Jara hardly knew where to start. She had taken plenty of practice laps around the shal ow end of the Sigh when she was a teenager. But back then her options were limited by the boundaries of her parents' L-PRACG: no partners over eighteen, no extreme stuff. Now suddenly she was free to explore the three hundred thousand channels running on Sigh protocols-free to dive deep and explore the crevices and trenches, the scabrous surfaces, free to coax the hidden pearls from their shel s. Most channels simply connected people of similar interests. There were other channels that specialized in every perversion humanity had dreamt up in the last hundred thousand years. Adventurous souls could dal y with automated pleasure bots that had survived the long Darwinian slog through the compet.i.tive market of s.e.xual programming. When the pleasure bots grew tiresome, there were channels that circ.u.mvented bodily mechanics altogether and delivered ma.s.sive unadulterated doses of endorphins.

But how to exorcise this obsession with Natch? It wasn't as easy as it sounded.

The Sigh was not restrained by the same limits as the multi network, so it was simple enough to plaster someone else's face on your partner and be done with it. But while this subterfuge might suffice for the man living down the street or the faintly glimpsed woman on the tube, the il usion simply didn't work for an intimate acquaintance. Cal it a failure of technology or psychology; virtual simulacra just could not fool the discerning human brain.

Enter the Doppelganger channel.

Jara found a series of intriguing promos featuring celebrity impostors of stars like Juan Nguyen and Jeannie Q. Christina, al with ridiculously mundane names and occupations. I'm Lester James, hoverbird repair technician, said an Angel Palmero look-alike. And I've been searching for you on Doppelganger.

It was a simple system. Point the interface to the Data Sea profile of your l.u.s.t object.

Doppelganger proceeds to track down his unwitting twins spread throughout human s.p.a.ce. Each twin is presented with an invitation to meet. Given a pool of sixty bil ion people to choose from, the odds were high that someone would accept the invitation. Frequently that someone was looking for a person just like you, which gave the arrangement a nice symmetry. The closer the match, the higher the fee.

Jara had fired off a Vault credit authorization to Doppelganger, along with a video of Natch at his most beautiful and solipsistic. Two days later, Doppelganger had led her to Geronimo.

The relationship worked very nicely for a week or so. Geronimo tried to fulfil Jara's fantasy of bedding her boss, and Jara tried to fulfil Geronimo's fantasy of bedding ... who? A neighbor, a co-worker, some woman who had caught his eye in a Beijing night club? Jara didn't know and didn't care. This was the Sigh, after al , where mutual fulfil ment was the decorum and questions were bad form.

Then that week turned into two and rounded the corner heading for three. Now, here she lay, thirty-seven minutes after her arrival in this leather SeeNaRee, and Geronimo was gone. Jara stil had twenty minutes left on the account, and an additional two hours until the next fiefcorp meeting. She decided to loaf for a while.

Jara hated to chastise Bonneth for bad advice, but it was becoming pretty clear that this form of therapy just wasn't working. There was something intensely s.e.xual about Natch. Yet he kept that virility under such iron control that Jara could not even tap into it through fantasy. What would Natch be like if he vented his pa.s.sions in the bedroom? What if there were no bio/logic fiefcorps, no Primo's ratings, no MultiReal to distract him? Easier to imagine a bird without wings or a fish that could not swim.

The closer Jara got to possessing the fiefcorp master, the more he seemed to edge away.

Achieving his lifetime goal of topping the Primo's bio/logic investment guide should have loosened him up a little, given him a sense of accomplishment. But instead, the entrepreneur was retreating farther and farther inside his shel .

How long would his sanity last?

It needed to last a while. Jara no longer had the consolation that this would al be over in eleven months when her apprenticeship expired. She had chosen to sign on to another apprenticeship, serving a brand-new company in a whol y untested market. Another few years wrestling with this peculiar crossbreed of loathing and l.u.s.t.

Meanwhile, Horvil was out there somewhere. Sweet, innocent Horvil, who had opened up his heart on the floor of the Surina Center for Historic Appreciation while a thousand Council troops marched through the courtyard. They had managed to avoid being confined alone ever since. Jara could honestly say she had never thought of Horvil in a romantic light, and had no idea what to do. Her feelings were as easy to decipher as cuneiform.

