But was it really so implausible to think Len Borda's goons might be scoping out Natch's apartment? Especially now, when he was mere hours away from demonstrating MultiReal to an audience of billions?

Horvil scurried out of the apartment and down the lift, whether to hide from the officers or to follow them, he could not say. He stood in the atrium and looked out the window, still vacillating between courses of action, when his eye caught a glint of metal on the ground reflected from the just-risen moon, past the billboard in the gutter on the side of the road. Horvil launched NiteFocus 50c and fine-tuned his vision with Bolliwar Tuban's TeleScopics 88 to make sure. Yep, definitely a bio/logic programming bar.

Eventually, the coven of Council troops moved westwards toward the hoverbird facilities. The engineer thrust his head outside the front door and scanned the horizon, left to right and back again. None of the officers carried bulky, shoulder-mounted disruptors, but who knew which of the surrounding buildings contained one the Council could summon at a moment's notice? When the coast was clear, he darted northwest as fast as his feet could carry him.

Horvil kneeled to the ground and examined the object closely, wishing his multi projection could solidify long enough for him to pick it up. A thin rod of burnished metal, nondescript but for the Roman letter S embossed near one end and a small dent in one corner. The kind of dent a tightly wound programmer might make by repeatedly whacking the bar against a hard workbench.

If this was indeed Natch's bio/logic programming bar, then what were the odds of Horvil finding it here? The fact that the munic.i.p.al LPRACG had not swept it up by now was a pretty astronomical coincidence in itself.

And if it was Natch's-how did it get here? And what did its presence mean?

Jara had the same questions.

"I'm not saying it means nothing," said the a.n.a.lyst, looking drawn and haggard from lack of sleep. "I'm not saying the bar doesn't belong to Natch. But there have to be hundreds of people who walk by that spot every day carrying programming tools. Anybody could have dropped that bar."

"But the dent," protested Horvil. "The fact that the bars weren't in his apartment ..."

"Circ.u.mstantial evidence. And besides, what if you're right? What if that was Natch's stuff lying on the street? It's useless information. Unless Natch left a trail of metal bars leading across town like breadcrumbs, it won't help us."

Benyamin rocked back and forth in his seat impatiently. "The least we can do is send someone to go get it."

"No," said Jara. "Multi projecting to Shenandoah is one thing, but sending someone there in the flesh is another. What if someone's trying to use that bar to lure us away from the Surina compound? We came here to Andra Pradesh to keep safe. We need to stay here."

The young apprentice muttered something under his breath and arose from his chair with a look of defiance. "I'll go," he said.

"No, you won't," snapped Jara. "You need to ride herd on those a.s.sembly-line programmers and make sure we've got a product ready to show this afternoon. Now sit down." Blood rushed to Benyamin's face. He looked to Horvil, Merri and Quell for support, but found only awkward silence. Horvil gave an almost imperceptible gesture downwards towards the chair, and his cousin crumbled to his seat.

"I think we need to try contacting Serr Vigal again," said Quell.

Jara shook her head. "What's the matter with you people? We've been through this, Quell. We keep going round in circles, the same arguments over and over again for hours." The a.n.a.lyst scoped out the conference table for a suitable object to use as a projectile, found none, and pressed her fingertips to the mahogany all the harder. "Even if Vigal was returning my messages, we can't have him deliver the speech. He's just not a good enough huckster. Have you ever sat through one of his neural programming speeches? They're excruciatingly boring."

"I'm afraid to say it, but I agree with Jara," offered Merri.

"But Vigal's got a reputation in the programming community," said Quell. "He's got a following. He knows what he's talking about."

"And after the tenth time he stops mid-sentence to scratch his bald head, people are going to wonder where Natch is. They're going to think something has gone terribly wrong in the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp, and consumer confidence in us is going to plummet before we can even get a product to market. Blowing your first major company presentation is worse than not doing one at all."

"So why don't we cancel already?" mumbled Horvil, his head bowed to the table under the confining archway of his clasped hands, as if waiting for a guillotine to drop.

"Because we have an alternative," said Jara.

The Islander let out a brutish noise halfway between a grunt and a laugh. "Now you're the one who's going around in circles. How many times do I have to say this? Margaret won't do it. She's handed the project off to Natch-she's not going to jump back into this whole business again."

