Deathworld

Chapter 6

That evening Charlie was sitting once more in his workspace, with piles of files around him, in the blackest mood he'd been in for days. Part of it was because this session had been delayed. His sandwich with his father, last night, had segued into one of the more ferocious games of cutthroat "timed chess" they'd ever had, and his father had won-an unusual outcome. Charlie had chalked it up to the fact that he was slightly distracted by his evening out with Mark. Now, though, he was in the midst of analyzing the information that Mark had helped him bring back… and that was accounting for the rest of his dark mood.

Charlie sat leaning back on the bottom-most bench in his workspace, looking into the Pit. It was full of virtual information and exhibits again, so much so that he'd had to move the worktable out of the middle of it. Now the floor of the Pit was occupied by six different sets of information, floating in the air… and what bothered Charlie the most was the similarities between four of them.

They had all been strangulations, of course. That was bad enough. But in four of those suicides-the "double" suicide of just a few days ago, and the New York and Fort Collins ones-the toxicology reports had turned up something that would have immediately struck the authorities as suspicious, Charlie thought… if they had bothered comparing notes. But they hadn't.

He got up, strolled over to the New York suicide. This had been Renee Milford. Charlie had been through her autopsy, but he had no heart for looking at those pictures of her. He had found one that he preferred in one of the local New York virtual environments dedicated to news and current events-a family "virtshot" of Renee sitting at the beach in a one-piece bathing suit, with the tall brick water tower of Jones Beach State Park away behind her in the distance. She was blond, and pretty, and eighteen. Her smile was sunny, she had a slight sunburn on the tops of her shoulders, she was laughing at the camera, and she looked as if she didn't have a worry in the world. The picture had been taken in 2023, the year before she died.

Charlie looked down at the image of Renee sitting there, her hair a little tousled by the wind, blown sand glittering in the air. Next to her, hanging in the air like some kind of malevolent, multicolored, multilegged bug, was the image of the molecule the city toxicologist's analysis had found in her blood. It was scorbutal cohydrobromate.

The hydrobromates were not in the pharmacopeia, either the government's informal "N. P." or the official "U. S. P." list. They had no legitimate medical use. They were what an earlier generation had referred to as a "designer drug," a chemical built to get people high… and sometimes intended to perform other functions as well. In the case of the hydrobromates, the high was usually enough. But scorbutal hydrobromate, when it started to be produced in the 2010s, soon acquired a tarnished reputa- tion, even for a recreational drug. It was a mind-dulling, inhibition-loosening drug, and was used by crooks who wanted their victims to be less than clear about what was happening to them. One form of it, delivered as an aerosol spray, had briefly been used on night trains in Europe in a real-life scenario of the old urban myth about people being "gassed" unconscious so they could be robbed in their sleeping compartments. The gangs who did this had been caught and put away, but not before the drug's reputation spread, and more of it started to be made all over the place, in Europe and then in North America. "Scobro" was popular, for it was cheap and relatively easy to make-it could be thrown together out of various readily available household chemicals and a well-known remedy for upset stomachs-and best of all, from the criminals' point of view, it tended to metabolize quickly. It was very short-acting. Having left the brain muddled and dozy, its molecule then came apart into its component bromides in the bloodstream itself, often before the liver even had a chance to start detoxifying it.

Charlie scowled at the molecular model hovering gently in the air by the image of Renee Milford, who appeared to have strangled herself in her parents' garage. The toxicologist in Queens-who knew what she had been thinking of, while she was working on this case, or what she might have suspected? But she had run a much more thorough and expensive blood series on Renee than had strictly been required… and the scorbutal had turned up in it. Luck, Charlie thought, or just good timing. The drug deconstructed itself even more quickly in the rapidly acidifying bloodstream of someone who was dying or dead than it did in the blood of a live person, and in a matter of minutes there might have been none of it left at all.

He sighed and moved on to the next set of "exhibits," the one for Malcolm Dwyer, who had been one of the two kids to die here in the D. C. area a few days ago. Malcolm had had a big dose of the drug, so much that even after the delay in finding his and Jeannine Metz's bodies, there had still been significant amounts of it in his bloodstream-enough, at least, to identify it by the bromide and bromate fractions pooled in the parts of his body already beginning to experience rigor. The coroner in Arlington had found it and recognized it immediately for what it was.

The problem was that, by itself, finding sco-bro in someone's bloodstream didn't mean that much. Yes, the drug was illegal, like almost all the other designer drugs. But lots of people took it anyway. And in a case like this, the nature of the crime scene would itself tend to minimize the role of any drug. After all, no drug could make you commit suicide… could it?

