Horvil turned to Natch. He wanted to know the answer to this question too.
"I've tried to contact her," said the fiefcorp master with a frown. "She won't answer. Won't accept my multi requests. She's just sitting there on top of that bloody Revelation Spire, and she won't come down."
"Well, somebody has to be talking to her," continued Benyamin. "Quell? Don't tell me you haven't seen Margaret since the demo."
The Islander was busy removing his coin-shaped apparatus and replacing the burdensome collar around his neck. At Ben's question, his gaze instantly slid inward to some troublesome emotional vista. "Yeah, I've seen her," he mumbled. "A few times. She's ... not doing well. You're not going to get a lot of help from Margaret."
"What's wrong with her?" asked Horvil.
Quell stood and shifted from one foot to the other, then back again. "She's ill," he said laconically.
Natch shook his head. "It's not Margaret's problem anymore," he said. "That's why I hired Merri and Jara, to work on these kinds of policy questions. You three need to concentrate on getting all those bugs ironed out so Possibilities doesn't choke in front of a billion people."
"This should be easier than last time though, right?" said Ben. "We had MultiReal interacting with hundreds of millions of people in that auditorium. This time it's only twenty-three."
"You're forgetting something," replied Horvil with a reprimanding finger wag. "At the demo, we really just did five hundred million one-on-one interactions in a row. Nothing complex about that. Heck, it was all rigged off a mathematical progression, so Natch didn't even have to think about it. But next week at the exposition, we could have twenty-three conflicting realities to work out. That's twenty-three times as bad-no, twenty-three times exponentially as bad."
Natch shrugged, already halfway to the door that would lead them back to the Harper tube station. He wasn't worried. If there was any bio/logic engineer in the world capable of hunting down such a challenge, it was Horvil. With nine days to go, his old hivemate would have twenty-three-way MultiReal conflicts mounted and stuffed on his mantel by the time the exposition was under way.
The fiefcorp master turned to make sure the others were following him and was confronted by the odd sight of Benyamin wriggling his arms and legs like a man trying to bring back the circulation. "What's with you?" he said.
Ben snapped his head up, embarrassed. "Sorry, Natch. Those MultiReal choice cycles can be exhausting-but it is such an incredible rush."
I0
Two days passed with a cyclone of activity. Impromptu meetings swept across the horizon and threw previously settled decisions up in the air again. Fiefcorpers breezed into Natch's apartment with no advance notice at all hours of the night, and there were no apologies offered or expected.
Jara couldn't sleep. Every time she lay in bed and felt herself sliding under, she would come thrashing awake with Natch's name on her lips and Magan Kai Lee's words buzzing in her ears:
As long as Natch refuses to cooperate with us, the SarinalNatch MultiReal Fiefcorp is my top priority.
We are exploring every transaction your fiefcorp has ever done, every piece of code you've ever launched onto the Data Sea. This MultiReal exposition you are so diligently preparing for will not happen.
We will bury Natch.
Shouldn't she have warned Natch by now that the Defense and Wellness Council was still gunning for him? Wasn't that her duty as a fiefcorp apprentice? Then again, certainly this would not be news to Natch. He might have achieved a temporary triumph over the Council, but the entrepreneur knew better than to declare victory so soon. What more could Jara really tell him?
The internal argument raged as the night wore on. She composed a dozen messages to the fiefcorp master, discarded them, started again. The script for the MultiReal exposition, meanwhile, sat in a fetal state, shapeless and unformed.
Finally, at half past six, the analyst kicked off her blankets and summoned a view of the building's exterior on the viewscreen. She half expected to find a team of Defense and Wellness Council officers staring back at her taking notes. There were Council officers out there, all right, but they were far below, strolling placidly through the London mist along with everyone else. Was this a message in and of itself?
Jara collapsed back into her warren of pillows and tuned the viewscreen to the latest John Ridglee.
THE BOY WHO COULD DO NO WRONG
If the Prime Committee gives out civilian medals for bravery, then I propose somebody nominate Natch.