Confused, emotional y knotted, exhausted, Jara final y logged off the Sigh and waited for the mediocrity of the real world to seep in again. There was a name for the haze of a mind switching between multi connections; why wasn't there a word for the postcoital letdown of logging off the Sigh?

Jara sat up in bed and looked at her stil -white wal s. In the living room sat the pitiful arrangement of daisies she had blown an inappropriately large chunk of her fiefcorp stipend on. She arose, walked into the breakfast nook, and had the building brew her up some hot nitro.

When did you lose yourself? the a.n.a.lyst asked her reflection in the window.

Was it at Andra Pradesh, when Len Borda's troops were swooping al around her? Or further back, when she had threatened to quit the fiefcorp after Natch's little black code stunt? Maybe there wasn't a single moment. Maybe it was a gradual eroding of self, a twenty-year process that had started long before she ever heard of Natch or Horvil. Everything that had happened in her adult life felt like one attenuated chain reaction to that moment in the hive when her proctor had settled his hand on her thigh, a few centimeters higher than propriety dictated, and Jara had tried to convince herself that she liked it there.

7.

The familiar sight of his tenement curving around a Shenandoah hil top put a smile on Natch's face that not even black code could dim. Natch had never felt a sentimental attachment to any of the places he had cal ed home; he remembered walking out of the hive for initiation with barely a backward glance. But he had never savored the unique flavor of returning to a place he had fought to defend either.

The front doors swished open to greet him. Natch stepped into the atrium and nearly col ided with Horvil.

The engineer's chubby face instantly sparked into a grin. "You're back!" he cried, folding the fiefcorp master into a bear hug. Natch could feel a turgid programming bar pressed against his back. The distinct smel of peanut b.u.t.ter drifted through the air.

"I'm back," agreed the entrepreneur.

"For real this time, right?" The engineer poked him in the col arbone with one grubby finger. "Not just another five-minute stop-by in multi?"

"For real."

"About time," grumbled a voice from the back of the atrium. Horvil shuffled aside to reveal his cousin Benyamin, who was rising from one of the stiffbacked chairs that lined the building's front hal . "Your apartment won't let us in," he said, stretching his arms up in the air with fingertips clasped.

"Wel , that's not completely true," said Horvil with a frown. "Vigal, Jara, and me, we can al override the security just fine. But you never approved everyone else for emergency access."

"So we've been stuck working out here," continued Ben.

"At least the building management was nice about it," said Horvil. "They could've kicked us out. But they didn't. They even let us drag the workbench out here once or twice."

"You can thank her for that." The young apprentice tilted his head slightly to the left, indicating another roomier chair where the channel manager, Merri, had taken up residence. Merri struggled to stand, suppressed a yawn, then switched on a stim program to suffuse her with some energy.

Natch took in the blonde woman's disheveled dress and the backpack propped slantwise against the leg of an end table. Suddenly he realized that, unlike Benyamin, Merri was here in the flesh and probably hadn't been home since the demo at Andra Pradesh. "Why are you stil here?" Natch asked incredulously. "Why didn't you go back home?"

Merri shrugged with embarra.s.sment. "I know how expensive it is to teleport to Luna,"

she said. "It's just not worth wasting the company's money. And I'm not up to one of those long shuttle rides right now."

"Someone else would've put you up. Horvil's Aunt Beril a has a fancy estate in London.

They must have a thousand spare bedrooms."

"It's not a big deal, Natch. The local Creed Objectivv hostel works just fine."

"But you've got a companion on Luna," Benyamin retorted. "Bonneth needs you, you said. She can barely get across the apartment by herself-"

"Bonneth," said Merri with an air of tired finality, "wil be fine." Natch sensed undercurrents of tension between the two fiefcorpers, but decided this was something he could deal with another time. He shook his head, stepped around the pleasantly befuddled Horvil, and strode down the hal to his apartment with three apprentices in tow.

Jara seemed to have antic.i.p.ated Natch's arrival before he even made it in the door. The tiny fiefcorp a.n.a.lyst was perched on the arm of Natch's sofa, contemplating an ornate holographic calendar floating in midair. "We need to talk scheduling, Natch," she announced without even looking up, as if continuing a conversation already in progress.

