Deathworld

Chapter 4

That afternoon at Bradford Academy, Charlie saw Nick at lunch, long enough to sit down next to him and spend twenty minutes or so there, but not long enough to have any decent conversation with him, for Nick was surrounded at his table by other kids who knew him, all of them plying him with questions about Deathworld and the Seventh Circle. Nick was positively smirking with glee, telling them about it in hints and riddles, mostly, and pausing to play the occasional scrap of a legally "lifted" audio track from the virtual experience on his pocket HardB ard.

Charlie wasn't all that interested in the music. It sounded too much like unadulterated screaming to him, the vocals shrieking so relentlessly that it was hard even to make out the instrumentals, mostly blaring stuff in electrohorn and amplified lute so riddled with feedback that you could hardly tell what key it was in. What did concern him was Nick. His buddy was absolutely holding center court, and plainly enjoying it. A lot of the other students had heard about the suicides, and many of their parents had told them to stay out of Deathworld. A few, whose parents hadn't been concerned, had ventured in and then become seriously frustrated by the challenges of just the first level. All of them were pumping Nick for information about level one, or asking him if he knew any of the kids who'd killed themselves, or if he wasn't worried about getting in more trouble-but Nick was laughing it all off as if it was minor stuff.

Finally the crowd thinned briefly, and Charlie, who had actually had to stand and wait with his lunch tray until a seat opened up a few spaces down the table, was finally able to lean over and say, "Nick, you okay?"

"Huh?" Nick looked at him strangely. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Your folks just yanked your circuitry," Charlie said. "Most of us might find that a little annoying."

Nick frowned. "It won't last forever," he said. "Besides, I'm getting a job lined up for over the summer… I'll be able to pay for my own access time, and they won't be able to stand over me and say what I should do and what I shouldn't."

This made Charlie blink slightly. Nick was not exactly someone he would have categorized as the rebellious type… but all of a sudden all kinds of personality quirks that Charlie hadn't noticed before seemed to be popping out. Could it just be some developmental thing? Charlie wondered. Kind of a stage? People get those…

"Besides," Nick said to him, looking a little ways across the room, "there's no point in assuming my folks are going to just let this drop, even after I've paid the bill off." And abruptly he looked depressed. His whole face sagged out of shape. "They stink, just like everything else, and if they don't give me trouble about this, they'll find something else pretty quick. About time I started pulling back a little, letting them realize that they don't get to say what kinds of things I enjoy, or get to run my whole life until there's none of it that feels worth living. Soon enough they won't be able to run any of my life, anyhow."

Charlie opened his mouth to start to say that whatever Nick's folks did, they didn't particularly stink. They were certainly no worse than his. And there was something slightly unnerving about the phrasing of that last line, when it came out of somebody wearing that profoundly depressed expression. But then Nick's face brightened up again, just as if someone had thrown a switch, and he said, "Anyway, did you hear the lifts I got?"

"Uh, it was hard not to hear them. The guy's voice is, uh-"

"Staggering, isn't it? Wait till you hear the stuff I bring back later in the week. I'm gonna make Seventh in a matter of hours, and there's a whole bunch of new stuff down there, really hard-edged." Nick grinned, a rather feral look. "And I already got a hint about some of it." He nudged Charlie conspiratorially with one elbow. "You know what the theme is down there?"

"No."

" 'Strung Out.' "

Nick laughed, a laugh that almost sounded like his usual self. "Charlie, you're so deadpan sometimes, they could make coffins out of you. `Strung-' get it?" And he made a gesture above his head like someone pulling a noose tight, and crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, and made a "gack" noise.

Charlie blinked.

"Hey, Nicky," one of the other kids said from the group gathered around his HardBard, "the thing's stopped playing."

"Huh? Oh, that's the copy-defeat, it wants me touching it every so often-"

He scrambled up from the table and went over to them, leaving Charlie staring, somewhat bemused, at a cold cheeseburger. Then the "tone" sounded, a siren-bleat that was a five-minute warning of the approach of the next class period, and soon Nick had vanished, with everyone else. Charlie got up and ditched his tray in the recycler, and went off to his physics class. He got 97 percent on the physics paper he had turned in that morning, an occurrence that normally would have caused him either to do handstands or call the media. But by then, and even several hours later as he waited for the light-rail tram home from school, Charlie was feeling rather grim.

