Jara ran her hands through her hair and yanked hard at the roots in frustration. "And what does your mother think of al this? Is she ever going to come out of her office and talk to us? Come to think of it-why hasn't she kicked us out of her house yet?"

"I-I don't know."

The a.n.a.lyst lay quietly for a moment. A ray of sunshine poked through a slat in the blinds and jabbed her in the eye, prompting her to turn onto her right side and bury her nose in the couch's crook. She had no doubt that Horvil could weed through al the changes and restore MultiReal to ful functionality. But with the program's creator dead and its chief engineer headed for some orbital prison, how much time would that take? Weeks? Months? He wouldn't even be able to use an a.s.sembly-line floor to do the heavy lifting.

"So are you going to do anything about it?" asked Benyamin, his voice suddenly querulous.

Jara shook her head. "I don't know, Ben. I don't know if there's anything else I can do. Let me mul this over for a while, okay?"

"But-"

"Please.

Ben disappeared. Jara lay there and debated the merits of sleep. Not ten minutes later, Merri found her way into the study.

The people in this company sure aren't acting like they're suspicious of me, thought Jara.

Why can't everyone just leave me the f.u.c.k alone? The blonde channel manager hesitated in the doorway for a ful two minutes before Jara final y grew tired of waiting. "So what's the problem?" she said.

"It's my companion," squeaked Merri.

"Bonneth?" said Jara, taken aback. "Is she okay?"

"At the moment ... yes. But when that last infoquake struck ... Jara, she was total y cut off from Dr. Plugenpatch. For hours. She tried to keep me from finding out, but I could hear it in her voice." Merri's hands twisted at the hem of her blouse until Jara thought she might rend it in two. "This is al my fault. I was the one who insisted on moving to Luna in the first place, because I thought the artificial gravity would be better for her condition. If another one of those infoquakes. .h.i.ts up there .. Her sentence floated away into the thick wal paper of books.

Comprehension dawned on Jara with a nauseating rush. She had a.s.sumed Merri's misery was a mixture of sorrow for Margaret Surina and apprehension about her own fate at Creed Objectivv. I guess she deserves more credit than that, thought the a.n.a.lyst. These infoquakes represented a real and immediate danger to countless mil ions like Bonneth with obscure diseases.

OCHREs and Dr. Plugenpatch and bio/logic software formed a symbiotic triangle; remove one of the three, and the whole structure would col apse. To someone with Bonneth's condition, even a brief outage might very wel be fatal.

Jara felt herself souring involuntarily. Did Merri think she was the only one who had these problems? Jara's mother lived on Luna too. Terraformers had made great progress on the moon in recent decades, but it stil remained largely uninhabitable without bio/logics. If an infoquake delivered a catastrophic blow to the Data Sea, would Jara's mother be any better off than Bonneth?

"So what do you want me to do about it?" Jara croaked final y, rol ing onto her back to face the ceiling and the skewering sunlight.

"I don't know," said Merri. "I just thought you might have some advice...."

"Wel , I don't," replied the a.n.a.lyst. "Why does everyone keep coming to me for advice about things I can't control? I have enough on my plate right now without worrying about hypotheticals. You're just going to have to tough it out. Do the best you can."

"Okay," managed the blonde woman, already shifting toward the door. "One more thing, though ... We can't decide whether we should say anything in the drudge statement about Quel ...."

"I told you, talk with Robby! You figure something out for once!" Jara's voice strained and final y cracked. She regretted the words as soon as they escaped her mouth.

The channel manager let out another quiet "okay." Jara rested her forearm over her eyes to block the glare and waited for Merri to leave. Which, eventual y, she did.

Seething with self-recrimination, Jara drifted off to an uneasy sleep.

Jara couldn't have said how long she slept. The sun was no longer burning a warm spot into her forearm, and the chattering of the apprentices down the hal had faded. She must have been out for a few hours, at least, but she didn't real y want to know.

I'm not ready for this responsibility, she confided silently to the fates. The pit of her stomach felt hol ow, acidic. I'm not ready to run a fiefcorp. Please tel me I don't have to.

As if in answer to her plea, Jara opened her eyes and saw a familiar face.

Natch.

