Brone approached, shadowed by three figures wearing identical black robes to Loget's.

His skin was grub pale, as if he had not seen the sun since his last appearance at Natch's apartment and could not be bothered with bio/logic pigmentation. The entrepreneur watched how Pierre Loget bowed low to the bodhisattva, and the way his three black-robed lackeys did the same. Brone seemed at ease here, in command. Natch had never seen him so comfortable with his prosthetic arm and emerald eye, and the beige suit he wore brought a kind of dignity to his stoutness.

"So where's your spooky costume?" said Natch with a snort of false bravado.

Brone did not appear to have heard him. "How many did we lose down there?" he asked Loget.

"Eleven or twelve, I think."

The bodhisattva nodded, melancholy. "Now what did Petrucio have loaded in that dartgun, do you think?" He and Loget shared a look that was merely the tip of a Confidential Whisper iceberg.

Seconds later, Loget knelt behind Natch and plucked something from the back of his thigh. A tiny silver needle whose bite hardly broke the threshold of perception. Natch could feel his blood pressure rise as he remembered the confrontation in the Tul Jabbor Complex, the MultiReal duel, the endless panorama of choice cycles. Petrucio's dart had hit him, al right-but had it even penetrated the skin far enough to discharge its armada of tainted OCHREs? Shouldn't Natch feel ... something?

Brone took the sliver. He held it up to the light, dutiful y scanning its surface as he twirled it around slowly like a baton. Then, without warning, he plunged the tip of the dart straight into the palm of his artificial hand. Natch gasped, wondering what this theatrical gesture was supposed to prove, until he saw the intent look on Brone's face and concluded that the prosthesis must be performing some kind of chemical a.n.a.lysis.

"If there was any code embedded on the tip of those OCHREs, it's gone now," announced the bodhisattva after a minute.

"What's going on?" snapped Natch, impatient. "Where are you taking me? Why did you hit me with black code last month?"

Brone turned to one of his subordinates. "Go ahead and get a-"

Natch had had enough. His muscles were screaming with exhaustion, but he managed to grab Brone by the lapels and half walk, half shove him against the side of the virtual hive building. The bodhisattva's head hit the stucco with a thump, indicating the presence of a real wal there. "Answer me!"

Natch yel ed. "What the f.u.c.k did you do to me?"

Loget stepped aside in preparation for something messy. Brone, however, wasn't fazed.

He gave the entrepreneur an opaque look that said he would not be pushed into revealing his hand so easily.

And here sits Brone, the man whom you wronged al those years ago, he had told Natch in those frantic days before the demonstration at Andra Pradesh. He is angry. Yes. He hates you and would love to see you dead. Yes.

Indisputable facts.

"Take a look behind you, Natch," said Brone in a ragged whisper. "Tel me what you see."

The entrepreneur turned his head and saw that the SeeNaRee had evaporated, leaving only the dul plastics of a luxury hoverbird interior. They were standing in a rear compartment, about two meters away from the door Natch had leapt through to escape Magan Kai Lee and Petrucio Patel.

Immediately behind them was a large rear window, showing rapidly retreating clouds.

"We're in the air," said Natch stupidly. "We're over the ocean."

"And who is pursuing us?"

Natch gazed al around. Theirs was not the only vehicle in the sky, but al of the distant craft appeared to be minding their own business. "n.o.body," he said.

"Yes," replied the bodhisattva in that maddeningly supercilious tone of his. "And do you know why n.o.body is pursuing us, Natch? Do you know why we're not dodging Council missiles right now?"

Natch shook his head.

"Because that black code floating in your bloodstream renders you invisible to Len Borda's tracking mechanisms. Do you understand me? The Council has no way to find you. "

The entrepreneur stepped back, his tongue flopping uselessly in his mouth. Al this time, the black code-a cloaking tool?

Brone removed Natch's hands from his suit jacket and firmly walked the entrepreneur back two paces. His touch was glacier cold. Then he gave Natch a light push in the chest, knocking him back onto a stone planter. The hoverbird interior was blanketed by Proud Eagle SeeNaRee once more.

"You can thank me later," said Brone, his voice registering something mealy that might be cal ed amus.e.m.e.nt. "We'l be there in a few hours."

"Where?" cried Natch.

No one answered. Brone, Loget, and the other black-robed figures disappeared into the virtual building, leaving Natch locked in the rear compartment, alone.

Natch studied his surroundings. It was an uncanny simulation, accurate down to the loose flagstone on the patio that Natch remembered digging at with his foot many a lazy summer afternoon. The palm fronds felt as rubbery as real palm fronds, and the rich olfactory melange from the garden was a scent firmly entrenched in his memory.

