Instead of lying, Merri found herself plastering a WinningGrin 44 on her face. "Robby, you know what a perfectionist Natch is," she said. "How he wants everything done his way, down to the last detail. You know he's going to insist that every last connection strand is absolutely perfect before he goes out on that stage."

Again the placating smile, the fake burst of comprehension. "No doubt!" Robby e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "So that just leaves us with one more topic."

"Yes?"

"The Council." Merri quickly tossed a PokerFace 83.4b atop the WinningGrin. "They've been-heck, Merri, they've been hara.s.sing my boys and girls here." He tilted his head in the direction of his "boys and girls," who all murmured their a.s.sent.

Suddenly, Merri felt very tired. "What do you mean by 'hara.s.sing'?"

"It's just your typical Defense and Wellness Council aggravation," said Robby, sweeping his concerns over one shoulder with a long, bony hand. "Requests to see our permits, people following us around, that kind of thing. Friz here got cited for 'walking too close to a tube track' the other day." Friz, the junior channeler, jutted his bottom lip forward and gave his best hangdog look. "Nothing we can't handle, of course. But you know, if we have another one of those infoquakes ..."

Robby Robby let the sentence drift off, but Merri was all too ready to complete it. If we have another one of those infoquakes, the Council might swoop down and take MultiRealfrom us by force. The public might get frightened away from the product altogether. The drudges might start calling for Natch's head. Any way you look at it, it's entirely possible none of us will make a single credit off this crazy enterprise.

Again, Merri found herself stretching the bonds of her oath, reaching for the sweet opiate of prevarication. She adopted her most confident tone of voice and enhanced it with bio/logics. "Robby, n.o.body knows what's really going to happen out there tomorrowmuch less next week or next month! Your team is going to be put on the spot, and you might have to do a lot of improvising. You'll probably have to endure a few more of those bogus citations from the Council. But Natch is utterly committed to this product. He hasn't just staked our careers on it; he's staked his own. And in the years you've known him, has Natch ever steered you wrong?"

The channeler seemed to be weighing his options for a few excruciating seconds. His eyes flickered on the black-and-white swirl of the Objectivv pin riding her left breast. Finally, Robby dispensed one of his Cheshire cat smiles. The same smile quickly rippled down the table until all two dozen channelers were wearing it. "I gotcha, Merri," said Robby. "You're absolutely right. If this is what Natch wants, this is what Natch gets. We trust in Natch."

I wish I did, Merri said to herself glumly.

Benyamin was experiencing deja vu, but it had nothing to do with any of Natch's bio/logic programs.

He was standing on the balcony overlooking his mother's a.s.sembly-line floor where he had stood for most of the past year. Two hundred workbenches lay in a grid below him. He was younger than many of the programmers, and had less coding experience than almost all of them. It felt like nothing had changed in the past few months, like he had never decided to step out from under Berilla's oppressive wing and seek a job in the fiefcorp sector.

As always, Ben listened for some undercurrent of resentment running through the staff. Were they jealous of this kid who had leapfrogged to the management office straight out of initiation? Did they resent the fact that the monthly interest on his trust fund exceeded half their salaries combined? The answer to these questions, it seemed, was still no. If there was any embittered muttering going on here, it was drowned out by the rumble caused by hundreds of clanking bio/logic programming bars. The a.s.sembly-line coders were oblivious. Too busy concentrating on tunes from the Jamm and holding Confidential Whisper conversations with distant companions.

"Thirty-one percent done," came a smoky female voice, late forties or early fifties.

Benyamin turned to find Greth Tar Griveth, the woman who had replaced him as floor manager, walking onto the balcony from his old office. Her office now. Ben sensed that the job, which had been a whistle stop on the track to success for him, was more like a post of permanent exile for Greth. She had only been here for six weeks, but she had already adapted the vacant stare, the careless flip of the hand, the bored mid-sentence yawn that had been hallmarks of Ben's seventh and eighth months.

"Only thirty-one percent?" said Ben with a groan. "But we need this done in less than twenty-four hours!"

Greth stood next to him at the railing and let out a weary ffff. "We'll get it done. I think."

"You think?"

