Infoquake (49 page)

Robby Robby himself had roped together an ad hoc group of
nearly six thousand orbital colony residents, and was busy preaching
the gospel of-something. Merri tuned in a video feed. "We know
what you're going through out there," exclaimed Robby, his idiotic
grin wobbling sympathetically. "The last to know. The last to hear.
The last to be noticed. Right?"

A lukewarm cheer from the crowd.

"Who suffered during the infoquake last week? Was it the terrans?
Was it the lunars? No, of course not-it was you. Am I right? You citizens of Allowell, of Patronell, of Furtoid, of 49th Heaven, of Nova
Ceti, and all the rest-it was you who bore the brunt of that terrible
catastrophe, wasn't it?"

A righteous buzz of discontent. A few raised fists.

"Well, keep those multi connections right here in Andra Pradesh,
ladies and gentlemen, because tonight the Surina/Natch MultiReal
Fiefcorp is gonna show you a whole new dawn for orbital colonists ..."

Merri cut off the feed and shook her head. Robby and his channelers had been wandering all over the map during the past few hours,
voicing new sales motifs at every exchange. Her instincts told her she
should rein Robby in, insist he stay on message. But did it really
matter what the channelers said at this point? They were pitching a
technology nobody understood to crowds that had no idea whether
they should or should not care. Merri couldn't really ask any more of
Robby's staff than to keep the audience interested and upbeat.

She was about to head backstage for a much-needed break when
she felt a tug at her elbow. "There you are!" cried a worried Benyamin.
"I've got to show you this. You won't believe-"

Merri put a calming hand over Ben's. "Slow down," she said. "Take
a deep breath. How's the assembly-line going?"

"Almost done. They're putting the final touches on right now. But
this is more important."

The channel manager let him drag her across the stage and up into
the mezzanine. She was feeling the first twinges of impatience when
the word Petrucio caught her ear.

"Yes, yes, yes, of course it's true that the Patels are licensing MultiReal from Surina/Natch," stated a rail-thin woman of Polynesian
descent, who stood on a makeshift podium fielding questions from several thousand fiefcorp masters. "Why bother to deny it? The MultiReal
you're going to see here today is the same MultiReal Frederic and
Petrucio will be demonstrating later tonight. Same product, different
brand."

Merri fed the woman's face into the public directory and soon verified her suspicions. She had never actually seen Xi Xong outside a
viewscreen, where her emaciated frame often sat alongside Robby
Robby, Phrancoliape and The Felwidge Group in drudge roundups of
the top channeling firms. But given the amount of work Xong did for
the Patel Brothers, Merri should have expected her appearance here
tonight.

"There have to be some kind of Meme Cooperative regulations
against this," 'Whispered Benyamin. "That woman can't just come
here into our audience and start stealing customers, can she?"

"I'm afraid she can," replied Merri with a sigh. "There's not really
much we can do about it. If we kick her out, she'll only draw more
attention."

As it was, Xong did not seem to have any trouble attracting attention. With her opal-bedecked kimono and her glittering nail polish,
she presented quite an elegant contrast to Robby's slick hucksterism.
"The Patels look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with
Margaret and Natch," continued Xi Xong, responding to a muffled
question from the crowd. "Competitors? Why, certainly the Patels
have had a little friendly competition with Natch over the years. What of it?"

"Friendly?" protested one of the onlookers. "They've done everything but try to kill each other."

A frothy laugh bubbled from Xong's china doll lips. "Don't believe
everything you hear from the drudges!" she said with a dark twinkle
in her eye. "So there's no love lost between Natch and my clients.
What does that matter? MultiReal is a wide-open market, and there
will be more than enough room for two fiefcorps here. Besides, don't
they say that a rising tide lifts all boats? As long as that tide pushes a
few boats towards our safe shores, then everyone wins."

Merri couldn't help but admire the woman's poise, even if her
wardrobe was too gaudy for the channel manager's taste. She caught
sight of one of Robby's boyish cube-heads bounding up the aisles, and
for a split-second wished she could exchange sales teams.

"Do you want to know what the worst part is?" said Benyamin.
"She's not the only one here trying to poison Natch's reputation."

Merri frowned. "Who else?"

"You might as well ask who isn't here. Lucas Sentinel has a whole
group here spreading lies. PulCorp, Billy Sterno, Bolliwar Tuban, the
Serlys, the Deuterons, Studio Fitzgerald-they've all got their own
people mouthing off in the wings."

"Jara was right."

"About what?"

"It's too late to cancel. With all these fiefcorps looking for blood,
we've got to pull this demonstration off, or we're finished in this business."

Jara tried on several courses of action in her head, but none of them fit.
She could run, but there really wasn't anywhere to run to. She could
hide, but that would be utterly futile given the surveillance technology at the Council's disposal. Jara thought about what the protagonists of
the dramas did in these kinds of situations. They relied on glib words
and cool detachment, of course, two things that Jara did not possess.
What would Natch do?

A low crescendo of thunder swept across the courtyard and set the
window panes vibrating. Rhythmic thumps. Boom boom, boom boom. It
took her a few minutes to decipher the sound as that of a thousand
boots marching on travertine in perfect synchronization. She listened
intently for signs of battle-the high-pitched whine of continuous
dartgun fire, the muffled boom of disruptors, all the war noises the
dramas had trained her to recognize over the years. But if there was
indeed a skirmish going on outside, none of it was reaching Jara's ears.

