Nick needed somewhere with a little more room for what he had in mind, so he backtracked through the tunnels to where they widened out into a round cavern, something like fifty meters across, that Eighth-Circle Banies referred to as the Bubble. Only a few people were there at the moment, passing across the empty stone space on their way to somewhere else. When they were gone, Nick said, "Sound management system…"
"Ready."
"Access lift library."
"Got it."
"Play `Strings5.' "
Music and image faded in, and suddenly Joey Bane was there some meters away, alone and spotlighted in the darkness, sitting on the four-legged bar stool he used for these performances one of many. It, like every other inanimate object onstage but Camiun, always wound up getting broken at the end of "Cut the Strings." It was last summer's concert in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, and Joey was sweating. Even the Bowl's slightly cooler position in the mountains was no defense against the heat wave the L. A. basin had been suffering that week. Joey was looking out at the crowd with half a smile, letting them settle, and finally he touched Camiun's strings and sang:
"I ran into Astraea with her veil on, sneaking out the party's back door: I stopped her right there and I got her a chair, asking what she was leaving for:
`The party's just getting started, my lady; what's the rush to leave us today?'
And the goddess she looked at me and she said, `There's nowhere left for me to stay…' "
Quietly the rest of the band came in, in that deceptively soft and easygoing introduction, as the Goddess of Virtue explains that the day she's feared has come, the day when the human race is at last entirely wicked, when she must finally hide her face and leave the world to its fate forever, and Joey responded to the news"… Nothing left to live for, nothing left to give for, nothing left to care about:
Nothing left to cherish, all hopes left to perish, Nowhere to go but out!
No one left to bring to, no pure heart to sing to, What's the point of hanging on?
When the reason in the rhyme's all been eaten by crime, when the last joy's finally gone?"
and then the great chorus of rage and desperation, crashing down in chord after chord as Camiun and Joey Bane together, full-throated, shouted down the blasting band behind them:
"Then cut the strings-let's be done with it. If the last night's here, then let's be one with it.
If the songs all die, if the music's all gone, If the night's come crashing on the last free dawn, what possible point is there in carrying on? Cut-the-strings!"
Nick stood listening for enjoyment's sake, but his mind was on the lyrics, especially the very first verse, which he was now sure was not the usual one. Joey would sometimes play with the middle verses, inserting something cruelly topical that suited the venue or the world situation of the day, but Nick had never heard him vary the first verse. Now he glanced over his shoulder for a second, thinking of the "front hall" upstairs, before you ever got into the Maze, ever came close to the tunnels or the Stairways to Nowhere-and Nick started to wonder about a faint noise that he'd heard from behind one of those doors that led off the front hall…
The sound of the audience's upscaling howl of excitement brought Nick around again. Bane had stood up at the first chorus-no one could sing that sitting down, not and do it justice-but now, two choruses further along, he turned around, and as always, Camiun was gone. None of the concert virteos, no matter how you studied them, ever shed much light on how that happened. Maybe it was an illusionist's brand of magic, maybe it was something more obscure. But speculation always got lost in the wake of what always happened next, which was Joey Bane snatching yet another of Wil Kersten's unfortunate guitars out of his hands and smashing it to smithereens on the floor, or on some other piece of equipment that happened to be at hand. Off he went on his expected rampage, the crowd screaming noisy approval in the background, and the concert dissolved in a shriek of tortured amplification equipment and other shattered impedimenta.
Nick let it play itself out, and when the clip finally faded into darkness, he stood there a moment later in the Bubble, with the torches flickering around him from their iron grips in the wall, and considered what to do next.
Upstairs. I want to check that door. I don't want to stay too long… gotta save a little time on this commcard for later in the week.
But first let's see if I can find Charlie…!
Charlie made his way home to find the house empty again-his mom wasn't back from the hospital yet-and, waiting for him in his workspace, bobbing gently up and down in the air, was the virtmail message he'd been hoping for. He made his way down the stairs of the lecture hall to it, and looked the little glowing sphere's exterior shell over to see if it was "canned" or "live"-some mails, when touched, would link live to the person who had sent them if he or she was available online.
No use taking chances, Charlie thought, even though he couldn't see anything to suggest a live linkage. "Workspace management," he said.
"Here, Charlie."
"Implement stealth routine one."
The interior of the Royal Society's lecture room went away, to be replaced by a plain white plain with blue "sky," a mimicry of a public-access space. Charlie looked at his hands and arms and saw that his workspace had settled a copy of his "Manta" seeming about him. He could see it, thinly, over his skin, transparent.
Satisfied, he reached out and touched the mail. A moment later Shade was standing in front of him, surrounded by a little halo of darkness. The message had been sent from somewhere in Deathworld.
"Manta," she said, "I got in touch with Kalki. He'll be in the World tonight around ten eastern. He really wants to see you and talk to you. Let me know if you can make it."
The image paused, waiting for Charlie to activate the reply function. For a moment he stood there looking at her earnest face, and chewed his lip.
Mark did say to give it a rest for a day or two… Yet at the same time, the thought kept coming up in the back of his head: It's May. Early in May… And every day lost meant the chance that someone else might die. If one of these people are involved with the "suicides," and I lose the chance to get close to them while Mark's playing with his programming…
Still. He was pretty definite.
Charlie sighed. "Start reply."
"Ready."
"Shade, thanks, but listen, I-" He stopped himself in the middle of saying "I can't make it." Do you dare not take the chance? The risk was just too great. In his mind's eye Charlie could just see the blurred look on some innocent kid's face as the drug took them, left them defenseless-"I might be a little late," he said, "but I'll be there. Thanks for letting me know. End."
The workspace collapsed the message down into a smaller sphere. "Ready to send?" it said.
"Send."
It vanished. Charlie looked at the empty air where it had been. Then, "Restore normal environment," he said.
The lecture hall came back. Charlie glanced around it, and at the six sets of images which had been restored to their original locations, and then headed off for Mark's workspace to collect the Magic Jacket.
Some hours later he was standing by the front doors of the Dark Artificer's Keep, waiting. There was a fairly steady stream of Banies coming in and going out, and demons stood by the doors on either side, at attention, looking like doormen at some expensive apartment building. Manta stood there off to one side in his floppy shirt and old worn black slicktites, twitching slightly, looking nervously around him. None of the Banies paid him the slightest attention.