Geosynchron (13 page)

"Not much. That was always Serr Vigal's line of study, not mine."

"It's incredibly complex. It's not like a recording that you can just
rewind and erase. The brain stores bits and pieces all over the cerebral
cortex, and it's not organized in any way that makes sense to you and
me. So if you try to erase a memory of running through Old Chicago,
and there's a calculation error-even a minuscule one-well, you
might end up erasing a memory of running through the playground
when you were a boy. Or you might forget the word Chicago. Crude
examples, but you get the point. There's no way to know for sure."
Petrucio had tossed one hand up in the air as if trying to discard the whole thing. "Guess that's why you build prototypes before you put
code into production."

Natch had not been satisfied with this response. "But was this a
problem with Margaret Surina's original code-or your implementation of it?"

"I don't know. Frederic and I only tested the `unhappening' on very
short spans of time. Seconds. A few minutes."

Natch had taken this information in with a solemn countenance.
"I need one more thing from you, 'Trucio."

Patel had looked at him wordlessly.

"You need to tell me how to turn off this fucking MultiReal-D."
And then, in answer to the question Petrucio had been about to ask:
"Because it frightens me. I don't need it, I can take care of myself.
What I need right now is solid ground underneath my feet. What I
need is to know that what happens, happens."

He could tell that Petrucio did not understand, but Petrucio
nodded in acquiescence anyway.

Brone would understand, Natch tells himself.

The notion startles him, but Natch instinctively recognizes it as
truth. This is one situation where his friends would be of little help.
Horvil would regard his predicament as an intricate maze to be woven
through; Serr Vigal would float off into even further abstraction; Jara
would chide him for engaging in useless mental masturbation. No, the
only one who can really appreciate the paradoxes at play here is his old
enemy, the man whom he maimed during the Shortest Initiation.
Brone.

He wonders what Brone is doing right now. If Petrucio's theory is
correct, and Brone did indeed try to kill Natch in Old Chicago, then
MultiReal-D must have left him in an impotent rage. He would have
discovered that Natch had somehow eluded him, despite all his precautions, but he would not remember any more of the details than
Natch. Certainly he must have taken stock of the entrepreneur's disap pearance and concluded that MultiReal had something to do with it.
Perhaps he might have even connected it with Petrucio's black code
dart at the Tul Jabbor Complex. What will he do now?

And what, for that matter, will Natch do?

Natch wants to live. He has the power of MultiReal at his command, the power that gives him mastery over cause and effect itself. He
has no connections, no belongings, no ties, and no responsibilities. Yet
the whole world is after him-businesses, governments, creeds,
drudges, and practically everyone else. He has the power to go anywhere and the opportunity to go nowhere. Only twenty-four hours
ago, such unencumbrance felt like the nothingness at the center of the
universe. But now? What can he do in such a situation? What does he
want to do with this new life in this new reality ... ?

The honk of a seagull brings Natch's mind back down from the
aether. The bird has perched on the windowsill right on the other side
of the glass where it regards the entrepreneur curiously. Then it
whizzes off, snatches a fish, and makes for the deeper water.

He turns back to contemplate the sunset. What was previously two
isolated containers of clear blue and sea green has now become a
jumble of improbable colors as the pigments of the sun dissolve in the
deep. Delicate pinks and sturdy blues, concentrated yellows and
bashful reds.

Natch stretches his arms, looks up to the stars that are just beginning to peek through the curtain of the day. Frederic's MultiReal-D
demonstration triggered something inside of him. Natch has faced
death. He has been through it and come out the other side.

Petrucio said he would have two to three months of clear, tremorfree existence once Natch follows his instructions. What can happen in
two to three months? Anything can happen.

Anything.

9

Jara's grandfather Herschel had been a small man. He had only stood
a hundred and sixty centimeters tall, even if you measured from the
soles of his feet to the peak of his mountainous hair. But he had died
when Jara was still a year shy of puberty, so he had always seemed like
a giant to her.

Few of his business colleagues had shared that estimation. Longsuffering Herschel had made a hardscrabble living as a freelance
accountant, balancing (and occasionally cooking) books for the
unscrupulous, for companies who wobbled on the brink for the
entirety of their brief and miserable existences. The little man had
done his job uncomplainingly if unenthusiastically.

But when he sat in front of a chessboard, the giant would emerge.