The tourists who had been kicked out of the atrium half an hour
earlier came scurrying by. Over her mother's shoulder, a toddler gave
Jara a curious look as they fled past Albert Einstein into Relativity
Hall. They were followed shortly by a phalanx of panicked green-andblue Surina guards, fumbling with their dartguns as they scrambled to
reach some defensive checkpoint. Jara dissolved as much as possible
into Sheldon Surina's open-toed sandals, but nobody paid her any
attention. Obviously, Len Borda had not even bothered repeating his
fiction about protecting the scientist statues this time.

Outside, the first row of Defense and Wellness Council officers
strode past the window. Their white robes looked positively spectral in
the cloudy afternoon light, an affront to the notion of camouflage.
Their faces bore the kind of stone-like neutrality that only bio/logics
could produce. They were aiming squarely for the Revelation Spire,
where Margaret was presumably holed up in a high story awaiting
some kind of apocalyptic showdown. Jara peered out another window
that gave her a view closer to the Spire. She had seen a squadron of
Surina security forces there earlier, but now they had vanished.

What would Natch do under these circumstances? Jara knew
exactly what he would do: he would go ahead and give the presenta tion anyway, until someone physically dragged him off the stage or
blew him into a million pieces.

An idea popped into Jara's head, an idea that had been percolating
for hours even though she had refused to acknowledge it.

Why couldn't she deliver the presentation?

Casting her mind out to the Surina facilities, Jara discovered that
the spectators were indeed staying put in spite of Len Borda's little
incursion. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was scheduled to hit
the stage in little more than an hour, and the auditorium already held
almost 400 million multi projections. If these numbers kept up, this
would be an even larger crowd than the one Margaret had garnered last
week-maybe even large enough to rival the 1.3 billion who had
attended Marcus Surina's funeral forty-six years ago.

When the tromp of the troops became deafening, Jara put her
hands over her ears and slithered even farther into the shadows. Still
feeling exposed and vulnerable, she reached into her bio/logic bag of
tricks and turned on Cocoon 32, a Lucas Sentinel program that had
helped calm her down many times in the past.

Jara could instantly feel the tumult from the outside world fading
away as her OCHREs filtered out the sounds around her and dimmed
her sight until everything had faded to a dull gray. No ConfidentialWhispers, no incoming messages. No background chatter from the
Data Sea.

Could she really stand up in front of a billion people and demonstrate a technology she barely understood herself? And not just any
technology-perhaps the most radical invention in the history of
humanity, and one that was almost completely untested.

There were a million reasons why she couldn't deliver the presentation. Jara had no experience speaking in front of large crowds. She
had a bad reputation in the bio/logics industry. She hadn't swung a
baseball bat in nearly twenty years.

But what other options did she have at this point? Slink off to a tube station and go home? Wait for the hubbub to die down and then
drop a groveling Confidential Whisper to Lucas Sentinel asking for her
old job back?

Face it, Jara, she told herself. You want to fail.

The thought surprised and angered her. She wanted to fail. She
wanted Natch's latest business venture to go down in flames. The analyst conjured a mental picture of herself: a small, fluttering, frightened
thing, cowering at the feet of marble goliaths, men and women with
minds and hearts and wills of stone.

And suddenly something inside of her rebelled. That's not me, she
thought. I can't be like that. To settle for failure-that's like accepting death.
If I just sit back and let things happen, I might as well have never lived in the
first place.

Jara took a deep breath, counted to twenty, and flipped off the
Cocoon. She had made her decision.

At just that moment, a familiar figure came barreling around the
corner. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the room as soon as he
saw the analyst, but the tub of jelly around his gut obeyed the laws of
inertia and kept going. The statue of Isaac Newton looked on with
amusement as Horvil toppled to the ground in accordance with the
good scientist's theories.

"Oh, thank goodness!" bellowed the engineer, crawling his way
across the floor to Jara's side. "I've been looking all over for you."

Jara gave her fellow apprentice a look of steely determination.
"Horv, I'm going to deliver the presentation."

Horvil's mouth gaped open. "No luck with Margaret?"

She shook her head. "Quell was right. Margaret's gone totally
offline. She ran to the Revelation Spire with a dartgun. I think she's
going to make some kind of last stand up there. So with Natch gone
and Margaret out of the picture, I guess it's up to me."

The engineer's face turned white. "Jara, there are Council officers out
there. Thousands of 'em."

"I don't care. I'm not just going to sit here and do nothing."

"Before they let you set foot on that stage, they'll stick you with
black code darts like a pincushion."

"Then they'll have to do it in front of a billion people."

Horvil's face took on a look of panic. His eyes tilted upwards as if
beseeching the Father of Bio/Logics for an infusion of sanity. "Listen to
me," he said, grabbing Jara's tiny hands and clutching them tightly
within his own. "We can delay the presentation. Nothing says we have
to do ours before the Patel Brothers do theirs. We can just lay low and
do the whole show some other time."

"Are you completely deranged? If we put this off, the Patel
Brothers will eat us for lunch. They'll pounce on us, and we'll have to
spend the next month digging ourselves out."

"So what? Is it really worth it, Jara? Maybe Margaret's right. Just
let it go."

"Horvil, these are our lives we're talking about here. This is our
business. Don't you care about the fiefcorp and MultiReal and-and
everything we've worked for in the past five years?"

"No."

Jara blanched, momentarily struck dumb. "No?"

The engineer's face blossomed into a shy smile completely devoid
of irony. "All I care about is not losing you."

Jara sat stunned, unsure what to say. Was he trying to put her off
her guard? Or maybe this had something to do with their unspoken
rivalry for Natch's favor? Certainly the big lummox couldn't be sincere. In the three years she had known him, Horvil had barely uttered
a single word that wasn't laced with sarcasm. Jara sighed. Why was it
that as soon as she found her own moment of mental clarity, everything
else had to slide out of focus?