Cybermancy (8 page)

That’s because no one messes with Necessity.
Repeat,
no one
. Not my grandmother or her sisters, not Zeus, not Hades, not even Eris—and Discord’s flat-out nuts, a friend, but nuts all the same. Necessity is to the gods what Fate is to everybody else.

So if Shara’s trip had been interrupted at the hardware level, it was because of something Necessity had personally built into the system. The very thought made my bones itch.

“Can you find out where she is?” I asked, trying not to get my hopes up. There was nothing at all I could do to affect Necessity, but at the same time the possibility that Shara was still
somewhere
meant there was a chance she’d end up here.

“I don’t know. As far as I can tell, this”—Cerice tapped the screen for emphasis—“autoforwarded her to an address that should be a null set.”

I closed my eyes. Not good. Not good at all. “I note your use of the word should. Can I take that to mean that it isn’t actually a null set?”

“I don’t know.” Cerice cocked her head to one side, the way she often did when she’d found an absolutely fascinating programming problem. “It shouldn’t be possible for this string to work as an end address, but a file-received message came back to the mweb server in response to Shara’s forward. Take a look.”

I leaned in. Sure enough, there was the standard response string from—I mentally translated the binary—souladmin@necessity . . . Dot, dot, dot? That didn’t make any sense at all. But there it was.

The clear e-trail showed that whatever had happened to Shara made sense to the mweb architecture, but I hadn’t a clue how to do anything about it. Even if I knew where Necessity kept her personal server stack, I wouldn’t dare go after it. There are fates much worse than death. Just ask Prometheus.

“So now what?”
I asked. Necessity had Shara, or at least her server did. While I might be willing to tackle Hades, the Fate of the Gods was a whole different story.

Apparently, Cerice didn’t know what to do either. She just slumped in her chair and looked defeated. “We wait.”

“I hate waiting.”

Me
too
,
said a text box on Melchior’s screen.
All right if I go back to goblin now?

I nodded, and Melchior shifted forms. “Why don’t you two head back to the apartment?” He made shooing gestures. “I’ll catch up in a little while.”

“But I’ve got to—” Cerice began.

Melchior didn’t let her finish. “Don’t argue. You’re out on your feet, and you’ve already told us your program’s screwed without Shara’s help. It won’t be any more screwed if you take thirty hours off, and maybe the rest will help you get some fresh perspective.”

“Why thirty . . .” Cerice trailed off as she looked up at the clock. “Oh.” It was a quarter past one. In thirty hours it would be sunrise on Sunday, and the Furies would come to kill me.

“Go,” said Melchior. “I’ll just tidy up around here.”

“Thanks, Mel,” I said. He hates cleaning, probably even more than I do. This offer was entirely about giving Cerice and me some time alone. “I appreciate it.”

 
The first time we made love it was a desperate, against-the-living-room-wall affair, all sliding flesh and seeking tongues—striving to ignore the sword of Damocles hanging over us. The second go-round was slower and longer, with Cerice riding me to a climax on the
oriental
rug in the hall. Finally, in our own bed, we managed to forget everything but each other. There, massage led to caresses, which moved on to mutual nibbling, then to a slow passion, spooned-up together on our sides.
Mutual orgasm.
Exhaustion.
Sleep.
And . . .

I was in the hallway at the front of the
University
of
Minnesota
’s
Weisman
Art Museum
.
In front of me stood my cousin Moric.
He wore head-to-toe armor, red and blue, blood and bruises.
That couldn’t be right. Moric was dead, eaten by a burst of Primal Chaos that I had unleashed.
Yet here he was.

I heard gunshots from outside, and sparks danced on the back of his armor. He didn’t seem to notice, turning to face me instead of looking for the shooter.

“Ah, dear little Raven.
How nice of you to come out to meet me. Did you run out of places to hide? Or did you finally remember the nobility of your blood and decide to look your death in the face?”

