'Aha,' Joey Bane said. He stroked a dark, dissonant spatter of notes out of Camiun. 'The eternal problem. Can't choose 'em, can't get rid of 'em, can't do 'em without messing up the rug.' He snickered softly. 'We've still got a fair bunch of 'em down here, though. Fifth and sixth floor down, mostly.'
' 'Still'? Why aren't all of them here permanently?' 'Oh, all of them spend a little time here,' Bane said. 'Mostly the part of their lives called 'your childhood.' '
Nick shot the virtstar a look.
Bane raised his eyebrows. 'Anyway, the ones who stay,' Bane said, 'the really hard cases, are mostly down on six. With the other violent types. A few manage to get farther down… you ever get that far, you'll see.' He shook his head, smiled again, touched Camiun's strings, and played a little minor-key imitation of an ambulance siren. 'Gets tough down there,' Bane said. 'Don't know if you're really interested in going down that deep anyway, a nice kid like you… '
'Won't be any time soon for me,' Nick said, 'at the rate I'm going.' He thought he might as well tell the truth, even though it was embarrassing.
Bane looked at him. 'Huh,' he said. 'Well, guess what, you've lucked into today's special offer. Every day we pick a few people for an upgrade. So come on down!'
To Nick's absolute astonishment, the earth started to rumble. Joey Bane got up, holding Camiun by the neck, and laid it over his shoulder, turning his back on the cold gray river. 'You want to stand back, now,' Bane said, stepping away from the rock. 'You fall down the hole and land on your head, we won't be responsible… '
The earth shuddered harder, and from the air all around them came an upscaling moan that turned into a screech, as if the ground itself was in torment. It split open before them, raggedly, with a terrible sound of ripping stone, and the chasm went stitching and stretching itself away for what looked like half a mile to either side before it stopped, and the rumbling settled back into silence. A fearsome red glow came boiling up out of it, as if light could be made liquid: a seething light, full of screams and howls of desperation and anguish.
'Hey, spaz,' Nick said softly, in complete admiration.
Bane stood there tapping his foot for a moment, then shook his head. 'And am I supposed to climb down there?' he said to the air in extreme annoyance. 'Hey! Tech!!'
An escalator appeared in front of them, leading down into the Pit.
'You can't get good help anymore,' Bane muttered, heading for the escalator, 'I'm telling you. Stinking road- ies, I should never have let them unionize. Come on.'
The two of them got onto the escalator and started trun- dling down into the sulfur-smelling depths, past the thick layer of stone that made up the 'floor' of the first level. Nick was glad to see it drop away behind him, for it really was rather boring, full of nothing but 'screamers' and clueless Guest Dead wandering around trying to figure out what made this place so cool. This way of leaving the level was easier and less trouble than finding the rope ladder that was the usual way down onto the next level, the Second Floor.
They passed the last of the first rock floor, now a ceiling, and came down past that second level. The view was better from this clear space in the middle of everything than it would be on that level itself, for the weather in there was really foul. Right across that cratery, mud-colored landscape a terrible hurricane of a wind was endlessly screaming, full of dirt and garbage, blowing wildly assorted junk past you all the time-drink cans and snack wrappers, torn, dirty paper and old shopping bags and small showers of gravel and stones, all borne along with a grimy near-horizontal rain. Various people were blown along there, too, or what remained of them. Until you saw their expressions, it was hard to tell whether they were chasing each other or actually fastened to each other somehow, so that where one went the other had to go, too. Their faces, though, when you caught a glimpse of them through the murk, were furious. They snatched and grasped at the person to whom they were bound, tearing flesh as they rolled and tumbled along around the great second-level circle, blown irresistibly by that wind.
'Ah, love,' Bane said, 'ain't it grand… ' He watched one particularly entangled couple go blowing by, clutching and scratching at each other, shrieking in pain and rage. 'You've been through here, of course… 9 9
'Didn't think much of it,' Nick said, somewhat bemused for the moment by the sight of someone else being blown by on that wind-a thin, middle-aged, hostile-looking woman, pedaling a bicycle. A faint yapping was coming from the bike's basket, but it was drowned by the howl of the wind almost instantly as the woman was swept away out of sight. Where had he seen that image before?
