"I need your advice," said Natch.

"Oh?"

"I'm ready to start my own fiefcorp."

Later that morning, Horvil and Jara agreed to come over to a.s.sist in the planning. Following standard etiquette, which said that crucial business decisions should be made in person, the two caught a hoverbird across the Atlantic from London. They met in the flesh for the first time on the runway and gave each other formal bows. By the time they arrived in Omaha, Horvil and Jara were already grumbling at each other like longtime companions.

Natch brought the first meeting of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp to order around Vigal's kitchen table at noon.

From the outset, cash flow was the primary issue. Natch couldn't realistically expect any revenue flowing into the company for at least sixty days, yet there were a number of capital investments that needed to be made in the beginning. Licensing fees to the Meme Cooperative, listing fees to Primo's and the L-PRACGs, bio/logic equipment, administrative programs. Natch's savings would go a long way towards covering these costs, and eventually he would recoup the rest through new-fiefcorp tax breaks. But in the meantime, he was short the credits for apprentices' room and board those first few months.

He turned expectantly towards Horvil, but the engineer surprised him by shaking his head. "Sorry," he said, "but if I'm gonna be your apprentice, Natch, I don't want to complicate things."

Natch's eyebrows creased in confusion. "You want to be my apprentice?"

"Sure, why not? You're gonna need a first-rate engineer on the team, aren't you? The way I figure it, the only place I'm safe from that compet.i.tive streak of yours is on your payroll."

"But-the pay ..."

"This ain't about the money, Natch," said Horvil jauntily, pleased to catch his friend off guard. "I've got enough of that. I just don't want to miss out on all the fun. And besides-someone has to keep you sane."

Serr Vigal beamed at the engineer in approval. "I don't think your credits will be necessary, Horvil," he said. "I can cover the payroll for the first few months."

This outpouring of faith and goodwill began to arouse Natch's suspicions. "And what do you want in return?"

"Do I have to want anything in return?" replied Vigal with a cozy smile.

Natch's face turned a fl.u.s.tered purple. "I'm serious, Vigal," he muttered. "What do you want?"

Vigal sighed and considered the question for a minute. "Okay, then how about a membership on the board, with a stake in the decisionmaking. A minority stake, of course," he added hastily. Natch nodded in mute satisfaction. Young fiefcorps often ended up with a concerned father or generous aunt on the board. "I can't promise I'll be available every day or even every week," continued the neural programmer, "but just remember, I'll always be there when you need help."

Embarra.s.sed, Natch turned towards the last person at the table. He didn't know what to expect from Jara. Unlike his career, hers had not blossomed over the past few years. A gradual detente in her relations with Lucas Sentinel had resulted in the occasional piece of business, but Jara had come increasingly to rely on Natch's consulting fees to make a living.

The fiefcorp master summoned one of his simmering stares, the kind he had learned to use on Jara through trial and error. "I'm going to need a good bio/logic a.n.a.lyst too, Jara," he said.

The small businesswoman shifted uncomfortably in her chair as she tried, and failed, to meet Natch's stare head-on. Eventually, she lost the battle of wills and lowered her eyes to the table. "Count me in," she said finally, gritting her teeth. "But don't think you talked me into this, Natch. Everyone knows that fiefcorps are where the real money is these days. I've been waiting a long time for an opportunity like this to come along."

Natch gave his fellow fiefcorpers a predatory grin. So have I, he thought.

Despite all the careful planning and preparation that went into the formation of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, success did not come easily for the company.

Bio/logic programming was a much different animal than Routine On Demand coding. The work was more labor-intensive, and required the skills of a hard-core nuts-and-bolts engineer like Horvil and the leadership of a generalist like Natch. Because of the difference in scale, the stakes for any one particular piece of code were much higher. Each revision took weeks to complete. You couldn't afford to take the shortcuts commonplace in the ROD coding world. Nor did you have the luxury of wasting time on unnecessary features; you needed an a.n.a.lyst like Jara who had her fingers on the pulse of the market and could pinpoint exactly what revisions would be the most lucrative.

