Multireal (67 page)

"I didn't come here to discuss Marcus Surina," said the lieutenant,
shattering the high executive's moment of reflection. "I came because
I have something to show you."

"What?" Borda scowled.

Magan gestured at the side of the cabin. The water-worn planks of
the SeeNaRee wall dissolved to reveal one of several office windows.
During the evenings, these windows provided Borda a peerless view of
the cloud-covered globe he had taken an oath to protect. The high
executive folded his arms across his chest and retreated back to the
porthole as his lieutenant gave the window a silent command.

The prerecorded footage that appeared on the screen might have
been taken at any of a hundred anonymous outposts lurking on the
edge of Pharisee Territory. The fort was dome-shaped and sandcolored, a camouflaged wart that kept watch on the enemies of civilization. Borda sent a quick ping to the Data Sea and verified that the
rivers flowing in the background were indeed the White Nile and the Blue Nile. Which made the rubble-strewn city in the distance Khartoum-or what remained of it.

Corpses lay sprawled around the outpost. Council officers, for the
most part, with a few rustically garbed Pharisees thrown into the mix.
An ambush.

"Where did you find this?" demanded the high executive.

"You'll see it come across the transom shortly," said Magan. "My
officers stumbled across it first, that's all. We believe that the Pharisees
made at least a dozen such attacks this morning."

The anonymous Council soldier whose eyes were recording the
video stepped closer to the carnage and focused on the wheezing body
of an officer who looked hardly a day over nineteen. A knife with a
wicked serrated edge had made rough work of the boy's face, while
black code did the rest. OCHREs could do little here but buy him
some time and nullify the pain. Several triage teams were working this
side of the battlefield, but whether they would make it back to this soldier in time was unclear.

Hot fury pulsed through the vein in Borda's forehead as the videographer walked slowly along the line of the fallen. Not only had these
savages dared to openly attack a Council outpost, but the timing suggested that the Pharisees had done so under cover of the last major
infoquake. The videographer approached one of the enemy corpses and
used the tip of his boot to turn the woman over on her back. The
woman's face was obscured by blood, but beneath her scraggly black
hair a glint of copper was visible. The soldier reached down and
plucked a small, coin-shaped object off the dead woman's lapel.

"What's that?" snapped Len Borda, hesitant to reveal his ignorance
but also afraid of missing something crucial.

"They allow the unconnectibles to interact with the Data Sea,"
replied Magan.

"A connectible collar without the connectible collar," grumbled Borda.

He was about to ask Magan who this woman was to have engi neered something so clever, when another Council officer stepped up
to the videographer with an upside-down field soldier's helmet in his
hand. There were perhaps two dozen of the connectible coins piled
there, along with a single copper collar.

"Islanders," said the high executive.

So it appeared that the Islanders and the Pharisees had temporarily
put aside their differences for a common goal. And why wouldn't they?
The Defense and Wellness Council was being rocked by internal strife,
the centralized government was suffering from labor unrest, and all of
connectible society was reeling from the infoquakes. It was the perfect
storm both groups had been awaiting for years.

But how had the Islanders managed to slip troops into Pharisee
Territory without the Council noticing? Borda pondered the question
silently for a moment until his gaze drifted off to the river. Of course:
underwater. From the Pacific Islands along the equator ... with a
detour provided by friendly dissidents in Andra Pradesh ... down
through the deserted bubble colonies on the base of the Arabian Sea,
which had once been the height of luxury for vacationing Indians ...
and then to Khartoum. Borda frowned. Such tactics displayed a degree
of sophistication unheard of in this part of the world. He supposed
there must be plenty of information on submarine warfare in the
Council archives, but no one had practiced it in modern times.

Magan remained seated in his chair, impossibly unemotional. "It
gets worse," he said. "We suspect the Islanders are getting logistical
support from the libertarians. Maybe even black code."

Borda's head snapped around. "Khann Frejohr?"

Lee didn't answer. Instead, he waved his hand at the window and
summoned another scene just as the anonymous Council officer with the
grisly face emitted one last gurgle and succumbed to the Null Current.

This new video clip showed a factory assembly line-a real assembly
line, not a throng of programmers swaying to their detestable Jamm music.
Dozens of connectible coins were rolling off a series of mechanized conveyor belts. The group eagerly pawing through the pile of coins included several
Islanders, a pair of what looked like Lunar tycoons-and a man with the
symbol of the rising sun embroidered on his robe. Borda had seen that
infernal logo too many times during the recent labor troubles to forget
who it belonged to: Creed Libertas. Speaker Frejohr's puppets.

"Rey Gonerev's not sure if Frejohr is involved in this or not," added
Magan Kai Lee. "But whoever they are, they're setting up distribution
channels throughout the Islands. Which means-"

"I know what it means," snapped the high executive. It meant, in a
best-case scenario, that the Islanders were preparing a massive act of
civil disobedience by refusing to wear the standard connectible collars.
Worst case, it could be the sign of a more sophisticated espionage operation or the prelude to another large-scale rebellion.

