"I will!"
Mark vanished. Charlie was left standing in his workspace with a pile of files.
"Son," he heard his father say from outside in the real world. "You've been in there for an elephant's age. Want a sandwich?"
"Absolutely," Charlie muttered. He checked to make sure that the files were saved, and then closed down his workspace and returned to the real world, where his stomach was growling fiercely… but not so much so that it drowned out the nervous muttering in his head.
Scorbutal hydrobromate.
Were these really suicides…?
Late the next afternoon Nick stood out in the softly falling ash, and held very still, listening for something beside the screams of the Damned. He didn't immediately hear the sound he was waiting for, but he was willing to wait for a good while. If there was anything he had been learning in the last couple of days, it was patience.
He was in no hurry to get back to the spot he had finally reached during the session before last, the first "subbasement" of the Dark Artificer's Keep… even though his money was getting close to running out, even though his folks were getting increasingly interested in "sitting down and having a talk" with him. Nick had the secrets of the Eighth Circle seriously on his mind, for he was beginning to suspect that there was more to play for, a lot more, than just lifts of new songs and the possibility that you might meet one of the clone-Banes down here.
Nick had decided to follow a hunch. He had gone back to do what Shade told him she'd been doing: to talk to others he found wandering around the ashy wilderness on the far side of the Lake of Tears, and guide them through. At first he wondered whether this had been such a great idea, for the environment responded badly to it. It was as if the crevasses started to target Nick, going out of their way to stitch themselves straight at him as he made his way through the knee-deep ash. He had had a couple of extremely close calls over the first few hours, as the ground stubbornly, even maliciously, opened again and again under his feet. Once, if this had been reality, he would have left the skin of the palms of both hands on the jagged outcropping of rock that was all that kept him from plunging into the lava-filled abyss below. But Nick kept doing what he had decided to do. It was sheer stubbornness, at first. If the environment was going to target him, he was going to outlast it.
After five or six hours of this, things got a little better. The environment started getting less dangerous… or maybe Nick just got better at anticipating it. But he also stopped noticing quite so acutely what it was doing, for he started getting interested in the conversations he was having with the people he was guiding through. Their responses to the situation in which they suddenly found themselves varied from complete confusion to annoyance that they were no longer in control of their path through the darkness. But one way or another, they were all glad of the help, though some of them plainly would have choked rather than admit it. Some of them were wearing virtual "seemings" that were meant to make them look very impressive and self-sufficient indeed-tall shapes cowled in darkness, like the image of Joey Bane in the "front door" to the Orpheus, Don't Look Back! virteo collection, or barbarian heroes, or statuesque women wearing space-babe slicktights and toting projectile weapons the size of their upper bodies, or giant snarling beasts slinking along through the fiery night and trying to look independently deadly. Some of them protested at being saved from falling into a hole in the ground by a skinny high school kid in neodenims and a beat-up Mets batting helmet. Most of them "forgot" to thank him. But none of them, Nick noticed, told him to go away while he was actually helping them out.
At the end of his last session Nick had gone home exhausted and collapsed into bed too weary to even be annoyed with his mother, who had been waiting up for him. He had taken care of his homework before he'd left, so he wasn't sure why she was waiting, and she gave him an odd look as he passed through the front room on his way to bed.
"Honey," she said, in an unusually neutral tone of voice for her, "your friend Charlie called earlier."
"Yeah?"
"He was asking about something called a 'walk-through.' Would you know what he wanted?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, I'll take care of it tomorrow." That caught Nick a little by surprise. Charlie wasn't much of a gamer, preferring to do "solid construction" sims, the more concrete kind of virtual experience. All the same, if he's getting interested…
Nick looked for Charlie the next day at school, but didn't see him. Either he'd had to swap his lunch periods to take care of some study commitment, or something else had happened to throw their schedules out of synch. Nick went through the day more or less on automatic, as he had done for the last couple of days, since things started to get really interesting back in Deathworld. That afternoon he headed back into the WorldBooths public Net-access center down at the Square in an unusually good mood, despite the fact that his money was getting so short. At the end of the week he would have some more allowance coming, and be able to really get back into the swing of Deathworld over the weekend. Nick had spent the day getting ahead of schedule on his homework, which his folks had been checking with unusual care. They'd have no excuse to bother him for two whole days.
And after that, when the money does run out… For two full days of gameplay would exhaust what he had.
Nick sighed, paid at the cashier's booth in front, took his recharged cash card, and headed back to his usual booth right at the rear, locking himself in and settling into the implant chair and slapping the card into it. Have to deal with that when it happens, Nick thought, and blinked his workspace into being around him.
It was still bare. He hadn't felt like spending the time to get his redecorating done. But off to one side, standing there, was a simulacrum of Charlie, in end-of-the-day shinesweats, arms folded, smiling that wry smile he wore sometimes, an expression that suggested he was feeling foolish about something.
"Go," Nick said to the simulacrum.
"Sorry I missed you," it said immediately, in Charlie's voice. "I was up late last night doing some research.- Look, all work and no play, you know the drill… I was wondering if you had any walk-throughs of Deathworld. I wanted to have a look through, but I don't want to spend six weeks dragging around in the upper levels. You have something that can get me about halfway down? Give me a yell, or leave me a message."
The image froze again. Nick was caught between two impulses-to catch Charlie "live" right now, if possible, and take him down into Deathworld himself, or to leave him a message. The second impulse won.
"System," Nick said, "record reply…"
"Ready," the system said in its plain-vanilla voice. Nick raised his eyebrows. He really should get some Bane audio in here, if nothing else.
"Charlie. sorry I missed you, too," he said, getting up out of the "chair" on the virtual side and going over to the doorway where his files were stored at the moment. He opened it and looked in. "File access. Deathworld," he said, "press material, walk-through… Yeah, that one. Transfer to Charlie Davis's machine."
He turned back to the simulacrum of Charlie. "Here," he said. "This one came out of the 'Last Train Out' review environment about a month and a half ago… the data for the first three levels is still good, as far as I know. The company's been swapping in new material from about Four down, to defeat the older walk-throughs there out there, but this should still be a help. Let me know if you have any problems. I'll talk to you later… "
The simulacrum, having been answered, vanished. Nick breathed out, then closed the door and opened the second one, his automated login gateway to Deathworld.
He had implemented a "shortcut" entry that let him in to pick up where he had left off. The Deathworld system still showed him the copyright statement burning crimson in the air for a few seconds-there was no getting away from that, no matter how many times a day you might come in here and then Nick walked through into the darkness awaiting him on the other side.