During the first few weeks, Natch worked nearly non-stop. He bounced from Jara's flat to Horvil's flat to Vigal's flat so many times that he was constantly disoriented. But Natch knew he was finally on the right track and moving full steam ahead.

Still, the sales figures in those initial months were abysmal. Natch began each day by examining the upgrades and revisions waiting on the dock for a launch onto the Data Sea. After launch, Jara would sit back in nervous antic.i.p.ation, senses tuned to the Sea's very molecular hum, waiting for the currents of trade to shift in their direction. And each day she felt the sting of disappointment when traffic failed to come. Besides the occasional sale to a curious browser or the random ping of a cataloging data agent, there was very little activity.

"What are we doing wrong?" Jara moaned to Natch one day.

"We're not doing anything wrong," he replied coolly. "We just need the mojo to acc.u.mulate. Give it time."

And then one day it happened.

DeMirage 24.5 was a pedestrian routine designed to reduce the effect of optical illusions. Natch had halfheartedly picked up the project hoping to capitalize on all the ocular research he had put over the years into programs like EyeMorph. Jara didn't have much of an opinion one way or the other about the program. Horvil gave it a cursory look and spent a few hours performing delicate surgery on the pro gram's innards in Minds.p.a.ce. Natch barely paused to write a descriptive fore and aft for the product before launching it on the Data Sea. He a.s.signed a BizWorks administrative agent to watch the traffic and sound a short ping for every sale, then went to sleep.

Natch's program hit the Data Sea right in the midst of a major turf war.

The Serly Fiefcorp had been involved in a fierce compet.i.tion with a fast-rising company known as the Patel Brothers. Each company's partisans were launching a daily barrage of complaints to the Meme Cooperative, to Primo's, and to various L-PRACGs throughout the civilized world. Finally, the battle came to a head when Serly's databases were struck with a malicious piece of black code that temporarily put a small portion of the company catalog out of commission. One of the programs. .h.i.t was Serly's TrueOptix 88. While Serly's people were a.s.sessing the damage to the catalog, they decided to pull TrueOptix from the Data Sea until they could determine if it had been infected. Prosteev Serly immediately brought a complaint before the Meme Cooperative blaming the Patels, but the evidence was thin and the case quickly vanished like one of the visual phantasms that TrueOptix was designed to prevent.

The Patel Brothers were not known for playing nice.

Prosteev Serly's loss, however, became Natch's gain. Serly had channeling deals in place and packaging agreements to fulfill. Data agents scurried around the Data Sea to find a suitable replacement for the optical program, and located Natch's DeMirage 24.5. Within minutes, Natch's program had become the de facto standard for ocular hallucination management on the Data Sea.

The pings began sounding at 8:32 a.m. Shenandoah time and continued throughout the day. Eventually, the noise became so deafening, Natch had to adjust the program to ping once every hundred sales. As the night wore on, the BizWorks administrative program slowed to pings every thousand sales, then every ten thousand. And still the pings kept coming.

Horvil was ecstatic. "Can I juggle a mean bio/logic programming bar or what?" he crowed.

"Beginner's luck," Jara corrected him with a smirk.

Natch shook his head. "Luck," he said, staring intensely at the Shenandoah cityscape, "had nothing to do with it."

3.

THE PHOENIX.

PROJECT.

Merri sat on Natch's chair-and-a-half and watched the fiefcorp master make frantic circles through the garden. When he started, he was treading on turf, but as their conversation absorbed more of his attention, he gradually strayed into the patch of daisies. Soon he was carelessly stepping on flower petals and tracking dirt onto the carpet.

"So in another eighteen months, it'll be ..." Natch stopped and squinted, as if the future were a distant object hovering outside the window.

"May," replied Merri.

"It'll be May," continued Natch. "That's right. So if we extend your contract until then and your shares stay on target, then I expect they'll be worth-this...." He waved his hand at the viewscreen, mutating the psychedelic Tope painting into a more prosaic spreadsheet. A sizable boldfaced number sat in the bottom-right corner of the screen. "And that's a conservative estimate. Now that we've hit number one on Primo's, it's only going to go up. So how's this figure suit you?"