There was no sign of Nick at the school tram stop, at the time they usually met there to share the first part of their respective rides home. He might have caught an earlier one, Charlie thought. Or else he's gone a different way. Maybe caught the bus around the corner, up to the Square, where his new access is.

Doesn't mean anything's really wrong.

But Charlie was finding that hard to believe.

And what if the problem's actually at my end? Charlie thought, as the tram swung around the corner toward the little plaza that was nearest his house. It wasn't a pleasant idea. Could it be that I just don't know my best friend as well as I thought I did?

Charlie got off the tram at his stop and plodded down the street, for once completely unmoved by the scents drifting out of the neighborhood pizzeria, and turned the corner into his street. And maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe it's nothing. He's been stressed. I've been real busy…

But that sudden look of depression that had taken possession of Nick's face was like nothing Charlie had seen before. He couldn't get it out of his head, nor could he stop thinking about the way it had come and gone like something turned on and off with a switch. As Charlie went up the front steps and let himself in, he realized he was more worried now than he had been before he talked to Winters.

His folks were out, as he'd known they would be. His mom was going to be coming in later than usual because of her in-service, and his dad was still at the slipped-disk seminar. Charlie rooted around in the freezer for a burrito, put it in the oven, waited thirty seconds for the "ding," put the thing on a plate, and ingested it at high speed, thinking. You need to get a handle on this, he told himself sternly. You need to put Nick aside and concentrate on your research.

Yeah, sure.

Nonetheless, Charlie sat down at the table, where the "newspaper" still sat, and pulled over a pencil and a scratchpad. "Whether you're going to crack someone's chest or paint a wall," his father always said-the last time, ruefully scraping the last teaspoonful out of a container of spackle-"always make a plan. It saves you time, it breeds more useful ideas, and it keeps you from looking stupid later."

Charlie scribbled on the pad for a few minutes. Having filled one page of it, Charlie paused, wondering one more time if all this was overreaction. Might be able to get through to him now-

He dropped his pencil and trotted upstairs to the den, sat down in the implant chair, lined up his implant with the server, and closed his eyes. A little shiver down the nerves, like a shiver of cold, but without having anything to do with temperature, and Charlie was standing in his workspace. Gaslights were lit around the walls of the oval room, producing the usual faint smoky/chemical smell. It was ten in the evening in London, and outside he could hear people making their way to the opera through the crowded eighteenth-century streets.

Charlie stood there looking around him. There were e-mails hanging there in the air over the worktable, bobbing gently up and down, but none of them were vibrating or bouncing around in the way Charlie had programmed his system to use when a message was urgent. He went over to the worktable, touched one of the e-mails. The air lit with its transmission information and source. TAAJ GREEN-Nice to hear from her, but it could wait. He touched another of the little spheres floating there, and it lit from within with a blue glow. Next to it a man appeared, saying, "Tired of fast food? Looking for something better in regional cuisine? Come to Georgetown's newest-"

Charlie grimaced, grabbed the spammy little mail-sphere out of the air, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. It vanished with a satisfying crunch, and the man vanished as well, making a digitally strangled noise.

He sighed, looked around him. "Nick?" Charlie said.

"Making that connection for you now," Charlie's system said. "Access is open."

"All right-" He went over to the doorway that he used for access, and stuck his head through. But on the other side was nothing but the plain glowing whiteness he had seen before. There, sitting in the midst of it, was the Eames chair, and some mail-solids spinning unanswered in the air, but no sign of Nick.

He went back into his own space and said to his workspace, "Conditional instruction."

"Ready," the workspace maintenance program said. "State the conditions."

"If Nick Melchior calls, e-mails, or shouts for me," Charlie said, "call the house comms number until 2300 hours. Implement immediately."

"Conditional instruction saved. Implementing now." "Thanks." Charlie closed his eyes and told his link through the

implant to undo itself. With that slight shiver, he was back in afternoon light, in the den again.

With a frown, Charlie went downstairs, sat down at the table, and once more started making notes on the scratch-pad. Soon he'd filled a page, and then another. He was more worried about Nick than he had been on the way home. Afternoon was shading toward dusk when he looked up again at a sound from down the hall.

"Charlie?"

