Deathworld

Chapter 2

Charlie Davis was sitting in his virtual workspace, wondering how to get the steam engine to work. He could have cheated and called up the software company's help line, which would have sent him a helpful "ghost" of James Watt, but the prospect of doing so struck him as an admission of failure. So instead he sat on the floor of the workspace, staring at the pressure gauges all over the engine's shining brass outsides, and wondered what the heck to do next.

Charlie knew people whose workspaces were marvels of the "special effects" end of virtuality. One of his buddies in the Net Force Explorers kept her workspace on one of the moons of Saturn. Another one had built himself a perfect replica of Windsor Castle, which he had filled with expressions of his own hobby, model trains. Charlie had found that a little bizarre, especially the miniature train shed which Mikey had installed in St. George's Chapel. "You should talk," Mikey had retorted. "Your workspace used to be used for medical research the hard way-vivisection… "

That hadn't been precisely true, but it wasn't the kind of discussion that Charlie much felt like having with someone pointlessly argumentative as Mikey, and he'd let it pass. Charlie had built his workspace into a duplicate of the eighteenth-century operating theater of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It was a splendid if not very sterile space in which concentric circles of mahogany "bleachers" surrounded an oval area in which was set a scrubbed wood table on which some of the most important experiments in the medicine of that time had been done. The circulation of blood had been explored there, and the structure of human bone, and Pasteur had dropped by to lecture on germ theory. If the professors working there had occasionally gone a little loopy and tried things like transplanting the head of one dog onto the body of another, well, that was then, not now, and everybody was entitled to have a bad day, experimentally speaking. Meanwhile, Charlie loved the place, the warm wooden gleam and polished-brass shine of it. It was the birthplace of modern medicine, and Charlie was going to be a doctor one of these days… though he intended to become an operative for Net Force as well. The only question was which of these goals he was going to manage first.

Then Charlie sighed heavily. "Actually," he muttered, "the only question is how I'm going to get this stupid thing in front of me to work."

It was, of course, not a real steam engine, just a mathematical simulation of one. If it _ was built properly, it would look and run like a real steam engine in the virtual world. Now, any workspace software worth its purchase price, if you told it to create such a thing out of nothing, would do just that and not bother you with the sordid details. But Charlie was learning how to write simulations in the programming language Caldera II, the language which virtual environments used to create things out of nothing so that they would behave real. And Caldera was desperately complex, difficult to control, easy to screw up, and otherwise just a major pain.

Charlie was not particularly interested in steam engines. What he really wanted to use Caldera for was to model the activity of neurons in the living human brain. But to create such models in any programming language, even Caldera, was an immensely subtle and difficult business-if you were interested in building models that actually worked like their counterparts in the real world, anyway, and suggested reasons for the way they behaved as they did. The steam engine was one of the "sample" simulations which came with the most current Caldera software package, and a good place (the software company said) to start practicing before going on to the more involved simulations. The program which the tutorial coached you in writing was one that described in maddening detail the way the virtual environment running it was supposed to act, so that you would put out your hand and feel hard cold brass or polished wood instead of air or fog that just looked like brass or wood, and so that the article you created in virtuality would act like a real thing, obeying real rules of science, and reacting appropriately to whatever you did to it.

That was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Charlie had so far managed only a steam engine that looked like brass but felt like rubber, and which produced something that looked like steam, but was just cold vapor. He got up from the floor, walked around the engine, looked at it one more time.

"Okay," he said to the air. "Main program, routine five…"

A "window" opened in the air near him, showing the first of the lines and lines of code he had written so far, coached by the tutorial. Somewhere in here there was a statement that was wrong that the debugging routine hadn't found, and that the program thought was a genuine and valid instruction. And it would be, Charlie thought, annoyed, if people built rubber steam engines.

"Scroll down three," Charlie said. "Scroll down one. Scroll down one." He stared for several moments at that particular screenful of text, chewing his lip. After a moment he said, "Line sixty. Change statement. Old statement: `vis 15 hardness 80 spong 12'. New statement: `vis 15 hardness 120 spong 12.' "

"What the heck is a spong?" someone said out of the air behind him.