Merri gave a slight nod, but Natch could see she had some reservations. Not over money, he was fairly certain; even in this economy, she was not likely to get a better compensation package anywhere else. No, it probably had something to do with the swirled black-and-white logo prominently displayed on her breast pocket, the insignia of a Creed Objectivv truthteller.

Natch gave the woman a long appraising stare while she read over the apprenticeship contract one more time. Merri might have been Jara's diametric opposite. Her large frame dwarfed Jara's, though it did not quite reach Horvil-sized proportions. She had blonde features that spoke of Nordic ancestry and a demeanor both easy and reserved. Over the past six months, there had been times when Natch felt like slap ping that pious look right off Merri's face-but for process' preservation, one could get only so angry at a woman who possessed such an encyclopedic knowledge of the bio/logics world.

"You're concerned about the workload," said a voice on the opposite side of the room. Merri turned to face Serr Vigal, who had been hovering quietly in the shadows like a spook. Natch hadn't been quite sure whether the neural programmer was even paying attention.

"Well, partly," conceded Merri with a sidelong glance at Natch. "But I'm also not sure how comfortable I feel being a channel manager. I was trained for bio/logic a.n.a.lysis, you know."

Natch faced the window and scowled. He was not about to give up such a precious a.s.set as a channel manager who had taken the Objective truthtelling oath. Whatever the reality was, people believed that honest salespeople sold better products. "This is a small fiefcorp, Merri. Everyone gets to do a little bit of everything around here. s.h.i.t, you can even grab a pair of programming bars and take on some of Horvil's workload, for all I care."

Merri brightened and gave one of her typical placating smiles. For a devotee of Creed Objectivv, she fakes her emotions pretty well, Natch thought. "Would it be all right if I ... thought about it for a few days?" asked the blonde channel manager.

The entrepreneur shrugged. "Fine."

"Okay, then ..." And with that, Merri cut the multi connection and returned her mind to a red square tile several hundred thousand kilometers away on Luna.

Natch gazed out into the gloom of the Shenandoah dusk. Dark clouds were a.s.sembling on the westward horizon and rattling their sabers, threatening a violent thundershower. In all probability, the Shenandoah L-PRACGs had already pet.i.tioned the Environmental Control Board to steer the worst of the storm clear of downtown using its geosynchron bots. But still, the clouds felt like a heavy-handed omen to Natch. Something was hiding in those clouds, some cruel and brutal creature with Natch's name roiling in its murky consciousness.

He shifted his attention to Serr Vigal. "We've had this discussion before," he said.

The neural programmer had sunk back into the shadows, invisible but for the occasional beard hairs glinting like flecks of silver. "It's common sense, Natch," he replied. "Now that you're constantly neckand-neck with the Patels, there's a real danger of overworking your apprentices. I think you need to bring more people onboard."

"I hired Merri."

"But she's not taking any of the workload off Horvil and Jara."

Natch knew his old mentor was correct, that eventually the two apprentices would snap under the strain of eighteen-hour days in the trenches fighting the Patel Brothers. They would get tired of the sorties in the middle of the night, the maneuvering for field position. The endless exchange of small-arms fire.

But as soon as business started pouring in, Horvil and Jara had forgotten all about their bewilderment and indignation surrounding the black code incident. Natch's interviews with Sen Sivv Sor and John Ridglee had sp.a.w.ned a drudge feeding frenzy, which in turn produced a tidal wave of sales. Suddenly, important engineers were contacting Horvil for advice and dissecting his recursive functions as if they were ancient Sanskrit texts. And Jara, who was used to shuffling money between fiefcorp accounts to placate some creditors and put off others, was now trying to find places to invest the overflow.

"Horvil and Jara will be fine," mumbled Natch. "Oh, I know you're right, Vigal. I'll need to bring more people aboard at some point. It's just that I don't trust anyone else."

"Maybe you need to give those two a holiday," said Serr Vigal. "The fiefcorp is running pretty smoothly. There's no reason you can't slow down for a week or two."

Natch, his arms folded over his chest, turned to glare at the neural programmer. NiteFocus 50c allowed him to peer through the veil of shadow and see the concerned look on his mentor's face. "No," he said, "there is a reason."

"Ah, the message."

