Deathworld

Mark grinned. 'Assuming,' he added, 'that they don't pitch eight kinds of fit when they find out what we're doing.' He made a pointing-upward gesture that indicated the entire adult world in general, but specifically his father, and his mother, and Charlie's mom and dad, and James Winters. 'Because you haven't told them…'

Charlie made an unhappy face. 'How did you know?'

'The same way I know that I haven't exactly told my dad about what we're up to,' Mark said. 'You know you're being careful… I know you're being careful. But they don't understand, do they?'

'I'm not sure they would,' Charlie said, 'no.' The thought of what his father's face would look like, if he told him what he was planning to do, had been haunting him the last day or so. And as for Mom… But haunting him more assiduously were the faces of Renee, and Malcolm, and Jeannine, and the rest of them. No one else was in the position to find out as much about what had happened to them as Charlie was. And more to the point, time was running out. There was only so much of the month left, at which time Charlie was sure that the person who he was sure had been stalking the 'suicides,' and was somehow complicit in their deaths, might well go dormant again. A year would go by during which media and police attention to the suicides would wane, and then, Charlie was sure, there would be more of them.

No more, he had thought last night, as he'd been going over his plans, and had started putting them into operation while scanning through some of the bleak-sounding messages left in the Deathworld 'bulletin board' system. No more deaths. The image of the dim hallway, the peeling paint, a huddled form lying across the room from him, intruded itself again. No more.

'Hey,' Mark said.

Charlie looked up.

Mark leaned back a little, let out a breath, looked the jacket up and down one more time. 'Not that it's not a good idea. But are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?'

Charlie walked around slowly and waved his arms around a little in the jacket, getting the feel of it. There was a faint fizzing sensation associated with it, something like the sensation that came with a mouthful of soft drink before you swallowed it. 'Yeah,' he said. 'It's partly that I know I can pull this off, solve this problem, without having to run to 'the grown-ups' for help. But there's also the time problem. If I waited to do this the way my folks or Winters would rather have me do it, it could get to be too late.' He shook his head. 'So I don't see that I have a choice. There are things more important than just 'being careful.' '

'Yeah.' Mark let out a long breath.

Charlie sighed as he came back and leaned against the Rolls. 'Besides, for Winters at least, I'm going to need more solid evidence than I've currently got. What I'm sitting on right now won't stand up.'

'Well,' Mark said, 'you'll have some solid stuff pretty soon, if you're right.' He leaned back on the Rolls's hood. 'But if you insist that it's not going to be enough just to have proof that someone tried to hack into your workspace…'

'It's going to have to go a little further than that,' Charlie said. Meaning that I am going to have to stake myself out as bait, not just virtually… but physically. The prospect still made him nervous enough, though, that he was unwilling to say it out loud, even to Mark.

'I could see where it might,' Mark said. 'But the implementation's gonna be tricky. How's your research been coming?'

'Oh, fine,' Charlie said. 'There's tons of stuff available on the subject on the Net.' He smiled, but the expression was grim. Suicide, even in these affluent times, was not something that was showing any tendency to go away. 'I get depressed sometimes just reading it.'

'That might be a good thing, under the circumstances. If one of the people you're interested in finding actually comes across you, you'll look more like you're really likely to do something about it.'

'Don't even joke about it.' Charlie had spent the last couple of evenings, when he wasn't busy with other things, studying the symptoms of impending suicide as carefully as if he was about to have a test on them… which, in a way, he was. If there was anything he knew about himself at the moment, it was that he wasn't in the slightest suicidal, but the descriptions of the feelings of those who were filled Charlie with pity. And the idea of such people being ruthlessly taken advantage of by someone with another agenda besides pity, a deadly one, left him furious.

Mark's expression was somber. 'I wasn't joking… not really. But look… the minute you decide it's enough, that you have the data you need…'

'I'll call.'

'Call a minute early,' Mark said, 'just to be safe. I won't be far from my workspace anytime I'm not in school.'

Charlie got up, dusted the jacket down again. 'Cut it out!' Mark said. 'It's not like it can get dirty, or wrinkled.'

'One less thing to worry about,' Charlie sighed. He looked up at the faraway ceiling of the VAB. A couple of buzzards peered down at him from the tops of their metal cliffs. 'You get it to rain again?'

Mark shook his head. 'You can't hurry nature,' he said, with a wry look. 'Besides, I'm still analyzing the phe- nomenon… There are some weird things about the humidity that have to be resolved… When are you going to go in and try that out?'

'Tonight,' Charlie said. 'My folks are going out. I won't be disturbed. And then again early in the morning, and late tomorrow night again, and early in the morning after that… ' He slid down off the hood of the Rolls. 'Until we get a result.'

'Assuming you do,' Mark said. 'Well, just be careful. I'll be keeping an eye on the jacket's link to my space tonight, and whenever I'm in from now on. Yell if you need anything.'

'Believe me, I will.' Charlie headed toward the door back into his workspace. 'I'll call you as soon as I go in, so you can check the link. Let me know if you find out you're going to be elsewhere, though.'

'No chance of that tonight,' said Mark, 'or in the next few. At least not till I can get this thing's armor to stop going away without warning… ' He tapped the Skoda's hood. It lifted itself smoothly up. A moment later Mark was half under it, nothing showing but his neodenimed legs. Charlie took in this view, smiled slightly, and headed back to his space.

No one looked twice at the lone kid, small, kind of young looking, dressed in worn slicktites and a floppy striped 'sagdown' shirt several years out of style, as he wandered around in the ash and darkness of the Eighth Circle. Banies came in all ages and sizes, and could look any way they pleased if they felt like going to the trouble of adopting a seeming, or could show themselves 'as they were'- though if this was how this kid really looked, there were doubtless those who would have found him a little strange. His sense of style needed work, and the weary look on his face alone was enough to suggest that he probably was as depressing as a Joey Bane lyric himself.

He had been here for a while now, looking around him like someone feeling slightly lost. Anyone interested enough to notice would have seen that he tended to avoid the other Banies in the area, by and large, though he spoke politely enough to them when they approached him. Almost always, after a little while, they went off and left him where he was, and he found himself alone again.

And soon enough-though perhaps not soon enough for him-someone noticed.

The boy was kicking through the ash of the outer reaches with his back to Mount Glede, while in the area through which he walked, nothing could be heard but one song, over and over again, repeating at his request to the environment: the final chorus from the Seattle concert version of 'Cut the Strings,' with the six-minute instrument destruction sequence ending in the demolition of the venerable old King Dome, scheduled to be blown up anyway that year after the Quake of '22. For about the fifteenth time in a two-hour period, that vast crash and shriek of destruction filled the air, but the images accompanying it were being suppressed, and only darkness surrounded the boy who was listening, standing there, staring at the ash around his feet, like a dark statue…

When the girl approached him, seemingly melting out of the storm of black ash that was falling at the moment, the look he gave her was less than interested.

'Hi,' she said.

'Hi,' the boy said, looking her over dully. Long dark coat, short purple skirt, black vee-neck top, purple hair, pale skin-she was taller than he was, maybe a year older, and she looked faintly annoyed. 'What?' he said then, for she was staring at him.

'Are you lost?' she said.

'No.' He turned away.