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  Confused, scared, his anger turning to fear, Kyle put the knife down on the countertop. The instant he did the sailor grabbed the front of his tee shirt and yanked him up off his feet. "Gonna slice me up, huh?" He smacked Kyle across the face, hard, once, twice, three times, then threw him across the room to bang onto his cot so hard that it collapsed.

  His mother got out of bed as the sailor pulled on his clothing, talking softly to him, begging him not to go.

  "Come on, you can have both of us. We'll have a party."

  But the sailor buttoned up his pants and left. "I don't like wise-ass kids with knives," he snarled.

  When he shut the door behind him Kyle's mother staggered over to his collapsed cot and pulled him from its tangled blanket. "You little bastard!" she screeched. "You little trouble-making bastard!"

  She beat him with the leather strap she kept hanging on the closet door. Because the sailor had left without paying.

  Stiff and sore as he was the next morning, Kyle made his way through the cold damp wind coming off the harbor down the long blocks of row houses to school. School was a refuge for Kyle, a safe place where he could escape the reality of his hellish existence. If the teachers knew of his mother's business they never mentioned it. The kids teased him, but it was no worse than the teasing they subjected all the other kids to. Kyle took their teasing good-naturedly; he was willing to accept it, to have friends. Teasing was nothing; only kids who liked you bothered to tease you.

  At school Kyle could escape. He was a good student, not the brightest in class, but he did his homework faithfully and always came to class prepared—no matter how late he had to stay up at night.

  But on this day Kyle's mind was not on the classroom lessons. He knew he could not go home after school. He knew he could not face his mother or watch his sister do what his mother did. And he heard that sailor's drunken, leering, terrifying, "So maybe you wanna get fucked too, hah?"

  That night he slept in a cardboard carton, part of a small mountain of discarded cartons and crates piled up by one of the dockside warehouses. It was cold and wet, the kind of chill that penetrates to the bone. But it was better than going home. He dreamed of his mother but sometimes she was Crystal but no matter who she was she was angry at him, furious, slashing at him with that leather strap and screaming wildly.

  In the earliest light of morning he made his way to the nearest dock, furtive as one of the rats that dwelled in the old warehouses, and crapped into the harbor's scummy water. His stomach ached with hunger and he wondered how he could get something to eat. He washed as best as he could in a rain-filled oil barrel that he found leaning against a warehouse wall, then put his books under his arm and made his way to school.

  He lived like that for nearly five weeks, sleeping in the trash piles outside the warehouses, scrounging food from other kids at school or stealing their lunch bags when hunger pressed so hard he did not care if they caught him.

  His teacher, a wrinkled-faced spinster who always looked unhappy, noticed that he was losing weight, dirty-faced, coughing. But he remained quiet and obedient in class despite the increasing filthiness of his clothes.

  Each night Kyle avoided the occasional shadowy figures he saw along the docks. He wanted no part of those older men, even though he saw that sometimes they lit fires and cooked food for themselves. He stayed to himself despite the steamy aromas of their cooking that made his stomach growl impatiently. And all through those weeks neither his mother nor his sister made the slightest attempt to find him. At first he had expected his mother to appear at the school, demanding that he return home. Or maybe his sister might hang around outside the school, trying to catch a glimpse of him. one evening he snuck back to the corner of the street where their flat was. He saw Crystal walking up the street toward him, her face smeared with heavy makeup. She was wearing one of her mother's dresses; it looked stupid on her, but still some guys across the street whistled at her. Kyle ran away, unable to face his own sister.

  He felt guilty about that. He wanted to protect Crystal, wanted to take her away on one of the ships he saw in the harbor. But he knew that was a dream, a fantasy so far removed from him that he might as well ask her to fly to the Moon with him.

  Kyle did not know it was pneumonia. He was lucky, though. The night he collapsed, body flaming with fever, one of the homeless winos eking out a living among the docks stumbled across his unconscious form and dragged him out to the front of a warehouse, where even the laziest and most obtuse night watchman would inevitably spot him.

