"It's political," replied the engineer. He seemed remarkably non chalant, almost jocular, for someone whose career was under siege. "Lots of bad blood between the Guild and the Cooperative. Goes back twenty years. The Guild's been accusing the Co-op of coddling the business interests. So the Co-op keeps one-upping them lately, pushing the envelope. If the Guild takes away your card, then you can bet the Co-op's going to take away your license-"

Natch switched focus back to the channel manager. Labor politics always made him irritable, and al he real y needed to know was that the Council was taking aim at Horvil's license to do business. He scrol ed feverishly up and down the Creed Objectivv letter that Merri had received. There was only the typical bureaucratic obfuscation: al flourish and no content. "So what's going on, Merri?" he said. "Why did they suspend you?"

"My chapter manager says it's about ... 'pledging under false pretenses.

The entrepreneur writhed under the neural miasma, wishing for the luxury of a molded tube seat instead of the Spartan practicality of this hoverbird chair. "Listen, I'm sorry to hear about this, but-"

"But what does it matter to the fiefcorp?" Merri sighed. "Wel , the Objectivv truth-tel ing oath is a potent tool, Natch. Channelers who've pledged not to lie have a big advantage. So if the Meme Cooperative thinks we're gaming the system ...

If they think I joined the creed specifical y so the fiefcorp could take advantage of the oath ..."

"Al right, I get it. Unfair compet.i.tion. Customers filing lawsuits left and right: I only bought their program because of the oath, and the oath is a sham."

Perhaps not enough for any kind of conviction, but enough to get an investigation under way. Enough, maybe, to get Merri's license from the Meme Cooperative suspended.

Natch's heart raced. The contours of Magan Kai Lee's scheme were beginning to take shape. Not a military onslaught but a bureaucratic one, with the Cooperative as rifle and business licenses as ammunition. But why? What did Magan get out of suspended licenses?

Two more high-priority pings, almost simultaneous. Benyamin and Serr Vigal. Whatever else the Council was capable of, they had certainly mastered timing and coordination.

"It appears that the Vault has put me under investigation," muttered Vigal without preamble.

"My mother, Natch," said Benyamin, one beat away from abject terror. "She shut down the a.s.sembly-line floor."

"She what?"

"It was that programming floor manager, Greth Tar Griveth. She must have blabbed something to my mother-that's the only thing I can think of. The Council swooped in and opened an investigation. But that's not the worst part, Natch. My mother, she went into a rage when she found out. She actual y ordered the floor to rol back the changes to MultiReal they made last month."

The hoverbird made a sudden shimmy from the turbulence. Natch's stomach lurched.

"They're rol ing back-?"

-and even Primo's uses the Engineering Guild's routines to determine their rankings,"

continued Horvil, stil operating under the a.s.sumption that he had the fiefcorp master's ful attention. "That's what the rumor is anyway Vigal: "I don't understand it, Natch. Some fool at the Vault has decided that I'm funneling money from my memecorp fund-raising into the fiefcorp. He says the receipts don't add up. The lawyer I talked to even accused me of slipping money to the Surinas, of al people ..."

"I know what you're thinking, Natch." Merri. "You thought I took the Objectivv truth-tel ing oath years ago. But no, I only took the oath about nine months before I signed on with you. About the same time you started courting me for the job ..."

Natch tried to pa.r.s.e through the confused babble streaming through his head, the overlapping ConfidentialWhispers, the worried moans. He tugged at the hoverbird harness as if preparing to stand up and pace off the built-up frustration. But there was no room to pace in this cramped vehicle. So instead he sat in his seat, paralyzed, as the avalanche of bad news came crashing down.

"We've got to do something, Natch. If we don't get to that factory floor quick, they could real y mess things up. It might take us weeks to sort through it-"

"The Vault's put a hold on al my memecorp accounts. I tried to get on a shuttle to the cognitive processes conference this morning, and they wouldn't even let me board...."

"The silver lining here is that the Guild doesn't have any power to block access to the MultiReal code. Cooperative doesn't either, real y. So I can stil get the program ready for the exposition, you just can't pay me for it...."

"What should I do, Natch? The creed must be so disappointed in me.... I don't even know where to start...."

"You know I've always been lazy about balancing the books, Natch, and it's just so complicated with money going in and out al over the place. You don't suppose that somewhere in the past few years I might have misplaced a few-"

"Horvil's going to hate me...."

Natch turned to the window for a calming vision of the sea and saw only the il icit chunk of MultiReal code they had found in his head.

A ping. A text message, from Quel .

Be on your guard. We spotted a whole cl.u.s.ter of Council hoverbirds on the outskirts of Andra Pradesh a few hours ago, headed your way.

