by Tom Clancy
Mark threw Charlie one apologetic glance, and then removed himself from the room with a speed that suggested he had recently had ion drivers installed.
A moment’s silence ensued. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do with you,” Winters said at last, “when you play the moral card on me like that.”
Charlie thought it wisest to keep his mouth shut for the moment.
Winters sighed and leaned back in his chair again. “Your mother and father,” he said, rubbing his face, “are going to have my hide off my bones if I don’t come down on you hard for this dumb stunt. Which it was.” Charlie looked down. “The ‘morality card’ aside. Morality starts at home, Charlie. You have not treated your folks very well. If you and the irrepressible Mr. Gridley hadn’t had God’s own luck, not to mention a sense of timing developed well beyond what people of your tender years should have, you could very well have been ‘suicide’ number seven. And maybe Mark and Nick for eight and nine. And regardless of the fact that the work and the evidence you left us would have made your death murder rather than suicide, and that your murderer would have been behind bars very quickly indeed, it would have shattered your parents’ lives.”
Charlie sat there with the sweat bursting out all over him, because he knew it was true, and that one way or another, he was unlikely to hear the end of this for months.
The silence stretched out again for a long while.
“All right,” Winters said. “We’ll see what you work out with them. They’ve let me know that, after talking to Jay Gridley, they think you should be allowed to continue as a Net Force Explorer. You may have to get used to being, uh, monitored a little more closely. You threw quite a scare into them.”
Charlie swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
“But there is this.” He gave Charlie a thoughtful look. “If you hadn’t done what you did … heaven knows who she might have killed next. How many more murders it would have taken to quieten her ghosts … and of course they wouldn’t have stayed quiet, not for long.” He sat back, looking at his folded hands. “Unfortunately, among the various kinds of serial killers, there are a few who `seal over’ very effectively for prolonged periods between crimes. They’re crazy as bedbugs, but either they’re not crazy enough to let their symptoms show where people can see them, or there’s no one to see. Living by herself, her son dead, her husband pretty much permanently out of thepicture, with no one to see how weird she got every April … this could have gone on for a long while. It could have caused Deathworld to be shut down, and left Bane fighting endless lawsuits that would not have been his responsibility. So an injustice has been prevented … though frankly, from what I’ve seen of the place, I wonder if-”
Then Winters stopped himself. “No,” he said, sounding annoyed. “Injustice is injustice, dammit, and artistic opinions shouldn’t enter into it. That way lies tyranny. Now would you mind explaining why you’re looking at me like that?”
Charlie had begun to smile, just a little. He couldn’t help it. “I think there’s more to that place than meets the eye,” he said. “And really, Mr. Winters, I think the media’ ye overstated the case a little about Deathworld. It’s not as kinky and cruel as they think. It’s more a teaching exercise.”
“Oh, is it?” Winters said. “Well.” He glanced down at his desk, reading something that had been manifesting under its surface for a while now.
He sighed. “It was always forensics with you, wasn’t it?” he said. ” ‘The noblest use of science,’ I heard one of my people call it. Well, some good has come of this aspect of your riffling of the records, anyway. There really should have been more cooperation among the various police forces handling the suicides. There are mechanisms set up for that, but they don’t get used enough. This outcome will enable us to put bugs under some people’s rumps, and have them look more closely at how to coordinate deaths that have similarities. A ‘smart’ system can be coached by forensic people and profilers to start handling and correlating data like this … as long as the cops put it in. And that a kid beat them to a serial killer might just shame them into using it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Fine. But at the end of the day I suppose I might have known you’d do what you did, once faced with the evidence. Regardless of how earnestly you promised me you wouldn’t jump the gun.”
Charlie blushed hot again. This is all I need. A rep as an incorrigible gun-jumper. With one of the two men who’ll determine whether I ever work in Net Force at all. . _ _
“Don’t mistake my intent,” said Winters. “I don’t mindlessly push the ‘team player’ concept because some corporate-minded superior makes me do it. I do it because it is the sine qua non of this organization, the single thing that makes us effective. When you start working with other people in Net Force someday, assuming that you graduate medical school without incident and that you are somehow spared for that work by an overly kindly Universe which keeps you from getting your butt kidnapped or killed when you put it in harm’s way”- Charlie began wondering whether it was possible to feel as hot and embarrassed as he presently did without actually running a clinical fever- “then you are going to have to do what you tell them you’re going to do, for the simple reason that they’re going to act on that information, and when they do, if you’re not doing what you said you were going to do, you may get them killed. They will be depending on you to keep your word. If you can’t … you are no good to anyone. So get the polar bears and the Helicobacter out of your system now, because there’ll be no room for them later.”
Winters looked at him.
“Uh,” Charlie said, “yes, sir.”
There was a long silence. “Good,” Winters said. “Then we understand each other. Insofar as anyone my age can truly understand anyone yours.” He shook his head. “Which is little enough. Especially after I just heard you defending Deathworld to me.” He raised his eyebrows at Charlie. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d care much for the music, for one thing. I thought you were all for tech-notrad.”
“The context,” Charlie said, “makes other readings possible.”