He had seen enough. Incensed, Len Borda strode across the cabin
in five long strides and threw open the door to the foredeck. He was
immediately assaulted by the rage of the SeeNaRee storm, which
lashed out at him like a demon with a whip of hailstones. There was a
dark cloud out there with a terrible face at its center, howling Borda's
name. But the high executive refused to turn away. He planted his feet
firmly on the deck and stood his ground.

He knew that face. He had seen it forty-seven years ago, staring up
at him with deathless hatred even then. The body it belonged to had
been little more than a charred lump, with lungs still clinging to a
hoarse parody of breath through the stubbornness of OCHREs alone.
As he watched, the man had slid into a long, incoherent monologue of
babbles and moans, punctuated by the occasional scream. Please! Please,
let me ... let me see my daughter one last time.... Anything! I'll give you
... anything ... all the money in the world, please.... And then, in one
last moment of lucidity, the ruined man had turned his eyes to the soldier recording the video-through the soldier, to the high executive he
must have known would be watching. And he had cursed Len Borda.

But Marcus Surina hadn't cursed Borda to die. He'd cursed him to live. May you see many more decades, Surina had said, that stilted manner
of his persisting to the very end. May you live long enough to see exactly
what you've done to the world.

And Len Borda did. No sane person believed in curses, of course,
but Borda had survived longer than any other high executive in the
history of the Council. For decades, Borda thought he had the last
laugh. He survived the Economic Plunge of the 310s that was the
direct result of his actions against the TeleCo board. More than survived, he fixed it, wielding the power of the free market as both
hammer and nails. Then came many years of economic prosperity that
rivaled even the Great Boom he had witnessed in his youth. During
those heady times, entire months would go by when Borda didn't feel
the need to replay that video, to stare into the horrid, defiant face of
his enemy, the man who would not yield.

But one of the planks in Borda's economic recovery was Margaret
Surina, daughter of the man who had thwarted him. Why had he
funded the resurgence of the Surinas when he could have let the family
languish into obscurity? Why had he paid for Margaret to develop
MultiReal? Yes, she had been useful at the time-but was it also an
attempt to appease the ghost that tormented him?

May you live long enough to see exactly what you've done to the world, he
had said. It was hardly an exaggeration to state that everything happening today was a direct result of Borda's actions. Everything: the libertarian unrest, Magan's rebellion, the Pharisee and Islander attacks, the
debacle at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the deranged fiefcorp master hiding
somewhere in the wild with an apocalyptic weapon in his hands.

Was the curse of Marcus Surina claiming its retribution?

Borda opened his eyes. Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee had
come to stand beside him when he was not paying attention. He too
had his feet planted firmly on the ship's deck, despite the maelstrom.
His hands were clasped behind his back and his expression was calm,
even thoughtful.

"This is no time for a government in conflict," said Magan. "This
is no time for a divided Defense and Wellness Council. Abide by the
agreements we made. You know it's the right thing to do. Step down
from the high executive's seat while you still can."

Len Borda turned back to face the clouds, to that burned and
twisted visage still staring at him from beyond the grave.

You think you've won? he howled at the shade of Marcus Surina. You
think I've reached the breaking point? You underestimated me once, and now
you're making the same mistake again. There will be no bargains. There will
be no accommodations. I swear that I'll live to see MultiReal destroyed or under
the Council's control. I won't bow down to you. Not now, not ever.

The high executive closed his eyes again and drew himself up to
his full height, which was considerable. He inhaled the mist and rain
for a moment and tried to clear his head.

"Magan Kai Lee," said Borda, "I hereby relieve you of your duties
as an officer of the Defense and Wellness Council. You and your subordinates will be given twenty-four hours to surrender to the authorities
and submit to the judgment of the Prime Committee on the charge of
treason. Should you fail to turn yourself in, you will be declared a
traitor and pursued with all the strength and vigor of the centralized
government. Do I make myself clear?"

He waited a full ten seconds before opening his eyes, but Magan
Kai Lee was gone.

High Executive Len Borda walked slowly back into his cabin and
shut the door behind him. Then he lowered himself gingerly into his
chair and glowered at his hands for a few moments. He yelled for the
first mate. A SeeNaRee sailor stepped through the cabin door, saluted
crisply, and informed Borda that the first mate had been lost overboard
during the last sortie with the French.

Borda nodded and ordered the sailor to set a new course. Due east,
full speed ahead.

44

There was some talk about arriving separately at the fiefcorp meeting
to allay suspicions, but Jara and Horvil both nixed it in the end. As
Horvil succinctly summed up the issue: "Who the fuck cares?"

They showed up at the Surina Enterprise Facility at five minutes
before ten. Jara stepped through the meeting room door and was surprised to find the place devoid of SeeNaRee. She had a moment of whiteknuckled panic. Had the infoquakes undermined so much of the computational infrastructure that even SeeNaRee wasn't safe? Then the analyst
took a closer look and realized that this unimaginative committeedesigned conference room was SeeNaRee. Even worse, since Jara had been
the first one in the door, it was her mood that had summoned it.

Vigal, Merri, and Benyamin stumbled in over the next fifteen minutes, glum as witnesses to an execution. Jara called the meeting to
order.