Part 31 (2/2)

”Okay, while you're at it, here's another big question,” said the a.n.a.lyst. ”A month ago, you and I were sitting in the Center for Historic Appreciation at Andra Pradesh. On the floor, with your arm around me. Panicked people running al over the place, Council offi cers everywhere.” She nodded her head toward the door, which shuddered momentarily as some shadowy figure slammed against it, then disappeared. ”Now here we are again. A recurring pattern. So which direction are we spiraling in, up or down?”

The engineer rubbed his chin and peered into the distance with his newfound Horvilish calm. ”That's a very interesting question. Let me dig out my slide rule.”

Jara burst into laughter. It was probably the only laugh to be heard for a kilometer or more.

And then they were kissing. She couldn't quite say who leaned in first, or whether they had both done so simultaneously. It wasn't the explosive outburst of pa.s.sion that Jara had been hoping for from Natch these past few years; it was congenial, friendly, familiar.

Jara opened her eyes. Nothing had real y changed. She didn't real y even think she loved this man sitting next to her. But she liked him and respected him and trusted him. For now, wasn't that enough?

Horvil sat back with a sunny grin that belied everything they had experienced since this entire MultiReal crisis had begun. ”Al right, now that that's over with,” he said, ”what say we get out of here?”

Jara looked at his pudgy, uncomplicated face, drank in his expression of calm cert.i.tude, and then nodded. ”Okay, where to?”

”Fol ow me. We're catching a ride.”

The door slid open on command, revealing a scene of utter disarray. The crowds clogging the hal ways of the Tul Jabbor Complex had thinned slightly, but those who remained were more strident and unnerved. If Horvil's Daoist theory was right, the crucial difference between this scene and the one at Andra Pradesh was that n.o.body was in charge here. A large contingent of Defense and Wel ness Council officers flew past them looking just as muddled and confused as any of the hundred private L-PRACG security forces. A few bodies were scattered on the ground, though whether they were dead or merely temporarily stunned from the infoquake, Jara could not tel .

Horvil screwed up his face, clutched Jara tightly in his arm, and let out a completely gratuitous war cry. Then he went careening into the crowd with the a.n.a.lyst hugging his every step.

There was some shoving, but most people knew better than to get in the way of a bel owing mammoth like Horvil. Jara col ided with a young Islander running in the opposite direction, leading the a.n.a.lyst to wonder if those connectible col ars were even working in the middle of al this. Was the infoquake affecting the Islanders too? The engineer yanked the young man to his feet and gently thrust him aside. We're going to get through this, thought Jara. And without MultiReal.

The curving hal ways of the Tul Jabbor Complex were interminable, but Horvil wasn't heading to the front entrance. After a few more minutes in the fray, he led them to a smal meeting room in a relatively deserted alcove. Five burly men in purple robes awaited them there. They were armed to the teeth and festooned with the Creed Elan regalia.

”Come on!” bel owed the man in the lead. ”Let's go!”

There was no time to think. A door at the far end of the room swung open, and the two fiefcorpers fol owed the guards into a courtyard where a red Vulture hoverbird idled half a meter off the ground. Within seconds the guards had half a.s.sisted, half tossed them through the hoverbird doors, and the Vulture was making a steep arc up into the blue.

Jara flopped to the floor and would have slid al the way down the center aisle but for a hand that lashed out and gripped her ankle. ”Gotcha, Queen Jara,” said Robby Robby, beaming like an idiot.

Seconds later, she and Horvil had managed to crawl to the hoverbird's upholstered pa.s.senger seats and strap themselves in. A quick glance around the cabin revealed the bird's other occupants: Serr Vigal, Benyamin, Merri, and Robby Robby, along with a pilot and the guards who had ushered them in here.

”I don't suppose,” sighed Jara heavily, ”that anybody's seen Natch.”

Blank stares echoed from the rest of the hoverbird's occupants, and Jara knew then that n.o.body else had even thought to look.

The a.n.a.lyst smiled wanly and shrugged her shoulders. Horvil gave her a wink from his seat across the aisle. Jara turned to one of the gruff Elanners and stuttered out a tired ”thank you.”

