Infoquake Part 14

More SeeNaRee, Natch moaned to himself. Did I miss a trend? Is everyone conducting business in these gaudy fantasy worlds nowadays?

Brone had changed significantly since Natch had last seen him, bundled in the back of that Falcon four-seater in b.l.o.o.d.y rags. His aura of youthful ent.i.tlement was gone. He had gained a considerable amount of weight, but did not carry it in the dignified manner of a Horvil or a Merri, and the handsome face that once inspired sighs from female hivemates was mangled beyond repair. Natch traced a long scar from his chin to his forehead, pa.s.sing straight through the center of his right eye. The eye gleamed with the sickly emerald of a prosthesis.

"You like my face, I take it?" said Brone, his voice devoid of earthly emotion. "I'll bet you didn't even know the bear did that to me. He would have had the whole head for breakfast, but luckily I was able to satisfy him with a light snack." Brone held up his right arm, and Natch gasped in spite of himself. The flesh came to an abrupt end just below the elbow, where it merged with a pale synthetic hand and forearm.

"Oh, don't feel too sorry for me, Natch," he said, sneering at the look of discomfort on the fiefcorp master's face. "These imitation limbs work quite well. Look!" Brone painstakingly unclenched his prosthetic fingers and reached for the cheese slicer. The utensil did a clumsy dance in his hand but finally went clattering to the floor. By instinct, Natch reached down to pick it up, and fell flat on his face when his fingers pa.s.sed straight through the metal. SeeNaRee. Brone let out a quiet snort and offered his old rival a hand up-the artificial hand. Natch gripped the slick, rubbery limb and pulled himself to his feet. Contrary to the act he had put on seconds ago, Brone actually seemed to be quite nimble with his prosthesis.

All at once, the purpose of Natch's visit rushed back to him: Margaret Surina, the Phoenix Project, investment capital. He needed to keep his focus. "I was invited to breakfast by the Bodhisattva of Creed Tha.s.sel," said Natch between clenched teeth.

Brone paid Natch no mind; he seemed to be partic.i.p.ating in an entirely different conversation. "I suppose you're asking yourself, What about cosmetic surgery? Organ harvesting? Flesh-repairing OCHREs?" He leaned back and brought the fingers of his hands together in front of his face, like a spider contemplating its next meal. The glint of reflected diamond was visible in his teeth. "Certainly science has progressed farther than this."

"I came to discuss-"

"Figaro Fi," said Brone in a commanding voice, cutting Natch off in mid-sentence. "You remember the fat little capitalman Figaro Fi? This whole cripple routine was Figaro's idea. Show off your scars, my boy, he said. Play up your handicaps. Hold out your stump to gain their sympathy, then hold out your good hand to take their money." As he spoke, Brone hunched over in a cruelly effective parody of the little man. Longrepressed memories of the night before initiation came flooding back to Natch, and he nearly retched in disgust.

"Perhaps it was a despicable thing to do," continued Brone, "but it worked! Figaro brought me everywhere in those miserable years after the initiation. He would stand me up in these little auditoriums with a group of capitalmen, put a bio/logic programming bar in my hand, and cheer me on like a monkey while I performed tricks in Minds.p.a.ce. Figaro's programming cripple, victim of the Shortest Initiation! Who could withhold money from such a sad and n.o.ble soul?

"And Figaro was right! How amazingly simple it is-all you have to do is admit that the world has defeated you, and the money will come pouring in. It's an intoxicating feeling. And if you make the right connections, if you stroke enough egos, if you convince enough of those shallow, soulless capitalmen that their gifts have soothed your pain-why, you win the game. The capitalmen begin throwing you private contracts. You can work outside the auspices of the Meme Cooperative, where you don't have to worry about the constraints of Dr. Plugenpatch. You can toss that Primo's bio/logic investment guide in the dungheap where it belongs!"

Brone began rubbing his chin in far-away contemplation, and Natch had to use every ounce of his willpower not to wrap his hands around his throat and begin squeezing as hard as he could. He looked around for something to sit on, and found nothing but diamond outcroppings that were almost certainly illusions.

