I could read his walk well enough to know that he was planning to brush past me without a word, counting on the other Battle Magick students to keep us apart. I stepped out to meet him and stiff-armed him in the middle of his chest.
He looked down at my hand as though he could wither it with a
glance, then he met my eyes. "You don't want to be touching me, Hansen." I matched his tone as best I could. "I have news for you, Hari." "Fuck your news. Move your hand or I'll break your arm."
The last of the BM students filed into the VA suite; we were alone how in the corridor.
"Hari, just listen for one second, will you?"
"You're the one who's not lis—"
I popped him across the mouth, a good smooth right hook with my open palm, not too hard but with my hip behind it to drive the follow-through, just the way Tallman teaches it. He staggered across the corridor, off balance, and caught himself on the wall.
He bared his teeth. "Do you have any idea how dead you are?"
He delivered the line pretty well, but I knew his heart wasn't really in it; if he'd meant it, we wouldn't be talking.
"You want to kill me?" I said with a shrug. "Get in line."
"Yeah, I heard about you and Ballinger." He spat on the floor, then scowled at the pink trace of blood in his saliva. "That `enemy of my enemy' shit doesn't fly with me, so don't bother. It was a stupid thing to do."
"No, it wasn't," I told him. "It was the smartest thing I've done so far. It's so smart it's going to get us both graduated with honors, and on our way to Overworld."
"Yeah, swell. I'm late for class."
"Can't have that," I said. "Hammet's going to call you for the first solo simulation."
Now I finally had his full attention. His gaze sharpened. "Bullshit." I just smiled.
He stepped closer to me. "How do you know?"
"I bribed him for it." I chuckled right into his astonished face. "What's the point of being rich, if you don't use money to get what you want?"
He took another step, now close enough that I could smell coffee on his breath. His eyes glittered like the edge of a knife. "Why?"
"It's because of this idea I have. To solve our problem."
Faintly, though the door at my back, I heard Hammet launch into his classic Risk Lecture: "You, as Actors, have a precisely defined role, irrespective of whether you swing a blade or throw a lightning bolt, joust or heal the sick. It is purely and simply this: Your function in society is to risk your life in interesting ways."
Hari heard it, too, and he glanced past my shoulder with thinly veiled longing. I didn't need to flash on him to know that he was wondering if he'd ever get the chance to do exactly that.
"All right," he said grimly. "All right, I'm listening."
"No time to explain right now. When he calls you, he'll put you into the Waterfront. I've been through this sim, and it's a tough one. Don't use any magick."
No surprise, no incomprehension showed on his face; he watched me with transcendent concentration. "Why not?"
"Because you're not good enough, Hari. Hammet will make you look like a fool He's a sadist; humiliating his students is the only real pleasure he takes in life."
"But if I don't use magick—"
"Just don't, you hear me? Magick is exactly what they're expecting. You're a shitty thaumaturge. Stick with what you know."
I studied him, trying to see if I was making any impression, but he was as blank as stone. I shook my head. "Get in there. Hammet will be calling you any second."
"Kris—"
"No time, Hari. You want to talk about it, I'll be at my usual table over lunch. Now go."'
11
I sat in the back of the Aud, behind the other BM students, and watched Hari on three of the four big screens in front of the banked keyboards of the instructor's station. The three views showed him from behind, before, and above; the fourth didn't show him, but instead was Hari's POV.
He moved with some assurance through the Waterfront; he, like the other students, had had two dry runs the week before, to become accustomed to moving in the feedback suits and to get the feel of pulling the simulated Flow. On the screen, he looked again the generic-featured manikin I'd fought in the Meadow, dressed in loose, nondescript tunic and pants.
