Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

  Taylor was not discouraged by this lecture. He gave the matter a moment's careful thought. "This man told the head of the chapter on 49th Heaven that he was once the top bio/logic programmer in the world," he offered.

  "Lots of people know that Natch was number one on Primo's," replied Horvil.

  "He had a very interesting conversation with the head of the local chapter, which he then proceeded to relay to me in full. I found it quite striking, and perhaps it may mean something to you." Taylor rolled his eyes upward as if delicately probing his memory. "The man said that he once thought he had no future. But then his guardian told him something that inspired him: Your future is what you choose to do tomorrow. And the direction you're searching for? Your direction is where you choose to go. "

  The engineer was about to dismiss the quote as improbable when he caught the peculiar look in Serr Vigal's face. In the space of four sentences, his expression had morphed from one of utter skepticism to one of sadness and desperate hope. Was Vigal, in fact, the guardian who had spoken these words to Natch?

  "If we assume that this person might be Natch," began the neural programmer in a low, unsteady tone, "how can we help you find him?"

  14

  Jara knew that by taking a hiatus from connectible civilization, she would miss the entirety of the West London Grandmasters' League's annual tournament. This chagrined her. Not that she had any hope of getting past the first round, but she had committed to play, and she hated to break commitments. Jara supposed that what really mattered was the commitment to herself, the reason she had joined the league in the first place. And by following Quell out to the Islands, she felt like she was not only staying faithful to that promise, she was renewing it.

  Other things were not so easily settled, however. Jara was fairly certain she'd be able to maintain audio and video contact with Horvil from Manila. The Islanders weren't so barbaric that they couldn't see the usefulness of instantaneous communications. But would they allow a more prurient form of communication through the Sigh? Doubtful that a government that blocked the multi network would let in signals from something as trivial as a virtual sex network.

  There was little danger of a disconnect on Horvil's end. Four of the five hotels on 49th Heaven that he contacted for pricing offered free hours on the Sigh at check-in.

  So that night, Jara let Horvil pick the environment. Though the engineer playfully threatened to call up "Contortionist Whores of 49th Heaven" ("C'mon, Jara, it's research," he said), in the end he chose a virtual version of his own apartment, if his apartment were cleaned and spruced up and the gravity lowered to 0.8g. "Who knows how long it might be until we see each other again," Horvil explained as they sat together on the couch under the window that overlooked the Thames. "I don't want to be distracted during our last time together by a lot of make-believe."

  "Don't start getting melodramatic on me," Jara chided him, brushing his cheek affectionately with her knuckles. "You know 49th Heaven isn't that dangerous, unless you go to the inner rings."

  "So don't you think it's more likely that Natch would hide there?"

  "Maybe. But I'm not worried. You can take care of yourself."

  Horvil leaned back and insinuated his hands under Jara's blouse, the better to run his thumbs up the jagged highway of her spine. "Thank you. I'm gratified. But it's really me that should be worried about you."

  "It's not like I'm going to Furtoid," said Jara with a purr as Horvil's backrub began to have its soothing effect. "Sure, they won't have multi, but Manila's just a tube ride away. The Islanders aren't savages. What could happen?"

  She had phrased the question in a humorous tone, but the engineer took it with uncharacteristic seriousness. "What could happen? Are you kidding? Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee are gearing up for a civil war, security's a mess everywhere you turn-and you're headed straight for the biggest flashpoint on the globe. Jara, Manila could be a war zone next week. Didn't it occur to you that this mission Quell's hiring you for could be dangerous?"

  Horvil wasn't saying anything that Jara didn't already know. Yet somehow she had not quite thought of it that way. Quell had hired the fiefcorp for a consulting job, and that's exactly what Jara was preparing for. Sitting around conference tables, holding late-night arguments, conducting research, convening focus groups. She supposed she needed to be reminded that assassins, mercenaries, saboteurs, and spies were also, in some sense, consultants.

  Jara could feel a lump welling in her throat. Suddenly the potential consequences of this separation were beginning to stack up.

