Stair after stair disappeared behind them. Banners and ceremonial plaques and eclectic sculptures marched by. Natch a.s.sumed there had to be an elevator somewhere along the way; not even bio/logical y enhanced legs could be expected to climb half a kilometer of stairs unaided.

It wasn't aching muscles that caused him to stop for a breather ten minutes later but the glacial cold permeating the soles of his feet. Natch supposed he should be grateful that the magic of modern architecture kept the Spire from turning into a giant wind tunnel. He scowled, not feeling grateful for anything today. "How do you stand the cold?" Natch complained.

"You get used to it," grunted Quel in response.

The fiefcorp master reached out to the Data Sea and located a program cal ed NumbSoles 85. The program was prefaced with a lengthy warning about the dangers of nerve-enhancing software, which Natch ignored. He quickly revved up the bio/logic code until he could sense his toes again, and the two pressed on.

Final y, some ten stories up, Natch and Quel found themselves standing in front of a bank of elevators. Translucent shafts extended from the top of the elevators into the distance like the pipes of some ma.s.sive organ. Natch couldn't begin to guess which one led to the Spire's summit, and the troops stationed nearby weren't volunteering any information. Quel strutted into the third elevator from the left without hesitation. Natch fol owed.

The ride up was a fifteen-minute exercise in tedium. After the first couple dozen floors, the building's architects had abandoned any pretext of utility; the upper levels of the Spire were al but empty, except for the occasional platform of troops aiming heavy weaponry out the windows.

Just when the monotony was growing unbearable, a sixth sense prompted Natch to look up. He saw a large gray ma.s.s approaching through the elevator's gla.s.s ceiling, a ma.s.s that could only be the underside of the Spire's top floor.

Carved on that surface was an enormous basrelief sculpture showing an emaciated figure with impossibly long fingers clawing at the elevator shaft.

Natch took in the supercilious stare and the hawkish nose, and realized that this was Sheldon Surina. THERE IS NO PROBLEM THAT CANNOT BE SOLVED BY SCIENTIFIC INNOVATION, read the inscription beneath him. Natch shivered as the elevator capsule slid between the talons of the father of bio/logics and came to a stop.

The door opened. Natch, overwhelmed, let out a gasp.

An enormous observation deck with s.p.a.ce for perhaps sixty or seventy people. Sofas and divans spread languorously about the room. Several original Topes in al their psychedelic glory; the armless and legless torso that was the last remaining piece of the Venus de Milo perched precariously on a display table. Wal s and ceiling made completely from flexible gla.s.s, giving the impression that the room floated in the clouds.

"Is he gone?" came a timorous voice from the other side of the room. "Is it safe?"

Margaret Surina.

Natch replayed their last encounter in his mind. It had been a month ago, shortly after the first infoquake and shortly before his runin with the blackrobed a.s.sailants. He remembered the bodhisattva of Creed Surina as a nondescript woman with raven-black hair and fierce blue eyes.

A bio/logic scion struggling to maintain her grace under pressure. But nowNow Margaret, inventor of MultiReal and heir to the Surina fortune, huddled in a cavernous chair with a dart-rifle in her trembling hands. The gray that had been making slow inroads on her hair had become the dominant color. Her preternatural y large eyes loomed even larger through black rings of sleeplessness that tested the limits of OCHRE technology.

"Is who gone?" said Quel gently, threading his way across the room toward the bodhisattva.

Margaret double-checked that her rifle was c.o.c.ked and loaded. "Gorda," came her hoa.r.s.e reply.

The fiefcorp master exploded. He could barely restrain himself from kicking a meticulously crafted vase that might have been ancient even in the days of the Autonomous Revolt. "Is he gone?" shouted Natch. "Len Borda's been gone for a f.u.c.king month, Margaret. If you would answer my messages, you'd know that. While you've been sitting up here doing nothing, we've been putting on demos and planning expositions and trying to appease everyone who's expecting a ful y functioning product next week." He gestured wildly out the window at the somnambulant clouds. Their indolence seemed like part of a conspiracy against him. "Of course, it's not going to be a ful y functioning product, is it?

No. Because I've been dodging the Defense and Wel ness Council for the past four weeks, and you've been up here, refusing to help us."

Quel reached Margaret's side and slowly untwined the bodhisattva's fingers from the rifle.

The gun slipped to the floor and made a m.u.f.fled thump on the Persian rug. "Are you okay?" he said in a low voice.

