noise that he'd heard from behind one of those doors that led off the front hall…
The sound of the audience's upscaling howl of excitement brought Nick around again. Bane had stood up at the first chorus-no one could sing that sitting down, not and do it justice-but now, two choruses further along, he turned around, and as always, Camiun was gone. None of the concert virteos, no matter how you studied them, ever shed much light on how that happened. Maybe it was an illusionist's brand of magic, maybe it was something more obscure. But speculation always got lost in the wake of what always happened next, which was Joey Bane snatching yet another of Wil Kersten's unfortunate guitars out of his hands and smashing it to smithereens on the floor, or on some other piece of equipment that happened to be at hand. Off he went on his expected rampage, the crowd screaming noisy approval in the background, and the concert dissolved in a shriek of tortured amplification equipment and other shattered impedimenta.
Nick let it play itself out, and when the clip finally faded into darkness, he stood there a moment later in the Bubble, with the torches flickering around him from their iron grips in the wall, and considered what to do next.
Upstairs. I want to check that door. I don't want to stay too long… gotta save a little time on this commcard for later in the week.
But first let's see if I can find Charlie…!
Charlie made his way home to find the house empty again-his mom wasn't back from the hospital yet-and, waiting for him in his workspace, bobbing gently up and down in the air, was the virtmail message he'd been hoping for. He made his way down the stairs of the lecture hall to it, and looked the little glowing sphere's exterior shell over to see if it was 'canned' or 'live'-some mails, when touched, would link live to the person who had sent them if he or she was available online.
No use taking chances, Charlie thought, even though he couldn't see anything to suggest a live linkage. 'Workspace management,' he said.
'Here, Charlie.'
'Implement stealth routine one.'
The interior of the Royal Society's lecture room went away, to be replaced by a plain white plain with blue 'sky,' a mimicry of a public-access space. Charlie looked at his hands and arms and saw that his workspace had settled a copy of his 'Manta' seeming about him. He could see it, thinly, over his skin, transparent.
Satisfied, he reached out and touched the mail. A moment later Shade was standing in front of him, surrounded by a little halo of darkness. The message had been sent from somewhere in Deathworld.
'Manta,' she said, 'I got in touch with Kalki. He'll be in the World tonight around ten eastern. He really wants to see you and talk to you. Let me know if you can make it.'
The image paused, waiting for Charlie to activate the reply function. For a moment he stood there looking at her earnest face, and chewed his lip.
Mark did say to give it a rest for a day or two… Yet at the same time, the thought kept coming up in the back of his head: It's May. Early in May… And every day lost meant the chance that someone else might die. If one of these people are involved with the 'suicides,' and I lose the chance to get close to them while Mark's playing with his programming…
Still. He was pretty definite.
Charlie sighed. 'Start reply.'
'Ready.'
'Shade, thanks, but listen, I-' He stopped himself in the middle of saying 'I can't make it.' Do you dare not take the chance? The risk was just too great. In his mind's eye Charlie could just see the blurred look on some innocent kid's face as the drug took them, left them defenseless-'I might be a little late,' he said, 'but I'll be there. Thanks for letting me know. End.'
The workspace collapsed the message down into a smaller sphere. 'Ready to send?' it said.
'Send.'
It vanished. Charlie looked at the empty air where it had been. Then, 'Restore normal environment,' he said.
The lecture hall came back. Charlie glanced around it, and at the six sets of images which had been restored to their original locations, and then headed off for Mark's workspace to collect the Magic Jacket.
Some hours later he was standing by the front doors of the Dark Artificer's Keep, waiting. There was a fairly steady stream of Banies coming in and going out, and demons stood by the doors on either side, at attention, looking like doormen at some expensive apartment building. Manta stood there off to one side in his floppy shirt and old worn black slicktites, twitching slightly, looking nervously around him. None of the Banies paid him the slightest attention.
'Waiting long?'
He didn't have to fake being startled. Manta turned hurriedly and saw a tall shape looming over him, somewhat indistinct in the darkness.
'You Manta?' he said.
'Uh, yeah. I don't-'
'I'm Kalki,' the guy said. 'Come on. Who can see anything here? Let's get a little closer to the doors.' He took Manta's shoulder in a friendly way and guided him over that way.
Manta shivered a little. Allowing people he didn't know well to touch him had always come hard to him. It was something left over from his distant childhood he didn't readily discuss. As they got closer to the doors, and the light of the great chandelier spilling out of them, he got a better sense of what Kalki looked like. He was slender, about eighteen, and not wearing a seeming-or at least not an unusual one. He wore street clothes, just neos, a slipshirt, and a 'bomber' jacket. His face was unusually handsome, with high cheekbones and eyes that drooped down at the corners a little, a look that would have been humorous if it wasn't so sad. A seeming after all? Manta thought. Or am I just unusually paranoid?
'Shade couldn't make it,' Kalki said. 'Some family thing came up, she said. She told me about you… ' 'Not too much, I hope,' Manta said.
Kalki looked at him thoughtfully. 'Come on,' he said, 'we can go in here and talk.'
They went in through the Front Hall, and Manta looked up at the great black and gray chandelier, casting its cold light. 'It gives me the creeps,' he said softly.
Kalki chuckled. 'You want creepy, you should try Nine,' he said. 'That'll raise the hair on your head, all right.'
'You've been down to Nine?'
They headed off to the side of the huge space, where there were some benches faired into the stone of the massive walls. 'I've been through the gates,' Kalki said, sounding bored. 'It looked so much like the beginning of Eight, to me, that I decided not to bother. They've gone to so much trouble, hiding the lifts down there, I wonder whether they're worth it… after all, the stuff I've found on Eight so far hasn't been so great. Sometimes I think it's just a ploy by the management to get everyone real excited about substandard stuff.'
'The more I see of down here,' Manta muttered, 'the less excited I am about it.'
'Yeah?' They sat down on one of the carved benches, watching people come and go through the great doors. 'Shade told me,' Kalki said, 'that you were pretty sad about things. I see she wasn't exaggerating… '
'Yeah.' Manta looked out into the darkness, and then after a moment said, 'She said you'd felt this way… '
Kalki nodded. 'A while ago now,' he said. 'It can be pretty tough when you're right down in the middle of it.'
'I left some messages in the 'board' area,' Manta said softly. 'Just to try to get someone to talk to me. No one answered.'
'Hey,' Kalki said, 'life does stink, doesn't it? The trouble is that people bring the outside reality in here with them. Here, you can change things… but out there, no one does anything about the nature of reality, the way people interact with each other. Or don't. No one listens to anything Joey's saying. And why should they? To do that, they'd have to admit the world stinks, in the first place.'
'I don't have any trouble admitting that,' Manta said. 'It's been a waste of my time since I first started noticing things. Now…' He shook his head. 'It's like every breath hurts. I'm tired of breathing:'
Kalki let out a long breath. 'You have folks?' he said.
