Multireal (26 page)

"Everything locked down until then?" said Magan.

Natch had read something once about a special polymer the Council
used to keep forensic evidence in place. It was supposed to be only molecules thick and practically invisible, some kind of miracle coating that kept every hair and dust mote from drifting off. That would explain why
nobody was protesting Quell's handling of the body. "All locked down,"
confirmed Papizon, eyeing the Islander with suspicion.

Unsure what to do, the fiefcorp master took a seat next to the limbless Venus de Milo. Council officers fanned around the room with their
noses to the ground, looking for evidence, but what they were hoping
to find Natch didn't know. The Surina troops, meanwhile, had gathered near the window, where they were muttering to themselves.

Quell's tears continued unabated for several minutes, but despite
Papizon's obvious concern for the sanctity of the evidence, nobody
made any move to pry him away. Natch watched the Islander with
amazement. Ever since that first tour of the Surina compound several
weeks ago, he had known that Margaret and Quell were more than just
master and apprentice. But he had never expected a display like this.

Magan Kai Lee clasped his hands behind his back and stepped to
the window, where he confronted the enormity of Andra Pradesh laid
out before him. From where he was sitting, Natch could see the lieutenant executive's face reflected in the glass. His expression was aggressively neutral, a study in forced calm.

"Don't worry," he said quietly. "We'll find out who did this." It
was unclear who he was speaking to.

"Find out?" whispered Quell, raising his head slowly, dangerously.
"We don't need to find anything out. We already know who murdered
her." He gingerly laid the bodhisattva back down on the desk and got
to his feet. Natch noticed that the shock baton had not left his grip.
"Who had the most to gain by Margaret's death?" said Quell, voice
steadily rising. "Len Borda. The man who'll stop at nothing to get his
hands on MultiReal."

Lieutenant Executive Lee raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The
other government officials began to slowly back toward the Council
troops and their dartguns. Someone quickly escorted the serving
woman to the elevator and sent her on her way.

"Don't give me that look," said Quell. He was addressing Natch,
though Natch wasn't quite sure what look he was supposed to have
given. "Do you really think Borda would hesitate to murder a Surina?
Then you don't know your history." The Islander began swishing the
bar back and forth, like a buccaneer testing the tensile strength of his
blade. "Didn't you know? Len Borda killed Marcus Surina"-swish-
"because Marcus refused to let the Council take control of teleportation." Swish swish. "You think a ruptured fuel tank blew up his shuttle?
No." He came to a halt in front of Margaret's desk, brandishing the
crackling baton before him with both hands. "That was Council sabotage. It was fucking Len Borda. And now ... and now ..."

The Islander slipped into a pause as Magan turned from the
window to face him. Officers on both sides of the room were tensing
up, sliding fingers uneasily into the triggers of their guns. Electricity
from the baton flared up to the glass ceiling like a bolt of lightning in
reverse.

It happened in an instant.

One of the bureaucrats backed up and stumbled into a vase. The
vase shattered. A finger tensed, a muscle twitched, a Council dart came
whizzing across the room.

Quell charged.

Natch saw a blur of motion streak past him, knocking over the
Venus de Milo in the process. The entrepreneur reached out instinctively
to catch the hunk of stone before it hit the ground. He watched as the
sculpture passed through his virtual hands and landed on the Persian
rug with a thunk.

The Islander was quick, but not quick enough. Magan Kai Lee
dropped into a street fighter's crouch and lunged out of the way just as
Quell came rushing in. The lieutenant executive did a clumsy roll on
the ground and pulled himself up to his feet by the lip of an end table.

A canopy of dart fire covered the room. Natch ducked to the floor,
forgetting momentarily that he was here in multi and these darts could not hurt him. Council officers slid into textbook military formations,
while Surina troops huddled behind furniture with guerrilla instinct.

Quell and Magan Kai Lee were circling around each other in the
center of the room, where the furniture was not so dense. By all rights,
Magan should have been terrified. The Islander towered over him by
more than half a meter. But Natch took one look at the cool detachment in Magan's face and the ferocious desperation in Quell's, and he
knew this would not end well.

The rest of the guards quickly reached a detente. A handful of
troops from each side lay paralyzed and twitching on the ground with
needles protruding from their torsos. But the rest stood stock-still,
eyes riveted on the confrontation in progress. Papizon had one finger
suspended in the air, as if gesturing to some invisible third combatant,
while the unarmed bureaucrats had fled to the safety of the elevators.
Natch was on the floor behind the downed (yet intact) statue.

"Don't do it," said Magan. "It's not worth it."

"Worth it to me," roared Quell. And then he was in motion once
again.

Darts streaked across the room from the Council officers' gun barrels, heading straight for the Islander's chest. Natch gaped in astonishment as Quell made an elegant pirouette and swatted the darts aside
with two rapid swings of his truncheon. It looked as slick and effortless as a choreographed dance maneuver.

MultiReal.

For the second time in their brief acquaintance, Natch saw some
distant relative of fear and uncertainty behind the Council executive's
eyes. Magan scurried backward as fast as he could, tearing down pottery and knocking over chairs in an attempt to flee. Surina guards,
meanwhile, started methodically taking out the Council troops, who
were wasting their ammunition on the Islander. Poison needles littered
the floor. One ricocheted off the Islander's club and passed straight
through Natch's insubstantial forehead.