"Something's coming up, Vigal. I can feel something out there, coming up fast. A tidal wave. Something."

Natch nodded towards the viewscreen that was still displaying Merri's apprenticeship contract. He called up a message in its place and enlarged the type so it was readable from across the room.

Natch, I would like to personally congratulate you on achieving number one in the Primo's bio/logic investment guide. Several members of my administrative staff are devoted users of your programs. Your sleep deprivation utilities, I'm afraid, are particularly popular around here.

As you may have heard, Creed Surina will be holding a cultural festival next week to celebrate what would have been Sheldon Surina's 400th birthday. We are looking for able bio/logic programmers such as yourself to contribute to a presentation on my ancestors' legacy to the world. I would be honored to have you as my guest for dinner at Andra Pradesh this Wednesday, November 23, to discuss the details.

Towards Perfection, Margaret Surina Master of the Surina Perfection Memecorp Bodhisattva of Creed Surina The letters hung on the screen before him, waiting for some gesture or flicker of the eyeb.a.l.l.s to indicate which way Natch wanted to scroll. Finally, the fiefcorp master blinked hard and sent the missive away.

"I'm afraid I don't understand why you're so worried, Natch," said his guardian. "It looks like a perfectly normal invitation to me."

"It just doesn't feel right," said Natch. "I can't explain it. It's like ... Like a vast collection of numbers that have some hidden kabbalistic connection to one another. Like a constellation millions of light years across, and you're sitting in the middle trying to decipher what it looks like from a distance. "Let me ask you this, Vigal. Why invite me to dinner? It means that Margaret doesn't want to see me in multi-she wants me to trek halfway around the globe to talk to her in person. That seems awfully formal for a first meeting. Does she think there's some security risk? Or maybe she has a business proposition for me. You know the etiquette - important business deals happen through personal meetings."

The neural programmer frowned. "Maybe you should just take this at face value."

"Face value," Natch scoffed. "I never take anything at face value."

Vigal rose from his chair with a creaky sigh, then walked over and clapped a virtual hand on his protege's shoulder. "Perhaps you need to get some rest, Natch." He gave the shoulder a gentle squeeze and then stepped back, looking the young programmer up and down wistfully. "Rest-that's advice I think I'm going to follow myself. Make sure you Confidential Whisper me if you need anything."

Minutes later, Natch was alone.

The fiefcorp master prived himself to all incoming communication and darkened the windows. Then he called up the invitation on the viewscreen once more and crouched on his haunches in front of it.

Could this be some trick by the Patel Brothers? A punishment for filching the lead on Primo's for those brief forty-seven minutes? He verified the message's digital signature against the one in the public directory, and the directory declared it authentic. The message had not come from the hand of some Surina flunky either, but straight from the bodhisattva herself. Signatures could be forged, of course, but it was a fiendishly difficult task. Natch knew all the standard tricks for lowlevel signature forgery, and this message used none of them.

He collapsed onto his sofa and instructed InfoGather 96a to find as much up-to-date information about Margaret Surina as possible. The program launched a volley of data agents onto the measureless ocean of information and began bouncing the results off its a.n.a.lysis engines, deducing connections, drawing conclusions, cooking up bite-sized summaries.

Seconds later, the viewscreen lit up with the image of a woman around Serr Vigal's age. The drudges described the heir to the Surina family mantle as a glamorous figure, but Natch could see little glamour in this nondescript woman. Margaret was neither tall nor short, neither heavy nor thin; she could have been one of those composite sketches of women compiled from a hundred different ethnicities. The plain gray pantsuit she wore belied her vaunted sense of fashion, and even her raven-black hair lay unostentatiously on her shoulders. If she did not have the prominent Surina family nose and her father's eyes, preternaturally large and shining with fierce intelligence, Natch would not have believed that this woman was the heiress to the world's largest programming fortune.

MARGARET SURINA (301-).

read the caption that floated next to the woman on the screen.

The bodhisattva of Creed Surina and master of the Surina Perfection Memecorp, Margaret Surina is heiress to the Surina family fortune and the vast empire left her after the untimely death of her father Marcus. She lives in Andra Pradesh at the residence constructed in honor of her ancestor, Sheldon Surina, the Father of Bio/Logics.