Charlie looked over his shoulder. Nick Melchior was there, one of his best friends from school, if not the best. There was something about Nick's sense of humor that meshed well with Charlie's, and besides, Nick seemed never to have seen anything even slightly funny about the idea that a kid from as painful and hopeless a background as Charlie's should be unswervingly set on becoming a doctor. Charlie, for his own part, was always amazed that anyone from as unsettled and insecure a background as Nick's should have been able to do as well at school and be as generally good-natured and good-tempered as he was, when at any moment his dad or the whole family might be uprooted and sent off to some distant foreign place to do virtcam work for one of the major news services.

Nick leaned against the mahogany railing around the "operating floor" and stared at the engine.

"I could try to explain what a spong is," Charlie said, "but I'd just confuse myself. I'm not sure / know all of what it is yet. It has to do with the way this thing reflects light… or at least, that's all I can make of it so far… "

Nick pushed away from the railing and walked around the sim, eyeing it. He was fair-haired, green-eyed, biggish across the shoulders, though not one of the taller kids in Charlie's year-unusual when half the juniors in the class seemed to be shooting up like trees, having hit some weird kind of sympathetic growth spurt. Nick seemed stuck at about five four, and for Charlie, who was stuck at five two and was beginning to wonder morbidly whether he had some obscure glandular disorder, it was pleasant to have the company of someone who didn't look down at him as if from a great height and inquire sardonically as to why he didn't go out for basketball. "It looksgood," Nick said.

"Yeah, well, if you put some chest rub in it, it'd make somebody a great cold vaporizer," Charlie muttered. "Go ahead, give it a kick."

"Huh?"

"Go on, kick it. Hard as you can."

The steam engine had four handsome brass-trimmed wheels with iron tires. Nick walked over to one of them, looked it over, and kicked it, hard. Then he started jumping around. "Ow! Sonofa-Wha'd you tell me to do that for?"

Charlie stared, dumbfounded. "Buddha on a bike," he said, "did I fix it?" He went over to the next wheel and kicked it too, quite hard, disbelieving-then joined Nick briefly in the dance. "Oh, crud!"

"Thanks loads, Charlie, like I don't have enough problems today, now I'm lamed for life, too!" Nick was now holding the injured foot and staring at it as if he could see through his boot to tell if something was broken.

"Ow, look, I'm sorry. I fixed it! I guess I must have fixed it, anyway. The train was soft, before, like rubber." Charlie leaned against the railing near Nick, rubbing his own foot and then bearing weight on it gingerly. "Sorry!" He stared at the engine. "What the frack did I fix? I wasn't working on the hardness… "

"You're asking the wrong expert, expert. What you can do, 0 mighty medical talent, is tell me whether my foot's going to be this sore when I come out of virt."

"Dummy," Charlie said. "No. It won't hurt long here, either; you know pain can't be turned up even as high as in real life in here. Just as well. What's your problem, anyway?"

"My foot, clueless one, is-"

"Your other problem. Whatever you were yapping about when you came in."

"Oh. Just my dad."

"Are they sending him somewhere weird again?" Char lie boosted himself up to sit on the railing, morosely studying the steam engine.

"No. No, it's just Net stuff."

Charlie blinked. "What?"

"You remember Joey Bane's domain?"

"Oh, yeah. Death-o-rama or whatever."

"Deathworld."

"Yeah." Charlie had been through one of its upper levels briefly with Nick a couple of months back, but hadn't gone back. It was one of the more expensive domains to spend time in, and besides, he wasn't a big shadow jazz fan. His musical tastes ran more to hopflight, because of the rhythms, and terzia rizz, which was experiencing something of a comeback after four centuries of neglect. "So what's the problem?" Charlie said. "Bills getting too high?"

