Multireal (23 page)

Robby's sentence was sliced off abruptly in midsyllable. But it
wasn't just Robby-all of Natch's ConfidentialWhisper threads with
his employees had been cut. He turned to the window, wondering if
there was some kind of malfunction with the hoverbird, and discovered
his connection to the MindSpace workbench in Shenandoah was gone
too. In place of the yellow jacket was a Defense and Wellness Council
hoverbird matching their course. Natch looked out the other window
to find a second vehicle bracketing him in.

Raw and bloody anger. "What the fuck is going on?" he barked at
the pilot.

The woman seemed unconcerned. She rapped her knuckles against
the side of the hoverbird. "Don't bother trying to access the Data Sea,"
she said. "Nothing's getting through this hull unless we want it to get
through."

"Where are you taking me?"

"The Twin Cities," she said, turning back to the weather reports
and traffic chatter on the window. "Might as well get some sleep while
you can. You're not going anywhere."

16

Natch didn't sleep for an instant.

The Council could have taken him just about anywhere in human
space. He was powerless to stop them. Rumor posited the existence of
hundreds of anonymous government compounds far from the civilized
world that would be ideal places for interrogation and coercion.

So when the pilot began a familiar flight pattern toward the foggy
lowlands of the Twin Cities, Natch couldn't help but expel a breath of
relief. The Kordez Thassel Complex below was many thingslibertarian gathering place, corporate Mecca, architectural perditionbut it certainly was not a Defense and Wellness Council stronghold.
The Thasselians prided themselves on running a facility that was open
and anonymous to all. This meant that Len Borda's lackeys had to go
through the mundane process of filing a room request and shelling out
a deposit, like the rest of the ants Natch could see milling around
below. Somehow that comforted him.

Then Natch was ambushed by a brutal thought. Why wouldn't the
Council take him to one of those secretive compounds, unless they had
nothing to fear from him?

Natch thought it best to project an image of confidence. "You
know the minute I leave this hoverbird, I'm going to summon John
Ridglee and Sen Sivv Sor," he announced.

"Save your bandwidth," replied the pilot, yawning. "They've
already been summoned. In two hours, this place is going to be
crawling with drudges."

Natch let her finish her landing sequence in silence. At least he
could console himself that the pilot was not setting down at the
normal hoverbird dock across the creek, but at a more exclusive
parking space in the rear of the building.

He expected to see an intimidating squad of armed Council officers
when the hoverbird hatch opened. Instead, there stood a woman with
wild braids of ebony hair. Natch felt a shock of cognitive dissonance as
he recognized the face of Len Borda's chief solicitor, a face that should
rightly be hugging the margins of some gossip column. The Blade.
Standing behind her was a blond mercenary with the shoulders of an
ogre and the demeanor to match.

"Towards Perfection," said Rey Gonerev, bowing smartly. "On
behalf of High Executive Len B-"

Natch cut her off. "Jara," he said. "Where the fuck is Jara?"

Gonerev fluttered her eyelids rapidly. How long had it been since
anyone had treated her like a petty obstacle? "She's inside with the rest
of the fiefcorp," said the Blade, after a moment's hesitation.

"Good," said the entrepreneur. "Now move." The solicitor barely
managed to scoot out of the way before Natch came barreling past.

Gonerev and the other Council officer struggled to keep up as he
strode toward the closest door of the Thassel Complex. I hate this place,
thought Natch as he walked through the doors and took in the deliberately crooked floors and the unevenly cut stone walls. He headed for
a door at the far end of the hallway that was being guarded by a
handful of men in white robes and yellow stars. Nobody made any
move to correct his course.

Natch tried to think of some valiant act that could get him out of
this predicament. Should he run? Should he call the Council's bluff and
contact the drudges? But every path led to the same endpoint: he
needed to see Jara. He needed to know what was going on. Indeed, as
much as it chagrined him, Natch knew his best option at this point
was to proceed as Rey Gonerev directed.

It was a relatively deserted wing of the complex, but still
swarming with self-important businesspeople buzzing from meeting
to meeting. One of the insects did not see him coming-a Vault
employee, if the double balanced pyramids on his belt were any indi cation. Natch collided with the man, sending the two of them reeling
in opposite directions. Enraged at everything and nothing at once, the
fiefcorp master thrust his palms forward and shoved the bureaucrat flat
onto his back. When the universe pushes me, I push back!

And then Natch was standing, immobilized, trying to calibrate a
cerebral compass that was spinning wildly out of control. He lost sight
of his whereabouts for a few seconds and felt himself slip into an extradi-
mensional space between moments. The blankness of multivoid, the
empty husk of the OCHRE probe in his apartment the other day.

The nothingness at the center of the universe.

Suddenly Natch caught sight of the Vault official sprawled on the
floor, frozen as if caught in a basilisk's stare, and something inside him
curdled. The blond mercenary was helping the man to his feet with the
assistance of another Council officer, while Gonerev was staring at
Natch with surprise and perhaps a little trepidation. He didn't stick
around to apologize.

The white-robed men and women parted to let him through to the
door. Natch paused, remembering the time he had come to the Thassel
Complex to meet with his old hivemate Brone. The meeting had
begun with an electrical shock from the door handle, followed by
Brone's ghoulish laughter. Could this entire thing be a setup? Natch
was fairly certain that the Council hoverbirds outside were real Council
hoverbirds, and the Council officers here were real Council officers. But
this facility was owned and operated by Creed Thassel, the creed Brone
had purchased with his riches. The organization's membership rolls
were secret. Who was to say these people couldn't be Council officers
and Thasselian devotees?

