Cybermancy (2 page)

“I didn’t think it would,” I managed to say through a mouth gone terribly dry.

“Good!” said all three in perfect unison, their voices as solemn and final as the closing of a sepulchre. “We
must
oppose any who dare the underworld gate, no matter who they are, or how we feel about them. None may pass within save through death or the will of Hades, and for the dead the passage is one way.”

“Ah, how exactly would this relate to me?” I asked, though I thought I knew.

“Cerberus has spoken.” The three heads nodded.

“Guys . . . I’m really not sure I get where you’re going with this,” I said.

“We don’t get a lot of company,” said the left head, reverting once more to my buddy, Bob.

“Nobody comes here for fun,” said Mort.

“Are you questioning my card-playing motives?” I assumed my best hurt-innocence expression. “I know we didn’t start off on the best foot, but I thought that was all in the past.”

If I hadn’t done some fast talking when I tried to make that initial contact, I’d have ended up as doggy chow. Fortunately, on my second and subsequent visits, the trio had proved much
more friendly
. That made this sudden shift in canine attitude all the more surprising.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Dave, “and don’t take
us
for fools.”

“Orpheus was the last to come and go unsanctioned and unscathed,” said Bob.

Another demigod cousin of mine, Orpheus had played a tune of such beauty and wonder that it put Cerberus into a deep sleep, allowing the musician to pass into the underworld and retrieve his beloved bride, Euridice. It was a great triumph but short-lived, since Apollo cut his head off and made it into an oracle not long after.

“He wasn’t the last to try,” said Mort. “There have been others.”

“Many passed the gate alive,” said Dave. “In is easy. Out is the problem. None of them made it back, though there have been thousands.”

“Tens of thousands,” said Bob. “They failed, and they died. Their names are forgotten.”

“Except by us,” said Mort. “We do not forget.” He looked sad but determined. With a move so fast I barely saw it, his head darted forward, and he caught the slab of basalt we’d been using as a table in his massive jaws.

“Don’t make us turn you into a memory,” said Bob. While he spoke, Mort’s jaws began to close, crushing the stone as a lesser dog might a rotten bone. “We’d hate to have to kill you.”

The noise was terrible, but I had no trouble hearing Dave’s voice. “But we would kill you. Never doubt it. You’re no
Orpheus
.” He pronounced the name with a heavy emphasis that rang oddly.

“Of course not,” I replied. “I couldn’t play a lyre to save my life, and my singing voice is only good for attracting harpies.”

Mort made a last effort, and the rock burst completely asunder, showering me with shards and dust. “Let whoever it is you lost go, Ravirn.”

Without another word, Cerberus swung his giant bulldog’s body around and stalked back toward the river and the cave Hades had dug for his kennel. I wiped sweat from my face and let out a little sigh of relief.

A faint
bing
came from my shoulder bag as Cerberus passed out of sight. I unzipped it and dropped the cards inside, reaching down to retrieve the bright blue clamshell of my laptop with the same movement. Setting it on a rock, I flipped up the lid.

Large red letters read,
That
went well
! A small goblin-head logo below and to the left of the screen was sadly shaking itself back and forth, an unmistakable sarcastic
not
.

“On the contrary, Mel.
For the first time in ages and despite everything, I think this all might just work out.”

The laptop made a rude noise. Melchior is not what you’d call the most reverent of creatures in either of his forms, laptop or webgoblin. When I’d first programmed the spell that gave my familiar life, I’d put in a subroutine designed to provide a touch of sarcasm and back talk. He’d long since exceeded his specs.

I’m never quite sure how to feel about that. Mixing magic with computer code has changed the way my family works at every level, merging hacker with sorcerer, and forever scrambling the logical and the irrational into one big WYSIWYG mess. I’m sometimes tempted to agree with the traditionalists in the pantheon that all this newfangled computer stuff is a royal pain. Then I actually have to perform a spell, and I’m reminded just how much less dangerous magic has become since the advent of the mweb and the birth of digital sorcery.

