"The drudges. I could send a message to Sen Sivv Sor and John Ridglee right now."

Natch shrugged, as if the effort of responding to such an inane proposition was beneath him. He caught the spinning donut of code with one hand and began studying its surface once more.

Jara let her hands drop inertly to her sides. Is he right about me? she thought. Is that all I am-a whiner and a whistle blower? She thought back to her days peddling bio/logic a.n.a.lysis to Lucas Sentinel, to all the times she had cursed her fate and threatened to quit. Wouldn't Lucas pull the same stunts that Natch did, if he had the guts or the foresight?

She hadn't really intended to quit, she realized now. Despite all the indignities, Jara couldn't bring herself to hate this cantankerous child. What she had wanted was the opportunity to deliver some kind of high-handed sermon about Pyrrhic victories and the value of interpersonal relationships. She wanted him to take her seriously. "People could have gotten hurt, Natch," Jara said quietly.

"They didn't."

"But they could have."

Natch finally capitulated and flipped off the Minds.p.a.ce bubble around his workbench. The holographic donut melted back into the void. "Jara, everyone who invests in bio/logics knows what's going on. Things like this happen all the time. Do you think the Patel Brothers got to the top without getting their hands dirty? Or Len Borda?"

Jara snorted angrily. "Oh, I see, the end justifies the means."

The entrepreneur narrowed his eyes, as if trying to adjust his focus to a shallower depth of field. "Do you really think number one on Primo's is the end? Then you don't understand anything, Jara. Getting to number one on Primo's isn't an end at all-it's a means. It's part of the process ... just a step on the ladder."

"So what is the end? Where do all these means lead to?"

Natch stared out into the nothingness for a moment without speaking. She saw him for a brief instant unadorned, between masks. His jaw rocked back and forth, and in his eyes burned a hunger the likes of which Jara had never seen. That fire could consume her schoolgirl l.u.s.t, swallow it without a trace. She shivered involuntarily.

"I don't have a clue," said Natch. "But when I find out, I'll let you know." And with a peremptory wave of his hand, he cut her multi connection.

Jara found herself standing once more on the red square in her London apartment. It was Wednesday afternoon already. In a few blessed hours, this entire debacle would be a distant memory. On the viewscreen, she could hear the crowds milling about in the public square, restless, impatient, disconsolate.

Jara sank to the floor and cried for a moment, then dragged herself back to her office. There was work to be done.

Sleep tore at him, shrieked at him, pummeled him without mercy. His traitorous body was only too happy to succ.u.mb, and it took a monumental effort of will for Natch to keep himself awake.

Sheldon Surina, the father of bio/logics, had once defined progress as "the expansion of choices." Natch wanted the choice to stay awake. So he switched on PulCorp's U-No-Snooze 93 and let the OCHRE machines in his body release more adrenaline. Within seconds, he was awake and alert.

He was on the tube headed north out of Cisco station, through the great redwood forests that carpeted much of the northwest, and up to Seattle. Natch had been on this route hundreds of times. The tube would shuttle back and forth between the two port cities all afternoon, hauling industrial supplies and a dwindling number of commuters. At this time of the morning, the pa.s.senger car was nearly empty. Besides Natch, there was an elderly gentleman who appeared to be killing time; two businesswomen who were probably accompanying their cargo in the trailing cars; and an Islander tugging uncomfortably at the steel collar around his neck. Fickle economics, which had once courted TubeCo with ardor, had moved on to younger and more acrobatic mistresses.

Natch had no business to transact in either Cisco or Seattle. He came to see the trees. To see the trees and to plot his next move.

Everyone in the fiefcorp knew about his ritual of tubing out to the redwood forests whenever he had something to mull over. n.o.body understood it, least of all Jara. "You refuse to eat a meal sitting down because it's a waste of time, but you'll spend three and a half hours riding a hunk of tin across the continent?" she had once scolded him. "Why tube all the way out there when you can multi instead?"

"It's not the same as being there in person."

Jara rolled her eyes. He saw the incomprehension written all over her face: This is the same kind of backwards logic that the Islanders and the Pharisees use. I thought you were smarter than that.

"What about a hoverbird?"

"I don't like hoverbirds. Bad memories."

"Okay, then why don't you teleport? I know, it's expensive. But time is money, isn't it?"