  When he woke up in the hospital Kyle had the good sense not to give his name. He did not want his mother to find him. He could not face returning home to her and Crystal. He steadfastly refused to say a word about his family or background, even to the police officers who were brought in to question him.

  "They'll put you in an orphanage, kid," said one of the policeman, half-angry at Kyle's stubbornness, half-worried at the life ahead for this scrawny boy.

  "You won't like the orphanage," warned the other cop. His first view of the orphanage was through the windows of a police van. Under a bleak gray winter sky the buildings looked even bleaker and grayer, like a prison. Inside, the walls were cold and bare, the floors worn smooth by generations of boys passing through.

  They brought him to a small office and sat him down in front of a desk. Behind the desk sat a young woman a social worker, with a long paper form to be filled out. The first question on it was, "Name?"

  "I don't remember my name," said Kyle.

  The woman did not believe him. The guard standing behind him cuffed him lightly on the ear to encourage his memory. The woman frowned up at the guard.

  "You have to have a name," she said to Kyle. "If you won't give us one, or can't give us one, I'll make one up for you."

  That was how he came to be called Kyle Muncrief. It was the name of a handsome leading man in a soap opera that the social worker watched every afternoon.

  Kyle did not like the orphanage, true enough. But it was better than home. He tolerated the half-spoiled food and intolerant staff workers who treated the boys like diseased cattle. He did not mind the gray barracks of the living quarters; his cot was actually better than the old one he had slept on at home, its scratchy army surplus blanket thicker and warmer. He survived the brutal hazings and bullying of the other guys. He made friends easily enough, but he took no part in their gangs and tribal wars. When the guards handed out physical punishment to everybody because some wiseguy did something and they could not determine who the culprit was, Kyle took his beating without saying a word.

  The one thing that Kyle resisted was the attempts some of the boys made to sodomize him. "I'm straight," he insisted, even though he had never had sex with anyone. When three boys laughingly tried to pin him down he fought them until they were all bloody. The guards had to break up the battle. Kyle spent a week in solitary detention because the other three all blamed him for the fight. He took his punishment and when he came back to the barracks no one bothered him again.

  There was a school that took up most of his waking hours. Gradually the other guys left him alone, knowing that he was not a partisan of any gang and that he could be trusted to keep silent about their doings. Eventually they even came to him for help with their own schoolwork or, pathetically, help with writing the letters that they hoped would spring them free of the orphanage.

  He became good at writing. He learned that books allowed him to escape into different worlds and leave the orphanage far behind. Thanks to his reading and the determination of his favorite teacher he developed a vocabulary that was almost refined, compared to the other boys. His teacher made Kyle promise that he would never sound the way they did, never debase his language with their filthy four-letter words.

  "If you want to get somewhere in the world out there," the man repeated endlessly to Kyle, "you should sound like a gentleman, not a gutter rat."

  Every boy learned a trade at the orphanage. Kyle learned bookkeeping
. In his teens he was offered an opportunity to take correspondence courses that would lead to a CPA certification. He leaped at the chance, knowing that it was a sure road to the real world outside the institution's walls.

  When he was finally released from the orphanage he had an accountant's degree in his hand and a job in Baltimore arranged by the social worker who had handled his case from the very beginning. She had grown fond of Kyle over the years and predicted that of all the boys leaving the orphanage that year he would go the farthest.

  He went to Canada. Six months after he began working for the accounting firm in Baltimore he received his draft notice. Even in the orphanage Kyle had watched news reports from Vietnam almost every evening. He had no intention of being killed in some senseless jungle ten thousand miles away. He fled to Toronto.

  First, though, he snuck back to his old neighborhood one evening, searching for Crystal. He had dreamed of taking her with him, off to Canada or South America or Xanadu, anywhere to be away from the life her mother had forced on her. But there was no trace of his mother or Crystal. No one he questioned admitted even to remembering them. They had disappeared. Or died.