Margaret twitched her nose and blinked in confusion, as if she had been unaware of the Islander's presence until that exact moment. "Is it-is he-is everything okay?" she said, desperation mounting with every syl able. "Why did you come back? Tel me everything's fine. Please, Quel . Tel me he's okay."

The Islander clasped one of her hands between his gargantuan paws. Natch had never imagined that Quel was storing such tenderness inside that bricklike exterior. Once again, the fiefcorp master found himself wondering exactly what kind of relationship the Islander and the bodhisattva had shared for al those years. "Everything's fine," said Quel . "Everything's okay."

"You're-you're sure?"

"Yes." A pause. "Margaret ... have Jayze and Suheil been up here?"

Margaret gave a hesitant nod. "Yes, they're-they're helping out. Just for a bit, until things ... calm down."

Quel fired a murderous look out the window at the Indian sky, and Natch was very glad he wasn't Jayze or Suheil Surina at that moment.

But Natch had enough to worry about without getting ensnared in Surina family politics.

A half-operational product, the high executive on his back, renegade MultiReal code in his head. He could spare no pity for this cowering shel of a woman. Natch marched across the room and grabbed a straightbacked chair. Then he dragged it in front of the bodhisattva and sat down. Quel shot him a look of disapproval, but Natch would not be deterred. He stared intently into Margaret's face. "I need some answers," he rasped.

Lucidity sparked in Margaret's face. "Natch," she replied evenly. "You're stil -Borda hasn't taken control of MultiReal, has he?"

"No, of course not."

"He's going to put pressure on you. You know that, Natch, right?" Margaret's words were slow, methodical, as if she were struggling to remember how to use them. "He'l do to you what he did to my father. Or worse. Borda, he's on some kind of crusade against my family and everything we've touched ...

But Natch, you need to know this-he can't take MultiReal away from you. He can't. I've made sure of that."

Natch grabbed hold of himself, realizing that he was dangerously close to the point where rage overcomes reason. He switched on Soothelt 121.5 and waited a few seconds for the mild sedative to buff over his rough nerve endings. "I'm not afraid of Len Borda," he said. "I can handle him. But I need to know why there's MultiReal code in my head, Margaret. I need to know what you did to me. "

"That's what I'm trying to tel you." Margaret's hands were waving in the air in ever-widening circles. Quel watched those hands like a bird guarding its chick, ready to lash out the instant she got too close to the rifle on the floor. "MultiReal is becoming a part of you. You're not just its owner anymore, Natchyou're the guardian and the keeper."

"What the f.u.c.k are you talking about?"

The Islander clasped both of the bodhisattva's hands to his own. "You're afraid of something, Margaret. What is it?"

Margaret col apsed in on herself, despondent. "The nothingness at the center of the universe," she muttered. "The decisions I need to make. I-I'm afraid to make them."

The entrepreneur shot up and began pacing in tight concentric circles of his own, around the chair he had dragged across the room. Quel let go of her hands and made his way to the nearest window, where he glared at the outside world with scarcely concealed contempt. Every few seconds, he would turn back in Margaret's direction to make sure she hadn't picked up the rifle again.

"Listen," said Natch to the bodhisattva. "Let me explain something to you. I can't have mystery code hiding in MultiReal. If the program's interacting with something in my head, I need to know that. This is a scientific discipline, Margaret-we need to have the ground rules. You can't expect my engineers to ignore al these questions."

"But you'l have answers. You'l have access to al the answers, when you need them."

"What answers?"

Margaret's eyes were whirlpools spiraling down to an immeasurable depth. "Answers to help you make the crucial decisions."

Natch found a velvet couch nearby and folded himself into its welcoming embrace. Quel was right; this entire trip was a pointless exer cise. Perhaps Serr Vigal could sift through Margaret's gibberish, if indeed there were any nuggets of sanity left to be panned from that muddy psyche, but Natch could make no sense of it. He resolved to simply col ect her words and keep them handy for later a.n.a.lysis.

As for Quel , he seemed to have abandoned the mission of discovery he had undertaken the other day. His eyes were tinged with a peculiar mixture of concern, compa.s.sion, and incandescent rage. He retreated back to the bodhisattva's chair and sat on its arm. Margaret immediately col apsed against him like a mannequin.

But the bodhisattva had not finished her rambling. There was a struggle going on behind her eyes, a final wrenching effort at clarity. "Listen to me, Natch," she said. "You stil have options. Don't let them tel you otherwise. The Council, your fiefcorp, anybody. MultiReal is yours now, Natch.