Natch had had no reply. He was not very good at elaborate explanations. He simply knew he did his best thinking while in a tube car staring at giant sequoias. Teleporting or multi projecting out to the redwoods just wasn't the right way to do it. It was wrong, like an imperfect bio/logic program was wrong.

Maybe what he appreciated about the tube was that it was done right. TubeCo had an eye for perfection in everything they did. Their vehicles were not "hunks of tin," as Jara had accused. They were sleek and beautiful, the product of a business that had reached its awesome maturity. Transparent from the inside but breathtakingly translucent from the outside, the tube cars floated on a cushion of air just molecules thick and whooshed over slim tracks with quiet grace. Even the armrests on the chairs were sculpted from synthetic ivory and contoured for maximum comfort. Unlike so many technological marvels these days that blended into the background-microscopic OCHREs that regulated the human body, multi projections that were nearly indistinguishable from real bodies, data agents that existed only within the mind-the tube was a visible, palpable manifestation of human achievement. It was progress writ large.

The redwoods, in contrast, were nature writ large. Natch gazed through the transparent wall at the sequoias towering over the tube tracks. These trees had watched over this route long before the tube even existed. Most of them had undoubtedly seen the days of Sheldon Surina and Henry Osterman, the days of bio/logics' founders. Some of the trees had stood here since long before the Autonomous Revolt or even the First American Revolution. All of human history, in fact, was but a footnote to their tranquil and reflective existence.

The tube car completed its circuit through the redwood forest and slid to a graceful stop at the Seattle station, but Natch stayed on for another pa.s.s. Then another, and another. He watched the trees, he pondered the future, he formulated plans. Gradually, the effects of the UNo-Snooze program wore off. Natch let his guard down and drifted off to sleep.

In his sleep, he dreamed.

He dreamed he was standing in a grove of redwoods, dwarfed by their majesty. He felt small: a forgotten attribute in the great schema of the universe. He was trapped down here. The forest was endless. Tube trains whizzed by just over the next hill, powerless to do anything but circle around in vain looking for an outlet.

But Natch had found a method of escape. He had prepared for this moment. He was a bio/logic programmer, a master architect of human capability. He had studied in the Proud Eagle hive, apprenticed with the great Serr Vigal, gone up against formidable enemies like the Patel Brothers. And he had brought all his skill and learning to bear when he had crafted the ultimate program: Jump 225.

He stared at the canopy of leaves many kilometers up in the sky. It looked impossibly distant. But then he thought about the jump program, the way it swirled and swooped in Minds.p.a.ce with impossible grace. The sheer number of its tendrils, its connections. The geometric shapes that formed mathematical constellations beyond human perception.

Natch was confident. He started the jump program, felt programming instructions flowing off the Data Sea and into the data recepta- Iles built into his very bones. Felt the tingling of OCHRE systems interpreting the code and routing commands to the proper leg muscles.

He Jumped.

Natch propelled himself right-foot-forward in an elegant arc towards the sky. The code was grounded in one of the cla.s.sic moves of natural law: the jump, a movement humanity had worked out through a hundred thousand years of constant iteration. Yet the program bore the indelible signatures of an artificial product: the curl of the toes at mid-leap, the triumphant arching of the back, the pleasing whistle where no whistle would otherwise exist. The sky drew nearer and nearer, the ground now but a distant memory. Breaking free of the redwoods was already a foregone conclusion, and Natch had set his sights on still loftier goals. Jump 225 would take him not only above the redwoods, but up into the clouds and out of natural law altogether. He would achieve freedom from the tedious rules that had governed human existence since the beginning of time. Down would no longer follow up. Autumn would no longer follow summer. Death would no longer follow life. The jump 225 program would accomplish all this, and more.

Then, just when his straining fingertips struggled for purchase on the twigs hanging off the highest branches-when he could feel the feathery touch of the leaves-when he had just gotten his first whiff of pure, clean, unspoiled sky-the inevitable descent began.

Natch could see himself falling in slow motion, as if he were looking down from the pinnacle of the tallest redwood. He could see his arms flailing and feel his lungs bursting every second of the way down. The whistle of the jump had become the screech of gravity's avenging angel. What mere seconds ago had been a triumphant jump now turned into a horrible, agonizing Fall. How could he have been so blind? How could he not have seen this?

This was worse than not having jumped in the first place: the force of the impact would surely crush him, flatten him, destroy him. And still he accelerated. Falling so fast now that he would actually crash through the ground, down through the pulverizing rock, down to the center of the earth, where nothing could ever rise again. He yelled his defiance. He shook his fists. He railed at the trees, reaching out in a vain effort to pull them down with him.

