"But you'll have answers. You'll have access to all the answers, when you need them."
"What answers?"
Margaret's eyes were whirlpools spiraling down to an immeasurable depth. "Answers to help you make the crucial decisions."
Natch found a velvet couch nearby and folded himself into its welcoming embrace. Quell was right; this entire trip was a pointless exer cise. Perhaps Serr Vigal could sift through Margaret's gibberish, if indeed there were any nuggets of sanity left to be panned from that muddy psyche, but Natch could make no sense of it. He resolved to simply collect her words and keep them handy for later analysis.
As for Quell, he seemed to have abandoned the mission of discovery he had undertaken the other day. His eyes were tinged with a peculiar mixture of concern, compassion, and incandescent rage. He retreated back to the bodhisattva's chair and sat on its arm. Margaret immediately collapsed against him like a mannequin.
But the bodhisattva had not finished her rambling. There was a struggle going on behind her eyes, a final wrenching effort at clarity. "Listen to me, Natch," she said. "You still have options. Don't let them tell you otherwise. The Council, your fiefcorp, anybody. MultiReal is yours now, Natch.
"I was foolish to have held on to it for so long. I am not my father. I'm not strong enough to make these decisions. But you ...
"Natch, I picked you for a reason-because you'll resist Len Borda to your dying breath. You will resist the winter and the void. Understand this-something my father was trying to tell me. The world is new each day, every sunrise a spring and every sunset a winter. I know you'll understand this. You will stand alone in the end, and you will make the decisions that the world demands. The decisions I can't make. I know this. I know it."
There would be no more elucidation coming from Margaret Surina that afternoon, for as she finished the last word she slipped into a sudden fitful sleep. Quell cradled her in his arms, saying nothing. The fiefcorp master could see that the Islander comprehended no more than he did.
Natch stood once more and walked to the closest window. Far down below through the mist, he could see Andra Pradesh laid out before him like a chaotic playground of the gods, but from that quarter there were no answers forthcoming either.
15
The trouble began with a message in the early hours of the morningearly hours for Horvil, at least, who was still exhausted from yesterday's drudge onslaught and who even in the most lax of times would cross multiple time zones and hotel it to justify a few extra hours of sleep.
The engineer pulled his face from a cool crevice of the sofa and fluttered his eyelids to dispel the pixie dust. Bulky letters were hopping up and down impatiently on their serifs before Horvil's face.
HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP
Horvil rolled onto his back, dropped his head into a net of interwoven fingers, and checked the signature. The message had come from ... Prosteev Serly?
As an engineer in a highly visible fiefcorp, Horvil had met just about everyone in the Primo's top fifty. The entrepreneur Serly had bought him a few drinks last week on the pretext of fostering good relations among the competition. Never mind that Horvil no longer was the competition since MultiReal had come along. It soon became apparent that Serly was really after technical assistance with NiteFocus 51, which he had bought at auction when Natch liquidated the company's old programs. Horvil suspected that Natch wouldn't approve of such generosity to a former competitor, especially with the exposition looming so close. But free booze was free booze. Horvil and Serly spent a few hours in a Turkish bar discussing iterative functions and quantum dynamics and the conductive properties of the optic nerve. Prosteev took lots of notes and, more importantly, poured lots of drinks. The two had parted friends.
Horvil zapped off a ConfidentialWhisper. "How ya doing, Prosteev?"
Prosteev, panicked, teetering on the edge of violence: "What kind of shit did you put in that NiteFocus code, Horv? What's Natch trying to pull? I thought he was getting out of bio/logics, and now he does this to me-"
"Hold it, hold it, hold it," interrupted the engineer. "Start from the beginning. I have no idea what you're talking about."
"I'm talking about massive failures with NiteFocus. I'm talking about twelve thousand complaints in the past three hours, and more every minute. Now I've got the Meme Cooperative breathing down my neck, people demanding refunds, my analyst threatening to quit-"
Horvil calmed the man down the best he could and asked for temporary access to the MindSpace blueprints. He threw on a robe and shuffled to his workbench. Crumbs from yesterday's sandwich made lazy backflips off his sleeve. (Read the contract, he could hear his inner Natch griping. You don't have to help Prosteev Serly. That sale was final the instant those credits changed hands.)