Charlie stood there, looking at Malcolm's image-another virtclip, a young black guy not that much older than Charlie, tall, good looking, cheerful. And dead now. Charlie's mother had been pretty certain that you couldn't cause anyone to suicide if they weren't already suicidal. But even she had been willing to admit that new ways of doing things were being invented every day…

And how do I know this isn't a coincidence, anyway? Granted, it would have to be a huge one…

Charlie walked around to the third set of data that had shown the drug. This was Jaime Velasquez, from Fort Collins. He was a little, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy built sort of like Mark Gridley, but older, and with a much more innocent face. The picture Charlie had of him was of a guy almost completely muffled up in ski clothes, grinning past a ski mask which a friend just out of shot in the same virtclip had just pulled down, waving his ski poles at the camera, then falling down in the snow as the same out-of-shot friend hooked a sky behind one of Jaime's knees and knocked him sprawling backward into the powder. In Jaime's bloodstream-either because he had had a very slight dose, or had lived long enough to detoxify it, or had been too long dead before they had found him-there had been almost none of the whole scobro molecule left at all. The toxicologist had either missed the bromide fragments in the postmortem blood samples, or had seen them and assumed they had come from some other source… or perhaps had dismissed them as unimportant. Either way, they hadn't been mentioned in his dictated text report.

But all the same, the drug had been there. Charlie heaved a big sigh of frustration. If the coroner in Colorado had known about the findings of his associates in New York and Maryland, he might have been able to get his own police force to examine the crime scene more carefully for signs that anyone else had been there. But it hadn't happened. There had been no comparison of data.

Charlie scowled as he walked around to the next set of exhibits. Some of it had to do with what Mark had described: separate states' failure to contribute information to a common pool, intrastate authorities' unwillingness to cooperate with one another. But there could have been other causes as well. Coroners who saw what they wanted to see, Charlie thought. Or what they were convinced that they should be seeing. Just another suicide. Nothing unusual…

But then each of them was looking at a separate case… not at one case as part of a group or set of cases. It's not their fault they didn't realize what they were looking at.

But here I am, Charlie thought, and 1 think I know what I'm looking at.

Murder.

The minute you find anything… said James Winters's voice in the back of his head.

Charlie opened his mouth to tell his system to place a call…

… then closed his mouth again, thinking.

You know what he's going to say, said something in the back of Charlie's mind.

He sat down on his bench again and looked out at the exhibits.

There were very few things that Charlie hated more than drugs. He had seen them ruin people's lives, had seen them ruin the life of his birth mother, the one person he had loved more than anyone else in the world. They'd killed her, slowly, by hours and inches. That memory was one that he didn't often examine closely. He was not up for looking very hard at it right this minute, either. But the moment he called James Winters and started to present this data to him, that painful old history wasgoing to be held up in front of him by that careful and thorough man. Winters would say to him, Are you sure this isn't clouding your judgment a little, Charlie? You know how you feel about drugs. I understand it completely. It makes perfect sense to me that you would want to keep other people from suffering the same kind of loss that you have.

But you shouldn't let it make you see losses like that where there aren't any…

And he would remind Charlie once again about the huge numbers of people on the Net, and the incidence of accident and circumstance among those people, and the way they impacted on mortality statistics.

But it wouldn't matter. I know what I'm seeing here. These people did not commit suicide. They were "helped" to die.

Charlie looked over at the New York data again. Here, unfortunately, the investigation into Renee's death had been less wonderful. The coroner had been conscientious, but the police had not, and they had done very little work on the actual area where she had been found dead. Up in Maine, in Bangor, though, someone had been-suspicious? Or just not certain of what they were seeing. And there were some odd findings at the scene.

Charlie went around to Richard Delano's exhibit and looked at what was spread out there. There was a virtclip of Richard, a short, well-muscled guy, blond, gray-eyed, in baggies and a hot-weather vest, walloping someone's fastball in a softball game on some unnamed summer afternoon, then taking off around the bases, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. And there, spread out next to the clip, was the Bangor police department's own virtual version of the crime scene, the living room of the house where Richard had been found. They had gone right around the room and virtsnapped everything, in both macro and micro. They had come up with some odd fiber evidence: bits of cotton fluff that were found nowhere else in the house but in this one room, the living room. And they were on the "top" of the rug, not old, not trodden in as they might have been expected to be, but something new. And not native to any of the suicide's clothes. Charlie looked at the fibers, enlarged and hanging in the air like tangled white ropes.

A friend? Maybe. But a friend who had never been in the house before? Or in any part of it except the living room? That was a little weird. Someone the person didn't know? But there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever that person was, Richard Delano had let him or her in.

It was very odd, and Charlie didn't know what to make of it. Neither had the Bangor police. They had not been able to confirm any other person being in the apartment any time around the time of death unfortunately the entrance to Delano's house had been hidden by shrubbery from the other houses in the street. The outside light had come on and gone off again within a minute or so as it might have no matter how many people were entering the house, and that was all anyone had noticed. Finally, after days of investigation, the police had listed their concerns about the crime scene as "inconclusive" and had moved on to other issues. If they had noticed scorbutal cohydrobromate in the body, they might have thought otherwise, but they hadn't.