A split-second before impact, Natch awoke.

2.

THE SHORTEST.

INITIATION.

Natch's forefather Hundible was an acquaintance of Sheldon Surina and one of the earliest investors in bio/logics. He was a gambler, a teller of tall tales, a drifter of unknown origin and unsavory character.

But above all else, Hundible was a poor financial planner. His getrich-quick schemes sank like leaky boats, leaving him constantly floundering in a sea of fathomless debt. Where he found the money to invest in bio/logics, no one knew. Human biological programming seemed an unlikely venture for Hundible; Surina himself, with his prudish ways and supercilious att.i.tude, seemed an unlikely partner. Naturally, everyone a.s.sumed this new discipline was destined to fail.

Yet it was Hundible who had the last laugh. His partner, the skinny Indian tinkerer with the big nose, went on to revitalize science and revolutionize history. The gambler's modest investment ballooned a thousandfold and generated a large fortune. Hundible retired at the seasoned age of thirty-three, took a high-society companion, and slid contentedly out of history. If he had any interest in the great flowering of science that his investment helped bring to fruition, there was no record of it.

Hundible eventually pa.s.sed on. His wealth endured, for a while.

Natch's ancestor was not the only one to stumble serendipitously onto Surina riches. A host of rogues, early adopters, and cutting-edge investors were handsomely rewarded for their early backing of bio/logics. Lavish mansions and villas sprouted up around the globe to serve their owners' whims-places where they could escape the harsh moral strictures that had kept order since the Autonomous Revolt. The bio/logic entrepreneurs deliberately sought cities that had largely escaped the havoc of the Revolt: Omaha, Melbourne, Shenandoah, Madrid, Cape Town. Cities that yearned for the greatness of antiquity, cities whose local governments could be easily bought.

This change in the political landscape did not escape the attention of the old nation-states. The old governments might have been dilapidated and their halls of power decaying, but they still had plenty of resources at their disposal to fight this territorial encroachment. They vested much of their power in a centralized Prime Committee. The Committee turned around and bestowed ultimate martial authority on a single Defense and Wellness Council. Crusading high executives of the Council like Tul Jabbor and Par Padron made reining in the excesses of the bio/logic entrepreneurs their top priority.

Thus the battle was joined. Society split along ideological fault lines: governmentalists who favored central authority versus libertarians who sought power for local civic groups. By the time Natch's fiefcorp ascended to number one on Primo's, this dichotomy had come to seem like the natural order of things.

Hundible's descendants grew fiercely protective of their fortunes. Not only were they fending off the Committee and the Council, but they were also under siege by the greatest enemy of all: time. The bio/logic entrepreneurs knew that theirs was not the immutable wealth of the lunar land tyc.o.o.ns. Their money was not a tangible thing like terraformed soil that they could stick their hands into. No, for better or worse, the fates of the bio/logic entrepreneurs were tied to the bio/logic markets.

And markets, like all living things, are mortal.

Natch's mother Lora was fourteen when the Economic Plunge of the 310s. .h.i.t.

Lora was schooled in the best hives, with the children of important diplomats and capitalmen. Her proctors were crisp, disciplined citizens who saw the hive as a Petri dish in which to experiment with the latest academic fashions. Lora and her hivemates yo-yoed between pedagogical theories, learning much about politics but very little about government, finance, engineering or programming.

But what did it matter? When Lora looked into the future, she saw nothing but the comfortable track her parents had laid out for her, with scheduled stops at initiation, loss of virginity, career, companionship and motherhood. There would be plenty of time along the way to pick up any other skills she needed.

In the meantime, Lora worked diligently to become a Person of Quality. She developed a keen fashion sense and an eye for good beauty-enhancement programming. She sharpened her social skills at the regular charity b.a.l.l.s held in the Creed Elan manors. She dipped her toes in the Sigh, that virtual network of sensuality, and learned a thing or two about the pleasures of the flesh. And when holidays rolled around, she retreated to her cavernous family mansion to dally with servants whose parents had not been blessed with the money for a hive education.

Then, one gloomy spring day, Lora and her hivemates awoke to find all the proctors riveted to news feeds off the Data Sea. Marcus Surina has died, they said. An accident in the orbital colonies. A few of the proctors wept openly.