"Down here, Mom," he said, looking with surprise at the pages of notes. His mom-small and dark and petite in her "formal" whites, which she didn't normally wear at work when doing psych-came strolling in, dropped some textbooks and her computer/workpad on the table, and draped her pink sweater over the chair at the table's other end. "You have anything to eat, sweetheart?" she said.

"Uh, yeah."

She opened the fridge and rooted around for a moment, coming up with a jug of iced tea. "I wish," his mother said, sloshing it thoughtfully, "that someone would explain to me why this always goes cloudy in here."

He thought about that. "Microparticulate matter?" Charlie said. "Tea's not really an infusion when you make it out of tea bags. It's a suspension. The characteristics of the suspension change when you chill it."

His mom shut the fridge and went to the cupboard for a glass, then came back to get some ice out of the freezer. "Sounds good to me."

"It's a theory," Charlie said. "I'll ask my physics teacher tomorrow."

"Why? Sounds like you're on the right track." She sat down at the table on his right, glancing idly at the newspaper.

As she did, her eye fell on the headline about the two suicides. Charlie saw her look, and he sighed and pushed away the notes he was making. "Mom-" He glanced up, trying to find a way to begin to explain it all to her.

"Charlie," she said, "what is it? You look like you've lost your best friend."

"Uh, not quite." And he found himself wondering whether the phrase, as she was using it, was intended simply as a cliche. It could be a slightly unnerving experience, having a psychiatric nurse as a mother. Not that she could read your mind or anything-in fact, her normal disclaimer was "I don't have to read minds. Faces are more than enough." Maybe in my case, Charlie thought, it's more than usually true. She sees my face every day. "Suicide-" Charlie said.

"Hmm," she said. "Are we coming at this as a general subject, or for a specific reason?"

He swallowed. "I'm worried about somebody." "Who?"

Charlie shook his head. "Uh, I want to be clear about my facts first. How do you tell for sure if someone's going to kill themselves?"

"For sure?" his mother said, raising her eyebrows as she sat down. "You don't ever, for sure. I wish… Oh, there are various signs. Personality changes… changes in behavior, inability to concentrate or do business or schoolwork, for example… changes in the way someone sleeps or eats, feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness. Also, a lot of talk about suicide coming up suddenly can be significant. Or gestures like suddenly giving prized possessions away… " She turned her glass around on the table. "You have to look to see how many of these signs are there at once, how serious. they seem… and look hard to make sure that the person isn't doing these things for some other reason."

Charlie sat back in his chair. "Did you hear about these suicides in the Deathworld virtual environment?"

She raised her eyebrows. "Matter of fact, I have. There was a mention of them in an article in one of the psychiatric journals last month."

"Did the article say anything about what might have caused them?"

His mother thought for a moment. "Nothing concrete," she said. "The authors talked briefly about the details of the people who had suicided, but the article didn't go into a lot of depth. Mostly it was investigating the possibility that this was an `artefactual suicide cluster,' a situation in which there are an unusually high number of suicides in a given area or set of circumstances, but none of the deaths exhibit any affiliation to the others any identifiable common cause. A statistical fluke, in other words."

"You mean the article couldn't find any linkage among the suicides, except for the fact that they had all been in Deathworld."

"That's right." His mother shifted in her chair. "But bear in mind, honey, that this was just a short article, and it was thin on detail."

Charlie thought about that for a moment. "Okay," he said. "Then tell me something else. Have you ever heard of someone committing suicide because of some kind of implanted suggestion?"

She looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds before replying. "While such things can be done," his mom said, "they take a lot of doing. A whole lot. The human mind is committed to keeping itself going, at any cost, even under what looks like intolerable pressure to the outside world. Sometimes it copes by going crazy. Even though that may not seem like a particularly wonderful option to you or me, it satisfies the mind's basic need-to keep on going. It takes a considerable intervention, a very noticeable level of interference, to subvert a mind sufficiently to make it completely give up that commitment to survive."

"Like they used to say that you couldn't be hypnotized into doing something you wouldn't normally do."