I typed,
Run Melchior
.
Please
. There was a time when I’d issued actual commands to my computer the way most people did. Sometimes I missed it. He could be a nasty and stubborn little piece of hardware.

The red letters returned.
Fat chance.
The logo raised a skeptical eyebrow.
I’m not getting anywhere near Rover.

I sighed. Hades, as part of the whole original Olympus-home-of-the-gods milieu, was located in the basement of the central structure of reality. My next destination had a less ritzy address, and getting there required temporarily converting my flesh-and-blood analogue body into a string of ones and zeros and electronically transmitting it from point
a to
point b.

That meant running a spell.
Melchior
, I typed.
Mtp
:/
/ mweb.DecLocus.prime.minus0208/harvard.edu~theyard. Please.

Executing.
Connecting to prime.minus0208.
A brief pause followed.
Connected.
Initiating Gate procedure.

The eyes and mouth of the logo opened and bright laser-like beams shot forth, one blue, one green, one red. Together they stitched a hexagonal pattern of light on the ground. A green glow began to climb upward in the area above the hexagon as though the edges of the diagram delineated the walls of an invisible glass eight feet in height. I eyed it a little more warily than I once would have.

The digital me would make the trip via the mweb, the magical computer network that tied all of the infinite worlds of possibility into one gigantic matrix. When I was a boy, I’d been led to believe the Fates had created the system, but I’d since learned that wasn’t quite true. Necessity, the shadowy and enormously powerful entity sometimes called the Fate of the Gods, was responsible for spinning the mweb from the Primal Chaos, though she left its day-to-day administration to my grandmother and her sisters.

In another context, that firm hand on the reins might have provided a certain amount of reassurance to a traveler about to embark on a little jaunt between the worlds. Unfortunately, I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that Fate hates me.
So all the hazards inherent to mweb-based travel go double for me.

Just like the various human sorts of network, the mweb experiences the occasional hiccup. But what’s merely frustrating when the error involves an e-mail going astray becomes infinitely worse when it happens in the few brief moments while a person exists as nothing more than a very fragile string of ones and zeros traveling between gates. I’d lost relatives that way. Still, I suppose it beats walking.

I stepped into the column of light.

Gating
, said the words on Melchior’s screen.

The stone-dotted shores of the Styx wavered before my eyes as the gate transformed me into one more electronic signal in a sea of data. For an infinite instant I could almost feel myself streaming down the channel between worlds, the pressure of chaos all around me, my laptop familiar a dim presence at my nonexistent side. Then, as abruptly as it had opened, the gate closed, returning us to the world of the physical.

We arrived in a cold and moonlit elsewhere, Harvard Yard in another layer of reality, one where winter held sway. Our point of entry, a secluded corner between Stoughton Hall and the Phillips Brooks House, was further shielded from view by the bulk of a tree. Since I’d been excommunicated from my family and dropped out of college, I’d been living in a nearby apartment with my girlfriend.

Cerice, another of the Greek pantheon’s demi-immortal children, was finishing up a doctorate in C-Sci at the
Harvard
Center
for Experimental Computing before going to work as a coder for Clotho, her family matriarch. I could have gated directly back to our apartment, but I wanted to walk a bit, and I wanted to see Cerice. As anyone who’s ever lived with a Ph.D. science candidate in her last year of research knows, she would be found in the lab and not at home, even so very late on Thursday night.

Run Melchior. Please
, I typed into the laptop for a second time.

Executing in 5, 4 . . .

I set the computer on the ground as the countdown ended. The screen, suddenly as pliable as a sheet of latex, bulged forward as though someone—or perhaps
something
would be more apt—had pressed its face against it from the far side. Sharp ears and a sharper nose shaped themselves into being as my familiar shifted from laptop to webgoblin. The back of the screen formed into the round dome of his bald blue head. The lower half of the clamshell frame became a miniature torso with arms and legs ending in clever hands and tiny feet.