But this was no pedestrian work of SeeNaRee. Natch strol ed around the entire garden, then circ.u.mnavigated the hive building a few timesimpossible under standard rules of SeeNaRee. He remembered the giant hol owed-out diamond with the hidden exits from his last encounter with Brone. Clearly his old hivemate had only disdain for such rules.

Natch sat on the edge of the planter and tried to absorb the idyl ic calm of the garden. He could barely move, but he needed to marshal his strength for whatever Brone had planned. He needed to be ready.

But ready for what?

Obviously he couldn't declare victory over the Defense and Wel ness Council just because he had narrowly escaped their clutches this time. Officers had actual y fired on him in plain view of the public, in a sacred hal of government, no less. Natch couldn't be sure the code in their dartguns was of the lethal variety. But based on the agonized twitching of the bodies caught in the crossfire, Len Borda had moved beyond mere light-paralysis routines. No, if he couldn't wrest control of MultiReal from Natch's hands, then the high executive was prepared to a.s.sa.s.sinate him in cold blood and deal with the consequences later.

Natch shivered. Could he ever be safe from the Council again? Even a black code cloaking mechanism couldn't protect his Vault account from being seized by the government. They couldn't prevent people from recognizing his face or his voice or his mannerisms. Magan Kai Lee had claimed he could keep Natch out of Borda's reach-but even if Natch could trust him, the claim seemed unlikely.

He looked at his hands, now shaking uncontrol ably. A sudden pain lanced through his head, as it had been doing every hour with fascistic regularity for days. How could he know for sure the black code was a device for cloaking his bio/logic signatures, as Brone said? Certainly the lack of pursuit was a strong piece of circ.u.mstantial evidence, but not conclusive by any means. The chaos from the infoquake and the disguised hoverbird alone could have thrown the Council off his scent.

And what about the two other pieces of foreign code wending their way through Natch's bio/logic systems? There was stil the matter of the MultiReal yel ow jacket, not to mention whatever program Petrucio Patel had infected him with.

How had Petrucio managed to hit him? Why had MultiReal just stopped like that?

Natch buried his face in his hands. He felt leprous, unclean. Could he even trust his own thoughts with those insidious OCHREs in his neural system?

One black code program was bad enough; now he had three. Three times the black code, a thousand times the potential malevolence.

So many questions and so few answers. Natch felt a moment of extreme claustrophobia and panic. Run away! he told himself. Get as far away from here as you can!

He looked for some sign of the hoverbird hatch he had leapt through a scant half an hour before. Unsurprisingly, he found only the virtual hive building and the imposing wal s that surrounded the garden. But what good would an emergency hatch do anyway, kilometers up in the sky? Natch had no parachute, no oxygen supply, and no experience using either of those things anyway.

And even supposing he could fashion some miraculous escape and safe landing ... what then? Could any of the fiefcorpers shelter him? The Council would probably have them al under the strictest surveil ance now-besides which, they might not want to help him. Natch had threatened to trash Horvil's and Ben's careers. He had not raised a finger to help Merri fight the bogus charges that had gotten her suspended from Creed Objectivv. He had left Serr Vigal lying unconscious on the floor of the Tul Jabbor Complex. Quel had vanished. He had stretched the control ing clamps on Jara to the snapping point.

Natch was struck with a sudden inspiration. He knew what had happened at the Tul Jabbor Complex. He knew how Petrucio Patel had been able to shoot him with the dartgun.

Snippets from the soccer demonstration in Harper echoed through Natch's head. Ben kicking the bal , Quel blocking every kick. Something's ...

strange, Benyamin had said. I'm using MultiReal, just like before-but it just stops at some point. It leaves me hanging there in midloop.

Limited choice cycles! Horvil had shouted. I think I get this now. We put a limit on the number of reality loops Ben can do at one time-but your version of MultiReal stil has no limits.

Someone must have modified the MultiReal program while Natch wasn't looking. Set a limit on the number of daily choice cycles and brought the program down to the level of the Patel Brothers' licensed version. Natch had drained his reservoir of daily choice cycles with al of those acrobatics in the auditorium of the Tul Jabbor Complex. Petrucio had not.

I suppose if you're both running limited versions, Horvil had said, the person with the most choice cycles wins.

So someone had decided to alter the parameters of the MultiReal program. Who would make such a decision except Jara?