Looks like they might be fol owing you.

Natch sat back, activated a bio/logic routine to stanch the flow of sweat from his brow, and dialed the Confidential Whisper discussions down to a murmur. Stop, he told himself. Calm down.

He inhaled deeply and let the rarefied hoverbird oxygen rush into his lungs. The Council wants you in a panic, he thought. They want you confused.

They want you to make mistakes. He found a snapshot of memory and held it up: a young boy, sul en and wild-eyed, threatening to report the capitalman Figaro Fi to the authorities. He had blown his chance at getting seed money for a fiefcorp and wasted several years of his life as a consequence. And why? Because he had been flummoxed by Brone.

But that's not going to happen again.

You can beat them.

Natch uncurled his fingers from their death grip on the armrest and slid into a straight and narrow mental groove. He watched himself cool y line up the fiefcorpers' woes as if in spreadsheet columns. Horvil's termination from the Bio/Logic Engineering Guild. Merri's suspension from Creed Objectivv.

Vigal's supposed financial improprieties. Ben's mother's attempt to rol back their MultiReal code. Quel 's security issues at the Surina compound.

Margaret's stupor. Jara'sThe panic lapped briefly over his mental seawal s, bolstered by exhaustion and doubt and black code. Why hadn't he received any word from Jara?

He tried pinging her. No response. Again, and again. Stil nothing.

Stay focused, Natch admonished himself. Think. What's the Council trying to do? Magan Kai Lee had unleashed a torrent of suspensions, improprieties, and investigations on him, al scrupulously planned and nearly impossible to trace back to the Council. But what did it real y add up to in the end? Clearly he was missing something. Where did he factor in? What catastrophe did Magan have waiting for him?

The last ConfidentialWhisper arrived from Robby Robby. "Bad news for ya, Natchster,"

said the channeler. He paused, waiting for some interjection from Natch that did not come. "Just tried to bring my team out to Sao Paulo for a look around the soccer stadium, and they wouldn't let us in. Told me the exposition's been canceled. Can you beat that? Jara's orders, they said. I tried to set them straight, but they-"

Robby's sentence was sliced off abruptly in midsyl able. But it wasn't just Robby-al of Natch's ConfidentialWhisper threads with his employees had been cut. He turned to the window, wondering if there was some kind of malfunction with the hoverbird, and discovered his connection to the Minds.p.a.ce workbench in Shenandoah was gone too. In place of the yel ow jacket was a Defense and Wel ness Council hoverbird matching their course. Natch looked out the other window to find a second vehicle bracketing him in.

Raw and b.l.o.o.d.y anger. "What the f.u.c.k is going on?" he barked at the pilot.

The woman seemed unconcerned. She rapped her knuckles against the side of the hoverbird. "Don't bother trying to access the Data Sea," she said.

"Nothing's getting through this hul unless we want it to get through."

"Where are you taking me?"

"The Twin Cities," she said, turning back to the weather reports and traffic chatter on the window. "Might as wel get some sleep while you can. You're not going anywhere."

16.

Natch didn't sleep for an instant.

The Council could have taken him just about anywhere in human s.p.a.ce. He was powerless to stop them. Rumor posited the existence of hundreds of anonymous government compounds far from the civilized world that would be ideal places for interrogation and coercion.

So when the pilot began a familiar flight pattern toward the foggy lowlands of the Twin Cities, Natch couldn't help but expel a breath of relief. The Kordez Tha.s.sel Complex below was many thingslibertarian gathering place, corporate Mecca, architectural perditionbut it certainly was not a Defense and Wel ness Council stronghold. The Tha.s.selians prided themselves on running a facility that was open and anonymous to al . This meant that Len Borda's lackeys had to go through the mundane process of filing a room request and shel ing out a deposit, like the rest of the ants Natch could see mil ing around below. Somehow that comforted him.

Then Natch was ambushed by a brutal thought. Why wouldn't the Council take him to one of those secretive compounds, unless they had nothing to fear from him?

Natch thought it best to project an image of confidence. "You know the minute I leave this hoverbird, I'm going to summon John Ridglee and Sen Sivv Sor," he announced.

"Save your bandwidth," replied the pilot, yawning. "They've already been summoned. In two hours, this place is going to be crawling with drudges."

Natch let her finish her landing sequence in silence. At least he could console himself that the pilot was not setting down at the normal hoverbird dock across the creek, but at a more exclusive parking s.p.a.ce in the rear of the building.