How convenient, thought Jara, stubbornly clinging to her midnight malaise. We issue a press release, and all the drudges who hate Natch suddenly get amnesia. She continued reading:
After Len Borda's aggressive posturing of late, the Surina/Natch Fiefcorp's announcement of a MultiReal exposition is not only brilliant, it's courageous. It puts Natch and his apprentices out in the open when a lesser man would seek the shadows. It's a bold and clear statement to the Defense and Wellness Council: we are not afraid of you.
And the symbolism of twenty-three lucky lottery winners playing MultiReal soccer shouldn't be lost on anyone either. Let's hope the twentythree members of the Prime Committee are watching these soccer players carefully.
Sen Sivv Sor, meanwhile, was covering another promising development: the burgeoning membership of a creed called Libertas. The organization had been skulking around the periphery of the libertarian movement for years. But suddenly, with the election of Khann Frejohr as speaker of the Congress of L-PRACGs, the membership ranks of Creed Libertas were exploding. And the match that had set off the powder keg was nothing less than Magan Kai Lee's raid on Natch's apartment. In the past few days alone, the creed had pledged another fifteen to twenty million devotees.
There was plenty more, but Jara was suddenly interrupted by a multi request. Horvil.
She leapt out of bed, darted into the breakfast nook with the speed of a panther, and began a frenzied effort to straighten the countertop. What are you doing? the analyst scolded herself. It's Just Horvil. She abandoned the breakfast nook to its sloppery ten seconds later and accepted Horvil's multi request. It had to be pretty important for the engineer to be up this early in the morning.
Horvil sidled in from the foyer, managing to look both furtive and transparent at the same time. His left hand was clenched tightly in his vest pocket, while his right nervously raked through rows of black hair. "I need to talk to you about something," he said.
Oh no, thought Jara, suddenly realizing why she had reacted the way she did. This was the first time the two of them had been alone since that awkward scene in the Center for Historic Appreciation. All I care about is not losing you, Horvil had told her as they crouched between the toes of the Sheldon Surina statue, waiting for their doom at the hands of the Defense and Wellness Council.
Jara looked in that chubby face now and auditioned a series of emotions-embarrassment, unease, gratification, reticence-but none of them seemed to fit the part. Finally she sat down in an easy chair and braced herself for whatever Horvil might have to say. "What is it?" she managed finally.
Horvil threw himself down on the couch opposite her and exhaled loudly from one side of his mouth. "It's-it's about Benyamin."
The analyst blinked rapidly in surprise. "Benyamin?"
"He's being blackmailed."
It took Jara a few seconds to refocus her mental lenses. Who could possibly be blackmailing Ben? The answer leapt into her mind after a moment's study. "That woman at Berilla's assembly-line shop. The one who manages the programming floor."
Horvil nodded ruefully. "Greth Tar Griveth," he said. "She's asking for credits. Lots of credits."
"Just to keep things quiet from your Aunt Berilla? This is ridicu lous, Horv. After all that's happened in the past month, can't Ben just tell his mother he's hired her shop to do the assembly-line work on MultiReal? It's not like we won't pay her. Would she really shut down the programming floor?"
"You don't know her," replied the engin
eer with a sad shake of the head. "Berilla hates Natch. She's trying to mobilize that whole creed of hers to pass these official statements condemning him. If she finds out one of her shops is doing barwork for our fiefcorp-fuck yeah, she'll shut down the programming floor. In a heartbeat."
Jara made a dismissive gesture with the flick of a wrist. "Why are you even bothering me with this?" she said. "There's a thousand good assembly-line shops out there. Ben really shouldn't be contracting his mother's company anyway. Tell Ben to go solicit some competitive bids. He's still got a few days before we need to pass off the final templates. They're just doing low-level work right now. That should be plenty of time."
"He's tried. He put together three new deals, but they all fell through."
"Why?"
"Nobody's saying." Horvil's face devolved from melancholy to fullfledged misery. "The assembly-line managers just tell him that they're already running at capacity. But I think they're scared. Every time Ben shows up somewhere to talk business, a squad of Meme Cooperative officials shows up the next day and starts checking tax records. The word's gotten out."
