Geosynchron (17 page)

Jara turned around and scanned the scores of people who had come
to watch the proceedings. There seemed to be more drudges than
usual-including the uncharacteristically quiet pair of John Ridglee
and Sen Sivv Sor, seated in a prime spot at the front of the drudges'
gallery. She looked for some sign of Natch. If not the man himself,
then perhaps a token of the unusual: someone dressed in an inappropriate fashion, someone paying too much attention to something that
deserved no such attention. Jara could detect no trace of Natch, but she
did see the black-robed and bejeweled Pharisee. Every day since the
judges had gaveled the trial to order, he had sat in the last row bothering nobody. But today, he was not only looking Jara's way; he was
striding towards her through the aisle with a determined gleam in his
eye.

Jara looked down to the ground and felt her teeth start to chatter.
"Horv ..." she started.

"I see, I see," muttered the engineer. She could see his knuckles
whiten as he gripped the table harder.

Jara wasn't sure why she felt so frightened. Despite the Pharisee's
size, she would be hard-pressed to describe him as menacing. Nor was
he particularly unkempt, defying the stereotype. What looked like a
wild lion's mane of hair from a distance turned out to be neatly braided
and ornamented as he got closer. Part of the oddity of his appearance
had to do with his connectible collar, which he wore with more awkwardness than any Islander Jara had ever seen.

So he wasn't quite the intimidating figure she had imagined-but
that didn't mean Jara had any desire to see him any closer. Where were
those Creed Elan security people already?

The Pharisee was only about ten meters away when his purposeful
stride was interrupted by the arrival of the judges. The three of them
walked in from the street entrance, as was customary in modern Indian
courtrooms, causing the assembled crowd to rise and clear a path. The
unconnectible giant took his cue from the crowd and stepped out of
the aisle. Jara slowly exhaled with relief.

Things quickly settled down as the two women and a man reached
the judges' rostrum and gaveled the proceedings to order. Jara took
another furtive look at the audience for a sign of Natch. If he was going
to appear, it would likely be in the next twenty minutes, after the
Surina family rested its case. Still she saw nothing. At least the Pharisee had decided to stay put and not make any more advances towards
the defendants' table.

The Surina lawyers went through fifteen minutes of procedural
minutiae-in Andra Pradesh, there was always room for more procedural minutiae-before the judges called on Jayze and Suheil's lead
attorney.

"How stands your case?" asked the senior judge, the traditional
prelude to the announcement that one side would rest.

The attorney puffed himself up with self-importance. "If it please the court, we would like to call one more witness to the stand. A witness we had been unable to locate until this morning."

Jara darted a bewildered look at John Ridglee and Sen Sivv Sor.
Wasn't it their side that was supposed to be calling the surprise witness? But the pair looked just as nonplussed as she felt.

"Call your witness," replied the senior judge.

"The Surina family trusts would like to call the former head of
Andra Pradesh security and the former chief engineer for the Surina
Perfection Memecorp," said the attorney. "Quell of the Pacific Islands."

The courtroom imploded into stunned silence. The last the world had
seen of Quell, he was being dragged by Defense and Wellness Council
officers from the Revelation Spire, presumably on suspicion of murdering Margaret Surina herself. The Council had released no information
about his status since, despite repeated inquiries from the drudge sector.

Jara allowed herself to feel a quiet burst of hope. If Quell was no
longer languishing in an orbital prison cell, did that mean Len Borda
had released him? Surely now that he was standing here before an
impartial court of law, he would be free to dispel all of this nonsense
about Margaret being the deranged victim of Natch's manipulation.

But then why was he testifying for Jayze and Suheil Surina? And why
was Martika Korella letting out a long, ragged sigh of discouragement?

Quell walked into the courtroom dressed in a stylish pinstriped
suit with his long ponytail impeccably trimmed. Jara was used to
seeing him as a barely repressed force of nature that might spill into
savagery at any minute, a man who tolerated the silliness of connectible culture only because he did so on his own terms. But today the
Islander looked as civilized as any midrange capitalman. His demeanor
was calm, almost studious. If he noticed the mistrustful murmurs of
the audience and the leering looks of the drudges, he made no sign.

Horvil threw an unabashed grin in the Islander's direction as he
passed. Quell's eyes ran right over the engineer as if he were simply
another bystander.

"It's not turned on," said Horvil to Jara over Confidential Whisper.

"What are you talking about?" she replied in kind. "What's not
turned on?"

"His connectible collar."

The fiefcorp master looked at the copper band around Quell's neck,
half concealed by the collar of his suit. "How can you tell?"

"The interior usually gives off a really faint glow. You can see it in
the shadows. But not this one. He's just wearing it for show." Horvil
made a subtle pointing gesture towards his heart. "He's using one of
those coins."

Jara squinted and noticed the glint from a tiny disc-shaped
receiver stuck on the Islander's breast. Horvil was correct. She didn't
know why any of this was pertinent to the court case at hand, but she
duly filed it away for future reference.

By this time, Quell had mounted the steps leading to the witness
stand. He stood and placed his hands flat on the podium in the traditional witness pose. His eyes were not focused on either the plaintiffs'
or the defendants' tables, but rather on some nebulous spot in the air
before him.

Suheil and Jayze Surina were grinning like jackals.

And they had good reason. For as soon as Quell opened his mouth,
he began to demolish the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp's defense in
a very thorough and methodical fashion. Jara and Horvil could do little
but gape in disbelief.