He expected to see an intimidating squad of armed Council officers when the hoverbird hatch opened. Instead, there stood a woman with wild braids of ebony hair. Natch felt a shock of cognitive dissonance as he recognized the face of Len Borda's chief solicitor, a face that should rightly be hugging the margins of some gossip column. The Blade. Standing behind her was a blond mercenary with the shoulders of an ogre and the demeanor to match.

"Towards Perfection," said Rey Gonerev, bowing smartly. "On behalf of High Executive Len B-"

Natch cut her off. "Jara," he said. "Where the f.u.c.k is Jara?"

Gonerev fluttered her eyelids rapidly. How long had it been since anyone had treated her like a petty obstacle? "She's inside with the rest of the fiefcorp," said the Blade, after a moment's hesitation.

"Good," said the entrepreneur. "Now move." The solicitor barely managed to scoot out of the way before Natch came barreling past.

Gonerev and the other Council officer struggled to keep up as he strode toward the closest door of the Tha.s.sel Complex. I hate this place, thought Natch as he walked through the doors and took in the deliberately crooked floors and the unevenly cut stone wal s. He headed for a door at the far end of the hal way that was being guarded by a handful of men in white robes and yel ow stars.

n.o.body made any move to correct his course.

Natch tried to think of some valiant act that could get him out of this predicament. Should he run? Should he cal the Council's bluff and contact the drudges? But every path led to the same endpoint: he needed to see Jara. He needed to know what was going on. Indeed, as much as it chagrined him, Natch knew his best option at this point was to proceed as Rey Gonerev directed.

It was a relatively deserted wing of the complex, but stil swarming with self-important businesspeople buzzing from meeting to meeting. One of the insects did not see him coming-a Vault employee, if the double balanced pyramids on his belt were any indi cation. Natch col ided with the man, sending the two of them reeling in opposite directions. Enraged at everything and nothing at once, the fiefcorp master thrust his palms forward and shoved the bureaucrat flat onto his back. When the universe pushes me, I push back!

And then Natch was standing, immobilized, trying to calibrate a cerebral compa.s.s that was spinning wildly out of control. He lost sight of his whereabouts for a few seconds and felt himself slip into an extradi-mensional s.p.a.ce between moments. The blankness of multivoid, the empty husk of the OCHRE probe in his apartment the other day.

The nothingness at the center of the universe.

Suddenly Natch caught sight of the Vault official sprawled on the floor, frozen as if caught in a basilisk's stare, and something inside him curdled. The blond mercenary was helping the man to his feet with the a.s.sistance of another Council officer, while Gonerev was staring at Natch with surprise and perhaps a little trepidation. He didn't stick around to apologize.

The white-robed men and women parted to let him through to the door. Natch paused, remembering the time he had come to the Tha.s.sel Complex to meet with his old hivemate Brone. The meeting had begun with an electrical shock from the door handle, fol owed by Brone's ghoulish laughter. Could this entire thing be a setup? Natch was fairly certain that the Council hoverbirds outside were real Council hoverbirds, and the Council officers here were real Council officers. But this facility was owned and operated by Creed Tha.s.sel, the creed Brone had purchased with his riches. The organization's membership rol s were secret. Who was to say these people couldn't be Council officers and Tha.s.selian devotees?

He opened the door and walked inside.

Natch found himself standing on a stone slab atop a mist-shrouded alp, the Mount Olympus of some long-dead cultural imagination. The SeeNaRee was littered with broken columns and armless stone maidens that might once have held up the ceiling. Above him, impos sibly muscular clouds were girding for battle against an otherwise gorgeous blue sky.

Sitting in the midst of the slab was an ordinary rectangular conference table. Benyamin, Jara, Horvil, Merri, and Serr Vigal lined the sides of the table looking alternately scared and defiant. There was no sign of Quel . Sitting at the head of the table was Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee, flanked by a dozen Council guards with stony faces.

The fiefcorp master turned to Jara. "So I leave you alone for a couple of days, and you go to the Council?" cried Natch. "What were you thinking?"

Jara writhed uncomfortably in her seat for a few seconds, refusing to meet the entrepreneur's gaze. Her face reflected a troubled and selfloathing soul.

"f.u.c.k you," she growled. A miserable-looking Merri put her hand on Jara's shoulder, and the a.n.a.lyst fel back into an uneasy silence.

Magan's face was the very archetype of calm. He was wearing his formal uniform, complete with the gray smock that was the sign of his office. "Have a seat," he said on seeing the fiefcorp master. "Ridgel o, make sure he doesn't leave my sight until this is finished." The fairhaired barbarian who had accompanied the Blade pul ed out a chair at the table's foot and extended his hand in Natch's direction. Four of the officers behind Magan marched across the stone and made a confining semicircle around the chair.