The fiefcorp master paused a moment and let the comfortable trappings of home flood his senses: the windows showing bar charts of the bio/logic markets, the workbench in his office with a trapezoidal structure bobbing above it in Minds.p.a.ce, the sprightly patch of daisies in the apartment's precise geometric center. A cup of tea on the kitchen counter gave mute testimony to Serr Vigal's presence. "Where's Vigal?" asked Natch.

"Here I am," came the voice of the neural programmer as he wandered in from the balcony. Natch thought he spotted a few more gray hairs in his old guardian's goatee and an unusual amount of concern written on his wrinkled forehead.

Serr Vigal surprised the both of them by taking Natch into a tight embrace.

"I'm glad you're back," mumbled Vigal.

"Me too," said Natch.

The moment was brief. There would be plenty of time later for sentimentality; right now Natch had business to attend to. He stepped free of the neural programmer's arms and began his normal hectic pace around the living room. Benyamin and Horvil hustled to find seats. "Everybody here? Someone's missing. Where's Quel ?"

Merri settled into a quiet corner on the floor next to the balcony and sat with her legs crossed. "Quel went to get a bite to eat," she said. "He kept complaining about the food in your building, so we found him an Indian restaurant down the street. He should be back in a few minutes."

"Where's he been sleeping?"

The channel manager shrugged her shoulders. "I think he rented a room somewhere."

"Fine," said Natch with a flip of his hand. "Okay, Jara. Scheduling. Go."

"This was the day of our presentation at Andra Pradesh," said Jara, pointing to the holographic calendar. The square marked Tuesday, December 6 popped off the calendar like a kernel of corn on the flame. "And here's today." December 28 leapt up, causing the previous three weeks to cascade off the surface of the holograph. "The public hasn't heard a peep out of us in three weeks. No press releases, no timetables, no demos, nothing."

"Natch's been a little busy," snorted Horvil, who had appropriated the chair-and-a-half for his a.s.s and the matching ottoman for his feet.

"Granted," said Jara. "But the public doesn't know that. Three weeks is an eternity in bio/logics. It's a good thing the Council pul ed that little stunt yesterday, because people were wondering if he was stil alive."

"Don't even joke about that," muttered Vigal, balancing his cup of tea on one palm as he found a place on the couch between Ben and Jara.

"Magan Kai Lee swoops down here with dartguns blazing, and you cal that a little stunt?"

said Horvil. "If Natch hadn't warned us to stay clear, we could've al been kil ed."

Jara did not back down. "Come on, Horv," said the a.n.a.lyst. "The Council just wanted to scare him. They weren't planning on kil ing him."

Ben let out a harrumph. "How do you know that?"

"Because," replied the a.n.a.lyst as calmly as a proctor explaining arithmetic to a hive child.

"Natch can't hand MultiReal over to the Council if he's dead, now can he?"

Benyamin's mouth clamped shut. Silence enveloped the apartment.

Jara continued. "Listen, Ben. We're talking about basic Data Sea networking principles.

Len Borda can't just steal the MultiReal code from Natch. He needs core access, or Natch could just lock him out of the program whenever he felt like it. And core access on the Data Sea isn't something the Council can fake. They'd need the matching signatures tied up in Natch's OCHRE system. It's practical y impossible to crack."

Serr Vigal nodded sagely. "She's right," he said. "Even the Defense and Wel ness Council can't circ.u.mvent Data Sea access controls."

The young apprentice refused to give up. "They could get core access from Margaret."

"Sure," said Horvil, picking at a loose thread on his jacket. "But think of it this way.

There're two people in the world with the master key to MultiReal.

One of them's holed up in a tower with five thousand armed guards, and one of them's just hanging out in an apartment building. Who would you go after?"

"This is al beside the point," continued Jara. "Without Natch's cooperation-or Margaret's-Borda wouldn't even be able to find the code. You can't just trace subaether transmissions. He'd have to search every qubit on the Data Sea with pattern recognition algorithms. Even using the fastest computational engine in existence, that'd take ..

Arithmetic fluttered behind Horvil's closed eyelids as he yanked the string on his jacket free. "Two thousand one hundred twenty-nine years. No, wait.