"I can see you're restless," said Brone, turning to Natch as if noticing him for the first time. He leaned back in the gargantuan chair and laid his arms on the throne, like a withered and haunted king. "You want to sit, you want to stand, you want to move, you want to stay still-it's been like this your whole life, hasn't it?

"Well, let me tell you, Natch, I know where you're heading, and I've been there. There's a whole economy up in that rarefied air that the drudges know nothing about. And I made riches up there. Riches! You fantasize about living in a lunar estate some day? I own one, Natch, and it's worth every b.l.o.o.d.y credit. Sunrises over the lip of Tycho while you watch and sip chaff in a gravity-controlled dome ... servants at your beck and call ... pretty young gardeners pruning all those twisted moon plants. There's nothing like it.

"But the lunar estate grows tiresome after a while. So do the sycophants and the bootlickers. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true. I bought myself the gaudiest estate I could, and the private hoverbird service, and the baubles and jewels and gadgets. And then I asked myself: Now what?

"So I went searching again.

"First, I went to the medical specialists. Hack the body, and the mind will follow-isn't that what Sheldon Surina said? But can you believe what a superst.i.tious world we live in, Natch? The Autonomous Revolt was hundreds of years ago-and yet the Prime Committee still won't allow a simple tank-grown limb! The only place for human flesh is on the human body, they say." His voice rumbled up to a dangerous level, as if he were playing to the rafters in some imaginary amphitheater.

"So they gave me the next best thing." And then, as Natch looked on in horror, Brone unsnapped his fake arm and thrust it onto the table, where it landed on the bleu cheese with a sickening thwup. A circle of plastic p.r.o.ngs shone wetly on the end of Brone's stump, like octopus teeth. "Completely self-contained, no nerves or blood required: a miracle of engineering. You would be surprised to know how quickly one can tweak it to work in Minds.p.a.ce like a bio/logic programming bar. And, of course, having an artificial limb gives one certain ... advantages." When the fingers of the disembodied hand began twitching of their own accord, Natch leapt back and nearly sprawled on his face again. The fingers tore through the rind of the cheese and performed a gooey dance, s.p.a.ckling the floor with bits of white.

Natch felt sick. He recognized his own ruthless utilitarian tactics at work. What was it that old Kordez Tha.s.sel had said? Do not let taboos and social restrictions stop you from gaining advantage over your enemy. OCHREs rushed to defuse the acid in his stomach, and Natch would have supplemented their soothing effects with a bio/logic program if he thought it would help. "I-I came here today," he stuttered, "to-"

Brone completely ignored him. "So the replacement arm and the replacement eye were dead ends," he said with a shrug. "I knew as soon as they were installed that I had been using my handicap as an escape. It was an easy way to distract me from what I really wanted to do, from the one thing that would make me happy.

"And that was killing you."

Natch edged back, flailing his arm behind him in search of the door. He realized with dismay that it had vanished. He didn't want to know anymore why Brone had invited him here this morning, or what his interest in the Phoenix Project was; Natch just wanted out. But the diamond walls completely surrounded him now. He was trapped.

Brone leaned back in his throne and regarded Natch with sepulchral eyes, like someone watching from a separate plane of existence. The disembodied forearm began tapping out a mad rhythm on the cheese plate. "I spent months planning the whole scenario. I followed you around, Natch, did you know that? I scouted out a thousand locations for the perfect ambush. Should I follow you to Cisco and shoot you down in the forest? Or plug you full of black code on a sidestreet in London? Or just push you off your own balcony in Shenandoah and be done with it?"

Natch rubbed his back against the diamond wall and did not breathe. The door had to be there somewhere ... if he could just pierce the veil of this confounded SeeNaRee....

"But don't worry, Natch," said Brone, his voice one big sneer. "You're not in any danger here today." He spread his hand and stump wide in a conciliatory gesture. His smile was the smile of a ghoul. "You see, I have found religion."

The fiefcorp master stared at his old enemy, not comprehending. "The Bodhisattva of Creed Tha.s.sel," Natch croaked under his breath. "Where is he?"