Jara had gotten her parents' permission to accompany Herschel to
one of the grand tourneys on 49th Heaven when she was eight years old.
Or, more accurately, she had stowed away on his hoverbird and Herschel
had pretended not to discover her presence until it was too late to turn
back. Watching her grandfather demolish players twice his size in match
after match was one of the great memories of her childhood. He had
never seemed to waver or lose his temper, no matter how far he had been
pushed into a corner. More often than not, the retreat to the corner had
been nothing more than a feint, a multidimensional strategy, and Jara
would experience the extreme pleasure of seeing Herschel swoop out of
nowhere and checkmate an opponent with a few deft moves. Witnessing
the sudden transformation of smug and overconfident players into
sweating nail-biters had been more of an education than anything in her
hive curriculum. Jara's grandfather had emerged from that tournament
among the top hundred players in the world, with a nice pot of winnings
that he had quickly blown on gifts for friends and family.

Jara had asked what his secret was over breakfast one morning.

It's all a question of knowing what to sacrifice, Herschel had told her.
You know what I'm talking about?

Jara had built up a reservoir of jam on one side of her plate, then
carefully dunked a crepe into the deep end. I guess. Is it like that saying
where you lose the battle but win the war?

Sure, her grandfather had replied. Sometimes you've got to let the enemy
take your knight in order to save your queen. But it's bigger than that. Sometimes you don't just have to lose the battle-sometimes you have to lose the whole
war in order to get across the point you were trying to make in the first place.
Y'know, Jar, sometimes you even have to give up the point you were trying to
make if you want to win the biggest game of all.

What's that?

Life. Herschel had stabbed his fork across the table and speared a
chunk of jam-drenched crepe from Jara's plate, then popped it into his
mouth with a wink and a smile.

The girl had solemnly chewed upon her grandfather's words for a
while. So how do you know when to win and when to lose?

You just have to figure out what's important to you, Herschel had said.
Do that, and you're golden. Win, lose, it's all the same.

Jara felt like this was a particularly apropos lesson for her to remember
today, as she sat in the den of the official West London Grandmasters'
League and watched some teenage girl parcel out her ass and hand it to her,
move by move, piece by piece. Jara's bishops were the first to go, followed
by both knights and then-agonizingly-her queen. Meanwhile, all she
had managed to capture was a rook, a bishop, and a handful of pawns.

The fiefcorp master wasn't entirely sure why she had decided to
join the Grandmasters' League in the first place. Like so many of the
bizarre things she had tried lately-the visits to esoteric creeds, the
sexual exploration on the Sigh, the excruciating sessions of "gong
therapy"-this suggestion had come from her fellow fiefcorper Merri.
The weeks on the Sigh hadn't turned out too well; Jara had almost suc ceeded in forgetting the name of the sandy-haired dimwit who had
served as a Natch surrogate in her bed for a few weeks. She had decided
that an intellectual challenge was more her speed, something that
would keep her mind racing while at the same time distract her from
the frustrations of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp.

So, chess.

Jara had begun two weeks ago a surprisingly lousy player. Apparently, skill in chess was neither genetic nor did it transfer by osmosis.
She had endured humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat, trying to
keep her grandfather Herschel's words close at hand.

You just have to figure out what's important to you. Do that, and you're
golden. Win, lose, it's all the same.

Only now, two weeks into her chess odyssey, was Jara beginning to
see the truth to that advice. The stringy-haired girl across the table was
busy eliminating the last defenses around Jara's king. But suddenly the
fiefcorp master noticed that her opponent was still zealously guarding
her queen, beyond the point of good strategy or even rationality. This
was something she could use in the future, and she would not have discovered it if she had managed to eke out a victory. This was her key to
winning the next match with this young upstart, and the next one, and
maybe the next one after that.

Jara handed over her king with a nod and a smile.

She left the clubhouse of the West London Grandmasters' League and
quickly found herself surrounded by drudges, in much the same way
her king had been surrounded on the chessboard by pawns.

"Towards Perfection!" said John Ridglee, merging smoothly into
step beside the fiefcorp master. His fingers danced across a crisp black
van dyke that might have taken him two hours to groom. "Nice day
for a stroll, isn't it?"

"It was," replied Jara, eyeing Ridglee's competitor Sen Sivv Sor,
who was flanking her other side. With his shock of white hair and
angry red birthmark on his forehead, he might have been the yin to
Ridglee's yang. Or the Tweedledee to his Tweedledum, thought Jara sourly.

"Interest you in a cup of chaff?" said Sor.

"You're buying?" said Jara.

"Of course."

The fiefcorp master shrugged. "All right then."

There had to be some urgency to Ridglee and Sor's mission if it had
inspired the hated rivals to join forces. A few scant weeks ago, she
would have bolted at the sight of either one, possibly stopping to
deliver a kick to the crotch first. There had been so many inquisitive
media types hounding the fiefcorp then that Jara had been able to use
them as a shield from the Defense and Wellness Council. But that was
eons ago, back when the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was a real,
functioning company. The drudge attention had all dissipated when
Natch disappeared. Now she could stroll around London at her leisure
without being accosted by a single frenzied drudge or menacing figure
dressed in the white robe and yellow star.