The sight was so embedded in her consciousness it had almost become archetype: Natch making tracks across the carpet, arms clasped behind his back, muttering to himself. Al the scene needed was an obscure piece of bio/logic code floating in Minds.p.a.ce and a window ful of share price histograms. "Good job," Natch said gruffly.

Jara had never felt so happy to receive a rude half-greeting in her life. She could feel her anxieties melting away. Natch would know how to handle the situation. He always did. "What did I do this time?" she replied.

"The statement to the drudges. Short and sweet, I like that." Natch tromped right over a green throw pil ow that Jara must have knocked to the floor in her sleep.

The a.n.a.lyst propped herself up on one elbow; not satisfied, she clambered to a sitting position. A quick skim of her mental inbox revealed the finished drudge statement and about a hundred commentaries from across the Data Sea. Seemed like the statement had produced exactly the reaction Jara was hoping for: total indifference.

"We have a lot to do," continued Natch, talking to himself more than he was talking to Jara. "A whole lot. We've got to get that MultiReal exposition back on track. That's critical. We need to time it careful y. Can't give people the impression that we're trying to profit from Margaret's death. But we can't let anyone forget about the exposition either. You've got a script ready?"

Jara nodded drowsily. After al that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, the exposition felt like it belonged in another universe altogether. "I do have a script," she said. And it was a pretty good script, too, she remembered. Easily digestible without being too gimmicky; a departure from the first basebal demo, but a departure to a familiar territory. "No worries on that score. But-"

Natch was in no mood for objections. "But what?" he snapped.

"Aren't you worried about our business licenses? We can't just keep going forward like nothing's happened. How's everyone going to get paid?"

Natch stopped, planted his hands in his pockets, and stared Jara directly in the face with such intensity it was almost surreal. "Don't worry about the licenses," he said. "It's al under control."

Jara could feel a throbbing current run from her abdomen to the back of her neck.

Geronimo had utterly failed to spark that current in al his weeks of fumbling, and yet Natch could ignite her from halfway across the room. Keep it together, Jara admonished herself, turning away from those radiant blue eyes. You're exhausted and you're not thinking clearly. "What do you mean, it's under control'?" she said.

The entrepreneur got down on his haunches and reached out to steady himself momentarily with a hand on Jara's kneecap. "Fol ow the chain of command." His tone was low, conspiratorial. "Who pressured the Meme Cooperative to suspend our licenses? The Defense and Wel ness Council. And what's the one governing body in the world that can put pressure on the Defense and Wel ness Council? Who does Len Borda answer to?"

The answer was straight out of hive-level civics. "The Prime Committee," said Jara, trying to mental y wil Natch's hand away from her knee.

"Exactly."

"But the Prime Committee's afraid of Len Borda. They're practical y a rubber stamp for the Council. When was the last time they disagreed with Borda on ... anything?"

"They'l disagree with him on this. Trust me." Natch had not so much as blinked in a minute, perhaps two.

Jara was starting to feel dizzy. Every time she got a handle on the situation, Natch would ratchet things up to some new plane with a total y different set of rules. He had jumped into fund-raising and product marketing and high-stakes mergers with great success, but did he know anything about politics?

Jara didn't think so. In fact, she didn't know anyone who paid less attention to the ins and outs of government than Natch. How could he be so certain he knew how to influence the Prime Committee?

"Listen, Natch," she said. "I don't think you've thought this through. Even if the Committee is sympathetic to our cause, how are you going to get to them? There's only twenty-three of them, and sixty bil ion people clamoring for their attention. What are you going to do, just walk over to Melbourne and demand they focus on MultiReal?"

Natch was unfazed. "I won't. I'm going to get someone else to do it for me. Someone they'l listen to."

The a.n.a.lyst's brain flitted through the roster of governmental figures that paraded around the drudge reports. Natch's touch wasn't making things any easier. Most of the politicians she could name were either too beholden to the Defense and Wel ness Council or too ineffectual to put up any resistance.

Unless ... yes, there was one person who didn't fal into either of those categories. "The speaker of Congress," said Jara. "Khann Frejohr."

Natch grinned crazily in affirmation and pushed himself to his feet, using Jara's knee as fulcrum. Then he began marching around the smal room again like an automaton.

Not knowing what else to do, Jara straightened her spine and threw the results of an InfoGather 99 onto the window.

