"Why don't you ask Horvil?" said Serr Vigal.

Natch shook his head. "He's got plenty of credits, but there's no way he can move that kind of money without his Aunt Berilla finding out about it. And she'd rather slice off her own arm than invest in me."

"Another fiefcorp, then. Pierre Loget. Or Lucas Sentinel."

"Sentinel?" spat the fiefcorp master, as if the name were a curse word in a foreign tongue. "Are you kidding? He's still furious at Jara. And don't forget that when I pushed the Patel Brothers down to the number two spot on Primo's, Sentinel's company fell to number three. Loget doesn't like me any better."

"What about that financier you met with all those years ago? He said he liked you, didn't he?"

"Figaro Fi? He joined the Prepared a year and a half ago, Vigal. He's probably dead by now."

Serr Vigal pursed his lips and made a noise of dismissal. Thppt. He got slowly to his feet and ambled over to the window, which was showing some beachside resort full of bronzed children laughing and throwing sand at one another. A welcome change from the dreary November Omaha rain. "I can help you a little bit, of course," said the neural programmer. "The memecorp has some extra equipment lying around that I can lend you. But I just don't have the kind of money you're talking about."

"Which leaves me back where I started," said Natch with disgust. "The capitalmen." He kicked at a tuft of carpet and scowled at the frolicking children through the window. No self-respecting capitalman would lend him such a large sum of money for a project he couldn't even define. They wouldn't care that he ran the number two company on Primo's, or that he was working on Margaret Surina's fabled Phoenix Project-they would just ask to see the specs. Natch couldn't blame them. Margaret had no track record to boast of, no prior business successes to point to. All she had was the Surina family reputation. And that reputation hadn't helped anyone recoup their losses from TeleCo, had it?

"This is my worst nightmare, Vigal," Natch moaned. He waved his hand at the screen and changed the display right under Serr Vigal's nose. His guardian blinked in mild surprise as the beach made way for the trading pit of some Melbourne financial exchange. "The biggest opportunity of my life, and I can't make it happen. n.o.body will invest until Margaret unveils the technology at the end of next week. But then it'll be too late. I won't have the resources to get this prototype up and running in time."

Serr Vigal rubbed his goatee quietly for a few minutes, deep in thought. "I wonder what this Phoenix Project really is."

"Margaret said she started out with memory enhancers. You know neural programming, Vigal-where could she go from there?"

"In sixteen years? Just about anywhere."

"Well, it has to be a neurological program, doesn't it? She must have looked at my background-she must know I apprenticed with you. She must know the bulk of our catalog is devoted to optics and mental processes. DeMirage 54, EyeMorph 66a, Mento Calc-U-Later 93.9, NiteFocus 50c-I could go on and on. Why else would she come to me?"

"Why indeed?" said Vigal. "There are hundreds of fiefcorps and memecorps out there capable of handling a project like this. And most of them have more experience in this business than you, not to mention greater resources."

"She said she wanted someone with a flair for showmanship."

"And do you believe her?"

"Stop being so-so elliptical. If you think something's going on here, then just come right out and say it."

Vigal leaned against the viewscreen, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his face with courage. "I don't think anything," he muttered. "I simply fear."

"And what do you fear?"

"I fear that Margaret has picked you for this enterprise because she thinks she can manipulate you." The neural programmer took a long, sad look at the traders tussling with one another on the Melbourne exchange floor. Undoubtedly, most of them were only multi projections, but that did not make the scene any less violent or chaotic to behold.

Natch felt the old alienation swooping down on him and constricting his lungs. He snarled angrily, poking a virtual finger into his guardian's chest. "And so what if she thinks she can manipulate me? That doesn't change anything. I've still got to find a way to get into the Phoenix Project, or I'll never get out of this ... this horse race on Primo's."

"And do you know that this Phoenix Project of Margaret's is a panacea for your problems? I worry that you're throwing everything aside for some vague business venture when you don't even know what it is."