"The second shift is coming on now, and they're much quicker than the first. Plus, we just finished up a gig for the Elanners, so we'll have some more coders to put on the job. Look, over there."

Greth Tar Griveth pointed at the rightmost row of programmers, where Ben could see the Surina/Natch templates slipping silently into the production line. One by one, the workers in that quadrant of the floor completed their current projects and watched blue and pink chunks of code pop up in their Minds.p.a.ce bubbles. Small bricks in the Gothic castle that was the MultiReal engine. Other coders were gazing numbly at pieces of the Probabilities ROD. If any of them suspected they were plugging away at the world's most notorious compendium of bio/logic code, they showed no sign.

Nor did the salty a.s.sembly-line floor manager have a clue what program her crew was laboring away on. Ben had made sure that the words Natch, MultiReal and Surina did not escape his lips, and he praised the Fates that his apprenticeship to the Surina/Natch Fiefcorp was not yet common knowledge in Creed Elan circles. Still, he took no chances, and made sure a fat sheaf of credits was sitting in Greth's Vault account to dissuade her from asking questions.

"Here's the real test," said Greth, pointing to a gangly kid in the epicenter of the floor whose workbench could have rivaled Horvil's in sloppiness. "They call that kid The Robot. Arrived just after you left, and already he's leading the floor in output. Never complains, never says much of anything."

Ben fastened his gaze on The Robot, who was wrapping up work on someone else's tangled web of a program. Indeed, the young man was tearing through the template with astounding speed. Ben watched as The Robot whirled the ma.s.s around with one hand, grabbed the programming bar he needed with the other, and then caught the template backhanded, just in time to make the appropriate connection. "So why's this guy a good test?" said Ben.

"Because he's got absolutely no imagination," replied Greth. She stretched, nearly poking Benyamin in the eye with a stray elbow. "Give him your ordinary coding job and he'll sweep through it in record time. But make the slightest flaw in your template, and he just folds. Look."

True to her words, as soon as the kid moved on to his next job-a golden program that looked like a bowl of fruit-he froze up. The bio/logic programming bars in his hands hovered in place, vibrating like stuck gears. Ben could practically hear the ConfidentialWhisper conversation from his supervisor guiding him through the obstruction. After a ten-minute pause, The Robot hesitantly got back to work. Soon, he was a blur of motion once again.

"If he can handle the templates your cousin put together," said Greth Tar Griveth drily, "we'll be okay."

Ben held his breath as The Robot finished up his current a.s.signment and made the swirling-hand motion signaling his readiness to accept a new template. A pink blob, one small corner of the MultiReal engine, appeared in front of him.

The Robot whipped through the template in twenty-two minutes.

Greth loosened her grip on the railing and let out a deep breath. "It'll be close, but I think we'll get your job done on time. Maybe even twenty or thirty minutes early."

Ben inhaled a draught of cool air, expelling a warm puff in return. The billow of air failed to accomplish the calming effect he had intended. "That's cutting it a little too close."

"Yes," replied Greth, not bothering to contradict her predecessor. It is."

Horvil had almost forgiven the Surina guest lodge for the lumps in its mattress and found a route to sleep, when an urgent ConfidentialWhisper reached his mental inbox. The engineer accepted it. He found himself flailing against the wall under the galewind force of an angry Jara.

"Emergency meeting!" she cried. "Emergency meeting now! Everyone report to the Enterprise Facility!"

Horvil groggily threw on yesterday's clothes and made his way across the Surina compound, discovering along the way that he had put on only one sock. The central courtyard was aflurry with security officers going about their midnight routine, questioning pa.s.sersby, relentlessly patrolling, checking their weapons and loading dart canisters from their belts. Horvil was not surprised to find the Islander Quell in their midst. He told the newest fiefcorp apprentice about the meeting, and the two quickly followed Jara's beacon to a conference room on the fifth floor of the Enterprise Facility.

They wandered into a piece of SeeNaRee t.i.tled Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grandejatte. Jara stood beside a cool river rendered in tiny pinp.r.i.c.ks of color, while Parisian matrons in ridiculous hooped petticoats sauntered on the opposite bank. Her fiery mood made a sharp contrast with the calm pointillist trees. Horvil was about to chide Quell for his SeeNaRee program's poor selection when he caught sight of Merri in the river a few meters down, wading barefoot and watching the ducks. Obviously, the channel manager had arrived here first.