"Yeah, but that's not most of it. Mostly my mom and dad think it's corrupting me or something." Nick's good-natured face was twisted somewhat out of its usual placid shape, and as he hoisted himself up beside Charlie, the look lingered.

"You?" Charlie blew out an amused breath. "Nothing there to corrupt."

"Thanks loads, Dr. Genius. No, they're just freaked out by the news stories."

"I missed the news today," Charlie said. "It's Saturday.

This is the day I take off from the world, theoretically." "To spend time on really important things."

"James Watt thought so," Charlie said, he hoped not too sharply. "I like retrotech. So splash me. Meanwhile, what happened?"

"Somebody killed himself."

"Someone who'd been doing a lot of Deathworld?"

"Something like that." Nick rolled his eyes expressively, then paused, briefly distracted by the fresco on the ceiling, of the god Apollo receiving Aesculapius into heaven, while a lot of other gods in togas leaned in to observe, and possibly to pass private remarks on the newcorner's snappy cane with the snakes wrapped around it. "Who are all those people?"

"I'll tell you some other time, if I can ever get you to stop interrupting yourself!"

Nick rolled his eyes again. "Some guy in Iowa," he said. "A seventh-circler, apparently. He hanged himself. At least that's what the police were saying."

"Did they say anything else about whether he'd been depressed, or something like that?" Charlie said.

Nick shook his head. "Not that I heard. From the story I heard, it sounded like they were in a hurry to get him buried." He grimaced. "And as soon as my folks heard about it, they went completely voidside. They don't want me going in there, blah, blah, blah… "

Charlie leaned back a little and looked over at his friend with some concern. He had heard about the other suicides, but he hadn't really thought of them as anything significant. Oh, obviously they were tragic for the people involved, and the people left behind, but a certain number of people suicided every year due to misuse or overuse of virtual services of one kind or another, and mostly the psychiatrists figured that these were people who would have found some other reason to do away with themselves if the Net had not existed. Still… it was a little creepy. "This is how many suicides of people associated with Deathworld, now?"

"Six, I think they said."

Charlie looked at the steam engine thoughtfully. "Seems like kind of a lot."

Nick plopped himself down on one of the front-row benches and shrugged a don't-care kind of shrug. "Aw, c'mon, Charlie, don't you side with them, too! You know the world is full of idiots looking for a chance to pop themselves off, and any excuse would do. It can't be Deathworld's fault that they found their way down there at one point or another. If it were, the government would have found out about it and shut them down."

"Well…" Charlie got up with a sigh, walked around the back of the steam engine and had a look at the coal box, which had somehow started to look a little transparent. He touched it. At least it was solid, which it hadn't been until just now. "Net Force is supposed to inspect and certify anything that looks like it might be dangerous to users," he said.

"So since they haven't shut it down, it must be okay," Nick said. He sighed. "Not that my dad is going to care one way or another… "

Charlie kicked the coal box experimentally. It buckled under the kick, and he looked at the half-circle dent and moaned softly. "I am never gonna get the hang of this," he said, and went to sit down by Nick and stare at the steam engine. "Main program, routine six…"

Another window opened up, showing the beginning of the code that "built" the coal box. "Scroll down twenty," he said. "Repeat. Repeat. Scroll down one. Line ninety-three. Change statement. Old statement: `vis 15 hardness 120 spong 12'. New statement: `vis 15 hardness 90 spong 12., "

The code readjusted itself. "I don't get it," Nick said. "You're going to go to medical school, do the doctor thing like your dad, you said." -

"Yup." And then go into Net Force, Charlie added silently, but this was not something he discussed with anyone, not even with Nick. There was so much competition to get into that elite force, so many people who were also trying to get in… and it was not in Charlie's nature to want to have to say to anyone later, "I wanted to get in, but I couldn't make it." When he made it, when he started working for them in criminology or forensics after he got his MD and his specialty… that would be the time to discuss it, because he would have the ID in his wallet for anyone to see, his ticket to the cutting edge, to the most exciting work on Earth. Until that day came, though, Charlie had resolved to keep his intentions to himself. If his life had taught him anything up until now, it was caution.