“Neither,” I said, echoing the words I’d spoken then through the mouth of a doppelganger. I wondered at his use of
Raven
. He’d died before I’d earned that name. “I decided that if I was going to go, I should at least take you with me.”

Then, just as I had at the time, I braced myself and opened a line into the interworld chaos. What I was doing was a violation of every rule I knew about the proper management of magical power, and the potential cost was terrible. Tapping the raw chaos without taking major precautions was an invitation to end your magical career as a charcoal briquette.

I felt like I’d stuck a needle in my arm and started pumping liquid flame directly into my veins. As I did so, I expected my knees to give way as they had that long year ago, perhaps even breaking the right one anew.

But instead of collapsing or cooking in my own juices, I stood there and took the pain as the fires roared through my circulatory system. The pure raw stuff of chaos filled me until I felt as if I must dissolve from within. I’d never experienced such agony. I’d never experienced such . . . ecstasy.
Ecstasy?
Yes. Along with the fire came a terrible rush of joy, like a whole-body orgasm. The internal burning didn’t hurt any less, but I found myself wanting it to go on forever. Of course, it couldn’t. After what felt like hours but was truly not much more than the time between blinks, the chaos passed beyond my capacity to contain.

It burst forth from the palms of my hands in twin streamers of wildfire, twisting and coiling along a line that ran from me to a point just above Moric’s heart. His armor protected him briefly, but the power of it knocked him off his feet. Soon he began to burn. Again the scene diverged from my memory. Then, the eyeballs of my doppelganger had melted. Now, I watched in horror as Moric flopped and rolled, trying to fight clear of the fire.

My stomach turned in horror at what I was doing, yet I couldn’t look away, couldn’t even tell myself that if I’d known about this, I would never have done the deed. It had been him or me. As much as it tore at me to see him like this, I knew that if I had it all to do over again, I’d still have to pick me. Seconds ticked by. Finally, Moric died. The flow of chaos did not. It built, rolling back over me and filling the space, eating away at the walls and floor. The power had me in its grip just as it had all those months ago, and it was not letting go.

Then, I’d had to sacrifice my doppelganger and slip between worlds to break free. Even that had only worked because the mweb was temporarily down. This time I had opened the link directly through my own body, not that of a surrogate. There was nowhere to run and no way to escape. The chaos kept flowing. Moric’s body was long gone, completely dissolved. Now the hall followed. I felt the floor give way beneath me, but I didn’t fall. I floated at the heart of a rapidly expanding globe of pure Primal Chaos.

I could no longer see anything but the wild tumbling colors that fill the place between worlds, but somehow I could feel the stuff eating into the substance of the planet, tearing great chunks out of reality and devouring them whole. I felt the University die.
The city of Minneapolis.
The continent of North America.
The whole damn Decision Locus, reabsorbed by the stuff that had given it birth. Then, when I was alone, a living point in the heart of a chaos, it turned on me and
I
, too, was devoured.

I woke with Moric’s final throes echoing in my mind and cold sweat running off my forehead. The only light in the little bedroom came from the blinking red LEDs of the clock: 6:30. I’d only slept a few hours. It would already be getting light outside, but Melchior had drawn the curtains for us. I was dead tired, but jangling nerves and the emotional aftershocks of the nightmare were enough to let me know that I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep.

As gently as possible, I disengaged myself from Cerice. She made a tiny noise of protest when I opened the covers and the cold air hit her but subsided when I tucked them back around her neck. I might have had the more strenuous day, but she’d been running on sheer will for weeks. Now that she’d finally let herself collapse, I didn’t expect her to move before noon.

A selfish part of me wanted to get her up, to drag her out in a pell-mell effort to deny my danger. But she really needed the sleep, and I knew deep down that waking her would only serve to drive the awareness of impending doom deeper. Instead, I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and slipped out to the kitchen with the intention of making myself some coffee and breakfast. Melchior was there before me, handing me a cup as I staggered through the arch that led into the hallway.

“Eggs?” he asked.

