by Tom Clancy
“Well …” Charlie got up with a sigh, walked around the back of the steam engine and had a look at the coal box, which had somehow started to look a little transparent. He touched it. At least it was solid, which it hadn’t been until just now. “Net Force is supposed to inspect and certify anything that looks like it might be dangerous to users,” he said.
“So since they haven’t shut it down, it must be okay,” Nick said. He sighed. “Not that my dad is going to care one way or another… .”
Charlie kicked the coal box experimentally. It buckled under the kick, and he looked at the half-circle dent and moaned softly. “I am never gonna get the hang of this,” he said, and went to sit down by Nick and stare at the steam engine. “Main program, routine six …”
Another window opened up, showing the beginning of the code that “built” the coal box. “Scroll down twenty,” he said. “Repeat. Repeat. Scroll down one. Line ninety-three. Change statement. Old statement: `vis 15 hardness 120 spong 12’. New statement: `vis 15 hardness 90 spong 12., “
The code readjusted itself. “I don’t get it,” Nick said. “You’re going to go to medical school, do the doctor thing like your dad, you said.” -
“Yup.” And then go into Net Force, Charlie added silently, but this was not something he discussed with anyone, not even with Nick. There was so much competition to get into that elite force, so many people who were also trying to get in … and it was not in Charlie’s nature to want to have to say to anyone later, “I wanted to get in, but I couldn’t make it.” When he made it, when he started working for them in criminology or forensics after he got his MD and his specialty … that would be the time to discuss it, because he would have the ID in his wallet for anyone to see, his ticket to the cutting edge, to the most exciting work on Earth. Until that day came, though, Charlie had resolved to keep his intentions to himself. If his life had taught him anything up until now, it was caution.
“So what do you need this stuff for?”
“Modeling nervous systems,” Charlie said. “And other things. Solid in-bone surgical prostheses, temporary re- placement organs, stuff like that.”
Nick gave him a wry look. “It looks like this system’s making you nervous, all right,” he said, “but that’s about all. You should lose this stuff and get out and get yourself some fresh air.”
Charlie sighed and leaned back on the bench, for the moment unwilling to go over and kick the coal box again, for fear of what he’d find. “Been listening to your folks too much, Nick? I bet they say the same thing.”
“Yeah, well …” Nick gave him an amused look. “I can’t help it. I can’t get excited about baseball the way my dad can.”
“Neither can I.” The two of them laughed with approximately equal levels of irony. Once a week or so, all through the spring and summer, Charlie found himself wondering how his dad, a doctor of incredible intelligence and (usually) of good sense and taste, could go out, regular as clockwork, every Saturday when the weather was right and he wasn’t on call, to play sandlot softball with the GWU med-surg team. Then, for the rest of the week, he would spend at least half an hour every morning mulling over the box scores of the most recent Braves games. He would periodically try to get Charlie interested in this as well, even try getting him interested in virtual Little League baseball … though Charlie’s dad would then routinely talk himself out of this idea halfway through each new effort, muttering that the virtual form of the sport was a “poor second best.” Charlie just nodded and put up with it, this being easier than arguing the point anew every week, or trying to explain one more time to his father that right now he was a whole lot more interested in modeling than in any sport yet invented.
“Seriously, though,” Charlie said. “You consider taking a couple of weeks off from Deathworld, just to get your folks off your case? If they’re really worried … it might be the kindest thing. Besides, once they were sure you weren’t hooked on it or anything, or about to hang yourself from the shower-curtain rail as soon as they turn their backs, they might ease off a little.”
Nick shook his head vigorously. “I’ve tried that before with other things,” he said. “My mom doesn’t even notice. My dad …” He sighed. “You let him win one, when it’s something that matters, and he starts bearing down harder on everything else. Pretty soon I wouldn’t have a life left, or at least no life that didn’t look like what he thought it should look like. Besides, I’m finally getting somewhere down there. If I drop the momentum now, the system’ll notice and stop fast-tracking me. I’ve been racking up enough points that I’m gonna get somewhere significant over the next month or so … finally get into the Dark Artificer’s Keep and get a listen to the really good music.” He shook his head. “My dad’s just gonna have to lump it for the time being.”
Charlie got up and went over to the coal box again, nudging it cautiously with one toe. The dent he had made in it abruptly sprang out … and the coal box went almost completely transparent, except for the coal, which “hung” there in midair as if sitting in some kind of wheeled plastic basket, like the ones in the “grocery stores” of old. “Frack,” Charlie said, with feeling. “Frack, frack-““You oughta take a break from this,” Nick said. “You’re getting stressed out. Since when do you use language like that?”
Charlie looked with mild annoyance at Nick. But he had to admit that his friend had a point. “Program, quick save,” Charlie said. “Then close program.”
“Saved. Closing,” said the computer, folding up the various open windows. The steam engine vanished, leaving them alone in the big wood-paneled hall, with squares of sunlight from the high windows now tracking themselves along the floor.
“Must be noontime. Probably I should get something to eat anyway,” Charlie said. “Look, you wanna come over in the flesh later? We can make some burgers or something … nobody at home has anything planned for today.” It was one of those moderately rare times when both his mother and his father had Saturday off.
“Thanks, but I’m busy this afternoon,” Nick said. “They’re offering a discount for Saturday Deathworld access between noon and six … apparently that’s a slow time at the moment, with the summer coming on. Look, why don’t you come with me? I can ‘sub’ you in on my account, and you can watch me get into the Keep.” Nick grinned with excitement.
Charlie thought about it … then shook his head. “No, you go ahead … it’s not my cuppa. But when you get out, drop by and let me know how it went. They let you make ‘tapes’?”
“Nope … the content is all copyright. They control that pretty tightly. You try to copy an experience and show it outside of their protected routines, and there’ll be lawyers on your doorstep five minutes later. But I can save the experience inside the ‘realm,’ and you can see it some other time.”
“That sounds good. You do that, okay?”
“Okay.” Nick headed for the stairs that led up to the door, then paused. “You sure? This is gonna be one for the ages.”
“Nope . you go ahead. But thanks.”
“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 ag
ain 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.
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 en
gine. 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.