"So what do you need this stuff for?"

"Modeling nervous systems," Charlie said. "And other things. Solid in-bone surgical prostheses, temporary re- placement organs, stuff like that."

Nick gave him a wry look. "It looks like this system's making you nervous, all right," he said, "but that's about all. You should lose this stuff and get out and get yourself some fresh air."

Charlie sighed and leaned back on the bench, for the moment unwilling to go over and kick the coal box again, for fear of what he'd find. "Been listening to your folks too much, Nick? I bet they say the same thing."

"Yeah, well…" Nick gave him an amused look. "I can't help it. I can't get excited about baseball the way my dad can."

"Neither can I." The two of them laughed with approximately equal levels of irony. Once a week or so, all through the spring and summer, Charlie found himself wondering how his dad, a doctor of incredible intelligence and (usually) of good sense and taste, could go out, regular as clockwork, every Saturday when the weather was right and he wasn't on call, to play sandlot softball with the GWU med-surg team. Then, for the rest of the week, he would spend at least half an hour every morning mulling over the box scores of the most recent Braves games. He would periodically try to get Charlie interested in this as well, even try getting him interested in virtual Little League baseball… though Charlie's dad would then routinely talk himself out of this idea halfway through each new effort, muttering that the virtual form of the sport was a "poor second best." Charlie just nodded and put up with it, this being easier than arguing the point anew every week, or trying to explain one more time to his father that right now he was a whole lot more interested in modeling than in any sport yet invented.

"Seriously, though," Charlie said. "You consider taking a couple of weeks off from Deathworld, just to get your folks off your case? If they're really worried… it might be the kindest thing. Besides, once they were sure you weren't hooked on it or anything, or about to hang yourself from the shower-curtain rail as soon as they turn their backs, they might ease off a little."

Nick shook his head vigorously. "I've tried that before with other things," he said. "My mom doesn't even notice. My dad…" He sighed. "You let him win one, when it's something that matters, and he starts bearing down harder on everything else. Pretty soon I wouldn't have a life left, or at least no life that didn't look like what he thought it should look like. Besides, I'm finally getting somewhere down there. If I drop the momentum now, the system'll notice and stop fast-tracking me. I've been racking up enough points that I'm gonna get somewhere significant over the next month or so… finally get into the Dark Artificer's Keep and get a listen to the really good music." He shook his head. "My dad's just gonna have to lump it for the time being."

Charlie got up and went over to the coal box again, nudging it cautiously with one toe. The dent he had made in it abruptly sprang out… and the coal box went almost completely transparent, except for the coal, which "hung" there in midair as if sitting in some kind of wheeled plastic basket, like the ones in the "grocery stores" of old. "Frack," Charlie said, with feeling. "Frack, frack-""You oughta take a break from this," Nick said. "You're getting stressed out. Since when do you use language like that?"

Charlie looked with mild annoyance at Nick. But he had to admit that his friend had a point. "Program, quick save," Charlie said. "Then close program."

"Saved. Closing," said the computer, folding up the various open windows. The steam engine vanished, leaving them alone in the big wood-paneled hall, with squares of sunlight from the high windows now tracking themselves along the floor.

"Must be noontime. Probably I should get something to eat anyway," Charlie said. "Look, you wanna come over in the flesh later? We can make some burgers or something… nobody at home has anything planned for today." It was one of those moderately rare times when both his mother and his father had Saturday off.

"Thanks, but I'm busy this afternoon," Nick said. "They're offering a discount for Saturday Deathworld access between noon and six… apparently that's a slow time at the moment, with the summer coming on. Look, why don't you come with me? I can 'sub' you in on my account, and you can watch me get into the Keep." Nick grinned with excitement.

Charlie thought about it… then shook his head. "No, you go ahead… it's not my cuppa. But when you get out, drop by and let me know how it went. They let you make 'tapes'?"