  He went to Toronto alone, then, and took the first job he could find, as a delivery boy for an office-supply firm. He rode in a pickup truck through the downtown business district and lugged heavy cartons of papers into plush offices where the carpeting was thick and the air was hushed with the quiet urgency of big money. He spent most of his salary on clothes. After years of living in hand-me-downs or institutional uniforms, Kyle became a fashion plate. He wore the latest styles and he wore them handsomely.

  He knew how to make friends, and even began dating some of the filing clerks and secretaries he met on his delivery rounds. But when he dreamed, he dreamed of his sister Crystal, the twelve-year-old that he had failed to protect. Even when he finally summoned up the courage to take a young redheaded typist to bed, he fantasized about his sister while he made love clumsily to her.

  Within little more than a year Kyle was working as an accountant in one of the business offices he had delivered supplies to. He rose quickly, despite some sneers from his fellow workers about "the eager-beaver Yank with the flashy wardrobe." Then he met Nancy.

  She was the daughter of one of the firm's vice presidents. She had a pretty face but an overweight, heavy-legged body. She was intelligent, gentle, and shy, but beneath it all there was a good sense of humor and a trace of mischievousness. Her father was wealthy. They met at a company picnic. Kyle recognized the opportunity she represented. Her physical appearance did not matter much to him; he was not driven sexually—or so he told himself. Nancy's parents were at first alarmed that their daughter was attracted to the eager-beaver Yank with the flashy wardrobe. But as they began to see how happy he made Nancy they began to regard him as a diamond in the rough, and told each other that he was honest, hard-working, and undoubtedly a good catch.

  By the time President Carter granted amnesty to most of the Vietnam draft-dodgers, Kyle was engaged to Nancy and on his way to a vice-presidency of his own. He had no intention of ever returning to the States. But to his horror he found himself helplessly attracted to Nancy's sister, Judith, who was fourteen. For almost a year he struggled against his growing obsession as each night he dreamed of Crystal and each day he tried to avoid seeing nubile, laughing Judith. That summer she lolled around the family's lakeside cottage in nothing more than a tee shirt and underpants, or ran off for a swim in the cold lake wearing a skimpy bikini.

  Local boys seemed to rise up out of the ground wherever she appeared and she was enjoying her first experience of sexual power.

  Kyle never touched her, never allowed himself to be in the same room alone with her. But he knew it was only a matter of time until he his self-denial crumbled. He could not see Nancy without seeing Judith. And he could not take his eyes off her. In his dreams she became his sister, his lost, lovely, loving Crystal. Crystal was the one he wanted, and he began to loathe dull, overweight Nancy.

  Kyle fled once again. He left Nancy without a word of explanation and went back to the States. Once again Kyle Muncrief found himself starting a new life. He worked his way into a position with a small Wall Street investment firm that specialized in finding start-up money for new high-tech companies. He met dozens of scientists, most of them wildly impractical when it came to business. But even from the most unrealistic of them he learned important hints of what was possible, what could be developed in the reasonably near future.

  He swore to himself that he would never even look at an underage girl again, but it took every ounce of his willpower to keep that oath. The pressure within him built relentlessly, night after night. He needed Crystal, she was the only person in the world he could trust, the only one who loved him, the only one he could love.

  He began prowling the seamy night streets searching for Crystal, staring at the pre-teen girls being offered on dark corners, knowing that Crystal was much older now, fearing that he was going insane. He worked out at gyms, he went on religious retreats, he saw psychiatrists. He denied it all night after night after night. But inevitably, inexorably, he would find himself searching for the sister he had lost. He began to think about suicide.

  He worried about his secretary, a sharp-minded woman named Victoria Kessel. Soon enough she learned that he was visiting psychiatrists. She was clever enough to discover his secret, and the thought of Victoria finding out about Crystal filled him with fear. But Vickie made it clear that she sympathized with her boss. Whatever demons were driving him, she made no judgments. But she wanted responsibility, authority. She wanted power.