"No. The Phoenix Project is it. This is the answer. This is what I've been searching for. I know it, I can feel it with every cell in my body. You don't think I can just ignore an opportunity like this, do you?"

Vigal smiled wanly. "That is a decision only you can make, Natch."

Merri looked as if she had been in her foyer for hours awaiting Natch's arrival. He frowned briefly. There were few things Natch detested more than someone who was too eager to please. A good employee says no more often than yes, the great Lucco Primo once claimed.

"Towards Perfection, Natch," she said softly.

"Perfection," replied Natch. "Ready?"

"Yes, but ..." Merri flinched, as if raising an objection were the most difficult task in the world. "I was hoping you could shed some light on the role you want me to play today."

Natch checked the Shenandoah central time service. They had almost twenty minutes before the potential investors arrived at the Surina Enterprise Facility. He walked past the channel manager and into her living room, cursing the multi network's insistence on reproducing the wobbly effects of imperfect gravity control. "People don't trust me," Natch said bitterly, taking a seat on a round ottoman covered with a delicate floral pattern. "I've hit number one on Primo's, I've proven myself time and time again, but still n.o.body worth talking to will do business with me. I need your credibility, Merri."

Merri absorbed all this with an air of mystification. "My credibility?"

"When people look at me, they still see the Shortest Initiation. They look at Horvil and see ... well, we've been working together so long, they see me. And Jara made some powerful enemies when she was on her own. We're all tainted goods, Merri. But you ... n.o.body has said a bad word about you on the Data Sea since you graduated from the hive. You've got an honest reputation."

The blonde woman shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. "So you're saying you want me there because of this." She nodded at the swirled black-and-white pin displayed prominently on her jacket breast pocket.

"Well, of course it helps that you're an Objectivv," said Natch. "Come on, Merri, you can put two and two together. We're going to a fundraising pitch. You've taken a pledge not to lie."

Merri wrinkled her nose in disappointment. "It's not quite that simple."

Natch shrugged. He had always disdained the creeds and their arbitrary ethical systems-the Surinas with their slavish devotion to science, the Elanners with their hypocritical advocacy for the poor, the Tha.s.selians with their shallow and pointless worship of business. But he reserved a special irritation for the Objectivvs. Natch could not fathom why the public tolerated, even revered, the creed's disciples. The way they babbled about "the search for objective truth" and dissected every utterance of that cryptic old hermit known as The Bodhisattva made Natch cringe.

"We can discuss philosophy some other time," said the fiefcorp master, rising from the ottoman and nodding pointedly at the red square tile in the hallway. "Right now we've got work to do. Get ready to follow my beacon."

"So," stammered Merri, "what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know," said Natch indifferently. "Keep quiet. Act ethical."

He didn't wait for Merri's next disapproving grimace. Instead, Natch closed his eyes, focused on the beaker of concentrated entropy that was Andra Pradesh, and let the cold frisson of multivoid envelop him. Seconds later, he stood at the gates of the Surina compound, staring up at the Revelation Spire. Natch stretched his mind out to the multi network and activated a beacon to tag his spatial coordinates for Merri to follow.

She needn't have worried about getting separated from her master. The blue-and-green-clad security officers kept the two visitors waiting at the compound gates for ten minutes. The Surina guards were busy eyeing a group of white-robed Defense and Wellness Council officers across the way who seemed to have nothing better to do than pace at the bottom of the mountain and polish the barrels of their dartguns. Merri shuddered with relief when she and Natch were finally escorted into the safety of the Surina compound.

The Enterprise Facility was an impressive location for a fundraising pitch: twelve stories of blue stretched stone cantilevered off the side of a mountain in defiance of the natural laws of gravity. Merri followed him silently through the throngs of suits up to a room on the ninth floor. A room blissfully free of irritating SeeNaRee. They entered to find eight capitalmen already seated at the semi-circular conference table. Natch consulted the time and noted with satisfaction that he was exactly twelve minutes late, which was three minutes earlier than he had planned.