"Nothing important, no." His mother leaned back in the chair again. "Let's put it this way. Your whole life is a series of conditioning experiences. Your early life, for example, is about teaching you how to behave in human society, everything from 'Thou shalt not put thy feet up on the furniture' to 'Thou shalt not kill.' " Charlie hurriedly took his feet off the chair nearest to him. His mother smiled. "And your training, the conditioning you get from your parents, your teachers, your friends, slowly slots everything more or less into 'order of importance' in your unconscious, your ID, whatever you want to call the part of your brain that reacts before you really have time to think about it. You learn, ideally, which instructions are really important and which ones aren't. So someone who hypnotized you might not have too much trouble getting you to put your feet up on a chair. On the scale of 'important,' that's pretty low. But if they tried to tell you to kill yourself?" She shook her head. "You wouldn't do it. Not unless you had been conditioned all your life to believe your own survival wasn't particularly important… or unless you were deranged already."

"What about subliminal stuff, then?"

She stretched. "That has some effect, yes… but they've been arguing about it for a century now, and no one's sure how much. Again, the question has to be taken case by case. Some people are more susceptible to subliminals than others… and not necessarily people who are stressed or have psychiatric problems, either. Some environments are more conducive to the administration of subliminals than others, and suggestions which produce strong results in one format or medium will fail completely in another." She shrugged. "Use of subliminals in public communications is illegal, of course. Not to say there's not ongoing suspicion that they're occasionally used. But as for making someone kill themselves?" She shook her head. "I very much doubt it."

"What if someone found a new way to do it… more strongly, or in some way that couldn't be detected?"

"New things are happening all the time, honey," Charlie's mother said. "But what can't be changed is the principle on which such a technique would have to operate. To be subliminal, a command has to affect a mind without that mind noticing… and a healthy mind tends to notice when something tries to tell it to stop its own function."

Charlie sighed. "Okay."

"Now are you going to tell me what this is about?" she said. "Somehow I don't think this is for some report for school. Are you concerned about one of your friends?"

He hesitated. "Yeah," he said. "But, Mom, I can't tell you any more about it yet. I'm not sure I'm not completely off course."

She gave him a long, considering look. "Funny," she said. "Part of me wants to jump on the table and demand that you tell me everything right now. But part of me reminds that other part that if you're being careful about your conclusions, that's probably something you picked up from your dad and me over time." She smiled, and the expression was rather rueful.

Charlie's mother put the iced-tea glass down. "Okay," she said. "You tell me when you're ready. But, Charlie, if this starts to look like real trouble with your friend, whether you're ready or not, I want you to tell me then. Right?"

"Right," he said.

She got up and took her glass over to the sink, rinsed it out, and stuck it in the dishwasher. Charlie got up and stretched, too. "I feel silly," he said.

"Why, honey?"

"I feel like I should have known all this stuff. When it's explained, it sounds like common sense."

His mother chuckled. "Your father said the same kind of thing," she said, "when he and I first started talking about the human mind, all those years ago. No matter how medical schools swear they're going to pay more attention to the psych side of things, it never really happens. So I married your dad to make sure we would both have plenty of time for me to educate him."

Then she grinned. "Of course," she added, "he thinks the same about me. So I suppose we're even." Her smile got more wicked. "But then, doctors always do think they can teach nurses things. Far be it from us to dissuade them. Speaking of which, let me get changed out of this uniform before he gets home… "

She headed out of the kitchen.

Charlie looked at his notes, then gathered them together and went up the stairs to go back online.

He spent the next three hours or so in his workspace, pulling off the Net every reference to the suicides that he could find. Shortly his space was full of scraps of virtual paper floating in the air, both those copied from his original notes and those sourced elsewhere on the Net. He had little windows screening video clips of police statements, too, and local Net and live-media reporters, and scraps of text burning in the air by themselves; stories chained together by little associational lines of light, and here and there a virtual report or reporter, with a genuine piece of landscape, or a person or persons talking. It was very crowded in Charlie's workspace, more so even than the time he called in Sir Isaac Newton and the whole Royal Academy to find out why it took them so long to get the Longitude Problem straightened out.

The images of the suicides were, by and large, not much use to him, and the stories routinely gave him information on everything except what he wanted to know. What caused them…? No one seemed to have the slightest idea.

About how they happened, there was more information. One suicide had been in the kid's own bedroom, another had been in the living room of a kid's house while the parents were away. The third had been like the most recent one, in a hotel room not so far from the suicide's home. A fourth had been in a park. A fifth had been in a car in a public parking garage. Maine, New York City, the D. C. area, a suburb of Atlanta… All East Coast, Charlie thought, except this one, in the garage. Colorado. Fort Collins-a college town.

