Geosynchron (15 page)

At its essence, Jayze and Suheil Surina's complaint was an old and
familiar one. Margaret Surina had given fifty percent of one of the
family's greatest assets-MultiReal-to an outsider. But this outsider
wasn't just anyone; he was Natch, one of the world's most notoriously
Shylockian businessmen. Margaret had spent the next few weeks shedding her sanity like clothing on a hot day and then died under suspicious circumstances, leaving MultiReal in Natch's hands. Obviously,
claimed the Surina family's lawyers, her agreement with Natch should
be rendered null and void.

"Face it," Horvil had sulked after his first read-through of the complaint. "They've got a solid case."

"But not airtight," Jara had replied.

The complaint had been filed with Natch's freewheeling libertarian government in Shenandoah, where the judges were quite lax on
matters of ceremony. It almost felt like you could stand up in court
there and hash through disagreements in plain speech like civilized
human beings. The judges felt more like friendly arbitrators than grim
custodians of the distant and impersonal Law.

But the fiefcorp quickly lost the battle for jurisdiction soon after
Jara's run-in with the drudges. "Why try the case here in Shenandoah
when Natch is nowhere to be found?" Suheil and Jayze's attorneys
argued. "Nobody else in the courtroom has any connection to this
city." Jara grudgingly admitted they were right, and unfortunately,
Natch's L-PRACG agreed too. So the case migrated from Shenandoah
to the Surina family's pet government in Andra Pradesh. Jara and
Horvil temporarily put all other fiefcorp business on hold so they could
travel to Andra Pradesh and get this lawsuit out of the way.

It soon became apparent that the courts in Andra Pradesh were not like those in Shenandoah. Horvil and Jara had to endure endless debate
about trifling matters of ritual, like whether the plaintiffs should sit on
the left side as customary in Western courtrooms or on the right as customary in modern Indian courtrooms; like whether they should impose
a cutoff on the number of drudges allowed to view the proceedings;
like whether the court should follow the Pevertz-Laubumi Disambiguation Procedure, which required witnesses to parse their sentences
in three different ways to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding. It
all felt like a transparent ploy by the Surinas to keep the lawyers
jawing as long as possible and exhaust the fiefcorp's legal defense fund.

Jara felt like she should bring this up with Martika Korella, their
attorney. But she soon decided that she trusted the woman about as
much as she trusted an Autonomous Mind. In short, not at all.

It wasn't that Korella was incompetent. On the contrary, multiple
sources had recommended her as a woman of principle, fierce intelligence, and thorough familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of the Indian
legal system. In the days leading up to the trial, Korella had assured
them this was a winnable case and seemed to be preparing a cogent
defense. Then one morning she had appeared in court with the look of
a woman who had not only seen a ghost but had invited that ghost for
tea and chatted with it about the weather. Korella's enthusiasm for the
case had simply dried up overnight.

"I don't know how to explain it," Jara told Horvil. "It's like she
knows she's in a fixed fight."

"So shouldn't we fire her?" the engineer replied.

"Well, the thing is ... I think the fight might be fixed in our favor.
I can't tell. Besides, if someone can get to her, they'll get to anyone we
hire to replace her."

Fixed or not, Suheil and Jayze Surina didn't look too happy with
the state of things in the courtroom either, but those might simply
have been their natural dispositions.

Suheil, dour and dim-witted in the best of circumstances, had been advised by his handlers to avoid the courtroom. His temper was legendary throughout the Indian subcontinent, and he appeared to be
congenitally unable to talk in a low tone of voice. He followed his handlers' advice most of the time and kept to the hallways, glowering at
passersby and kicking things. Jara thought he looked like a troll.

But Jayze had been given no such counsel. She lorded over the
plaintiffs' wing of the courtroom like a petty despot, making imperious
gestures to her aides for glasses of water throughout the day. Her retinue seemed only too eager to appease her. She bore an uncanny resemblance to her second cousin Margaret, which made it difficult for Jara
to watch her. With her precise mannerisms, her wide blue eyes, and her
limp black hair, Jayze Surina might have been Margaret's evil twin.

Things only deteriorated once the testimony began. Jara found
herself stewing for hours in her seat at the unfairness of it all.

The core of Jayze and Suheil Surina's argument was that Margaret
had shown signs of mental instability long before she had signed a deal
to hand day-to-day operations of the company over to Natch. Therefore, the bodhisattva had clearly not been of sound mind when she
made the agreement.

The prime piece of evidence? The agreement itself.

"It's absolutely not legitimate business practice," scoffed a leading
economic scholar on the stand to the plaintiffs' attorney. "Just handing
over fifty percent of a company with four hundred years of name recognition to a complete stranger? I can't think of a single precedent for
that kind of behavior."

"Not one," parroted the attorney.

"It doesn't sound like an agreement that anybody would sign if
they were in their right mind, does it?"

"No, it doesn't to me either."

Jayze and Suheil's attorneys did not stop at impugning Margaret's
business sense. A parade of Surina family retainers made their way to
the stand to testify about her bizarre behavior for the whole of the last decade. One of the minor bodhisattvas at Creed Surina complained
about how Margaret had paused during a major speech to the devotees
and simply walked offstage without explanation, midsentence. Aides
detailed how she would send them on inexplicable and sometimes contradictory errands at all hours of the night. Professors divulged how
she had gone from being a merely odd steward of the Gandhi University to a strangely self-destructive one.

On and on the testimony went. Jara could sense the scales of justice tilting in Suheil and Jayze's favor with every nugget of irresponsibility and irrationality the witnesses piled on. "Do you think Jayze and
Suheil are paying these people to perjure themselves?" she asked
Horvil.

"You mean, have they been bribed?"