Brone gave a long and uncomfortable pause, like a robot in suspended animation. "I am the Bodhisattva of Creed Tha.s.sel," he said at last.

It took a minute for the words to penetrate Natch's defenses. He turned them around in his head, breaking them down into small digestible pieces to try and make sense of them. Brone the head of the Tha.s.selians?

Before he could get a grip on the situation, the SeeNaRee changed.

Suddenly, they were hurtling through black s.p.a.ce in a small starcraft not much bigger than the Falcon that transported them home from initiation all those years ago. Rocks and chunks of ice whizzed by at breakneck speed. Natch looked out the starboard window just in time to see an asteroid the size of a tube train hurtle past them, missing the ship by half a meter.

"I could turn you in to the Prime Committee," Natch gasped. "You can't hide exits like that. It's against the law. And you can't just switch environments on the fly without giving me fair warning."

Brone sat back in his padded captain's chair, toying idly with the steering panel that rose before him from the floor like a metallic mushroom. He did not react at all to the first asteroid collision, which made the rickety craft shudder as if it were a few bolts away from completely collapsing. "How ironic," Brone croaked. "Natch threatening to turn me over to the law? Here at Creed Tha.s.sel, we take a more laissez-faire approach to laws. As old Kordez used to say, Rules are for those who follow rules. "

"But-" The rusted hull of a dead s.p.a.ceship slammed into the side of their craft, sending Natch sprawling onto the floor once again with his teeth chattering. He bit the inside of his cheek with an audible chomp. Brone remained comfortably seated, and Natch noted that the disembodied arm sat motionless on the table. Yet another infraction, thought the fiefcorp master bitterly. Inconsistent laws of physics.

"Creed Tha.s.sel was really in abysmal shape when I found it," continued Brone, studying the fingernails of his good hand intently. "You'd be surprised how many people think Creed Tha.s.sel ceased to exist twenty years ago. There was that expose by Sen Sivv Sor. Financial scandals. A real paucity of leadership. The imbeciles running the organization were even on the brink of losing control of the Kordez Tha.s.sel Complex. So when I got religion, Natch, I got it for a real bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt price. They needed my money. They needed my vision and my initiative."

Cosmic debris continued to slam into the ship, leaving Natch huddled on the floor with his hands over his head. OCHREs had already staunched the bleeding in his mouth, but he couldn't help probing the scar with his tongue. He knew he cut quite a ridiculous figure to his old rival, but survival was all he cared about at this point.

"Forgive me," sighed the bodhisattva, his voice devoid of supplication. "I suppose I've gotten carried away." He waved his hand in the air-the hand of flesh and bone-and the cluttered field of debris outside the ship vanished. The virtual gravity stabilized. "So let us discuss business, you and I."

Natch warily got to his feet and brushed himself off. It seemed strange that an hour ago, the only thing occupying his mind was his dire need for capital. Now suddenly, he was treading water in a sea of old landmines. "Do I have any choice?" he muttered.

"Game playing!" shouted Brone abruptly, his eyes ablaze. He arose from the chair and stood at the port window, his stump resting wearily against the gla.s.s. "All these games we've played throughout the years, you and I. And this whole setup-the invitation, the SeeNaRee, throwing the arm on the table-just another move in the game. A way to put you off guard. But believe it or not, after all the hurt and pain and suffering you have caused me, Natch, I am capable of forgiving you."

Natch gritted his teeth. Forgiving me for what? he thought.

"Soon, we will all be moving beyond games," continued Brone. "All of us ... you, me, the drudges, Horvil, the idiots at the Defense and Wellness Council, all those narrow-minded bean counters at Primo's. Soon, it will make no difference who the winners and losers are."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about Margaret Surina, of course. I'm talking about the Phoenix Project'." Natch could practically hear the belittling quotation marks.