"I was foolish to have held on to it for so long. I am not my father. I'm not strong enough to make these decisions. But you ...

"Natch, I picked you for a reason-because you'l resist Len Borda to your dying breath.

You wil resist the winter and the void. Understand thissomething my father was trying to tel me.

The world is new each day, every sunrise a spring and every sunset a winter. I know you'l understand this. You wil stand alone in the end, and you wil make the decisions that the world demands. The decisions I can't make. I know this. I know it."

There would be no more elucidation coming from Margaret Surina that afternoon, for as she finished the last word she slipped into a sudden fitful sleep. Quel cradled her in his arms, saying nothing. The fiefcorp master could see that the Islander comprehended no more than he did.

Natch stood once more and walked to the closest window. Far down below through the mist, he could see Andra Pradesh laid out before him like a chaotic playground of the G.o.ds, but from that quarter there were no answers forthcoming either.

15.

The trouble began with a message in the early hours of the morningearly hours for Horvil, at least, who was stil exhausted from yesterday's drudge onslaught and who even in the most lax of times would cross multiple time zones and hotel it to justify a few extra hours of sleep.

The engineer pul ed his face from a cool crevice of the sofa and fluttered his eyelids to dispel the pixie dust. Bulky letters were hopping up and down impatiently on their serifs before Horvil's face.

HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP.

Horvil rol ed onto his back, dropped his head into a net of interwoven fingers, and checked the signature. The message had come from ... Prosteev Serly?

As an engineer in a highly visible fiefcorp, Horvil had met just about everyone in the Primo's top fifty. The entrepreneur Serly had bought him a few drinks last week on the pretext of fostering good relations among the compet.i.tion. Never mind that Horvil no longer was the compet.i.tion since MultiReal had come along. It soon became apparent that Serly was real y after technical a.s.sistance with NiteFocus 51, which he had bought at auction when Natch liquidated the company's old programs. Horvil suspected that Natch wouldn't approve of such generosity to a former compet.i.tor, especial y with the exposition looming so close. But free booze was free booze. Horvil and Serly spent a few hours in a Turkish bar discussing iterative functions and quantum dynamics and the conductive properties of the optic nerve. Prosteev took lots of notes and, more importantly, poured lots of drinks. The two had

parted

friends.

Horvil zapped off a ConfidentialWhisper. "How ya doing, Prosteev?"

Prosteev, panicked, teetering on the edge of violence: "What kind of s.h.i.t did you put in that NiteFocus code, Horv? What's Natch trying to pul ? I thought he was getting out of bio/logics, and now he does this to me-"

"Hold it, hold it, hold it," interrupted the engineer. "Start from the beginning. I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about ma.s.sive failures with NiteFocus. I'm talking about twelve thousand complaints in the past three hours, and more every minute. Now I've got the Meme Cooperative breathing down my neck, people demanding refunds, my a.n.a.lyst threatening to quit-"

Horvil calmed the man down the best he could and asked for temporary access to the Minds.p.a.ce blueprints. He threw on a robe and shuffled to his workbench. Crumbs from yesterday's sandwich made lazy backflips off his sleeve. (Read the contract, he could hear his inner Natch griping. You don't have to help Prosteev Serly. That sale was final the instant those credits changed hands.) Sifting through the soft blues and purples of the NiteFocus code was like catching up with an old friend. Horvil remembered the nimble swing of the Sifting through the soft blues and purples of the NiteFocus code was like catching up with an old friend. Horvil remembered the nimble swing of the programming bar that had created that parabola, the deft touch that had closed those loopholes. He briefly relived the evening when Natch had tested the program on his balcony and declared it unfit for public consumption. Soon Horvil was back in hyperfocus as he sifted through error reports and Plugenpatch specifications.

An hour and a half later, Horvil found the mistake: an improperly defined variable in one of the program's isolated ghettos. He swept through the logs and verified that the error was, in fact, his responsibility and not something tacked on later by Serly's engineers. It was a trivial mistake from those frantic nights before the NiteFocus 48 launch. Under normal conditions, such a flaw might go unnoticed for years without causing any trouble. Half the bio/logic programs on the Data Sea had failings like this that would only crop up in the most bizarre situations. Not even Primo's and Dr. Plugenpatch could find them al .

The engineer tossed his programming bar over one shoulder with a wel -practiced motion, where it landed on a pil ow and rol ed to join several others on the floor. He cal ed up bug reports and began crossreferencing the source of the errors.

Bil board holographs, mostly, along with the occasional Data Sea news feed.

