Deathworld

'Your loss,' Nick said. 'See you, Doc.'

'Later, Mr. Nick,' Charlie said.

His friend vanished. Charlie sat there a moment more, staring at where the steam engine had been, and then said to the computer, 'Secure the space, please.'

'Workspace secured,' said the program that managed it, 'all files confirmed saved; backup to SafeHouse remote facility accomplished.'

Charlie closed his eyes and performed the specific slight muscle-twitch that deactivated his implant.

The world went dark. He opened his eyes, glanced around.

Sunshine was coming through the venetian blinds of the back window of the den. Charlie got up, stretched-no matter what claims the implant-chair people made, the built-in massage and muscle-toning programs never left you completely unstiff after a prolonged session on the Net. I really should try to do something about that sometime, he thought, shaking his arms to get the blood moving again as he climbed out of the chair. Tweak the programming a little…

Then again, Charlie thought, if I have as much luck with that programming as I'm having with Caldera at the moment, maybe I'd better leave well enough alone. I'd probably come out of a session with my arms and legs tied in knots.

He walked over to the window and looked down. The back windows faced south. About twenty feet below him was their little pocket garden, a square of grass with a smaller square of paving slabs inside it, and various potted plants sitting around in it, mostly herbs for his mother's cooking. Behind the yard was another house's yard, and its windows, and to left and right the view was much the same.

Charlie yawned and went out of the den, heading down the stairs to the first floor and the kitchen level. The house was a two-century-old 'brownstone' on 16 and W, a place which Charlie's father routinely referred to as 'the Money Pit.' The family had moved into it when it was only partly renovated. For their first year there, when Charlie had been eleven and then twelve, the place had been in a constant state of uproar involving inescapable plaster dust, thick paint-daubed plastic sheeting, piles of demolished brick being saved for recycling, and endless crews of workmen barging in and out at unpredictable intervals. Finally, sick of the delays and the expense, Charlie's father had thrown the workmen out (having first allowed them to finish the second floor and the basement) and had announced his intention to finish the third floor and the attic himself, in his spare time.

Charlie still snickered every time he heard the phrase, since his father, like any other doctor, had a tendency to come home from the hospital and spend what little spare time he had snoring. When his dad did get it together to work on 'the upstairs,' Charlie and his mom inevitably got dragooned into the act as well. Charlie could now mix plaster with the best of them, and his dad had announced that he was ready to be taught how to lay a hardwood floor. This had not happened yet-the new semester had begun, and in a teaching hospital like the one at George Washington University, that meant a lot less spare time for the doctors of middle seniority, like Charlie's dad. But Charlie didn't waste much time worrying about it. The house was comfortable enough as it was at present: three bedrooms and an office where one of the implant chairs lived, a kitchen and two bathrooms, and a den that housed the other implant chair, the main Net server, and a busy, messy library. The new master bedroom and private living area which his father was planning for the upstairs would happen someday, but for the moment, Charlie tended to treat it like anything else safely distant in the realm of myth.

Now Charlie headed down the stairs and made for the kitchen, which was in the back of the building, with doors opening out onto the little garden. He got himself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker, which was always full night and day, and stood there for a moment, getting used to reality again, gazing out into the sunlight on the paving and the grass.

There were still times when Charlie woke up, very early in the morning, and felt bizarrely dislocated, as if his mind was comparing the shining new surroundings, the polished floor and pastel or stripped-brick walls, with some other reality, older, grittier, more basic. Floors that were notpolished wood, but cracked linoleum, worn and dirty, scattered with garbage; walls that were not newly plastered andpainted and hung with prints, but grimy, peel- ing, splotched with damp, holed where someone had punched them. The memory of someone shouting incomprehensible words of rage, someone else weeping: the memory of a face that should have been beautiful but was instead swollen and vague, blue with bruising. The smell of unwashed bodies, the smell of something burning; the too-clear image of a match under a spoon, a spray injector, a syringe-

'Hey, son, what's new in the world today?'

Charlie turned, swallowed, and the proper world came back, and with it his dad, lumbering into the kitchen, a big broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man in a polo shirt and jeans, high-cheekboned, with thoughtful eyes and a mouth that spent most of its time grinning. Now those dark eyes were unusually thoughtful as they took in the look on Charlie's face.

'Nothing much,' Charlie said.

'How's that steam engine?'

'Malfunctioning,' Charlie said, moving aside to let his dad at the coffee. His father tossed the morning paper onto the big table in the middle of the kitchen and went rooting in the cupboard for the gigantic coffee cup that read YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS.

'Never trust retrotech,' his father murmured, emptying what seemed to be about half the contents of the coffee-maker into that cup, and then going over to the fridge and opening the door. He reached in, then started rooting around. 'Kenmore, where the heck's the milk?'

'No milk today,' said the fridge.

'Well, I can see that, you dumb contraption, why didn't you order any?'

'Error 3033 Server Busy,' said the refrigerator, somehow managing to sound a little sullen.

'Well, you just keep trying, Kenny, or we'll trade you in for a better model before you can say 'two percent low-fat'. See that?' his father said, shutting the refrigerator with a wounded — air and heading back to the cupboard for dry coffee creamer. 'I told you, never trust modern technology.'

'You said never trust retrotech,' Charlie said as his father sat down and grabbed the Washington Post. It started unfolding and unfolding itself across the flowered tablecloth to the default display size.

'That, either,' Charlie's father said. 'Now I'll have to go out and get milk before the game, or your mother'll be on my case.'

'I can go get it, Dad.'

'Would you?' His father looked up as if astonished by his son's kindness. It was a look Charlie had gotten used to over time, the expression of a man who has almost forgotten what free time is like, and is astonished to find that other people have any.

'No problem.' In fact, if I get out right now, I can escape before he asks me to-

'You know, son,' his father said, as the main sports page resolved itself in color and motion in front of him, showing a batter swinging and missing very conclusively at a 3–2 pitch, 'a nice day like this, a boy your age should be out getting some fresh air with other kids. Now, if you felt like coming down to the park with me, after the game's over some of the other dads and I-'

'Y'know,' Charlie said, 'I just realized what I'm doing wrong with that steam engine.' Not working on it, among other things! He headed out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward the 'airlock' front hall where his bike sat. 'Later, Dad. I'll get that milk first-'

His father was chuckling softly behind him. As Charlie pushed the front door open, wheeled the bike out it, closed the door again and spoke it locked, he began to wonder if he had been manipulated into getting the milk a touch more quickly than he would have done otherwise.

Nonetheless Charlie grinned a little as he got up on his bike. His mother and father-his foster mother and foster father, actually, though they were working to adopt him formally, really-were the world's best. A little manipulation, in the greater scheme of things, didn't matter in the slightest. He looked up at the stripped brick of the outside of the building and saw, as if overlaying it faintly even in the bright Saturday morning sunlight, that older, darker memory: dimly lit hallways, echoing with laughter bitter or abandoned, the sounds of pain, abuse, and loss. That was all gone now. Nick and Adelie Davis had come and taken him away from all that, into a world where life had purpose besides getting high, and meaning besides bare survival, and hope as opposed to none. When those old memories came hunting Charlie, they never caused him anything but pain. But he knew it would be stupid to deny them, or try to escape them. If he was ever going to be fully himself, they were going to have to be part of the equation.