For a while, Surina's death seemed like a distant event that had little connection to the girl's carefully structured hive existence: a supernova in a remote galaxy, visible only through powerful refractive lenses. Surina had been the master of TeleCo, a big and powerful company. He was a direct descendant of Sheldon Surina, the inventor of bio/logics. His death had been a terrible tragedy. What else was there to say?

But from that day forward, everything changed.

Lora's friends began checking out of the hive and disappearing, n.o.body knew where. One by one, Lora's parents cut back on subscriptions to the programs that gave her eyes that china-doll sparkle and her hair that reflective l.u.s.ter. The servants were let go. Nameless fears escaped from the demesne of adulthood and roamed the hive at night with impunity, whispering words the children did not understand.

Six months after Marcus Surina's death, Lora's parents unexpectedly showed up at the hive and told her to pack her things. They gave her a single valise and told her to take as many of the precious knickknacks and gewgaws lining her shelves as she could carry.

Where are we going? she asked.

To Creed Elan, they replied.

The last time Lora had seen the great ballroom at the Elan manor, its railings had been festooned with purple flowers, and its marble floors lined with elegant revelers in formal robes. Now the ballroom was a shantytown of cl.u.s.tered cots and frightened children. Lora's parents deposited her on an empty bunk and kissed her goodbye.

There's an opportunity in the orbital colonies that we can't pa.s.s up, but it's much too dangerous for children, they said. Don't worry, Creed Elan will take good care of you, and the family will be back on its feet in no time. Just wait here and we'll send for you.

They never did.

During the next few months, Lora managed to string together what had happened from sc.r.a.ps of overheard conversation and bits of news footage on the Data Sea. Her parents had invested heavily in TeleCo, as had all of the absentee parents of the boys and girls moping the hallways at Creed Elan. It had seemed like a safe bet. No less an authority than Primo's had heralded teleportation as the Next Big Thing. And why wouldn't it be? The master of TeleCo was a Surina. Sheldon Surina's invention of bio/logics had propelled the entire world from chaos to a new era of prosperity and innovation. The emerging science of teleportation would surely do the same, with a handsome and brilliant and urbane pitchman like Marcus Surina at the helm. Yes, the economics were fuzzy and the technical challenges daunting, but TeleCo would figure it all out in time.

And that might have happened, if Marcus and his top officers had not been charred to ash by a ruptured shuttle fuel tank.

Marcus Surina's successors at TeleCo tried to pick up the pieces of his work, but it was a Herculean task. They soon discovered that the economics of teleportation weren't merely fuzzy; they were disastrous. The company quickly scaled back its ambitions from Marcus Surina's pie-in-the-sky dreams to more sober and subdued goals. TeleCo supplicated the Prime Committee for protection from its creditors, and soon all the manufacturers and distributors that had antic.i.p.ated a teleportation boom went belly-up. The ripples spread far and wide, leaving dead companies floating in their wake. Eventually, the ripples touched even Creed Elan, that last bastion of n.o.blesse oblige.

Years later, Lora wondered how much of a fight the rank-and-file put up when the bodhisattvas of Creed Elan decided to let the children go. The girl found herself shunted off to a small, private inst.i.tution that was obviously destined for bankruptcy.

Within the s.p.a.ce of two years, Lora had gone from a promising young debutante to a penniless member of the diss. Her quest to become a Person of Quality would have to be put on hold.

After exhausting the generosity of her family's remaining acquaintances and selling all her trinkets, Lora found shelter on the thirtyfourth floor of a decaying Chicago office tower. The furniture had long ago been stripped away, and the windows had no gla.s.s. Every few years, one of these buildings falls down and kills everyone inside, cackled one of the neighboring women, a wretched old hag who had never experienced high society and resented Lora for her all-too-brief tenure there. Maybe this one will be next.

Lora learned to do the Diss Shuffle, that ungainly two-step that had her feigning malnutrition on the bread lines one day and faking job experience during interviews the next. Employment was almost impossible to come by for a woman with no marketable skills, no work experience, and no references. She tried the sacred totems that had opened doors for her in the past-the name of her hive, the names of her parents, the name of the fashionista who had designed her ball gowns. But in this new world, those names had lost their magic.