"I don't know-"

"Oh, please!" snapped the bodhisattva in a sudden fit of pique. "Don't waste your breath. The Phoenix Project is the whole reason you held those little fundraising charades of yours, isn't it? It's the whole reason you're here. But even if you hadn't held those meetings, Natch, I would have come looking for you. I know all about your visit to Andra Pradesh. Tha.s.selian agents were watching when you walked in and out of those gates at the Surina compound, and they attended your little performances yesterday too. That's the advantage of having an organization with a secret membership.

"Let me be forthcoming. You're a step behind in this game, Natch, just as you've always been a step behind me in everything else. The struggle for the Phoenix Project was well underway before you b.u.t.ted your nose into it. I have no problem with your pathetic attempts to grab a little portion of the pot, but don't think you can walk away with the whole thing. There are too many people who know too much."

Natch gave a haughty sniff in Brone's direction. "And what do you know that I don't?"

"I know what you have been trying to find out-I know what this technology of Margaret's is." Natch could practically feel Brone's grim smile, even though he was facing the other direction. "Let me tell you, it is everything you suspect it is, and more. Perhaps even more than Margaret imagines."

The fiefcorp master hesitated and felt Serr Vigal's suspicions rushing in to fill the hole in the pit of his stomach. Could Brone be telling the truth? The Tha.s.selians continued to pledge their devotees in secret, after all, and there were no Creeds Coalition bylaws preventing people from pledging to more than one creed. "So what are you wasting time with me for?" said Natch with affected nonchalance. "If you're so far ahead of me, go talk to Margaret yourself."

"I have tried, many times. The Surina woman does not listen."

"Perhaps she's put off by your winning way with people."

Natch's wisecrack did not succeed in penetrating Brone, now standing at the window rubbing his chin with his handless stump. Natch couldn't help but shiver. "Obviously, you cannot see the forest for the trees, Natch. I wish I could say this surprises me, but it does not. So let me tell you the truth of the situation that has so far eluded you." Brone spread the fingers of his good hand out against the window, as if straining to reach something beyond the black void. "I have seen the future, Natch. And the future is you and I, in business together, selling the Phoenix Project."

The thought made Natch nauseous. "Bulls.h.i.t."

"I understand your dilemma, Natch," said Brone, his voice barely a whisper now. "You want to walk out the door right now and never see me again." He nodded towards the rear of the s.p.a.cecraft, where a plain metal door suddenly materialized out of nowhere. "But Margaret Surina has dangled the carrot just beyond your reach, like everything has always been just beyond your reach. You need my help. n.o.body is buying your fundraising pitch, and you're running out of time. You need the money that I can provide-money that's just sitting in the coffers of Creed Tha.s.sel waiting for a worthwhile investment. I can transfer the credits to your Vault account before the hour is up."

The entrepreneur snorted. "And what do you get in return?"

"Nothing at all. This is simply a cash loan. Repayment over five years with Vault standard interest rates."

Natch stared uncomfortably at the plastic teeth of Brone's stump. He could feel the wheels of his mind spinning and spinning but gaining no traction. "Why would you do that?"

"Because," replied Brone with maddening calm, "you need money and I need a foot in the door. If I attached strings to the offer, you wouldn't take it."

"Let me see the contract," Natch grunted.

Brone stepped away from the fiefcorp master's side, and gave a sweeping bow towards the window. The twinkling stars of s.p.a.ce were replaced with the dull black-and-white text of a legal doc.u.ment. Natch scanned the length of the contract in less than a minute, then read it over twice more to make sure he wasn't missing anything. The contract was conspicuously short and completely free of legal doubletalk or hidden provisos.

"I don't get it," Natch rasped.

"That is because you have a limited intellect," said Brone. "This is an act of trust, Natch. It is a concept beyond your understanding."

The fiefcorp master looked back and forth between his wraithlike nemesis, the grubby hand on the table, and the blocky letters on the viewscreen. If I had the slightest doubt you could find the money to do this, Margaret had said, you wouldn't be here. He checked his internal calendar and looked once more at the menacingly small block of days remaining until Margaret's planned unveiling of the Phoenix Project.

Suddenly, with his mind's eye, he saw a raging bear in the wilderness. A battered and bleeding boy lying in the back seat of a Falcon hoverbird. An act of trust?

