Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Pallas Ril is like the watch, here. My bottom hand represents Earth. See, when the watch is at rest, it’s stable right here on Earth. Now, let’s say that Overworld is a different height, see, a higher level of reality—say halfway between my hands. So, if we want to raise the watch to that level, without moving my hands, there’s two ways we can go about it. One is to shorten the chain, like this. Simple, isn’t it? This is kind of like freemod—that’s short for ‘frequency modification,’ which isn’t even the right term for it, but anyway . . . This is what we do for trainees who go to Overworld for a long time, sometimes years, to finish their training and develop the personas that they hope will make them stars someday. When they decide to come home, they go to one of our fixed transfer points, and the equipment there lengthens the chain again. Just like this, see? They’re back on Earth. But there’s a problem with this. When you’re on freemod, you’re just like a native. You’re completely a part of the Overworld universe, and you’re completely cut off from the Studio. No first-handers, not even a recording for second-hand cubes. You wouldn’t like that a whole lot, would you? We get all the fun, and you can’t share it.”

  (Audience roars agreement)

  “Now, ammod—amplitude modification, which isn’t the right term either, but there you go—that’s a little more complicated. It’s what happened to Pallas, what happens to me and every other Actor you ever enjoy.”

  Here his wrist snapped in a little arc, and the pocket watch whirled in a circle as centripetal force drove it up and out to midlevel.

  “See, it’s a whole different way of getting to Overworld. To keep the watch up here, I have to keep spinning it. That’s the same as adding energy, you see? That’s what we do through the thought-mitter link. The same link that carries our experiences back here to Earth for you to enjoy, carries energy from the Studio reactor to us, to keep us on Overworld.”

  Hari, eyes closed, remembered the veneer of concern on Kinnison’s face as she leaned toward him, and he remembered his urge to slap her.

  “And so,” she asked, “can you tell us what happens if the link gets broken?”

  Hari had held his hand still then, and he, Kinnison, and the entire audience watched in silence as the pocket watch spiraled down to his other palm.

  “So, she slides back to Earth.”

  Hari had followed the script flawlessly; this was the spot for him to turn grave.

  “It’s a lot more serious than that. See, Overworld isn’t what you’d call adjacent to Earth’s universe. Just the opposite; it’s so similar to Earth because, you might say, it’s a harmonic of Earth, like an octave. There are any number of different universes that lie at energy levels between ours and Overworld’s, and most all of them are so unlike our own that I can’t even describe them. They’re all hostile to life as we know it. In some, for example, the element carbon, the element that makes up pretty much your whole body, can’t even exist there, by the physical laws. When an Actor slips out of phase with Overworld, it’s death. It’s the most hideous death imaginable. Most of them are never seen again. Some eventually slip into phase with Earth, and it’s, well . . . gruesome. I don’t even want to describe it.”

  “And this is what will happen to Pallas Ril if you don’t find her?”

  His best hardguy voice: “It might’ve happened already.”

  The sick twist in Hari’s stomach forced his eyes open to see his own face staring back at him from the heads-up on the cab’s windscreen.

  The cab lurched from one slavelane to another, swinging, so that for an instant his projected face overlay the building storm clouds out on the Pacific.

  “I know that when you slip that helmet over your heads, you are me. You feel what I feel. I know that you love her, too. And I swear to you, that if anything has happened to her, no power in any universe will save the men responsible. I will make Berne pray for death; Ma’elKoth will curse the day his parents met. No one whose hand was in this will escape me. I swear it.”

  It was all scripted, all written by the pros from Studio Hype, but at the end it hadn’t mattered. That oath was as honest as any words he’d ever spoken.

  “Hoo, mama,” the cabbie chuckled. “Sure wouldn’t want you mad at me.”

