They slid on past the level of the winds and the storm-borne couples. "Idiotic behavior, really," Joey was saying as he turned away from the view, "claiming they can't control themselves, that love made them do it. Poor excuse. So now they really can't control themselves." He gave Nick a narrow-eyed look that might have had a wink associated with it, but the light changed again as they plunged down past the next level of floor/ceiling and down into Floor Three, and Nick couldn't be sure what he had seen. "You wouldn't ever try a weak excuse like that, though… "
"Uh, no," Nick said.
"Yeah, right," Joey Bane said, and didn't quite snicker. "Third floor, gluttony, excess, and general overindulgence…"
If the weather had seemed bad on the level above, it was worse down here. Dirty sleet and freezing rain fell endlessly from blackness, and people both too fat and too thin ran along under it as if being scourged by whips, while behind them came a monstrous black-pelted shape, howling and snarling and grabbing them up in its jaws… grabbing them up and chewing on them like newly caught rats, times three. It had three sets of jaws, three heads-huge, ugly ones like those of pit bulls-and six burning eyes. At least Nick thought he counted six. This was an image he had been careful to keep his distance from, the couple times he'd been down here. If the Dog caught you, it could strip you of half your "time" credits in the domain and make you do the last couple of levels over again, which would get real boring real fast. Besides, it had been eating people when he had been here last, and the view had not been pretty. Nick's feeling at the time was that this was an aspect of "the truth" that it was going to take him a while to get used to.
The monster bounded to the edge of the floor of that circle and began barking and slavering furiously at the two of them as they passed. "Bad dog," Joey Bane yelled at it, "bad dog! Shut your mouths, it's me! The neighbors are gonna start complaining again!"
The monster kept right on barking as they passed. "Obedience school for that one was a waste of time," Joey muttered as the escalator took them by. "I tell you, this is the last time I let my sister pass off the runt of the litter on me. The poor guy's damaged. And he never gets enough to eat, either. He bolts his food and then he can't hold it down, and he… Oh, look at that." Bane turned his head and yelled over the railing of the escalator, "Tech! You better get somebody over here to clean that up! If he slips in that and hurts himself, the vet bills are coming out of your pay-"
Nick wasn't looking, and was trying not to look like he wasn't looking, as the hound went bounding off after another trio of running, shrieking prey. "The stomach acid eats the flooring," Joey Bane said. "Not the dog's fault, it's his diet. Fad dieters and runaway gourmets, what do you expect? They're so hung up on eating, or not eating, that they don't care what it does to them, or how many millions of people they starve in the process of feeding just a few a ton more than they need, or making special foods for themselves with no calories to speak of… "
Nick gulped. He was hanging on to his control as best he could, trying to stay cool, to look cool, like none of this bothered him. It may take me a while, he thought, I don't care how much time I'm going to have to spend in here, but I'm going to learn to cope with it whatever I do. I am not going to look stupid in front of-
"Fourth floor down," Joey Bane said, looking over the rail of the escalator. "The Haves and the Throwaways. All gamblers, really, except some of them do it with stocks and bonds and margins and others do it at the gaming tables or in factories where they burn up resources that can't ever be replaced… " He made a gentle tsk, tsk noise as the two of them passed on by and downward. "This is an awfully underrated area. Hardly anyone spends more than the minimum time watching this bunch. It must be the suits."
Or the screams, Nick thought, or these were truly appalling. They came out of thick billowing darkness, and there were terrible crashing and crushing noises coming out of it as well, like a constant multicar accident being continually enacted in the gloom. Nick swallowed as another crash produced a chorus of screams. They did not sound like the kind of thing you would hear in a madefor-Net drama. They sounded real.
"Accountants," Joey Bane said idly as they went past one more thick rock floor/ceiling. "Not so quiet and colorless, are they? This is nothing, though. Wait till you see what happens to the lawyers. Oh, not all of them, by any means. Many of them are very nice people, but the ones we get down here- Ah, here we are. Five…"
The music had been scaling up around them all the while. Now, as they came out on the floor of the fifth level, it crashed into the savage main chorus of "You Said You Weren't Gonna Wait Up," and just as Nick was about to start singing the next verse, the music started to fade away into silence. This was not one of those dark circles, and Nick swallowed when he saw what was there.
Huge cliffs reared up in the distance on all sides, and beneath them strode and strutted gigantic parent-figures dressed absurdly in clothes dating to before the turn of the last century. Bizarre floppy sweats and backward hats, and even stranger, the non-"smart" jeans of the previous few decades, with T-shirts that hadn't yet learned the art of molding themselves to the wearer's body. They stalked around the dark rocky circle holding huge weapons in their hands-though they hadn't started out as weapons, actually, but as hammers and ax handles, kitchen knives and rolled-up newspapers. Their eyes glowed with a ter rible light, and it wasn't until one or another of them had passed you that you saw the demons' wings, sinewed and fingered like those of bats, stunted and clawed. Among these awful figures, reaching no higher than their knees and running in all possible directions to get away from them, were adult figures in modern clothes, sliktites and leotites and new chitons, all terrified, all trying to get away… but they couldn't. There was nowhere for them to run, no way out, no way to climb the slick cliffs that bounded the circle here. The giant parent-demons pursued the helpless adults and attacked them with the household implements they carried. Nick wanted to look away, but an awful fascination kept him watching. The punishment was deadly and endless. Broken heads resealed themselves, packing the brains tracelessly back in: broken bones reknit themselves, and bruises spread just long enough to go black, then paled back out of lividity to normal flesh again as the demons with the clubs and ax handles chased after the abusing parents and gave them back what they had given their own children.
Next to Nick, Joey Bane was smiling slightly and singing what the lyric of the next verse would have been if the "outer" music had still been playing: "She hit it right on when she said it: 'They only hit you till you cry…
And the tormented ones were crying as they fled, yelling and howling as loudly as they could, but the demon-parents were all deaf, and couldn't hear them, and just kept hitting. Around and around they went, the demons beating their victims while intoning phrases like "This hurts me more than it hurts you" and "You'll thank me for this some day… "
Nick had heard that one often enough lately, about college. Though no one had hit him while saying it, he had been bruised enough by the words, by Mother's absolute certainty that Nick would someday actually thank her for making him so miserable. Does she even listen to herself say these things? he wondered furiously, but she was suf fering from the same syndrome as the demons here were. She didn't hear him…