Multireal (8 page)

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. Tell them I need to see them."

Ridgello 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 small-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 tall pillar. 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 Wellness Council needed
no caption, but bold block letters at his feet did pose a question.

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 dramatically 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 willing 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 Wellness 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 allow 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 hallway, 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 really
some sublevel engineer's attempt to circumvent 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
fallen 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 hallway-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 Wellness
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 followed you on the periphery of your
vision. It meant a few unexplained transactions in your Vault account,
too small to be of consequence yet too large to go unnoticed.

"And me?" said the Blade.

"You," replied Magan, "will 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 Wellness 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 challenge. 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 still
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?

6

Geronimo: twenty-two years old, heterosexual, 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 really was.

In the more prosaic world offline, the sullen man across the room
wearing the CALL ME GERONIMO T-shirt might really be a diplomat or
a black code junkie or a fugitive from the law. There was no way to tell
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 lust 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', Cassandra?" 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 substitute, which was more than most could say.

"Towards Perfection yourself," Jara replied, standing on tiptoes to
give Geronimo a hungry hello kiss. The kiss quickly evolved into a fullon tongue-dueling affair until the pain in her toes made her withdraw.

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

The fiefcorp analyst winced. Jara didn't know whether this idiot
was really 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, uncontrollable, setting everything it touched
aflame. "Awright," mumbled Geronimo. "Let's get moving."

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