Part 16 (2/2)

That f.u.c.king weasel Magan Kai Lee, he growled to himself. The lieutenant executive had found a way to neatly slice Natch off at the knees. It al looked so easy in hindsight. Take away Natch's license to sel bio/logic programs on the Data Sea, and you took away his ability to profit from MultiReal through any legitimate channel. Oh, there were plenty of Lunar tyc.o.o.ns outside the aegis of the Meme Cooperative who might stick him on their payrol , plenty of back avenues to making money he could explore. But Magan had judged him correctly.

He knew that Natch wouldn't let go of MultiReal on any terms other than his own. And scavenging the dark corners of the marketplace for sc.r.a.ps, with the Council d.o.g.g.i.ng his every move-that was tantamount to giving up.

Then there was the problem of Jara. Magan had put al the leverage in Jara's hands. If Natch obeyed the Meme Cooperative's order and granted her core access to MultiReal, she would have just as much control over the program as he did. Natch wasn't sure if she had the legal right to sel it off or give it away. But she would have the power to simply move the databases somewhere else on the Data Sea where n.o.body else would ever, ever find them. And yet, what alternatives did Natch have? He could always defy the Meme Cooperative's order, but then he would have to go on the run from the Council again, a prospect he dreaded.

Natch summoned a mental picture of the a.n.a.lyst and studied it intently. Jara was n.o.body's pushover. But she was also hopelessly naive and eminently predictable. How long would she last as Magan Kai Lee's puppet before either he or Len Borda did away with her?

Once that happened, MultiReal would be in the hands of the Defense and Wel ness Council. And after thatThe nothingness at the center of the universe.

Natch would not give up.

Borda, he's on some kind of crusade against my family and everything we've touched, Margaret had told him. But Natch, you need to know thishe can't take MultiReal away from you. He can't. I've made sure of that.

Why shouldn't he believe it?

Jara had the advantage. She had the authorities on her side through whatever misguided deal she thought she was making with the Council. She had the legal rights to MultiReal while the rest of the fiefcorpers' fates were tangled up in Meme Cooperative jurisprudence. She would even have public opinion on her side, at least in the beginning.

But what did any of that matter? Natch knew how to control people. He knew how to disa.s.semble them and find their weak spots. Moreover, he possessed the ability to move the whole world, to put the bio/logics market in a panic with a few wel -placed rumors and bits of black code, to change public opinion by cozying up to the drudges and the opinion makers. Who cared that the public suspected him of involvement in Margaret Surina's death?

That was a temporary impression sown in panic and fed with unsubstantiated rumor. It would fade.

Natch knew what motivated Jara. He knew her better than the Council, no matter how long they had been fol owing her and how many thousands of background doc.u.ments they had uncovered.

He could handle Jara.

The entrepreneur nudged his eyelids open a fraction and took a surrept.i.tious peek around the tube car. How long had he been sitting here debating himself with fists clenched? Time was a sieve. He looked at the three spies of the Defense and Wel ness Council who had been fol owing him since the Twin Cities-spies who stood out from the rest of the businesspeople, tourists, and layabouts like ants in a bowl of sugar. They gazed back at him and grinned cruel y.

Natch turned his attention back to the window, which had been recycling fiefcorp industry news for the past few hours. He could feel the black code inside him, a thousand vessels of doom just waiting to unload their toxic cargo on his OCHRE systems.

He could handle black code. He could handle the Defense and Wel ness Council and the Meme Cooperative and the Patels, too. He could handle anything the world threw at him. The world might just depend on it.

2I.

Horvil reclined on the bed with arms held high in a position of surrender. His parents had long ago relinquished their piece of the estate to Aunt Beril a and moved on to warmer climes-the control ed heat domes of Nova Ceti, to be specific.

Yet here his old room sat, unchanged, like a mausoleum for his teenage years. The same battered chair with nailhead trim stil hunkered near the door.

The same hearty ficus plant stil towered over the southwest corner of the room, an embarra.s.sment of fecundity. And the windows were stil broadcasting raucous advertis.e.m.e.nts for Yarn Trip's reunion concert in Beijing, even though the concert had come and gone eight years ago, and the band had long since broken up again, re-reunited, then split (theoretical y) for good.