Jara groaned. "Magan Kai Lee." She felt nervous even saying the lieutenant executive's name out loud, as if those words were a talisman to release some infernal warrior from imprisonment. Magan had so many arcane weapons at his disposal-taxes, regulations, laws, policies-and Natch had so many weaknesses. It just didn't seem fair. "So what's Greth asking for that's so ridiculous?" said Jara.
Horvil listed a number that ventured past the ludicrous into the realm of the obscene. The analyst whistled. "I don't know if Natch would fork over that many credits," said the engineer. "That's way too much. Besides, it's too big of a number for Ben to transfer without Aunt Berilla getting wind of it. Someone's bound to notice. Especially with the Council and the drudges hanging over everyone's shoulders."
Jara rapped her knuckles hard against the chair's nailhead trim. "Come on, Horvil, this Greth woman can't be that unreasonable. She's got to see that if she keeps behaving like this, she'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."
"That's the whole thing," said Horvil, slumping to a spinecracking position in the couch. "Greth's not being reasonable. Either she's a loose cannon or she's just not very bright. She doesn't care about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs-she wants one big egg instead."
Jara sighed. She hated to admit it, but paying up was the only solution that made sense. Natch would authorize the bribe without thinking twice and find a way to carve it out of the woman's flesh later. That was simply his way of doing things.
The analyst was feeling the preliminary sorties of a massive headache and fired up Deuteron's Anodyne 88. "So what does Natch have to say about all this?"
Horvil flapped his lips in irritation. "Benyamin's afraid to tell him," he said, letting his head slump onto the back of the couch. "I kind of agree. Relying on that woman in the first place was a major fuck-up, and Ben knows it. He's convinced that Natch will kick him out of the fiefcorp for this. So I ... I told him-"
"You told him you'd talk to me."
The engineer made a peculiar half-nod without actually taking his neck off the back of the couch. "You're the-the most level-headed one in the fiefcorp. You always keep your wits in these situations. I told Ben you'd know what to do."
Jara folded her arms over her chest and frowned. "If I'm the level headed one," she grumbled, "then this fiefcorp is in bigger trouble than I thought." Does Horvil have any idea how much time I've spent on the Sigh with that idiot Geronimo? Does he have any idea that Magan Kai Lee is recruiting me to betray Natch, and I haven't said no yet?
"Listen, Jara," continued Horvil, "Ben trusts you. We all trust you. I mean, if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be able to-"
Jara could sense a clumsy segue in the making, and she made a slicing gesture to cut him off. "Okay, fine," she sighed. "It's probably better not to pester Natch with this crap anyway. Here's what you tell Ben. Have him transfer a piece of the money from our accounts, the fiefcorp accounts. We've got it right now, and if we use the company money it won't get on your aunt's radar. Have him tell Greth Tar Griveth that this is all he could get on such short notice-but if she'll wait until after the exposition, he'll give her the rest plus an additional twenty percent."
Horvil gasped. "Twenty percent? I could buy a hoverbird with that additional twenty percent."
"It doesn't matter. She won't get it. Greth's leverage evaporates after the MultiReal exposition."
The engineer gave a judicious nod and rubbed his nose. "It sounds reasonable coming from you," he said, "but what if Greth doesn't buy it? She's going to suspect that Ben won't follow through."
"Not if she thinks this is all coming from Benyamin's head," replied the analyst. "No offense, Horv, but your cousin is kind of naive. Ben can sell it to Greth if he really thinks we're going to pay her after the exposition. Just tell him we don't have all that cash at the moment, and it's going to take a while to get it."
Horvil stood up from the chair, looking relieved and not a little sheepish. "Thanks, Jara," he said. "I think you might have saved Ben's job."
Jara smiled wanly and waved a farewell at Horvil before he disappeared. She felt that nothing short of an industrial decontamination chamber could wash away the stench of corruption oozing from her pores. She remembered Natch's words to her just last month. Everyone who invests in biollogics knows what's going on. Things like this happen all the time. Do you think the Patel Brothers got to the top without getting their hands dirty? Or Len Borda?