Natch quelled the inner voice screaming dire words of doom. He blocked out the chortling of Figaro Fi and Captain Bolbund and the Patel Brothers that echoed through his head. Then he reached out with his mind and affirmed the contract.

Brone smiled. His detached hand dragged itself painstakingly to the edge of the table and then threw itself to the ground, where it wriggled like a fish out of water.

Horvil studied the viewscreen with as much concentration as he gave his bio/logic programs. "If you ask me-"

"Which I'm not," muttered Jara.

"If you ask me, daisies would work much better in here than violets." The engineer put his nose up to the viewscreen as if trying to give individual attention to every pixel. Then, in feng shui mode, he glanced around Jara's apartment with eyes narrowed. "A garden of violets is going to stick out in here like a sore thumb," said Horvil. "But daisies, they're so ... light and ... airy. They'd look terrific with this blank wall effect you have going on here." He made an expansive gesture at the unadorned white plaster running the length and breadth of the room.

Jara snorted loudly. Was this clod actually serious for once, or was he just being sarcastic? She couldn't tell which option was worse. The fact that Horvil had absolutely no taste or personal style whatsoever only compounded the problem. Then again, Jara thought bitterly, why would you need to have fashion sense if you've got enough money to buy it instead? She remembered the rare ceramic sculpture Horvil had hanging on his wall with a stray glob of peanut b.u.t.ter encrusted on its bottom edge, and she cringed.

The a.n.a.lyst forced herself to stop this dreadful internal monologue. She couldn't blame Horvil for her failure to carve a home out of this tiny apartment. She could only blame herself. And that was why Jara had decided she was going to order a new garden and wall hangings today. Who cared if she could ill afford them on her apprentice's salary. She had to draw the line somewhere. "I'm going with violets," she said between tense grinding teeth, and gave the viewscreen a silent command.

In the blink of an eye, the living room wall shifted back a meter to make room for a row of holographic violets that slid up from the floor. Horvil yelped and quickly scooted out of the way. As Jara searched for a suitable layout, he took a seat at the kitchen table and watched the shifting kaleidoscopic patterns on the floor. "Maybe you could try layout 57, with a few daisies sprinkled in to match th-"

"Horvil, please."

He shut up. Jara settled on a slight arc that spanned the length of the room, and confirmed the order. Delivery tomorrow at 3:25 pm, the system told her. Somewhere on the Data Sea, computational agents for the tenement building cut a thick slice out of Jara's Vault account.

This was all a diversion anyway, a way to pa.s.s the time until they could squeeze some information from Natch about what was going on. He had promised to explain everything in a fiefcorp meeting at seven o'clock. But by the time eight-thirty rolled around with no sign of Natch, the three apprentices decided their fiefcorp master wasn't coming. The same thing had been going on for a week. Horvil tried to get in touch with Serr Vigal, but the neural programmer had predictably prived himself to incoming communication, probably off fundraising. So Horvil and Jara spent the next few hours in Jara's apartment listening to Merri explain what little she knew about the Phoenix Project. The three tossed improbable theories back and forth, and got nowhere. Eventually, Merri decided to cut her connection so she could spend some time tending to her companion Bonneth, who was bed-ridden with another one of her crippling fevers.

Jara was ready to kick Horvil out and get some sleep, when she felt an incoming multi request.

Natch appeared in the room, looking as bothered and beautiful as always. He was already pacing the length of the room before he had completely emerged from the haze of multivoid. "Horv, I'm going to need you to interview some new engineers and programmers," he said, as if they had been discussing the topic for hours.

"Are we expanding?" asked Horvil.

"What does it look like?"

Horvil shot a glib look at Jara. "How many do we need?"

"I don't know," replied Natch without missing a beat. "Two. Five. Ten if they're stupid."

The engineer stood with arms akimbo and sucked in his stomach as if girding for battle. "I hear and obey, brave commander," he said, and vanished.

