Part 17 (1/2)
Jara ran her hands through her hair and yanked hard at the roots in frustration. ”And what does your mother think of al this? Is she ever going to come out of her office and talk to us? Come to think of it-why hasn't she kicked us out of her house yet?”
”I-I don't know.”
The a.n.a.lyst lay quietly for a moment. A ray of suns.h.i.+ne poked through a slat in the blinds and jabbed her in the eye, prompting her to turn onto her right side and bury her nose in the couch's crook. She had no doubt that Horvil could weed through al the changes and restore MultiReal to ful functionality. But with the program's creator dead and its chief engineer headed for some orbital prison, how much time would that take? Weeks? Months? He wouldn't even be able to use an a.s.sembly-line floor to do the heavy lifting.
”So are you going to do anything about it?” asked Benyamin, his voice suddenly querulous.
Jara shook her head. ”I don't know, Ben. I don't know if there's anything else I can do. Let me mul this over for a while, okay?”
”But-”
”Please.
Ben disappeared. Jara lay there and debated the merits of sleep. Not ten minutes later, Merri found her way into the study.
The people in this company sure aren't acting like they're suspicious of me, thought Jara.
Why can't everyone just leave me the f.u.c.k alone? The blonde channel manager hesitated in the doorway for a ful two minutes before Jara final y grew tired of waiting. ”So what's the problem?” she said.
”It's my companion,” squeaked Merri.
”Bonneth?” said Jara, taken aback. ”Is she okay?”
”At the moment ... yes. But when that last infoquake struck ... Jara, she was total y cut off from Dr. Plugenpatch. For hours. She tried to keep me from finding out, but I could hear it in her voice.” Merri's hands twisted at the hem of her blouse until Jara thought she might rend it in two. ”This is al my fault. I was the one who insisted on moving to Luna in the first place, because I thought the artificial gravity would be better for her condition. If another one of those infoquakes. .h.i.ts up there .. Her sentence floated away into the thick wal paper of books.
Comprehension dawned on Jara with a nauseating rush. She had a.s.sumed Merri's misery was a mixture of sorrow for Margaret Surina and apprehension about her own fate at Creed Objectivv. I guess she deserves more credit than that, thought the a.n.a.lyst. These infoquakes represented a real and immediate danger to countless mil ions like Bonneth with obscure diseases.
OCHREs and Dr. Plugenpatch and bio/logic software formed a symbiotic triangle; remove one of the three, and the whole structure would col apse. To someone with Bonneth's condition, even a brief outage might very wel be fatal.
Jara felt herself souring involuntarily. Did Merri think she was the only one who had these problems? Jara's mother lived on Luna too. Terraformers had made great progress on the moon in recent decades, but it stil remained largely uninhabitable without bio/logics. If an infoquake delivered a catastrophic blow to the Data Sea, would Jara's mother be any better off than Bonneth?
”So what do you want me to do about it?” Jara croaked final y, rol ing onto her back to face the ceiling and the skewering sunlight.
”I don't know,” said Merri. ”I just thought you might have some advice....”
”Wel , I don't,” replied the a.n.a.lyst. ”Why does everyone keep coming to me for advice about things I can't control? I have enough on my plate right now without worrying about hypotheticals. You're just going to have to tough it out. Do the best you can.”
”Okay,” managed the blonde woman, already s.h.i.+fting toward the door. ”One more thing, though ... We can't decide whether we should say anything in the drudge statement about Quel ....”
”I told you, talk with Robby! You figure something out for once!” Jara's voice strained and final y cracked. She regretted the words as soon as they escaped her mouth.
The channel manager let out another quiet ”okay.” Jara rested her forearm over her eyes to block the glare and waited for Merri to leave. Which, eventual y, she did.
Seething with self-recrimination, Jara drifted off to an uneasy sleep.
Jara couldn't have said how long she slept. The sun was no longer burning a warm spot into her forearm, and the chattering of the apprentices down the hal had faded. She must have been out for a few hours, at least, but she didn't real y want to know.
I'm not ready for this responsibility, she confided silently to the fates. The pit of her stomach felt hol ow, acidic. I'm not ready to run a fiefcorp. Please tel me I don't have to.