“Depends, are you cooking them?” Melchior and food preparation made for a bad mix.

“Great Zeus, no!” said Melchior. “I’m going to run down to the hotel on the corner and pick them up from their café like I did the coffee.”

“That would explain the Murray’s Hall logo on the mug, then.” It was a very high-class establishment where Harvard put up visiting VIPs and rich alums. The food was outstanding, and I could avoid any guilt by leaving them the money for breakfast in my will. “Sounds good, Mel. What am I getting?”

“Normally, I’d say ‘whatever’s under the heat lamps when I get there,’ but they just put in a new computerized ordering system, so the sky’s the limit.”

Hacked breakfast
and
a menu, what more could you ask for? I told Melchior what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later he delivered a set of covered hotel dishes containing a bacon-and-mushroom omelet, crispy hash browns, homemade English muffins, a couple of dark chocolate croissants, a ham steak, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and more coffee. I picked up a place mat and wafted a breakfast-flavored breeze down the hallway. When even this enticement didn’t generate a sound from Cerice’s direction, I tucked in. I’d have to ask Melchior to steal another breakfast when she finally woke up.

Once I’d finished transferring calories from my plate to my stomach and gotten up a good head of caffeine, I asked Melchior to go back to laptop and called up a Graphic User Interface version of the e-mail transfer point Cerice had found. Maybe GUI would show me things that hadn’t been apparent in binary.

Collecting a tiny dagger from a sheath in the sleeve of my leather jacket, I plugged a networking cable into the hilt and connected the other end to Mel’s laptop form. The athame was maybe five inches long and narrow enough to pass for a letter opener, but no letter opener had ever been this sharp. I braced my wrist against the edge of the table,
then
plunged the blade into my left palm, bearing down until the guard touched my flesh and the tip stood out from the back of my hand. Bitter agony catapulted me out of my flesh and into the world of the mweb, where it left me.

I hung above a sort of crystalline city, the mweb server in all its multicore interconnected glory. I’d had Melchior color the native software in a pale translucent green, remote client apps in a deeper opaque olive, and the internal pathways between programs sea blue. Backbone lines into and out of the server were orange, lesser links yellow. The honking-big pipeline that went directly to the Fate Core I marked in do-not-touch radioactive red. I’d already dodged one death sentence for interfering with it; no sense giving the Furies extra incentive.

Melchior tightened focus on the place where Shara had gone elsewhere. It felt like a slow-motion skydive as I went from a satellite’s-eye city view through neighborhood mode down to looking at a single building. The e-mail routing node was a cube about the size of a six-story office building and part of a big cluster of similar nodes, mostly much larger ones. It also stood out like a cyclops in an optometrist’s shop. Instead of the greens we’d used for software nodes, it was literally a black box, an enigma attached directly to the motherboard. There were no obvious connections leading out of the server. E-mail went in and then it went . . . somewhere else. Then verification of messages received came back from wherever that somewhere was.

I moved closer, almost touching the node. I couldn’t be sure without entering, but it looked an awful lot like an independent core, a computer within the computer. I reached out toward it and . . . stopped. Something about the node raised the virtual hairs on the back of my electronic neck, and it
wasn’t just knowing
I was flirting on the edges of Necessity’s business. Accessing Melchior, I had him pull up one of my standard hacking tools, a code weasel,
a
completely independent program with no connections back to him or me. It appeared in my hand, a small furry thing like its namesake, different only in that it had bat wings. Moving well away from the node, I released it.

It dropped like a hunting hawk, backwinging just before it touched the black surface and landing gently. Before it had time to so much as fold its wings, a ball of black fire emerged from the node and engulfed it, incinerating it instantly. A dark flash and the weasel
was
gone. The flame, hovering above the node and spinning in place, remained. I decided I’d used up my luck for the day and had better leave. The second I moved, so did the ball. It came after me like an ebony comet with a tail of black sparks glinting behind it like chips of midnight.