"Towards Perfection," he said brightly, moving to the focal point of the table. The five men and three women returned his greeting with varying degrees of politeness and curiosity. Merri stood respectfully to one side with her hands clasped behind her back, her Creed Objectivv emblem on prominent display, waiting for some signal from her fiefcorp master.

"Let's not waste any time," announced the fiefcorp master, gesturing to the white open s.p.a.ce on the wall behind him. An itemized list of business expenses appeared in blocky fixed-width characters. Natch paused to let the capitalmen absorb his list. As expected, their eyes uniformly zeroed in on the big ticket items at the bottom: ten additional bio/logic programmers and engineers, fifteen channelers, office and meeting s.p.a.ce, bio/logic programming equipment, marketing expenses. The total figure spelled out in the bottom right corner was an eyebrow-raising sum. "This is what I need by the end of the week," he declared. "Are there any questions?"

Eight pairs of eyes-nine, counting Merri's-gaped dumbly at the entrepreneur, waiting for some elaboration. But Natch simply stood there and gazed around the room with a smoldering stare. He looked as if he were preparing to either cut his multi connection or march around the table slicing off heads.

Finally, one of the capitalmen raised her hand timidly. Merri sent an inquiry to the public directory and discovered she was the investment manager for a libertarian L-PRACG and no stranger to fundraising pitches. "Exactly what is all this for?" she said with an air of bemus.e.m.e.nt.

Natch fixed her with an unblinking stare. "For development of Margaret Surina's Phoenix Project, which I am licensing."

The investors gawked at the entrepreneur as if he had just offered to sell them a set of dragon's teeth. The mythical Phoenix Project, the boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Margaret's Folly. Natch could practically hear his audience's frantic ConfidentialWhisper conversations, their frenzied queries to the Data Sea.

"The Phoenix Project?" continued the capitalman in disbelief. "Are you serious?"

"Dead serious," replied Natch.

"What is it?"

"You'll have to wait and see."

A sense of shock crusted over their fury at being lured out to India for such a ludicrous presentation. Merri was surprised to see that Natch had been correct about her ties to Creed Objectivv; the pin on her breast pocket might have been the only thing preventing the capitalmen from vanishing in disgust. But even that would only keep the outrage from boiling over for so long. The capitalmen began hurling questions at him in rapid-fire succession, which Natch answered brusquely and without hesitation.

"What can you tell us?"

"I can tell you that if you invest in me, you'll make more money than you've ever dreamed of."

"How much?"

"The sky's the limit."

"What is this Phoenix Project anyway? Is it a bio/logic program? Something you're going to launch on the Data Sea next week?"

"The Phoenix Project is a bio/logic program, but it's much more than just a bio/logic program. No launch schedules have been decided on yet."

"Don't you have any specs you can show us? Technical diagrams? Projections? Anything?"

"No."

"How do we know we can trust you? How do we know you're not just making this all up?"

"If you don't trust me, don't invest."

By the time Natch wrapped up the discussion a scant fifteen minutes after it had begun, Merri's face had turned to stone. She asked no questions and did not react at all when her master said his goodbyes and cut his multi connection. Merri cut her own connection and walked out to the foyer of her apartment, expecting Natch to await her arrival there. But the apartment was empty.

She found him in his own flat in Shenandoah. Natch was already at the window fiddling with a series of bio/logic price graphs as if nothing had happened. He seemed unaware of Merri's presence until she cleared her throat two minutes later. "You should catch up on your work while you can," he said gruffly. "We've got another one of these in an hour and a half, and then a third one late tonight."

The channel manager nervously ran her fingers through her milky hair. "Are you really planning to license a bio/logic program from Margaret Surina?"

"I'm definitely planning to," replied Natch. "I'd give 60-40 odds right now that it'll actually happen."

