Multireal (62 page)

The bodhisattva smiled. The prospect of seeing his enemy suffering physically seemed to give him cheer. "I was wondering when
you were going to ask about that," he replied. "The shaking and the
blackouts-don't think I haven't noticed."

"So it's your code that's causing them?"

"Maybe," said Brone, his smile curling into a smirk.

"Well, you need to do something about it," snapped Natch. "I can't
work like this."

Natch folded his arms in an attempt to keep steady and eyed the
room Brone had claimed as his personal headquarters. He didn't know
how long Creed Thassel had been making modifications to this old
hotel, but Brone seemed to have left the room exactly as he had found
it. Yellowed photos of some long-forgotten Texan dynasty on the walls,
a dilapidated metal desk, cracked brick on the floor, a prodigious
leather sofa on which he was now reclining. A real window, with actual
glass, though how it had survived the centuries since the Autonomous
Revolt intact Natch couldn't guess.

The bodhisattva put his feet up on the splintered oak table in front
of him and clasped his hands behind his head. "I could make some modifications," he said, affecting nonchalance. "We've been able to tweak
that cloaking program for the rest of the crew. Billy has the occasional
flutter, but everyone else is coping with the black code just fine."

"So then tweak it."

Brone sniffed. "And why should I?"

The two enemies stared each other down, Natch filling up with
increasing rage and Brone sliding deeper into insouciance with every
passing second. It was a peculiar game of bluffs. Natch knew that
Horvil's so-called mind control trick wouldn't work here. Even if
Natch could use MultiReal to find that one possibility in a thousand
where Brone decided to do his bidding, he would need to repeat the
same trick over and over again possibly for hours. As he had discovered with Khann Frejohr on his balcony, that was excruciatingly hard
work. Natch simply didn't have the strength for it. But he couldn't
admit that to Brone, could he?

"Fix it," said Natch between clenched teeth, "or I'll leave. Right
now. I'll leave and take MultiReal with me, and your `Revolution of
Selfishness' will be over before it even gets off the ground."

Brone shrugged. "Ah, but if you leave, that jittering is only going
to get worse. Much worse. I've seen what that black code can do. The
first volunteer ended up with the Prepared. I'd absolutely hate to see
that happen to you."

"I'll take my chances. I can fix it myself."

"Really? Then why haven't you?"

Silence. The sounds of clanking silverware from the devotees'
dinner came wafting down the hallway.

Brone's face softened into something resembling capitulation.
"Understand my position, Natch. I need you here. You and I are the
only ones who are really capable of finishing the MultiReal project.
Pierre and Billy are talented programmers, I grant you that-but
they're two-dimensional thinkers, or Margaret Surina would have
licensed the program to them in the first place. But admit it, you need
me too. You can't make all those thousands of bio/logic connections by
yourself, and in case you hadn't noticed, Old Chicago's not exactly
teeming with assembly-line programming shops.

"So I'm in a bind, Natch. You can use MultiReal at any point to
run out of here, and we can't stop you. This black code is the only bargaining chip I have. So let's be reasonable businesspeople. Let's follow
the example of the diss, and let's barter. You give me something I
want; I'll give you something you want."

Natch, muttering under his breath: "So what do you want?"

"Only what's fair," replied Brone, opening his arms with a gesture
of welcome that had more than a hint of saccharine. "Give me access
to MultiReal like you've given the rest of the devotees. I'm not asking
for core access. I'll stick with the same subset of programming tools,
I'll abide by the rest of your rules. Just let me do something instead of
sitting back here killing time."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

The entrepreneur pursed his lips. He could feel the slightest decline of the road ahead into a long and slippery slope. Brone finding tool after
tool to barter with. Natch granting more and more concessions.

But he held the final trump card, didn't he? Core access to MultiReal. That was all that mattered in the end. MultiReal couldn't give
Natch the power to control someone else's life; but it could give him
the ultimate power to control his own. Give Brone what he wants this
time, Natch told himself. You're much too powerful for him to take MultiReal away, and he knows that.

"Fine," he said. "But I want Loget to tweak the black code. Not
you. We might be working side by side here, but I still don't trust you."

The bodhisattva rose and gave an ingratiating bow. His prosthetic
eye caught the light and twinkled. "I wouldn't expect anything less
from you, Natch," he said. "I'll make sure Loget is on the case first
thing tomorrow morning."

40

Natch was starting to remember why he had never sought out Pierre
Loget's company. The man's brain ran on dandelion logic, scattering to
the four corners of the Earth in the slightest breeze. Loget began the
morning chattering about Hegelian dialectics, then flitted on to
modern Patronellian dance and the thermodynamics of hoverbird
flight without any discernible segue.

"The black code," insisted Natch after ninety minutes of this.
"Have you finished tuning that fucking black code?" He was lying
faceup on one of the icy crescent platforms, arms tied lightly at his
sides so the shaking wouldn't knock him over the edge. Loget, meanwhile, was hauling chunk after chunk of Natch's OCHRE code into
MindSpace while he babbled about nothing.

"Just be patient," replied Loget. "This takes time."

"How much time?"

The Thasselian giggled nervously. "I don't really know. You should
have let Brone fix you up. I've never done this before."

Natch mumbled a curse at the ceiling and shut his mouth.

