Part 24 (1/2)

Face it, Jara, she told herself. You want to fail.

The thought surprised and angered her. She wanted to fail. She wanted Natch's latest business venture to go down in flames. The a.n.a.lyst conjured a mental picture of herself: a small, fluttering, frightened thing, cowering at the feet of marble goliaths, men and women with minds and hearts and wills of stone.

And suddenly something inside of her rebelled. That's not me, she thought. I can't be like that. To settle for failure-that's like accepting death. If I just sit back and let things happen, I might as well have never lived in the first place.

Jara took a deep breath, counted to twenty, and flipped off the Coc.o.o.n. She had made her decision.

At just that moment, a familiar figure came barreling around the corner. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the room as soon as he saw the a.n.a.lyst, but the tub of jelly around his gut obeyed the laws of inertia and kept going. The statue of Isaac Newton looked on with amus.e.m.e.nt as Horvil toppled to the ground in accordance with the good scientist's theories.

”Oh, thank goodness!” bellowed the engineer, crawling his way across the floor to Jara's side. ”I've been looking all over for you.”

Jara gave her fellow apprentice a look of steely determination. ”Horv, I'm going to deliver the presentation.”

Horvil's mouth gaped open. ”No luck with Margaret?”

She shook her head. ”Quell was right. Margaret's gone totally offline. She ran to the Revelation Spire with a dartgun. I think she's going to make some kind of last stand up there. So with Natch gone and Margaret out of the picture, I guess it's up to me.”

The engineer's face turned white. ”Jara, there are Council officers out there. Thousands of 'em.”

”I don't care. I'm not just going to sit here and do nothing.”

”Before they let you set foot on that stage, they'll stick you with black code darts like a pincus.h.i.+on.”

”Then they'll have to do it in front of a billion people.”

Horvil's face took on a look of panic. His eyes tilted upwards as if beseeching the Father of Bio/Logics for an infusion of sanity. ”Listen to me,” he said, grabbing Jara's tiny hands and clutching them tightly within his own. ”We can delay the presentation. Nothing says we have to do ours before the Patel Brothers do theirs. We can just lay low and do the whole show some other time.”

”Are you completely deranged? If we put this off, the Patel Brothers will eat us for lunch. They'll pounce on us, and we'll have to spend the next month digging ourselves out.”

”So what? Is it really worth it, Jara? Maybe Margaret's right. Just let it go.”

”Horvil, these are our lives we're talking about here. This is our business. Don't you care about the fiefcorp and MultiReal and-and everything we've worked for in the past five years?”

”No.”

Jara blanched, momentarily struck dumb. ”No?”

The engineer's face blossomed into a shy smile completely devoid of irony. ”All I care about is not losing you.”

Jara sat stunned, unsure what to say. Was he trying to put her off her guard? Or maybe this had something to do with their unspoken rivalry for Natch's favor? Certainly the big lummox couldn't be sincere. In the three years she had known him, Horvil had barely uttered a single word that wasn't laced with sarcasm. Jara sighed. Why was it that as soon as she found her own moment of mental clarity, everything else had to slide out of focus?

”Horvil,” she said gently, bundling her hands inside the warm nest of the engineer's palms. ”I hope you can understand this. But I have to make that presentation. I just have to. This isn't about the fief corp or Natch, or-or product release schedules. It's about me. It's about ... not backing down. Not failing.”

The engineer considered this for a moment. Jara couldn't imagine what thoughts were running through his head. Could a rich boy from the other side of London who had never had a moment of financial instability in his entire life still understand a crisis of conscience? ”You have to promise me you'll be all right,” he said.

Jara smiled sadly. ”I'm afraid that's not up to me.”

There was no burst of comprehension, no sudden epiphany behind Horvil's eyes. But finally he nodded and clenched the a.n.a.lyst's hands tightly. ”Okay,” he said. ”So how can I help?”

”You can help me navigate. Do you know if there's a back entrance to the arena?” She gestured through the window at the now-familiar sight of Council officers roaming freely around the Surina courtyard. Their ranks ringed the Revelation Spire like a white crown, and lined the boulevard to the arena's front doors as well. The Surina security guards were nowhere to be found. ”Obviously, we can't go that way.”

Horvil jutted his chin out with determination, and the two of them rose to their feet. ”As a matter of fact,” he said, ”there's a side entrance, through the museum here. Quell took me past it yesterday.”