KHANN FREJOHR (280-).

Speaker of the Congress of L-PRACGs Khann Frejohr came into power at the end of 359, after a vote of no confidence toppled the previous speaker from office. Frejohr is the foremost representative of the libertarians, the political movement that seeks to shift power from the central government to the L-PRACGs.

As a youth, Frejohr was a wel -known labor activist and vocal opponent of High Executive Len Borda. His career suffered a serious setback when he was accused of fomenting the Melbourne riots of 318. The atrocities committed there by angry rioters shocked the public, which had only recently endured the death of Marcus Surina and the col apse of the world economy. Many claim that these riots put the libertarian movement back twenty years.

Frejohrs role in inciting the riots was never proven, but he spent several years in a Defense and Wel ness Council prison on related charges. He was subsequently pardoned by the Prime Committee in 326 under a general amnesty for political prisoners. Frejohr was first elected to the Congress of L-PRACGs in 332.

The a.n.a.lyst skimmed through a listing of the speaker's parliamentary maneuvers in a daze. Khann Frejohr started the Melbourne riots? Now that her attention had been drawn to this fact, Jara realized she had known it al along but simply forgotten. Her respect for the Congress's PR apparatus grew exponential y.

Jara found an image of the speaker and projected it into the middle of the room so he appeared to be standing on the coffee table. Khann Frejohr was rather short, with a shock of white hair and a single eyebrow forming a shelf of moral rect.i.tude across his forehead. He had the look of a man who had been rakishly handsome decades ago. Hardly the type to lead an opposition to Len Borda.

Natch's hands were quivering, his voice a low rasp. "Don't you see the opportunity we have?" he said, stretching an arm through the holograph of Frejohr without appearing to notice. "Magan Kai Lee used the Meme Cooperative to take away a fiefcorp from its rightful master. How do you think the other fiefcorps are going to react to that? Do you think Lucas Sentinel and Pierre Loget and the Deuterons are going to sleep easy knowing Len Borda can shut down their businesses whenever he feels like it? No, of course not. They're scared to death.

"And they're not alone! The libertarians have just taken control of the Congress. They're putting up a united front and recruiting people to the movement left and right. That creed of theirs, Creed Libertas? You should see their new membership numbers. And guess what? You read that article by Sen Sivv Sor-people are flocking to Creed Libertas because of the Council's actions against me.

I'm sure Margaret's death'l bring them a ton of converts too.

"Meanwhile, what's the Council doing? They're sending armed goons to break into my apartment! They're seizing businesses! They're marching on Andra Pradesh!" Natch's face was flushed and feverish now, his hands gesticulating wildly at the four corners of the room. "Don't you see? This is going to cause a tidal wave-the kind of wave that only comes along once in a generation. We can ride that wave, Jara."

The a.n.a.lyst shrank as far back into the couch as she could, teetering between fear and excitement, not wanting to let go of either. "I don't understand,"

she protested weakly. "You're going to use Khann Frejohr to get to the Prime Committee?

But there are sixty bil ion people trying to get his attention too.

What makes you think Khann Frejohr wil talk to you?"

"The meeting's already been arranged," said Natch with a smirk. "Come on, Jara, I'm the face of the libertarian movement! Why wouldn't he talk to me?" His voice was completely lacking in irony.

"So you've got a meeting with Speaker Frejohr," said Jara. "But why would he stick his neck out for you? How are you going to convince him to confront the Prime Committee?"

Natch's face turned into one mad rictus of glee. Jara shuddered; she had seen that look before. It meant that once again, the entrepreneur was three steps ahead of everyone else on the planet.

And then he col apsed.

There was no swoon or gradual loss of consciousness. One moment Natch was striding around the room with his normal swagger, the next he was lying in a heap on the floor. He only missed banging his head on the sharp edge of the desk by centimeters. Jara was kneeling on the floor next to him in an instant.

Before she even had a chance to feel his forehead, the entrepreneur sprang up, flailing his arms to ward off some unseen terror. His elbow smacked Jara across the face, causing him to recoil and scurry back into a far corner. For a moment, she could see him bare and unmasked, a child in the dark.

Then Natch was back. Exhausted, confused, determined. A little embarra.s.sed. "I'm sorry," he blurted out.