It didn't make sense; none of it made sense. Why would Jara purposely cripple MultiReal like that? Unless ... yes, everything was quickly fal ing into place. He could picture the scene. The Patel Brothers dropping subtle hints in Jara's direction, appealing to the naive do-gooder inside her. Throwing her a few crumbs in exchange for hobbling her version of MultiReal with limited choice cycles.

How could you do this to me? he howled in his mind at the a.n.a.lyst. Don't you see what you've done? You let the Patels infect me with another piece of black code! How could he have ever trusted Jara with core access to MultiReal? How could he have ever trusted her with anything?

And were the rest of the fiefcorpers any better? Jara might have made the decision, but Horvil's would have been the hand that implemented it.

Certainly Benyamin, Merri, and Vigal weren't excluded from the process either.

Natch knew then: he could not go back. He was through with the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp.

Outside the fiefcorp, his prospects weren't much better. His reputation in the fiefcorp field had been trampled into dust; the Meme Cooperative had suspended his business license; and certainly after the free-for-al at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the Prime Committee would soon vote to take possession of MultiReal.

Who else was there? Robby Robby was unlikely to jump into the Council's crosshairs for Natch. Andra Pradesh would offer precious little sanctuary, now that Suheil and Jayze Surina were running the place. Khann Frejohr and his libertarian al ies wouldn't stick their necks out for him again. The drudges would take his statement, but they couldn't offer him any protection from troops in white robes-not anymore.

Natch had literal y nowhere to turn.

What did Brone want with him? If he wanted to see Natch dead, he could simply have sat back at the Tul Jabbor Complex and let the Council do the job for him. Why save him from the high executive's wrath and cart him off somewhere in a hoverbird? Was he to be tortured and forced to hand over MultiReal? Or did the bodhisattva have something even more nefarious in store?

The entrepreneur hauled himself up from the planter and wandered along the property wal . What salvation he was hoping to find there he couldn't say, but he refused to simply sit and accept this kidnapping without a struggle. He put his palms against the brick and began tracing the mortar with his fingertips. The door had to be here somewhere....

Natch could not have guessed how long he searched. But suddenly, he found it: an exterior hoverbird hatch, camouflaged by the brickwork.

He stared at the brick for several minutes. What if I opened that hatch and just ...

Jumped? he thought. A few minutes of terror, easily diluted with bio/logics and a single instant of pain. Then eternal tranquility. He would be forever out of the Defense and Wel ness Council's reach.

There was a question of pressurization. Natch tried to recal what he knew about the thermodynamics of hovercraft. Was it possible for a mere human being to open an exterior hatch in midflight?

The entrepreneur slid to the ground and sat with his back to the hatch. He gazed at the Proud Eagle garden, unsure of what to do. An hour pa.s.sed.

Two. And then the slight lul ing movement of the hoverbird came to a halt.

Wherever Natch was going, he had arrived.

A sliver of daylight appeared behind the doorway, then widened into a ful circle. Natch hopped quickly through the portal back into reality, almost beyond caring what awaited him on the other side.

The hoverbird had parked in a bombed-out courtyard so littered with debris that Natch momentarily thought he had stepped into another one of Brone's twisted works of SeeNaRee. Pulverized concrete served as the garnish for a yard of twisted steel girders, jagged piles of gla.s.s, and fusedtogether scarecrows of ancient plastics.

Standing at the far end of the courtyard was a red brick building so rigid, so unyielding, so perpendicular that it had to be of ancient vintage. The skyline beyond the courtyard was dominated by a huge cl.u.s.ter of ruined buildings leaning into one another like old tombstones.

Brone had taken him to one of the diss cities. The old cities, bombed and ruined centuries ago by Autonomous Minds run amok. Broken letters dangling off the side of a neighboring tower clearly spel ed out CHICAGO FIRST NATIONAL.

Chicago. Natch's mother had lived here once.

Brone, Pierre Loget, and a dozen others stood at the end of a ragged path that ran through the minefield of rubble. Steps and a portico in the ancient Roman style led to a dark pa.s.sageway.

Natch looked around for a means of escape but found none. The idea of hijacking the hoverbird seemed quite preposterous, particularly since the pilot who knew how to fly it had already exited the craft. Escape on foot? The courtyard was lined by a black wrought-iron fence that had been newly instal ed and painted. Even if Natch had the strength to climb it, he doubted that he could successful y navigate the spikes without impaling himself. Use MultiReal? He remembered that he was out of choice cycles for the day; besides which, in his exhausted state, the program might kil him. And once outside, he faced the same question as before: where would he go?

Loget and the other black-robed figures retreated through the pa.s.sageway and into the building, leaving Brone and Natch alone. Brone raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward the pa.s.sageway. It was almost an inviting gesture.

