Multireal (54 page)

"Come with us," says Magan, palms upturned and extended. "We
can make a deal. We can keep you safe from Len Borda."

Petrucio's look flings vitriol. There's dried blood on his suit. His
finger caresses the trigger of his dartgun.

Natch turns around again and looks at the waiting hoverbird. The
figures who escorted him down the hallway are leaping aboard, firing
a few wild shots back down the hall that don't hit anything but stone.
A lone figure leans out and stretches a hand toward him. Its skin is the
color of mahogany. "Hurry up, Natch!" cries the voice. "Don't trust
him!" Natch looks up, sees the man pull back the cowl of his robe, and
gapes in astonishment.

Pierre Loget?

Natch is now submerged far below the realm of conscious decision
or human emotion. All he can see is the murderous look in Petrucio
Patel's eye, the thousands of deaths the Council has inflicted on him this
afternoon. The weariness that's dragging at his heels, the man who
invaded his home and called him irrelevant. He vaults for the hoverbird.

Petrucio raises the gun in both hands and fires.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Choice cycle stacks on top of choice cycle, a colossus of possibility.
Petrucio is using MultiReal too.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

For a brief, infinite instant, Natch and Petrucio Patel stand alone,
facing off on the battlefield of the mind. A thousand darts bite into
Natch; Natch swats them away. Mental processes whirl and spin; the
colossus branches out into new and unexpected dimensions. And still
the darts keep coming as Patel expends his own choice cycles to navigate to new realities.

Natch should be collapsing by now-he should be prostrate on the
floor in pain and weakness-but he stubbornly refuses to submit. He
will not submit. Hit, miss, hit, miss, hit, miss, and then-

MultiReal stops.

Natch feels a pinprick in the back of his thigh as the dart pierces
his flesh. Loget grabs his arm just as he jumps onto the hoverbird. A
few black-robed figures leap on after him, and the door shuts.

35

The crowd surged forward once the shooting began. Horvil disappeared almost immediately. Merri and Benyamin found themselves
swept up the stairs and out the exit. Robby Robby managed to shelter
Jara in the lee of his immense hairdo for a moment before he also stuck
a limb out too far and was overwhelmed.

Jara was now alone in a furious crush of strangers. A Defense and
Wellness Council officer yanked on her shoulder and herded her out
the door, sending her careening into someone else's elbow. She tried to
yell a question to the man in the white robe and yellow star, but he had
already vanished in the stampede.

Another aftershock of the infoquake made Jara's knees buckle. She
slipped and felt a moment of hysteria. I'm going to get trampled to death
out here, she thought. Despite her little sermon about conserving computing resources five minutes earlier, she prepared to activate MultiReal. What do I have to lose?

And then a chunky arm emerged out of nowhere and locked itself
tight around her waist. "Hold on," said Horvil, his brow furrowed
with determination. "I'm getting us the fuck out of here." Jara merely
stared at him.

With that, Horvil dove into the tornado.

Where had all these people come from? Even an auditorium filled to
capacity shouldn't have generated this much foot traffic through the corridors. Jara looked up at the six levels of offices behind smoked glass on
either side of the corridor and discovered they were emptying rapidly.
She gazed myopically at the crowd and was astounded to realize that a
number of the fleeing citizens were, in fact, government officials. The
black ring of the Prime Committee was hanging from more than one
neck, as were the insignias of the Congress of L-PRACGs, the Vault, Dr. Plugenpatch, and any number of private security organizations. Jara saw
unsheathed dartguns and disruptors aplenty, but as far as she could tell,
nobody outside of the auditorium had actually fired one.

Horvil bulldozed his way through the panicked pedestrians like an
industrial combine. Nobody wanted to mess with a man of his girth.
Jara noticed that the engineer had actually acquired a trail of hapless
civil servants hoping to follow him to safety. They fell behind when he
turned the next corner and quickly dispersed.

Within minutes, Horvil had elbowed his way to the central atrium
of the Complex, where people were alternately gravitating toward the
giant holograph of Tul Jabbor and speeding away from it. Jara supposed
that an Autonomous Mind could have factored through all the trajectories of fleeing souls and plotted a safe course through the melee, but it
was beyond mere human means. She was glad she had resisted the temptation to activate MultiReal. What if the exhaustion had overtaken her
in the middle of all these people? No, her best strategy was to latch on
to the biggest, sturdiest person she could find and hold tight.

That person was Horvil. For a moment, he looked like he might
plop down right there and begin sketching mathematical models.
Instead he scooted over to the wall with Jara close behind and began
probing every office door they passed in hopes of finding one that
would yield.

Finally one did-but only because its occupant chose that precise
moment to run screaming into the corridor. The pasty-faced woman
didn't even glance in Horvil's direction as she scurried by. Horvil
didn't hesitate. He tightened his grip around Jara's waist and leapt into
the office just as the door closed behind them.

Minutes passed. Their heartbeats slowed.

Horvil's luck was incalculable. He had stumbled into some middle
manager's office, complete with standard Prime Committee-issue desk,
wall of viewscreens, and hanging ficus plant. It was little more than a
cubicle, and the only chair in sight looked frightfully uncomfortable. So the two fiefcorpers slumped to the floor with backs to the desk and caught
their breath. A sign on the wall next to the door told them to PROMOTE
L-PRACG COOPERATION AT ALL COSTS in sanctimonious small caps.

