Nick could hardly bear the thought of not hearing that new music before everybody else did. 'Why did you bring me just here and tell me all this stuff, and then just walk away?' he yelled. 'Just to make me crazy, or what?'
'You figure it out!' Joey Bane yelled back, still walking away through the gathering darkness, as behind him a demon-giant in an old-fashioned Mets uniform chased a hapless mother and father across the circle with a baseball bat. Nick caught a glance at the back of the uniform shirt as the demon passed. The name was hard to make out, but its number was 666. Nice touch, that. 'But haven't I been telling you life stinks?' Bane said. 'Don't you even listen to the lyrics? Bye bye, stinker… '
And he vanished into the darkness, laughing.
Nick stood there, heart pounding, not knowing whether to be delighted or furious. Finally he decided on furious… but it was a cheerful kind of fury, one that left him determined. 'I'll be back!' he yelled at the darkness. 'I'll do it, however much time it takes! I'll be back, and I'll meet you down on Six… and deeper than that!'
Only the faint sound of mocking laughter came floating back to him from the walls of the Keep, and a glint of silver and black as from away up high there, Camiun trilled once, amused.
It took a long while to get the lion man and the tiger woman to stop fighting and talk to him, but finally they showed him the way back up to Four, through a door, and up a stairway hidden in the stone of the cliffs, and the tiger woman dropped a line about a 'golden key' that Nick was sure was a hint that had to do with how you were supposed to get into the Keep. Nick headed upward in a much improved mood, but there was still an edge of anger on his determination to come back here and show everybody that he hadn't hit his level, that he didn't need any more favors, that he was enough of a Banie to succeed down here no matter how the program tried to get under his skin, and no matter how long it took to do it. His dad was probably going to have a spasm when he saw the Net bill, but Nick was more certain than ever that he didn't care… this was worth it.
In the gateway the abandon-hope words were still burning red when he got back up there, but as Nick approached them, they twisted and curled in the air like burning red worms and formed themselves into new words. These said:
THE TIGER WOMAN IS A LIAR
He stopped and looked at that. It's not completely true, Nick thought. She did tell me how to get back up to Four…
Then he paused just on the inside of the gateway, wondering. She and the lion man had interrupted each other constantly once he got them to stop ripping each other up, and now he wasn't at all sure just which of them had told him about the way back up to Four. But he definitely remembered her telling him about the key.
So is it a false lead? Or is this a lie itself?
Nick let out a long breath. He wasgoing to have to come back as soon as he could and start working out how to get from Three to Four, so that he could test the situation and see what the real story was. One thing you have to give this place, Nick thought. It keeps you coming back…
There was no point in lingering any longer, though. He had stuff to do at home. Nick passed through the gateway, and as usual, that big red asterisk appeared in the floor under his feet, burning like lava. Just for amusement, he stepped on it.
Instantly a vast carpet of glowing small print appeared beneath his feet, laid out and vanishing away into the virtual middle distance like the crawl in some old-fashioned space movie. It said:
© JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES 2018–2025. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS VIRTUAL DOMAIN IS A WORK OF FICTION. ANY RESEMBLANCE OF ANY MANIFESTATION TO PERSONS ALIVE OR DEAD IS COINCIDENTAL. THIS SITE IS TO BE USED FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. YOU MUST BE SIXTEEN YEARS OF AGE TO ENTER. BY ENTERING THIS VIRTUAL DOMAIN YOU STATE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE OF THIS FACILITY. YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU INDEMNIFY AND HOLD BLAMELESS JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEES FOR ANY ADVERSE AFFECT WHATSOEVER WHICH MAY BE INCURRED BY THE USE OF THIS FACILITY, AND JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEES ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR SUCH EFFECTS…
Nick walked on down the carpet of words with his hands stuffed in his pockets, amused, half wishing his mom could see him, half dreading her reaction, now minutes away, when she found out where he'd been. Well, it doesn't have to happen right this second…
YOU ALSO WAIVE IN PERPETUITY YOUR RIGHT AND THE RIGHT OF YOUR HEIRS OR ASSIGNS OR ANY OTHER RESPONSIBLE PERSONS IN WHATEVER LEGAL RELATIONSHIP TO YOU TO MAKE ANY CLAIM WHATSOEVER AGAINST JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEEES IN ANY JURISDICTION NOW KNOWN OR ANY OTHER WHICH MAY HEREAFTER BE DISCOVERED, IN PERPETUITY. THIS AGREEMENT IS BINDING IN THIS FORM IN ALL U. S. JURISDICTIONS EXCEPT THE FOLLOWING: MD, NY, ME, VT. MARYLAND LAW REQUIRES THE FOLLOWING DISCLAIMER: THIS FACILITY MAY CONTAIN CONTENT INTENDED TO SHOCK OR DISTURB…
Nick snickered at that as he walked past it. He hadn't been all that shocked. Maybe people in Maryland were just too delicate to live. But he was made of sterner stuff. ' `Nicey-nice,' ' he sang under his breath as he walked down the long strip of text, as if down a red carpet, 'wasting your time, smiling at folks without reason or rhyme: life is too short as it is; it's a crime… only death's certain to call… '
The music came up around him as he left, Joey Bane's voice singing, with Camiun providing the growling harmony under the main line, and the pulse beat rhythm driving it all. There was supposed to be a new version of 'Nicey-Nice' out now. Nick resolved to break a little of his saved-up ticket money loose for it right away.
He turned off his implant, and vanished.
In the virtual realm Deathworld suddenly accrued another sixteen dollars and fifty-three cents of credit.
And in the real world, several hundred miles away, someone who had been in Deathworld only an hour before was found dead.
Chapter 2
Charlie Davis was sitting in his virtual workspace, wondering how to get the steam engine to work. He could have cheated and called up the software company's help line, which would have sent him a helpful 'ghost' of James Watt, but the prospect of doing so struck him as an admission of failure. So instead he sat on the floor of the workspace, staring at the pressure gauges all over the engine's shining brass outsides, and wondered what the heck to do next.
Charlie knew people whose workspaces were marvels of the 'special effects' end of virtuality. One of his buddies in the Net Force Explorers kept her workspace on one of the moons of Saturn. Another one had built himself a perfect replica of Windsor Castle, which he had filled with expressions of his own hobby, model trains. Charlie had found that a little bizarre, especially the miniature train shed which Mikey had installed in St. George's Chapel. 'You should talk,' Mikey had retorted. 'Your workspace used to be used for medical research the hard way-vivisection… '
That hadn't been precisely true, but it wasn't the kind of discussion that Charlie much felt like having with someone pointlessly argumentative as Mikey, and he'd let it pass. Charlie had built his workspace into a duplicate of the eighteenth-century operating theater of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It was a splendid if not very sterile space in which concentric circles of mahogany 'bleachers' surrounded an oval area in which was set a scrubbed wood table on which some of the most important experiments in the medicine of that time had been done. The circulation of blood had been explored there, and the structure of human bone, and Pasteur had dropped by to lecture on germ theory. If the professors working there had occasionally gone a little loopy and tried things like transplanting the head of one dog onto the body of another, well, that was then, not now, and everybody was
