Geosynchron (12 page)

The hoverbird was a standard Vulture model used by business
executives the world over. There were two facing rows of plush passenger seating, multiple viewscreens, and a foldable conference table.
Quell half expected to see a couple of stiff executives sipping Turkish
coffee and discussing Primo's ratings. Papizon was already halfway out
of his evac suit and halfway into the copilot's seat, next to a jovial
woman with short red hair. Sitting in the row of passenger seats facing
the door was a lithe woman with long, braided hair and skin of dark
mocha-the Defense and Wellness Council's chief solicitor, Rey
Gonerev, whom some called the Blade.

Gonerev gestured at Quell's dartgun, which he had unconsciously
aimed in her direction. "So are you going to shoot me, or are you going
to come in and sit down? We don't have all day."

"What-"

"We're breaking you out." A pause, which nobody filled. "Of
prison. Now sit the fuck down."

Quell did. He pulled the mask of the evac suit up over his head and
let it hang off the back of his neck, then laid his gun on the table.

"All right, Panja," said the Blade. "Let's go."

Within seconds, the door behind Quell shut and sealed itself, there
was the sound of disconnecting clamps, and the hoverbird streaked
away. Normally the prison was ringed with a cordon of patrolling
Council hoverbirds. But for whatever reason, today the skies were clear,
except for their ship and an escort of half a dozen Vulture 'birds. Quell
caught one last glimpse of the Orbital Detention and Rehabilitation
Facility, with the corrugated docking passageway dangling off the
bottom like a hangnail. There were little flares of light coming from
windows all over the unconnectible wheel of the prison, but the structure looked perfectly intact. He hoped Plithy was okay.

No more dock runs, thought the Islander, flushing with relief. No
more inedible stew. No more broken thumbs ...

"Here," snapped Gonerev. "Take this." The flick of her wrist was so
abrupt that Quell almost missed the small copper disc she tossed in his
direction. He caught it and recognized a connectible coin, one of the
devices he had put together from Margaret's specs to mimic the bulkier
connectible collars mandated by the Defense and Wellness Council.
The Islander experienced a mental flutter. How did the Blade get ahold
of one of these?

Gonerev stared at him with a look of scarcely concealed impatience. "Would you rather wear a collar?" she said. "I'm sure Papizon
can dig one up somewhere if you want."

Papizon poked his head over his seatback. "I don't care," he said, his
voice a clear parody of Quell's own. "I'm never wearing one of those fucking
things again. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?"

Quell shook his head, recognizing his own words after Magan's officers had yanked his collar off at the top of the Revelation Spire. He
suspected that Papizon was trying to exhibit a sense of humor, but the
concept was clearly beyond the Councilman. The Islander took a deep
breath and clamped the coin to the neckband of the evac suit.

It took a few seconds for the coin's subaether signals to lock on to
the OCHREs floating in Quell's bloodstream. He heard a sudden mellifluous tone as the coin tested a number of different audio frequencies;
the world was briefly covered with a thin gauze of red, then green, then
blue. Finally the coin had fully hooked up to Quell's personal bio/logic
systems. He could sense the vastness of the multi network surrounding
him, penetrating the hull of the hoverbird, binding him to the connectibles' virtual expressway.

Quell blinked. The seat next to Rey Gonerev was no longer empty.
Now it contained the calm figure of Magan Kai Lee.

There was no point in reaching for his pistol; black code darts
would zip right through the man's virtual presence without effect. But
Quell had to restrain himself from reaching for it anyway. He had
already seen the lieutenant executive of the Defense and Wellness
Council thrown off his game once; he wasn't likely to see it twice in
his lifetime. Quell decided his best move at this point was to project
an aura of serene confidence. He leaned back in his chair. "Whatever
torture you've got in store for me, I can handle it."

The lieutenant executive displayed the trace of a smile. He looked
almost childlike, seated in a chair designed for someone twice his size.
"Oh, I'm certain of that," he said. "In fact, we're counting on it."

8

The delineation is as clear as anything in the world. Below, the ocean.
Above, the sky. Dividing the two, the ever-so-slight parabola of the
Earth's horizon.

Natch stands at the window of an observation tower in the suburbs
of Angelos and watches that dividing line slowly devour the setting
sun. It's a short tower, only three stories, and it's painted light peach
like so much of the architecture out here. But the builders placed it at
the end of a man-made promontory out into the ocean, so the view is
impeccable. A smattering of lovers and tourists share the view with
him from a distance just large enough that nobody can quite make out
his face.

The gun Natch used to shoot Petrucio and Hiro is now floating out
with the tide, where it will likely be netted by the local L-PRACG
trashsweepers and then analyzed by the Defense and Wellness Council.
Natch is unclear how long information about the gun's recent firing
will survive in its memory banks, and whether that will be enough to
trace it back to him. If the Council can indeed deduce that Natch used
the weapon to make his escape, then Petrucio will be off the hook.
Regardless, any such deduction is days away at the earliest.