Charlie looked over at the other two sets of evidence. They were inconclusive, too, lacking either any suggestion of other persons being in the area, or any detection of scobro in the victims. His case was not at all complete… and James Winters would not be convinced.

This'll all have been for nothing.

He put his head in his hands, depressed. Nick was still somewhere in the middle of Deathworld, and Charlie felt sure in his bones that someone else was still there, too, stalking the place, looking for another victim. If 1 don't convince Winters that I'm right about what I've found, someone else is gonna get killed. Maybe not Nick… maybe someone else. But it doesn't matter in the slightest. Murder's going to happen.

Especially since it's still May. Charlie could not get rid of the idea that this meant something specific.

Anyway, it's beyond coincidence at this point. What are the odds that all these suicides should just happen to be using this drug?… And just happen to be in Deathworld, and just happen to kill themselves this way? Taken separately, there was always the chance. But this many coincidences, taken all together… suddenly they weren't coincidences anymore.

Charlie breathed in, breathed out.

But it's still not proof of the kind that Winters is going to need. Everything I've got is circumstantial.

Now, if I had some proof that somebody was being targeted, being followed…

Yeah, like who?… He was in no position to go through Deathworld and start asking questions of everybody he met. Word about nosy "strangers" and "newbies" traveled fast in these online demesnes. The Banies were probably no different than any other kind of fans defending their territory, in this regard. Anybody who showed up and started asking a lot of questions would be identified as a stooge, maybe a cop, and isolated, within hours. Or else just get fed a lot of misinformation that would completely screw up any serious investigation.

No, there has to be another way.

Charlie sat there for a long while, as it got lighter outside in the London of two centuries ago, and the sky started to turn a pale peach color up in the high windows.

Then he sat up straight.

All right, Charlie thought. When investigation takes you as far as it can, when the data won't support the conclusions securely enough… then, if you're really sure you're right, you go find the information to make it support them.

By catching somebody in the act…

Nick stood quiet between the dark stone walls, in the dripping darkness, with his eyes closed, and listened. It was the only way, down here, to tell truth from falsehood. Appearances were deceiving, as he had learned higher up in Deathworld, and there was no point in wasting your time on trying to work things out from the way they looked.

The inside of the Dark Artificer's Keep was the kingdom of fraud… all the different sorts of it: flattery and lies, hypocrisy and purposeful misdirection, rumors started to make trouble or destroy reputations. Counterfeiting and impersonation were punished there, and all the kinds of theft. Illegal copying was punished there, too, and theft of ideas… and since Joey Bane had suffered enough from that kind of thing in his early career, Nick was not entirely surprised to see the Thieves of Song hung up from the trees in the Black Arboretum, squawking out twisted fragments of song while the blackbirds picked at their tenderer bits. He had passed through there with some amusement, picking up in passing, from under a rock in the Arboretum, the clandestine lift of "Steal from Me…" with all the pirated versions of other Bane songs sampled and intercut into it, Joey Bane's own convoluted joke-7- the audio version of a trophy wall, one that grew and grew day by day, so that every new version was a collectors' item.

The punishments down here in the stony black tunnels and passageways were all variations on a single theme. Those who had stolen others' stories and lives and taken them for their own use were now bound forever in one place, immured in the black stones themselves, and forced to listen in silence to those who actually had lives of their own. It was the living who had the key to the secrets here. Their questions, asked of the darkness, were the answers to the Keep. As elsewhere in Deathworld, some of the people you met in the Keep were real players, but some were actors or "plants," part of the game, and to find out what they knew about the way down to the doorway into Nine, listening was the key.

At first it had seemed to Nick merely a frustration de- signed to weed out those who weren't really serious about finding the way down to Nine. But slowly he had begun to suspect the truth lay elsewhere. Whether he would find i it in time to descend to Nine before his money ran out, and before his folks entirely lost patience, was now his main concern.

He sat down on one of the benches let into the wet black stone wall, underneath one of the occasional torches that were fitted into iron wall-brackets, and listened. It was damp down here. He was below the level of the lake, Nick guessed, and that warm saline body leaked and oozed through to most places on this level, trickling down walls, welling up as puddles in the narrow, close, dark stone passages. Listening was the whole art of finding your way around here, listening for the sound of water and the direction in which it ran, listening to other voices, finding your way to them, discovering what they had to say. It was not like Seven, where manipulation of the pain of the Damned was how you found out what you needed to know. Here, keeping your own mouth shut and your ears open was everything. Someone's story told in a long soft monologue, a phrase of music heard in silence and waited for, was what would make the difference. There was always a clue, something useful.

It's a shame that listening to people in the real world isn't always this useful, Nick thought. If it could be this way with other kids at school, or with parents, or other people you met, what a difference it would make. Unfortunately they were usually intent on forcing you to come around to their way of thinking, and any listening on their part was limited to checking to see whether you were agreeing with them.