Horvil remembered the day of that concert. He had stomped out of the house after an argument with Beril a and rented his own apartment the very same afternoon. But every time he came back here, his aunt rewound the window decorations to that same frozen instant. As if one day, Horvil might thaw the moment and resume life in the manor like nothing had changed.

He sensed an incoming Confidential Whisper. Aunt Beril a.

”You can't avoid me forever, Horvil,” she said, voice properly petulant.

”Wel , I'm right down the hal ,” replied the engineer. ”Come on over. We can listen to Yarn Trip together. I always forget-were you into their molten lava phase or their mocha grind phase?”

An audible frown. ”You know I've got a meeting to prepare for.”

”Real y? Sure you're not just afraid to face the fiefcorp after what you did? I mean, shutting down the programming floor's one thing, but actual y trying to rol back the changes-”

”This isn't about the fiefcorp. It's about you. Why haven't you fol owed up with Marulana already?”

The engineer harrumphed. ”Don't think I'm gonna take the job, that's why.”

”But this isn't some dul bureaucratic position. Chief engineer for Creed Elan, Horvil! A position of responsibility. A job of consequence, for process'

preservation! You'd have a staff. You'd have a budget and the best equipment. And you wouldn't have to put up with him.”

”Not that again. I don't want to hear it.”

He could feel Beril a's frustration from al the way across the mansion. She abruptly changed course. ”Listen, Horvil, you tel those people they're welcome to stay for a few more hours until everything blows over. But I won't have drudges camped at my gates forever! I wil not have my household disrupted like this. Do you hear me?”

Horvil prived himself to Aunt Beril a's communications without a word. Then he closed his eyes, turned to face the wal , and played Yarn Trip's turbulent ”s.h.i.+tscape Symphony” on his internal sound system. Twice. Loud.

Jara found a study down the hal and appropriated it as a temporary office. The room looked like it might have lain untouched for several generations, or perhaps been transported here intact from antiquity through some subversion of time and s.p.a.ce. There were a lot of rooms like that in the mansion.

Jara looked at the treepaper books sitting on the shelves and shook her head at the ancient names filigreed on their spines. Coleridge, Toynbee, Kipling.

She lay down on the couch, draped one arm over her forehead, and cried for a good ten minutes.

What had happened to her career? How had she devolved from such a bright and promising student to a pariah in her own fiefcorp? Jara tried to retrace the winding path that had led her to this moment-the affair with the proctor, the years with Lucas Sentinel, the obsession with Natch, the dal iances with Geronimo-but it al seemed sickening and improbable.

You can't even say the faefcorp situation is al Natch's fault, Jara told herself. You're to blame almost as much as he is. You partic.i.p.ated in Natch's lies and schemes for three years without saying anything. You even spread false black code rumors when Natch asked you to. Magan Kai Lee threatened the company right to your face, and you didn't do a thing about it.

Jara felt a sudden urge to contact Geronimo again, but the urge came from a place far removed from l.u.s.t. Then she pictured Rey Gonerev, reading a bureaucratic report about Jara's Sigh activities with a knowing smirk on her face. I've read so much about you in the Council files that I feel like I know you ... intimately, the Blade had told her. So Jara restrained herself.

A knock sounded on the door, and in came Benyamin.

”I looked into the situation with the a.s.sembly-line floor,” said the young apprentice, ”and it's not good.”

Jara felt like rol ing over and tel ing Ben to go away. ”Not good how?”

”Greth Tar Griveth-that woman who blackmailed me-she made a big mess.” Benyamin flopped his arms aimlessly like limp dough, unable to muster the energy for a more emphatic gesture. ”Turns out she was taking that money and using it to bribe some of her people. I don't know if Magan Kai Lee put her up to this or what. But Greth's people have been sabotaging the MultiReal code.

Throwing in little surprises of their own.”

Exhaustion had taken Jara's senses, and she couldn't quite get her mind to spark. ”How bad is it?”

”Wel , Greth only had limited access to the code in the first place. There's only so much damage she could do. But add the rol back on top of it, and you've got ... Wel , you've got a big mess.”

”Does MultiReal stil work?”

”Sure, it works just fine, for your basic one-on-one interactions. But we won't be able to do that twenty-three-way soccer game anytime soon.”

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