  9

  THE ATTENDANT HELD the door respectfully, to allow Hari to pass. As he entered the tiny room, Hari shook the attendant’s hand; this bit of upcaste-to-down contact, though unusual, was not unheard of, and it served to cover the passing of a small packet of pure cocaine from Hari’s hand to the attendant’s. All flows of credit were electronically monitored, but cocaine and other stimulants could be purchased legally by anyone of Professional caste or above; it and other drugs had become the preferred medium of black-market exchange and were absolutely de rigueur for unobtrusive bribes. Hari always brought a substantial supply on his visits to the Buchanan Social Camp; a steadily descending series of bribes—from the Director on down to the Laborers who oversaw the surgically deafened cyborg Workers that attended the internees—was the only way Hari could buy a chance to speak with his father.

  The attendant pointed silently to the touchpad on the wall, where Hari would press to signal that he wished to leave, and then spread his hands, fingers up and out.

  Ten minutes.

  Hari nodded, and the attendant closed the door; it locked with a heavy mechanical chunk.

  “Dad?” he said, coming to the edge of the bed. “Dad, how are you feeling?”

  Duncan Michaelson lay twisted beneath sheets of sweat-soaked synthetics, his eyes rolling like misshapen marbles. Veins writhed across his hairless skull; his wasted arms strained spastically against padded straps, and the soft mumbling moan that bubbled from his lips echoed his perpetual nightmare.

  Dammit, he’d been promised Duncan would be awake.

  Hari shook his head angrily and almost went to the touchpad to signal the attendant, then shrugged and went to the small window instead. He was paying a lot for this window—a 20 percent surcharge to his monthly debit. He might as well get some use out of it.

  That monthly debit, which supported the expense of maintaining Duncan in the Buke, was all that stood between Hari’s father and a cyborg’s yoke; that yoke, and the Worker’s life that went with it, would have killed Duncan in months even years ago, when he’d been vastly stronger than he was now.

  Hari had been paying to keep him in prison for more than ten years.

  Rain streaked the window, blurring and dimming the grey world outside. A stroke of lightning shattered a small tree into glowing flinders only a few meters away; the crackle of energy and the splintering crash of thunder triggered Hari’s reflexes, and he dove for the floor with a startled shout. He rolled into a crouch next to a small desk, shaking his head and disgustedly waiting for his pulse to normalize.

  On the bed above him, Duncan Michaelson opened his eyes. “Hari?” His voice was thin and querulous, barely above a whisper. “That you, Killer?”

  Hari steadied himself with a hand on the bedrail and stood. “Yeah, Dad.”

  “God, you’re getting big, Killer. How’s school?”

  “Dad, I . . .” He pressed his hand to his forehead. “Fine, Dad. Just fine.”

  “Your head hurt? I tolja t’stay away from those Artisan kids. Hoods, all of them. I’m a Pr’fesh’nal, goddammit. Better get y’mom t’stitch that up.”

  Hari shifted his hand so that his fingers brushed the ancient ridged scar that twisted just above his hairline. When he was ten years old, he’d fought a whole gang of older Artisan boys; six of them had been pushing him and singing one of those tuneless songs that boys can make up on the spur of the moment. This one, they called “The Crazyman’s Kid.”

  A brief smile flickered over Hari’s face at the memory—one boy rolling on the ground cupping his crushed testicles, another howling as he pressed his hand to his face, trying to stem the blood that spurted from the ragged mess Hari’s teeth had made of his nose. For a moment, he wished he was ten again; he wish
ed he’d gotten a couple more of them before their leader—Nielson, something Nielson—had ended the brawl with a brick.

  But nostalgic reflection had never been Hari’s habit, and this passed swiftly away. His mother had not stitched the gash Nielson’s brick had left in his scalp; by that time, she’d been dead for three years.

  And Duncan had been completely fucking bugnuts for two of them.

  “I will, Dad.”

  “That’s good . . .” Duncan’s strengthless hand scratched at the straps. “Can you loosen me up? Gotta terrible itch.”

  Hari loosened the straps, and Duncan scratched himself around the edges of the nutrient patches on his chest. “Oh, that’s good. You’re a good kid, Hari . . . a good son. I wish I hadn’t . . . I just, y’know, could have . . . I . . .” Duncan’s eyes rolled up under their flickering lids, and his voice slurred back into throaty, incoherent muttering.

