and lamenting their fates in a hundred languages and (as the song said) "a hundred shades of scream." It was noisy, but once you got past that, you noticed something. The screams tended to repeat themselves after a while, up here. Eventually you could start to work out, just by the sound, without trying to have any conversations, which of these figures were genuine people-other virtual visitors to Deathworld, the "Guest Dead" who stopped in, as Nick did, to make some noise of their own where it was safe to do so, and to remind themselves how pointless life was. Not that Nick was all that interested in the Guest Dead up at this level, especially since he didn't need them anymore. There was much more exciting business farther down, everybody said… people far more dangerous, more interesting… and more isolated from the real world. Nick was so tired of the real world.

After he had beaten the first level, the screams and shrieks that went up on the smoky air from the tortured souls all around him stopped making much difference to Nick. Indeed, you got used to them after a while, and needed something a little more immediate, something newer and scarier, to shake you up. Though you couldn't just go and get it, for the system in Deathworld wouldn't let you down into the deeper circles until you had spent a certain amount of time in the upper ones, talking to the people you met there. When you met enough real people, and pooled with them what information you had about the level you were working on at the moment, your reward was to be allowed to progress deeper into the site, to the lower circles, where the virtual experiences got more vivid, more out-of-control.

Bane's voice sang through the darkness:

"The world gets more real, and things just get worse: run as fast as you like, you can't outrun the hearse.

Nick kicked the dust up, approaching the Tree, and idly eyed the distant forms. In the beginning he had been surprised by the way the other people he saw had always seemed to be at a distance, no matter how long he walked toward them. Then he had discovered that this distancing was part of the domain's "idiom," and that it took an act of will to overcome it, not just the act of walking in a given direction. You had to go out of your way to actually talk to someone, had to strain against the fabric of this dark universe to break through. With some people you could strain against it all day and never get anywhere the -

twouldn't hear you or see you. They stayed shut up in their own private little worlds. It was one of the games Bane's Place played with you, either personally or at one remove, through the domain itself. For if the Circles had a motto other than the one hanging back there between the gates, it was "People stink. Life stinks. Everything stinks. Even this."

The music doesn't stink, though, Nick thought as he got closer to the Tree, noticing for the first time it not only had no leaves, but also no bark. Something seemed to have bitten it off. The music was one of the best things about this place, and Nick had no time for people who suggested it was all variations on the theme of "You're Going to Die Anyway, So You Might as Well Get Really Mad First."

There's a lot more to it than that… Nick would know, for he had all the officially released song collections, and even a few of the "pirate" segments supposedly extracted from the depths of this very domain. Beyond getting far enough down to see if those pirate "lifts" were genuine, Nick's other great dream was to see one of the live Bane concerts some day. It wouldn't happen any time soon, for those concerts were much too expensive, the price of the tickets having to cover the (nowadays) extortionate price of actually taking a physical concert on the road. It was something few rock stars bothered to do anymore, in a time when the audience's experience could be arranged and controlled much more completely in a Net-based venue than anywhere in the real world. But Joey Bane did it, saying, "I'm just old-fashioned that way."

There was a hope that Nick might be able to afford one of the virtual concerts, this year or early next. Assuming Dad doesn't blow his top when he sees the next Net access bill and ground me. But Nick had been squirreling away his allowance for a long time now, even diverting what should have been lunch money at school, happy to go hungry when he considered the alternative. Soon he would have enough to see The Man Himself in concert, hear in a live performance that great legendary scream of rage and despair at the end of "Lady Macbeth," see for himself the onstage carnage as Bane destroyed yet another tenthousand-dollar electric lute and the instruments of everybody else in his band at the end of "Cut the Strings." That would be worth any amount of grief from his dad and mom. Just a couple of hours of freedom, Nick thought. In the company of someone who knows what the world's really like, who doesn't pull his punches, who tells the truth about how awful everything is… The dream had kept him going for a long while.

