"You don't have the experience to handle this," scoffed Borda quietly. "Marcus Surina-"

"Marcus Surina was a buffoon. He hid behind his family name and his reputation with the drudges. But this man, this Natch-he has no family to lose.

He has no reputation to uphold. This man wil outthink and outplot your armies until the end, Borda. No, there is only one person capable of defeating Natch."

"And who is that?"

"Himself."

Len Borda slumped perceptibly and turned back to the sea, looking old and careworn-but not before Magan caught the briefest shimmer in the high executive's eye.

Magan felt a sudden nibble of doubt at his ankles. Al his experience with Borda had taught him that the high executive was a creature of pa.s.sion rather than forethought, a short-term planner. But why then did he occasional y see that knowing glimmer in Borda's eye? Was it just the nostalgia of the grizzled veteran watching the young protege come into his own? Or could it be that Borda's ardor was merely artifice? Was that how Borda had bested al his would-be supplanters over the years?

The high executive stood for a long time without speaking. His ship had returned to calm seas, but the fog around them had only thickened. There was no sound but the soft, rhythmic lapping of oars on seawater, the distant cry of a gul .

Final y, Borda spoke. "I would like to offer you a compromise."

Magan said nothing.

"New Year's Day is just a convenient symbol," continued Borda, his voice disarmingly matter-of-fact. "We chose that day to protect the markets, didn't we? To cushion the financial impact of the announcement. But the real financial impact won't come until the new year's budget goes into effect on the fifteenth of January." The high executive stood up straight, brushed something off his col ar. "So I'l give you two and a half weeks. Prove to me you can handle this crisis, Magan. Bring MultiReal under the Council's control by the fifteenth, and I wil abide by our agreement."

Magan could feel his mind whirling like a difference engine, calculating odds, extrapolating possibilities. "And how do I know I can trust your word this time?" How do I know I won't end up at the bottom of a river, like the last lieutenant executive who tried to bargain with you for succession?

"What choice do you have?" said Borda.

"Don't delude yourself," said Magan, his voice keen and deadly as a razor. "This decision isn't yours to make, not anymore. You don't think I'm the only one eager to plant a black code dart in your skul , do you? The only reason you sit in the high executive's chair to this day is because I al ow it."

For the first time in the conversation, Len Borda smiled. It was a horrid expression, the hungry grin of a carnivore. "Spare me the pity of Magan Kai Lee," mocked the high executive. "I don't need it."

And then, without warning, the SeeNaRee dissolved away. Magan found himself standing no longer on an ancient British sloop-of-war, but in a modern office arranged with the strictest military discipline. Two tables, a smattering of chairs, windows with a view of the globe below. Standing in a semicircle around him were four Defense and Wel ness Council officers who had been hidden in the virtual mist. Their dartguns were drawn and aimed at Magan. As the lieutenant executive regarded them with a cool eye, he felt the barrel of another dartgun press into the back of his neck.

"I give you until the fifteenth of January to take possession of MultiReal," said Len Borda, his voice larded with triumph. "If you do, we have an agreement. If you don't ..." The officer behind Magan pressed the dartgun barrel deeper into his flesh.

Magan kept his face neutral, determined to show no trace of emotion or hesitation.

"You're not giving me anything, Borda. The Council wil have control of MultiReal by the fifteenth, and you wil relinquish the high executive's chair-one way or the other."

He turned without being asked, and the officer with the dartgun at his neck turned with him. Magan strode calmly to the elevator. Four of the officers sheathed their weapons as he pa.s.sed, but the one at his back never let the nozzle of the dartgun stray from Magan's skin, even as he accompanied the lieutenant executive onto the lift.

When the doors closed and the elevator began its ascent to the main level, Magan fired off a secure Confidential Whisper to the man at his back.

"Keep that dartgun right where it is until I'm off the elevator," he commanded. "Then send someone to find Papizon and Rey Gonerev. Tel them I need to see them."

Ridgel o nodded. "As you wish, Lieutenant Executive."

5.

On the way back to the hoverbird docks, Magan took a detour to see the statue of Tul Jabbor. The atrium where the statue resided was the one place in DWCR whose location never changed. The statue itself was a smal -scale replica of the one standing in the center of the epony-mously named Tul Jabbor Complex in Melbourne. A thick man with mahogany skin atop a tal pil ar. No matter where you stood, some holographic trick caused Jabbor's gaze to always meet you head-onand left you constantly standing in his shadow. This was as unsubtle an architectural metaphor as Magan had ever seen.

The founding father of the Defense and Wel ness Council needed no caption, but bold block letters at his feet did pose a question.

DO YOU ACT IN JUSTICE?.

The locution had always seemed peculiar to Magan. Acting in justice, not for or with justice. As if justice were merely a vehicle you might ride to a particular destination, and the terrain you trammeled to get there was nothing more than dirt under your wheels.

Certainly Tul Jabbor had treated justice that way. He had dramatical y expanded the Council's power by going after erstwhile supporters like the OCHRE Corporation; some even suspected he had signed Henry Osterman's death warrant. Then again, Jabbor had come to power in a world without precedents, a world simultaneously drunk with the possibilities of bio/logics and desperate to avoid repeating the horrors of the Autonomous Revolt.