All of them, actually, were in or near college towns, even the suicide in Maine, in a suburb of Bangor. But that would be Deathworld's target age, anyway, Charlie thought. Eighteen to twenty-five… And the age spread of the victims varied: nineteen, several eighteen-year-olds, a twenty-one-year-old, another who was sixteen.

But that matches the stats, Charlie thought. After talking to his mother, one of the first things he had done online was to pull up stuff on suicide. The age spread of all these suicides generally matched the stats, too. There seemed to be a tendency toward suicide-proneness in the late teens and early twenties, for reasons that none of the authorities seemed able to agree on.

Charlie walked among the scraps of information hanging in the air around him, peering at them, trying to find a pattern. None was obvious, except for one or two mentions of how the suicides had happened. And maybe there really isn't a pattern, no matter what I'd like to believe, Charlie thought. The cops must have looked at all this stuff and decided there was no connection.

But for whatever reason, Charlie couldn't bring himself to believe this. There was something about all these deaths that bothered him.

Partly it had to do with what had been said in the two news accounts which were even slightly specific about methods… and what they implied matched uncomfortably to something Nick had mentioned. "Strung out…" From what Charlie could find out from random mentions in the chat groups dedicated to Bane and the Banies, there was a lot of this kind of hanging symbolism in the "lower circles." Mostly it was seen there as a good way to punish criminals, especially murderers.

Charlie turned to look at one of the displays, a virtual "snap" taken with a digital handheld sampler-a tabloid picture, obviously taken from a distance, against the law enforcement agency's wishes, using a heat-assisted imager and looking through a window that had carelessly been left open for a moment. It still raised the small hairs on the back of Charlie's neck. It looked, at first glance, like someone hadn't really thought things through. You wouldn't normally think that trying to do yourself in from a coat hook would be all that effective. But in this case it had worked entirely too well. And the face…

Charlie was not willing to spend too much time looking at it. The face told him very little. But the awkwardly splayed-out body troubled him more. The sight of it made him gulp, and then he was ashamed of himself, embarrassed, even though there was no one to know about his reaction. But it was going to take a long time to get rid of that initial wash of nervousness at seeing someone lying in that position… because when he had been tiny, he remembered seeing people like that in his first home, the home he preferred not to think about anymore. When those scenes surfaced from memory later in his life, when he was old enough to understand, Charlie had realized that those people had all either been stoned, or dead.

He gulped again. He was going to have to come to terms with the worst of those memories eventually, he knew. But it was hard.

For the moment Charlie went back to studying the news story that went with the image. It told him little about the cause of death that he didn't already know. Hanging, obviously. But nothing about the details surrounding the death. No autopsy information. None of the follow-up stories had given anything like that, especially not this virtual tabloid. It was the horror of the death itself that the tab was interested in selling.

I wonder, though. Are the police purposely having the news services withhold information? Charlie thought. It made sense. They might be waiting for someone to reveal information about the crime that only they knew, that they didn't want the general public to have access to.

Good for them. But it doesn't help me any. And he kept flashing on Nick saying, with glee, "Strung out-"

Charlie shook his head and looked back at the "window" in which he had the salient details of the deaths set out. There was something that had briefly attracted his attention earlier, and to which he now returned: the dates. The first suicides were in May and July of the year before last. The third and fourth had been in May and October of 2024… and now here were the' fifth and sixth, both in May as well. He remembered Winters's caution about the accidental aspects of this kind of thing. But at the same time-could May mean something in particular to Deathworld people? "What's Joey Bane's birthday?" he said to the computer.

"August 8, 1996."

Charlie sighed. "So much for that theory," he muttered. "Have we got the Encyclopedia Retica capsule on Bane?" "Displaying it now."

It spilled out in front of Charlie in two different windows: the text version, with a discography of the man's music and various analyses of his style by various critics-most of them surprisingly supportive. Clearly Bane was thought by his peers to genuinely be a talent, even if Charlie wasn't impressed. The other window had a sound-andmotion record consisting of snippets of various concert performances and interviews.

One of these, which appeared in the capsule only as a soundbyte over some stills-Bane's voice saying, "My goal is to get Hell to pay me royalties"-caught Charlie's attention, if only because it was a quote he had heard several times recently, in the brief flow of news following the most recent double suicide, and never in context. He got up, went over to the window, and poked the still then showing with his finger. The computer said, "Holding. What would you like me to do?"

