Deathworld

brown bird was back, chucking peanuts out of it, four stories down, at about a peanut per second. 'One of the better uses for calculus, I'm told, is in the design of custom in-bone surgical prostheses. Check it out.'

Charlie grinned. Does that man read minds? Or just faces?.

He headed back to his workspace in a hurry to get ready for school… though school was now the last thing on his mind.

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