"Now, stop that," Winters said. He turned, pulled up the venetian blinds, and tapped sharply on the window. "These guys, you give them all the food they can use, and what happens? They start to get picky. You! Yeah, it's you I'm talking to! Cut it out!"
He tapped on the window a few more times. The bird pointedly picked out two more peanuts, dropped them, and finally selected a third and flew away with it.
"I swear," Winters muttered, "they think I'm a charity." He sighed and turned back to Charlie.
"All right," he said. "If you find anything worth our attention, you'll let me know, of course. But you really should examine the possibility that your friend has something else going on in his life at this point which is making Deathworld look like an attractive alternative to physical reality. There are enough things on the Net that people find useful for that kind of purpose."
Charlie nodded. "I'm looking into it," he said. "But I really don't think that's it."
Winters regarded him with an expression that was hard for Charlie to understand, until he spoke. "Certainty," he said, and the tone was approving… in a way. "It's a wonderful thing to be so sure of your results that you'll discuss them with a superior before you produce the goods."
Charlie swallowed, and hoped it didn't show. "I'm pretty sure," Charlie said.
Winters sat quiet for a moment. "Good," he said. "Then go do some discovery, and report to me when you think you've found out everything you're going to find. If nothing else, what you turn up, if it's anything germane, can be appended to our master file. Data is always good, even if it's just deep background."
"All right," Charlie said. He got up.
Winters stopped him in his tracks with a dark look. "And Charlie-one thing. Any evidence you find that suggests anything like conspiracy, or anything else obviously illegal-I want to hear about it pronto. Don't get in over your head."
"Right, Mr. Winters," Charlie said, sweating again.. "Right. So get out of here and get to class."
Charlie started to get.
"Oh, and Charlie-"
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Winters was half turned to bang on the window glass again, for the brown bird was back, chucking peanuts out of it, four stories down, at about a peanut per second. "One of the better uses for calculus, I'm told, is in the design of custom in-bone surgical prostheses. Check it out."
Charlie grinned. Does that man read minds? Or just faces?.
He headed back to his workspace in a hurry to get ready for school… though school was now the last thing on his mind.
Chapter 4
That afternoon at Bradford Academy, Charlie saw Nick at lunch, long enough to sit down next to him and spend twenty minutes or so there, but not long enough to have any decent conversation with him, for Nick was surrounded at his table by other kids who knew him, all of them plying him with questions about Deathworld and the Seventh Circle. Nick was positively smirking with glee, telling them about it in hints and riddles, mostly, and pausing to play the occasional scrap of a legally "lifted" audio track from the virtual experience on his pocket HardB ard.
Charlie wasn't all that interested in the music. It sounded too much like unadulterated screaming to him, the vocals shrieking so relentlessly that it was hard even to make out the instrumentals, mostly blaring stuff in electrohorn and amplified lute so riddled with feedback that you could hardly tell what key it was in. What did concern him was Nick. His buddy was absolutely holding center court, and plainly enjoying it. A lot of the other students had heard about the suicides, and many of their parents had told them to stay out of Deathworld. A few, whose parents hadn't been concerned, had ventured in and then become seriously frustrated by the challenges of just the first level. All of them were pumping Nick for information about level one, or asking him if he knew any of the kids who'd killed themselves, or if he wasn't worried about getting in more trouble-but Nick was laughing it all off as if it was minor stuff.
Finally the crowd thinned briefly, and Charlie, who had actually had to stand and wait with his lunch tray until a seat opened up a few spaces down the table, was finally able to lean over and say, "Nick, you okay?"
"Huh?" Nick looked at him strangely. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"Your folks just yanked your circuitry," Charlie said. "Most of us might find that a little annoying."
Nick frowned. "It won't last forever," he said. "Besides, I'm getting a job lined up for over the summer… I'll be able to pay for my own access time, and they won't be able to stand over me and say what I should do and what I shouldn't."
This made Charlie blink slightly. Nick was not exactly someone he would have categorized as the rebellious type… but all of a sudden all kinds of personality quirks that Charlie hadn't noticed before seemed to be popping out. Could it just be some developmental thing? Charlie wondered. Kind of a stage? People get those…
"Besides," Nick said to him, looking a little ways across the room, "there's no point in assuming my folks are going to just let this drop, even after I've paid the bill off." And abruptly he looked depressed. His whole face sagged out of shape. "They stink, just like everything else, and if they don't give me trouble about this, they'll find something else pretty quick. About time I started pulling back a little, letting them realize that they don't get to say what kinds of things I enjoy, or get to run my whole life until there's none of it that feels worth living. Soon enough they won't be able to run any of my life, anyhow."
Charlie opened his mouth to start to say that whatever Nick's folks did, they didn't particularly stink. They were certainly no worse than his. And there was something slightly unnerving about the phrasing of that last line, when it came out of somebody wearing that profoundly depressed expression. But then Nick's face brightened up again, just as if someone had thrown a switch, and he said, "Anyway, did you hear the lifts I got?"
"Uh, it was hard not to hear them. The guy's voice is, uh-"
"Staggering, isn't it? Wait till you hear the stuff I bring back later in the week. I'm gonna make Seventh in a matter of hours, and there's a whole bunch of new stuff down there, really hard-edged." Nick grinned, a rather feral look. "And I already got a hint about some of it." He nudged Charlie conspiratorially with one elbow. "You know what the theme is down there?"
"No."
" 'Strung Out.' "
Nick laughed, a laugh that almost sounded like his usual self. "Charlie, you're so deadpan sometimes, they could make coffins out of you. `Strung-' get it?" And he made a gesture above his head like someone pulling a noose tight, and crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, and made a "gack" noise.
Charlie blinked.
"Hey, Nicky," one of the other kids said from the group gathered around his HardBard, "the thing's stopped playing."
"Huh? Oh, that's the copy-defeat, it wants me touching it every so often-"
He scrambled up from the table and went over to them, leaving Charlie staring, somewhat bemused, at a cold cheeseburger. Then the "tone" sounded, a siren-bleat that was a five-minute warning of the approach of the next class period, and soon Nick had vanished, with everyone else. Charlie got up and ditched his tray in the recycler, and went off to his physics class. He got 97 percent on the physics paper he had turned in that morning, an occurrence that normally would have caused him either to do handstands or call the media. But by then, and even several hours later as he waited for the light-rail tram home from school, Charlie was feeling rather grim.
There was no sign of Nick at the school tram stop, at the time they usually met there to share the first part of their respective rides home. He might have caught an earlier one, Charlie thought. Or else he's gone a different way. Maybe caught the bus around the corner, up to the Square, where his new access is.