“Thanks. I’ll tell Mr. Rabin.” Massek vanished.
That changed the parameters somewhat. Cerise pushed herself up from her desk and went to the door of the office. “Jensey. I’m going out on the net for the next few hours. I’ll be back by two—it’s to do with the incident yesterday, if anyone asks.” She meant Coigne, and Baeyen knew it.
“I’ll tell him,” the dark woman answered. “Do you want me to sound a recall for you?”
“I’ll set one,” Cerise answered, and turned away. She returned to her seat, adjusting the chair controls to a more comfortable setting, one that wouldn’t leave her crippled after a few hours. She checked the toolkits and the standbys already displayed on the screen, and touched keys to have the system warn her when it was time to go home. Then she took a deep breath, and launched herself out onto the net.
She is flying now, bursting like a rocket through the company IC(E), exploding onto the net like a firework. Overhead, a light gleams like a moon, full and brilliant an open conference, and she hesitates, tempted, but makes herself turn away. The lines of the nets expand before her, roads and rivers of data like glowing highways, she chooses one, not quite at random, and lets it carry her down toward the BBS.
The rivers move more slowly here, where talk is free and the lines are overburdened. She disciplines herself to that meandering pace, drifts silently from node to node. The Bazaar is the great center of the BBS, the link of traders’ nodes where anything and everything is bought and sold. Lights flare around her as she drifts closer, bursts of compressed iconage like the cries of a street hawker, and the air smells of burnt cinnamon. She bats the most persistent symbols idly away, feeling them break like bubbles against her hand, familiar advertising, most of them, some of them not, new names and faces, new services, strangers on the net. She drifts past, not bothering to make any reply, her own icon dimmed and ghostly in the midst of all that brilliance, seeking the sellers that lay behind the walls of light, behind the barriers of the obvious. She tests the virtual winds, tasting the data, but finds none of the familiar markers that hint at the road to Seahaven. At the Polar Flare, where there is always news of the shadows, she catches the ball of light that is flung at her, unwraps the spinning advertisement without bothering to read the icons, there is nothing at its center, and she frowns, and tosses the glittering shards like confetti back onto the net. There are other nodes, she crosses them, finds at last a familiar symbol, and touches it. The shape within becomes a presence, a scent and then a swirl of light, a hand-icon inviting her inside. She reaches into her own toolkit, finds the right shape to answer it. Their icons merge, weaving together into a sphere that will provide at least the illusion of privacy, and the familiar presence speaks.
*Haven’t seen you in a while, Cerise. Are you buying or selling?*
He knows perfectly well she’s gone legit, gotten a real job, a legal job, and Cerise smiles, letting the brainworm display the expression for all to see.
*Neither, Max. As you should know. I’m trying to get to Seahaven.*
As she expects, that stops him, and there is a little pause, the light flickering around her like a silent fire. She hangs in its warmth like a salamander, happy in her element, and hears a faint intake of breath.
*The road’s closed today, or so I hear. Come back tomorrow.*
Trouble?
She makes the question ambiguous, and hears Max Helling laugh.
I thought you left her.
He knows better than that, he was there, and Cerise keeps her tone cold and level. *If it’s her—and she left me. *
*If—?* There is another little silence, and then Helling laughs again. *So that’s the way you’re playing it. I heard this Trouble got into Multiplane.”
*That’s the way it is. Or so I hear.* Her echo of his words is malicious, and she hears it strike home.
*I’ve retired, too, Cerise. Don’t push me.*
That is news, and Cerise lifts an eyebrow, knowing the brainworm will relay the gesture, asking without speech whatever happened to Aledort. She says nothing direct, however, waits, lapped in the golden light. She waits, and it is Helling who speaks again.
*Like I said, the road’s down today. Try tomorrow—through Eleven’s Moon.*
He flips away, shattering the sphere that encloses them into a thousand shards like flying knives. Cerise ducks in spite of herself, in spite of knowing she should have expected it, and Helling is gone But he’s told her what she wanted, what she needs to know, there’s nothing more she wants from him, not for now. She smiles, delighting in the glittering air, the crush and bother of the advertising, the slow and complex rhythm of the data tides that lie beneath the BBS, and turns along a curve of blue-green light, taking the long way home.
« ^ »
TROUBLE PLAYS JIGSAW well, even by the standards of the nets. The crystals dance through the playing sphere, flickering from blue to green to yellow, racing up and down the spectrum in an unpredictable pattern, and she reaches for the red ones, catches them just as they blush from orange into red, and slings them into their place in the growing structure. The twisted sculpture, a fantastic, spiraling tower like a mad single-branched candelabra, shivers under a sudden shower of pieces, her own and her last opponent’s, flickering like a flame between blue and red. Around the inner surface of the sphere, the eliminated players cluster in ones and threes, bright icons at the corners of her vision, redetermining the playing area. She smiles, fierce behind the mask of her playing piece, the brainworm turned up full, so that she feels every unreal motion, and launches a crystal—already red, too late in its cycle to use—toward an icon who’s drifted too close, a silver shape like a Scottie dog. She turns away before she sees it hit or parried, to catch another drift of crystals. A few are shading toward red; she catches three in quick succession, tosses them, slowly, not with all her strength, so that as they approach the twisted tower they are just turning red. Her opponent, a wedge of iridescent silver like a fighter plane, knocks the first away with a well-placed crystal of her own, but the second and the third sink home, and the tower shades imperceptibly closer to the true red that would mean Trouble’s victory. Trouble smiles behind the masking icon, and launches herself up and over the wavering structure—it sways even wider, but she has timed it perfectly—and finds a rich field of crystals on the far side, all ripening toward the red she needs. The iridescent fighter swoops sideways, swinging wide around the structure, gathering crystals of her own, but Trouble is ahead of her. She slings the last five crystals into place, banking them off the nearest part of the sphere to snap into the lattice at the bottom of the tower, the hardest of all shots to execute but the most certain, done right. The tower flares scarlet, flashes victory; victory flares around her own icon, bathing her in sheer delight, direct pleasure, and she gasps inside the encircling field of color. The other icons, the glittering fighter, the Scottie dog, a stylized Ferrari, and all the rest, drop slowly to the common plane of the net, and the playing sphere fades around them.
Nice game, the fighter says, gruffly, and Trouble smiles again.
Thanks.
*I didn’t catch your name,* the Ferrari says.
Trouble pauses, savoring the moment she had known would come—she had planned for it, came out to play in order to provoke it, and now she intends to enjoy it. Trouble, she says at last. The original, and before they can react, before they can do more than absorb the words, she’s launched herself for the nearest node, leaving only the shell of the icon behind her. The cutouts flare as she drops through the node, and she vanishes from the net in a shower of smoke and flame that obscures her trail beyond recovery.
Trouble lay back in her chair, jolted by the drop from virtuality, let herself sit for a moment, until her heartbeat slowed to normal. She had spent the last three days tracking the person who called themself Trouble through the net, and had gotten nowhere, found nothing except a file full of crackers’ gossip. And Treasury was
