Infoquake (30 page)

Natch traced the message signature to a standard administrative
account at Creed Thassel. He barely even paused before replying in the
affirmative.

Natch lobbed an InfoGather request onto the Data Sea while flipping through his wardrobe for an appropriate suit, then had the results
read aloud to him while he dressed.

The creed had been founded almost a hundred years ago by Kordez
Thassel, a libertarian philosopher and financier whose only qualification to lead a popular movement was that he had failed at everything
else. Somehow, his teachings about the virtues of selfishness had earned
him a following in the new breed of fiefcorp power brokers. Then he
disappeared from view and left public relations in the hands of anonymous creed spin doctors. For years, Creed Thassel worked diligently to
protect its mysteries, going so far as to swear its devotees to secrecy and
refusing all but the most cursory participation in the Creeds Coalition.
Whispers spoke of blood rites, oaths of fealty, and a mythical master
program built by renegade coders.

And then the young drudge Sen Sivv Sor published the expose that
made his reputation. Sor's undercover reporting revealed that the blood
rites were nothing but parlor tricks, the oaths of fealty were mere confidence schemes, and the mythical master program did not exist. Thasselian membership dwindled, but the core devotees remained. Soon
enough, everyone forgot about the scandal, and Creed Thassel abandoned its hokey mystic aura for a more prosaic philosophy of individualism. Membership rolls remained secret, but few cared to pry anymore.

A creed of fools, thought Natch as he walked the early-morning
streets of Shenandoah, bound for the hoverbird terminals. But fools who
have no love for Creed Surina or the Council. Vigal's words from the previous day rang in his ears: I fear that Margaret has picked you for this enterprise because she thinks she can manipulate you. Natch's blood curdled at
the thought of being someone's pawn, and he felt like throttling his guardian for even suggesting it. Nevertheless, he knew it couldn't hurt
to have a third party on his side.

The Thasselians' invitation arrived too late for Natch to take the tube,
his preferred mode of travel. So instead, he hopped aboard one of the
hundreds of hoverbirds that ferried passengers across the continent
every hour. His flight from Shenandoah to the Twin Cities was smooth
and without incident.

Natch found the Kordez Thassel Complex to be one of the ugliest
human constructions he had ever seen. A series of squat, functional
buildings skulking among the lowlands, half-hidden in the chill
November mist. He followed a narrow bridge from the hoverbird terminal over the Complex's surrounding moat and into the Thasselian
headquarters. The inside was no better. Hallways stood at odd angles
to one another amidst sloping ceilings and crooked doorways; Natch
doubted there was a pair of perpendicular lines anywhere in the place.
He knew very little about architecture, but he imagined it took a lot
of money and patience to construct such deliberate lopsidedness.

Even at this early hour, hundreds of businesspeople rushed through
the hallways with stiff, purposeful gaits. Two burly guards pointed
Natch through the labyrinth of corridors and conference rooms to his
appointed meeting spot. He found himself facing a nondescript door,
the old-fashioned kind you needed to physically pull open. He hesitated for a moment and eyed the mahogany slab of door with suspicion. Natch searched his feelings, yet he could find no reason for his
unease. He reached for the doorknob.

As soon as the brass tongue slipped free of its sheath, the knob
erupted with a jolt of static electricity. Natch squealed in surprise and
snatched his hand away. He quickly called up a grounding program to
neutralize the charge, but the damage was done. The fingertips of his left hand would be sore for days.

A hollow laugh echoed inside the room. "You're getting sloppy,
Natch!" said a tired voice in a tone reminiscent of an aging diplomat
or a patrician. "I could never catch you with that trick back in the old
days. Horvil was always much easier to fool. But who says we don't
learn from our mistakes?"

Natch shivered involuntarily at the sound of the voice that had
been mocking his dreams for years. The voice that embodied his worst
fears and deepest shames.

Brone.

He sat on a large thronelike chair in the center of a cavernous room.
The room itself was a gigantic hollowed-out diamond of exceptional
clarity and brilliance. On the table in front of his chair sat a Spartan
breakfast of crackers and crusty bleu cheese.

More SeeNaRee, Natch moaned to himself. Did I miss a trend? Is
everyone conducting business in these gaudy fantasy worlds nowadays?

Brone had changed significantly since Natch had last seen him,
bundled in the back of that Falcon four-seater in bloody rags. His aura
of youthful entitlement was gone. He had gained a considerable
amount of weight, but did not carry it in the dignified manner of a
Horvil or a Merri, and the handsome face that once inspired sighs from
female hivemates was mangled beyond repair. Natch traced a long scar
from his chin to his forehead, passing straight through the center of his
right eye. The eye gleamed with the sickly emerald of a prosthesis.

"You like my face, I take it?" said Brone, his voice devoid of earthly
emotion. "I'll bet you didn't even know the bear did that to me. He
would have had the whole head for breakfast, but luckily I was able to
satisfy him with a light snack." Brone held up his right arm, and
Natch gasped in spite of himself. The flesh came to an abrupt end just
below the elbow, where it merged with a pale synthetic hand and
forearm.

"Oh, don't feel too sorry for me, Natch," he said, sneering at the
look of discomfort on the fiefcorp master's face. "These imitation limbs
work quite well. Look!" Brone painstakingly unclenched his prosthetic
fingers and reached for the cheese slicer. The utensil did a clumsy dance
in his hand but finally went clattering to the floor. By instinct, Natch
reached down to pick it up, and fell flat on his face when his fingers
passed straight through the metal. SeeNaRee. Brone let out a quiet snort and offered his old rival a hand up-the artificial hand. Natch
gripped the slick, rubbery limb and pulled himself to his feet. Contrary to the act he had put on seconds ago, Brone actually seemed to be
quite nimble with his prosthesis.