And so several years slipped by in slow motion. Down in the realm of the diss, nothing changed. The same expressionless faces meandered down the street, day after day, neither angry nor frightened nor scared nor hurt, but just there: zombies of the eternal now chewing synthetic meats grown in tanks. The beneficent forces of government sent bio/logic programming code raining down from the skies, containing chemical nourishment and protection from disease and hygiene. Black code sprouted up from the lower realms, programs to stir the sludge of neural chemicals in their skulls and relieve the boredom.

Sometimes she had real flesh s.e.x with strangers in trashed-out buildings. Other times, she and her roommates embarked on errands of violence against the crumbling city. Bio/logics had made it very difficult to seriously injure someone with a pipe or a rock. But buildings ... buildings followed the natural laws of entropy, and could eventually be beaten down into dust.

And then one day, the rumors began. Len Borda, the young high executive of the Defense and Wellness Council, was giving out money to the bio/logic fiefcorps. It's a ma.s.sive program of military and intelligence spending designed to end the Economic Plunge, they said. Jobs will be returning soon.

Lora had not hunted for work in nearly two years. She had rarely even made it around the block in that time. But the rumors stirred memories of her old life, of the comfortable track that prescribed career, companionship and motherhood. Lora left the Chicago slums and tubed to the metropolis of Omaha in search of work.

Within a few weeks, Lora's search brought her to the attention of Serr Vigal.

Vigal had matriculated in one of the great lunar universities and discovered an innate pa.s.sion for neural programming. He settled in Omaha the same week that High Executive Borda defied the Prime Committee and began handing out ma.s.sive defense subsidies. Vigal founded a company devoted to the study of the brainstem, and went to the Defense and Wellness Council for funding. They approved his request almost without question.

The young neural programmer decided to incorporate as a memecorp instead of a fiefcorp. Vigal had to spend much of his time pleading for public funding from a patchwork of government agencies, but he felt this was time well spent if his employees were insulated from the pressures of the marketplace.

His choice of company structure also allowed him to make unconventional hiring decisions.

Lora was his first such decision. Vigal could see her qualifications were slim, yet her scores on the logic quizzes he routinely gave to applicants were astronomical, far higher than most of his pedigreed apprentices. Clearly the woman was full of untapped potential, and Vigal was intrigued. The field of neuroscience had moved far beyond the basic mechanics of forming neurons and positioning dendrites. If he was to succeed in this field, Vigal knew he would need creative thinkers to help decipher the hidden electrical order in the brain. He hired Lora.

Unfortunately, Vigal's first controversial decision sparked his first major conflict. Lora was a quick learner, but the work was difficult and the rest of the team unforgiving. Mistake piled on top of mistake while the apprentices were crunching to hit major deadlines. Once the project was completed, a group of Lora's fellow apprentices approached Vigal and demanded her dismissal. It's impossible to work under these con ditions, they said. We have friends with much better credentials who are still out there in the ranks of the disc.

Vigal refused to terminate her contract, but he had selfish reasons.

He had fallen in love with her.

Over the next year, Lora found a place in the company as Vigal's muse. The very sight of her fierce blue eyes inspired flights of fancy, flights that glided Vigal over distant mathematical lands few had seen. And yet, one touch of her hand on his shoulder was enough to ground him and bring a sense of direction to his wandering intellect.

The memecorp began to experience great success. Soon, Serr Vigal had become one of the world's pre-eminent neural programmers, a fixture on the scientific lecture circuit, and a much-sought-after expert on brainstem issues. The other apprentices in the company suspected that Vigal and Lora were lovers, but they looked at the company's accomplishments and decided to give their master some leeway.

Lora frequently accompanied Vigal to scientific conferences and fundraising pitches. One month, Vigal sent her to the remote colony of Furtoid to prepare for such a conference. Two days later, the entire colony was quarantined with a sudden epidemic. Whether the virus was deliberately engineered or simply an evolutionary fluke was never determined.

Portions of Furtoid remained quarantined for months. Four hundred forty-seven people died in those sections of the colony.

Including Lora.

Vigal went into a deep depression when he heard the news. The future had seemed so bright and his own ambitions so limitless. He was just starting to notice the void in his heart that men often discover in their thirties, a void that neither career nor accomplishment can fill. Lora had filled that void for Vigal. Now that she was gone, life seemed bleak and purposeless.

But when Vigal arrived at distant Furtoid to claim her body, he had a surprise waiting for him. Lora had left behind a child, ex utero, at the colony's hiving and birthing facility. The child had been there in the gestation chambers since soon after conception. Rumors abounded that Lora had taken a lover, but the hive had been unable to locate a father.