Deathworld

by Tom Clancy

  He walked on in, looking around at the bizarre portraiture that hung on the walls of the entryway. They were supposed to be images of gameplayers who had passed on successfully to Nine, Nick knew, normal people living in his own time. But the portraits made them all look like crazed royalty of two or three centuries back, in rococo clothes and wigs that looked like they might come alive and crawl off their wearers’ heads. He wondered what his own portrait would wind up looking like if-When. When they did it.

  Nick smiled slightly and headed in toward the doorway on the far side of the entry hall. Past that door was where things got interesting. Six staircases apparently designed by Escher led off toward the roof, and six more toward the basement, though none of them felt particularly like “up” or “down” when you were climbing them. Somewhere in this vast pile, in which none of the normal directions mattered, the Maze was hidden-a huge tangle of paths and walkways, arched and open, covering all six of the walls of a great cube of space somewhere in the Keep. Nick had actually found it accidentally, once, when he was first in here and just wandering around in the place trying to get a feel for it. Then he’d lost the Maze again while trying to work out how he’d found it to begin with. A whim of the system, he thought. Never mind. Over the weekend there’ll be time to start doing some proper searching-

  “Hey, Nick …”

  He turned quickly at the sound of a slightly familiar voice. It was Shade again. In here she looked a little less like her name, but only a little less ,justa young girl of maybe fifteen, in a long black outer coat, a short dark purple skirt, and a black sweater, dark purple hair, and eyes that shaded from violet to almost black depending on how much light there was. Those big dark eyes, and the somber set of her mouth, suggested some old sorrow hanging over her. She was pale. In this light, almost right under the great chandelier, Nick could see much better how frail she looked, how fragile. Not that Nick was so foolish as to be misled by appearances down here. As in most virtual environments, anyone could look like anything they pleased. For all he knew, up in the Real World, Shade was a six-foot-six, two hundred-and-eighty-pound football player. Somehow, though, Nick doubted it. There was a brittle feel to conversations with her that made him wonder if she was either a plant from Joey Bane Enterprises, someone used to see how players treated each other, or someone who wasn’t really cut out for this particular virtual experience, but was just too stubborn to give it up.

  “Hey, Shade,” he said. “You doing okay?”

  She sighed. Most of her conversations seemed to start with a sigh, or contain several of them. “I guess so,” she said. “It’s quiet today … you’d almost think everybody was scared off by something… .”

  Nick shrugged. “Not me.” The whole business with the Angels of the Pit had rolled off his back pretty quickly once he got into the Keep and started working on the business of solving it.

  “I don’t know… .” Shade said. “I wonder if maybe there’s something to it.”

  “To what?”

  She shrugged, gazing up and about her. “What they did …” She turned those violet eyes on him. “I keep wondering if it’s really so terrible. When everything’s going wrong . .”

  The way she trailed off, Nick had a feeling that she was about to tell him how everything was wrong for her, if he didn’t stop her. He shook his head. “Some people might think it isn’t,” he said slowly. “I guess there are times when everything really does seem to stink. But that’s not where I am at the moment.”

  “Things are better for you, then, at home?”

  “I don’t know about better,” Nick said. “A little quieter, maybe.” Certainly his father had been letting him alone … whether he was unwilling to restart their fight, or not, Nick wasn’t sure. Just the news that Nick had a job lined up for the summer seemed to have quieted things down somewhat. For the rest of it, it was as if his mother and father had declared a truce for the moment. The lightening of the atmosphere in the house had been noticeable. “I’m not thinking about that right now, Shade. I’m on my way to the Maze… .”

  “Aren’t we all,” Shade said, and laughed a little. “But I haven’t finished exploring the Keep yet. There’s still a lot of ground that I haven’t covered yet… .”

  Nick laughed. “You sound like you enjoy rummaging around in here for its own sake. Not me! I want the music.”

  “Oh, I do, too… .”

  “Well, then, come on and help me find the Maze! That’s the way down to Nine, and Nine’s where the good music’s supposed to be, the ‘unknown’ lifts. And Joey himself …”

  Shade gave him an odd look, almost nervous. “Oh, I don’t mind hanging around up here,” she said. “Besides, they say that once you leave Eight for Nine, you can’t come back.”

  That surprised him. “Who says?”

  “Other people up here.” Shade glanced around her, although those “other people” were not much in evidence right now. “All the time, in the Upper Circles, you see people from as far down as Eight wandering around. Slumming … helping the newbies, or torturing them with news of the lifts you can get down lower.”

  Nick nodded. He’d seen enough of this as he worked his way down. One and Two were pafticularly bad in this regard-a lot of the people from the circles between Three and Six seemed to enjoy coming up there and making the new Banies nuts. “But have you noticed,” she said, “that you never see anyone from Nine?”

  Nick nodded. This might have been why rumors about Nine were very few and far between. It left another question, of course: If nobody from there comes back to tell us what’s happening, then how are there any rumors at all? But rumors didn’t need reality to get started. That was one of the things this level was about, as he had been discovering.

  “You hear anything else about how to get down there?” Nick said to Shade.