The Waterfront was another standardized encounter environment, modeled on the Terana docks on the west coast of the Ankhanan Empire. A tangled maze of clapboard shops, taverns, and brothels crowded what once were broad rights-of-way between massive stone-built warehouses. The streets teemed with people of all descriptions as well as a liberal sprinkling of the subhuman races of Overworld, but these were only for atmosphere. Hari could actually interact only with Hammet's TM, five retired Actors who waited in feedback suits of their own, in other cubicles of the VA suite. They would take on the roles of the other characters in this encounter.
The first Waterfront encounter is pretty simple. As he's walking along, the student hears feminine screams from a nearby alley; when he investigates—which he will, as avoiding the encounter is not an option if he wants to pass VA—he sees a man using a stout stick to beat a woman. The student has three spells to call upon: a Minor Shield, a fairly powerful Telekinesis, and, of course, the basic Flow bolt that any spellcaster can use.
What most students do—what I did, in fact—is self-righteously order the man to lay off, and when he refuses, to enforce the order with magick, either Shielding the woman or attacking the man with the TK or a Flow bolt.
This is where your average student gets stomped, because there isn't just one man, there are four: one behind him, and two more lying low on the one-story rooftops to either side of the alley. As soon as the student enters the trancelike state of mindview, all three of them jump him.
Now, don't get me wrong: You can fight them. The street and alleyway are even designed with a number of features that can be improvised into weapons by a resourceful student, like some broken jugs and splintered timbers, loose cobblestones as big as your fist that can be thrown by TK, and a couple of nooks you can back into and seal with a Shield.
In the end, though, they'll get you. Even if you manage to fight off all four—which, as far as I know, no one has ever done successfully, except me—the woman herself is part of the plan, and she'll knife you at her first opportunity. That's where I lost.
The whole purpose of this encounter, it seems to me, is to humiliate the student who goes through it—and to impress upon all the BM kids how vulnerable they are when they enter mindview. You can't win the fight; what Hammet does, afterward, is talk about how you could have made losing more entertaining.
Hammet's first clue that Hari's encounter wasn't going to go entirely according to plan probably came when Hari peered around the corner of the alley and saw the man beating the woman with the stick. His manikin's face was, of course, expressionless, but Hari's distinctive mutter came over the Aud's PA rich with scorn.
"Oh, that's original," he snorted. "Give me a break."
He shook his head and shuffled his feet a little; I thought he was searching for a balanced stance to enter mindview, and my heart sank. But he had other things on his mind: his shuffling feet had found one of those loose cobbles, and he bent and picked it up.
This is where the student steps forward and utters some fatuous variation on the time-honored "Stop, you fiend! Unhand that woman!" but Hari
just stood there for a moment and watched him beat her, holding the cobblestone thoughtfully.
Hammet keyed his mike. "Michaelson, what are you doing?"
"I'm intervening," came Hari's muttered reply. "That's what I'm supposed to do, right?"
'Get on with it, then."
"All right."
He took one step forward and fired the cobble overhand. As the stone left his hand he shouted, "Hey, asshole!" The man with the stick turned to look, just in time to catch about half a kilo of stone full in the mouth. The impact lifted him off his feet and dumped him to the ground like he
'd been hit with a bat.
Every student of Battle Magick in the Aud gasped like an affronted Leisurewoman.
"All right, I've intervened," Hari said to the air, sounding bored. "Now what?"
Some of the gasps gave way to snickers.
Hammet snarled something unintelligible, and the two men who had waited atop the single-story buildings leaped down toward Hari as though they wanted to land on him. Somehow, he'd been expecting this; he darted toward and past one of them, his arm extended to hook the falling man's legs out from under him. The poor guy tumbled in the air and landed hard on the back of his neck.
The other rolled with the fall and came up with a knife in his hand, but Hari had kept moving to the alley wall, where the pile of timbers stood. By the time the knife guy rolled to his feet, all he had a chance to see was a long section of two-by-four swinging down at his head. He got his arm up in time to take the blow, but it drove him back down to his knees, and Hari kicked him in the face.