Jara shook her head. She rubbed her cheek where Natch had hit her. The fact that it was clearly an accident didn't make her feel any less uneasy. She sat on the floor with her back to the couch and waited for her pulse to slow to a manageable level. The hologram of Khann Frejohr stood placidly on the coffee table, forgotten.

"Listen," said the entrepreneur quietly after several minutes of awkward silence. He gazed intently at the carpet, searching for the right words. "This whole business with Magan Kai Lee and the Meme Cooperative. Putting you in charge of the fiefcorp. It's okay. It's not your fault."

The a.n.a.lyst blushed. "I should have told you," she muttered. "I should have let you know he was planning something." She hunched forward, planting her elbows on her thighs and her chin in her palms. "Natch, you know I didn't make any deal with the Council, don't you?"

Natch shrugged. "Of course." Jara couldn't help but let out a sigh of relief.

They sat silently, listening to the floorboards outside in the hal way creaking as the servants pa.s.sed. Somewhere down the hal , servants were dragging furniture around in preparation for a group of Creed Elan do-gooders who Beril a had invited over, despite al the calamity of the past twenty-four hours. Jara tried to remember the last time she had been alone in a room with Natch for more than thirty seconds and came up empty.

"So what happens now?" Jara ventured after a few minutes.

Natch's eyes were suddenly suspicious. "What do you mean?"

"Wel ... technical y, I'm your boss right now."

A tired smile crept over Natch's face, though Jara couldn't quite see the humor in the situation. "Let's just see how it goes," he said, making a dismissive motion with one hand as if he were tossing troubles over his shoulder. "I'm not worried. We can make some kind of arrangement until we figure out this whole license thing."

"An arrangement?"

"Wel , someone's got to be in legal control of MultiReal. We can't have it floating out there in receivership. And we can't let Magan Kai Lee get ahold of it."

"No, I suppose not."

"So I sat down and thought about it for a while, and then I came to a decision." The entrepreneur took a deep breath. "I've decided to let things stand for now. The Meme Cooperative wants you to be the master of MultiReal? Fine. I've given you core access to the program."

Jara did her best not to gape in shock. Natch complying with a regulatory body's orders was like the wolf cozying up to the sheep. Natch simply didn't do these kinds of things without ulterior motive. "Why?" she said.

"Because I need you to trust me," he replied. "I need you on my side."

The a.n.a.lyst stared into his eyes, trying to penetrate those depths the best she could. Jara had been working for Natch for several years now, and she had never felt like anything but a useful vessel for his ambitions. She had never felt like she deserved to be anything else. Now she was being entrusted with the most important thing in Natch's life: his business. Should she feel pleased or dejected that he would only do so grudgingly, after a deluge of threats from the government?

The important thing is that you've final y earned his respect, Jara told herself. She had thought she was looking for Natch's love, or maybe even his l.u.s.t, but now she realized that what she was real y after was just basic understanding and acceptance. She wanted parity. Did it real y matter how she had achieved that?

"Now don't get too excited," said Natch with a laugh. For a second, Jara could see half a decade slough off his face like a shed skin. She remembered the day she had met him, in that tiny apartment in Angelos. The raw purpose. The intensity of him. "I'm not just doing this for your benefit. I'm also doing this because it's a good PR move that'l improve my hand with Khann Frejohr.

"And don't forget that obeying the Meme Cooperative is the last thing Magan Kai Lee expects me to do. It's going to drive him crazy wondering what I'm up to. It'l divert his attention.

"Look at it this way. The Council wasn't just out to yank our business licenses. They were out to divide the fiefcorp. To pit us against each other. So what's the smart move here? To confound their expectations by working together. And that's just what we're going to do."

Jara made a wary nod, unsure if she could trust this unfamiliar emotion. She thought she had been through psychological trauma, but Natch must have gone through ten times as much for him to make such a mental adjustment. The a.n.a.lyst exhaled sharply. Margaret Surina had said that MultiReal would change the world, but Jara had never expected that change so close to home.

"I just can't believe you'd give up MultiReal that easily," she said.

Natch grinned, and suddenly the wolf had returned. "The Meme Cooperative said I had to give you core access. They never said I needed to give up mine. Now come on, let's get to work. And that starts in Beril a's office."

22.