Multireal (35 page)

"Then where is he?" cried the drudge. "My sources tell me the
Defense and Wellness Council arrested him."

"I'm sorry, but your sources have been misinformed. Natch was in
London for a fiefcorp meeting yesterday. Since then, he's been taking
inventory of our databases to make sure nothing was damaged in the
infoquake. As far as I know, the Council hasn't named Natch as a suspect in any investigation."

Sor nodded, clearly not satisfied with Jara's answers but unwilling
to press his first-questioner status any further. He bowed and stepped
out of the way. Behind him, the line of angry questioners snaked far up
into the audience. One down, thought Jara.

"What do you know about this Islander the Council dragged out
of the Revelation Spire?" asked the next questioner, a man with a
simian brow and low-dragging knuckles to match.

"The Islander Quell is a member of our fiefcorp and one of the principal engineers of MultiReal," said Jara. "He's been in Margaret's employ
for years now, since-since the beginning." She reached inside her memory
for a number to back her up and was surprised to discover that she had
none. Everything's happening much too fast, the analyst thought. Has anyone
even had a chance to ask Quell how long he's been on the project? Long enough to
gain Margaret's trust, of course-but how long is that? Two years? Ten? Twenty?
"Obviously we're not pleased with the way the Council treated him in
Andra Pradesh," she continued. "It's pretty clear there's some misunderstanding going on, and we hope to have it resolved shortly."

"The rumor on the Data Sea," said the next drudge, "is that this
Islander murdered Margaret and tried to take MultiReal for himself."

Jara had put together a perfectly innocuous laugh this morning in
MindSpace, and now she let it loose on the crowd. "That's ridiculous,"
she said. She gave Robby a sidelong rolling of the eyes, which Robby
returned on cue. "Quell's been a trusted member of Margaret's staff for
years. He knows most of the Surina security force by name."

The laugh failed to appease the audience. In fact, it only seemed to
inflame them further. Drudges began to step up in rapid succession
and shoot questions at her, one after another like machine gun fire.

"If this Islander is so trustworthy, why did the Council arrest
him?"

"Wasn't he just covering for you so you could execute a hostile
takeover of the company?"

"Natch was already implicated in the murders of his hivemates
during initiation. Why wouldn't he do it again?"

"Why did the Meme Cooperative suspend everyone's business
license at the fiefcorp but yours?"

"How do we know you didn't have anything to do with Margaret's
death?"

"What's going to happen to MultiReal? Did you sell it to the
Council?"

"If you don't have anything to hide, why are you taking money
under the table from Creed Thassel?"

Jara gaped at the last question. The Thasselians? How had they
gotten involved in all this? She thought back to the bizarre fundraising pitches Natch had undertaken last month when the fiefcorp
was frantically trying to prepare for the unveiling of Margaret's thenmysterious Phoenix Project. Natch had made some elusive comments
about borrowing money from an unnamed "third party," and Horvil
later hinted that an old acquaintance from the hive had stepped forward with the cash. Jara had shrugged it off. Was Natch so desperate
he would take funding from a discredited creed? And not just any
creed, but a notoriously shady one with a secret membership roster?

The analyst flailed around in vain for an answer. She gave the subtlest of glances in Merri's direction, but the channel manager's mien
was impenetrable. "I'm really not at liberty to discuss the company's
finances right now," Jara replied lamely.

With a notoriously unethical creed as grease, the press conference
began to slide down a dangerous slope toward the paranoid. The
drudges began launching personal attacks on Natch's character, or personal attacks on Jara's character, or far-flung theories about MultiReal that bordered on the insane. It was all Jara could do to simply keep up
with her canned responses. Someone even tried to pin the disappearances of Pierre Loget and Billy Sterno on Natch, to which Jara could
only shake her head.

Just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse and even
Robby Robby was showing traces of unease, a misshapen lump of a
man stepped to the front of the line. He had shifty eyes and an oily dab
of mustache.

"A hundred and twenty violations of the Meme Cooperative
bylaws!" squawked the man. "Isn't it convenient that in all the hullabaloo surrounding Margaret's death, everyone's forgotten about that?"

Jara stared at the drudge, certain she had seen him before. She lobbed
his picture at the public directory, but his profile had been carefully
scrubbed clean. Jara searched her memory and came up blank there too.
"The Meme Cooperative gives out twenty thousand citations every year,"
she said. "If you read through the list, you'll see that ninety-five percent
of them are politically motivated. Once Natch gets his day in front of the
arbitration board, I'm sure he'll be vindicated for most of them."

"Most of them? Most of them?" The man emitted a squeal that
might have passed for amusement and gave the woman behind him a
conspiratorial elbow in the gut. Jara hoped the other drudges would
hustle this odd person out of the queue so she could draw the conference to a close, but instead they were clearing a space for the man's
grandstanding. "So what would you say if I told you I'm filing a whole
new set of charges against the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp for
breach of contract?"

Jara was starting to get a major headache. "Breach of whose contract?"

"I'm glad you asked," said the man with a queer smile. Then he
turned his back to the stage and lifted his hands with a flourish, like a
prophet signaling to his people that they had arrived at the Promised
Land.

A small band began to march through the crowd from the back of the auditorium. Amused smiles percolated across the faces of the
drudges. Jara counted eighteen people in the group that came to a halt
behind the grandstander. It was as random a group as one could possibly assemble, and Jara didn't recognize any of them.

"What are you doing up there?" came a frantic ConfidentialWhisper from Benyamin. "Call security before this guy hijacks the
whole press conference!"

Jara fidgeted and turned to look at an equally perplexed Robby
Robby. What could she do?