Though who knows, he thought. Maybe it would be possible to outlisten them, if you just had enough patience. He got up again, stretched. Last time Nick sat there for nearly two hours before he caught that faint soft shimmer of music, far away in another passage, and after much feeling his way around in near-total darkness, he finally found his way to the little chest set into one of the stone walls, where the lift of "Down the Narrow Ways" had been hidden. But Nick didn't think there was any point in waiting here any longer, for a certain "feel" was missing to this tunnel/passage which the other one, where he'd found the lift, had had. So now Nick was trying to cover as much ground as possible in each session, trying to locate spots that had the same "feel," and which could also conceal doorways or hidden passages that might somehow lead to the Maze itself.

He turned right, then right again, down another low-ceilinged passageway, paused, and listened for sound, for that particular "feel." Nothing. Nick went on, trailing his hand along the wet, cold stone.

"Ow!" he said then, stopping and looking at the wall. Nothing but lumpy rock, and here and there something jutting out that might have been an elbow, a knee, frozen in the stone. Except where his hand had been-there was someone's mouth, there were teeth, and half-buried in the stone, the glint of an eye, watching him.

"Sorry," Nick said, making a resolution to watch where he put his hands in the future, and went on walking. This could take me a long time, Nick thought. Some of the walk-throughs claimed that the so-called "anteroom chambers," the approaches to the Maze itself, regenerated themselves in new and random patterns every few days, so that you would think you had learned them and then return to find them completely different. Others said that no such thing happened at all, and that the people making the claim were confused. Nick wasn't sure what to think. In his cynical moods, it struck him that randomly regenerating the pattern would be a great way to make some extra money. But somehow he didn't think Joey Bane was quite that desperate for funds…

Nick came to a dark opening on his right and paused, looked in. It was just a little cavelet, not much bigger than a walk-in closet, with a stone bench built into the black stone wall and going right around from one side to the other. The light from the burning cresset out in the main "hallway" reached it only dimly. Nick had run into these in other parts of the "anteroom chambers" over the past few hours, and often enough they were in places where you might hear something if you stayed there long enough. So he went in, and sat down, and spent a little while more just listening.

His head turned as, down the corridor, in the direction from which he had come, he heard voices, and the sound of soft footsteps approaching. At first Nick was torn, and thought about leaving… not sure I want to meet anybody right now… But he was also feeling a little lazy, and a little curious, especially as the voices got closer. One was a guy, one a girl, though her voice was not that light-it had a husky sound. So far he had tended to keep to himself in Deathworld, except for a few chance encounters such as that with Shade, but maybe it would be better to start putting aside that tendency down here.

Nick stayed where he was. "Look, forget it," said the soft husky voice. "I'm not going to waste any more time arguing about it with you, either. I'm just going to find it, no matter how long it takes… "

Two shapes passed by the doorway, silhouetted against the cresset-light from the passage. One of them kept right on going, but the other paused to peer in, taking a moment about it, letting her eyes get used to the dark. She was about Nick's height, maybe a little younger than he was. It was hard to tell. He saw a long fall of blond hair, nearly waist length, stirring a little in the cool air running down the passageway behind her; she was dressed in light shorts and an "infrablack" T-shirt that glowed slightly, even in this shadowy place, with the intensity of its darkness. She drew in breath sharply as she looked at him.

Nick blinked. "Uh, sorry," he said.

She looked at him for a moment more. Elsewhere it would have been an invasive stare, but in Deathworld you got familiar with it fairly quickly-the expression of someone trying to work out whether you were part of the game or not, and whether it was worth their while to stop to talk to you. Nick had to chuckle a little. "I'm not local," he said, that being one of the code phrases meant to indicate that you weren't a plant or a generated feature.

The girl looked at him a little less intently, but the expression was still curious. A moment later she was joined in the doorway by her companion. At first glance he looked like a football player-tall, big across the shoulders, brawny. The effect was increased by the fact that he was wearing a plaidh mhor, the so-called "great kilt" which was just coming into style for guys at the moment. The kilt was patterned in infrablack and a very dark blue, the so-called "Armstrong Hunting" plaid, and everything else about the guy's clothes matched, from shoes to the tied-on headband. He looked like her brother, or maybe an extremely well-matched boyfriend. "Somebody you know?" he said.

"No," Nick said, and "No," the girl said, in the same breath. Then the girl laughed.

"You waiting for somebody?" she said.

"Besides Joey? Nope," said Nick. "Nobody here right now but us chickens."

The guy looked at him like he was, from Mars. The girl looked oddly at him, too, but then she laughed. "I thought my mom was the only person on earth to say that anymore," she said. "Suddenly I don't feel quite so weird."

The two of them glanced around them. Nick knew why. "No booby traps in here," he said. "It's a quiet spot."

"We should go-" the guy said.

"Why?" said the girl, sounding annoyed. "We haven't found anything. And we're not going to, not today, not before our nickel runs out, anyway… "

"You're looking for-?" Nick said.

