Deathworld

'Yeah, fine. But Mark, who tripped the wire?!' 'I don't know.'

'You don't know? I thought you put a trace on the trip wire routine!'

'I did,' Mark said, sounding extremely annoyed now, 'but unfortunately, your pigeon was using an anonymizer to conceal the server of origin. They're perfectly legal. I thought the routine I had running would beat it… but this `anonner' is a new one, just opened up. Among the identification routines it's been built to defeat is the one I was using. Dammit.'

'But can't you use something… you know… from Net Force?'

Mark's voice got, if possible, even more annoyed. 'The `industrial strength' identification routines at Net Force are locked down tight, Charlie… to get permission to use the 'Drano' utilities, you have to have a court order and ID as a senior Net Force supervisor. Which I am not… yet. And I can't exactly ask any of them, either. So I'm winging it, using routines that have a lot less oomph. If I want to upgrade one of those to industrial strength I'm going to have to do that myself. In fact that's what I'll have to do after school today go check out this new anonymizer, find out which protocols it's using, figure out how to defeat them. Probably take me a day or so. You better sit the next couple dances out until I can sensitize the 'trip wire' to backtrack the next hit correctly.'

Charlie was fuming. 'You don't know anything about where the 'trip' came from?'

'Not a thing,' Mark said, sounding just as annoyed. 'Could have been next door to you, or in Ulan Bator.'

Charlie sighed. 'Okay,' he said. 'Let me know when you get the new routine up again.'

'I will. But look, Charlie, just give it all a rest for the moment. A day or so won't make any difference.'

'Yeah…' Charlie headed out of the VAB and back to his own space, beginning now to be actively nervous. A day or so… But no matter what Mark said, Charlie couldn't get rid of the idea that it could matter. It most definitely could…

Chapter 8

Nick looked for Charlie at school that day but missed him at lunch again, and wasn't able to track him down between classes. He had things on his mind, and he really wanted to talk to Charlie about them.

His last-period class had been canceled, so Nick stopped by the wing of the school where he knew Charlie sometimes had a late upper-level biology class. But it had been relocated or rescheduled-the room was locked and empty. Nick let out an exasperated breath and started to walk home.

His path took him by the NetAccess center as usual, and there Nick paused by the door and took out the last commcard he had left, the one he had fished out of his bottom drawer in his bedroom several days earlier, having forgotten that it was there in the first place. Nick looked at the card and sighed. He was woefully short of cash, now there wouldn't be any more allowance money until Friday, and this was only Tuesday. Yet at the same time he wanted to give Charlie the opportunity to walk through Deathworld with a friend at his side, not only for enjoyment, but now, after his conversation with Khasm and Spile, for security as well.

And there were other matters on his mind. A random thought, something about the various lifts he had brought back from Deathworld with him, had been obsessing Nick for the past couple of days. The Eighth Circle was proving difficult to crack-and it's gonna be impossible, without some more money to spend some more time there, Nick thought. But he was noticing that the hints and whispers he had been expecting from 'plants' in the Circle had been very few. He had been wandering around in those stony tunnels and up and down the Escheresque stairways for days now and had come up against-he smiled wryly at the expression-a stone wall.

Yet there had been more lifts available than usual, so many that his pocket lift carrier couldn't handle them all anymore, and Nick had to load them in and out of the storage area in his public server. Most of them were different versions of songs Nick already had lifts of. Only a collector, an aficionado, or a raving completist would feel the need to have them all. But Nick certainly fitted into the last category, at least, and it was while he was listening to some of the 'alternate' versions in bed a few nights ago that he had noticed some of the lifts were alternates in other ways as well. They had lyrics that other versions of the songs didn't have-

He shook his head and went into the access center. 'Hey, Nick,' the guy behind the front counter said. 'Early today-'

'Yeah, well, you might not see me for a few days,' Nick said. 'Running out of green…' He slapped the commcard up onto the reader plate.

'You're okay,' said Dilish, the guy behind the counter. 'Got a couple of hours left on that one.'

'That much? Super! My usual one open?'

'No, there's someone in there, take Eight… I'll reroute your server info over there.'

Nick went back to the booth and closed himself in, locking the sliding door and sitting down in the implant chair. A moment later he was standing in the usual white space, and he got up and reached into his pocket, coming up with the key that 'remembered' his location from the last visit.

'Deathworld access,' Nick said. The door in the air opened, a black rectangle in all that whiteness, and the copyright notice began rolling by. Is it an illusion, he wondered, or does that thing actually get longer every time? Finally it vanished, and Nick went through into the dimness of the Dark Artificer's Keep, entering into the dark stone corridor where he had been standing when he last exited.

Nick needed somewhere with a little more room for what he had in mind, so he backtracked through the tunnels to where they widened out into a round cavern, something like fifty meters across, that Eighth-Circle Banies referred to as the Bubble. Only a few people were there at the moment, passing across the empty stone space on their way to somewhere else. When they were gone, Nick said, 'Sound management system…'

'Ready.'

'Access lift library.'

'Got it.'

'Play `Strings5.' '

Music and image faded in, and suddenly Joey Bane was there some meters away, alone and spotlighted in the darkness, sitting on the four-legged bar stool he used for these performances one of many. It, like every other inanimate object onstage but Camiun, always wound up getting broken at the end of 'Cut the Strings.' It was last summer's concert in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, and Joey was sweating. Even the Bowl's slightly cooler position in the mountains was no defense against the heat wave the L. A. basin had been suffering that week. Joey was looking out at the crowd with half a smile, letting them settle, and finally he touched Camiun's strings and sang:

'I ran into Astraea with her veil on, sneaking out the party's back door: I stopped her right there and I got her a chair, asking what she was leaving for:

`The party's just getting started, my lady; what's the rush to leave us today?'

And the goddess she looked at me and she said, `There's nowhere left for me to stay…' '

Quietly the rest of the band came in, in that deceptively soft and easygoing introduction, as the Goddess of Virtue explains that the day she's feared has come, the day when the human race is at last entirely wicked, when she must finally hide her face and leave the world to its fate forever, and Joey responded to the news'… Nothing left to live for, nothing left to give for, nothing left to care about:

Nothing left to cherish, all hopes left to perish, Nowhere to go but out!

No one left to bring to, no pure heart to sing to, What's the point of hanging on?

When the reason in the rhyme's all been eaten by crime, when the last joy's finally gone?'

and then the great chorus of rage and desperation, crashing down in chord after chord as Camiun and Joey Bane together, full-throated, shouted down the blasting band behind them:

'Then cut the strings-let's be done with it. If the last night's here, then let's be one with it.

If the songs all die, if the music's all gone, If the night's come crashing on the last free dawn, what possible point is there in carrying on? Cut-the-strings!'

Nick stood listening for enjoyment's sake, but his mind was on the lyrics, especially the very first verse, which he was now sure was not the usual one. Joey would sometimes play with the middle verses, inserting something cruelly topical that suited the venue or the world situation of the day, but Nick had never heard him vary the first verse. Now he glanced over his shoulder for a second, thinking of the 'front hall' upstairs, before you ever got into the Maze, ever came close to the tunnels or the Stairways to Nowhere-and Nick started to wonder about a faint