Sifting through the soft blues and purples of the NiteFocus code was like catching up with an old friend. Horvil remembered the nimble swing of the programming bar that had created that parabola, the deft touch that had closed those loopholes. He briefly relived the evening when Natch had tested the program on his balcony and declared it unfit for public consumption. Soon Horvil was back in hyperfocus as he sifted through error reports and Plugenpatch specifications.
An hour and a half later, Horvil found the mistake: an improperly defined variable in one of the program's isolated ghettos. He swept through the logs and verified that the error was, in fact, his responsibility and not something tacked on later by Serly's engineers. It was a trivial mistake from those frantic nights before the NiteFocus 48 launch. Under normal conditions, such a flaw might go unnoticed for years without causing any trouble. Half the bio/logic programs on the Data Sea had failings like this that would only crop up in the most bizarre situations. Not even Primo's and Dr. Plugenpatch could find them all.
The engineer tossed his programming bar over one shoulder with a well-practiced motion, where it landed on a pillow and rolled to join several others on the floor. He called up bug reports and began crossreferencing the source of the errors. Billboard holographs, mostly, along with the occasional Data Sea news feed.
Horvil turned back to that insignificant thread drooping in MindSpace like a flaccid phallus. What were the odds of twelve thousand specific calls to that strand in one morning? Astronomical. This was no coincidence. Someone had bought advertising space on those billboards and posted just the right image with just the right resolution at just the right time: a perfect storm of sabotage. But how had the saboteurs found the flaw? Unless they had stumbled on it by accident, which seemed unlikely, they would have had to reverse-engineer the whole thing from scratch. Not an easy task.
Horvil's mind triangulated with furious speed. Who could spare those kinds of resources? Who could afford to rent all that billboard space for those incriminating holographs? And who had the motive to muck with Horvil's code anyway?
Horvil silently tallied up all the bio/logic programs out there that bore his signature. Optical programs, mental process refiners, memory aids. Four dozen? Five? Certainly if one program was vulnerable to such attack, they all were.
The yellow jacket floated on the surface of the hoverbird window, lifeless, inert. If Natch stared long enough, he could see it drift from side to side like a buoy bobbing on the ocean. There was a faint hum coming from some subterranean register as well. Natch knew it was just a trick of the hoverbird's audiovisual system, a way to hint at information that only a properly configured MindSpace workbench could provide. But until he arrived back in Shenandoah, this poor man's display would have to do.
He was still a few hours out from Shenandoah, closer than he would have been if he had taken the tube with Quell. But the Islander was so upset at the state of affairs in Andra Pradesh, he had decided to stay behind for another day to see what he could accomplish. Natch bristled, thinking of the MultiReal exposition in less than a week and the mountain of programming changes that needed to go to the assembly-line shop in the next forty-eight hours. But in the end he decided to give the Islander so
me leeway and just get himself home as fast as possible. Thus, a chartered flight, in a four-seater Falcon hoverbird. The pilot had never made any attempt to talk to him; she simply tuned the cockpit windows to a geosynchron weather report and lifted off.
As Andra Pradesh became a memory and Europe fled in the hoverbird's wake, Natch stared at the yellow jacket on the window, evidence of the MultiReal code in his head. Who planted you there? he asked the insect. What are you doing? What relation do you have to the black code?
What are you waiting for?
Natch was startled out of his reverie by a ConfidentialWhisper request. Horvil. The fiefcorp master waved the blob on the window away until it was nothing but a ghostly presence, a malicious idea. Many meters below, he could see the choppy waves of the English Channel. "What?" he snapped brusquely, shaking his head to jumpstart his synapses.
The engineer's tone was tired and fatalistic. "We've got a problem, boss."
"Well? What is it?"
"The Council."