At least he could finally see the code that had been tormenting him
for these past weeks. It looked like a mutated treble clef, dappled with
splotches of orange and purple. Natch had thought it would be a relief
to put a definitive shape to his pain. Instead, the very ordinariness of
the subroutine increased his depression.

After another hour, Natch started to grow suspicious. There was
neither method nor madness to Loget's tinkering as far as he could see.
Instead the man was fumbling around like a hive child given coursework beyond his grade level. Loget would stir blocks of code aimlessly
with his bio/logic programming bars for ten minutes at a stretch
without making a single connection. Natch knew that every fiefcorper had a unique methodology-three programmers, five programming styles, as
Primo's liked to say-but this was ridiculous.

"You're delaying," barked the entrepreneur.

"No, I'm not. I swear I'm not," said Loget. "But-"

"But what?"

"You've got MultiReal code in your head, Natch. How did that get
there?" The man seemed apprehensive, unsure, maybe a little
awestruck. Natch didn't answer.

Loget noodled around for another hour (covering avant-garde
sculpture and the lesser-known dramas of Juan Nguyen in the process)
before he finally admitted that he would need to consult with Brone.
Natch let him go.

This charade continued for two days. Brone stayed on the
periphery of the programming floor the whole second day, and every
time Natch looked in his direction he saw nothing but puzzlement on
the bodhisattva's face. Natch couldn't figure out what was going on.
Was Loget unwilling or incapable of accomplishing the task? Was the
renegade MultiReal code in his head complicating matters? Or was
this all just a masquerade to cover something else?

Meanwhile, progress on MultiReal slowed to a crawl as Natch's
pains and blackout episodes grew in severity. An epic rage had been
sputtering in his gut for weeks; now he could feel it picking up
strength and roaring to new heights. Frustrated, Natch cut off access
to the program early the second night and stormed to his room. Sleep
seduced him.

He was awakened in the middle of the night by Margaret Surina.

The bodhisattva made no noise that might explain her presence. In
fact, she seemed to be at the center of an inexplicable absence of noise, a
lacuna in the world, as if the universe ceased to exist at the bottom of her
toes and miraculously resubstantiated at the frayed ends of her hair.

You're dead, Natch told her. Somehow he knew that the apparition
would understand him even if he didn't use his vocal cords.

But the bodhisattva did not answer. She merely stood in the center
of the room and stared at Natch. She looked as she had before all the
trouble started, when MultiReal was but a pseudonymous project bobbing balloonlike in the distance. Her black hair was flecked with gray;
her fingers were long and precise; her eyes were ghost luminous. Her
feet, he noticed, did not quite touch the ground.

What do you want? insisted the entrepreneur. What are you doing here?

No response.

Natch clawed at his scalp through his sandy hair. Was the Council
right about him? He was sitting in bed talking to a dead woman, and
he couldn't even get the dead woman to talk back. Madness. In a panic,
Natch lobbed a pillow at the apparition; it passed straight through her
torso and landed on the floor with a feathery fwump. The bodhisattva
of Creed Surina did not react.

He was about to tear out of the room when Margaret began to
speak. The voice was faint, nearly inaudible, and it did not emanate
from her lips so much as it floated down from the ceiling.

You are the guardian and the keeper of MultiReal, Natch. Remember that.
The guardian and the keeper.

And then she was gone.

Natch pondered the bodhisattva's words for a moment, accompanied by the pianissimo sounds of a decaying hotel. Squeaking floorboards, archaic climate-control machinery. Bats somewhere in the
courtyard.

The guardian and the keeper. Margaret had used that phrase on top of
the Revelation Spire, the last time Natch saw her alive. What did it
mean? He thought of the original order of the Keepers, vilified by history, who had let the reins of the Autonomous Minds slip through
their fingers. The resulting stampede had caused a global apocalypse.
Was this a warning that similar things awaited if he let go of MultiReal? And why should he listen to the warning of a phantom anyway?

Enough. Enough with riddles. Enough with lies and manipulation.

Natch threw himself out of bed and grabbed a dressing gown from
the hook on the door. The three parallel bars of the Creed Thassel
insignia saluted him in gold thread from the breast pocket. He picked
up the satchel of bio/logic programming bars Brone had lent him, bolted
through the hall, and took the stairs down to the atrium three at a time.

He could feel the tiny pinprick in the back of his thigh ache as he
stood before a bio/logic workbench and flipped on MindSpace. The
castle zoomed out of the void until it filled the bubble.

Now that Margaret was gone and Quell had been taken away, who
could he trust with MultiReal? Jara would trade it to the Council for
the peace of mind, and Horvil would blindly follow her. Khann Frejohr would use it to further his narrow political agenda. Petrucio and
Frederic Patel would sell it to the highest bidder without a second
thought. The Council would use it as a weapon of domination and submission. And Brone? Brone would hand it out to everyone in the universe to satisfy his bizarre notions of selfishness.

But MultiReal was not some commodity to be rationed out, and
nobody would bully him into giving it away. Natch could see the route
he must take. The bends and curves ahead were still murky, unclear;
even the ultimate destination remained hazy and indistinct. Still, he
would not submit to someone else's path for MultiReal, whether that
path was Khann Frejohr's, Magan Kai Lee's, or Brone's. Or Margaret's,
for that matter. He would not give up.