"Nope… the content is all copyright. They control that pretty tightly. You try to copy an experience and show it outside of their protected routines, and there'll be lawyers on your doorstep five minutes later. But I can save the experience inside the 'realm,' and you can see it some other time."

"That sounds good. You do that, okay?"

"Okay." Nick headed for the stairs that led up to the door, then paused. "You sure? This is gonna be one for the ages."

"Nope. you go ahead. But thanks."

"Your loss," Nick said. "See you, Doc."

"Later, Mr. Nick," Charlie said.

His friend vanished. Charlie sat there a moment more, staring at where the steam engine had been, and then said to the computer, "Secure the space, please."

"Workspace secured," said the program that managed it, "all files confirmed saved; backup to SafeHouse remote facility accomplished."

Charlie closed his eyes and performed the specific slight muscle-twitch that deactivated his implant.

The world went dark. He opened his eyes, glanced around.

Sunshine was coming through the venetian blinds of the back window of the den. Charlie got up, stretched-no matter what claims the implant-chair people made, the built-in massage and muscle-toning programs never left you completely unstiff after a prolonged session on the Net. I really should try to do something about that sometime, he thought, shaking his arms to get the blood moving again as he climbed out of the chair. Tweak the programming a little…

Then again, Charlie thought, if I have as much luck with that programming as I'm having with Caldera at the moment, maybe I'd better leave well enough alone. I'd probably come out of a session with my arms and legs tied in knots.

He walked over to the window and looked down. The back windows faced south. About twenty feet below him was their little pocket garden, a square of grass with a smaller square of paving slabs inside it, and various potted plants sitting around in it, mostly herbs for his mother's cooking. Behind the yard was another house's yard, and its windows, and to left and right the view was much the same.

Charlie yawned and went out of the den, heading down the stairs to the first floor and the kitchen level. The house was a two-century-old "brownstone" on 16 and W, a place which Charlie's father routinely referred to as "the Money Pit." The family had moved into it when it was only partly renovated. For their first year there, when Charlie had been eleven and then twelve, the place had been in a constant state of uproar involving inescapable plaster dust, thick paint-daubed plastic sheeting, piles of demolished brick being saved for recycling, and endless crews of workmen barging in and out at unpredictable intervals. Finally, sick of the delays and the expense, Charlie's father had thrown the workmen out (having first allowed them to finish the second floor and the basement) and had announced his intention to finish the third floor and the attic himself, in his spare time.

Charlie still snickered every time he heard the phrase, since his father, like any other doctor, had a tendency to come home from the hospital and spend what little spare time he had snoring. When his dad did get it together to work on "the upstairs," Charlie and his mom inevitably got dragooned into the act as well. Charlie could now mix plaster with the best of them, and his dad had announced that he was ready to be taught how to lay a hardwood floor. This had not happened yet-the new semester had begun, and in a teaching hospital like the one at George Washington University, that meant a lot less spare time for the doctors of middle seniority, like Charlie's dad. But Charlie didn't waste much time worrying about it. The house was comfortable enough as it was at present: three bedrooms and an office where one of the implant chairs lived, a kitchen and two bathrooms, and a den that housed the other implant chair, the main Net server, and a busy, messy library. The new master bedroom and private living area which his father was planning for the upstairs would happen someday, but for the moment, Charlie tended to treat it like anything else safely distant in the realm of myth.

Now Charlie headed down the stairs and made for the kitchen, which was in the back of the building, with doors opening out onto the little garden. He got himself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker, which was always full night and day, and stood there for a moment, getting used to reality again, gazing out into the sunlight on the paving and the grass.

There were still times when Charlie woke up, very early in the morning, and felt bizarrely dislocated, as if his mind was comparing the shining new surroundings, the polished floor and pastel or stripped-brick walls, with some other reality, older, grittier, more basic. Floors that were notpolished wood, but cracked linoleum, worn and dirty, scattered with garbage; walls that were not newly plastered andpainted and hung with prints, but grimy, peel- ing, splotched with damp, holed where someone had punched them. The memory of someone shouting incomprehensible words of rage, someone else weeping: the memory of a face that should have been beautiful but was instead swollen and vague, blue with bruising. The smell of unwashed bodies, the smell of something burning; the too-clear image of a match under a spoon, a spray injector, a syringe-

"Hey, son, what's new in the world today?"