"You're responsible for all this, aren't you?" said Jara, leaning
against the engineer's shoulder.

Horvil tipped an imaginary hat. "Of course."

"A little over the top, wasn't it? I mean, did you have to spark
worldwide pandemonium just to get out of your fiefcorp contract?"

"I dunno, sometimes I think you just have to take the big chances.
Like the great Lucco Primo once said, Global catastrophe causes fertilization and, um, crystallization of purpose in-in fiefcorp negotiations. Or
something like that."

The joke wheezed to a halt, leaving the two alone with their thoughts.

Jara realized that Horvil had never actually taken his arm from
around her waist, but she was in no mind to remove it. After all, now
that she had core access to MultiReal, she was just as much of a target
as Natch, wasn't she? Through the translucent glass of the door, she
could see the bedlam of Prime Committee bureaucrats and hear the
tramp of confused Defense and Wellness Council officers. One of those
officers could hit the door with a priority override and zap them full of
black code at any time. The menacing figures in black robes could
track them down. Drudges might be waiting to pounce right in the
hall. Was there any safer place to be than nestled in the plush cushion
of Horvil's belly? Jara tilted her head back slightly into Horvil's chest
and listened to the rhythmic chugging of his heart, as steady an engine
as could be found in this wretched place.

"What are you thinking?" she asked softly.

"Oh, I'm thinking about the Spiral Theory of History," replied
Horvil.

Jara smirked. "You'll have to explain that one. I was never very
good at history."

"It's one of the tenets of Creed Dao, I think. Something about the looping patterns of history. Events recur, but it's not just a circle, it's
more like a spring or a coil. So we're not just going round and round
the same groove-we're progressing somewhere. Moving up or down
on a spiral track." The engineer twirled the index finger of his left
hand, drawing an invisible cone that would come to a point at some
hypothetical place in the aether.

"Horvil, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Come on. Marcus Surina introduces this revolutionary new technology, teleportation. Everybody goes wild over it, there's all this hullabaloo, and then he dies suddenly in a hoverbird explosion. The whole
economy tanks. Now here we are, a generation later. Margaret Surina
introduces another revolutionary new technology, there's all this hullabaloo, and then she dies suddenly. Murdered, maybe. A spiral."

The analyst gave him a playful poke in the side. "You're just now
figuring this out? The drudges have been pushing that story for weeks.
Just like her father, history repeats itself-"

"No no no, you're missing the whole point, Jara. It's not just history repeating itself. There are a lot of recurring patterns, sure, but it
can't be the same, because everything we do is informed by what happened in the past. We're going somewhere. It's either spiraling up, or
it's spiraling down. And the Daoists, they believe that you can track
that change, that you can figure out the laws of the universe if you can
figure out the coefficient of change between historical cycles."

Jara laughed quietly in the crook of Horvil's arm. It was just like
him to float off into abstraction like an untethered balloon amidst such
turmoil. "Well, which way are we going? Up or down?"

Horvil made a jovial face as his mind came crashing back to the
present. "I dunno. That's the big question, I guess."

"Okay, while you're at it, here's another big question," said the
analyst. "A month ago, you and I were sitting in the Center for Historic Appreciation at Andra Pradesh. On the floor, with your arm
around me. Panicked people running all over the place, Council offi cers everywhere." She nodded her head toward the door, which shuddered momentarily as some shadowy figure slammed against it, then
disappeared. "Now here we are again. A recurring pattern. So which
direction are we spiraling in, up or down?"

The engineer rubbed his chin and peered into the distance with his
newfound Horvilish calm. "That's a very interesting question. Let me
dig out my slide rule."

Jara burst into laughter. It was probably the only laugh to be heard
for a kilometer or more.

And then they were kissing. She couldn't quite say who leaned in
first, or whether they had both done so simultaneously. It wasn't the
explosive outburst of passion that Jara had been hoping for from Natch
these past few years; it was congenial, friendly, familiar.

Jara opened her eyes. Nothing had really changed. She didn't really
even think she loved this man sitting next to her. But she liked him
and respected him and trusted him. For now, wasn't that enough?

Horvil sat back with a sunny grin that belied everything they had
experienced since this entire MultiReal crisis had begun. "All right,
now that that's over with," he said, "what say we get out of here?"

Jara looked at his pudgy, uncomplicated face, drank in his expression of calm certitude, and then nodded. "Okay, where to?"

"Follow me. We're catching a ride."

The door slid open on command, revealing a scene of utter disarray.
The crowds clogging the hallways of the Tul Jabbor Complex had
thinned slightly, but those who remained were more strident and
unnerved. If Horvil's Daoist theory was right, the crucial difference
between this scene and the one at Andra Pradesh was that nobody was
in charge here. A large contingent of Defense and Wellness Council
officers flew past them looking just as muddled and confused as any of
the hundred private L-PRACG security forces. A few bodies were scattered on the ground, though whether they were dead or merely temporarily stunned from the infoquake, Jara could not tell.

Horvil screwed up his face, clutched Jara tightly in his arm, and
let out a completely gratuitous war cry. Then he went careening into
the crowd with the analyst hugging his every step.