”Don't thank me,” muttered the guard, wiping the barrel of his handheld disruptor before sheathing it. ”I'm just doing my job. Thank her.”

Jara fol owed the man's. .h.i.tched thumb over his shoulder and was shocked to see a familiar figure who had been hidden from view in the seat next to the pilot. ”Beril a?”

The matriarch's gaze was fixed out the opposite window, where the tumult was stil visible but growing more distant with each pa.s.sing second. The confusion of the Tul Jabbor Complex began to seem like a natural occurrence the higher they climbed: warring ant tribes scrambling for turf. Melbourne itself metamorphosed from a place of fiercely clas.h.i.+ng agendas to an orderly grid of unmoving buildings.

Beril a pursed her lips as if she had just slurped on a particularly tart lime. ”What has that man gotten you al into this time?” she grumbled.

5.

POSSIBILITIES 2.0.

36.

The turbulence of the Tul Jabbor Complex vanished the instant Natch pa.s.sed through the doors of the hoverbird. The Council officers, the whizzing darts, the fleeing bystanders, Petrucio Patel: al gone.

Natch flopped onto a thin carpet of leaves and skidded to a halt against a particularly scabby tree. He could feel the cogs of his mind catch on a smal and intractable stone. This place, this garden with its motley a.s.sortment of plants and trees that could have been carelessly flung from a barrel of random seeds: how did he get here? And where had he seen this place before?

The entrepreneur crawled in the dirt, parted a curtain of grapevine, and saw a patio of hand-crafted stone. A careful y stuccoed building lay two meters ahead, with plenty of benches and brick abutments to sit on. Insects both large and smal danced a tarantel a around the latticework.

A hand reached down and took ahold of Natch's. The skin was deep mahogany, the color of furniture. ”You al right, Natch?”

”I'm fine,” grunted the entrepreneur. He let the man tug him to his feet, and found himself face-to-face with Pierre Loget.

Loget was sanguine to the point of absurdity. His cowled black robe was definitely the same type Natch had seen that day in the al eyways of Shenandoah. Up close, he discovered that what he had taken for red Chinese lettering was not actual y lettering at al , but a geometric pattern with a vaguely Arabic motif.

And the man himself? Wel , the man was Pierre Loget: effeminate, inward-facing, thoroughly nonthreatening.

It was almost too much to contemplate. Pierre Loget had arranged a strike force to pump him ful of black code? Natch couldn't possibly see how Loget fit into the weave of current events. Yes, they were compet.i.tors on the Primo's rankings, and to compete on Primo's a.s.sumed some amount of rancor by definition. But Loget had always seemed aloof from the fray, a hermetical y sealed individual. Natch had only spoken to the man a few times in his life, and each encounter had blurred into the everyday administrative bustle of fiefcorpdom. A meeting, a seminar, a dinner party Jara had dragged him to once.

Natch wasn't sure if he should feel angry or relieved. ”What are you doing here?” he said.

”How did you know where to find me?”

Loget's laughter fluttered through the SeeNaRee, pigeonlike. ”With al the publicity surrounding that Prime Committee hearing, I suspect everyone in the solar system knew where to find you.”

”And the black code? What the f.u.c.k was that about?”

The programmer put a delicate hand on Natch's shoulder. ”You should ask the bodhisattva,” he said simply.

”The-what?”

”Natch has been hit,” said a voice behind him. ”Weren't you paying attention back there, Loget?” Natch could feel a s.h.i.+ver emanate from someplace deep in his gut and quickly work its way to his shoulder blades. He knew that voice almost as wel as he knew his own.

The bodhisattva of Creed Tha.s.sel. Brone.

Suddenly the pebble lodged in Natch's mental gearworks sprang free. Natch was correct; he had been in this place before. It was the garden at the Proud Eagle hive where he and Brone had spent most of their childhood. He had not utterly lost control of his faculties and plunged into madness after al .

He had jumped onto a hoverbird, and that hoverbird had been outfitted with SeeNaRee capabilities.

Natch tried to imagine the exorbitant sum of money it would take to accomplish such a thing. To instal SeeNaRee on a hoverbird? And then to track down video of the Proud Eagle hive and go through the laborious process of SeeNaRizing it? Why?

<script>