Winters gave him a cockeyed look. “I hear the sound of someone managing information on what he considers a ‘need to know’ basis.” He sighed. “You should go away, now, because you’re making my head hurt.” He glanced at the bird feeder stuck to his window, where a small brown bird was taking out one nut at a time and dropping it to the ground. “Even more than he was,” Winters added, “until I realized what he’s doing. He’s feeding two of his buddies on the ground. Possibly his kids. They’re too big to tell.”
He made a shooing gesture at Charlie. Charlie got up. “… So get out of here,” he said.
In haste, Charlie got out.
School that day went by in something of a blur, mostly caused by Charlie having to refuse again and again to say anything about what had happened down at the public access place near the Square. The case was now officially sub judice and could not be discussed. By the end of the day he was thoroughly tired of not being able to say anything, and seriously relieved to see Nick.
“Are you okay?” Charlie said to him as they started to walk in the general direction of home.
“Uh, yeah.” Nick chuckled a little. “I didn’t realize whose son Mark was! James Winters called my dad.”. “He did? Oh, no!”
“No, it was okay,” Nick said, sounding completely unconcerned … but then he didn’t have to answer to James Winters. “My dad was really impressed.”
“Winters didn’t … say anything awful, did he?”
“Not at all. He was nice, actually. From what my mom said, he made me come out sounding like some kind of hero.” He gave Charlie an odd look. “They’re probably gonna hand you the same kind of stuff.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Charlie said. “It hasn’t been a problem so far.”
They headed for Nick’s apartment, if only because Charlie wasn’t willing to go straight home to his own and find some new and interesting aspect of last night�
�s argument waiting for him. When they got there, though, Charlie wondered whether this had been wise, for Nick’s mother was putting down the receiver of the vidphone with an odd look on her face.
Nick froze when he saw it. Charlie, not knowing what that kind of expression might mean on someone else’s mother, didn’t bother panicking. On his own, though, he would have been cautiously optimistic about what was to follow. “Hi, Mrs. Melchior …”
“Hi, Charlie honey, how are you?” She sounded very abstracted.
“Uh, hi, Mom,” Nick said.
“Nick,” his mother said, “what have you been doing?”
Charlie saw the oh-no-what-now look cross his friend’s face. “We came straight from school, Mrs. Melchior,” he said, hoping it wouldn’t make things worse. “Did we-”
“No, Charlie, it’s all right,” said Nick’s mother, looking dubious. “I guess. Honey, that was someone from the service provider.”
Nick instantly burst out in a sweat that Charlie could see from two feet away, and indeed could practically feel. “Mom, in three weeks I’ll have enough to give them about two hundred-”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” his mother said, “because they say that the last month’s bill has been paid in full.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “Oh, no. If Dad went and-”
“Your dad didn’t do anything, honey,” said Nick’s mother, sitting down at the small kitchen table and looking at him oddly. “It seems someone from Joey Bane Enterprises got hold of them and said that the company was paying your expenses for ‘your efforts on their behalf.’ Which they took to mean the last month’s comm charges, with a cash reserve to cover another year’s worth of use. And apparently they’re reimbursing you for your public access in the last couple of weeks.”
“Oh, wow,” Nick said, looking almost weak with relief, and collapsing into the chair opposite his mom at the table.
Charlie stood and watched all this with poorly concealed approval.
“Charlie,” said Nick’s mother to him, turning on him what would have been a fairly fierce expression except for the confusion still underlying it, “did you have something to do with this?”
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. Not directly, anyway. Or at least not the way you think… .
He was spared having to go through any longer a list of mental reservations by Nick’s mother sighing, raising her hands in the air, letting them fall again. “Honey,” she said, “it’s very nice of them to come in and get you off the hook like this-”
“Mom,” said Nick, “I’m going to keep the summer job … if it’s all the same to you.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day,” she said, and got up, heading down the hall toward the rear of the apartment. “Meanwhile, I suppose we’d better see about getting your server reconnected… .”
Nick and Charlie looked at each other as she went down to the den. “It’s a miracle,” Nick said softly.
“Somehow I doubt it.”
“I wonder how much of … you know, what we did … is going to come out.”
“I don’t think it’d be smart for us to discuss that here,” Charlie said softly. “Not under the circumstances. You gonna be online again tonight?”
“One way or another,” Nick said. “I meant it about the job… . I noticed that when I’m out of the apartment more, the tension level around here goes down somewhat. I would have thought it’d be the other way around. Could it be that they wanted me to get out more or something? Even if it’s just to use a public booth?”
Charlie shrugged. “Who knows,” he said, “what parents think?”
“I know what you mean.” Nick grinned a little. “I like to think of dealing with them as practice for when we finally meet up with alien life-forms.”
“You and me both, brother. Well, if you ever find out why it’s working better, tell me. Meanwhile, let’s do whatever needs doing here, and then get out before the situation deteriorates somehow… .”
Later that evening Nick and Charlie met in Deathworld again, near the Keep of the Dark Artificer. This time there was no agenda, nothing to worry about. This time they could walk and talk and simply relax, debriefing each other. “You know,” Nick said, once or twice catching a betraying expression on Charlie’s face, “if I didn’t know better … I’d think you were beginning to like some of this music.”