The entrepreneur hadn't expected much in the way of gratitude,
but Patel was still capable of surprising him. Not only had he given
Natch a comradely pat on the shoulder as they left the hoverbird, but
he had offered something much more valuable: a process for disabling
his tremors and blackouts. Which, Petrucio had assured him, are
caused by the code that provides backdoor access to MultiReal, and not
by any Thasselian programming.

"This isn't a permanent cure, you understand," Patel had said.
"There isn't one. You'll probably have to keep tweaking the code a few times a year for as long as you own the program. But if you follow these
instructions, it should buy you two or three months."

Natch had stared at his throbbing left hand with a peculiar mixture
of relief and apprehension. "But ... how do you know about this?"

"Because Frederic and I had the tremors too, back when we had
access to that security back door. So did Margaret. Manifests differently
in everyone, of course. Frederic had a stutter, and I had a twitching
eyelid. Margaret said it was one of the consequences of letting threehundred-year-old code roam free in a modern OCHRE system."

The entrepreneur's jaw had dropped. "Three hundred years old?"

"That's what she said," Petrucio had continued with a dismissive
hand gesture. "Who knows whether she was telling the truth. Who
knows if she even knew the truth."

Natch recalls the specter of Margaret Surina he saw atop the Revelation Spire a few weeks ago. Only hours before her sudden and inexplicable suicide, if Brone's story could be believed. Her eyes were
probing the walls for imaginary enemies, and her mind was a tattered
remnant of what it used to be, barely cognizant of anyone or anything
but Quell the Islander. The ultimate consequence of sixteen years of
cohabitation with that MultiReal back door? He looks down at his
own trembling hand again, product of a mere few months of exposure.
It's plausible.

All he knows is that he does not want to end up like Margaret.

He wants to live.

The realization, only hours old, shows no signs of subsiding. It's a
peculiar feeling. A feeling that makes his extremities quiver and his
stomach hollow-not totally unlike the want that has powered him as
long as he can remember-but this is a sensation that points outward
to the world rather than curling in on itself.

Natch wants to live, but what irony that the world he wants to live
in no longer exists.

Margaret had warned him of this. She had stood in front of a bil lion people and prophesied a world free from the tyranny of cause and
effect.

What would our lives be like if we had made different choices? she had
said. In the Age of MultiReal, we will wonder no more-because we will be
able to make many choices. We will be able to look back at checkpoints in our
lives and take alternate paths. We will wander between alternate realities as
our desires lead us. The ever-changing flux of MultiReal will become reality.

But what are the terms and boundaries of this new reality that
Natch has wandered into? Suddenly Frederic Patel can decapitate him
with a samurai sword and he cannot, both at the same time. Brone can
chase him through the ruins of Old Chicago and then forget. Memories can blur and devolve. Things can happen and then unhappen. In
such a world, how can Natch trust that he is really standing here in an
observation tower staring at the setting sun? Will that too be yanked
away from him? Does anything in the universe in fact exist-or is existence itself only a temporary delusion, a momentary wave that can suddenly recede back into the nothingness without warning?

Natch shakes his head. Sophomoric speculation that belongs in the
realm of the adolescent.

But. He has seen it. He has lived it.

If Natch can't trust the basest proposition that what happens, happens ... what can he trust? Is there anything solid enough in this world
for him to plant his feet on?

Petrucio had been kind enough to clear up one more discrepancy that
had been troubling Natch since the dungeon in Sao Paulo. Namely,
how the Patels had found a way to immunize themselves from the
effects of MultiReal.

"A trick?" Natch had yelped in red-faced disbelief.

Petrucio had put an avuncular hand on the entrepreneur's shoulder. "You think you're the only one who knows how to use
social engineering to his advantage? Don't feel bad. There's no way
you could have known that you weren't really interacting with me or
Frederic in there. They were digitized projections. Remotecontrolled puppets, more or less. We couldn't have actually walked
into that room, or you would have used MultiReal to find the possibility where we freed you. We had to wait until you were convinced
the program was useless."

In exchange for all of Petrucio's unexpected generosity, Natch had
decided to reveal something of his own. "The MultiReal-D unhap-
pening," he had said. "The rollback of memories. It's dangerous."

Petrucio had stroked his mustache in consternation. "How so?"

"Something's been happening to me ever since I left Old Chicago.
I didn't have any explanation for it until you told me about MultiRealD. I've got these ... blank patches in my memory. Random things,
just gone. Things that happened to me a long time ago, unrelated
things. They just seem to have disappeared."

Patel had moved his hands from his mustache to his forehead,
where he had begun rubbing firmly at his temple, as if trying to soothe
away pain. "It's not an exact science, you know-erasing memories. I
don't know how much you learned in the hive about how the brain
stores memory...."