Cybermancy (13 page)

“No, more like bad technoreality, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I owed you the apology, and I wanted to give it to you up front. And hey, I’ll be honest. I figured it’d lower the odds of your hanging up on me, too.”

“You’re not making much sense.”

“Sorry, it’s been a very strange couple of hours, not least because I seem to have awakened under an offending star. My mouth and my foot have been trying to get on better terms all day, and now I’m stranded with a fritzed webgoblin.”

“Ravirn!” she said sharply.

“Yes.”

“You’re babbling.” She did not sound amused.

“Am I? No, don’t answer that. I am. Look, I think Melchior might be really messed up, and I need a hand.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, her voice softening at once. She had a big soft spot for webgoblins in general and Melchior in particular.

So I gave her the story. When I finished, I could hear her putting her hand over the phone. A muffled conversation followed.

“You still there?” she said after a while.

“Yeah.
I just told you, I’m stranded, as in ‘can’t go anywhere. ’ Remember?”

“Sorry.
Stupid question.
Wait there; we’ll be along shortly.” The phone went dead.

“Thanks, Cerice,” I said to the dial tone. “That’s really sweet of you. We’ll see you soon.” Then I hung up.

After about fifteen minutes, the phone rang. I looked at it dubiously. It was almost certainly for the people who lived here and quite likely to be someone who’d find the idea of a strange man answering a bit on the alarming side. On the other hand, Cerice should have been here by now.

“You going to answer that?” asked Melchior.

“Yeah, I’d better.” I picked it up. “Hello.”

“Ravirn?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’ve got another problem.”

“Why did I just know you were going to say that?”

“Maybe it’s because you attract them the way Cerberus attracts fleas,” offered Melchior. I just nodded. When someone’s right, they’re right.

“Tell me about it,” I said to Cerice.

“Shara can’t gate.”

“What?” I asked.
“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time in ages I could hear something akin to panic in her voice. “Maybe it’s because she was dead. Maybe it’s something else, something worse. Right now she’s throwing up in the trash can, but she keeps telling me it’s not a virus.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Shara tried to connect, and she just sat and cycled for the longest time. That had me worried. Then she came up with an error message I’d never heard of.”

“LTP error, client has encountered bad data from the server?” I asked.

“That’s the one. How’d you know?”

“It’s the same one I got with Melchior. I told you about it a few minutes ago.”

“Right,” said Cerice. “I knew that. Shit. I
knew
that. Damn!”

“What happened next?” I asked, trying to bring her back to the topic. Cerice was a consummate problem solver. This behavior was completely unlike her. Shara’s problems were consuming her.

“Sorry,” said Cerice, sounding calmer. “Anyway, she tried again and got the same error. She was just going for a third round when she let out a little ‘eep’ noise and ran for the wastebasket. Now I can’t get any sense out of her. She says she’s not sick, but she keeps throwing up.”

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

“How?” asked Cerice.

“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Just hang on.” With that I hung up.

“Boss?” said Melchior.

“Yeah.
I don’t suppose this is good news, is it?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Once I heard Shara was having problems, I tried to call Kira.”

“And ...”

“No go. The mweb is really turbulent right now. It felt like someone shoved a hyperactive spider into my inner ear. Maybe that’s why Shara’s throwing up.”

“Motion sickness?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh, could be.” It could be indeed, but I really didn’t like the idea. If it was true, something big was happening with the mweb, something like nothing I’d ever heard of. “Or maybe you and Shara just have a bug in common. You do share a lot more software than most goblins.”

“I hope that’s the case,” he said. “I’d much rather I was screwed up than the mweb.”

Me too.
I could do something about a webgoblin virus. The mweb on the other hand . . . I shuddered. That was too big a problem for me, and the more I thought about it, the likelier it seemed. Hadn’t we been having all kinds of communication problems, starting with Shara’s long delay and Tisiphone’s static-touched Vtp message?

“Time to go,” I said, scooping Melchior up and setting him in my bag. Suddenly I was in a hurry.

“Yeah,” he said as he sank down until only the upper half of his face was visible.
“But where?”

“The airport,” I said. “If human people can get around on planes, so can
we
.”

 
This isn’t half-bad
, typed itself on Melchior’s screen.

Speak for yourself
, I typed back with one hand. I needed the other to maintain my death grip on the seat arm.
My stomach’s still on the ground in Minneapolis.

It turned out I was a nervous flyer. If I’d had any idea of how bad it was going to be, I’d have stolen a motorcycle and gone cross-country. Compelled by a sort of sick fascination, I looked out my window again. All I could see was clouds. I shuddered.

No wonder airports are such miserable places
, I typed.
The people in them know they’re going to have to get on planes.

I’d driven people to and from airports, even hung around in them a few times watching the planes take off and land. I had cousins who’d gotten pilot’s licenses just for the joy of flying, but somehow I’d never had any desire to try it myself. I’d always figured that was because I knew a simple spell could take me from any point in all the multiple levels of reality to any other in a matter of seconds, so why bother? Apparently, it was actually my subconscious anticipating how much I’d hate the whole experience and working to reduce my suffering.
Sensible subconscious.

This is a stupid way to travel
, I typed, trying to distract myself.
It’s worse than faerie rings.

Nothing is worse than faerie rings. Faerie rings are the magical equivalent of old-style absinthe, slow death and sudden insanity.

He had a point, but . . .
At least I understand how
they
work
, I typed.
This is unnatural. A giant steel cigar with wings not much bigger than a Fury’s, and somehow they expect it to stay up. Humans are all mad.