"And do-do you really think any of those capitalmen are going to invest in you?"

"No."

Merri blanched. "No?"

The fiefcorp master turned to his apprentice with an impatient mien, like a hoverbird engineer trying to teach a child how to construct a paper airplane. "Listen, Merri-I don't expect any of those people to put up a single credit. I'm not going to get any money out of the people we talk to tonight either. That's not what we're doing."

"So. . ."

"So what are we doing? We're stirring the pot. We're creating noise. The people I invited to these fundraising meetings aren't the high rollers; they're the ones who like to gossip. By the end of the day, I guarantee you the people I really want to hear from will have heard the words Natch, Margaret Surina, and Phoenix Project in the same sentence. Listen, you can't just approach investors and ask them to put up money for this sort of thing. Anyone who's willing to take a risk like this is going to contact me privately and insist on complete secrecy. Not only that, but they have to be convinced that investing in the Phoenix Project is their idea."

Merri nodded politely though she understood nothing, and left Natch to his bio/logic price graphs.

Rumors about Natch's investor meeting quickly percolated through the Data Sea. Most of the comments he read were laced with the standard pejoratives Natch had seen attached to his name since childhood: c.o.c.ky, arrogant, insane. He didn't mind. People could insult him to their hearts' content, but now that he had the Primo's t.i.tle under his belt, they could no longer dismiss him so easily.

The second and third investor groups were better prepared and had more penetrating questions, but Natch would not crack. He kept a cloud of mystery over the entire project; if anything, he became even vaguer with his answers. What could I possibly reveal to these people anyway? he thought. I don't know much more than they do. As for Merri, she seemed to grow more comfortable with her silent performance the longer the night wore on, now that she had convinced herself that Natch was not actively deceiving anyone.

At seven o'clock that evening, word leaked on the Data Sea that Natch was scoping out investors for a new Surina technology that just might be the legendary Phoenix Project. Twenty minutes later, John Ridglee wrangled a terse no comment out of the Creed Surina spokesperson.

An admission or a denial from the Surinas would have been news. Refusal to comment was big news.

By ten o'clock Shenandoah time, the avalanche of messages had begun. It was mostly the same drivel that had tumbled Natch's way after hitting number one on Primo's a few weeks ago. L-PRACG-sanctioned advertis.e.m.e.nts for financial software. Pleadings for donations to this or that cause. Servile requests from old business a.s.sociates who once griped about how Natch had ruined them. Greetings from longlost hivemates whose names he had never cared to learn in the first place. Buried in the rubbish were a few legitimate queries from anonymous capitalmen, none of which led anywhere.

Horvil and Jara began shotgunning messages, ConfidentialWhis- pers, and multi requests to Natch by the dozens trying to figure out what was going on. Natch replied calmly that he would explain everything tomorrow night. Then he prived himself to all of their incoming communications and waited.

The Patel Brothers launched a handful of product upgrades just before midnight, further solidifying their number one position on Primo's. Pierre Loget's PulCorp made a surprising leap to second place, b.u.mping Natch down to number three and Sentinel to number four.

And then, at three-thirty in the morning, as Natch was making yet another circuit around the balcony and glaring at the music that wafted up faintly from Shenandoah's entertainment quarters, the message he had been waiting for arrived. Natch did not know what shape or form it would take, but he knew the instant he opened the message that he had found his investor.

Time is luxury. Action is currency.

-Kordez Tha.s.sel You are cordially invited to breakfast with the Bodhisattva of Creed Tha.s.sel today, the 25th of November, at 7:45 a.m. Omaha time, in the resplendent Kordez Tha.s.sel Complex in the northern reaches of the Twin Cities Megalopolis to discuss mutually beneficial business opportunities.

Natch traced the message signature to a standard administrative account at Creed Tha.s.sel. He barely even paused before replying in the affirmative.