"The Maze," said the guy. "Like everyone else down here."

"Among other things," the girl muttered. She sighed. "You mind if we sit down?"

Nick moved down on the bench a little. They came into the chamber and sat down, looking around the way people do when they're suddenly in a small space with someone they don't know.

"Thanks," the girl said. "Sometimes the quiet down here gets to me." She sighed. "Tires me out, a little… " Then she gave him a slightly embarrassed look. "Sorry," she said. "I'm Khasm."

"Nick," he said, nodding to her.

"I'm Spile," said the guy.

"Pleased," Nick said. To Khasm he said, "I know what you mean, though. It's a lot quieter down here than up in the top levels. Not quite so much of the screams and yells of the tormented."

Khasm laughed, a very brief sound, not all that humorous. "No need," she said. "We're the torment, walking around, doing what we want, saying what we like… and there's nothing they can do about it." She glanced at the wall, out of which here and there a face looked, frozen in stone, the only thing alive about them their eyes, which watched, watched everything.

Nick thought about what Khasm had said. Somewhere, once, he had read someone's opinion about life: Hell is other people. Maybe this was the same principle. "I wouldn't bet on them not being able to do anything," he said. "One of them bit me a little while ago."

"Hope you got your shots," Spile said, and grinned, also a rather mirthless expression. "You find any lifts around here?"

"Not close," Nick said. "The last one was about, oh, half a mile back that way." He pointed off to his left and behind him. "Or up a little… or down a little. You know how this place twists."

"What was it you found?" said the guy, fiddling with his plaid as if he wanted to get going again.

"Uh, 'Down the Narrow Ways.' "

The girl's eyes went wide. Nick could see it clearly even in this light. "You did? Where?"

Her intensity, and the almost anguished sound of her voice, surprised him. Sure, there were a lot of people who got really worked up about Bane's music… but so far Nick hadn't met any of them. "Uh, if you're really looking for it, I can show you. It's not too far, unless the corridors have reconfigured themselves."

"It's not for me," Khasm said. Nick suddenly noticed how tightly her fingers were laced together. "I have… I had a friend who was looking for it."

The sudden "had" came down in the middle of the sentence like a boot stamping on something. The hair stood up on the back of Nick's neck. "You…" He stopped, unused to being so certain about something, and uncertain just how to proceed. After a moment he said, much more softly, "You knew one of them. One of the Angels of the Pit."

"I hate that name," growled Spile, staring at the floor.

"Two of them," said Khasm, sounding bleak. "Or anyway, I knew Jeannie Metz. She lived down the street from me. We went to the same school. We were buddies." She looked over at Spile. "He and Mal Dwyer played virtual football together."

Nick didn't know what to say. But at the same time he was shocked into a sudden alertness that surprised him. This was more than just some story that would help you find your way to the Maze. This was real.

He couldn't keep himself from asking. "What made them do it?" he said softly.

Spile turned his head away, wouldn't say anything. "I don't know," said Khasm, angry. "I know this, though. She wasn't suicidal."

Nick wasn't going to say anything.

"I know what you're thinking!" Khasm burst out. "That nobody knows anybody as well as they think they do, and all that crap. I've had it up to here with hearing that, the last week! From everybody. Even her mom. She of all people should know better… but she really doesn't know her, either, it turns out. Not if she seriously thinks Jeannie did any drugs."

Nick opened his mouth, closed it. "Oh, yeah," Khasm said, "it wasn't in the news. The cops said they were doing her family a favor by not letting it get out… said it was tragic enough." She scowled. "But they told her family that, all right. Some favor."

"They claim," said Spile, looking up at last, "that it was one of these 'amnesia' drugs. Real convenient." He shook his head fiercely. "And now both the families are blaming each other's kid for getting the other one to kill themselves. Real neat." He glared at Nick. "Mal was the most normal, geekly guy you ever saw. Terrified of doing anything illegal. He wouldn't ever have done drugs, just because it would have embarrassed his folks, and he would have hated that. Plus, he wouldn't have seen the point anyway. He used to say to me, 'Why do I need another level of consciousness when I like the one I have just fine?' " He lowered his head, looking suddenly stricken, like someone who had too accurately reproduced someone's tone of voice, and now was stricken to the heart by it. "And he sure would never have killed himself," Spile said. "He'd been having a hard time of it lately… but not that hard!"

"And Jeannie hated drugs more than anything," Khasm said. "Her dad died of an overdose a few years ago. She'd never have done drugs, no matter how depressed she was!"

"Uh," Nick said. He was a little shocked to find himself edging away from them both. "Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

They looked at him in some shock themselves. Then Khasm sagged. "Sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. It's just that-you know how it is, everybody here we knew has beengoing around not asking the question-but you know they're thinking about it-and then when somebody does actually ask it-"

"It's okay," Nick said."… Look, I can take you to where that 'lift' is."

"That'd be nice of you," Khasm said, sounding subdued.