But Len Borda? Borda had two hundred years of Council history to guide him, with every manner of high executive from Par Padron the Just to Zetarysis the Mad as object lessons. He should have known better. Instead, Borda was ever wil ing to sacrifice principle for pragmatism, ever ready to steer justice down the muddy, unpaved path.

And you? the lieutenant executive asked himself, kneeling in silence before the statue of Tul Jabbor. Are you forcing Borda to step down because he's made a mockery of Par Padron's ideals? Or are you just afraid to wake up at the bottom of a river?

Magan Kai Lee was a man of reason and principle, or so he told himself. He had been drawn to the Defense and Wel ness Council by its discipline, its rigidity, and its stability when compared to the life of the diss-or so he told himself.

Now, after watching Len Borda use the Council as a blunt instrument of self-preservation for years, Magan was contemplating the ultimate move against the very discipline, rigidity, and stability that had brought him here in the first place. And that contradiction sat in his mind like a poisonous flower with everexpanding roots.

But Magan couldn't al ow Len Borda to repeat the mistakes he had made with Marcus Surina, could he? Wasn't there a higher principle at work here that needed defending?

Do you act in justice?

Papizon and Rey Gonerev caught up to him in the hal way, no simple feat in an orbital fortress whose constantly shifting corridors rendered geography meaningless.

"We spotted Natch an hour ago," said Papizon as he moved into step behind Magan like a hoverbird merging into traffic. "He's on a tube train, headed north out of Cisco."

The lieutenant executive ground his teeth together. "And you didn't think to look there before we raided his apartment?"

Papizon shook his head. He was immune to criticism. In fact, he seemed to have been inoculated against most forms of human expres sion altogether. Sometimes Magan wondered if Papizon was real y some sublevel engineer's attempt to circ.u.mvent the harsh Al bans in place since the Autonomous Revolt. If so, one couldn't have picked a more peculiar vessel: lanky, storkish, brown eyes not quite symmetrical and permanently half-lidded.

Rey stepped up to Papizon's defense. "We did check there, Magan," she said. "We swept half the tube trains in the Americas yesterday. Natch was definitely not on that tube line."

Magan gave the Blade an appraising look. She had pointedly not fal en half a step behind him like Papizon, but walked at his side like an equal. A message meant not so much for him as for the other Council officers in the hal way-the ones she would be jousting with someday when it was Magan's turn to step down from the high executive's seat.

Papizon: "So are we going to try to pick him up again?"

"No," said Magan, shaking his head. "Just keep an eye on him for now-and make sure he knows we're doing it. Make his life unpleasant."

"Unpleasant," his subordinate echoed with a nod, then slipped down a side corridor and disappeared. Making Someone's Life Unpleasant had been honed to a science at the Defense and Wel ness Council, and Papizon was a true authority on the subject. Unpleasantness meant snooping programs that left clear traces of their presence. It meant ghostly figures that fol owed you on the periphery of your vision. It meant a few unexplained transactions in your Vault account, too smal to be of consequence yet too large to go unnoticed.

"And me?" said the Blade.

"You," replied Magan, "wil be planning the main attack on this fiefcorp master. I don't care how much you spend-you have the coffers of the Defense and Wel ness Council at your disposal. We need unprecedented coordination.

Propaganda, logistics, regulatory, personnel, finance. This man has weaknesses, Rey. I want to know what they are, and I want your plan for exploiting them."

Gonerev nodded sagely with the look of someone taking notes in her mental log. "What about Margaret Surina?"

"Let her rot in her tower for now."

"And our time frame?"

"Two and a half weeks. MultiReal must be in our hands when the new year's budget goes into effect."

The Blade didn't blanch at the urgent timetable; if anything, she seemed to relish the chal enge. Magan thought briefly about the day when he would find himself with Rey Gonerev's dartgun pressed into the back of his neck. That day would surely come, but it was stil decades in the future. Would he go quietly? Or would he cling to power far beyond his time, resisting oblivion with every last breath in his body, like Len Borda? And if he resisted, how far would she be prepared to go to take him down?

2.

THE NOTHINGNESS.

AT THE CENTER.

OF THE UNIVERSE.

6.

Geronimo: twenty-two years old, heteros.e.xual, Caucasian, xpression board player for the Dregs of Nitro. A self-styled dissident, a philosopher, a poet, a lover. Or so his profile on the Sigh network claimed.

Jara wondered who he real y was.

In the more prosaic world offline, the sul en man across the room wearing the CALL ME GERONIMO T-shirt might real y be a diplomat or a black code junkie or a fugitive from the law. There was no way to tel for sure. Some sociologist had recently published a formula that purported to describe the ratio of truth to falsehood in Sigh profiles. Jara couldn't make heads or tails of it, but apparently the formula had something to do with Fibonacci numbers.

"Geronimo" spotted her and threw her a look. Jara could feel the incandescent knife of l.u.s.t twisting in her abdomen. He rose from the purple couch and began strutting toward her through the crowd.