"Expand that audio clip. Is there imagery to go with it?"

"Yes. Expanding-"

Shortly Charlie found himself looking at a full-virtual version of the infamous Josh Billings interview on CCNet. There Joey Bane sat, at ease and dressed all in black, in the well-known and instantly recognizable minimalist set, looking relaxed and amused as the famous interviewer tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to say something self-incriminating. Charlie stood a few feet away, his arms folded, and watched it.

"Look," Bane was saying to Billings's shocked face, "you should stop being so hypocritical about it. There's not a being on this planet who hasn't reflected on the cruelty and pain of life, the unfairness of it. Some of the greatest literature of every age has dwelt on the problem. But nowadays, if we give any consideration to it at all, we're so terrified of confronting the issue directly that we do it in secret. There's no consensus that it's all right to think these kind of thoughts anymore. In fact, nowadays if you talk about death or pain, people almost immediately start to think you're morbid, and if you talk about it frequently, they're likely to try to have you hospitalized. Is that fair? Is that sensible? These days we raise our kids on fairy tales from two centuries ago, for pity's sake, and suggest to them during the most impressionable part of their lives that the most they're going to have to worry about in life is wolves trying to steal their picnic baskets. When they come to you with their real concerns-that people suffer and die unfairly, and that the whole world is essentially cruel and unfair, and living in its hurts, we try to pretend it isn't so, we get uncomfortable, we turn away and do anything we can to avoid the subject. We don't have answers. Neither do our kids. If they're lucky they'll grow up and find some answers that we haven't seen… but not telling them the truth about the world, the Bad News, in my opinion predisposes them to the kind of despair that causes people to check out early. In my site, at least, kids get told the truth. Yes, the world stinks! What you do about it, that's your business. But at least there's a place for them to express their anger, which is a luxury a lot of them don't have anymore in our increasingly nicey-nice culture, where expressing an antisocial idea 'inappropriately,' or in front of the wrong people, can get you taken away from your parents indefinitely by some meddling social worker. In my place kids can see the truth, see the pain, and also see what happens to those who don't handle that anger right, who seal it over until it breaks out. You think I condone violence or crime or hatred? No way. But there's a lot of all those things out there, and pretending they're not isn't going to make them go away. I think we help kids by at least preparing them for the idea that the world stinks, so that when their folks finally let them out of the overprotected hothouse environment that the modern home has become, they're ready for what they're going to see when they're on their own when Mommy and Daddy aren't holding their hands anymore. And that's where a lot of the resistance to our site is coming from, from outraged mommies and daddies who're ticked because we're telling their little darlings the truth they never had the nerve or the brains to tell them themselves… "

It went on like that, nearly half an hour during which poor Billings barely had room to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps when he offered Bane the interview time, he hadn't thought through what it would mean to offer virttime to a man with the aerobic advantages produced by spending hours every night screaming and singing nonstop on stages real or virtual all around the planet. Only once did Bane pause, when Billings managed to say, "And over your gates, where it says 'Abandon hope…. isn't that crime? Plagiarism?"

"Nope," Bane said cheerfully. "It was lying around in the public domain, and no one was using it. I trademarked it. My goal is to make Hell pay me royalties."

Having come to the soundbyte itself, the image froze on the confident, arrogant face, and Charlie sat there looking at it for a while, thinking.

The folks accusing this guy of being evil, he thought, are wrong. He's not, really. Or at least I don't think he is.

But still… something's going on at his site to cause it to act as a 'core' for these suicides.

Now all I want to know is: what?

Charlie stood there and brooded for a moment. The man himself might not mean anyone any harm, but there was always the possibility that someone in his organization did. That someone was either trying to sabotage Deathworld by causing these suicides… or was running some other agenda, something a lot more obscure.

After a moment Charlie sighed. If that was the case, the odds of him ever finding out about it were minuscule. Besides, he thought, remember `Occam's Razor.' Don't go introducing possibilities into the equation out of nowhere. Deal with the ones you have evidence for, before starting to make things up.

