"Waiting long?"
He didn't have to fake being startled. Manta turned hurriedly and saw a tall shape looming over him, somewhat indistinct in the darkness.
"You Manta?" he said.
"Uh, yeah. I don't-"
"I'm Kalki," the guy said. "Come on. Who can see anything here? Let's get a little closer to the doors." He took Manta's shoulder in a friendly way and guided him over that way.
Manta shivered a little. Allowing people he didn't know well to touch him had always come hard to him. It was something left over from his distant childhood he didn't readily discuss. As they got closer to the doors, and the light of the great chandelier spilling out of them, he got a better sense of what Kalki looked like. He was slender, about eighteen, and not wearing a seeming-or at least not an unusual one. He wore street clothes, just neos, a slipshirt, and a "bomber" jacket. His face was unusually handsome, with high cheekbones and eyes that drooped down at the corners a little, a look that would have been humorous if it wasn't so sad. A seeming after all? Manta thought. Or am I just unusually paranoid?
"Shade couldn't make it," Kalki said. "Some family thing came up, she said. She told me about you… " "Not too much, I hope," Manta said.
Kalki looked at him thoughtfully. "Come on," he said, "we can go in here and talk."
They went in through the Front Hall, and Manta looked up at the great black and gray chandelier, casting its cold light. "It gives me the creeps," he said softly.
Kalki chuckled. "You want creepy, you should try Nine," he said. "That'll raise the hair on your head, all right."
"You've been down to Nine?"
They headed off to the side of the huge space, where there were some benches faired into the stone of the massive walls. "I've been through the gates," Kalki said, sounding bored. "It looked so much like the beginning of Eight, to me, that I decided not to bother. They've gone to so much trouble, hiding the lifts down there, I wonder whether they're worth it… after all, the stuff I've found on Eight so far hasn't been so great. Sometimes I think it's just a ploy by the management to get everyone real excited about substandard stuff."
"The more I see of down here," Manta muttered, "the less excited I am about it."
"Yeah?" They sat down on one of the carved benches, watching people come and go through the great doors. "Shade told me," Kalki said, "that you were pretty sad about things. I see she wasn't exaggerating… "
"Yeah." Manta looked out into the darkness, and then after a moment said, "She said you'd felt this way… "
Kalki nodded. "A while ago now," he said. "It can be pretty tough when you're right down in the middle of it."
"I left some messages in the 'board' area," Manta said softly. "Just to try to get someone to talk to me. No one answered."
"Hey," Kalki said, "life does stink, doesn't it? The trouble is that people bring the outside reality in here with them. Here, you can change things… but out there, no one does anything about the nature of reality, the way people interact with each other. Or don't. No one listens to anything Joey's saying. And why should they? To do that, they'd have to admit the world stinks, in the first place."
"I don't have any trouble admitting that," Manta said. "It's been a waste of my time since I first started noticing things. Now…" He shook his head. "It's like every breath hurts. I'm tired of breathing:"
Kalki let out a long breath. "You have folks?" he said.
This was the painful part, the lying. "My mom," he said. "But she's a druggie. The guy she's seeing…" He shook his head. "We don't see eye to eye. And they're a long-term thing. I'm gonna be 'phased out.' I can see it coming. She's gonna farm me out to some cousin of hers." Manta bowed his head, unable, unwilling to look up to see how Kalki was taking this.
"Sounds rough," Kalki said. "Look, Manta… you've got to believe it. It can get better. Without warning, sometimes."
Manta's laughwas bitter. "Is that the best you can come up with? That just maybe things might get better? The only way that's going to happen to me is if all this stops, if the hurting, and the yelling, and the pushing around, if it all just stops. I've had it. I don't mind being worthless, being in everybody's way, no use for anything, I can deal with that if I'm just left alone. But when they make you that way, and then they yell at you for it, when they take everything away from you and then scream at you for not acting normal, for letting them down-" The words choked off. "I couldn't even give stuff away, gave some of my stuff to the kids at school, the few things I had. They even yelled at me for that." He laughed, that harsh sound again. "It doesn't matter. Those things are safe now."
"You gave stuff away?"
Manta was silent for a moment. "When I realized my mom was going to send me off to Philly or wherever it is her cousin lives," he said, "and I wasn't going to be able to see my friends anymore…" He trailed off. "I knew she was gonna just throw all my stuff away… "
He listened hard to Kalki's silence. His mom had been pretty clear that suicidal people sometimes gave personal possessions away to friends in anticipation of the act itself.
Kalki shifted, and as Manta glanced back at him, he thought Kalki looked uncomfortable. "Look, Manta," Kalki said at last, "this isn't the best place to be having this conversation. You're talking about the most real thing there is… your own existence. But places like this are instead of reality. They can be really attractive, or interesting, but they're not real contact, with real people." He shook his head, glancing around them. "So much of the uncertainty in the world, the pain… I think it comes of there not being enough genuine contact."
He looked down at Manta. "We should get together and have this out," Kalki said. "Not here. Contact between human beings shouldn't have to be mediated by electrons." His voice was suddenly pained. "Or snatched in the few minutes between online experiences and virtual appointments… "
"For what?" Manta said. "This is real enough. You don't have anything to say that's going to convince me. If you did, you'd have said it already." He got up. "Thanks, but-the talking time's over. I know what I need to do."
He took off across the huge "front hall."
"Manta, wait!" Kalki yelled after him, and came after, but Manta broke his connection to Deathworld, and vanished into the darkness.
A moment later Charlie was standing in his workspace again, slightly out of breath, not from any exertion, but from nerves. He glanced over at the readout connected to Mark's "trip wire" routine: glowing letters and numbers hung in the air, zeroed out, showing no attempts to access his space in any way.
Okay, Charlie thought, the trap's baited. Now let's see what happens…
The next morning he came down from the den, yawning, feeling somehow faintly disappointed. Despite the fact that people seemed to have been reading "Manta's" messages on the Deathworld message facility, there were no answers to any of them. And no follow-through from Shade or Kalki. I wonder if I overreacted a little, he thought. Scared Kalki off…
This time his mother was in the kitchen, pouring coffee from a freshly filled pot, and the sound of the front door shutting told him that he had just missed his father. "You're up early," she said, turning as Charlie yawned again.
"Yeah," he said.
"Want some?" his mom said.
"Uh, you don't think it'll stunt my growth?"
She gave him a look. "Nah. That's just a matter of time. I doubt much of anything could do that at this point."
From the cupboard she got down the mug with the double duck on it and the motto EIDER WAY UP, filled it and handed it to him.
"Thanks…" he said, and flopped into one of the kitchen chairs.
They both drank coffee in silence for a moment. Then, "A lot of late nights, the last week or so," his mom said. "Yeah."