But right now that could wait. Sunlight dissolved the shadows, and Charlie pedaled off down to the nearby convenience store to get some milk, while turning over in his mind the problem of a rubbery steam engine. Shame I can't get Nick interested in this. He'd be a help. But Nick plainly had other things on his mind… Guess that means I'd better get busy.
Chapter 3
Nick stood by the Lake of Boiling Blood, gazing idly across its blooping, heaving depths, and decided that it looked a lot like spaghetti sauce.
He sighed. All around him the scalded screeches of various media figures of past and present-movie stars, singers, reporters, producers, directors-could be heard as they noisily repented their various overindulgences and infractions against taste, style, and veracity, while various demons pushed the Damned back into the boiling blood as they tried to escape, or pulled them out again (to give them a chance to recover, so that throwing them in again later would hurt more). The lake in which all the ViolentAgainst-Truth were imprisoned had numerous little fjords, pools, and lakelets winding up among the towering dark cliffs that embraced it on all sides, and from these could be heard particularly piercing shrieks and howls of anger and pain. Nick had stopped reacting to these now, having made the rounds of all the 'specialty' areas in his search for clues about the way down to the Seventh Circle. He had seen and spent hours in the worst of them all, the giant boiling-magma Jacuzzi in which former talk-show hosts and literary critics held one another under, tearing at each other whenever anyone managed to struggle to the surface, and from even that awful scene he had come away more or less unscathed. The other, lesser torments on this level held no more terrors for Nick now. Even the stink of the lake that boiled but never burned was beginning to become a commonplace, and he was busily trying to work out the details of where he should be heading next. The Seventh Circle was beckoning.
Over everything ran the savage rhythms of the new 'unpublished' tracks from Forlorn Voices; right now it was 'Slasher's Surprise' playing, with Joey Bane's voice unusually soft in the leadup to the second verse, almost as if enticing you to lean in close and have your brain fried when the chorus began screaming in your ears.
'It never seems to have occurred to you that if I cut you you would bleed…
but then it also never seems to have occurred that I might follow your own nasty lead:
Might get the strop out, might hone the edge down, might put the blade in deep:
maybe tonight's little pain will teach you to look before you leap!'
And then the shriek of sound, Cimiun singing out like both tormented and tormentor alternately, and Joey Bane's sardonic scream:
'Surprise, surprise, see the blood flow, Mister Do-unto-others-and-run!
Hey, what's the hurry, don't leave, don't go, I'm up for more of your kind of fun-'
spot he might have missed. He was getting ready to move on shortly, though, for he thought he had all the clues he needed. And Six was getting old, anyway. At first Six had seemed 'seriously cool,' to use his dad's ancient and hoary term. But now it had palled. In fact, at first Nick had been surprised to see how soon he had gotten used to it, how very soon it had all seemed slightly passe… and more, things had not happened in the order he had expected. He had thought that once he hit Six, the Keep of the Dark Artificer would be waiting for him. But when he reached the spot in the Ashen Plain where rumor said it was supposed to stand, he had found nothing but a big rough sign spray-painted on permanently smoldering plywood, and stuck in the ground: GONE FISHING ON LEVEL 8. SUCKER!
At first Nick had been absolutely outraged at this, and had turned to leave, infuriated at the waste of time and money. But then he thought again, distracted for the moment by the initial sight of the lake, and the smell of it-horrifying enough, to a nose not used to it, to strike almost anyone still, or sick. He had controlled his heaves, and his initial reaction, and then it occurred to him: Of course. It's a test. If everything stinks, why shouldn't everything stink here, too? Joey never said it would be otherwise.
So Nick had sighed, and coughed, and started hiking around the shallow lake, looking for clues as to what was the best way down to Eight. This took him a long while, since the only source of clues was those people trapped in the blood, being pushed into it or scrambling out again. You had to talk to them, find out who they were and what they were doing here, and try to draw them out on the subject… not that they would necessarily cooperate. Not all of them would stand near the edge of the lake and talk to you, either. There were big gaggles and parties of them out in the hotter part of the lake, and they would stand or float there, alternately screaming and looking back toward shore, scornfully, like people at a cocktail party who're in with the crowd that really matters and have no inclination to move around and meet anyone less important.
Nick had spent a long time wandering around the edges of the lake, trying to overhear something that would be useful to him. This had made him pretty annoyed after a little while. It feels like my life, he had thought. I'm supposed to be here escaping from reality, not getting stuck with more of the same!
But there was no choice, for the only other sources of clues were the other players-and they were a closemouthed bunch. None of them that Nick approached would talk to him, and finally he gave up trying. Probably they figure they've spent good money to find out what they know so far, Nick thought, and they're not going to give it away to anyone for free. Realizing this didn't make Nick feel any better, though, and eventually, after he had spent something like eight hours of 'peak time' without any result, he had sat down with his back against a sullenly hot boulder and taken what he considered would be his last long look at the place.
Then-when he was off his guard, lost in his fury and unfocused-he saw the answer. He saw one of the game-players, not a demon, look over her shoulder as if concerned that she was being watched, and then after a moment of apparently seeing no one nearby, actually wade into the boiling blood and head out toward one particular group. And Nick's mouth dropped right open.
If she can do that, I can do that!
Nick got up and made for the edge of the lake. There for a moment he hesitated, for the stuff looked deadly. But she did it!
Gingerly he put a foot in. He didn't feel anything. Confused, Nick bent down and held his hand over the boiling blood. He could feel the heat, and it felt bad. But after a moment's hesitation he stuck his finger in
To his astonishment, it didn't particularly hurt. The 'boiling blood' was only about as hot as a really hot bath. And he alternately laughed and cursed himself all the way across the lake as he got right in and waded or swam toward one of the big 'get-togethers' in the middle of the lava, a whole bunch of scalded, burnt people-or former people, all of whom looked as if they had been guests at a particularly interactive barbecue-who were standing around and laughing more than they were screaming. Nick felt dumb, in retrospect. He knew perfectly well that you couldn't suffer pain in a Net-based experience, or at least not pain bad enough to hurt you. The implant embedded in you was designed specifically to filter that kind of thing out. And it didn't necessarily follow that what hurt the Damned would necessarily hurt you. After all, they were supposed to suffer here. It struck Nick as likely enough that even in a real Hell, the torments wouldn't hurt someone who wasn't entitled to them.
Possibly there's a message there somewhere. In any case, Nick had learned to stop taking the physical images of things here at face value, as he would have in the real world. Maybe that's the message, too. That nothing is what it seems. That nothing can really be trusted.
It was a message that sank in deep. Nick put it aside for that moment, though, and got busy talking to the people out in the lake. In between torments he found them a voluble enough bunch. In fact it was hard to get them to stop talking, especially about their favorite topic, themselves. What was harder still was to get them to say anything about Deathworld itself, its structure and the way around it. Not that they seemed to be inhibited against this, specifically. They were just so utterly self-centered that even the torment of the boiling blood served only as a momentary distraction from their recitations of the important things they'd done, all the books they'd written and the money they'd made, the millions of people they'd influenced, the trends they'd set. Nick started to find this very choice when he paired their endless effusions against the fact that he only knew who a few of them were, out of hundreds he talked to. That week he did get a very thorough grounding in the faded pop culture of the last fifty years, and an increasingly clear sense of how very little of human endeavor lasts for any real length of time, whether it's worthwhile or not.
Finally, though, Nick learned by observation that if you asked questions while the demons were actually
