Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Diane Duane
Deathworld
Chapter 1
Nick stood in front of the gateway, and looked up and up at the pillars of it, there in the dark and the silence.
The polished basalt pillars were very tall. There was no seeing the top of them. They seemed to stretch forever up into the darkness. But in the empty black air between them, words hung burning in red. They read:
ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
Nick stood there in the silence for a few more moments, and then walked through the gates.
The first thing to assault him was the music, but then that was what he had come for, what had brought him here in the first place. Nick was finding it difficult to believe that there had ever been a time when he hadn't known about that particular bass beat, pounding and insistent. It was such a contrast to the voice singing above it, starting out so calm and scaling over the course of almost every song into a completely abandoned shriek of cheerful rage. That was what had gotten Nick's attention the first time he'd seen a Joey Bane virteo: the cheerfulness. This man was angry, and enjoyed it, and didn't care who knew. The song that met you at the gateway was that first one he'd heard, the most famous of Bane's songs, and the one Nick liked the best: 'Too Jagged Off to Care.'
Nick walked in through the darkness, and the music cycled up so that you could hardly hear the moans and wailing through or under it. The noise wasn't so bad up here, anyway. This was the Top Floor, a beginners' level, which, though it looked kind of impressive at first, was actually too dull and unshocking for any but the most hopeless types-mostly people who Nick thought must not get out a lot, or do anything much but answer their virtmail, too scared to venture out any further into virtuality. Nick had been just a little freaked by the concerted noise of human pain, the first time he had come in-but then the persistent welcoming beat of the Bane music had got him past that, and then after about fifteen or twenty minutes the landscape hadn't bothered Nick at all.
It was a wasteland. Gray lowering sky, stunted dead trees, shattered boulders, the temperature warm enough to be stifling, no wind. It was desolate, a place that looked the way he felt at the moment, and with the background noise, the howling and wailing, it sounded the way he felt, too. Nick shuffled along through the sterile gray dust, his hands stuffed down in the pockets of his coverall, and made a depressed face. He could just hear what his mother would be saying now, if she could see him: 'Do you have to slump like that? Stand up straight. Look at you, you'd think you had nothing to live for-though, then again, with that last report from school-'
Nick frowned. He'd tried keeping his hands out of his pockets, as an experiment, for nearly a week. It didn't divert her from her usual themes in the slightest. School was her favorite subject right now. He was absolutely sick of hearing her go on and on about it. As if there aren't lots of terrific things to do besides college, Nick thought.
And I'm passing everything, even if I'm not acing it. But his mom wouldn't listen to anything of the kind, and as for his dad, he didn't seem to care. That by itself should have been a positive thing. 'Let the boy alone, Miriam,' he would mutter as he headed for the back of the house and the implant suite. 'He has enough problems.' And Nick certainly did. But whatever his father was interested in hearing, Nick's problems weren't it. Nick had started to wonder what he would have to do to cause a little interest.
Then he had found Deathworld.
Not that the people who used the virtual domain called it that, though, among themselves. 'The Circles' was one of their private names for it, or 'Bane's Place' or 'The Bottom Floors'-though none of the people Nick had met here so far had ever seen the bottom floors, reputed to be truly terrifying regions of torment and fear, and desperately cool. Nick was eager to find out whether these rumors were true or just hype. You had to expect a certain amount of hype in conjunction with a place like this. After all, it was run by the biggest name in 'shadow jazz,' a man who had made his first million by the time he was only four years older than Nick. Nick sighed. Now, there's a depressing thought… I wonder what Dad would think of that if I reminded him?
Then again, probably it would be smarter not to. Neither Nick, in his wildest dreams, or his dad was going to be a millionaire any time soon. That was something of a sore point with his dad. His dad's job at the vid studio wasn't terribly secure at the moment-there had just been another round of cutbacks, and everybody was nervous. Nick supposed he should feel sorry for his dad, but his dad hadn't done a whole lot of feeling sorry for Nick's troubles lately. Nick shrugged. Let his dad deal with it.
The old dry leafless tree that marked the near shore of the river was visible across the plain, and Nick made for it, kicking up the dust. If his dad was twitching over things at the moment, well, that was fine with Nick. When his dad had found out about Nick starting to spend time in Deathworld, when the bill for the household Net account came in last month, there had been trouble… more trouble than it merited, Nick had thought.
'I don't like you giving my hard-earned money to that man,' his father had said while eating his dinner, as Nick passed through the kitchen. 'The guy's a wacko. The domain is full of unwholesome stuff. I saw something about it on the news a few days ago. And Joey Bane has enough money already without dumping ours on the pile, too. You just cut it out.'
Nick had muttered something noncommittal and escaped without making any statements about what he was going to do one way or another. But it was getting time for the new month's bill to come in, and his father would see the breakdown of the household's Net charges, and know where Nick had been.
Gonna be noise…
Yet Nick was peculiarly satisfied at the prospect. Whatever ruckus his dad kicked up, in Nick's personal life there was too much advantage to be derived from being here, and he wasn't going to give it up. Nick was not an outstanding student, not great at sports, no huge success with the girls, but he was in here, and few enough kids at school or outside of it had been able to get in. There was a waiting list, and you could sit on it for weeks or months without result.
No one was sure what made the Bane computers pick you as one of the lucky ones to be let in. The assumption at school was that there was some kind of obscure 'coolness' rating that no one understood. But being able to get access to the Circles at all, with a chance to see the dangerous stuff that was rumored to be down in those lowest levels, carried its own cachet. There were rumors about what had happened to people who had ventured down into those levels thinking they were tough enough… and discovering differently. There had been stories of some hos pitalizations… and everyone had heard about the suicides.
They didn't worry Nick. And as he thought about his father's reaction to his access to Deathworld, they worried him even less. His dad's annoyance pleased him somehow. If Mom and I are supposed to make your life all nice and smooth for you, he thought, well, it's not gonna be that way. You haven't exactly made it that way for us. Mom can do what she wants-but for me, I'm going to enjoy myself a little. If it bothers you… tough. When I do what you want, it doesn't make any difference. Let's just see how it goes when I don't snap to attention every time you open your mouth. Right!
And Nick grinned. It felt good to even have a chance to think such things, away from the little house where everything was always the same, and nothing ever seemed to change except for the worse, no matter what he did to try to make things better.
The Tree was closer, and Nick thought he could hear the cold sound of water flowing. Away across the dusty plain, he could see various people moving around-some of them in modern clothing, and real, or possibly so, many more of them in clothes from other times and places, decades old, centuries or millennia old, wandering around and lamenting their fates in a hundred languages and (as the song said) 'a hundred shades of scream.' It was noisy, but once you got past that, you noticed something. The screams tended to repeat themselves after a while, up here. Eventually you could start to work out, just by the sound, without trying to have any conversations, which of these figures were genuine people-other virtual visitors to Deathworld, the 'Guest Dead' who stopped in, as Nick did, to make some noise of their own where it was safe to do so, and to remind themselves how pointless life was. Not that Nick was all that interested in the Guest Dead up at this level, especially since he didn't need them anymore.