As if in answer to her plea, Jara opened her eyes and saw a familiar face.
Natch.
The sight was so embedded in her consciousness it had almost become archetype: Natch making tracks across the carpet, arms clasped behind his back, muttering to himself. Al the scene needed was an obscure piece of bio/logic code floating in Minds.p.a.ce and a window ful of share price histograms. ”Good job,” Natch said gruffly.
Jara had never felt so happy to receive a rude half-greeting in her life. She could feel her anxieties melting away. Natch would know how to handle the situation. He always did. ”What did I do this time?” she replied.
”The statement to the drudges. Short and sweet, I like that.” Natch tromped right over a green throw pil ow that Jara must have knocked to the floor in her sleep.
The a.n.a.lyst propped herself up on one elbow; not satisfied, she clambered to a sitting position. A quick skim of her mental inbox revealed the finished drudge statement and about a hundred commentaries from across the Data Sea. Seemed like the statement had produced exactly the reaction Jara was hoping for: total indifference.
”We have a lot to do,” continued Natch, talking to himself more than he was talking to Jara. ”A whole lot. We've got to get that MultiReal exposition back on track. That's critical. We need to time it careful y. Can't give people the impression that we're trying to profit from Margaret's death. But we can't let anyone forget about the exposition either. You've got a script ready?”
Jara nodded drowsily. After al that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, the exposition felt like it belonged in another universe altogether. ”I do have a script,” she said. And it was a pretty good script, too, she remembered. Easily digestible without being too gimmicky; a departure from the first basebal demo, but a departure to a familiar territory. ”No worries on that score. But-”
Natch was in no mood for objections. ”But what?” he snapped.
”Aren't you worried about our business licenses? We can't just keep going forward like nothing's happened. How's everyone going to get paid?”
Natch stopped, planted his hands in his pockets, and stared Jara directly in the face with such intensity it was almost surreal. ”Don't worry about the licenses,” he said. ”It's al under control.”
Jara could feel a throbbing current run from her abdomen to the back of her neck.
Geronimo had utterly failed to spark that current in al his weeks of fumbling, and yet Natch could ignite her from halfway across the room. Keep it together, Jara admonished herself, turning away from those radiant blue eyes. You're exhausted and you're not thinking clearly. ”What do you mean, it's under control'?” she said.
The entrepreneur got down on his haunches and reached out to steady himself momentarily with a hand on Jara's kneecap. ”Fol ow the chain of command.” His tone was low, conspiratorial. ”Who pressured the Meme Cooperative to suspend our licenses? The Defense and Wel ness Council. And what's the one governing body in the world that can put pressure on the Defense and Wel ness Council? Who does Len Borda answer to?”
The answer was straight out of hive-level civics. ”The Prime Committee,” said Jara, trying to mental y wil Natch's hand away from her knee.
”Exactly.”
”But the Prime Committee's afraid of Len Borda. They're practical y a rubber stamp for the Council. When was the last time they disagreed with Borda on ... anything?”
”They'l disagree with him on this. Trust me.” Natch had not so much as blinked in a minute, perhaps two.
Jara was starting to feel dizzy. Every time she got a handle on the situation, Natch would ratchet things up to some new plane with a total y different set of rules. He had jumped into fund-raising and product marketing and high-stakes mergers with great success, but did he know anything about politics?
Jara didn't think so. In fact, she didn't know anyone who paid less attention to the ins and outs of government than Natch. How could he be so certain he knew how to influence the Prime Committee?
”Listen, Natch,” she said. ”I don't think you've thought this through. Even if the Committee is sympathetic to our cause, how are you going to get to them? There's only twenty-three of them, and sixty bil ion people clamoring for their attention. What are you going to do, just walk over to Melbourne and demand they focus on MultiReal?”
Natch was unfazed. ”I won't. I'm going to get someone else to do it for me. Someone they'l listen to.”
The a.n.a.lyst's brain flitted through the roster of governmental figures that paraded around the drudge reports. Natch's touch wasn't making things any easier. Most of the politicians she could name were either too beholden to the Defense and Wel ness Council or too ineffectual to put up any resistance.
Unless ... yes, there was one person who didn't fal into either of those categories. ”The speaker of Congress,” said Jara. ”Khann Frejohr.”