Benyamin showed up moments later, and the five apprentices sat at a plain conference table overlooking the river. "So what's the emergency?" said Ben Jauntily.

Jara gestured to the empty chair at the head of the table. "Natch."

"What's wrong with him this time?"

"He's disappeared."

Four blank faces gazed back at her.

"You mean-he hasn't been in touch with you at all?" cried Horvil. "I thought he was supposed to be at that meeting with Robby Robby this afternoon."

Merri shook her head. "He didn't show up."

"Well, where the f.u.c.k is he? Hasn't anybody talked to him since the last fiefcorp meeting?"

n.o.body answered. A cloud of black and gray dots descended on them from the east, threatening to dump pixels of rain on the congregating Parisians.

"I've tried requesting a multi connection," said Jara, rubbing the pulsing vein on her temple. "I've sent him at least twenty Confiden- tialWhispers. Nothing. I even tried Margaret, but her secretary says she's been holed up with those diss L-PRACG people for three days straight now. Natch isn't there."

"Did you try Serr Vigal?" asked Merri.

Jara nodded grimly. "He's not answering me either, although that's not a big surprise. I checked the schedule of that conference in Beijing. He's probably delivering the keynote address right about now."

"Maybe Natch is ... testing us or something," said Ben to n.o.body in particular. "Maybe he's just trying to make sure we're on our toes. I know he has some pretty unconventional management tactics."

"Unconventional, yes," replied Horvil. "Totally f.u.c.king insane, no."

"Doesn't the man have any private security?" asked Quell.

Jara glared at the Islander as if he had grown a horn from his forehead. "Are you kidding?"

Quell let out an animalistic grunt. "I can't believe this," he snarled. "No common sense, just like Margaret. Natch knows he has enemies, doesn't he? The Patel Brothers, the Defense and Wellness Council, the Pharisees, all those programmers and ROD coders and drudges he's p.i.s.sed off over the years. The list is practically endless."

"Don't forget Lucas Sentinel," put in Horvil, counting on his fingers. "And the Meme Cooperative. Brone. Creed Tha.s.sel. Creed Elan. My Aunt Berilla-"

Ben groaned out loud.

"All right, that's enough!" shrieked Jara, slapping one open hand against the table and sending a loud thwak echoing through the SeeNaRee. The Parisians snapped their heads up in surprise, as did the rest of the fiefcorp. "It doesn't matter right now. We could sit here for a week naming people who hold a grudge against Natch. What we need to do is stay focused. We've got a presentation tomorrow at four o'clock, and I intend for us to be ready for it."

Horvil felt a smile slowly creep onto his face. There was no officially designated Number Two in the fiefcorp hierarchy, but Quell, Merri and Benyamin seemed ready to follow Jara to the heart of a simmering volcano. At that moment, Horvil was too. "So what do you want us to do?" ventured the engineer.

"I want you to go looking for Natch," said Jara. "You've known him longer than any of us, Horvil. See if you can get into his apartment and look for clues. Go everywhere he might possibly be hiding. Quell, I want you to comb every centimeter of the Surina compound and make absolutely sure he's not holed up here somewhere. As for you two, Ben and Merri-just keep working. If those a.s.sembly-line programmers don't finish in time-or if the channelers aren't ready-this is all going to be a moot point anyway."

"I've got a friend with the Elanners who runs a private detective agency," said Ben. "Maybe I could-"

Jara cut him off. "No. We don't want word of this to leak out to anybody outside the fiefcorp. Anybody, do you hear me? Not even Margaret or Robby. The last thing we need is for the drudges to start spreading rumors. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Natch is cooped up here with us, working on Possibilities."

"And what are you going to be doing, Jara?" asked Merri.

Jara clawed briefly at the vein in her temple, which had begun to throb once more. "I'm going to stay here and come up with a plan."

"A plan for what?" said Ben.

"A plan for what to do if Natch doesn't show up tomorrow."