Natch swiveled on the ball of his left foot and stopped directly in front of Jara. The a.n.a.lyst felt the familiar hollow sensation in the pit of her stomach as the entrepreneur locked eyes with her. Sapphires, she thought. "And you," said Natch in a feathery voice. "Why don't you tag along with Merri. She's meeting with Robby Robby to get him up to speed on how we do things around here."

Jara gulped. "Who's Robby Robby?"

"Our new channeling partner. He's a bit of a character, but he's got a staff that could sell you the clothes on your back while you're still wearing them."

The a.n.a.lyst nodded. Her own clothes seemed uncomfortably tight and constricting at the moment. "All right, I'll do that." Then, seeing that Natch was about to cut his multi connection, asked: "So what do you think-violets or daisies?" She tilted her head towards the holographic arch that the fiefcorp master had plowed straight through several times now.

Natch turned and studied the flower arrangement for a moment. "I'd say daisies," he announced, and then severed his multi projection without another word.

Jara cancelled the violets and ordered daisies instead.

Natch's thought processes had always been a mystery to Jara, but she soon began to wonder if he was losing his grip on reality. That night, he went on a t.i.tanic shopping spree. Natch bought everyone in the fiefcorp a new workbench with expanded Minds.p.a.ce capabilities and the fanciest set of bio/logic programming bars on the market. He let Horvil loose on the Data Sea to pick out the best code optimization routines and a.n.a.lysis algorithms. He set up a permanent account at the Surina Enterprise Facility so he could commandeer an office or a conference room at a moment's notice.

Where he got the money for all this, n.o.body knew. Jara was intimately familiar with the fiefcorp's Vault accounts, and she knew they couldn't withstand this kind of pummeling. True, the jump to number one on Primo's had provided them a good financial cushion. But Natch's reckless spending would soon put them into bankruptcy.

Somehow this prospect cheered Jara up.

So instead of protesting, Jara did as she was told. Over the next few days, she accompanied Merri to several meetings with the channeler Robby Robby. If anything, the man was even more insipid than Natch's description. He dressed in whatever ludicrous fashion the high society brats were wearing at the time-this week it was kimono pants and open-collared silk shirts-and went through programmable accents like other people went through socks. The cost of these silly peccadilloes went on the tab of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, of course.

Jara soon discovered what made Robby Robby so valuable, however: He was completely unperturbed by the idea of selling a mystery product. "What do you think my channelers do every day?" he said, walking them through a room of baby-faced salespeople holding ConfidentialWhisper conversations from their desks. There were perhaps twenty in all, each impeccably dressed and relentlessly cheerful. "Selling isn't about the product you're offering, Lady Merri. It's about what the customer wants." Every time Robby Robby called her Lady Merri, Jara wanted to give him a swift kick in the knees. But though she was a Creed Objectivv devotee, Merri got along with the slick salesman just fine.

Meanwhile, Horvil worked feverishly through the weekend to find capable engineering candidates who would fit Natch's high standards. He managed to round up a dozen applicants. All had the credentials to work in the top fiefcorps, and all were eager to sign on, which was no small accomplishment in such a tight labor market. But Natch found fault with every one of them. He even managed to send a top-flight engineer from the Deuteron Fiefcorp fleeing an interview in tears.

Finally, an exasperated Horvil brought in his nineteen-year-old cousin Benyamin for an interview. Horvil meant it as something of a joke. Ben's only real-world experience was an apprenticeship managing a floor of a.s.sembly-line coders, and he was the youngest son of Horvil's dreaded Aunt Berilla to boot. But to everyone's surprise, Natch made the boy an apprenticeship offer on the spot. Benyamin readily accepted.

"I don't get it," Jara told Horvil after he had relayed the story to her. "No offense, Horv, but Natch has been turning away everyone. How did Benyamin convince that b.a.s.t.a.r.d to hire a nineteen-year-old kid with no experience?"

Horvil shrugged. "I dunno."

"So how many hours was Natch grilling him?"

"Less than one. Ben says that Natch listened to his pitch without saying a word, and then asked him just one question. You're not going to go crying to your mother the first time I keep you up three days in a row, are you?"