There was much more exciting business farther down, everybody said… people far more dangerous, more interesting… and more isolated from the real world. Nick was so tired of the real world.
After he had beaten the first level, the screams and shrieks that went up on the smoky air from the tortured souls all around him stopped making much difference to Nick. Indeed, you got used to them after a while, and needed something a little more immediate, something newer and scarier, to shake you up. Though you couldn't just go and get it, for the system in Deathworld wouldn't let you down into the deeper circles until you had spent a certain amount of time in the upper ones, talking to the people you met there. When you met enough real people, and pooled with them what information you had about the level you were working on at the moment, your reward was to be allowed to progress deeper into the site, to the lower circles, where the virtual experiences got more vivid, more out-of-control.
Bane's voice sang through the darkness:
'The world gets more real, and things just get worse: run as fast as you like, you can't outrun the hearse.
Nick kicked the dust up, approaching the Tree, and idly eyed the distant forms. In the beginning he had been surprised by the way the other people he saw had always seemed to be at a distance, no matter how long he walked toward them. Then he had discovered that this distancing was part of the domain's 'idiom,' and that it took an act of will to overcome it, not just the act of walking in a given direction. You had to go out of your way to actually talk to someone, had to strain against the fabric of this dark universe to break through. With some people you could strain against it all day and never get anywhere the -
twouldn't hear you or see you. They stayed shut up in their own private little worlds. It was one of the games Bane's Place played with you, either personally or at one remove, through the domain itself. For if the Circles had a motto other than the one hanging back there between the gates, it was 'People stink. Life stinks. Everything stinks. Even this.'
The music doesn't stink, though, Nick thought as he got closer to the Tree, noticing for the first time it not only had no leaves, but also no bark. Something seemed to have bitten it off. The music was one of the best things about this place, and Nick had no time for people who suggested it was all variations on the theme of 'You're Going to Die Anyway, So You Might as Well Get Really Mad First.'
There's a lot more to it than that… Nick would know, for he had all the officially released song collections, and even a few of the 'pirate' segments supposedly extracted from the depths of this very domain. Beyond getting far enough down to see if those pirate 'lifts' were genuine, Nick's other great dream was to see one of the live Bane concerts some day. It wouldn't happen any time soon, for those concerts were much too expensive, the price of the tickets having to cover the (nowadays) extortionate price of actually taking a physical concert on the road. It was something few rock stars bothered to do anymore, in a time when the audience's experience could be arranged and controlled much more completely in a Net-based venue than anywhere in the real world. But Joey Bane did it, saying, 'I'm just old-fashioned that way.'
There was a hope that Nick might be able to afford one of the virtual concerts, this year or early next. Assuming Dad doesn't blow his top when he sees the next Net access bill and ground me. But Nick had been squirreling away his allowance for a long time now, even diverting what should have been lunch money at school, happy to go hungry when he considered the alternative. Soon he would have enough to see The Man Himself in concert, hear in a live performance that great legendary scream of rage and despair at the end of 'Lady Macbeth,' see for himself the onstage carnage as Bane destroyed yet another tenthousand-dollar electric lute and the instruments of everybody else in his band at the end of 'Cut the Strings.' That would be worth any amount of grief from his dad and mom. Just a couple of hours of freedom, Nick thought. In the company of someone who knows what the world's really like, who doesn't pull his punches, who tells the truth about how awful everything is… The dream had kept him going for a long while.
It wasn't so bad to hear that everything stank, after all. As long as you knew that there were lots of people who agreed with you that, painful though it might be, the truth was best. Someday, when I move out, when I'm on my own, I'll spend as Inuch time in Bane's Place as I want… and in other places, places on the edge, the scary stuff, the stuff my folks and all the deluded others don't want me to know about. They can wrap themselves up in their nicey-nice world if they like and pretend not to notice how awful things are. I'm going out where things are real. I'm strong enough to take it…
Nick was humming the first verse of 'Nicey-Nice' as he came up to the Tree, and the air around him was beginning to mimic him with the backbeat of the song, and he could see the cold smoke coming up from the river, when he saw something that hadn't been there the last time he came. A rock. And sitting on the rock was a figure wearing the most tightly tailored black slicktite possible, with what at first glimpse looked like a big black egg cradled in his lap. As Nick got closer, he saw it better, and caught his breath; for even in this dreary light the 'egg' shone and glinted as if it lay under an invisible spotlight. It was a smooth, rounded shape, not really black but a brown so dark as to be mistaken for black, with a short neck-an electric lute with an ebony body, all inlaid with a spidery platinum webwork-that most famous of instruments in dark jazz, Camiun. There were people who claimed that Camiun must be a little bit alive, or else haunted, since no mere man could make an instrument sound like that-like a soul in torment, or one just escaped from it. Joey Bane had said that on the day he discovered that the world was completely and irreversibly wicked, he would cut Camiun's strings, five minutes before he killed himself…
He's only virtual, Nick thought, stopping by the stone. But the slender, muscular, dark-clad figure gazing down into the icy gray water flowing by now shook his longish hair back and glanced up at Nick sidewise… and Nick gulped. He had talked to people here who'd claimed to have met this particular apparition. Half the time he'd figured they'd been making it up. But here he was, or rather one of the virtual representations of him: Joey Bane himself- the singer in his guise as Dark Poet from his second song collection, Discourse with Spirits, looking out across the unrelieved darkness of the landscape behind him with an expression both morose and amused. The lute in his lap hummed softly to itself, because its master's fingers were presently motionless on the strings.
'Hey, Joey,' Nick said.
That ironic smile curved itself up a little harder. Hard was the best word to describe it; it sat oddly on what would otherwise have been a young and innocent face.
'Nick,' Joey said. 'How goes the world?'
The domain's computer knew who Nick was, of course… but for a moment all he could do was shake his head. There were few enough, places like this in the Net. Mostly big celebrities didn't bother going to the trouble to personalize their domains-there was usually just an introduction when you came in. In this case, whoever designed the domain had gone to some trouble to customize the output for the users. That was probably one of the reasons it was so popular. You got the chance to really talk to the star, or at least to the Net-encoded version of his personality.
'Badly. As usual,' Nick said. That was the customary response, the answer that the audiences shouted back to The Man Himself at his concerts, live or visual, when he asked the question. The virtual Joey Bane smiled a little more grimly and put his hand over Camiun's strings to still the lute. It argued the point a little, fizzing and mut- tering under his touch.
'Yeah, yeah, everybody wants it their way,' Joey growled at the lute, and then looked up again. 'You just on your way in?' Bane's simulacrum said. 'Can't see you hanging around this level after you've solved it. Unless it's the music.' He looked bored at this possibility.
'No,' Nick said, 'I'm ready for something new.'
'Bet you are,' Bane said. 'Been stuck on three for a couple of weeks now. Hit your level?'
It was, among Banies, a rude question, suggesting you were incapable of taking the hard stuff, the real world, the truth… or that you were just dim. Had someone Nick's age said something like this to him, the circumstances might have become violent. But this was Joey Bane, and that ironic look was dwelling on Nick, watching to see how he reacted.
'Don't know yet,' Nick said, in a sudden burst of humility.
Bane looked at him darkly for a moment, and then laughed. 'Nothing wrong with not knowing,' he said. 'You look pretty down, though.'
'Aaah…' The implant had to be feeding the Bane-domain computer his EEG and other information that would have betrayed that fact. But the thin, hard face was also kindly, in a strange way, and Nick said, after a moment, 'It's just my folks.'
