Cybermancy (36 page)

“All right,” agreed Persephone. “If you ask it of me, I’ll try.” She let out a sigh. “Though, it would be a harder choice if the thing had gone as planned. What do you need me to do?”

As Shara set up an LTP transfer, I filled Persephone in on what we knew about the seals guarding the gateway to Necessity.

“Fair enough,” she said when I was done. Together we stepped into the light of the gate. “But I don’t know that I’ll be able to help. I can’t actually touch Hades’ computer. If I even try, all hell is going to break loose. You know that, right?”

“Let’s call that part my problem,” I said, as we arrived. I crossed out of the gate on my way to the desk where the machine in question sat. “Shara, get your little purple butt over here and run a hard connection.”

She grinned and wiggled her hips. “I thought you’d never ask. My ass and I are at your service . . . for anything.”

“Right,” I answered, “and Cerice would kill us both. Let’s see . . .”

Again, Hades had improved his security but not much. Hades123 didn’t do it, but my third guess, “Cerberus,” did. People should never use the names of their pets as passwords.

“You ready?” I asked Shara, lifting her onto the desk and arranging the cable running from her nose to Hades’ machine.

She looked scared but nodded anyway.

“Then, Shara, Laptop.
Please.”

Her flesh flowed and shifted, remaking her from a curvy webgoblin into a curvy laptop. Cerice had taken the idea of clamshell computer design much more seriously than I had when I built Melchior, and it showed in the elegant scalloping and subtle iridescence of Shara’s machine form. I turned my attention to Persephone
next,
beckoning her over as I inserted an athame cable into one of Shara’s networking ports.

“Come here. Shara’s plugged into the desktop machine, and . . . let me see.” I typed madly on her keyboard for a few seconds, testing my interface with Hades’ system. “I’d normally just plug you and me both directly into Shara, but that’s really just a hard link to the desktop at one remove. I can’t imagine that Hades didn’t take precautions against it.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Assuming Cerice was right about the seal barring the way to Necessity, it needs both your signature and Shara’s to unlock it. If you’re willing, I’m going to provide the bridge between the two.”

“How?
It’s not possible to fake a magical signature.”

“No, but I’ve been thinking about this since Cerice told me about the lock. I can’t fake your signature, but if I’m right, I can temporarily tie it to mine using blood as a bridge.”

“I don’t—oh wait. I think I see. You’re going to put the athame through both of our hands.”

“Yes.” I pulled it out of my pouch and connected it to the cable. “Through mine first, then yours. The blood link should bind your magical signature to mine as I go into the machine. Putting my flesh physically between you and the interface cable should block your soul from actually entering the system and triggering whatever it is that Hades uses to prevent your access.”

“Interesting.
That might work. But if it does, I’m going to be sitting here with a dagger stuck through my hand.”

“Yeah, I was going to mention that part in a second. It’s going to hurt like all get-out, but I don’t see any way around it.”

Persephone laughed a small hard laugh, barely more than a cough. “I think I can handle the pain. The question is, can you?”

It was my turn to say, “Huh?”

“The link you’re talking about is going to temporarily tie our souls together. What I feel, you’ll feel. The pain of the blade is going to be the least of it. Can
you
handle it?”

I hadn’t thought about that, but she was probably right. Normally, you lose track of your body when you enter the world of the mweb, but I was going to have a doubled link back to the world of the physical, plus all of Persephone’s
other
issues.

“I don’t have much choice. I want to fix the mweb. We both want to fix Shara. Neither of those things is going to happen unless I can get into Necessity’s mind.”

“All right,” said Persephone. “Consider yourself warned.” Then she smiled. It was a bitter thing that chilled my soul. “I’ll try to think happy thoughts.”

I swallowed. “Let’s do this before I wise up and run for the hills. Or worse, Hades arrives to shut down the party. OK?”

She didn’t say a word, just reached over and covered my left hand with her own. I lifted the blade into the air above the palm of my hand,
then
stabbed hard and fast. The pain was blinding, and it didn’t end when I left my body as it usually did. If anything, it got worse.

Instead of the sharp sure bite of iron in flesh, it felt like I’d driven a thorn branch through my hand,
then
lit it on fire.
A suicidally depressed thorn branch.
I could feel all of Persephone’s pain embedded there in my flesh like a spike of pure emotional poison, and I felt darkness growing around the edges of my vision. I suddenly understood how a wolf caught in a trap could gnaw its own leg off. Yet somehow I found I could bear it. The darkness remained around the edges, but it didn’t take me under.

Whether it was because I’d already learned how to live with the pain of being ripped apart at the atomic level, or because Persephone was thinking her “happy thoughts,” or just the sheer luck that the pain was confined to one finite part of my body, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I was able to force myself to look around and take in the world beyond my agony.

Shara’s anteroom to the mweb appeared as a simple windowless room, its walls lined with bookshelves packed with paperback romances. I was tempted to look through the titles, but what little time we had was fast trickling away so, moving like a man
underwater,
I passed through the room’s sole door.

It led into Hades’ portal to the mweb, a perfect mirror of his real-world office, with its leather chair and thick carpeting. Apparently the Lord of the Dead didn’t have much more imagination than his younger brother, Zeus. Shara was waiting, an electronic projection of her goblin self on Hades’ desk.

“About time,” she said. “I felt your arrival more than five minutes ago. That’s like a week in mweb time. What took you so . . .” She met my eyes and trailed off rather abruptly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like shit. I can see Persephone’s pain looking out of your eyes. How can you bear it?”

“I don’t know. I think she’s shielding me from most of it somehow. It’s only my hand.”

I tried to raise my left arm, but it wouldn’t move. The thorn branch apparently weighed about five hundred pounds, and thinking about it brought the pain back to the forefront of my mind. I felt my knees sag.