Oh, quit whining. You can be such a big baby. At least you’re not stuck back in coach.

I’d booked first class. Why not? It wasn’t like I was paying for the flight or anything, not with e-tickets and online check-in. But bigger seats and classier service couldn’t change the fundamental fact that flying and I did not belong in the same sentence. Sick of arguing with Melchior, I closed his lid and stuck him under the seat in front of me. That allowed me to cling to the seat arms with both hands. It was a marginal improvement, but I absolutely could not wait to get off that plane. I also couldn’t wait to throw away the printout of the return trip ticket I’d bought to avoid hassles with the Homeland Security Department’s data-mining software.

It was so bad that I stopped in one of the little airport bars at Logan and had a couple of shots of Scotch while I waited for my heart to go back to a normal rhythm. Then I caught the T’s Blue Line at the airport station. Two transfers and an hour or so of travel time saw me off at Harvard station in Cambridge just before the system closed down at twelve-thirty. Not long after that I was opening the door to Cerice’s lab.

I got a huge relieved hug and a kiss from Cerice.
And a smaller, shakier version of that greeting from Shara, who claimed to be feeling much better.

“I don’t buy it,” I told her. “You don’t look as bad as you did when I found you in Hades, but you sure don’t look good.”

“Way to flatter a girl,” said Shara. She turned her gaze on Cerice. “Sometimes I wonder what you see in this boy. Then he walks away in those tight jeans, and it all becomes clear.” She winked, but it didn’t look like her heart was in it.

“Nice try,” I said, “it’s not going to work. You look terrible.”

“Believe it or don’t,”
said
Cerice, “she looked a whole lot worse a couple of hours ago.”

My shoulder bag moved of its own accord then, lumping up, then falling off the desk where I’d set it. Muffled swearing came from inside, then it unzipped itself, spitting out Melchior.

“Were you just going to leave me in there,” he asked, “or did I miss something?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was a little preoccupied with Shara.”

“I see why,” he said, looking her over. Stepping closer, he touched her cheek. “Last time I saw that expression on your face, you were under the desk hiding from Persephone.”

Shara shivered and hugged herself. “Don’t talk about that, about her. I can’t think about her. I just
can’t
. She’s . . . brrr.”

“I agree with you there,” I said, remembering the horrible pain of meeting those winter eyes, then thinking about what Kira and Cerberus had to say about her. “I can’t tell you how much I wish she hadn’t made me promise her a favor.”

“What?” asked Cerice, an edge in her
voice.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Didn’t I mention that part?” I asked.

Her eyes sparked dangerously. “No. I don’t believe that you did.”

“It must have slipped my mind. No.
Really.
When I got back, and Shara wasn’t here, I kind of got distracted. I did mention that she helped me get Shara out, right?” Cerice nodded. “I guess I skipped the bit where she told me she’d have a task for me later.”

Cerice put a hand over her eyes. “Only my Ravirn could forget a little detail like goddess blackmail. I so wish I didn’t believe you.”

“Does that mean you do?” I asked.

“Yes.” She sighed. “It does. Now, I think
we
—”

She was interrupted by a loud
bing
from Shara. “Incoming visual transfer protocol message from [email protected]. Accept Vlink?”

“Accept,” said Cerice.

Ahllan was a webtroll and an old friend. She’d once been Atropos’s personal web server, but now she ran the familiar underground, an organization dedicated to freeing AIs from slavery in the houses of Fate.

“Vtp linking initiated,” said Shara after a long pause.

The light that burst from her eyes and mouth was the first clue that something had gone horribly wrong. It was white instead of colored in the primaries. The globe it formed was filled with silvery gray mist like something from an old-time black-and-white movie rather than the usual gold cloud. It was also brimful of static. When it partially cleared, the troll within was likewise black and white and so shot through with lines of interference that she looked like some kind of electronic zebra. She was also low res.

You could barely make out the heavy lower jaw and three-inch tusks. Even her huge potatolike nose only registered as a lumpy blur. Ahllan was an early-model webtroll, one of the servers Atropos had used in her own personal network back toward the dawn of the computer era. At a hair over three feet tall, Ahllan barely came up to my waist in person. But her shoulders were broader than mine, and she probably outweighed me. Her skin was mottled and brown and wrinkled like a winter apple. The only bright things about her were the wise eyes. They shone like black sapphires.
All that was lost to static.

“Ksshst an emergssshht.
Need to kssshht warn
you.
Urgent.
Ksssjsjt soon!”

“What?” I asked. With the garbling, I figured I’d better keep questions short and to the point. She might cut out at any second.

“Shshsjjt Garbage Faerie is crzshht.”

“I missed that, what?”

“Hang ozzzst, I . . .” The image suddenly sharpened and lost some of its striping, bringing her background—a beer can faerie ring on a blasted hillside—into focus. She was in the backwater of reality where I’d first met Ahllan and the troll’s onetime headquarters.

“There,” said Ahllan, her voice tinny and strained, but clear. “Much better, but it’s taking most of my processing power to modulate this so it rides with the churn on the mweb. I’ll be quick because it’s only going to get worse.”

“Why are you calling from Garbage Faerie?” asked Melchior. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” answered Ahllan. “Something awful has happened to the mweb. Worlds have fallen silent, and there are gaps in the net. The turbulence is incredible. I couldn’t even reach you from my new home. There’s change in the wind, big change. The web that Necessity built, the web I was designed to help maintain, is fraying. The great powers are restless.
Fate.
Discord.
Zeus.
Hades.”

“Do you think one of them is responsible?” I asked.