He opened the door and walked inside.

Natch found himself standing on a stone slab atop a mist-shrouded
alp, the Mount Olympus of some long-dead cultural imagination. The
SeeNaRee was littered with broken columns and armless stone
maidens that might once have held up the ceiling. Above him, impos sibly muscular clouds were girding for battle against an otherwise gorgeous blue sky.

Sitting in the midst of the slab was an ordinary rectangular conference table. Benyamin, Jara, Horvil, Merri, and Serr Vigal lined the
sides of the table looking alternately scared and defiant. There was no
sign of Quell. Sitting at the head of the table was Lieutenant Executive
Magan Kai Lee, flanked by a dozen Council guards with stony faces.

The fiefcorp master turned to Jara. "So I leave you alone for a
couple of days, and you go to the Council?" cried Natch. "What were
you thinking?"

Jara writhed uncomfortably in her seat for a few seconds, refusing
to meet the entrepreneur's gaze. Her face reflected a troubled and selfloathing soul. "Fuck you," she growled. A miserable-looking Merri put
her hand on Jara's shoulder, and the analyst fell back into an uneasy
silence.

Magan's face was the very archetype of calm. He was wearing his
formal uniform, complete with the gray smock that was the sign of his
office. "Have a seat," he said on seeing the fiefcorp master. "Ridgello,
make sure he doesn't leave my sight until this is finished." The fairhaired barbarian who had accompanied the Blade pulled out a chair at
the table's foot and extended his hand in Natch's direction. Four of the
officers behind Magan marched across the stone and made a confining
semicircle around the chair.

Natch bottled up his rage and took a seat in the chair Ridgello had
proffered him.

Magan Kai Lee sat up straight and folded his hands together calmly
on the table. "Four weeks ago today, this company made a promise to
the Defense and Wellness Council," he began, his voice matter-of-fact.
"You promised High Executive Borda access to MultiReal in exchange
for protection at your sales demo. The Council held up its end of the
bargain. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp did not."

Natch found the lieutenant's declaration amusing. "So what are you going to do, arrest all of us? Throw us in your orbital prisons? Go
right ahead, we're unarmed. Have fun explaining it to the drudges.
Len Borda can't be that contemptuous of public opinion-especially
now that the libertarians run the Congress of L-PRACGs."

"I have no intention of arresting you," said Magan.

"So why go after my apprentices' business licenses? Do you really
think we care what the Meme Cooperative does to us? You might have
slowed us down a little, but you aren't any closer to getting access to
MultiReal."

Magan let out an almost-imperceptible sigh, as if Natch were
hardly worth the effort of a response. "Go ahead, Rey," he said. "Let's
just get this over with."

The Blade strode out from behind the fiefcorp master; Natch had
forgotten that she was even back there. He felt an internal ping
informing him that he had received a message of high importance.
"What's this?" he sneered.

"That," said Gonerev, "is the brief my office filed yesterday
charging you with a hundred and twenty violations of Meme Cooperative bylaws."

Natch opened the document and tried to skim its murky surface,
but it was clouded with administrative doublespeak and he could
make no sense of it. He fired up the Ripley Group's DeLegalese 235
and waited a few seconds for the program to filter out the unnecessary
clauses and redundancies.

But Gonerev had already begun delivering a precis of her own as
she strode around the edge of the stone slab like a prosecutor grandstanding before a particularly susceptible jury. "Failure to pay the
Prime Committee tax to fund diss access to Dr. Plugenpatch," she
announced. "Breach of contract against three different channeling
firms in 356 and 357 ... False advertising of a glare-reduction program marketed to three thousand different L-PRACGs in 358 ...
Failure to file proper work permits in Omaha ..." The litany of Natch's sins both great and small continued for several minutes, filling
the SeeNaRee with a haze of regulatory vocabulary.

Natch let out a loud and ostentatious yawn. He didn't doubt that
he was guilty of these complaints, and dozens more besides, but not
even a niggling entity like the Meme Cooperative would waste its time
on such trivia. The entrepreneur waved his hand and broadcast the
document in large block capitals across the deep blue sky for all to
read. "Please don't tell me you dragged us out here for this," he said.
"I've been in front of the Cooperative arbitration boards a million
times for shit like this. They never do anything."

"Oh, but they have this time." Rey Gonerev's voice was one big
gloat as she leaned over the table next to Jara and placed her hands flat
on the table. "Not only has the Meme Cooperative filed charges against
you, but they've voted to suspend your license to operate a fiefcorp."

"Here," said the lieutenant executive, giving the slightest of nods,
is the notification you will be receiving from the Cooperative any
moment now."

The entrepreneur opened Magan's message in private this timethough judging by the worried frowns percolating from the fiefcorpers'
faces, they had all received copies anyway.

In accordance with the bylaws and regulations of the MEME COOPERATIVE, incorporated in Year 177 of the Reawakening and given jurisdiction
by the collective fiefcorps and memecorps to govern intra-business affairs,
and which has been recognized as a lawful entity and given license by the
PRIME COMMITTEE and the CONGRESS OF L-PRACGS, as ofTuesday,
the 3rd of January in the 360thYear of the Reawakening, this body hereby
suspends the business license for NATCH of the SURINA/NATCH
MULTIREAL FIEFCORP for a period of no less than 30 days, pending
review by the Cooperative's executive board, at which point further
action may be undertaken.