Jara brushed off her trousers and gave the Surina statue a respectful nod. ”Let's go then.”

The fiefcorp apprentices zipped past the statue of Tobi Jae Witt and down the hall. They dodged their way through a warren of curio tables and around a variety of large metal contraptions that had once housed Witt's experiments in artificial intelligence. The halls were now mostly empty of people. The few stragglers they did see were either terrified tourists looking for an escape route or Surina security forces hustling back towards the square.

Something about the conversation in the atrium had completely changed Horvil's demeanor. Minutes ago, he had been fearful for Jara's safety. But now he was taking the lead, lumbering into corridor inter sections as if preparing to use his belly to s.h.i.+eld her from a barrage of darts. Jara looked at the engineer with a broad smile on her face. She wondered whether Horvil planned on taking the stage with her, and whether she would try to stop him if he did.

Horvil and Jara crossed over a walkway that bridged the Center for Historic Appreciation with the auditorium. They tried to keep low to avoid attention, but most of the soldiers below were fixated on the Revelation Spire anyway. Hundreds of dart-rifle barrels poked from the notches in the Spire walls, daring the Council troops to come any closer.

”The arena's just past that door,” said Horvil. ”The stage entrance is down the stairs.”

Jara opened the door to the arena and found herself confronted with a sea of white robes.

The gathering crowd still stood at half a billion strong, but their ranks now included a large number of Defense and Wellness Council troops. The officers surrounded the stage and lined every aisle in the place. Just like last time, they silently shouldered their dartguns, their faces sculpted of stone.

Horvil gulped. ”You ready?”

”As I'll ever be.”

They galloped down the stairs, opting now for speed rather than stealth. The two reached the bottom and rounded the last corner. Sure enough, the corridor angled upwards and ended in a single metal door that would lead them directly onto the arena stage. Jara had not expected this last approach to the stage to be unguarded. But when she saw the three people standing in front of the door, she gasped and snapped on a PokerFace 83.4b.

Serr Vigal, the preeminent neural programmer.

Len Borda, High Executive of the Defense and Wellness Council.

And Natch, master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp.

Jara took an awkward step backwards, tripped, and fell neatly into Horvil's arms.

She didn't realize that Len Borda was so tall. He towered over the rest of them like a thin rock pillar, his bald head its capstone. Anywhere in the world, she would have recognized his dour face instantly, whether or not he wore the Council's white robe and yellow star.

Jara tried but could not shake her head clear of historical vertigo. Standing before her was the High Executive of the Defense and Wellness Council himself. The man who had led the world's most feared military and intelligence organization for fifty-seven years and counting. The man who had personally sparred with giants like Lucco Primo, Kordez Tha.s.sel and Marcus Surina. The man who had singlehandedly defeated the Economic Slump of the 310s. The man who had mastered the intricacies of his post long before Jara was born.

She thought of all the wild and unverifiable rumors she had heard about Len Borda over the years. The secret interrogations ... the hidden fortresses ... the pitiless military strikes ... the all-pervasive network of spies and snooping programs. And now that face was directly in front of her. Were the firm grooves on the man's brow a manifestation of evil intent, as the libertarian drudges contended, or merely the chiseled remnants of nature's implacable forces?

The High Executive barely noticed her presence. ”I will speak to the crowd,” he said to Natch in a gravelly ba.s.so profundo. ”You have ten minutes.”

Jara glanced at the fiefcorp master. At first glimpse, Natch appeared calm and collected, dressed in a sharp navy-blue pinstripe suit. Only someone who had studied his every pore and wrinkle ten thousand times could tell he was tottering on the brink of collapse. She detected traces of the stimulant program QuickPrep 49q on his face. ”I need twenty,” Natch said firmly.

”Twenty then.” Borda's tone of voice left the impression that twenty minutes was what he had been after all along. He waved a hand, and the door to the arena stage slid open, bathing him in the spotlight.

Jara mustered all of her courage and spoke to the retreating high executive. ”What about all those troops out there?” she cried.

Borda paused and gave her an unyielding look. The look of a man who could pinpoint her precise location, down to the minutest degree, in the orgchart of the universe.

The a.n.a.lyst felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to find Serr Vigal. ”Jara, the Council is here for our protection,” he said gently. ”It was Natch's idea.”