"Yeah."

The engineer scowled and shook his head. "Why would you need to
bribe them? Margaret never explained herself to anybody. She must
have made a million enemies."

Jara recalled her own interactions with the bodhisattva. As far as
she could remember, she had only met the woman twice. She had sat
in a conference room and watched Margaret trade bon mots with
Natch as if they were reciting lines from Oscar Wilde. And a few days
later, she had argued with Margaret about Natch's disappearance,
causing Margaret to pull out a dartgun and retreat to the top of her
skyscraper. Ten, fifteen minutes of interaction at most. Could Jara herself vouch that the last heir of Sheldon, Prengal, and Marcus Surina had
been of compos mentis when she signed that deal with Natch?

As the crazy proceedings went on and the case tilted farther and
farther in the Surinas' direction, the unnamed Pharisee sat in the back
row, day after day, watching the proceedings with grave interest. He
spoke to no one that Jara could see. Whether he even comprehended
what was going on was unclear.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, tensions between Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee were mounting by the day. For the most part, the two
factions of Council officers tried to show a unified face to the public
during routine security operations. But once a week, it seemed, some
turf battle would spontaneously erupt, leaving handfuls of dead or
incapacitated Council officers to litter the streets. The Islanders only
made things worse by executing random strikes here and there that did
not appear to be targeting either side.

And as the fighting intensified, Margaret Surina's murder
remained unsolved and the infoquakes continued, leaving occasional
reminders of civilization's fragility in the face of the brutal unknown.

Jara didn't expect anyone to show up early to the fiefcorp meeting on
the day before the plaintiffs were supposed to rest their case. Since the
company had purchased a slate of second-rate programs from Lucas
Sentinel and gone on autopilot to deal with the Surina family's lawsuit,
nobody seemed particularly enthusiastic about attending these meetings. Benyamin and Merri had retreated into their respective creed
activities; Serr Vigal had retreated to his ailing neural programming
company; and Robby Robby was presumably focusing on sales partners
with more lucrative products.

But when Jara made her way through the Surina Enterprise
Facility at Andra Pradesh and entered the company's designated conference room, she found Horvil and Robby there five minutes early and
deep in discussion. The engineer had arrived first in the conference
room and selected what looked like the inside of an internal combustion engine for SeeNaRee. Jara hoped this meeting ran short; the
clanking of gears and pumping of pistons would surely give her a
headache if she spent more than twenty minutes here.

"I was telling Horvil about the new MindSpace extensions coming
out next year," beamed Robby Robby. With his blue vinyl trench coat, thick mustache, and shaved head, the channeler was so up-to-theminute that he risked overtaking the present and slipping into the
future at any moment. "Did you realize you'll be able to work on three
levels of data at once with the new H-bar? Assembly-line shops are
gonna be a thing of the past, Queen Jara!"

"Fascinating," said Horvil, meaning it. Only a sharp look from Jara
prevented him from drifting off into a haze of engineering-speak.

Serr Vigal multied into the room a few minutes after the designated meeting start time, looking haggard and depressed. "Towards
Perfection," said the neural programmer to nobody in particular,
taking the seat at the far end of the table in the shadow of an enormous
metal lever. Jara felt sorry for him. Vigal's speech before the Prime
Committee two months ago had energized and enlivened him; but
then Natch had disappeared, leaving him with the realization that he
had much less influence on his former charge than he had thought. Jara
felt like offering Vigal a consoling word or two, but she could think of
nothing consoling to say.

Merri and Benyamin arrived together less than a minute later.
"Sorry we're late!" said Ben, taking a seat next to his cousin Horvil.
"Creed business. Merri can vouch for me. Elan and Objectivv are actually planning a group convocation later this month."

"Fascinating," said Horvil, not meaning it.

Jara didn't really care why they were late, now that the two of them
were here to take her mind off Horvil's engineering patter and Vigal's
glumness. "We ready to get started?" she said, forming a prim, businesslike pyramid on the table with her fingertips.

"Ready when you are!" chirped Robby.

The fiefcorp master stifled a grimace at the channeler's oppressive
buoyancy. "Should we begin with a look at the latest sales figures?
Merri?"

The blond channel manager pointed to the center of the tabletop
and summoned a pentagram of virtual sales charts. It was a sobering sight. In contrast to their old sales charts, which usually showed lines
in hot competition to climb to the peak of the y-axis, these charts were
as flat as Midwestern prairie. It didn't help that the programs bore such
mind-warpingly dull titles as Eyelash Kurler 23 and Cuticle Manager
46c.

"I wish I could offer an explanation for all this, but I can't," said
Merri with a weariness that went beyond moribund sales figures. Jara
suspected some fresh health crisis with Merri's companion Bonneth,
but she had no desire to press for details.

"Aw, it's not that bad," said Robby Robby, without any evidence
to back him up.

"I've got a perfect explanation," said Horvil. "This code sucks. I
don't know how Sentinel made a single Vault credit off these programs. I mean, look at this one." He pointed to a red line labeled Y
NOT DITCH THE ITCH 18, which was actually sloping into negative territory. "That piece of shit doesn't even `ditch the itch.' It just makes
you scratch somewhere else."

Jara gave the engineer a sympathetic sigh. "It's a start, Horv.
Something to build on."

Horvil made a droll farting noise and turned his attention to the
steaming SeeNaRee valves hanging from the ceiling a few meters up.
"Whatever."

"Come on, you'll get these programs fixed up in no time," said
Jara. "You've cleaned up far worse."

"I've seen it," said Robby.

"I suppose," replied the engineer with a frown. "It's just ... difficult, that's all. Two months ago, we were going to change the world.
Now we're managing cuticles."