Natch skipped ahead to the section that detailed Margaret's business interests: Surina has been the subject of gossip and speculation over the past twenty years since she founded the memecorp that bears her name. To date, the company has released no products and purportedly receives 100% of its funding from Creed Surina. Partisans of the Surinas believe the memecorp is at work on another technological breakthrough on par with such previous family accomplishments as bio/logics and teleportation. Surina supporters have even given this undefined new technology a name: "The Phoenix Project." Detractors, however, suspect that no such project exists and that Margaret Surina is instead using her memecorp to funnel money into libertarian and pro-Islander political causes.

Natch leaned forward and tried to cajole InfoGather into providing him more about this mysterious Phoenix Project, but no tangible details were forthcoming. Pundits on the Data Sea had been scrutinizing Margaret's every move for years now, gossiping about every new visitor to her compound in Andra Pradesh in ancient India, seeking evidence of some iibertechnology that might or might not exist. So far, they had come up empty.

The pressure on her must be enormous, Natch reflected. At Margaret's age, Sheldon Surina had already written his seminal paper, Towards the Science of BiolLogics and a New Direction for Humanity, the work that jolted the world out of its post-Revolt stupor and signaled the beginning of a new age. Sheldon's grandson Prengal Surina had already published the Universal Law of Physics at this stage of his life. Even Margaret's father, the poor doomed Marcus, had become a worldwide icon and pioneer of teleportation by the time he was fifty. The public was growing restless. What would Margaret's contribution to the world of science be?

The entrepreneur remembered his days of infamy following the Shortest Initiation and grimaced. Why does she need to make any contribution? he thought. What if she just wants to be left alone?

Natch studied the image of Margaret Surina carefully. The photog rapher appeared to have taken Margaret by surprise; she seemed frozen in the act of turning towards the camera. But there were no surprises written in those unnaturally large blue eyes. Margaret's eyes showed a woman in complete control of her surroundings, a woman capable of swallowing life's surprises whole without the least bit of discomfort. Natch finally had to admit to himself that this woman had him intrigued.

And could this Phoenix Project be that thing just beyond the horizon that he had been waiting for his entire career? Was that why the very words tugged at his soul like a magnet?

He sent a terse reply to Margaret's invitation: I would be honored to accept your invitation and make your acquaintance.

Towards Perfection, Natch, Master of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp

The city of Andra Pradesh had few munic.i.p.al building codes. Tenement high-rises and office buildings hobn.o.bbed with parks and shopping areas and even farmland, all jumbled together without regard to style or function. Andra Pradesh was a city that had rolled down from a mountaintop and sprouted haphazardly out of the wreckage.

On that mountaintop were the Surinas.

Natch saw the ma.s.sive Surina compound as soon as he stepped off the tube. Even a kilometer away, it dominated the skyline. He could easily make out the austere buildings of the Gandhi University of Andra Pradesh where Sheldon Surina had taught and the absurd towers of the Surina family's private residence. Somewhere below his level of sight were the administrative offices of Creed Surina, the Surina Enterprise Facility, and the Surina Center for Historic Appreciation. Above them all, a lone spire jutted obscenely into the clouds from the middle of the compound. Natch had heard somewhere that this was the tallest man-made structure built since the Reawakening. Down in the city below, dozens of buildings competed for the right to claim second place.

The tube could have deposited Natch right at the gates of the Surina compound, but he wanted the full effect of approaching it from a distance. I've already wasted several hours on the tube, he thought. Why not a few more minutes on foot?

Natch hustled through the crowded streets and tried to keep his mind blank. The people of Andra Pradesh rushed about at a frenetic pace as if galvanized by the presence of the Surinas in their midst. Conversations were louder, clothing more vivid. People of all colors, cla.s.ses and creeds seemed to blend in here, much like the buildings that surrounded them. L-PRACG security guards, street performers, vendors of exotic fruits and vegetables, businesspeople, a.s.sembly-line programmers, hoverbird traders and cargo haulers, rambunctious children: here in Andra Pradesh, distinctions blurred.