"Yeah," said Spile. "Once we've got it… we can get out of here… "

They stood up. "Down this way," Nick said, and started retracing his steps through the low dark corridors, with the other two behind him.

Neither of them said much for a while. After some minutes Khasm said, "The last time I saw her… it was a couple of weeks ago, with Mal and Bitsy and a few other friends. Down here. They loved this place." She sniffed once, softly, like someone trying to hide it. "She and Mal would come down here and hang out with the rest of us when things weren't going right… when we couldn't hang out together elsewhere."

Nick thought for a moment about the best way to phrase this. "Was there some kind of problem?"

"Oh, yeah, Jeannie and Mal had a thing going… and her mom didn't approve. Neither did his folks. They all thought they were too young to be thinking about marriage." Another sniff. "Both of them were angry about that, yeah, and a little depressed… but not that depressed. They were going to wait their parents out for a couple of years, let them get used to the idea. Jeannie told me so. And she told me that Mal agreed."

Nick paused at a corner, trying to remember which way he was headed. There was something niggling at him, and he felt he had to ask. He turned to Khasm. "Look, uh…" There was no kindly way to ask. He gave up trying. "You're saying she didn't ever mention suicide…?"

"Exactly once in all the time I knew her," said Khasm, and somewhat to Nick's surprise, she didn't sound angry this time, just tired. "What normal person doesn't think about it every now and then? It would be sick not to admit that it happens. And dumb, when life gets nasty, not to admit that it wouldn't be nice if all the pain just stopped!

But not that way. She never talked about it to do it. You know what I mean?"

Nick thought of that sudden rush of make-it-stop that he'd had the other day. Yet at the same time he hadn't had the slightest intention of taking the thought through to its logical conclusion.

"That was why the drug thing was so awful," Spile said as they turned a sharp corner, left, then right again. "But at least it didn't make the news… "

Nick thought about that. Somehow it didn't seem either accidental to him, or an act of kindness. The newspeople were notorious for publishing anything they could get their hands on, the more scandalous the better. I wonder… is that something the cops are keeping secret?

But why?

It was weirding him out. Nick saw as much pain and death and unhappiness on the Net news as anyone else did, but coming up against it in terms of real people, real lives, was something else again. And there was something else going on inside him, too. His dad was a Netcam man, one of the best. That was why he kept getting sent all over the place, why they had had to keep moving around so much when Nick was younger. Reporters fought to be assigned with his father, for he had (one of them had said once, in Nick's hearing) "a gift for finding trouble and following up on it." Now, unnerved, Nick was beginning to wonder whether that gift was starting to reveal itself in the next generation.

"Here," he said, and turned the last corner. Fortunately the corridors hadn't been doing anything unusual. Right up until now everything had been where it was supposed to be, and now the wall at the far end of what otherwise looked like a featureless dead end was exactly where Nick had left it. "Your account open?"

"Yeah," Khasm said. Nick went down to that blank wall, bent close to it. The light wasn't great down here, and he had only found this lift's hiding place because of a stubborn tendency to touch everything. "Here," he said, getting down on one knee. "See that kind of dimple there? It just caught my eye. It doesn't belong… "

"Yeah," Khasm said again. She leaned down to touch it.

The rock in front of them seemed to tear itself open. A moment later they were all looking at what Nick had found earlier: a small chest carved of what appeared to be a single emerald. Down in the bottom of it was what Nick had found there before, when he opened it himself: a single eighth note, glowing gold.

Khasm looked at it for a long moment before she reached in and touched it. The air filled with the sound of Camiun's strings being plucked slowly, one after another, more as their own small soft poem on the air rather than any accompaniment, and then came Joey Bane's voice, sorrowful and low:

"I never went the way you told me to, I argued every word you said.

I never thought the way you would have liked, I never walked the way you led.

And now he's gone with you where I would not, There in the dark he holds your hand;

And how I simply let you go to be with him I'll never understand.

So now I have them all to myself, at last, All my sorry, empty days, And now I walk alone and self-sufficient Down the narrow ways…

Nick stayed where he was, didn't move, as Khasm and Spile held still and listened to the second verse of the song. Finally the last few notes faded away, and Khasm lifted the eighth note out of the casket and closed her hand around it. When she opened her hand again, the note was gone.

She stood up and sighed, and sniffled again, and for a few moments she wouldn't say anything. "When they release the body and let her mom bury her," Khasm said at last, "I'll play it at the grave for her… after the funeral, when things quiet down."

They went out into the corridor. Nick, following her and Spite, was finding it hard to understand how he felt. Spite was a silent lowering presence in this darkness, but there was no feeling of threat about him, only pain, and Khasm, her eyes downcast, seemed to have gotten control of herself again, but that was even worse for Nick, in a way, than the sound of her fighting with her tears had been.

"Look," he said. "If there's anything else I can do-"

Khasm shook her head. "This," she said, holding up the closed hand that no longer had an eighth note in it, "this meant a lot. Uh… thanks."

