Cybermancy (12 page)

“Learns what?” I asked.

“That he’s not as strong as Dave, that he always loses
arguments, that
he’s never going to be alpha. Take your pick.” Bob began to whine then. “Whatever you might think about our relative dogginess, our shape makes a difference. And so does our name.”

“Subtle you aren’t,” I said, and it was my turn to sound sour. “If you think so much of this whole Raven thing, why don’t you just tell me about it?”

“Is that a sign of curiosity at last?” asked Mort. “Are you actually starting to wonder about who you are?”

“I know who I am,” I said. “I’m Ravirn, no matter what the Fates say. On the other hand, I have to admit that I’m beginning to wonder
what
I am. Or what others see in me. So, are you going to tell me anything? Or are you just going to stand there looking smug because I finally asked?”

“Asked what?” said Dave, who’d finally let loose of Bob.

“Who he is,” said Mort.

“What I am,” I corrected.

“A filthy little prison breaker,” said Bob, who went silent a moment later when Dave turned a dark eye on him.

“It’s about time you asked that question,” said Dave. “I just wish I knew the answer.”

“What?” I demanded. “All this time, the three of you have been giving me shit about this Raven business, and you don’t know what it means either?”

Dave looked sheepish. “What it means, no. That it’s important, yes. You don’t smell like a child of Fate anymore.”

“What?” I was surprised by that.

“We’ve met more than a few of Fate’s children,” said Mort. “You don’t die easy, but you can be killed.”

“I know that,” I said quietly. “I’ve sent two of my cousins across the Styx myself, though I’m not proud of it.”

“Moric,” said Dave, “and his uncle’s son, Laric.”

“Exactly,” said Mort. “Though you may not be able to smell it, there is a scent associated with those who come from the three houses of Fate. You don’t smell like that.”

I was frankly fascinated. “What do I smell like?”

“A raven,” said Dave.

“And Discord,” said Bob, still sounding angry.

“Say elemental Primal Chaos, and you’d be closer to the truth,” corrected Mort.

“Chaos?”
I asked. “Don’t we all smell of chaos? It runs in the blood we inherited from the Titans, yours as well as mine.”

“This is different,” said Mort. “The Primal Chaos in our veins is fixed. The Primal Chaos that wraps you like an invisible cloak is the raw wild stuff that churns between the worlds.”

“What did Clotho
do
to me?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” said Dave. “I really don’t. But the spinner spun Eris’s thread as surely as she did those of Atropos and Lachesis. She is the author of order and disorder both, and her motives are not always the same as those of her sisters. If you really want that question answered, you’ll have to ask it of Clotho.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got to go now.”

My brain felt like someone had stuck a stick blender in my ear and hit the on button. I simply couldn’t process the Raven stuff. To say nothing of the implications of Dave and Bob’s tiff and what they’d had to say about Hades and Persephone. Even more disturbing was
how
they’d said it. I started to walk away, then stopped and turned back.

“I almost forgot why I came today. I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble with my visit last week. I took advantage of our friendship, and that’s not nice. You don’t have to forgive me—I don’t regret the deed—but I owed you an apology.”

“Forgiven,” said Dave, with a smile.

“Forgotten,” said Mort.

“Fat chance,” snarled Bob.

It wasn’t until I’d moved a little way off and gotten Melchior out of my bag for the return trip that I thought to wonder where Kira was. Since she appeared a few seconds later, it was a brief concern.

“Yer likes ter live dangerously, don’t yer,” she said as she flew up.

“Think of the devil,” I said.

“And I’m yer reward,” said Kira. “When do yer think yer could do that jack job for me?”

“Like I said, drop on by. I’ll make time. Oh, and hang on.” I dug around in my bag for a moment and pulled out a plastic sack. “I got these for you as a temporary jury-rig.” Inside were three sets of earbuds and two stereo minijack Y-splitters.

“Thanks!” she said, flying in close to take them, then backing off and hovering.

There was something about her body language that suggested she had more to say, so I waited quietly. After a minute or so, she looked at her feet.

“Yer heard that bit about Persephone,” she mumbled.

“I did.”

“And Hades?”

I nodded. “It sounds like there’s some conflict in the kennel on the subject.”

“Aye,” she said. “There is that. It
don’t
seem right ter talk about my boss, but I owe yer a couple, so I’ll say this. Dave’s heart belongs to Persephone. Mort’s his own master. But Bob is Hades’ dog to the core.
More to the point, so’s Cerberus.
That hound’s more complex than he looks. He’s bound to obey the letter of his master’s orders, but his heads is pretty good at interpreting things to suit their fancies given half a chance. Yer won’t get that chance if you cross the river again.
Dave’s yer friend.
Mort, too.
But Cerberus has orders to see you dead, and he’s with Bob on this one. Be careful.”

“I will; and Kira, thanks for the warning.”

“Yer welcome. I’d best be going now before they miss me.” She flitted away.

With a sigh, I pulled Melchior out of my bag and set him on a rock. As I reached to flip his lid up, he changed back into his goblin form.

“I thought you didn’t like it here,” I said.

“I don’t. I really don’t, but I wanted to make sure you were really listening to Kira, and it’s easier to read your expression with eyeballs than CCDs.”

“Is it also more satisfying to say ‘I told you so’ in the flesh?”

“What do you mean by that?” His face was the picture of innocence.

“Oh, just get it over with. You and Cerice and everybody else were right about me needing to make sense of Clotho’s
gift
. I was wrong. Even I can see that now.”

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with reeking of Primal Chaos, would it?”

“No one used the word
reek,
but yeah, that pretty much nailed it for me. Oh, and while I’m on the subject of eating crow and other dark birds, I was an asshole earlier about asking for a gate. I’m sorry.”