Natch felt a sudden nausea wash over him. It was the same primitive queasiness he had felt the night before initiation, when he had been outflanked and humiliated by Brone, and somehow he knew this was not just another petty harassment. "So what did they do this time?" said Natch, molars grinding.
Horvil let out a 'Whisper-audible sigh. "They sabotaged my programs," he said. "Twelve of 'em so far and counting. No, don't say I'm being paranoid-this has their fingerprints all over it. They figured out a way to generate all these complaints to the Meme Cooperative, and the Meme Cooperative's been funneling them to the Bio/Logic Engineering Guild. They're accusing me of-get this-deceptive programming."
"So you've gotten some complaints. When has that ever-"
"Not just some complaints. More complaints than the Guild's ever received for one programmer." Horvil might have sounded amused if he didn't sound so exhausted. "Four million and counting. They're starting up a whole task force."
Natch blinked, hard. Four million complaints?
But before he had a chance to process this new datum, he was assaulted by a fresh Confidential Whisper request, also labeled urgent. Merri. "Natch," she moaned in a tone redolent of fresh sobbing. "They've-I've-"
Natch slumped down in his seat. "Let me guess. The Council."
Merri's nod was evident even through ConfidentialWhisper. "I don't know for certain-but it has to be them. Someone convinced Creed Objectivv to suspend my membership. Here, look." The fiefcorp master felt the neural twitch of an incoming message. He pointed at the hoverbird window and summoned a document whose quasi-mystical font could only have germinated in an Objectivv art department.
Horvil, still prattling on in the background: "I haven't heard anything from the Meme Cooperative yet, but the Engineering Guild is pissed. They've taken away my Guild card until this is all cleared up."
"I don't understand," said Natch. "Why would Magan Kai Lee care about some stupid trade guild?"
"It's political," replied the engineer. He seemed remarkably non chalant, almost jocular, for someone whose career was under siege. "Lots of bad blood between the Guild and the Cooperative. Goes back twenty years. The Guild's been accusing the Co-op of coddling the business interests. So the Co-op keeps one-upping them lately, pushing the envelope. If the Guild takes away your card, then you can bet the Co-op's going to take away your license-"
Natch switched focus back to the channel manager. Labor politics always made him irritable, and all he really needed to know was that the Council was taking aim at Horvil's license to do business. He scrolled feverishly up and down the Creed Objectivv letter that Merri had received. There was only the typical bureaucratic obfuscation: all flourish and no content. "So what's going on, Merri?" he said. "Why did they suspend you?"
"My chapter manager says it's about ... `pledging under false pretenses.
The entrepreneur writhed under the neural miasma, wishing for the luxury of a molded tube seat instead of the Spartan practicality of this hoverbird chair. "Listen, I'm sorry to hear about this, but-"
"But what does it matter to the fiefcorp?" Merri sighed. "Well, the Objectivv truth-telling oath is a potent tool, Natch. Channelers who've pledged not to lie have a big advantage. So if the Meme Cooperative thinks we're gaming the system ... If they think I joined the creed specifically so the fiefcorp could take advantage of the oath ..."
"All right, I get it. Unfair competition. Customers filing lawsuits left and right: I only bought their program because of the oath, and the oath is a sham." Perhaps not enough for any kind of conviction, but enough to get an investigation under way. Enough, maybe, to get Merri's license from the Meme Cooperative suspended.
Natch's heart raced. The contours of Magan Kai Lee's scheme were beginning to take shape. Not a military onslaught but a bureaucratic one, with the Cooperative as rifle and business licenses as ammunition. But why? What did Magan get out of suspended licenses?
Two more high-priority pings, almost simultaneous. Benyamin and Serr Vigal. Whatever else the Council was capable of, they had certainly mastered timing and coordination.
"It appears that the Vault has put me under investigation," muttered Vigal without preamble.
"My mother, Natch," said Benyamin, one beat away from abject terror. "She shut down the assembly-line floor."
"She what?"