  She shook her head. “Nothing that’s done me any good,” she said. “But I wish you luck.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, “thanks. Look, I’ll see you on the way out, maybe?”

  “Maybe you will.”

  She turned away.

  “Hey, Shade-”

  She glanced back at him.

  “Thanks for helping, the other day.”

  “I didn’t help,” she said. “Not really.” That faint air of sorrow seemed to come down on her again.

  Shade headed for the doors, which swung back to let her out into the darkness. Nick watched her go, thinking, Poor kid, I wonder what her problem is? But then, if he asked her, he had the awful feeling he’d find out … and right now, he had enough problems of his own. Besides, tonight was about enjoyment … because he wasn’t going to be able to afford much more of it.

  Nick turned and made for the door at the back, the entry to the Stairwell of Doom, to pick a stair and see where it took him.

  In the doorway a dark shape watched him for a few moments, then shrugged and turned away.

  Chapter 6

  That evening Charlie was sitting once more in his workspace, with piles of files around him, in the blackest mood he’d been in for days. Part of it was because this session had been delayed. His sandwich with his father, last night, had segued into one of the more ferocious games of cutthroat “timed chess” they’d ever had, and his father had won-an unusual outcome. Charlie had chalked it up to the fact that he was slightly distracted by his evening out with Mark. Now, though, he was in the midst of analyzing the information that Mark had helped him bring back … and that was accounting for the rest of his dark mood.

  Charlie sat leaning back on the bottom-most bench in his workspace, looking into the Pit. It was full of virtual information and exhibits again, so much so that he’d had to move the worktable out of the middle of it. Now the floor of the Pit was occupied by six different sets of information, floating in the air … and what bothered Charlie the most was the similarities between four of them.

  They had all been strangulations, of course. That was bad enough. But in four of those suicides-the “doub
le” suicide of just a few days ago, and the New York and Fort Collins ones-the toxicology reports had turned up something that would have immediately struck the authorities as suspicious, Charlie thought … if they had bothered comparing notes. But they hadn’t.

  He got up, strolled over to the New York suicide. This had been Renee Milford. Charlie had been through her autopsy, but he had no heart for looking at those pictures of her. He had found one that he preferred in one of the local New York virtual environments dedicated to news and current events-a family “virtshot” of Renee sitting at the beach in a one-piece bathing suit, with the tall brick water tower of Jones Beach State Park away behind her in the distance. She was blond, and pretty, and eighteen. Her smile was sunny, she had a slight sunburn on the tops of her shoulders, she was laughing at the camera, and she looked as if she didn’t have a worry in the world. The picture had been taken in 2023, the year before she died.

  Charlie looked down at the image of Renee sitting there, her hair a little tousled by the wind, blown sand glittering in the air. Next to her, hanging in the air like some kind of malevolent, multicolored, multilegged bug, was the image of the molecule the city toxicologist’s analysis had found in her blood. It was scorbutal cohydrobromate.

  The hydrobromates were not in the pharmacopeia, either the government’s informal “N. P.” or the official “U. S. P.” list. They had no legitimate medical use. They were what an earlier generation had referred to as a “designer drug,” a chemical built to get people high … and sometimes intended to perform other functions as well. In the case of the hydrobromates, the high was usually enough. But scorbutal hydrobromate, when it started to be produced in the 2010s, soon acquired a tarnished reputa- tion, even for a recreational drug. It was a mind-dulling, inhibition-loosening drug, and was used by crooks who wanted their victims to be less than clear about what was happening to them. One form of it, delivered as an aerosol spray, had briefly been used on night trains in Europe in a real-life scenario of the old urban myth about people being “gassed” unconscious so they could be robbed in their sleeping compartments. The gangs who did this had been caught and put away, but not before the drug’s reputation spread, and more of it started to be made all over the place, in Europe and then in North America. “Scobro” was popular, for it was cheap and relatively easy to make-it could be thrown together out of various readily available household chemicals and a well-known remedy for upset stomachs-and best of all, from the criminals’ point of view, it tended to metabolize quickly. It was very short-acting. Having left the brain muddled and dozy, its molecule then came apart into its component bromides in the bloodstream itself, often before the liver even had a chance to start detoxifying it.

  Charlie scowled at the molecular model hovering gently in the air by the image of Renee Milford, who appeared to have strangled herself in her parents’ garage. The toxicologist in Queens-who knew what she had been thinking of, while she was working on this case, or what she might have suspected? But she had run a much more thorough and expensive blood series on Renee than had strictly been required … and the scorbutal had turned up in it. Luck, Charlie thought, or just good timing. The drug deconstructed itself even more quickly in the rapidly acidifying bloodstream of someone who was dying or dead than it did in the blood of a live person, and in a matter of minutes there might have been none of it left at all.

  He sighed and moved on to the next set of “exhibits,” the one for Malcolm Dwyer, who had been one of the two kids to die here in the D. C. area a few days ago. Malcolm had had a big dose of the drug, so much that even after the delay in finding his and Jeannine Metz’s bodies, there had still been significant amounts of it in his bloodstream-enough, at least, to identify it by the bromide and bromate fractions pooled in the parts of his body already beginning to experience rigor. The coroner in Arlington had found it and recognized it immediately for what it was.