'Ah, you've never been in love, then,' Joey Bane said. 'Excuse me. Lust. Well, give it a few years. You'll be grabbing at some obscure object of desire and trying to pull all the best chunks out of it whether it wants you to or not, just like everybody else. And it'll stink. But then, doesn't everything?'
'Yeah,' Nick said with some pleasure, though he tried to sound casual about it, as they dropped past the floor of that level and toward the next one. It was not a sentiment he would have gotten very far with at home. That was one of the things that made Deathworld such a trip.
'Intelligent young guy,' said Joey Bane. 'You'll go far. Well, down a few, anyway.' And Nick had to grin. He knew this was all automatic, he wasn't as stupid as some of the people who insisted that all these virtreps of Bane were actually the man himself, 'slumming' in his Net domain… though there were rumors that sometimes, down in the deepest levels, you might run across one that actually was Joey Bane, rewarding some unusually persistent or talented Banie with a personal audience. For his own part, while he was still up in these levels, Nick knew perfectly well that the master site computer had been recording his preferences since he started coming here that it knew where he'd been and whom he'd talked to and what he'd said, and was tailoring his experience second by second to fit his needs and keep him coming back. It was probably reading Nick's body information through the implant chair right now, brainwaves and pulse and blood pressure and whatever, to make sure the things hap pening around him went in ways that he would like, that would make him keep coming back. But that was no big deal. Marketing computers all over the Net did that. And at the same time, it was fun. It was neat to talk to some- thing that Bane himself had helped program to sound and react exactly the way he would…
They slid on past the level of the winds and the storm-borne couples. 'Idiotic behavior, really,' Joey was saying as he turned away from the view, 'claiming they can't control themselves, that love made them do it. Poor excuse. So now they really can't control themselves.' He gave Nick a narrow-eyed look that might have had a wink associated with it, but the light changed again as they plunged down past the next level of floor/ceiling and down into Floor Three, and Nick couldn't be sure what he had seen. 'You wouldn't ever try a weak excuse like that, though… '
'Uh, no,' Nick said.
'Yeah, right,' Joey Bane said, and didn't quite snicker. 'Third floor, gluttony, excess, and general overindulgence…'
If the weather had seemed bad on the level above, it was worse down here. Dirty sleet and freezing rain fell endlessly from blackness, and people both too fat and too thin ran along under it as if being scourged by whips, while behind them came a monstrous black-pelted shape, howling and snarling and grabbing them up in its jaws… grabbing them up and chewing on them like newly caught rats, times three. It had three sets of jaws, three heads- huge, ugly ones like those of pit bulls-and six burning eyes. At least Nick thought he counted six. This was an image he had been careful to keep his distance from, the couple times he'd been down here. If the Dog caught you, it could strip you of half your 'time' credits in the domain and make you do the last couple of levels over again, which would get real boring real fast. Besides, it had been eating people when he had been here last, and the view had not been pretty. Nick's feeling at the time was that this was an aspect of 'the truth' that it was going to take him a while to get used to.
The monster bounded to the edge of the floor of that circle and began barking and slavering furiously at the two of them as they passed. 'Bad dog,' Joey Bane yelled at it, 'bad dog! Shut your mouths, it's me! The neighbors are gonna start complaining again!'
The monster kept right on barking as they passed. 'Obedience school for that one was a waste of time,' Joey muttered as the escalator took them by. 'I tell you, this is the last time I let my sister pass off the runt of the litter on me. The poor guy's damaged. And he never gets enough to eat, either. He bolts his food and then he can't hold it down, and he… Oh, look at that.' Bane turned his head and yelled over the railing of the escalator, 'Tech! You better get somebody over here to clean that up! If he slips in that and hurts himself, the vet bills are coming out of your pay-'
Nick wasn't looking, and was trying not to look like he wasn't looking, as the hound went bounding off after another trio of running, shrieking prey. 'The stomach acid eats the flooring,' Joey Bane said. 'Not the dog's fault, it's his diet. Fad dieters and runaway gourmets, what do you expect? They're so hung up on eating, or not eating, that