  Her life had slipped into a comfortable if uninspiring groove over the past two months. After decades of personal and professional dissatisfaction, Jara had become the head of a fiefcorp. She enjoyed financial stability and a slowly budding relationship with a man she trusted and respected. Would her company ever rise back to the heights Natch had taken it to? Would her unlikely twosome with Horvil eventually become a permanent companionship? Difficult, headache-provoking questions. Jara had been confident that the answers could wait awhile.

  But what if she had missed her opportunity? What if this mysterious consulting job of Quell's turned out to be much more complicated than she anticipated? What if Horvil got into bad trouble in that orbital colony whose name was synonymous with bad trouble? What if this internecine conflict between Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee led to some kind of global catastrophe?

  Jara had jumped into this game without a thought about the danger. It hadn't really occurred to her that by taking on Quell's commission, she had called an end to her much-deserved recess of the past two months. What if she could never find her way back to this place? This life plateau that she had fought so tenaciously to reach could come to an abrupt drop, leaving her with nothing to show for it but a lost court case and weeks of lazy, squandered evenings on the Sigh.

  At some point in the past few minutes, Horvil's backrub had slowed to a halt without either of them noticing. "Horvil," she said, "do you trust this Richard Taylor?"

  The engineer considered the question for a minute. "I don't think he's out to hurt us," he answered. "Whether we accomplish anything productive up there in 49th Heaven, I have no idea. Odds are we find ourselves back here in a week with nothing gained and nothing lost. ... What about you?"

  "I haven't even met him."

  "No, not Taylor. Quell. Do you trust Quell?"

  "I think-I think the same thing goes for him as for Taylor," said Jara. "I just wish ..." She stopped short. Jara didn't really know what she wished. She had some idea now of what the potential consequences were of playing this game, but the potential rewards-and whether they were worth the sacrifice-remained unknown.

  Horvil was a man of rationality, an engineer with a deep and abiding confidence in the powers of science. He did not believe in omens or premonitions that filtered down to the material plane from Places Beyond. Yet he couldn't help but feel that it didn't bode well for their trip to 49th Heaven that Richard Taylor wouldn't even board the hoverbird.

  "It's not that I've never been on a hoverbird before," said Taylor, staring in wide-eyed trepidation at the small vessel Vigal had chartered for them. "We do have motorized vehicles out in the Principalities of Spiritual Enlightenment, you know. Wheeled transports mostly, but some flying craft as well. I even flew one of them on a challenge once, back in my daredevil days. Back when I was a youth. But this! This! To actually ... leave the Earth's atmosphere ... ?"

  "Hundreds of thousands of people live up there, outside the Earth's atmosphere," said Vigal, a font of patience, pointing into the heavens. "It's quite safe. You can see the lights blinking on Allowell if you look up on a clear night."

  "Living on an orbital platform that has been floating in the sky for two hundred and fifty years I can understand. But this tiny vehiclekilometers up in the sky, above the clouds-what happens if it malfunctions? Or-or crashes?"

  Horvil shrugged. "No different than if a regular hoverbird crashes. Or a tube train, for that matter."
He peeked around Taylor's bushy beard at the craft's interior. This was about as luxurious a four-seater as money could buy, with upholstered seats and viewscreens aplenty, not to mention a foldable MindSpace workbench with specialized holders for bio/logic programming bars.

  Serr Vigal put a comradely hand on the Pharisee's shoulder. He had been trying to soothe Taylor's raw nerves with the balm of logic for almost half an hour now. Not that he had achieved any results. "Trust in the numbers, Richard," said Vigal. "Statistically, it's almost as safe as multi."

  "I don't multi," replied Taylor, giving a tug at the connectible collar around his neck.

  "Then it's almost as safe as walking. Listen to these statistics. According to the Committee on Aerospace Safety, there were only two hundred and twelve mechanical failures on orbital hoverbird flights in the past six months. Not all of them fatal. Divide that by the total number of hoverbird flights during those six months, and you get point oh oh five sev-no, wait, I'm sorry, I'm actually looking at a three-month period...."