The panic that had been bubbling beneath the surface now struck the fiefcorp like a miniature infoquake. Merri looked like she might pa.s.s out at any minute, while Quell gripped his connectible collar as if preparing to snap it in two. Horvil could feel his OCHREs working to slow a madly racing heart, and he would have bet anything his cousin was using his faraway look as cover while he reviewed his apprenticeship contract. Even the painted denizens of the SeeNaRee were milling around, opening and closing their parasols in confusion.

Only Jara appeared to have mastered her emotions. She stood up and placed her hands flat on the table. "Listen," she said through gritted teeth, "there's only so much time we can spend looking for Natch. You all know him as well as I do. If he doesn't want to be found, he won't be found."

"Why wouldn't he want to be found?" Merri asked.

Glum silence shrouded the table.

"If any of us had the slightest inkling of how Natch thinks, we wouldn't have signed on to this b.l.o.o.d.y fiefcorp in the first place," said Jara. "Let's get moving. It's one-thirty now. Everybody report back here at nine a.m. sharp."

Natch stood alone on the beach.

Civilization had not reached this place yet, or maybe it had left long ago and taken all of culture's detritus with it. The billboard advertis.e.m.e.nts, the black code darts, the tube tracks, the hoverbird clouds, the political manifestos, the buildings both large and small, the silly trappings of fashion-all of them gone.

The world reduced to sand, sky and sun.

The world a million years after humanity had breathed its last gasp.

The sun had risen to its midday perch and looked as if it might stay there for a while. Beneath his feet, the sand had begun to absorb the heat. As the temperature rose and the sand began to sizzle, tiny creatures burrowed their way to the surface of the beach. Sand mites by the millions scrambled around, wildly looking for some relief from the burning, but there was none to be found.

Natch closed his eyes and cast his mind out to the Data Sea to find a bio/logic program that would protect his tender soles, but he could find none. No bio/logic programs, no chatter from the drudges, no Data Sea. Was the vast corpus of human knowledge extinct too? Had it ever existed at all in this place? He opened his eyes again and scanned the horizon, looking for something, anything. A tree to shelter under, a rock with a cool face to it. But the world was completely flat and featureless.

He had begun to hop up and down to ease the burning, when he felt an icy drop of water tickle his feet.

The tide was rising. The water carved rivulets in the sand dunes as it spilled onto the beach. Natch leapt down towards the sea and dunked his feet in the spray. He heaved a tremendous sigh of relief and allowed the anxiety to slip from his mind.

Minutes pa.s.sed before Natch noticed the vast panicked retreat going on in the sand. Millions of tiny creatures-sand mites, miniature crabs, black segmented insects-all dashing pell-mell for higher ground. The salt.w.a.ter was licking his ankles before he came to a sudden realization: the insects weren't fleeing the heat, they were fleeing the tide.

He turned and headed back up the beach. But the tide was rising faster than he could run. By the time he overtook his own footprints running in the opposite direction, they were submerged beneath half a meter of water. Natch began running as fast as he could, lifting his legs in the air, stork-like, to stay above the tide.

The ocean had risen up above his knees when he realized he was not going to make it. The angle of the beach was too shallow, the progress of the tide too rapid. The strip of land he had been aiming for receded farther and farther away with each second. Natch stopped for a minute and turned around to see if there was another place he could head for, someplace safe from the rising tide. But there was nothing in any direction now but endless sea.

He began scrambling madly for higher ground. His splashes were the only noise that could be heard anywhere; the ocean itself did not crash or break or even ripple. Its surface was unbroken and lifeless. Eternal.

The water rose up to his chest, and Natch abandoned all hope of wading. He tried to leap up into a swimming position, but a remarkably strong force pulled on his legs, keeping him down. A deep underwater vortex into which the entire world would eventually sink.

Natch struggled wildly, clinging to his ambitions and desires. MultiReal was out there somewhere. So were number one on Primo's, a lunar estate, riches, glory. But one by one, he could feel all his cares draining out of him and sliding deep into the watery void. There were no fiefcorps down in that demesne of the drowned, no fiefcorps or memecorps or bio/logic programs or Primo's ratings.