She went off down the corridor, and Spile started to go after her. Nick astonished himself by putting a hand on that huge arm. Spile stopped and stared at him.

"I mean it," he said.

Spite looked at him in a kind of lowering silence, then said, "Yeah. Thanks. I-"

"Nick Melchior," Nick said. "I'm in the login lists."

"Okay," said Spite. "I- Maybe we'll get in touch."

He went after Khasm. Nick stood there, watching them go, and then headed out into the corridor himself, in the opposite direction, slowly making his way back toward where he had been when they'd found him.

It had never occurred to him that there might have been something odd about those suicides. But Khasm and Spite had been absolutely certain. And now Nick found himself remembering that Charlie had been a little concerned about Deathworld, himself, and all the time Nick was spending there.

Was he thinking about the suicides, too?

There was no telling. But he had certainly mentioned them once… and Nick had brushed him off. And then Charlie had asked him for that walk-through.

Nick had been delighted about this earlier: the idea of ranging around Deathworld with Charlie in tow would have been fun. Part of that was that Charlie was so smart about a lot of stuff. Nick didn't grudge him that. His buddy had been through hell in his time, a real hell as opposed to this rather entertaining fake one. But this would have been one place where, for once, Nick was just a little smarter than Charlie… and he didn't think Charlie would grudge him that, either.

Now, though, the concept had acquired an entirely different slant, and Nick wasn't sure he liked it at all. There was something about these suicides and Deathworld that was bothering him, all of a sudden… something fishy. And now Charlie was going to be wandering around down there, new to the place, not knowing the ropes. Anybody could come along and tell him anything… possibly get him in some kind of trouble.

Oh, come on, said the "sensible" part of Nick's brain. It's not like the environment's dangerous, or anything. If it were, Net Force would come in and shut it down. And Charlie's not dumb! Far from it.

But all the same… these suicides…

All of a sudden they gave him the creeps.

I've got to go see Charlie, he thought. As soon as I finish here today…

Nick headed off into the darkness.

Charlie had been up late again, the night before, sitting sideways on the lowest of the benches in his workspace with his feet up, studying the Deathworld walkthrough. It was complex, but not as bad as some environments he'd played in at one time or another. A lot of the business of getting through the upper circles seemed to involve talking to the Damned. That, by itself, was interesting for Charlie. Later on, once you got down to Eight, it started to be about talking to other gameplayers. It's as if the game designers are trying to teach people to talk to each other, Charlie thought. Easing them into it gradually. It starts out as sort of an entertainment, 'look at all the bad people getting what's coming to them. _. ' Then it changes focus.

Charlie wasn't quite sure what to make of that. Is this the work of some benign behind-the-scenes environment designer? Or could this be something that Bane wanted put in?

He paused for a little while to scan through the various virtclips and text interviews with Bane that he had gathered together. In none of them did Joey Bane say much about his actual input into the environment's design. If anything, he seemed to avoid the topic, or to try to suggest (in one or two of the interviews) that he was a nontechie who didn't know much about computers or the Net.

That Charlie found hard to believe, especially in the light of the way the professional music business was these days. It had become inextricably interwoven with the Net in terms of music distribution and marketing over the last twenty years, and if there was anything Charlie was certain of as far as Joey Bane was concerned, it was that the man was expert, even inspired, in terms of marketing. He suspected that Bane was as involved in this as in anything else to which his name might be attached. But proving

Then again, there wasn't any reason to worry much about that right now. The environment itself was going to present its own challenges. Because after Eight, after you find the way into the Maze and down into the Ninth level. _. no details. Even the walk-throughs, which were theoretically slightly illegal and usually went out of their way to reveal such details, suddenly went dry. It's as if it all stops there… or some really powerful influence is keeping people from discussing what they find there. Weird.

The threat of lawsuits, maybe?

But then you would think that was enough to keep people from talking about the first eight levels, too. And it's not.

Charlie brooded over that for a while. What influence was powerful enough to keep something so secret?

If I get down there, I may find out.

Meanwhile- He swung up and walked around his little gallery of exhibits again. Charlie had folded away all the autopsy results, and now was left with the kids themselves, sitting on front steps, lying on beaches, hitting a softball again and again… Jaime and Richard. Jeannine and Malcolm. Renee and Mitch. They could have been anybody from Bradford, Charlie thought. Or from any school around here. They look perfectly normal. Except that they had all committed suicide. That was the problem, of course. A suicide looks like anybody else, until the crucial moment hits during which taking one more breath becomes just too painful.

And then there are cases like these, Charlie thought, when there's something else going on.

… and only one way to find out what.

He sighed, glancing up at the windows. It was fully dark in London now, but it was still afternoon on the East Coast. He and headed off toward the doorway that led to Mark Gridley's workspace, opened it, and put his head through.