He stretched and grinned. “Better. I was starting to get a little stiff.”

“It’s your own fault for insisting on playing laptop whenever we visit Cerberus.”

“Given the choice,” said Melchior, “I wouldn’t get within a hundred Decision Loci of the security firm Fido, Fido, and Rover. At least in laptop shape I don’t look quite so edible.” He cocked his head to one side. “Speaking of shapes, yours could use a little work.”

“Chaos and Discord!”
I swore, though the oath no longer held the outrage it once had. I tended to think of the goddesses in question as the loyal opposition these days rather than the monsters I’d been raised to see. “Since I quit bothering with the wardrobe change, I keep forgetting to fix my face.”

I whistled
a half
dozen bars of binary code, initiating a process of transformation. Melchior nodded his approval as the vertical slits of my green eyes became humanlike circles, and my slightly pointed ears rounded themselves. I left my long black hair, fine bone structure, and dead white skin—I could always pretend I was a Goth.

“Better?” I asked.

He shook his head sadly. “What
would
you do without me?”

“Get a moment’s peace?” I responded sourly.

“I don’t think so,” replied Melchior. “Not with that sword attracting the attention of every cop within a thousand yards.”

“Oops.” I blushed.

In former times, whenever I visited with family—cousin Cerberus, for example—I’d always made sure to follow the protocols laid down by my grandmother, Lachesis, and worn my natural face along with the proper court garb in my black and green colors: tights, doublet, boots, and, of course, rapier and dagger. Now that I was apostate, I didn’t bother with the fancy clothes, preferring the protection and comfort of my Kevlar-lined motorcycle jacket, emerald Jack-of-lost-souls T-shirt, and black jeans. The boots I kept.
Likewise the blades.
They still seemed prudent, as did my .45 automatic. It wouldn’t do much good if Cerberus decided I looked bite-sized, but I had other enemies.

I undid the sheaths on my belt and handed them to Melchior, though I retained my pistol. The low-profile shoulder holster barely made a bulge under my leathers. He whistled a complicated binary passage that would have taken me an hour to perform on top of three days of practice and who knows how much coding time, did something creative with the local fabric of space-time, and made the weapons disappear.

And that is why I thank the Powers and Incarnations that I was born into modern times, when a hacker-cum-sorcerer like
myself
doesn’t need to do all of his coding on a dumb terminal or, worse, perform actual wild magic with all its inherent dangers and limitations. All magic taps chaos for its power, but the advent of the mweb, with its carefully regulated energy flows, has made the process
much
safer.

“Let’s go find Cerice and tell her what happened,” I said. She wasn’t going to be happy, but then, with her thesis defense scheduled in seven weeks, how would that be any different from her base state? Lately, she’d been so stressed, I half expected her to start bleeding from the ears.

“It’s your neck,” said Melchior, perhaps divining the direction of my thoughts. “Kneel, would you?”

I knelt, and he scrambled up onto my shoulder, where another whistled spell made him fade into his surroundings. It wasn’t quite invisibility, but anyone who saw him probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. Webgoblins didn’t exist. For that matter—a thought to remember when next I forgot to alter my appearance—neither did ex-princes of the middle house of Fate.

It was very late, and the night cold was really gnawing at my joints, especially the old injuries in my right knee, so I hurried. We had just reached the steps of Cerice’s lab building when a tiny blue hexagon of light appeared on the concrete railing.

“Now what?”
I muttered.

There
were
any number of folks who might gate in on me unannounced, most of them with ill intent, but none of them was six inches tall. Because of that I waited to see what happened next rather than do anything drastic. A moment later, a tiny naked woman popped into existence atop the pitted concrete. She had waist-length black hair, dragonfly wings, and—as I’d discovered the first time I met her—a thoroughly nasty disposition. A webpixie and sometime PDA, her name was Kira.