It wasn't so bad to hear that everything stank, after all. As long as you knew that there were lots of people who agreed with you that, painful though it might be, the truth was best. Someday, when I move out, when I'm on my own, I'll spend as Inuch time in Bane's Place as I want… and in other places, places on the edge, the scary stuff, the stuff my folks and all the deluded others don't want me to know about. They can wrap themselves up in their nicey-nice world if they like and pretend not to notice how awful things are. I'm going out where things are real. I'm strong enough to take it…

Nick was humming the first verse of "Nicey-Nice" as he came up to the Tree, and the air around him was beginning to mimic him with the backbeat of the song, and he could see the cold smoke coming up from the river, when he saw something that hadn't been there the last time he came. A rock. And sitting on the rock was a figure wearing the most tightly tailored black slicktite possible, with what at first glimpse looked like a big black egg cradled in his lap. As Nick got closer, he saw it better, and caught his breath; for even in this dreary light the "egg" shone and glinted as if it lay under an invisible spotlight. It was a smooth, rounded shape, not really black but a brown so dark as to be mistaken for black, with a short neck-an electric lute with an ebony body, all inlaid with a spidery platinum webwork-that most famous of instruments in dark jazz, Camiun. There were people who claimed that Camiun must be a little bit alive, or else haunted, since no mere man could make an instrument sound like that-like a soul in torment, or one just escaped from it. Joey Bane had said that on the day he discovered that the world was completely and irreversibly wicked, he would cut Camiun's strings, five minutes before he killed himself…

He's only virtual, Nick thought, stopping by the stone. But the slender, muscular, dark-clad figure gazing down into the icy gray water flowing by now shook his longish hair back and glanced up at Nick sidewise… and Nick gulped. He had talked to people here who'd claimed to have met this particular apparition. Half the time he'd figured they'd been making it up. But here he was, or rather one of the virtual representations of him: Joey Bane himself-the singer in his guise as Dark Poet from his second song collection, Discourse with Spirits, looking out across the unrelieved darkness of the landscape behind him with an expression both morose and amused. The lute in his lap hummed softly to itself, because its master's fingers were presently motionless on the strings.

"Hey, Joey," Nick said.

That ironic smile curved itself up a little harder. Hard was the best word to describe it; it sat oddly on what would otherwise have been a young and innocent face.

"Nick," Joey said. "How goes the world?"

The domain's computer knew who Nick was, of course… but for a moment all he could do was shake his head. There were few enough, places like this in the Net. Mostly big celebrities didn't bother going to the trouble to personalize their domains-there was usually just an introduction when you came in. In this case, whoever designed the domain had gone to some trouble to customize the output for the users. That was probably one of the reasons it was so popular. You got the chance to really talk to the star, or at least to the Net-encoded version of his personality.

"Badly. As usual," Nick said. That was the customary response, the answer that the audiences shouted back to The Man Himself at his concerts, live or visual, when he asked the question. The virtual Joey Bane smiled a little more grimly and put his hand over Camiun's strings to still the lute. It argued the point a little, fizzing and mut- tering under his touch.

"Yeah, yeah, everybody wants it their way," Joey growled at the lute, and then looked up again. "You just on your way in?" Bane's simulacrum said. "Can't see you hanging around this level after you've solved it. Unless it's the music." He looked bored at this possibility.

"No," Nick said, "I'm ready for something new."

"Bet you are," Bane said. "Been stuck on three for a couple of weeks now. Hit your level?"

It was, among Banies, a rude question, suggesting you were incapable of taking the hard stuff, the real world, the truth… or that you were just dim. Had someone Nick's age said something like this to him, the circumstances might have become violent. But this was Joey Bane, and that ironic look was dwelling on Nick, watching to see how he reacted.

"Don't know yet," Nick said, in a sudden burst of humility.

Bane looked at him darkly for a moment, and then laughed. "Nothing wrong with not knowing," he said. "You look pretty down, though."

"Aaah…" The implant had to be feeding the Bane-domain computer his EEG and other information that would have betrayed that fact. But the thin, hard face was also kindly, in a strange way, and Nick said, after a moment, "It's just my folks."

"Aha," Joey Bane said. He stroked a dark, dissonant spatter of notes out of Camiun. "The eternal problem. Can't choose 'em, can't get rid of 'em, can't do 'em without messing up the rug." He snickered softly. "We've still got a fair bunch of 'em down here, though. Fifth and sixth floor down, mostly."

" '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 virtual 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-"

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:

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:

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…

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.