The heat and humidity hit him like a blow. Well, it's Florida, isn't it, Charlie thought, and stepped into the hot sunlight and close still air inside the VAB. But you can have a little too much reality. Mark can be such a perfectionist sometimes… "Mark," Charlie shouted as he walked across the concrete, "you in here?"

"Yeah," Mark said, from somewhere right across that huge space, though out of sight. "Be with you in a minute."

Charlie made his way across to where the hardwood desk had been sitting last time. It was gone. There was one of the new Rolls-Skoda cars there, the sleek new armored number that everyone was talking about. Its hood was up, and Mark was peering in at the engine.

Charlie came up beside him after a couple of minutes and looked in, too. The engine was clean enough to eat off, a complex welter of shining tubes and piping and a massive engine block which had probably been carved in one piece out of a solid cube of steel. "Considering a purchase?" Charlie said. "Or is your dad worried about somebody's security?"

"Huh?" Mark straightened up, dusted his hands off. "No, it's just a sim," he said. "Somebody I know let me borrow it. They're having trouble with the way it runs. Keeps going nonphysical at bad moments."

Charlie thought rather ruefully of his steam engine. "I've been having spong troubles myself," he said. "But that's not what I came over for."

"So tell me." Mark put the Rolls's hood down and boosted himself up to sit on it. "And what happened with all those files?"

"A lot," Charlie said. "But, Mark, would you for cripesake turn on the air-conditioning? It's like a sauna in here."

"Nope," Mark said. "I'm waiting for something." He glanced up. Charlie followed his glance, but didn't see anything but the pygmy buzzards, way up high by the huge slot in the ceiling, circling near it. "So tell me what's up."

Charlie shook his head in mild exasperation, but went ahead to briefly describe what he had found in going through the autopsy files. "There's something going on about all these deaths that just doesn't feel right," he said. "And there's no way to look into it except from the inside."

Mark gave him a thoughtful look. "Looking into death from the inside," he said, "would seem to preclude you doing much of anything else."

"Not that far inside," Charlie said, with only a little annoyance. "Mark, I need you to wire me."

Charlie had expected to have to explain to Mark what he meant. To his surprise, he didn't. But he was also surprised to see Mark sit down on one of his folding chairs and blow out his cheeks like someone with a big problem. "Don't need much, do you," Mark said.

"You can do it, can't you?" Charlie said.

"Will I do it? Yeah, you know I'll do whatever you need done. Is it going to be easy? No, not like raiding those systems the other night."

Mark pulled his feet up under him to sit cross-legged on the Rolls's hood. "That was stealing-from-the-cookiejar stuff compared to this," he said. "Deathworld's probably got more copy protection schemes built into it than any environment I can think of. Bane's really sensitive to having his stuff ripped off… and half his technical staff keep busy inventing new and interesting ways to stop people from piping information directly out. A whole lot of stuff to have to defeat, second by second. And naturally you don't want anybody noticing what you're doing."

"Uh, no."

Mark sat there and brooded for a little. "By the way, what happened to your fishing trip?" Charlie said after a moment. "I didn't think I'd find you here."

Mark snickered. "Oh, I would have won. Dad has to stay home and do some classified thing." He shrugged. "Maybe it's just as well. He'll be out of my way for the rest of the weekend, and maybe longer… which is going to be good, since this is gonna need a lot of concentration… "

The two of them sat there quietly for a few moments more. Then Mark said, "Talk to me later tonight. I'll let you know if it can be done."

"Okay," Charlie said, getting up. "Mark-thanks." "Yeah, yeah…" But then Mark looked up, blinking. "You hear something?"

Charlie looked around. "Uh, no."

"I did, though-" Mark slid down off the hood of the Rolls, and looked up. "Hey…"

Charlie followed his glance. The buzzards were suddenly crowding off to one side of the VAB's upper reaches, and all looking hurriedly for high spots on which to perch, as if on the top of a cliff. Charlie looked up and saw…

He opened his mouth, then closed it again, for he didn't know how to describe what he was seeing. His first thought was The air is thickening. The idea seemed silly. But that was exactly what it was doing-thickening, like steam, like a thick fog, thicker, like smoke-though through it the sun poured from above, untroubled. Charlie shook his head, astounded. Clouds were forming above them, right there inside the VAB, and as Charlie watched, what looked like a thin silvery smoke seemed to start drifting down from them. He walked out into the middle of that space, not hurrying too much, for that silvery drift was taking a little time to come down, and finally he stopped, with Mark behind him, and felt, on his upturned face, the first fine drops of rain.

"Will you look at that," Mark said, triumphant. "It does this sometimes, the real one. I knew that if I'd really got this simulation down right, sooner or later it would happen." He pounded Charlie on the back and laughed. "Congratulations, Charlie, you've witnessed history!"

"Yeah," Charlie said, "and it's wet… " He brushed the rain off his shoulders and made for the door, smiling slightly… but still thinking about that gallery of smiling faces sitting inside his own workspace, and intent on finding out what had happened to them…

… without becoming one more smile.