Natch lobbed an InfoGather request onto the Data Sea while flipping through his wardrobe for an appropriate suit, then had the results read aloud to him while he dressed.

The creed had been founded almost a hundred years ago by Kordez Tha.s.sel, a libertarian philosopher and financier whose only qualification to lead a popular movement was that he had failed at everything else. Somehow, his teachings about the virtues of selfishness had earned him a following in the new breed of fiefcorp power brokers. Then he disappeared from view and left public relations in the hands of anonymous creed spin doctors. For years, Creed Tha.s.sel worked diligently to protect its mysteries, going so far as to swear its devotees to secrecy and refusing all but the most cursory partic.i.p.ation in the Creeds Coalition. Whispers spoke of blood rites, oaths of fealty, and a mythical master program built by renegade coders.

And then the young drudge Sen Sivv Sor published the expose that made his reputation. Sor's undercover reporting revealed that the blood rites were nothing but parlor tricks, the oaths of fealty were mere confidence schemes, and the mythical master program did not exist. Tha.s.selian membership dwindled, but the core devotees remained. Soon enough, everyone forgot about the scandal, and Creed Tha.s.sel abandoned its hokey mystic aura for a more prosaic philosophy of individualism. Membership rolls remained secret, but few cared to pry anymore.

A creed of fools, thought Natch as he walked the early-morning streets of Shenandoah, bound for the hoverbird terminals. But fools who have no love for Creed Surina or the Council. Vigal's words from the previous day rang in his ears: I fear that Margaret has picked you for this enterprise because she thinks she can manipulate you. Natch's blood curdled at the thought of being someone's p.a.w.n, and he felt like throttling his guardian for even suggesting it. Nevertheless, he knew it couldn't hurt to have a third party on his side.

The Tha.s.selians' invitation arrived too late for Natch to take the tube, his preferred mode of travel. So instead, he hopped aboard one of the hundreds of hoverbirds that ferried pa.s.sengers across the continent every hour. His flight from Shenandoah to the Twin Cities was smooth and without incident.

Natch found the Kordez Tha.s.sel Complex to be one of the ugliest human constructions he had ever seen. A series of squat, functional buildings skulking among the lowlands, half-hidden in the chill November mist. He followed a narrow bridge from the hoverbird terminal over the Complex's surrounding moat and into the Tha.s.selian headquarters. The inside was no better. Hallways stood at odd angles to one another amidst sloping ceilings and crooked doorways; Natch doubted there was a pair of perpendicular lines anywhere in the place. He knew very little about architecture, but he imagined it took a lot of money and patience to construct such deliberate lopsidedness.

Even at this early hour, hundreds of businesspeople rushed through the hallways with stiff, purposeful gaits. Two burly guards pointed Natch through the labyrinth of corridors and conference rooms to his appointed meeting spot. He found himself facing a nondescript door, the old-fashioned kind you needed to physically pull open. He hesitated for a moment and eyed the mahogany slab of door with suspicion. Natch searched his feelings, yet he could find no reason for his unease. He reached for the doork.n.o.b.

As soon as the bra.s.s tongue slipped free of its sheath, the k.n.o.b erupted with a jolt of static electricity. Natch squealed in surprise and s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away. He quickly called up a grounding program to neutralize the charge, but the damage was done. The fingertips of his left hand would be sore for days.

A hollow laugh echoed inside the room. "You're getting sloppy, Natch!" said a tired voice in a tone reminiscent of an aging diplomat or a patrician. "I could never catch you with that trick back in the old days. Horvil was always much easier to fool. But who says we don't learn from our mistakes?"

Natch shivered involuntarily at the sound of the voice that had been mocking his dreams for years. The voice that embodied his worst fears and deepest shames.

Brone.

He sat on a large thronelike chair in the center of a cavernous room. The room itself was a gigantic hollowed-out diamond of exceptional clarity and brilliance. On the table in front of his chair sat a Spartan breakfast of crackers and crusty bleu cheese.