  Horvil walked to the hoverbird's nose where the pilot was standing, blase as cardboard, doubtless reminding himself that he was getting paid by the hour whether they took off or not. The engineer gave the man a congenial roll of the eyes and parked himself on a steamer trunk that sat on the dock awaiting the next flight.

  Vigal hadn't realized yet that the Pharisee would not be mollified with facts and figures; the man would simply have to tamp down his fear or stay Earthbound. Horvil was not unsympathetic. Richard Taylor was facing a paradigm shift beyond any that the fiefcorp had faced with MultiReal. Connectibles skirted death each minute of their lives. Hoverbirds crashed on a daily basis. Bio/logic programming mishaps led to a handful of horrible deaths every month. Despite the most elaborate safety precautions, collapsible buildings killed at least twenty or thirty disobedient children each year. To live in modern society and partake of its miracles-instantaneous travel across thousands of kilometers, silent mental communication, immunity from disease-meant accepting that the universe would extract payment in the form of sudden, random death. It was a bargain connectibles had been born into. But the Pharisees-they had never signed up for such a bargain.

  Horvil wondered for the fifteenth time that morning whether this entire trip was really necessary. He wondered whether Richard Taylor really did have some lead on Natch's whereabouts, or if he was simply naive and misguided. And he wondered whether it was absolutely necessary to take Taylor along even if he could help them.

  Serr Vigal stepped over to the pilot with the Pharisee tagging behind. "You must have colleagues who fly hoverbirds every day," said the neural programmer. "Tell my friend here how many of them have crashed."

  The pilot ran a mistrustful eye over Richard Taylor's immense beard and exotically braided hair, his outlandish black robe and glinting jewelry. "Hey, man," said the pilot, deadpan, "we all crash eventually. That's life. You just gotta be ready to go at any minute."

  Taylor regarded the pilot with horror and began slowly backing away from the vehicle. Just what we needed, thought Horvil.

  But Vigal wasn't about to give up so easily. "You see?" he said, extending a hand towards the pilot. "If flying in a hoverbird wasn't so safe, would this gentleman feel comfortable joking about it?"

  In the end, Vigal was able to lure Richard Taylor onto the hovercraft. Horvil quickly climbed aboard and buckled himself in, blocking the Pharisee's exit. Within ten minutes, the four of them were rocketing off the dock and headed for the aether.

  Horvil could have predicted what would happen next. Taylor went into a convulsive panic for a few moments as the 'bird shot up in its initial ascent. When he realized that connectible engineers had long ago figured out ways to nullify the g-forces of flight, the panic gave way to utter fascination. The Pharisee started a long, rambling discourse about a fishing trip he had taken as a young man, the relevance of which Horvil could not quite see. Then as soon as the vista of Andra Pradesh had morphed into dull, unbroken cloud, he promptly fell asleep.

  The engineer pinged the neural programmer on ConfidentialWhisper as soon as Taylor's snores began to permeate the cabin. "What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?"

  Vigal laughed silently. "I think I'm beginning to like him, actually."

  "Sure, he's friendly, but that's not the point. Like him or not, the chances of Taylor actually leading us within a thousand kilometers of Natch are pretty slim. And if that's the case, this whole trip could end up being a big waste of time and money."

  "Admittedly. Though we seem to be in the same situation as the rest of the fiefcorp. What other options do we have?"

  "None," said Horvil with a sigh.

  "So what do we have to lose?"

  "We've got plenty to lose, Vigal. What if this whole thing is a setup? How do we even know Richard Taylor is a Pharisee and not just a good actor? It's not like we can look up his profile on the public directory or check his references. `The Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled'? We have no idea if this organization even exists. Sounds phony to me."

  The neural programmer ran his fingers through his salt-andpepper goatee as he examined the slumbering Taylor. "I think he's being sincere."

  "And this conversation you had with Natch-that thing about choosing your future-you're sure that's legitimate? You said those words to Natch?"

  "I'm sure."

