Burning Bright

He turned back to the display space, spun his chair into place at its center, but hesitated, slipping on the wire-bound gloves. It would be Carnival, all right, but that didn’t mean that his usual net projection wouldn’t be recognized. He crossed to the shelves where he kept the shells of the unfinished eggs, searched among the clutter until he found the mask he had bought two years before, for a party he could no longer clearly remember. It was a plain white mask, of the three-quarters size that left only mouth and chin free, a standard form, eyebrows and cheekbones and nose all coarsely modeled from the dead white plastic. He contemplated it for a moment—it had always been an affectation of his not to mask, to walk the streets and nets at Carnival as himself—but this was not the time for that. He set the mask carefully on one of the imaging tables, and switched on the cameras. Lights flared, crisscrossed, catching the mask in a web of stark white beams. He turned back to the display space, and saw the mask’s image floating in the air above his chair, waiting to be remade.

He fingered the remote to dim the windows, and the image grew correspondingly stronger as the competing daylight faded. He set the remote aside, pulled on the remaining glove, and settled himself in his chair. The servos whirred softly, tilting it and him to the most comfortable position; the image moved with him, floating in the air within easy reach. He studied it for a moment longer, then reached tentatively into another image bank to pull out a series of other faces. He found one with a mouth he liked, bleached that image to match the mask’s absolute lack of color, then patched the two together, bringing the mouth and chin from the new image to cover the missing parts of the original mask. He studied the result for a moment, then ran his hand over the compound image, deepening the modeling of mouth and chin so that it matched the mask. He cocked his head to one side, then drew the corners of the mouth down into a parody of tragedy’s mask. He tilted the eyes down as well, filled the empty holes with absolute black, and dumped the resulting image to main memory. It was not at all his usual style: no one on the nets should recognize it as him.

He reached into control space to change modes, rewriting his usual identification-and-projection package to display the newly created mask, and flipped the whole system to Carnival mode. Now all identification inquiries would automatically be ignored—this was the only time of year when that routine would not get one dumped from the nets in short order—and a secondary program would deflect any attempt to trace the point of origin. He smiled then—he was going to enjoy this after all—and flipped himself out onto the nets.

The nets were crowded with ghostly shapes, a cheerful anarchy overriding the narrowcast lines and filling the unreal echo of the city with light and sound and sheets of brilliant color. Scenes like the loops of a story egg filled a number of nodes: rather than simply projecting an image, many of the maskers had chosen to create a brief repeating scene, and let that represent them to the world. Ransome let himself drift for a while, slipping from one system to the next with the ebb and flow of the crowds. A few groups and systems still tried to keep to business-as-usual, pale geometrics and strings of symbols competing with the gaudy loop-displays of the revelers, but they were easily overwhelmed. Some of the Carnival displays were elaborate, a sphere of scenery enclosing a character or two—often Grand Types from the Game—so that Ransome had either to bypass that particular node or move through the ongoing scenario. Near the Game nets, it was easier to go through than to try to find a way around the miniature worlds; he let himself slide through like a ghost, ignoring the spray of words and images that greeted any stranger, idly tracking the Grand Types that appeared. There were quite a few Avellars, as well as the inevitable Barons and Ladies: Lioe should be pleased, he thought, and turned his attention toward the port systems.