Jara frowned, brushing one finger slowly over her bottom lip. "I realize you've known Margaret longer than any of us-for process' preservation, I've never even met her except for that two-minute appearance she put in at the fiefcorp meeting the other day. But I'm just not convinced. We've got a first-rate demonstration. Merri's been working with Robby Robby to get the crowd fired up. The entire thing is laid out. All Margaret has to do is stand up and deliver it. How can she refuse?"

"The infoquake," said Quell. "She keeps saying the whole thing was her fault. She thinks those people died because of hear"

"Delusions of grandeur," muttered Ben.

Quell glared sharp slashing daggers at the young apprentice. "When you're the daughter of the Surinas," he snarled, "there's no such thing as a delusion of grandeur."

"That notwithstanding," said Jara, "I have to try to convince her. For process' preservation, Quell-this woman is a scientist. She'll listen to reason, won't she?"

Jara marched through the Surina Center for Historic Appreciation with her miniature fists clenched. Security guards haloed her like ma.s.sive blue-green planets...o...b..ting a small but furious star. She approached the atrium through an archway labeled Subaether Court. A score of disgruntled visitors glared at Jara when she pa.s.sed, as if she were responsible for their being muscled out of the atrium.

But the fault lay with the nondescript woman in the center of the domed room gazing up at the statue of a skinny man with a large nose. He was not the largest of the scientific t.i.tans adorning the dome, but his stone effigy had an almost mythical presence. The man stood calmly with one hand extended, not offering a welcoming gesture so much as making a commanding sweep. At his feet were carved the words: ANYTHING WORTH DOING IS WORTH PERFECTING.

-Sheldon Surina Next to the Father of Bio/Logics, Margaret Surina was a half-presence at best. She looked like she might disintegrate inside her bodhisattva's robes at any moment. Her face was solemn, even apologetic. An internal monologue flashed behind her eyes like distant lightning.

Jara could spare no time for pity. She shook herself loose from the Surina guards and stalked to the bodhisattva's side. The guards established a perimeter around the room and kept their distance. "I've been trying to find you for almost two hours," said Jara.

Margaret did not even acknowledge Jara's presence. "The Texan governments tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate him," said the bodhisattva, her gaze never leaving that of her ancestor. Even carved in stone, Sheldon Surina bore a look of self-importance. "The public hated him for a long time too. People always forget about that. The Three Jesuses called him a devil, and the Pharisees slaughtered thousands of his supporters for sport. He came up with the idea for Minds.p.a.ce sitting in a cave in the Himalayas."

"Natch has disappeared," said Jara.

"I know."

The bio/logic a.n.a.lyst took a step back in surprise. Margaret knew? Then why hadn't she answered all the messages and Confidential Whispers Jara had been flinging her way? As one of the firm's senior partners, why hadn't she immediately called a meeting to discuss alternative plans for the presentation? Jara felt like crying at the unfairness of it all. Why does it feel like I'm the only one willing to fight for this fiefcorp? Why is it that when push comes to shove, Natch disappears, Serr Vigal prives himself to all communication, and Horvil just falls apart? And yet I'm the one who's trying to get out of this whole nightmare. I'm the one who wants to put this MultiReal s.h.i.t behind me and get on with my life.

"If you want to honor Sheldon Surina's memory," Jara said in a slow and deliberate tone of voice, "then you'll stop feeling sorry for yourself and help us figure out an alternate course of action."

Margaret recoiled as if she had just been slapped. "I have no idea where Natch is. I didn't do anything to him."

"I'm not suggesting you did. But you're the one who set this whole thing in motion."

"Indeed?"

"Come on, Margaret! You created this f.u.c.king program, you dragged Natch and the rest of us into this business. You stood up there in front of billions of people and announced a bold new era of multiple realities. It's too late to back out now. You have a responsibility-no, an obligation-to see it through."

"An obligation to whom? To you?" The descendent of Sheldon Surina snorted haughtily. "I don't know you."

"You know Natch," said Jara. "You know Quell."

Margaret firmed up her jaw, looking again at the cool stone representation of her ancestor. Natch's name had produced barely a ripple on the bodhisattva's face, but mention of the Islander had obviously shaken her. "My obligation," she replied, "is to him." By him, clearly, Margaret meant the big-nosed stone statue and not anyone this side of the grave.