From a distance, the resemblance was uncanny. Average height, hair sandy and slightly tousled, physique trim yet not quite muscular. Eyes a vivid sapphire blue. If only science could provide a way for Jara to have him at a distance before he opened his mouth.

"Perfection," said Geronimo as he approached, in that incongruous half-lisp of his. "How you doin', Ca.s.sandra?" Of course, Jara didn't use her real name here on the Sigh; few people did. But at least she projected her own pixyish body onto the network instead of some idealized subst.i.tute, which was more than most could say.

"Towards Perfection yourself," Jara replied, standing on tiptoes to give Geronimo a hungry hel o kiss. The kiss quickly evolved into a ful on tonguedueling affair until the pain in her toes made her withdraw.

"So you get us a room?" grunted the youth, almost shattering the il usion. "How 'bout one-a those leather ones?"

The fiefcorp a.n.a.lyst winced. Jara didn't know whether this idiot was real y dissident, philosopher, or poet, but one thing was certainhe definitely was not Natch. She hid her disappointment behind a coy smile. "Of course I got us a room.

What, you think I'm some kind of amateur?"

Geronimo chuckled and brushed his knuckles across the side of her breast, an act that didn't require the slightest apology or explanation to the crowd.

Not on this channel, at least. Jara could feel the knife twisting inside her, uncontrol able, setting everything it touched aflame. "Awright," mumbled Geronimo. "Let's get moving."

Please shut up, she thought. Please, please, please.

Jara and the boy walked arm in arm across the lounge, past columns of wriggling goldfish and green cushions nestled on the backs of porpoises.

They saw twosomes and threesomes and moresomes of al genders and orientations flirting away the time between encounters. Jara noticed a trio of four-breasted mermaids rubbing fins. Geronimo goggled appreciatively at a woman who must have been three meters tal , locked in a pa.s.sionate kiss with a man whose dangling equipment looked equal to the task. There were no fewer than three Len Bordas in the room. One of them had two heads.

They fol owed the data beacon around a long curved corridor, threading their way through gossiping bystanders. Geronimo was humming one of his atonal Dregs of Nitro songs. Final y, they reached a nondescript door and opened it to find an even more nondescript room. A low queen bed, a nightstand.

Mirrors.

"What, you want this?" said the youth with a sneer.

"I thought I'd let you pick," said Jara.

"Oh," replied Geronimo, grinning goofily. "I get it. Wel , lemme think for a minute...."

Don't think too hard, Jara glowered silently. You might damage something.

Geronimo flipped through a number of exotic environments Amazonian jungle, Arabian harem, something cal ed "The Twelve Rings of Zarquatt"-and final y settled on a pleasure den whose every surface was coated with black leather. Jara let out a smal noise of exasperation. This was exactly the same motif Geronimo had selected for their last two encounters. Jara could already tel that this afternoon's tryst would solve nothing. That knife was wedged much too deep for a neophyte like Geronimo to reach.

The Natch look-alike was hopping on one foot, struggling to remove his pants. Jara thought about cutting her connection to the network right then and there, but decided to stay. She had paid good Vault credits for this room.

Jara had figured that three weeks away from Natch would cool her pa.s.sion. She was wrong.

It's the eternal paradox of love, the drudge Kristel a Krodor had written recently. When he's at arm's length he's too far, but when he's in your arms he's too near. Jara was ashamed to admit she read such tripe.

But the idea of using the Sigh as a therapeutic tool hadn't come from Kristel a Krodor. It had come from an unexpected source: Bonneth, companion to her fel ow apprentice Merri.

Jara had decided to open up to Merri a few nights after the demo at Andra Pradesh. As the fiefcorp's channel manager and resident truthtel er, Merri spent hours every day in Natch's presence too, and s.e.xual orientation was no barrier to the entrepreneur's charms. She would have to understand what Jara was going through, on some level. But Jara never got the chance to find out.

Moments after Jara multied to her apartment, Merri rushed off to resolve some unexpected emergency with her beloved Creed Objectivv, leaving Jara and Bonneth alone.

The a.n.a.lyst felt as if she barely knew Merri, much less her quiet companion. But suddenly Jara found everything spil ing out in one long, torturous flood.

The proctor who took advantage of her, the two decades of professional frustration, the gul ible years as Lucas Sentinel's apprentice, the stabbing desire for Natch that would not go away.

Bonneth listened intently from her wel -padded chair. I think I know how you feel, she said. Wanting something you just can't have, not being able to let go. She raised her arms feebly and made a gesture at her brittle frame, twisted in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. Bonneth had Mai-Lo Syndrome, one of those rare instances of genetic engineering gone awry. The bones in her arms and legs were fragile as eggshel s, beyond even the skil of bio/logics to repair.

When you've got multi and SeeNaRee and powered exoskeletons, it's not such a handicap, continued Bonneth. But I'l admit ... sometimes I just have to know. Late at night, after I've repeated al those Dr. Plugenpatch statistics to myself a mil ion times ... I just need to know what it's like, even for a couple of hours, and then I can go on again.

So how do you do that? Jara asked.

That's easy, said Bonneth, with an impish smile. The Sigh.