Final y Natch thrust his hands into his pockets and fol owed the path through the open door.

A short, black hal . The smel of household cleaning compounds. Ambient light shining from beyond an archway.

And then-applause?

Natch emerged in a cavernous room that might once have been the grand atrium for an upper-crust hotel. Two hundred people could have fit on the marble floor that had been scuffed by centuries of footprints, while another few dozen might have lined the dual stairways that hugged the side wal s and came together on the mezzanine above. Whatever furnishings had adorned the place in ancient days had long since been carted off; instead the floor was lined with perhaps three dozen burnished metal platforms extending up on long stalks of silver. The crescent-shaped platforms hung in the air at varying levels from two to fifteen meters high, like a field of phantasmagoric flowers. Atop each platform sat an ordinary bio/logic workbench, and standing behind each workbench was a figure giddy with applause.

Natch's step faltered as he rubbed the sand from his eyes. The men and women clapping and cheering his arrival seemed disconcertingly happy to see him. More than that, many of them were actual y faces he recognized. Bil y Sterno, a pair of top a.n.a.lysts from the Deuteron Fiefcorp, an engineer who used to work for Lucas Sentinel.

There were words floating between the stalks in a clownish font, colored cherry red: WELCOME, NATCH!

"A-al these fiefcorpers," stuttered Natch. "They're Tha.s.selians too?"

Brone beamed proudly in the fashion of a motivational speaker showing off his disciples.

"Yes, Natch-we're al devotees of the teachings of Kordez Tha.s.sel here. But these aren't just Tha.s.selians-they're your comrades now! Comrades and fel ow revolutionaries."

Natch rubbed his forehead, where he was experiencing one of his periodic spikes of pain.

"Revolutionaries? What are you talking about?"

The bodhisattva extended his arms out in a solicitous gesture to the figures riding their elevated platforms, and there was an immediate crescendo in the applause. "I'm talking about the last revolution!" he cried. "The revolution of ultimate freedom!" More hooting and hol ering from the crowd. "The revolution against cause and effect!" They were stomping on their platforms now, causing a strange metal ic clang to reverberate around the room. Brone was in ful demagogue mode, shaking his fists in the air and tilting his head back. "I'm talking about the Revolution of Selfishness!" Another raucous cheer, even louder than before, which set the windows to vibrating.

Natch shifted into high alert and began casting python-quick glances over his shoulder to make sure he stil had a clear retreat. Pierre Loget was standing near the front door to the place, but he wasn't speaking the body language of conflict, and he appeared to be unarmed.

Suddenly the metal stalks were lowering to the ground and shedding programmers.

People began walking up to Natch and jubilantly clapping him on the back. There were catcal s of encouragement, words of congratulations. It was al a little too overwhelming for the entrepreneur's frayed nerves. Only a few hours ago, he had been racing through the Tul Jabbor Complex dodging black code darts; now he was being feted like a gladiator. And the people cheering him-he had humiliated some of these people over the years, ruined them. Why shower such praise on him now? Incomprehensible.

At some point, wine began to flow around the room, and Natch found a ful gla.s.s being pressed into his hand. He watched for some furtive sign of poison. But the revelers were al imbibing sloppily from the same bottle, pa.s.sing gla.s.ses haphazardly around with no semblance of order. Stil , Natch drank nothing.

The ancient hotel lobby quickly became the site of the strangest party Natch had ever witnessed. In one corner, Bil y Sterno was presiding over a cart of steaming finger foods that someone had rol ed in from a back room. In another corner, one of the more promising young programmers in muscle tissue and cartilage was dancing tipsily atop a crescent platform while a handful of engineers egged him on. Several of the figures in black robes had gathered in a solemn semicircle to mourn the ones who had not made it out of the Tul Jabbor Complex alive. And serving as ringmaster for the whole circus was Brone, smiling wider than Natch had seen him smile since initiation.

Final y, after an hour of this surrealism, Natch felt a set of fingers brushing his arm.

Pierre Loget. "You're tired," said Loget. "Go ahead, we've got quarters for you. Upstairs, room two-twelve. You can take either staircase."

Natch couldn't think of an appropriate reaction, so he made none. He started up the right-hand staircase and found his way down the dim corridor to a room with the number 212 freshly painted on its surface. The door swung open as he approached.

Run, he could hear an inner voice urging. Run while you stil can. But Natch didn't have the strength. He gave the room a quick once-over, then barricaded the door behind him. There seemed to be nothing sinister about the furnishings arrayed around the room, and the bed he col apsed in appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary bed.