By the time the fourth TA arrived, sword in hand, three men were down. Hari faced the fourth with his two-by-four angled before him like a bastard sword at garde. He hesitated, and through Hari's POV I clearly saw his gaze shift over Hari's shoulder; on the front view I saw the woman lunge toward Hari's back.
But again he was somehow ready for this; with uncanny, almost prescient assurance he slipped to one side and backhanded the two-by-four across her chest. It stopped her cold, and in that one second of stunned stillness, he dropped the board, took the knife from her opening fingers, and yanked her around in front of him as a shield, the knife against her throat.
"Drop the sword or she dies," he rasped, and I don't know if the TA believed him or not, but I did.
There was a moment of shocked silence in the Aud, then a scattering of applause, which turned to shouts of useless warning as the man Hari had felled with the rock rose up behind him and clubbed him across the back of the head.
Even then, Hari didn't fall immediately. Half stunned, he still managed to slash the woman's throat and cast her aside to turn on his attacker, but now the man he'd kicked in the face had risen as well, and the one who'd fallen on his head, and they all waded in on him with knives and clubs. He fought with desperate ferocity, but he couldn't handle them all at once.
They beat the crap out of him.
The feedback suits in the VA suite are loaded with failsafes; they can't do much worse than raise a welt or give you a minor bruise and a lump or two. On the other hand, the simulation programs were supposed to shut down a feedback suit when its sim takes what should be a killing or incapacitating blow.
From his keyboard at the instructor's station, Hammet had altered the simulation's parameters, to let his TM get up after they should have been eliminated—even the woman whose throat was supposed to be cut.
They spent longer than they really needed to take Hari out, battering him from one side of the virtual alley to the other and back again. They punished him as much as the feedback suit would allow, and he never made a sound. When his manikin lay stretched out and bleeding on the cobbles, Hammet ended the simulation.
He rose and keyed his throat mike. "Michaelson? You want to tell me what that was supposed to be about?"
Hari's response, muffled perhaps by the simulated unconsciousness of his manikin, sounded like something like, "Cheating bastard ..."
And a faint rustle of assent came from the BM kids in the seats of the Aud.
Hammet's tone went icy, and I could see the man was livid, as though he'd received a deadly insult. "Are you some kind of a joker, Michaelson? Why didn't you use any magick?"
Hari's reply was an open sneer. "What for?"
"Because that's what you do, you dumb shit. You're supposed to be a thaumaturge, aren't you?"
"What I am," Hari said, "is an Actor. What I do, is risk my life in interesting ways, right?"
"Don't mock me, you Temp sack of shit. How do you expect to graduate from the College of Battle Magick if you can't throw a fucking spell?"
I rose quietly in the back of the Aud; I had a feeling this argument was going to escalate in an unpleasant way, and I had already seen everything I needed to see.
This was going to work.
12
I sat alone in the dining hall. For self-protection, I chose to be in public view as much as possible, so I'd begun a habit of lingering there at mealtimes.
My friends often sat with me; I was still as popular as ever, and it was considered something of a coup in Shitschool to be seen eating at my ta ble. None of them really understood what was happening; they all thought I was very brave, for the way I'd faced down Ballinger, and they all joked and laughed and told each other, See? Those Combat jerks aren't as tough as they think they are. Most of them are only Labor trash, after all. Hollow men, they said smugly, congratulating themselves for their superior breeding, covered in muscle but empty inside.
I could have told them how tough those Combat jerks are. I could have told these scions of European Business houses, these social-climbing Professionals and self-conscious Tradesmen, that those hollow Labor men are filled with a terrifying solidity.
But what's the point? They wouldn't believe me, not really; I had no way to bring them to the understanding that Hari had given me. They'd only think I was putting on airs, that I was being melodramatic, the same way I'd thought Hari was. I ached to find a way to lock each of these smug creeps that I used to think were my friends in a room alone with Ballinger for ten minutes.
Let them look into the eyes of that hollow man as he looms over them like a thunderhead. It'd change their fucking lives.