All at once, the purpose of Natch's visit rushed back to him: Margaret Surina, the Phoenix Project, investment capital. He needed to
keep his focus. "I was invited to breakfast by the Bodhisattva of Creed
Thassel," said Natch between clenched teeth.

Brone paid Natch no mind; he seemed to be participating in an
entirely different conversation. "I suppose you're asking yourself, What
about cosmetic surgery? Organ harvesting? Flesh-repairing OCHREs?" He
leaned back and brought the fingers of his hands together in front of
his face, like a spider contemplating its next meal. The glint of
reflected diamond was visible in his teeth. "Certainly science has progressed farther than this."

"I came to discuss-"

"Figaro Fi," said Brone in a commanding voice, cutting Natch off
in mid-sentence. "You remember the fat little capitalman Figaro Fi?
This whole cripple routine was Figaro's idea. Show off your scars, my boy,
he said. Play up your handicaps. Hold out your stump to gain their sympathy,
then hold out your good hand to take their money." As he spoke, Brone
hunched over in a cruelly effective parody of the little man. Longrepressed memories of the night before initiation came flooding back
to Natch, and he nearly retched in disgust.

"Perhaps it was a despicable thing to do," continued Brone, "but
it worked! Figaro brought me everywhere in those miserable years after
the initiation. He would stand me up in these little auditoriums with
a group of capitalmen, put a bio/logic programming bar in my hand,
and cheer me on like a monkey while I performed tricks in MindSpace.
Figaro's programming cripple, victim of the Shortest Initiation! Who
could withhold money from such a sad and noble soul?

"And Figaro was right! How amazingly simple it is-all you have to do is admit that the world has defeated you, and the money will
come pouring in. It's an intoxicating feeling. And if you make the
right connections, if you stroke enough egos, if you convince enough
of those shallow, soulless capitalmen that their gifts have soothed your
pain-why, you win the game. The capitalmen begin throwing you
private contracts. You can work outside the auspices of the Meme
Cooperative, where you don't have to worry about the constraints of
Dr. Plugenpatch. You can toss that Primo's bio/logic investment guide
in the dungheap where it belongs!"

Brone began rubbing his chin in far-away contemplation, and
Natch had to use every ounce of his willpower not to wrap his hands
around his throat and begin squeezing as hard as he could. He looked
around for something to sit on, and found nothing but diamond outcroppings that were almost certainly illusions.

"I can see you're restless," said Brone, turning to Natch as if
noticing him for the first time. He leaned back in the gargantuan chair
and laid his arms on the throne, like a withered and haunted king.
"You want to sit, you want to stand, you want to move, you want to
stay still-it's been like this your whole life, hasn't it?

"Well, let me tell you, Natch, I know where you're heading, and
I've been there. There's a whole economy up in that rarefied air that the
drudges know nothing about. And I made riches up there. Riches! You
fantasize about living in a lunar estate some day? I own one, Natch, and
it's worth every bloody credit. Sunrises over the lip of Tycho while you
watch and sip chaff in a gravity-controlled dome ... servants at your
beck and call ... pretty young gardeners pruning all those twisted
moon plants. There's nothing like it.

"But the lunar estate grows tiresome after a while. So do the sycophants and the bootlickers. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true. I
bought myself the gaudiest estate I could, and the private hoverbird
service, and the baubles and jewels and gadgets. And then I asked
myself: Now what?

"So I went searching again.

"First, I went to the medical specialists. Hack the body, and the mind
will follow-isn't that what Sheldon Surina said? But can you believe
what a superstitious world we live in, Natch? The Autonomous Revolt
was hundreds of years ago-and yet the Prime Committee still won't
allow a simple tank-grown limb! The only place for human flesh is on the
human body, they say." His voice rumbled up to a dangerous level, as if
he were playing to the rafters in some imaginary amphitheater.

"So they gave me the next best thing." And then, as Natch looked
on in horror, Brone unsnapped his fake arm and thrust it onto the
table, where it landed on the bleu cheese with a sickening thwup. A
circle of plastic prongs shone wetly on the end of Brone's stump, like
octopus teeth. "Completely self-contained, no nerves or blood
required: a miracle of engineering. You would be surprised to know
how quickly one can tweak it to work in MindSpace like a bio/logic
programming bar. And, of course, having an artificial limb gives one
certain ... advantages." When the fingers of the disembodied hand
began twitching of their own accord, Natch leapt back and nearly
sprawled on his face again. The fingers tore through the rind of the
cheese and performed a gooey dance, spackling the floor with bits of
white.

Natch felt sick. He recognized his own ruthless utilitarian tactics at
work. What was it that old Kordez Thassel had said? Do not let taboos
and social restrictions stop you from gaining advantage over your enemy.
OCHREs rushed to defuse the acid in his stomach, and Natch would
have supplemented their soothing effects with a bio/logic program if he
thought it would help. "I-I came here today," he stuttered, "to-"

Brone completely ignored him. "So the replacement arm and the
replacement eye were dead ends," he said with a shrug. "I knew as soon
as they were installed that I had been using my handicap as an escape.
It was an easy way to distract me from what I really wanted to do, from
the one thing that would make me happy.