Charlie turned away from Joey Bane, frozen there in his chair, and frowned at the polished wood floor of the old operating theater as he walked among the "exhibits." And evidence is the problem. I don't have enough to come to any conclusions. For a good diagnosis, you need data clinical data on what happened to these people.

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 way.

"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.

And parents who're going to remind me of it every chance they get, for the foreseeable future.

Suddenly Nick could understand how nice it might be for it all just to stop. Like going to sleep and not waking up. The sudden desire for it to be that way, just quiet, just no more trouble, came down on him, darker and stranger than the surroundings… and Nick shivered.

Shade stopped, looked back at him. "Nick. Come on, what's the matter?"

"Uh, nothing."

That feeling was gone now, but it had been… weird. Nick went after her, shaking the umbrella a little to get the excess ash off it. The dark shape up ahead of them, in the shadow of the mountain, was a little better defined now, starting to look like a building. "Uh-oh, watch out for this one," Shade said, stopping very suddenly.

Nick stopped and looked down, stepping back hurriedly as the growing crevasse shot out arms in several directions, one of them stitching along right in front of his feet, the ash in front of him tipping down into it, faint flakes of darkness against the quickly revealed dull-red glow of the flow of lava, away down there. In the air above them, Camiun's tuning-up paused and then segued into a low quiet minor-key strumming. "So strange," Joey Bane's voice sang, "so strange…"

They made their way around the new crevasse, and kept walking. A shadow reared out of the air near them as they walked. Nick stopped and stared at what was swinging there. Two shapes. It wasn't a tree of any kind. It was some sort of metal framework, and a man and a woman were hanging upside down from it. "Mussolini," Shade said. "You know Italy… last century. They caught up with him, eventually." She raised her eyebrows, just visible in the light of the nearby volcano. "There are plenty more like that around here if you care to investigate… "

"Thanks, no." Nick gulped, sickened by the image swinging gently in front of him. Then he looked past Shade, still unnerved by that odd feeling that had come down on him, and saw something more to the point. Past the tall metal frame, at the foot of the volcano, was something that interested him a whole lot more. A faint shimmer of light, something genuinely reflective in all that dead matte black-a wide, dark sheet of water. It was the Lake of Tears, and beyond it, reflecting darkly, rose the Keep of the Dark Artificer at last, all gleaming black towers and walkways, and high up in one tower, a single light.

"That's really it," Nick whispered. "Finally…"

"Yup," Shade said, looking at the Keep. To Nick's eye she looked astonishingly blase about something which, in its way, was the heart of Deathworld. "Bigger than it looks," she said. "Don't be fooled by it."

He nodded, then turned back to Shade. There was something about her voice, something sad… "Are you okay?" Nick said.

She looked at him in surprise. "Why wouldn't I be?" The answer was defensive, flip, a little sarcastic…

Why wouldn't I be? he'd said to Charlie, and laughed at him. And Charlie had genuinely been concerned. Nick bit his lip. "Just asking," he said.

"Yeah, well, thanks." She tossed her hair back, a shadow in her greater shadow. "So what are you waiting for? You pass… you might as well go on in and see what's waiting."

"Pass?" Nick was bemused. "But I didn't do anything."

Shade gave him that scornful look again. "You asked the right question," she said, and began to fade away in the volcano's feverish light.

"But which one?"

She grinned. "If you have to ask," Shade said, "I can't explain it. Go on, go ahead and see if you get anywhere in the Keep. The way to Nine is through the Keep, they say… if you can figure it out. But I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope."

She vanished completely.

Nick turned to look at the huge doors of the Keep. Slowly, hauled open by troops of demons singing yo-yo-heave-ho, and pulling on giant bronze ropes, the massive doors swung open before him. Nick stood there feeling a great flush of triumph as Camiun's voice cried out in feedback-fuzzed ecstatic arpeggios all up and down the scale.

The demons stood waiting, standing at attention.

Nick, though, stood still there, thinking.

The way to Nine is through the Keep, they say… if you can figure it out.

Nick stood there, considering, for a while… then deliberately turned his back on the Keep and started to kick his way back through the downfalling ash, back the way he had come.

"Hey," yelled one of the demons down by the door, "where ya goin'?"

"Back to help some people," Nick said, and scuffed off into the darkness, toward the edge of the Eighth Circle again.

From the shadow of the doors, a tall dark form, not a demon, faded back into existence, watching him go… and smiled.