Maybe four hundred eighty-eight years. Or ..."

Jara raised her eyebrows and extended an open palm in the engineer's direction. "A long time, at any rate."

"But if the Council couldn't find MultiReal, then n.o.body could find it," protested Ben. "It would just float on the Sea forever with al the other useless c.r.a.p.

If Len Borda's trying to get rid of MultiReal, wouldn't that suit him just fine? Get rid of Natch and Margaret, and then n.o.body has core access."

"Yes, but what if Borda wants to keep MultiReal for himself?" said Jara.

Benyamin leaned forward on the sofa and ran one hand through his inky black hair. "I must be missing something," he said. "This doesn't make any sense. If Borda can't take MultiReal away, and he can't kil Natch, then al he can do is threaten, right? What are we so worried about?"

Horvil put a hand on the young apprentice's shoulder. "Do I real y need to spel it out for you, Ben?" he asked in a throaty whisper.

Al conversation came to a halt. Bio/logics could do much to shield the human body from pain, but in the wrong hands it could also be used to cause pain. Over the years, unscrupulous groups had devised OCHREs that injected painful toxins directly into muscle and bone, nightmare SeeNaRees that tapped into their victims' darkest fears, and programs that directly stimulated the pain centers of the brain. Who could say which of these techniques the Council used?

Natch stopped midpace in front of the window, silhouetted by the Shenandoah morning.

"The Patel Brothers are giving another demo this Sunday."

The rest of the company blinked in surprise. n.o.body had noticed that Natch hadn't said anything for several minutes. Merri gulped uneasily and gave Horvil a sidelong glance. "I was going to mention that," she said. "How did you know, Natch? The Patels haven't even announced it yet."

"Wel , how did you know?" asked Horvil.

"Robby Robby," replied the channel manager. "It's his business to know what's happening in the sales world. And it's my business to know what he knows."

Natch could feel the stares of his fel ow fiefcorpers, but he paid them no mind. His eyes were locked on that pulsing square labeled Tuesday, December 6, hovering menacingly near Jara's fingers like an accusation. How was it possible for three weeks to slip through his fingers and vanish without a trace? Already those days on the tube were becoming ghostly, indistinct, something from a dream. Jara was right: three weeks was an eternity in bio/logics. What unspeakable malice had the black code inside him unleashed during those three weeks?

"Natch ... ?" Vigal prodded gently.

The fiefcorp master blinked hard, trying to get his mind back into balance. He focused on the holographic calendar. How did he know about the Patel Brothers' demo? The same way he had known about Magan Kai Lee's failed incursion into his apartment building. Some might label it intuition or foresight, but to Natch it was simply algebra; al you needed to do was to churn through the variables and eliminate the cruft, and you would inevitably arrive at the solution. Couldn't they see the reddish aura surrounding that square labeled January I? Couldn't they tel the Patel Brothers were giving a demo that day just by looking at it?

"So what did Robby find out about this demo?" Natch asked Merri. "Any indication what they're doing?"

"Not real y. Just vague rumors. They've booked an auditorium at the Tha.s.sel Complex, but it's not one of the larger-capacity hal s. We're guessing it's an industry-only event. Robby thinks he can get one of us in without too much trouble."

"I'l go," said Jara.

The fiefcorp master nodded and began to pace once more. "So how do we respond?"

Horvil did some mental extrapolation of his own, then dropped his face dramatical y into the palms of his hands. "s.h.i.t," he said, nose poking through his thick fingers, "you're not gonna put us through al that c.r.a.p again, are you, Natch?

Another demo in less than seventy-two hours?"

Natch shook his head, and the rest of the fiefcorpers released their breath simultaneously.

"There's no point," he said. "The demo at Andra Pradesh showed everyone that we're the standard bearers in this business now. If we scramble to beat Frederic and Petrucio to the punch again, it'l just look like we're being defensive. Better for us to schedule something on our own timetable. Take a little time to get this one right."

Jara gave a curt nod of agreement. "So, when?" She swept her hand across the calendar, causing entire rows of dates to ripple smoothly off the surface. Her fingers drifted down toward February in a transparent effort to bring Natch's attention to a later date.

Natch studied the chunks of time floating in the middle of the room and rubbed his chin.