"Quell!" cried Natch, not sure if he was trying to encourage the
big man or dissuade him.

The Islander pounced with a yell and struck Magan full in the
chest with the baton. Sparks sparked through the air. The lieutenant
went flying back against the window, where his head thumped against
the glass. But Natch's cry must have penetrated the Islander's cloak of
rage, because he had pulled the blow at the last possible instant.

In spite of the blood trickling from his nose and the visible indenture in his chest, Magan Kai Lee clearly realized he should be dead
right now. "Fool," he croaked between ragged breaths, "don't you
realize I'm the only one standing between you and Borda?"

The Islander hesitated. His eyes swiveled back and forth from Magan
to the corpse of Margaret Surina, still lying on the desk where he had left
it. He seemed to reach some decision. His shoulders quivered, then
slackened. The shock baton slid from his fingers and hit the carpet.

And just at that moment, the elevator doors opened and two dozen
officers in white robes and yellow stars swept into the room. They
quickly formed a perimeter and relieved the remaining Surina officers
of their weapons. Natch caught a movement from the corner of his eye,
and whipped his head around to see a pair of military hoverbirds levitating right outside the window. He could only guess what their cannons were loaded with, but they were aimed right at him.

Magan Kai Lee slumped to the floor. He coughed, then spat blood.
"Invest your forces in ultimate sacrifice," he said in the timbre of command, motioning toward Quell. "Make sure you've covered all reasonable supply requisitions." The lieutenant executive was obviously
speaking in some kind of Defense and Wellness Council code, and he
didn't appear to be in any mood for translations.

Natch climbed shakily to his feet, trying his best to ignore all the
concentrated pandemonium in the room. The remaining Surina guards
were dragging their limp comrades one by one to the elevator under
the Council's watchful eyes. The officer named Papizon, meanwhile, was staring at the remnants of the battle with horror. Natch supposed
that the destruction of priceless art meant less to him than the
despoiling of precious evidence. Not even high-tech polymers could
insulate from this kind of havoc.

Half a dozen Council officers wrestled the Islander to his knees,
even though he was only offering token resistance. The MultiReal program had obviously sapped his strength to some degree, but more than
that, he seemed to have lost the will to resist. One of the officers brutally wrenched the Islander's thin metal collar off his neck, leaving a
shallow tributary of blood.

"I don't care," shouted Quell. "I'm never wearing one of those
fucking things again. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?"

Magan Kai Lee simply shook his head. His breathing had already
resumed something close to its normal rhythm, and the patch of blood
on his chest was beginning to evanesce into the air. But this was one
injury that would need more than OCHREs to heal. Magan gave Quell
one last angry look and swiped an arm wildly toward the elevators. The
Council officers dragged him away.

Natch stood as straight as his trembling knees allowed. He looked
around and realized that all of the friendly forces were now gone. "So
what are you going to do with me?" he said.

"You?" The question only seemed to irritate the lieutenant executive. "You are irrelevant. Go home."

And then Natch consulted the messages that had been piling up in
his mental inbox. The citation from the Meme Cooperative suspending
his business license was there, and it had taken effect a scant four minutes ago. Also present was the court order demanding that Natch
transfer MultiReal core access to Jara.

Magan Kai Lee had delivered on his promises. The Surina/Natch
MultiReal Fiefcorp was no longer under Natch's control.

18

The World Economic Oversight Board sensed a disturbance in the
marketplace.

And so the powers that moved the financial levers of the world
sent their agents to a secure location to make some decisions.
Everyone with a stake in the process was represented: the Congress of
L-PRACGs, the big businesses, the Defense and Wellness Council,
the labor organizations, the Meme Cooperative, the administrators of
the Data Sea, the Prime Committee, all the thousands of institutions
running Vault protocols.

It might have made for a cramped meeting had its participants
been made of flesh and blood. But these were virtual entities, data
agents stored as quark color changes on the Data Sea. One could find
no purer representatives of organizational will, for strictly speaking
these were not representatives at all but the things themselves, the
essence as expressed in formulas and business logic.

The administrator of the World Economic Oversight Board
gaveled the meeting to order, after a fashion. Roll was taken. Preliminary exchanges of information were made, micro-negotiations to determine place and order.

And then the administrator laid out the situation. A handful of
unorthodox transactions had spiked the stock exchanges, causing ripples to flow far and wide across the economic spectrum, amplified in
no small measure by sudden troop movements from the Islanders and
the Defense and Wellness Council. VIP travel itineraries were fluctuating by the second. Information requests across the Data Sea were
multiplying exponentially. Strange patterns abounded.

There was a flurry of conversation from the assembled crowd.
Newly spawned data agents dashed across the Sea to fetch follow-up information and make detailed queries against private data stores.
More micro-negotiations.

The administrator called for a status report. Like ants piling grain
before their queen, agents of the world's financial institutions began
depositing data points before the Oversight Board. Balance vacillations in key Vault accounts. Interest rates being charged by various
lending institutions. The values of certain commodities in the global
marketplace. Primo's ratings for a representative sample of bio/logic
fiefcorps. The status of bellwether legislation wending through the
various L-PRACGs. Each datum gave form and shape to the pile-a
form that stretched through dimensions invisible to the human eye.
Derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, probabilities and possibilities,
vectors of analysis that stretched from the universe's putative beginning to its predicted end.