"It was that programming floor manager, Greth Tar Griveth. She must have blabbed something to my mother-that's the only thing I can think of. The Council swooped in and opened an investigation. But that's not the worst part, Natch. My mother, she went into a rage when she found out. She actually ordered the floor to roll back the changes to MultiReal they made last month."
The hoverbird made a sudden shimmy from the turbulence. Natch's stomach lurched. "They're rolling back-?"
-and even Primo's uses the Engineering Guild's routines to determine their rankings," continued Horvil, still operating under the assumption that he had the fiefcorp master's full attention. "That's what the rumor is anyway
Vigal: "I don't understand it, Natch. Some fool at the Vault has decided that I'm funneling money from my memecorp fund-raising into the fiefcorp. He says the receipts don't add up. The lawyer I talked to even accused me of slipping money to the Surinas, of all people ..."
"I know what you're thinking, Natch." Merri. "You thought I took the Objectivv truth-telling oath years ago. But no, I only took the oath about nine months before I signed on with you. About the same time you started courting me for the job ..."
Natch tried to parse through the confused babble streaming through his head, the overlapping ConfidentialWhispers, the worried moans. He tugged at the hoverbird harness as if preparing to stand up and pace off the built-up frustration. But there was no room to pace in this cramped vehicle. So instead he sat in his seat, paralyzed, as the avalanche of bad news came crashing down.
"We've got to do something, Natch. If we don't get to that factory floor quick, they could really mess things up. It might take us weeks to sort through it-"
"The Vault's put a hold on all my memecorp accounts. I tried to get on a shuttle to the cognitive processes conference this morning, and they wouldn't even let me board...."
"The silver lining here is that the Guild doesn't have any power to block access to the MultiReal code. Cooperative doesn't either, really. So I can still get the program ready for the exposition, you just can't pay me for it...."
"What should I do, Natch? The creed must be so disappointed in me.... I don't even know where to start...."
"You know I've always been lazy about balancing the books, Natch, and it's just so complicated with money going in and out all over the place. You don't suppose that somewhere in the past few years I might have misplaced a few-"
"Horvil's going to hate me...."
Natch turned to the window for a calming vision of the sea and saw only the illicit chunk of MultiReal code they had found in his head.
A ping. A text message, from Quell.
Be
on your guard. We spotted a whole cluster of Council hoverbirds on the outskirts of Andra Pradesh a few hours ago, headed your way. Looks like they might be following you.
Natch sat back, activated a bio/logic routine to stanch the flow of sweat from his brow, and dialed the Confidential Whisper discussions down to a murmur. Stop, he told himself. Calm down.
He inhaled deeply and let the rarefied hoverbird oxygen rush into his lungs. The Council wants you in a panic, he thought. They want you confused. They want you to make mistakes. He found a snapshot of memory and held it up: a young boy, sullen and wild-eyed, threatening to report the capitalman Figaro Fi to the authorities. He had blown his chance at getting seed money for a fiefcorp and wasted several years of his life as a consequence. And why? Because he had been flummoxed by Brone.
But that's not going to happen again.
You can beat them.
Natch uncurled his fingers from their death grip on the armrest and slid into a straight and narrow mental groove. He watched himself coolly line up the fiefcorpers' woes as if in spreadsheet columns. Horvil's termination from the Bio/Logic Engineering Guild. Merri's suspension from Creed Objectivv. Vigal's supposed financial improprieties. Ben's mother's attempt to roll back their MultiReal code. Quell's security issues at the Surina compound. Margaret's stupor. Jara's-
The panic lapped briefly over his mental seawalls, bolstered by exhaustion and doubt and black code. Why hadn't he received any word from Jara?
He tried pinging her. No response. Again, and again. Still nothing.
Stay focused, Natch admonished himself. Think. What's the Council trying to do? Magan Kai Lee had unleashed a torrent of suspensions, improprieties, and investigations on him, all scrupulously planned and nearly impossible to trace back to the Council. But what did it really add up to in the end? Clearly he was missing something. Where did he factor in? What catastrophe did Magan have waiting for him?
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