  "You're so trusting," said Horvil with a shake of his head. "Okay, so maybe Taylor's being sincere. Maybe he's really trying to deliver some message to Natch from the Order of Faithful Children, or whoever they are. What does this organization stand for? What's in this message of his, and why is he being so secretive about it? How do we know these people aren't trying to find Natch so they can kill him? How do we know they're not on Len Borda's payroll?"

  Serr Vigal stared out the window and watched the hoverbird burst through the last of the clouds. The path back down to Earth was now completely obscured, and the path ahead lay out of their vision. An apt metaphor for their current predicament. "We don't know any of these things," he said. "You'll learn this when you get older, Horvil. Sometimes there's nothing else you can do but put yourself in the world's hands and trust that things will turn out all right."

  And then he, too, drifted off to sleep.

  3

  THE CONSULTANTS

  15

  Preparing for a trip of indeterminate length to the Pacific Islands was much more difficult than Jara had anticipated. Everywhere she looked was another commonplace item that might or might not work behind the unconnectible curtain. Did the Islanders have MindSpace workbenches, and if so, would Jara's fancy new set of bio/logic programming bars function on them? Would she be able to hang clothes in the closet of her hotel and have them magically emerge clean and pressed as they would in a connectible hotel? Would all the standard cosmetic programs for sanitizing and deodorizing the human body still work out there?

  Definitive answers to these questions and a hundred more were surprisingly hard to come by on the Data Sea, and Jara did not feel comfortable asking Quell. In the end, she decided to simply pack light. Whatever the source of Quell's funding, surely they would pick up the tab for laundering clothes.

  But the issue of gearage was nothing compared to the issue of transportation.

  Marcus Surina had once proclaimed that he would free humanity from the "tyranny of distance." And while his teleportation technology may have struck the tyrant a mortal blow, death rattles were still being felt decades later. Merri, who lived hundreds of thousands of kilometers away on Luna, had been prepared to teleport Terran-side to meet the fiefcorp in Manila. But TeleCo was experiencing technical difficulties with its long-distance quantum repeaters, so teleportation was out of the question. Ordinarily that would not be an issue, since multi projection from the moon was both cheap and reliable. But the multi network had been completely banned in the Pacific Islands by Dogmatic Opposition. And so Merri's only recourse was to spend forty-eight hours incommunicado on one of t
he misshapen lumps of metal that OrbiCo called a shuttle, alongside raw materials and industrial supplies. She wouldn't arrive in Manila for almost a full day after the others. Quell paid for this too.

  The last thing Jara had to deal with before taking a hiatus from civilization was the issue of the settlement. Martika Korella had indeed gone back to Suheil and Jayze Surina and worked out a compromise. As expected, the terms weren't nearly as good as they would have been had Jara skipped the trial altogether. The settlement would take a hefty chunk out of the funds Margaret had left behind, and hand over the title to MultiReal as well. But it would mean an end to the legal wrangling. A clean break from Possibilities. Besides which, Quell's sizable down payment would assure that the fiefcorp's coffers would not be empty when they returned from the Islands.

  Jara affirmed the agreement. She thought she would be sad at having gone through the trial for nothing, but all she felt was relief.

  Jara's biggest surprise, however, was finding Robby Robby waiting at the designated TubeCo train, knapsack slung jauntily over one shoulder. She would never have expected the channeler to take time out from his busy schedule to accompany them on this mad adventure.

  "Are you kiddin', Queen Jara?" he beamed. "Let you guys have all the fun?"

  For some strange reason, she was glad to see him.

  Maybe it was because dealing with Robby Robby took Jara's mind off dealing with Quell. The Islander had seemed like the epitome of calm and forethought two days ago on the patio of the Ostrich Egg. Now he had turned his attention inward, where there were evidently rough and turbulent seas on the horizon. He would answer the fiefcorp's questions about his homeland with staccato grunts of yes or no, if he answered them at all. Jara had still not been able to figure out the nature of their consulting gig, and beyond one tantalizing clue, Quell seemed in no mood to debrief her during their overnight trip to Manila.