  “Dad?” Hari reached out to his father, to shake him gently. His hand closed over Duncan’s shoulder. He could feel every tendon, every detail of bone and joint; Caine’s training rose from his subconscious and whispered the exact simple twist that would dislocate that shoulder, separate bone and ligament.

  Hari yanked his hand back as though his father’s flesh were hot iron. He stared at his palm for one long second, as though expecting to see a burn.

  He pushed himself away from the bed and turned again to the window, to rest his forehead against the chill smooth glass.

  Nearly everyone on Earth knew the approved version of Hari’s life, the classic Studio success story of the tough kid from the Labor ghettos of San Francisco. Only very few knew that Hari hadn’t been born a Laborer. His father, Duncan Michaelson, had been a Professor of social anthropology at Berkeley, and was in fact the principal author of the standard texts on Westerling and the cultural mores of Overworld. Hari’s mother, Davia Khapur, had met Duncan when she took his Principles of Linguistic Drift seminar for her masters in philology. The union of two traditionally Professional families had been too good to resist, and Hari’s earliest memories were happy ones.

  Hari now knew what had triggered his father’s breakdown. After Hari had clawed his way up to stardom, he’d finally been able to afford the medical tests that pinpointed Duncan’s progressive neural degeneration. Duncan Michaelson had an autoimmune disorder that ate away at his synaptic chemical receptors, essentially causing random short-circuiting throughout his central nervous system. As one meditech had brutally put it, “Your father’s brain has spent the past twenty years gradually turning to pudding.”

  But when it had begun, all those years ago, Hari’d had no idea his father was sick. He’d barely noticed Duncan’s increasing moodiness and brooding, lost as he was in the bright world of learning that a six-year-old Professional child had open to him. He remembered the first beating—the backhanded slap that had buffeted him across the carpet in his father’s study, the hands that had crushed his shoulders and shook him until his eyes filled with shooting stars.

  He remembered the screaming, back and forth between his parents—shouting filled with names he didn’t know, names that Duncan had been using in his seminars and lectures, names that frightened his mother until her teeth chattered. Many years would pass before Hari could afford to purchase the black-market banned books that told him who these names belonged to, names like Jefferson and Lincoln, Voltaire and John Locke. At the time, all he knew was that his father wouldn’t stop talking about these men, and it was going to get him in trouble.

  He remembered the brisk, businesslike manner of the silver-masked Social Police when they arrested Duncan. Six-year-old Hari had been long abed, but Duncan’s snarl had awakened him; Hari had watched through the barest crack of his bedroom door.

  Duncan must have been either too proud or already too crazy to lie; after he’d been gone for a week, more soapies came and moved Hari and his mother into a two-room apartment in the Mission District Labor ghetto.

  For years Hari had tried to believe that the reason his mother hadn’t divorced his father was that she loved him too much to leave him, even when his madness carried them all downcaste to a Temp slum. In other families, a divorce would have protected the innocent spouse’s caste status. It wasn’t until Hari was a teenager, many years after his mother’s death, that he’d realized a divorce wouldn’t have protected her. She hadn’t turned Duncan in for sedition; as far as Soapy was concerned, that made her his accomplice.

  She’d had nowhere else to go.

  His father was allowed to join them only a month later. Their assets had been confiscated, as Laborers can neither possess nor receive income from Professional work. Neither Duncan nor Davia had Labor skills; the best they could do was Temp at unskilled jobs. And Duncan grew worse, more erratic, more violent, more prone to bellowed declamations of the “rights of man.”

  Hari didn’t know what had killed his mother. He’d always sort of figured that Duncan had beaten her a little too hard one day, and that some Labor Clinic medical aide had been too zoned on Demerol to give her proper treatment. Hari’s strongest memory of his mother was of her lying on her bed in their tiny apartment, soaked in sweat, her palsied hand gripping his without strength. “Take care of your father,” she’d said, “because he’s the only father you’ll ever have. He’s sick, Hari. He can’t help himself.”