  Shaken, Kyle realized that he had found someone he could depend upon. He had to trust Vickie; even in the swinging world of Wall Street, where cocaine was commonplace and sex a tool of power, mental illness was beyond the pale. Kyle reinforced Vickie's loyalty by giving her the kinds of additional responsibilities she craved. With her added responsibilities, of course, came added salary, and bonuses, and perks. And his added dependency on her.

  Kyle first learned about virtual reality from a magazine article that Vickie pointed out to him. He was intrigued. Could a man create a long-lost sister in the electronic world of virtual reality? He visited several university laboratories, tracked down the best minds working on VR. He decided that he could not risk having some scientist or engineer develop what he wanted for him. Not unless he could be absolutely certain that the man (it would have to be a man, he was convinced) could never reveal his desires.

  But there was more to it than that. Virtual reality could be a money-maker, a big one. Kyle saw that the technology capable of producing private fantasies could be sold to the public as entertainment. He searched the nation for the key technical expert, the man he would build his company around, and found him at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Everyone who knew anything about virtual reality agreed that Jason Lowrey was the brightest, most innovative, most daring specialist in the field. "But he's a madman," Kyle was told time and again. "He's hell to work with. A total flake."

  Kyle flew to Dayton and met Jace Lowrey. He sat in a simulator cockpit and experienced a virtual reality dogfight. That night, trembling with fear and anticipation, he asked Lowrey if VR could be used for personal fantasies.

  Jace seemed neither surprised nor disapproving. "Oh sure," he answered easily. "I've already done that for one of the blue-suiters here. I could put all the whorehouses in the world outta business if I wanted to."

  Muncrief hired Jace on the spot, left his investment firm in New York and founded ParaReality Corporation, bringing Victoria Kessel with him to be vice president.

  One by one he found Hideki Toshimura, Lars Swenson, and Maxwell Glass, each of them eager for the profits they foresaw from Muncrief's vision of Cyber World. Then he set up shop in the Orlando area, only a few miles from Disney World, and started building a technical staff around Jason Lowrey. He gave Jace two priorities: First, develop the conflict games that would make Cyber World
unique. Second, give him his dearest heart's desire: give him Crystal.

  And now, as he flew home from Washington, he knew that a branch of the US government was going to force its way into his company whether he liked it or not. He only hoped that they did not know about his obsession and his sessions with the psychiatrists in New York. And that they would not find out.

  In Jason Lowrey he had at last found the man who could construct the fantasy that haunted his dreams. As long as Jace got what he wanted he seemed perfectly content to create a virtual reality simulation of Crystal—and to keep silent about it. Kyle knew that this gave Lowrey a hold over him, but the antisocial introspective genius appeared to have no interest in pressuring Kyle for anything more than additional equipment and assistants so that he could further his own virtual reality dreams. Still, Kyle worried. If his investors found out about it, if Glass and Toshimura and that self-righteous prig Swenson knew, it would bring the roof down on his head.

  That's why I've got to play along with this Smith character and whoever he's working for, Muncrief told himself as the USAir flight approached Orlando. I don't know how much the bastards know, and I can't afford to take the chance that they know everything. Maybe it'll be okay after we get Cyber World up and running. Once the money starts pouring in, maybe then it won't matter. But until then I've got to play along with them.

  CHAPTER 13

  Dan stood encased in a bulky spacesuit on the surface of the Moon, staring at Tranquility Base. It looked like a high-tech junkyard, abandoned equipment strewn across the bare, barren ground around the spraddle-legged base of the landing module Eagle. The American flag that Armstrong and Aldrin had unfurled still stood stiffly in the airless silence.

  Picking his way carefully through the scattered equipment, awkward in the clumsy suit and thick boots, he slowly approached the landing module. Welded to its side was a stainless steel plaque, still polished and gleaming after all the years.