That noontide, after Hari's VA debut, these creeps and hangers-on had left early, and I sat alone at my table, going over Hardanger's Primal Culture, barely seeing the words on the screen, wondering if Hari was going to find me here.
I was slogging through the third of Hardanger's five alternate translations of the heroic epic Dannellarii T'ffar when Hari came through the door. Two weeks ago, maybe, I would have kept reading, to pretend to be cool and nonchalant; I had neither time nor patience for that now. I flipped the screen closed and waited for Hari to reach my table.
He had a couple lumps coming up on his face, and he approached me cautiously. "All right," he said, eyeing me with a kind of animal wariness. "I'm listening."
"Sit?' I waved an offering hand to the chair opposite, and waited while he thought it over.
Slowly, watching me, he slid into the chair. "So. What was that about? Hammet hates my guts, now"
I shrugged. "Hammet hates everybody. Don't worry about it." "They beat the shit out of me."
"Only because Hammet reset the sim parameters, and everybody in that room knew it. The story will be all over campus by tonight. Nobody beats that encounter. Nobody. Not even me. You're going to be a legend in the College of Battle Magick, Hari."
"Like you? Big fucking deal. Am I supposed to thank you for it?"
"It'll make your career; I told him. "It'll get you graduated with honors and off to Overworld."
"How am I gonna graduate when I can barely throw a fucking spell?"
"Hari, Hari, Hari," I said, shaking my head in mock pity. "I think you're the only guy who was in the Aud today who didn't get it. You don't need magick, Hari. Leave the spells to upcaste pussies like me, huh? You're going to graduate from the College of Combat."
Give him credit as a flexible thinker: he didn't scoff. He leaned back in his chair and stared through me with narrowed eyes, thinking hard. I went on, "Did you get a recording? You proved today that you can fight and win—even when you're completely overmatched. Hari, that was five to one! You weren't even armed. I've never seen anything like it, and neither has anybody else around here."
He shook his head, and his eyes went cold; I could see him talk himself out of it. "Proves nothing. That's why they call it a simulation, Kris."
"Yeah, I know. Chandra won't even consider it—unless we force him to."'
"How do you
plan to do that?"
I took a deep breath and sighed it out; for a moment I had a fleeting fancy of being on Overworld, of summoning mindview and slipping a Suggestion into Hari's unconscious mind. It was a pleasant fancy, and it gave me a warm little smile.
"The whole thing revolves around proving that you, Hari Michaelson, skinny little Labor trash Shitschool student, can take on a highly trained warrior three times your size in the real world, straight up, no rules," I began. I would have gone on, but Hari was right with me.
"You're talking about Ballinger."
I nodded. "You can bump chests with him all you want, but me?" I spread my hands. "I need this settled before he kills me. I have it worked out so we can tie the whole thing up with a ribbon, and everybody's happy."'
"How do you figure?"
I held up my hand. "First, you tell me: What do you think?"
"Going over to Combat? Shit, Kris, it'll never happen. Even the girls over there outmass me by ten kilos. You ever been hit by somebody who is, like, double your mass?"
"Just once," I said grimly. "I didn't care for it. But we're talking about you. Forget whether you think it's possible. Do you want to?"
He sat there and stared through me, and didn't answer.
I leaned forward. "I know," I told him. "I know why you're in Battle Magick. Why you want to be an Actor. It's because, deep down, what you really like is to hurt people."
He didn't deny it. I grinned. "Do it on Earth, you're in prison, or cyborged. Do it on Overworld, you're a star."
He squinted at me.
"Sure," I went on, "BM was your best chance to get to Overworld—but not anymore. You don't have it, Hari. You're not going to make it." His lips compressed, and his face darkened.
"But, you know why you don't have it?" I said. "Why you'll never be an adept? I saw it all when we fought in the Meadow. Your Shell? It stops at your fists. It's because when you think about hurting people, when you really let your passion run, you don't care about magick. You want to do it by hand."