“Really?
Are you going to tell me it won’t happen again?”

“No. It’ll happen again. I’ll just have to apologize again when it does.”

“At least you’re honest about it. Apology accepted, though I reserve the right to tell you to stick it in your ear next time.”

“Deal,” I said. “Now, how about you open up a gate so I can go home and make my third major mea culpa of the day?”

“You think you’re going to even things out with Cerice with a single apology? Aren’t you just the demigod of
optimism.
” He got busy with some chalk and string, creating a temporary hexagram.

“Connecting to prime.minus0208,” he said once he was done. A very long pause followed, then, “LTP error, client has encountered bad data from the server.”

That was a new one on me. I’d never gotten an error message on a locus transfer protocol link before. But Melchior was continuing, and I didn’t have the chance to ask him about it.

“Automatically rerouting connection request to alternate server.
Waiting for response.”
There was another pause, briefer this time.
“Connected.
Initiating Gate procedure.”
The hexagram slowly filled with light.

As I waited for it to finish, I knelt beside Melchior. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know.” Melchior looked more than a little distressed. “The mweb is . . . I don’t know
,
I’ve never felt anything quite like it. I didn’t even know I
had
an LTP error menu until I accessed it. It must be something the Fates built into the webgoblin firmware specs.” He gave a little shudder. “I wonder whether there are any other surprises lurking down in the depths of my code.”

By then the gate was complete, so we stepped into the light.
And dropped.
I felt like I’d landed in a particularly wild waterslide. I shouldn’t have felt anything at all, not as a stream of ones and zeros passing along
an
mweb channel. I shouldn’t have felt anything, and I shouldn’t have been able to scream because there shouldn’t have been time. Nor should I have been able to hear Melchior’s panicked cries. None of those shoulds mattered. I screamed and screamed again, and Melchior screamed back. None of it helped, and I started to wonder if this was what had happened to all the relatives I’d lost in transit. Then it was over.

Melchior and I had arrived . . . somewhere. The tiny room with its twin lofts sure as Fate wasn’t our apartment in Cambridge, though it did look vaguely familiar. Then it hit me—my old dorm at the
University
of
Minnesota
, though the new occupants had completely different furniture and a much better cleaning routine than either I or my roommate had managed. The most important thing about them, though, was that they weren’t home.

That was good, since I hadn’t bothered to send a netspider ahead to check for surprises. I’d gotten out of the habit lately since I’d been gating to places where I knew I was safe or knew I wasn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter. Of course, it might not have mattered anyway, since I hadn’t intended to come here in the first place. I turned to tease Melchior about that but stopped when I saw his face. He didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked scared out of his wits. His skin had paled to an ashy color more gray than blue.

“You OK?” I asked.

“I . . . I’m not sure,” he whispered. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“Hey, just because we landed halfway across the country and twenty-eight hundred Decision Loci off target doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. You did get us to a college after . . .” I trailed off because Melchior was shaking his head vigorously.

“We’re in the right DecLocus,” said Melchior. “At least, that’s what the mweb world resource locator forks are telling me. As for Harvard vs. the U, my system software tells me
that’s
right, too. I just . . . This is bad, Boss.
Really
bad.”
He sat down on the floor with a thump. “There’s something very wrong here. It’s like all my firmware reference points are screwy.”

I glanced out the window. By the sun it must have been around three in the afternoon. If this really was Cerice’s DecLocus, it should have been running pretty close to OST. That meant we’d lost an hour or two in transit on top of whatever else had happened.

“Virus?”
I asked. He’d caught a killer whipped up by Atropos a year ago, and I’d almost lost him. I didn’t like to think about it.

“I don’t
think
so. I feel fine otherwise.” He looked away from me, and when he spoke again his voice was very quiet. “Do you think it could be aftereffects from the one that crashed me so bad?”

“Maybe.
It almost did you in, and I had to do a major repair job. But I’d think anything like that would have kicked in sooner.”

“Not if they programmed in some kind of sleeper,” said Melchior.

I didn’t like that idea at all. It suited Atropos’s nasty nature to a tee. “We should get you home so I can have a look at your internals.”

“Good idea, but how? I don’t think I should drive.”

I had to chuckle. “
Me
either, little buddy. Maybe we can get Cerice and Shara to come pick us up, or Kira. First, let’s find out for sure where we are. You say the mweb tells you this is prime.minus0208?”

He nodded. “But I can’t be sure. Not the way I feel. I don’t know if I should even try a Vtp link. What if I hit a logic
loop,
and it takes me down?”

“Not to worry, I have a radical idea.”

“What?”

I sat down at one of the desks and picked up the phone. “This.”

I might not have Melchior’s ability to process and send high-speed binary, but I could do a pretty damn good impression of an old-style modem or a phone-switching computer. Phone phreaking was something I’d picked up purely for the hack value. I’d never had to make an actual person-to-person call before, preferring Vtp for relatives and VOMP when I had to interact with the human world or couldn’t take a visual. Soon, a little whistling on my part had convinced the local voice provider that I was allowed to make unlimited long-distance calls from the number I was at. A few seconds later I waited while the phone in Cerice’s lab began to ring. On the third ring someone answered.

“Theoretical computing, Dr. Doravian’s lab, this is Cerice.” Relief flooded through me.

“Thank Zeus. I’m sorry.”

“What? Who is this?
Ravirn?”

“You got it. I wanted to apologize right off.”

“Apologize?
Over the
phone
?
What’s up?” She sounded very confused. “Why are you using a
phone
? Is this some retro romantic-fantasy thing?”