Multireal (55 page)

There was some shoving, but most people knew better than to get
in the way of a bellowing mammoth like Horvil. Jara collided with a
young Islander running in the opposite direction, leading the analyst
to wonder if those connectible collars were even working in the middle
of all this. Was the infoquake affecting the Islanders too? The engineer
yanked the young man to his feet and gently thrust him aside. We're
going to get through this, thought Jara. And without MultiReal.

The curving hallways of the Tul Jabbor Complex were interminable,
but Horvil wasn't heading to the front entrance. After a few more minutes in the fray, he led them to a small meeting room in a relatively
deserted alcove. Five burly men in purple robes awaited them there.
They were armed to the teeth and festooned with the Creed Elan regalia.

"Come on!" bellowed the man in the lead. "Let's go!"

There was no time to think. A door at the far end of the room swung
open, and the two fiefcorpers followed the guards into a courtyard where
a red Vulture hoverbird idled half a meter off the ground. Within seconds the guards had half assisted, half tossed them through the hoverbird doors, and the Vulture was making a steep arc up into the blue.

Jara flopped to the floor and would have slid all the way down the
center aisle but for a hand that lashed out and gripped her ankle.
"Gotcha, Queen Jara," said Robby Robby, beaming like an idiot.

Seconds later, she and Horvil had managed to crawl to the hoverbird's upholstered passenger seats and strap themselves in. A quick
glance around the cabin revealed the bird's other occupants: Serr Vigal,
Benyamin, Merri, and Robby Robby, along with a pilot and the guards
who had ushered them in here.

"I don't suppose," sighed Jara heavily, "that anybody's seen Natch."

Blank stares echoed from the rest of the hoverbird's occupants, and
Jara knew then that nobody else had even thought to look.

The analyst smiled wanly and shrugged her shoulders. Horvil gave
her a wink from his seat across the aisle. Jara turned to one of the gruff
Elanners and stuttered out a tired "thank you."

"Don't thank me," muttered the guard, wiping the barrel of his handheld disruptor before sheathing it. "I'm just doing my job. Thank her."

Jara followed the man's hitched thumb over his shoulder and was
shocked to see a familiar figure who had been hidden from view in the
seat next to the pilot. "Berilla?"

The matriarch's gaze was fixed out the opposite window, where the
tumult was still visible but growing more distant with each passing
second. The confusion of the Tul Jabbor Complex began to seem like
a natural occurrence the higher they climbed: warring ant tribes
scrambling for turf. Melbourne itself metamorphosed from a place of
fiercely clashing agendas to an orderly grid of unmoving buildings.

Berilla pursed her lips as if she had just slurped on a particularly tart
lime. "What has that man gotten you all into this time?" she grumbled.

36

The turbulence of the Tul Jabbor Complex vanished the instant Natch
passed through the doors of the hoverbird. The Council officers, the
whizzing darts, the fleeing bystanders, Petrucio Patel: all gone.

Natch flopped onto a thin carpet of leaves and skidded to a halt
against a particularly scabby tree. He could feel the cogs of his mind
catch on a small and intractable stone. This place, this garden with its
motley assortment of plants and trees that could have been carelessly
flung from a barrel of random seeds: how did he get here? And where
had he seen this place before?

The entrepreneur crawled in the dirt, parted a curtain of grapevine,
and saw a patio of hand-crafted stone. A carefully stuccoed building lay
two meters ahead, with plenty of benches and brick abutments to sit on.
Insects both large and small danced a tarantella around the latticework.

A hand reached down and took ahold of Natch's. The skin was
deep mahogany, the color of furniture. "You all right, Natch?"

"I'm fine," grunted the entrepreneur. He let the man tug him to
his feet, and found himself face-to-face with Pierre Loget.

Loget was sanguine to the point of absurdity. His cowled black
robe was definitely the same type Natch had seen that day in the alleyways of Shenandoah. Up close, he discovered that what he had taken
for red Chinese lettering was not actually lettering at all, but a geometric pattern with a vaguely Arabic motif.

And the man himself? Well, the man was Pierre Loget: effeminate,
inward-facing, thoroughly nonthreatening.

It was almost too much to contemplate. Pierre Loget had arranged a
strike force to pump him full of black code? Natch couldn't possibly
see how Loget fit into the weave of current events. Yes, they were competitors on the Primo's rankings, and to compete on Primo's assumed some amount of rancor by definition. But Loget had always seemed
aloof from the fray, a hermetically sealed individual. Natch had only
spoken to the man a few times in his life, and each encounter had
blurred into the everyday administrative bustle of fiefcorpdom. A
meeting, a seminar, a dinner party Jara had dragged him to once.

Natch wasn't sure if he should feel angry or relieved. "What are
you doing here?" he said. "How did you know where to find me?"

Loget's laughter fluttered through the SeeNaRee, pigeonlike.
"With all the publicity surrounding that Prime Committee hearing, I
suspect everyone in the solar system knew where to find you."

"And the black code? What the fuck was that about?"

The programmer put a delicate hand on Natch's shoulder. "You
should ask the bodhisattva," he said simply.

"The-what?"

"Natch has been hit," said a voice behind him. "Weren't you
paying attention back there, Loget?" Natch could feel a shiver emanate
from someplace deep in his gut and quickly work its way to his
shoulder blades. He knew that voice almost as well as he knew his own.

The bodhisattva of Creed Thassel. Brone.

Suddenly the pebble lodged in Natch's mental gearworks sprang
free. Natch was correct; he had been in this place before. It was the
garden at the Proud Eagle hive where he and Brone had spent most of
their childhood. He had not utterly lost control of his faculties and
plunged into madness after all. He had jumped onto a hoverbird, and
that hoverbird had been outfitted with SeeNaRee capabilities.

Natch tried to imagine the exorbitant sum of money it would take
to accomplish such a thing. To install SeeNaRee on a hoverbird? And
then to track down video of the Proud Eagle hive and go through the
laborious process of SeeNaRizing it? Why?

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, all 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, dutifully 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 analysis.

"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 wall there. "Answer me!" Natch yelled. "What the fuck 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 all 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.
"Tell me what you see."

The entrepreneur turned his head and saw that the SeeNaRee had
evaporated, leaving only the dull 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 all around. Theirs was not the only vehicle in the sky,
but all of the distant craft appeared to be minding their own business.
"Nobody," he said.

"Yes," replied the bodhisattva in that maddeningly supercilious
tone of his. "And do you know why nobody 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. All 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 called amusement. "We'll 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.