Horvil turned back to that insignificant thread drooping in Minds.p.a.ce like a flaccid phal us. What were the odds of twelve thousand specific cal s to that strand in one morning? Astronomical. This was no coincidence. Someone had bought advertising s.p.a.ce on those bil boards and posted just the right image with just the right resolution at just the right time: a perfect storm of sabotage. But how had the saboteurs found the flaw? Unless they had stumbled on it by accident, which seemed unlikely, they would have had to reverse-engineer the whole thing from scratch. Not an easy task.

Horvil's mind triangulated with furious speed. Who could spare those kinds of resources?

Who could afford to rent al that bil board s.p.a.ce for those incriminating holographs? And who had the motive to muck with Horvil's code anyway?

Horvil silently tal ied up al the bio/logic programs out there that bore his signature.

Optical programs, mental process refiners, memory aids. Four dozen? Five? Certainly if one program was vulnerable to such attack, they al were.

The yel ow jacket floated on the surface of the hoverbird window, lifeless, inert. If Natch stared long enough, he could see it drift from side to side like a buoy bobbing on the ocean. There was a faint hum coming from some subterranean register as wel . Natch knew it was just a trick of the hoverbird's audiovisual system, a way to hint at information that only a properly configured Minds.p.a.ce workbench could provide. But until he arrived back in Shenandoah, this poor man's display would have to do.

He was stil a few hours out from Shenandoah, closer than he would have been if he had taken the tube with Quel . But the Islander was so upset at the state of affairs in Andra Pradesh, he had decided to stay behind for another day to see what he could accomplish. Natch bristled, thinking of the MultiReal exposition in less than a week and the mountain of programming changes that needed to go to the a.s.sembly-line shop in the next forty-eight hours. But in the end he decided to give the Islander some leeway and just get himself home as fast as possible. Thus, a chartered flight, in a four-seater Falcon hoverbird. The pilot had never made any attempt to talk to him; she simply tuned the c.o.c.kpit windows to a geosynchron weather report and lifted off.

As Andra Pradesh became a memory and Europe fled in the hoverbird's wake, Natch stared at the yel ow jacket on the window, evidence of the MultiReal code in his head. Who planted you there? he asked the insect. What are you doing? What relation do you have to the black code?

What are you waiting for?

Natch was startled out of his reverie by a ConfidentialWhisper request. Horvil. The fiefcorp master waved the blob on the window away until it was nothing but a ghostly presence, a malicious idea. Many meters below, he could see the choppy waves of the English Channel. "What?" he snapped brusquely, shaking his head to jumpstart his synapses.

The engineer's tone was tired and fatalistic. "We've got a problem, boss."

"Wel ? What is it?"

"The Council."

Natch felt a sudden nausea wash over him. It was the same primitive queasiness he had felt the night before initiation, when he had been outflanked and humiliated by Brone, and somehow he knew this was not just another petty hara.s.sment. "So what did they do this time?" said Natch, molars grinding.

Horvil let out a 'Whisper-audible sigh. "They sabotaged my programs," he said. "Twelve of 'em so far and counting. No, don't say I'm being paranoidthis has their fingerprints al over it.

They figured out a way to generate al these complaints to the Meme Cooperative, and the Meme Cooperative's been funneling them to the Bio/Logic Engineering Guild. They're accusing me of-get this-deceptive programming."

"So you've gotten some complaints. When has that ever-"

"Not just some complaints. More complaints than the Guild's ever received for one programmer." Horvil might have sounded amused if he didn't sound so exhausted. "Four mil ion and counting. They're starting up a whole task force."

Natch blinked, hard. Four mil ion complaints?

But before he had a chance to process this new datum, he was a.s.saulted by a fresh Confidential Whisper request, also labeled urgent. Merri. "Natch,"

she moaned in a tone redolent of fresh sobbing. "They've-I've-"

Natch slumped down in his seat. "Let me guess. The Council."

Merri's nod was evident even through ConfidentialWhisper. "I don't know for certain-but it has to be them. Someone convinced Creed Objectivv to suspend my membership. Here, look." The fiefcorp master felt the neural twitch of an incoming message. He pointed at the hoverbird window and summoned a doc.u.ment whose quasi-mystical font could only have germinated in an Objectivv art department.

Horvil, stil prattling on in the background: "I haven't heard anything from the Meme Cooperative yet, but the Engineering Guild is p.i.s.sed. They've taken away my Guild card until this is al cleared up."

"I don't understand," said Natch. "Why would Magan Kai Lee care about some stupid trade guild?"