“Oh, I don’t know… .” Charlie said as they went in the gates of the Keep, and the demons there snapped to attention and saluted them. “Some of the rhythms are more interesting than I thought originally… .” He grinned. “But the lyrics …”
“Oh, give me a break. So they’re depressive.” “Morbid,” Charlie said, “that’s the word I would have used.”
They strolled through the great “front hall,” while Charlie looked around him, apparently fascinated by the architecture. Nick raised his eyebrows, mildly exasperated. “Just because some idiot critics call it morbo-jazz,” Nick said, “isn’t any reason to take them seriously. It’s hardly even jazz. If you think about it, you’ll see that the basic riff structure has been completely … uh …”
He trailed off, coming to a stop, slowly becoming aware that Charlie was staring at him. ” ‘Completely uh?’”
There was a dark form standing in their path, all in black leather, a shadow dressed in shadows. “Hey, Nick,” said Joey Bane, dry-voiced and ironic. “How goes it?”
Nick couldn’t find it in his heart to say “Badly, as always,” for this was the man himself, no simulacrum, no clone generated by the machine. The look in his eyes was too feral, too amused, and too real, for any program to fake.
Camiun was over his shoulder, and for once its strings were still. “I asked the system to let me know when you two gents came through next,” Joey Bane said. “I believe your last visit was, well, to put it politely, interrupted… .”
“Uh,” Nick said. “Yeah. I mean, no, it-”
“Look, relax,” Bane said. “Nobody’s going to ream you out. You did me and mine a favor. I thought I’d try to return it, a little. Come on.”
He gestured them toward the back of the entry hall. They walked with him. “Besides,” Joey said, “I would have come to take a look at you eventually, anyway. You just hurried me a little.”
Nick goggled. On the other side of Joey, Charlie was looking at Nick and plainly trying not to burst out laughing. Nick ignored him. “You wanted to look at me? Why me?”
Bane laughed. “Because you’re the one who’s always subverting my staff.”
Nick blushed. “I never-”
“You always! The DP people who do their dialogue-are always saying, ‘There’s this kid who talks to us all the time, and treats us like people-‘ “.
“Scorchtrap!”
“And the others. Bluebelch and Wringscalpel and Twistlestomp and the others. Where do they get these names, anyway? Whatever … they say the Demons want you to sit in on their next collective bargaining session. As if I don’t give them stock options, and as if we didn’t just have a split? What do they want now? Do they think I’m made of money?” Joey gave the two of them an ironic look. “But, kid, even the tables here say nice things about you. Somebody who’s as kind to inanimate objects and support staff as you are will go far in the world.”
Nick grinned. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
“So,” Joey said, “make yourselves at home. No connect charges for you two anymore. Though I think we’ll see more of you than of your friend here.” He nodded courteously enough to Charlie.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said suddenly, acquiring a wicked look. “I heard some material borrowed from Hovannes in that last lift Nick played for me. Maybe we have common ground after all.”
Bane grinned. “Maybe we do. Stop in sometimes and find out. Meanwhile, what’s your pleasure, gentlemen?” “We were going to do the Ninth Circle,” Nick said, looking over toward the doors on the left-hand side. “I would
n’t go that way.”
Nick looked at him in surprise. “Why not?”
“There’s a shortcut. Who wants to go through all that stuff again? The noise, the crowd-” He waved his hand, made an annoyed noise. “Nick, why go through all that again? You did it once. Once is enough. Suffering for a purpose-” He looked up, as it were, through the depth of Deathworld, somehow including in the glance all the screaming and horror of the upper levels, all the rage, and the acknowledgment of evil. “That’s one thing. Purification, punishment with an object, to deter or teach you never to do it again, that’s one thing. But prolonging it indefinitely, punishment for its own sake, for the mere love of cruelty-” He shook his head. “That’s not how we do it in Des Moines. Come on.”
He led them toward the back of the entry hall. The place was empty, for the moment, except for the three of them. “One word,” said Joey. “You got to the very threshold, last time, before you left. We have an agreement, which one of my clones would 1-lve administered to you before passing that last doorwL you saw off in the distance. We do not discuss with anyone but other people who’ve passed Nine, what lies beyond that portal. Anyone who does and is caught at it is banned for life.” He shrugged. “Every now and then someone breaks the promise and tells … but you know what? No one believes them. Suits me. And as for the rest of us … sometimes it’s fun to have a secret. Sometimes it’s fun to make a promise and keep it forever. Can you cope with that?”
They both nodded.
“Right,” Joey said.
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, piercingly.
Suddenly the air was full of music the likes of which Nick had never heard before-Camiun singing, for once, not in its usual dark fierce minor, but in a triumphant clarion major that was most uncharacteristic. Around them, like a mist, like a dream, the darkness and the stone and the night all began to melt away. Light came pouring in, and the view across a green landscape that scaled up and up through rolling hills. Farther up yet, to mountains stacked halfway up the sky, green at first, then blinding with snow, but snow that looked down on what seemed like an eternal spring.