Shaking her head, Jara arose and turned to take refuge in the bedroom. Suddenly she realized the window behind her was still tuned to a drudge clipping she had read the other day. It was a piece by one of the gossip drudges who made even Kristella Krodor seem like a paragon of substance. Jara looked at the headline and blushed furiously, realizing that Horvil must have seen it the whole time. If this ever got back to Natch, she didn't know how she could live with herself.
IS IT LOVE OR INFATUATION?
Our Foolproof Guide to Figuring Out How He Feels
After stepping off the multi tile, Horvil tried to bury his warped emotions in MindSpace, using his bio/logic programming bars as shovel.
His arms whirled in MindSpace, making and breaking data connections at blinding speed. Every few seconds, he would slip a bio/logic programming bar back into his satchel and slide another out to replace it with a single uninterrupted motion. Finally he chugged to a halt.
The engineer hitched back his thumb to survey the massive MultiReal castle before him. Horvil nodded and incremented the version number a fraction of a point. It's ready, he told himself. But are you sure you want to do this? He had been waiting for days to put the finishing touches on the latest iteration of Possibilities so he could conduct this experiment, but now he didn't feel so confident. Had anyone ever tried to run MultiReal nonstop to see what would happen? What if he got caught in some kind of unending choice cycle? Possibilities wasn't a typical bio/logic program that you could run through Dr. Plugenpatch to weed out the fatal errors.
Admit it, Horv. This shit is dangerous.
Then Jara's words came floating to the top of his consciousness. If I'm the level-headed one, then this fiefcorp is in bigger trouble than I thought. He couldn't keep going to Jara every time he faced a tough decision; he'd never get everything done in time for the exposition. Horvil flipped off MindSpace, activated Possibilities 0.812, and hustled out of the apartment before he could change his mind.
The first decision point came on the building's front steps. A large puddle of rainwater sat right at the intersection of stair and street; Horvil had been sloshing through it for days. But he could avoid soaking his shoes altogether if he could only vault over the side railing and land on that dry patch about a meter away-
Flash.
Horvil's consciousness slipped into a state of suspended animation as soon as he activated Possibilities. And then there was an indescribable flash, a mental widen
ing of view. The image of himself hurdling onto the dry spot of concrete hung in his mind like a bead on a string, in limbo. Some hidden inner sense showed him a line of alternate realities that stretched out to eternity in each direction, Horvils leaping and bounding at every conceivable angle. He felt himself scrolling among them, looking for a better possibility, a future in which-
Flash.
-Horvil sprang over the railing and made an acrobatic landing just beyond the puddle of rainwater.
The fiefcorp engineer paused and ran an arm across his sweating forehead. He had barely made it out of the building, and already he felt giddy. Not too late to turn back, Horvil told himself.
He stood and thought for a moment. Fuck that. Then the engineer hooked a right and headed toward Centurion Market Square, a place that promised any number of interesting experiments.
Turned out the feeling was intoxicating, a high unlike any he had ever felt. Horvil spent two hours in the West London tube station alone, hopping on and off the trains. He made graceful sashays to avoid jostling into passersby. He made improbable darts and zips to catch the last free seat on the train. And in one ridiculous act of chutzpah, Horvil even made a flying leap across the tracks right in front of a speeding tube train. Possibilities made it all seem so easy.
But such appearances could be deceptive. Each contingency the program laid out was the product of Horvil's own probability engine, the old ROD they had hastily tacked on to the program like a postscript. And Horvil found out the hard way that his probability engine was not omniscient. He was making another preposterous leap over a metal railing when his hand lost its grip and he found himself tumbling head-first down a flight of stairs. Luckily the engineer was able to activate MultiReal again several times on the way down, and he came out of the tumble unbruised. When he climbed back up the stairs to investigate, Horvil noticed that the railing was slick with rainwater and almost completely covered in shadow. Of course, he thought. MultiReal can only make calculations using the factors you give it. If you can't see that the railing's wet, MultiReal won't factor it in. He thought back to his crazy leap across the tube tracks a few minutes ago. What if the train had suddenly picked up speed after he jumped? What if there had been a wire running across the gap that he hadn't been able to see? He shuddered.
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