  The problem was that, by itself, finding sco-bro in someone’s bloodstream didn’t mean that much. Yes, the drug was illegal, like almost all the other designer drugs. But lots of people took it anyway. And in a case like this, the nature of the crime scene would itself tend to minimize the role of any drug. After all, no drug could make you commit suicide … could it?

  Charlie stood there, looking at Malcolm’s image-another virtclip, a young black guy not that much older than Charlie, tall, good looking, cheerful. And dead now. Charlie’s mother had been pretty certain that you couldn’t cause anyone to suicide if they weren’t already suicidal. But even she had been willing to admit that new ways of doing things were being invented every day… .

  And how do I know this isn’t a coincidence, anyway? Granted, it would have to be a huge one… .

  Charlie walked around to the third set of data that had shown the drug. This was Jaime Velasquez, from Fort Collins. He was a little, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy built sort of like Mark Gridley, but older, and with a much more innocent face. The picture Charlie had of him was of a guy almost completely muffled up in ski clothes, grinning past a ski mask which a friend just out of shot in the same virtclip had just pulled down, waving his ski poles at the camera, then falling down in the snow as the same out-of-shot friend hooked a sky behind one of Jaime’s knees and knocked him sprawling backward into the powder. In Jaime’s bloodstream-either because he had had a very slight dose, or had lived long enough to detoxify it, or had been too long dead before they had found him-there had been almost none of the whole scobro molecule left at all. The toxicologist had either missed the bromide fragments in the postmortem blood samples, or had seen them and assumed they had come from some other source … or perhaps had dismissed them as unimportant. Either way, they hadn’t been mentioned in his dictated text report.

  But all the same, the drug had been there. Charlie heaved a big sigh of frustration. If the coroner in Colorado had known about the findings of his associates in New York and Maryland, he might have been able to get his own police force to examine the crime scene more carefully for signs that anyone else had been there. But it hadn’t happened. There had been no comparison of data.

  Charlie scowled as he walked around to the next set of exhibits. Some of it had to do with what Mark had described: separate states’ failure to contribute information to a common pool, intrastate authorities’ unwillingness to cooperate with one another. But there could have been other causes as well. Coroners who saw what they wanted to see, Charlie thought. Or what they were convinced that they should be seeing. Just another suicide. Nothing unusual …

  But then each of them was looking at a separate case … not at one case as part of a group or set of cases. It’s not their fault they didn’t realize what they were looking at.

  But here I am, Charlie thought, and 1 think I know what I’m looking at.

  Murder.

  The minute you find anything … said James Winters’s voice in the back of his head.

  Charlie opened his mouth to tell his system to place a call …

  … then closed his mouth again, thinking.

  You know what he’s going to say, said something in the back of Charlie’s mind.

  He sat down on his bench again and looked out at the exhibits.

  There were very few things that Charlie hated more than drugs. He had seen them ruin people’s lives, had seen them ruin the life of his birth mother, the one person he had loved more than anyone else in the world. They’d killed her, slowly, by hours and inches. That memory was one that he didn’t often examine closely. He was not up for looking very hard at it right this minute, either. But the moment he called James Winters and started to present this data to him, that painful old history wasgoing to be held up in front of him by that careful and thorough man. Winters would say to him, Are you sure this isn’t clouding your judgment a little, Charlie? You know how you feel about drugs. I understand it completely. It makes perfect sense to me that you would want to keep other people from suffering the same kind of loss that you have.

  But you s
houldn’t let it make you see losses like that where there aren’t any… .

  And he would remind Charlie once again about the huge numbers of people on the Net, and the incidence of accident and circumstance among those people, and the way they impacted on mortality statistics.

  But it wouldn’t matter. I know what I’m seeing here. These people did not commit suicide. They were “helped” to die.

  Charlie looked over at the New York data again. Here, unfortunately, the investigation into Renee’s death had been less wonderful. The coroner had been conscientious, but the police had not, and they had done very little work on the actual area where she had been found dead. Up in Maine, in Bangor, though, someone had been-suspicious? Or just not certain of what they were seeing. And there were some odd findings at the scene.

  Charlie went around to Richard Delano’s exhibit and looked at what was spread out there. There was a virtclip of Richard, a short, well-muscled guy, blond, gray-eyed, in baggies and a hot-weather vest, walloping someone’s fastball in a softball game on some unnamed summer afternoon, then taking off around the bases, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. And there, spread out next to the clip, was the Bangor police department’s own virtual version of the crime scene, the living room of the house where Richard had been found. They had gone right around the room and virtsnapped everything, in both macro and micro. They had come up with some odd fiber evidence: bits of cotton fluff that were found nowhere else in the house but in this one room, the living room. And they were on the “top” of the rug, not old, not trodden in as they might have been expected to be, but something new. And not native to any of the suicide’s clothes. Charlie looked at the fibers, enlarged and hanging in the air like tangled white ropes.