He desperately tried to keep his head above water, but the current was too strong. The tide of nothingness, the Null Current, pulled him under.

Natch could see the light of the sun receding. He could feel the tug of the nothingness below, which was his final destination. His struggles and his worries seemed so petty once the Null Current had pulled him in. Down here, desire was irrelevant, because the undifferentiated ma.s.s of nothingness that was his destination allowed no changes, accepted no arguments, admitted no standards by which to measure and compare. In the deeps, there was nothing to want because there was nothing to gain, nothing to fix because there was nothing to break.

He stopped struggling as the darkness closed in, as the surface became a distant memory, as he was sucked down by the vortex that had no end, the vortex that spiraled down infinitely until it was no longer a vortex, until he and it and everything else melted together and merged into one endless eternal line, a vector pointing nowhere, a vector whose beginnings were irrelevant and improbable, and whose end was forever unreachable.

The apartment building was not much to look at by West London standards, but for Shenandoah, it had style in abundance. One might have said the building jutted out from the side of a hill, if not for its sine-wave shape that architects often used to camouflage the constant structural flux. A more appropriate description would have been that the building rippled or undulated from the hillside. Not the kind of thing you found crammed amidst the pointed abbeys at Bishopsgate.

Horvil had been inside the building a thousand times, of course, at all hours of the day and night. But he usually skipped the exterior view and multied straight to the network gateway in Natch's foyer. Funny how you could spend so much time embedded in a place that you didn't really know what it looked like from the outside.

From the ground, the engineer looked up the side of the tenement and saw several balconies like the one where he, Natch and Jara had stood and tested NiteFocus 48. It seemed like a million years ago, during a vanished era of innocence. Now all the building's balconies were occupied by strangers.

Horvil walked inside the front doors, nosed around the atrium for a few minutes, then ascended the lift to Natch's flat. He hesitated at the fiefcorp master's door for a few seconds. If Natch wasn't here, the apartment security program would probably let a trusted presence like Horvil invoke emergency protocols and enter. But that would trigger warning messages to Natch and possibly the building management as well. He didn't mind Natch receiving such a message-the entrepreneur might actually respond and put an end to this madness-but how much could you really trust a landlord these days? A series of gloating drudge headlines flashed in Horvil's brain: BREAK-IN LEADS TO Ma.s.sIVE MANHUNT FOR MISSING FIEFCORP MASTER.... NATCH LEAVES APPRENTICES HIGH AND DRY.... MISSING ENTREPRENEUR 'A WORTHLESS HUMAN BEING,' SAYS LANDLORD.

Horvil entered, stood in the foyer and counted to twenty. Nothing happened.

It took Horvil only a few minutes to determine there was no b.l.o.o.d.y corpse stinking up the premises. No scattered debris on the counters, no slack body standing on the red tile, no sign of a struggle. But he could see no evidence the place had been inhabited the past few days either. Not that Natch's messes could compare to the colossal disasters Horvil usually left for his cleaning bots, but a few half-drunk cups of chaff or nitro could usually be found on his table at any given time. Today, however, nothing.

Horvil knew the real test was not in the common areas, but in the office. That was where Natch spent most of his time anyway. The engineer poked his nose into the room and made a major discovery: Natch's bio/logic programming bars were gone. Of course, they could be lying in one of the drawers under the workbench, drawers that a multi projection could not physically open. But in all the years Horvil had known him, Natch had never set his programming bars anywhere but the top of the bench or on a side table within easy reach.

Wherever Natch went, he took his biollogic programming tools with him, thought Horvil. So what does that mean?

The fiefcorp apprentice wandered to the window and tuned it transparent. Natch would have headed northeast past the billboard (BANDWIDTH CONSERVATION IS PEOPLE PRESERVATION: A message from Creed Conscientious), towards the main city, towards the TubeCo station.

Towards the small cl.u.s.ter of officers in white robes now pointing in Horvil's direction.

Horvil instantly flipped on the window's sunblock and ducked out of the officers' line of sight. Don't be so paranoid, Horv, the engineer scolded himself. Just Council officers doing a routine patrol. They weren't pointing at you.