“I remember,” Damon assured him drily. “I’ll be there in an hour and a half, traffic permitting.”

“No traffic here,” Madoc drawled. “You should never have moved so close to the coast, Damie. World’s still overcrowded, thanks to you-know-who. Too many people, too many cars, wherever the real estate is in good condition. It’ll be a long time before the gantzers get to thisneighborhood.”

“Don’t bet on that,” Damon said. “The new generation can turn rubble back into walls with no significant effort at all. Around here you’d never know there was ever an earthquake, let alone two plague wars.”

“Around the alley,” Madoc riposted, “we don’t forget so easily. We’re conservationists, remember? Preserving the legacy of the plague wars and the great quakes, keeping alive allthe old traditions.”

“I’m on my way,” Damon said shortly. He wasn’t in the mood for banter.

Tamlin laughed, and might have said more, but Damon cut him off and the forest faded into darkness, leaving nothing visible except the customary virtual readouts, limned in crimson against the Stygian gloom.

He didn’t waste any time leaving the apartment and taking the elevator down to the basement. The elevator’s voice was back online but it didn’t have a word of complaint to utter.

The traffic was bad enough to make Damon wonder whether the twenty-first-century mythology of endless gridlock was as fanciful as everyone thought. At the turn of the millennium the world’s population hadn’t been much over five billion; the present day’s seven billion might be distributed a little more evenly in geographical terms, but people only thought of it as “small” by comparison with the fourteen billion peak briefly attained before the Second Plague War. As Madoc had said, the planet could still be considered overcrowded, thanks to Conrad Helier. The rising curve of the birthrate would cross the declining curve of the death rate again within ten or twelve years, and yet another psychologically significant moment would be upon the worrying world. Los Angeles had been so severely depopulated in the plague wars that it still lay half in ruins, but now that PicoCon had the Gantz patents all wrapped up and the last of the ancient antitrust laws had been consigned to the dustbin by the Washington Rump it was only a matter of time before the deconstructionists started the long march inland.

The further east Damon went the thinner the traffic became. He headed straight into the heart of the badlands, where the Second Plague War had struck hardest once the bugs had moved out of Hollywood, leaving nothing for the ‘77 quake to do but a little minor vandalism—by the time the Crisis arrived some twenty years later there had been no one around these parts to care. Soon enough, he was in a region where all the buildings which hadn’t already collapsed were in permanent danger of so doing: a district which was, in practice if not in theory, beyond the reach of the LAPD.

In truth, little enough of what Madoc Tamlin and his fellows got up to out here was unambiguously illegal. The fights were private affairs, which couldn’t concern the police unless a combatant filed a complaint—which, of course, none ever did—or someone died. Fighters did die, occasionally; a lot of the kids who got involved did so in order to earn the money that would pay for advanced IT, and some of them didn’t advance far enough quickly enough to keep themselves from real harm. Taping the fights wasn’t against the law, nor was selling them—except insofar as the tapes in which someone didget killed might be counted as evidence of accessory activity—so Madoc’s reputation as an outlaw was 90 percent myth. His only real crimes arose out of his association with software saboteurs and creative accountants.

Damon’s own record was no dirtier, formally or informally. He had never killed anyone, although he’d come close once or twice. He really had tried to see the fighting as a sport, with its own particular skills, its own unique artistry, and its own distinctive spectator appeal. He hadn’t given it up out of disgust, but simply because he’d become more and more interested in the technical side of the business—the way the raw tapes of ham-fisted brawls were turned into scintillating VE experiences for the punters. That, at least, was what he had told himself—and anyone else who cared to ask.

Damon found Madoc easily enough. He hadn’t been down the alley for more than a year, but it was all familiar—almost eerily so. The graffiti on the walls had been renewed but not significantly altered; all the heaps of rubble had been carefully maintained, as if they were markings on a field of play whose proportions were sacred. Madoc was busy wiring up a fighter who didn’t look a day over fourteen, although he had to be a littleolder than that.

“It’s too tight,” the fighter complained. “I can’t move properly.” Damon had no difficulty deducing that it was the boy’s first time.

“No it’s not,” said Madoc, with careful patience, as he knelt to complete the synaptic links in the reta mirabilewhich covered the fighter’s body like a bright spiderweb. “It’s no tighter than the training suit you’ve been using all week. You can move quite freely.”

The novice’s fearful eyes looked over Madoc’s shoulder, lighting on Damon’s face. Damon saw the sudden blaze of dawning recognition. “Hey,” the boy said, “you’re Damon Hart! I got a dozen of your fight tapes. You going to be doctoring the tape for this? That’s great! My name’s Lenny Garon.”

Damon didn’t bother to inform the boy that he hadn’t come to watch the fight and he didn’t deny that he had been brought in to doctor the tapes. He understood how scared the youngster must be, and he didn’t want to say anything that might be construed as a put-down. If he had judged the situation rightly, Lenny Garon was due to be cut up by a skilled knifeman, and he didn’t need any extra damage to his ego. Damon didn’t recognize the boy’s opponent, but he could see that the other wired-up figure was at least three years older and much more comfortable with the pressure and distribution of the reta mirabile.

Madoc stood up, already issuing stern instructions as to where the combatants shouldn’t stab one another. He didn’t want the recording apparatus damaged. “The only way you can make real money for this kind of work,” he told the novice, “is to get used to the kit and to make damn sure it doesn’t get damaged. Given that your chances of long-term survival are directly proportional to your upgrade prospects, you’d better get this right. It’s a good break, if you can carry it off. Brady’s tough, but you’ll have to go up against tougher if you’re to make your mark in this game.”

Lenny nodded dumbly. “I can do it,” he said uneasily. “I got all the feints and jumps. It’ll be okay. I won’t let you down.”

“We don’t want feints and jumps,” Madoc said, with a slight contemptuous sneer that might have been intended to wind the boy up. “We want purpose and skill and desperation. Just because we’re making a VR tape. . . . Explain it to him, Damon.”

Madoc turned away to check the other fighter’s equipment, leaving Lenny Garon to look up at Damon with evident awe. Damon was acutely embarrassed by the thought that it might have been using histapes that had filled this idiot with the desire to get into the fight game himself. The cleverer the tapes became as a medium of entertainment, the easier it became for users to forget the highly significant detail that fighters who were doing it for real were not insulated, as VE users were, from the consequences of their mistakes. Even if they had IT enough to blot out their pain, the actual fighters still got stabbed and slashed; the blood they lost was real, and if they were unfortunate enough to take a blade in the eye they lost the sight of it for a very uncomfortable couple of weeks.