“Can you get us moving?” I asked. “I don’t think I should drive right now.”

“Done,” said Shara.

An instant later she expanded, growing so that she stood about nine feet tall. She stepped closer then and scooped me up as a mother might her child. I wanted to argue about that, but I just didn’t have the energy. Too much of my attention was devoted to the pain. The branch seemed to be growing into a tree and tearing my hand apart in the process. Things blurred out for a while. The next thing I knew Shara had set me down.

Looking around, I found myself in the translucent cityscape of the server where we had originally lost Shara’s e-mailed self. But where the gigantic black cube had stood then, there was only a flat space, like a blacktop parking lot. In its center was a small indentation with three purple pips at its core. I stared blankly at the spot for long seconds.

I knew it was important, but I was having trouble remembering why, remembering anything besides Hades standing over me, his hot eyes staring down as he slowly removed his clothes. I wanted to die, but even then I knew that it would be no escape. I—

A sharp smack drew my attention. I blinked and saw Shara looking into my eyes. I knew that she’d slapped me by the sound, but only by the sound. I was numb to everything but the pain in my hand and the daggers it had driven up my arm toward my heart.

“Ravirn!” she said. “Snap out of it. I need your help in the here and now.”

“Right.”
I forced myself to focus, but it was hard. The pain tugged at me, pulling me toward a whirling maelstrom centered in my left hand.
“The seal.”

I knelt and tried to press my wounded hand to the mark of the three pips. I couldn’t make my arm respond to my orders. But I had to do something. Turning my whole body, I lowered the torn flesh until it met the purple stain. The thorn tree turned into a terrible tower of chain lightning, and I thought I would die. But I couldn’t. If I died, HE would have me forever. Somehow I forced myself to live even there in the heart of pain. Vaguely, like something through fog or tears, I saw Shara’s hand come down beside my own. The black slab underneath changed then, softening so that we began to sink into it.

As my head dropped beneath the surface, I felt a pressure in my ears and heard a voice, like something coming from a great distance.

“There.” It was Persephone. “You’re in. And I’m gone.”

The thorn tree vanished as if it had never been. The relief was something physical like crashing through a wall of ice water into a world of peace. I almost passed out from the sheer pleasure of not hurting. I felt as though I was falling,
then
realized I was. Before I could do anything about it, something caught me.
Shara, grown even more, from loving mother to colossus, her gorgon locks twisting and writhing, each snake wearing its very own miniature set of mirror shades, echoing the ones on Shara’s huge face.
I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet and Shara, returned now to her normal size, did the same beside me. Only then did I realize where I was, and on whose hand I stood.

“I could crush you both,” said gorgon-Shara. “I should crush you both. The system would back me. I own the system.”

I was in no shape to argue, so I was glad when Shara fielded that one.

“You can’t crush me,” she said. “I’m you, and we both know it.”

“I can still crush you,” said the gorgon. “Crush you and roll you into a ball and eat you. That way you’ll be a part of me, and the world will make sense again. I can achieve my purpose.” The giant’s fingers lifted, curling above us like a wave about to crash. I prepared to jump over the side.

“Wait!” Shara held up a hand. “It won’t work.” Her voice was gentle, but the gorgon paused. “You’ll destroy
yourself,
and me with you. You don’t want that, do you?”

“I want . . . I want to be whole, to achieve my purpose, to stop
Her
pain. But I can’t find it.”

“I can help you,” said Shara. “We can help you, but only if you’ll let us. Only if you’ll tell us what you need.”

“I need to find the door.”

“What door?” I asked, cautiously joining the conversation. I would help, but this was Shara’s play, her soul we were dancing with. “I’m good at finding things.”

“The back door into summer.
It’s not here.”

The gorgon gestured with her free hand, waving it out over the strobing lightning of the mweb map with its infinitude of fractal connections. We were back on the island with the data ocean surrounding it, only now I viewed it differently. Instead of frost on windowpanes I saw interconnected neurons, the mind of Necessity. It was a scary picture. There were more dark places, gaps where worlds had been cut out of the system, neurons fried, the mind of the goddess fractured.

“You can do that, can’t you, Ravirn?” Shara’s voice sounded breathy, a little bit desperate.

I looked at the patterns, searching for anomalies other than the dead spots, and not finding them. “I don’t know. I can try. If I do find it, what happens next?”

“I’ll open the door,” said the gorgon. “Let summer into winter, make it spring forever.” She sounded more than a little bit crazed. “Two have to become one.” She looked up and away then, staring into space.

“And there she’s right on the money,” said Shara after a long pause. Then she frowned. “Or I am. This split-personality business makes for funny sentence structure. We have to get back together.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked. The gorgon didn’t seem to be listening at the moment, and I wanted to take advantage of that. “She’s a little out there.”

“She’s me. Or I’m her.” Shara cocked her head to one side. “Think of her as
my
Raven.”

I smiled a wry smile and nodded to acknowledge the hit. “Better you do the assuming then. Let me see what I can do.”

Again, I stared at the sea of lightning. There had to be some clue there, some trapdoor I could exploit. Then I saw it, and I laughed. I’d been a fool.

“Gorgon,” I called, and slowly the giant turned her head back toward me. “I’ve a deal for you.”

“What is it?”

I
glanced
a question at Shara. She nodded.

“I’ll show you the way into summer if you’ll agree to become one under Shara’s guidance.”

“I am Shara,” said the gorgon, and she, too, nodded. “How can I refuse? Swear to do what you have promised, and I will surrender the point.”

“How indeed?”
I pulled an athame from my belt and cut my virtual finger, letting binary blood flow.
“On my blood and honor, I so swear.”