"I give you Natch's latest victims!" brayed the lumpy man. "I give
you the victims of the crass pyramid scheme called the MultiReal
exposition lottery! Eighteen suffering souls who entered into a Faustian bargain with your boss Natch! Eighteen souls promised a chance
at fame and fortune, under legal contract, mind you. A legal contract
that was broken without a second glance by your scheming, manipulative fiefcorp master!"

That was when Jara finally placed him.

Captain Bolbund.

Something rancid and congealed in Jara's gut made an effort to
creep back into her throat. It had been years since Natch's little altercation with Captain Bolbund in the ROD coding business, years since
she had endured his putrid poetry. The last Jara remembered, Bolbund's business license had been suspended for impersonating a Meme
Cooperative official. And yet here he stood, flaring his nostrils and stirring mischief. How long had this bottom feeder been festering in his
anger, waiting for an opportunity at revenge? Was the list of Natch's
enemies truly endless?

"Justice for the MultiReal exposition lottery winners!" thundered
Bolbund, swinging his fist back and forth in an attempt to wrench the
words into a rhythmic chant. "Justice for the MultiReal exposition lottery winners! Justice! Justice!"

Vigal openly buried his face in his hands, and Merri looked like she had been turned to stone. Robby and Frizitz were making clipped gestures to the channelers in the crowd, but what kind of message they
were trying to send was unclear.

Jara made a few stumbling attempts at imposing order, but the
genie would not be forced back into the bottle. Objectivv security officers rushed forward to apprehend the miscreant, but now he was
darting through the crowd like a fat gremlin. Laughter spurted out of
the drudges at the obscene spectacle. Someone even stuck a foot in
front of the Objectivv officers, sending them crashing to the floor like
a row of black-and-white-swirled dominoes.

The analyst rubbed her temples in frustration. A nightmare.

Jara wanted to bury her face in the soft refuge of her mother's belly.
Berilla's couch made a poor substitute. The microfibers on the pillows
wouldn't even absorb her tears, but left them to dribble down to the
crook of the couch instead.

Someone tapped on the door. "Come in," said Jara softly.

The door slid open and admitted Horvil. He took in the analyst's
misery and parked himself backward on a spindly chair. "You look
upset," said the engineer, once again demonstrating his penchant for
either stating the obvious or blundering right past it.

"I am upset," replied Jara. "I can't believe our own contest winners
are suing us. On top of everything else going on right now."

Horvil made a sour face. "Bolbund," he said. "Never thought I'd
see that idiot again. Don't worry about it. The whole exposition is yesterday's news. Those lottery winners'll just disappear into the woodwork, you'll see. If nothing else, that lawsuit's put more drudges at the
front gates. There must be six hundred people out there now."

Jara craned her neck toward the window, but the couch's armrest
blocked her view. "I should have listened to Ben," she said after a moment's reflection. "I shouldn't even have held that fucking press
conference. You don't think I made things worse ... do you?"

"All I know is that you stood up and did something," said Horvil.
"Somebody needed to."

The headache that had begun during the press conference had now
captured Jara's frontal lobes. She felt a masochistic urge to just let it
rampage for a while. "Listen, Horvil, I ... There's something I think
you should know."

Horvil sniffed and shrugged at the same time. "If you're going to
tell me about Natch's little threat to ruin my career, don't bother. Aunt
Berilla already told me. It's not really anything to get upset over. I
know he didn't mean it."

"Didn't mean it?" The pain lanced through the back of Jara's neck
as she sat up abruptly. "How can you say that?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who just stood up and told a million drudges
what an ethical businessman Natch is."

"That's for the good of the company. It's different."

Horvil nodded and slumped his chin down onto his folded arms.
"Natch is stressed out, Jara. He's losing it. Have you noticed all that
twitching, all those strange looks? I've-I've never seen him this bad
before. That black code is tearing him up. He's running out of options.
He wouldn't have made that threat to Aunt Berilla unless he had no
other choice."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," said Jara, aghast. "You're making
excuses for him. Of course he had other choices."

"Really?" Horvil asked. "If someone put a gun to your head and
said it's either you or Natch-what would you do?" The engineer rose
and walked to the window, where he stood in plump silhouette against
the moonlight. Jara could see that the drudges were definitely there,
camped right outside the gates. She was glad she could see out the
windows but they couldn't see in. "Natch didn't walk out just because
of me, did he?" asked the engineer.

Jara shook her head. "No, it's much more complicated than that.
You want to know the real reason Natch left?" She took a breath. "It's
because of me," she said. "It's because of what I'm doing to the
company."

Horvil pursed his lips skeptically. "What do you mean?"

"Listen, Horv ... I haven't heard anything from Magan Kai Lee or
Rey Gonerev since that meeting at the Kordez Thassel Complex. Not
a single word. Why do you think that is?"

"Well, there's a lot going on right now," said Horvil. "Infoquakes
popping up all over the place, Margaret's death. I hear that the
Islanders are stepping up their border raids-"

"No, come on. That doesn't explain anything. Lee has more than
enough people to deal with all that.... You want to know what I
think? I think the Council's leaving me alone because I'm doing exactly
what they want. Why did Magan Kai Lee arrange all this in the first
place, Horv? Why did he give me control of MultiReal, and what was
he preparing to do at the Thassel Complex?

"Natch knows exactly why. Magan Kai Lee put the program in my
hands because he knows I'm easy to manipulate. I won't be able to take
the pressure, and sooner or later I'll give in. I'll hand MultiReal right
over to the Council. That's why Natch left when I told him to leave.