  A few days later she died in that bed, while Hari played stickball a few blocks away. He had been seven years old.

  Duncan’s hold on reality was intermittent. On his lucid days, he was almost pathetically kind to his son, struggling with all his might to be the good parent that he knew in his heart he wasn’t. He did his best to educate Hari, teaching him to read, to write, and to do simple arithmetic. He managed to scrape together enough cocaine to not only purchase a screener but to bribe a local tech into illegally hooking it into the library net; Duncan and Hari spent many hours together before that screen, reading. But those were the good days.

  On the bad ones, Hari swiftly learned that he was safer among the dregs of the Mission District than he was with his father. Hari became almost preternaturally sensitive and adaptable; he was able to scent a shift in his father’s sanity from upwind and over a hill, and he could instantly fall in line and play along with the delusion of the day—could make himself see the world the way that Duncan saw it. He’d been taught early and often that any denial of—or deviation from—his father’s private reality was a short road to a savage beating.

  And he learned to fight back. By the age of ten or so, he’d discovered that the beatings would be just as bad whether he fought back or not. Fighting gave him the chance to escape.

  When he could escape, the only place a Labor kid could go was the street. His intelligence and adaptability let him survive out among the whores and the thieves and the addicts, the upcaste perverts and the prowling sexual predators. His unhesitating willingness to fight anyone, anytime, any odds, earned him a reputation for being as crazy as his father, and from time to time it saved his life.

  By the time he was fifteen, he’d had the world pretty well figured out. His father went crazy, he’d decided, because he kept trying to fool himself. His father’d read books by these guys that he kept ranting about. They told him that the world was one way, and he wanted to believe them, and so when the world showed him that it was something else he couldn’t handle it. He’d pretended so hard that he could no longer separate pretense from reality.

  Hari swore a private oath he’d never do that. He’d keep his mental balance by looking the world straight in the eye, for exactly what it is; he’d never pretend it was different.

  A childhood on the streets of the Mission District had pretty well shattered any illusions he might have inherited about the sanctity of human life, or the fundamental goodness of people. By fifteen, he’d already killed two men and had been supporting himself and his father for five years as a petty thief and a courier for the local black-market dealers.

  It was less than a mon
th after his sixteenth birthday that Hari had contrived to catch the attention of Marc Vilo; two weeks after that, he’d packed his few possessions and moved out. On Hari’s last day under his father’s roof, Duncan tried to open his skull with a pipe wrench.

  Vilo prided himself on the care he took of his undercastes. Unknown to Hari, Vilo saw to it that Duncan was provided for throughout the next six years as Hari grew, entered the Studio Conservatory, and spent three years in freemod training on Overworld. When Hari returned to take up his Acting career, Duncan had been in specialized care for several years. With continuing drug therapy, he was consistently lucid.

  His only remaining problem was that he’d never learned to shut up.

  Stripped of his Professional privileges, he could no longer legally teach. Instead, he’d gathered a following of young Labor men and women who met in secret in his apartment for discussions on banned philosophies culled from Duncan’s prodigious memory; they in turn disseminated these antisocial ideas among their own acquaintances. The soapies had known about this, almost certainly, but in those days they were somewhat more tolerant. It wasn’t until the crackdown that followed the Caste Riots that Duncan was convicted of sedition and placed under a standing sentence: either permanent restraint in a Mute Facility like the Buchanan’s or the cyborg yoke and life as a Worker.

  In the Buke, nothing Duncan could say or write would ever reach the outside world. The only human contact he could have was with a surgically deafened Worker who tended his personal needs. He was allowed full net access, but incoming only. Any personal requests were submitted to the Director by E-mail on a closed-circuit system designed specifically for that purpose; not only could Duncan not communicate with the outside world, he could never even converse with the other Buchanan campers.

  These rules, though, like all rules, could be bent—or broken—for the right price.

  And these rules made Duncan the safest man on Earth for Hari to talk to. When the winds that howled through the holes in Hari’s life became too bitter, he’d come here for a moment of stillness, for a moment of peace.