Jara stomped her foot and, only by sheer force of will, restrained herself from yelling at the venerable bodhisattva. Hadn't she been through this same scenario with Natch just a few weeks ago, when he all but announced his intention to frame his apprentices for that little black code scheme? Was there something inherent in the bio/logics trade that caused fiefcorp masters to lose their moral bearings? "So after sixteen years of working on this thing, you're just going to give up ,, "Now who's playing the victim? You're not an invalid, Jara." Until that moment, Jara had not quite been sure the bodhisattva even knew her name. "I'm quite certain Natch didn't hold a dartgun to your chest and force you to sign an apprenticeship contract. When you start a new business, there always are risks. You didn't think Natch and I were going to take all those risks while you sat back and watched millions of credits pour into your Vault account, did you?"

Blistering words clawed at Jara's windpipe, struggling for release. But at that moment, a Surina security guard trotted up to Margaret with a fist raised chin-level in salute. The bodhisattva gave the man a sidelong glance. Then the color drained from her face in response to some word she heard over Confidential Whisper.

"Go ahead," rasped Margaret, stumbling towards the window with a hand clutching her stomach. "You might as well tell her."

The officer turned to Jara and saluted smartly. "The Defense and Wellness Council is coming."

"What?"

"Several hundred hoverbirds have been spotted on the outskirts of Andra Pradesh. Three or four legions of Council officers are heading this way."

Jara felt her knees buckle, and before she knew it, she was sitting on the ground, woozy, her back leaning against Sheldon Surina's toes. Was it going to happen this easily? Just like Margaret's speech last week, Len Borda's troops were going to surge into the Surina compound and disrupt the proceedings-maybe even seize MultiReal by force-in front of the entire world.

Margaret pressed her forehead against the gla.s.s. A look of doom washed over her face. "You see?" she cried. "He's never going to stop, not until I'm dead and MultiReal is under his control. And what can anybody do about it? What can anybody do about it?"

Jara said nothing. Words seemed quite beside the point.

"Nothing to say? I thought so." The bodhisattva cast a hateful glance back at Jara, reached into a gap in her robes, and drew a sleek silver dart pistol. "Well, don't worry. The high executive is about to find out that confiscating MultiReal won't be as easy as it looks.

"The Spire!" she roared to her security detail, then stormed out the front door into the courtyard. Her cordon of guards followed close behind.

Millions of spectators had already poured into the Surina auditorium to await the first public demonstration of MultiReal. Despite Creed Conscientious' pleas, n.o.body seemed deterred by the prospect of another infoquake. They wanted to catch a glimpse of the infamous Natch, to see if he really deserved his reputation among the drudges. They wanted to measure Margaret Surina's accomplishments against those of her ancestors. More than anything, they just wanted to bask in the glow of history.

A carnival atmosphere swirled through the arena. Drudges and politicians of every ideological stripe wandered around broadcasting their a.n.a.lysis of the spectacle to their const.i.tuencies. Fiefcorp apprentices flaunted product slogans on their shirts and foreheads in vivid glow-in-the-dark colors. Creed devotees multied into the arena dressed in full creed regalia, while bodhisattvas from fringe groups stood on chairs and preached to anyone who would listen. Groups of children cl.u.s.tered together under the aegis of their hives, accompanied by stern-faced proctors of business, programming, politics and ethics. A few dozen L-PRACG activists multied into the auditorium stark naked and began chanting a tepid protest of Vault lending practices. One by one, they were caught in the beam of the Surina security disruptors and their multi connections cut. Council officers were nowhere to be seen.

Merri had been standing at the foot of the stage since the first thirty-five thousand spectators arrived and the auditorium began overlapping multi projections. She felt a strange sense of privilege to be here as a real body; it was quite literally a one-in-a-million opportunity. Fiefcorp apprentices living on the moon usually did not receive this kind of privilege.

Her reverie was interrupted by a reedy voice Merri had heard all too often over the past few days. "Say you run an a.s.sembly-line programming floor, and you're on a tight deadline. You don't have time to make mistakes." Merri zeroed in on the source of the voice, and saw Frizitz Quo not three meters away, holding court before an audience of Meme Cooperative officials. "Every time one of your workers fumbles a connection, that's a few precious minutes you've wasted. A few credits MultiReal could have saved you. Now multiply that by a few hundred workers, and that's real money...."