Charlie turned, swallowed, and the proper world came back, and with it his dad, lumbering into the kitchen, a big broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man in a polo shirt and jeans, high-cheekboned, with thoughtful eyes and a mouth that spent most of its time grinning. Now those dark eyes were unusually thoughtful as they took in the look on Charlie's face.

"Nothing much," Charlie said.

"How's that steam engine?"

"Malfunctioning," Charlie said, moving aside to let his dad at the coffee. His father tossed the morning paper onto the big table in the middle of the kitchen and went rooting in the cupboard for the gigantic coffee cup that read YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS.

"Never trust retrotech," his father murmured, emptying what seemed to be about half the contents of the coffee-maker into that cup, and then going over to the fridge and opening the door. He reached in, then started rooting around. "Kenmore, where the heck's the milk?"

"No milk today," said the fridge.

"Well, I can see that, you dumb contraption, why didn't you order any?"

"Error 3033 Server Busy," said the refrigerator, somehow managing to sound a little sullen.

"Well, you just keep trying, Kenny, or we'll trade you in for a better model before you can say 'two percent low-fat'. See that?" his father said, shutting the refrigerator with a wounded — air and heading back to the cupboard for dry coffee creamer. "I told you, never trust modern technology."

"You said never trust retrotech," Charlie said as his father sat down and grabbed the Washington Post. It started unfolding and unfolding itself across the flowered tablecloth to the default display size.

"That, either," Charlie's father said. "Now I'll have to go out and get milk before the game, or your mother'll be on my case."

"I can go get it, Dad."

"Would you?" His father looked up as if astonished by his son's kindness. It was a look Charlie had gotten used to over time, the expression of a man who has almost forgotten what free time is like, and is astonished to find that other people have any.

"No problem." In fact, if I get out right now, I can escape before he asks me to-

"You know, son," his father said, as the main sports page resolved itself in color and motion in front of him, showing a batter swinging and missing very conclusively at a 3–2 pitch, "a nice day like this, a boy your age should be out getting some fresh air with other kids. Now, if you felt like coming down to the park with me, after the game's over some of the other dads and I-"

"Y'know," Charlie said, "I just realized what I'm doing wrong with that steam engine." Not working on it, among other things! He headed out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward the "airlock" front hall where his bike sat. "Later, Dad. I'll get that milk first-"

His father was chuckling softly behind him. As Charlie pushed the front door open, wheeled the bike out it, closed the door again and spoke it locked, he began to wonder if he had been manipulated into getting the milk a touch more quickly than he would have done otherwise.

Nonetheless Charlie grinned a little as he got up on his bike. His mother and father-his foster mother and foster father, actually, though they were working to adopt him formally, really-were the world's best. A little manipulation, in the greater scheme of things, didn't matter in the slightest. He looked up at the stripped brick of the outside of the building and saw, as if overlaying it faintly even in the bright Saturday morning sunlight, that older, darker memory: dimly lit hallways, echoing with laughter bitter or abandoned, the sounds of pain, abuse, and loss. That was all gone now. Nick and Adelie Davis had come and taken him away from all that, into a world where life had purpose besides getting high, and meaning besides bare survival, and hope as opposed to none. When those old memories came hunting Charlie, they never caused him anything but pain. But he knew it would be stupid to deny them, or try to escape them. If he was ever going to be fully himself, they were going to have to be part of the equation.

But right now that could wait. Sunlight dissolved the shadows, and Charlie pedaled off down to the nearby convenience store to get some milk, while turning over in his mind the problem of a rubbery steam engine. Shame I can't get Nick interested in this. He'd be a help. But Nick plainly had other things on his mind… Guess that means I'd better get busy.