Natch bottled up his rage and took a seat in the chair Ridgel o had proffered him.

Magan Kai Lee sat up straight and folded his hands together calmly on the table. "Four weeks ago today, this company made a promise to the Defense and Wel ness Council," he began, his voice matter-of-fact. "You promised High Executive Borda access to MultiReal in exchange for protection at your sales demo. The Council held up its end of the bargain. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp did not."

Natch found the lieutenant's declaration amusing. "So what are you going to do, arrest al of us? Throw us in your orbital prisons? Go right ahead, we're unarmed. Have fun explaining it to the drudges. Len Borda can't be that contemptuous of public opinion-especial y now that the libertarians run the Congress of L-PRACGs."

"I have no intention of arresting you," said Magan.

"So why go after my apprentices' business licenses? Do you real y think we care what the Meme Cooperative does to us? You might have slowed us down a little, but you aren't any closer to getting access to MultiReal."

Magan let out an almost-imperceptible sigh, as if Natch were hardly worth the effort of a response. "Go ahead, Rey," he said. "Let's just get this over with."

The Blade strode out from behind the fiefcorp master; Natch had forgotten that she was even back there. He felt an internal ping informing him that he had received a message of high importance. "What's this?" he sneered.

"That," said Gonerev, "is the brief my office filed yesterday charging you with a hundred and twenty violations of Meme Cooperative bylaws."

Natch opened the doc.u.ment and tried to skim its murky surface, but it was clouded with administrative doublespeak and he could make no sense of it.

He fired up the Ripley Group's DeLegalese 235 and waited a few seconds for the program to filter out the unnecessary clauses and redundancies.

But Gonerev had already begun delivering a precis of her own as she strode around the edge of the stone slab like a prosecutor grandstanding before a particularly susceptible jury. "Failure to pay the Prime Committee tax to fund diss access to Dr. Plugenpatch," she announced. "Breach of contract against three different channeling firms in 356 and 357 ... False advertising of a glare-reduction program marketed to three thousand different L-PRACGs in 358 ... Failure to file proper work permits in Omaha ..." The litany of Natch's sins both great and smal continued for several minutes, fil ing the SeeNaRee with a haze of regulatory vocabulary.

Natch let out a loud and ostentatious yawn. He didn't doubt that he was guilty of these complaints, and dozens more besides, but not even a niggling ent.i.ty like the Meme Cooperative would waste its time on such trivia. The entrepreneur waved his hand and broadcast the doc.u.ment in large block capitals across the deep blue sky for al to read. "Please don't tel me you dragged us out here for this," he said. "I've been in front of the Cooperative arbitration boards a mil ion times for s.h.i.t like this. They never do anything."

"Oh, but they have this time." Rey Gonerev's voice was one big gloat as she leaned over the table next to Jara and placed her hands flat on the table.

"Not only has the Meme Cooperative filed charges against you, but they've voted to suspend your license to operate a fiefcorp."

"Here," said the lieutenant executive, giving the slightest of nods, is the notification you wil be receiving from the Cooperative any moment now."

The entrepreneur opened Magan's message in private this timethough judging by the worried frowns percolating from the fiefcorpers' faces, they had al received copies anyway.

NOTIFICATION.

In accordance with the bylaws and regulations of the MEME COOPERATIVE, incorporated in Year 177 of the Reawakening and given jurisdiction by the col ective fiefcorps and memecorps to govern intra-business affairs, and which has been recognized as a lawful ent.i.ty and given license by the PRIME COMMITTEE and the CONGRESS OF L-PRACGS, as ofTuesday, the 3rd of January in the 360thYear of the Reawakening, this body hereby suspends the business license for NATCH of the SURINA/NATCH MULTIREAL FIEFCORP for a period of no less than 30 days, pending review by the Cooperative's executive board, at which point further action may be undertaken.

This was a slightly more worrisome development. Natch should have figured that if the Council could find enough to soil his apprentices' reputations-if they could even dig something up on Merri and Serr Vigal-surely they could find the buried skeletons of the Meme Cooperative board too. A little push here and there, and a slap on the wrist becomes a bash with a shovel.

Natch leaned back in his chair and threw his arms behind his head, causing Ridgel o to back up a step. "So you suspended our licenses," said the entrepreneur breezily. "That just puts MultiReal back where it started. On top of that spire in Andra Pradesh. Good luck getting in there."

"Maybe you've been too preoccupied to hear the news," replied the Blade, walking around the table once more. "Margaret has been declared mental y unfit. Procedures are under way to remove her as the head of Creed Surina, and the Meme Cooperative has acted to suspend her business license as wel ."