Merri tuned out the sprightly Asian and called up the grid that would show her the location of Robby Robby's entire team of cubeheaded channelers. A diagram of the arena appeared in the air before her, speckled with purple dots to indicate the coordinates of each team member. A legend in the corner of the diagram silently tallied up audience demographics.

Robby Robby himself had roped together an ad hoc group of nearly six thousand orbital colony residents, and was busy preaching the gospel of-something. Merri tuned in a video feed. "We know what you're going through out there," exclaimed Robby, his idiotic grin wobbling sympathetically. "The last to know. The last to hear. The last to be noticed. Right?"

A lukewarm cheer from the crowd.

"Who suffered during the infoquake last week? Was it the terrans? Was it the lunars? No, of course not-it was you. Am I right? You citizens of Allowell, of Patronell, of Furtoid, of 49th Heaven, of Nova Ceti, and all the rest-it was you who bore the brunt of that terrible catastrophe, wasn't it?"

A righteous buzz of discontent. A few raised fists.

"Well, keep those multi connections right here in Andra Pradesh, ladies and gentlemen, because tonight the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp is gonna show you a whole new dawn for orbital colonists ..."

Merri cut off the feed and shook her head. Robby and his channelers had been wandering all over the map during the past few hours, voicing new sales motifs at every exchange. Her instincts told her she should rein Robby in, insist he stay on message. But did it really matter what the channelers said at this point? They were pitching a technology n.o.body understood to crowds that had no idea whether they should or should not care. Merri couldn't really ask any more of Robby's staff than to keep the audience interested and upbeat.

She was about to head backstage for a much-needed break when she felt a tug at her elbow. "There you are!" cried a worried Benyamin. "I've got to show you this. You won't believe-"

Merri put a calming hand over Ben's. "Slow down," she said. "Take a deep breath. How's the a.s.sembly-line going?"

"Almost done. They're putting the final touches on right now. But this is more important."

The channel manager let him drag her across the stage and up into the mezzanine. She was feeling the first twinges of impatience when the word Petrucio caught her ear.

"Yes, yes, yes, of course it's true that the Patels are licensing MultiReal from Surina/Natch," stated a rail-thin woman of Polynesian descent, who stood on a makeshift podium fielding questions from several thousand fiefcorp masters. "Why bother to deny it? The MultiReal you're going to see here today is the same MultiReal Frederic and Petrucio will be demonstrating later tonight. Same product, different brand."

Merri fed the woman's face into the public directory and soon verified her suspicions. She had never actually seen Xi Xong outside a viewscreen, where her emaciated frame often sat alongside Robby Robby, Phrancoliape and The Felwidge Group in drudge roundups of the top channeling firms. But given the amount of work Xong did for the Patel Brothers, Merri should have expected her appearance here tonight.

"There have to be some kind of Meme Cooperative regulations against this," 'Whispered Benyamin. "That woman can't just come here into our audience and start stealing customers, can she?"

"I'm afraid she can," replied Merri with a sigh. "There's not really much we can do about it. If we kick her out, she'll only draw more attention."

As it was, Xong did not seem to have any trouble attracting attention. With her opal-bedecked kimono and her glittering nail polish, she presented quite an elegant contrast to Robby's slick hucksterism. "The Patels look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with Margaret and Natch," continued Xi Xong, responding to a m.u.f.fled question from the crowd. "Compet.i.tors? Why, certainly the Patels have had a little friendly compet.i.tion with Natch over the years. What of it?"

"Friendly?" protested one of the onlookers. "They've done everything but try to kill each other."

A frothy laugh bubbled from Xong's china doll lips. "Don't believe everything you hear from the drudges!" she said with a dark twinkle in her eye. "So there's no love lost between Natch and my clients. What does that matter? MultiReal is a wide-open market, and there will be more than enough room for two fiefcorps here. Besides, don't they say that a rising tide lifts all boats? As long as that tide pushes a few boats towards our safe sh.o.r.es, then everyone wins."

Merri couldn't help but admire the woman's poise, even if her wardrobe was too gaudy for the channel manager's taste. She caught sight of one of Robby's boyish cube-heads bounding up the aisles, and for a split-second wished she could exchange sales teams.

"Do you want to know what the worst part is?" said Benyamin. "She's not the only one here trying to poison Natch's reputation."

Merri frowned. "Who else?"

"You might as well ask who isn't here. Lucas Sentinel has a whole group here spreading lies. PulCorp, Billy Sterno, Bolliwar Tuban, the Serlys, the Deuterons, Studio Fitzgerald-they've all got their own people mouthing off in the wings."

"Jara was right."

"About what?"

"It's too late to cancel. With all these fiefcorps looking for blood, we've got to pull this demonstration off, or we're finished in this business."

Jara tried on several courses of action in her head, but none of them fit. She could run, but there really wasn't anywhere to run to. She could hide, but that would be utterly futile given the surveillance technology at the Council's disposal. Jara thought about what the protagonists of the dramas did in these kinds of situations. They relied on glib words and cool detachment, of course, two things that Jara did not possess. What would Natch do?

A low crescendo of thunder swept across the courtyard and set the window panes vibrating. Rhythmic thumps. Boom boom, boom boom. It took her a few minutes to decipher the sound as that of a thousand boots marching on travertine in perfect synchronization. She listened intently for signs of battle-the high-pitched whine of continuous dartgun fire, the m.u.f.fled boom of disruptors, all the war noises the dramas had trained her to recognize over the years. But if there was indeed a skirmish going on outside, none of it was reaching Jara's ears.

The tourists who had been kicked out of the atrium half an hour earlier came scurrying by. Over her mother's shoulder, a toddler gave Jara a curious look as they fled past Albert Einstein into Relativity Hall. They were followed shortly by a phalanx of panicked green-andblue Surina guards, fumbling with their dartguns as they scrambled to reach some defensive checkpoint. Jara dissolved as much as possible into Sheldon Surina's open-toed sandals, but n.o.body paid her any attention. Obviously, Len Borda had not even bothered repeating his fiction about protecting the scientist statues this time.

Outside, the first row of Defense and Wellness Council officers strode past the window. Their white robes looked positively spectral in the cloudy afternoon light, an affront to the notion of camouflage. Their faces bore the kind of stone-like neutrality that only bio/logics could produce. They were aiming squarely for the Revelation Spire, where Margaret was presumably holed up in a high story awaiting some kind of apocalyptic showdown. Jara peered out another window that gave her a view closer to the Spire. She had seen a squadron of Surina security forces there earlier, but now they had vanished.

What would Natch do under these circ.u.mstances? Jara knew exactly what he would do: he would go ahead and give the presenta tion anyway, until someone physically dragged him off the stage or blew him into a million pieces.

An idea popped into Jara's head, an idea that had been percolating for hours even though she had refused to acknowledge it.

Why couldn't she deliver the presentation?

Casting her mind out to the Surina facilities, Jara discovered that the spectators were indeed staying put in spite of Len Borda's little incursion. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was scheduled to hit the stage in little more than an hour, and the auditorium already held almost 400 million multi projections. If these numbers kept up, this would be an even larger crowd than the one Margaret had garnered last week-maybe even large enough to rival the 1.3 billion who had attended Marcus Surina's funeral forty-six years ago.

When the tromp of the troops became deafening, Jara put her hands over her ears and slithered even farther into the shadows. Still feeling exposed and vulnerable, she reached into her bio/logic bag of tricks and turned on Coc.o.o.n 32, a Lucas Sentinel program that had helped calm her down many times in the past.

Jara could instantly feel the tumult from the outside world fading away as her OCHREs filtered out the sounds around her and dimmed her sight until everything had faded to a dull gray. No ConfidentialWhispers, no incoming messages. No background chatter from the Data Sea.

Could she really stand up in front of a billion people and demonstrate a technology she barely understood herself? And not just any technology-perhaps the most radical invention in the history of humanity, and one that was almost completely untested.

There were a million reasons why she couldn't deliver the presentation. Jara had no experience speaking in front of large crowds. She had a bad reputation in the bio/logics industry. She hadn't swung a baseball bat in nearly twenty years.

But what other options did she have at this point? Slink off to a tube station and go home? Wait for the hubbub to die down and then drop a groveling Confidential Whisper to Lucas Sentinel asking for her old job back?