The Surina lawyers started by establishing that Quell knew Margaret better than anyone in the world-better, even, than Suheil and
Jayze themselves. "How long did you know Margaret Surina?" asked
the lead attorney, a short man with a defiant attitude and enormous
eyebrows.

"About forty years," replied the Islander, without inflection.

"Before she was the bodhisattva of Creed Surina?"

"Yes."

"Before she founded the Surina Perfection Memecorp?"

A knowing sniff. "The memecorp was my idea to begin with. I was
in the room when she asked High Executive Borda for start-up capital."

The attorney nodded. "So you knew Margaret Surina before she
was the honorary chair of the Gandhi University?"

"Yes. I met her before she was the head of anything. When she was
a student at the Gandhi University." Clearly Quell was beginning to
find the lawyer's methodical method of questioning tiresome.

"How old was Margaret when you met her?"

"She was sixteen."

"So it's safe to say that you've known Margaret Surina since the
beginning."

"Of course," groused the Islander. "Weren't you listening to anything I just said?"

Jara couldn't help but break out in a smile. At least we know he
hasn't been brainwashed by some Council black code, she thought.

After demonstrating the length of Quell's acquaintance with the
late bodhisattva, the Surina attorneys quickly worked to dispel any
taint of his arrest and any suspicion of his involvement in Margaret's
death. "Nobody even accused me of hurting Margaret," said the
Islander, sounding affronted at the very suggestion. "I would never
have hurt her."

"So you were arrested for assaulting a Council officer, isn't that correct?" said the lawyer.

"No," replied Quell. "I was arrested for assaulting twelve of them."

Someone in the audience whistled. The judges quickly gaveled for
silence.

"And what happened?" continued the lawyer.

"They lived. They all recovered. I served my time."

The Surinas' attorney made a show of entering a beacon into the
court record that led to the official Defense and Wellness Council sentencing report. Jara scrutinized it briefly and saw mention of a military
trial and a two-month sentence. It seemed legitimate. She didn't need
to run a Zeitgeist program to see that the audience and the judges
bought his story too. The atmosphere in the courtroom visibly relaxed.

The courtroom's suspicion of murder dealt with, the Surina team
began laying down a pattern of the Islander's continued involvement
in her life. When Margaret had begun work on her Phoenix Project,
Quell had been there. When she had engaged in her quixotic purge of
the faculty at the Gandhi University, Quell had offered her advice.
When she had taken each of her several public tours of the Pacific
Islands, Quell had acted as chaperone. And when their work on MultiReal had begun to achieve a critical mass, when High Executive Len
Borda had begun stepping up his campaign of fear and intimidation
against Andra Pradesh, it was Quell who had suggested a partnership
with a private fiefcorp.

Jara felt a keen sense of embarrassment that she knew so little of
this history herself. How long had the Islander been an active member
of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp-five weeks? Longer? Yes,
they had all been distracted by Natch's cat-and-mouse game with
Magan Kai Lee and the attention of the drudges. But couldn't she have
spared an hour to find out more about Quell's background and his connection to Margaret?

Yet despite all these new details to fill the gaps in the Islander's life
story, Jara was nagged by the feeling that she still didn't know all the
pertinent facts. Some crucial aspect to the story was missing. Why had
Quell done all these things for Margaret over the years? What was an
Islander doing living in Andra Pradesh in the first place? Who was he
really working for? Whose side was Quell on?

The fiefcorp master shook her head and turned her attention back
to the trial, where Jayze and Suheil's legal team was using Quell to insinuate that Margaret had suffered a massive mental breakdown in
her final months.

"When did you first see signs of the bodhisattva's unusual
behavior?" asked one of the junior attorneys.

"I'd say about five years ago," said Quell, eyes downcast as if scanning through old memory. "She started having these-episodes, I guess
you'd call them."

"Episodes?"

"She'd blank out. Stare straight ahead for ten, fifteen minutes at a
stretch. You'd try to say something to her, and she wouldn't answer.
Like she couldn't hear you. I had to ... watch out for her when she
went into the world. Make sure she didn't black out in public or fall
down and embarrass herself."

"And this had an effect on her work?"

The Islander shifted from foot to foot, looking thoroughly uncomfortable. "Definitely. She started going off on tangents. Connecting
things in the bio/logic code that didn't make any sense. Keeping
things from me. Just like in her personal life, I'd have to run around
behind the scenes and clean up after her. It started taking more and
more of my time."

"But Margaret thought she had come up with a solution, didn't
she?"

"Yes. Natch." The Islander managed to make the slightest of gestures towards the defense side of the courtroom without actually
looking in that direction. "After one meeting with him, she decided
that he could solve all her problems. Overnight. She stopped paying
attention to the coding and handed everything to Natch."

"And Natch took advantage of this."

"Of course he did. You've heard the stories about him, haven't
you?" A knowing murmur made its way around the courtroom, even
through the judges' table, to Jara's horror. Martika half raised her hand
as if about to make an objection-the first time she had done anything substantive besides stare at the table since Quell had taken the stand.
But evidently she thought better of it and put her hand back in her
lap. "Natch pounced on her," Quell continued with some bitterness.
"Margaret had just unveiled the Phoenix Project before the world. The
first infoquake had just struck, people were dying left and right. And
there's Natch, in her office at the top of the Revelation Spire, insisting
that she sign over ownership of the program to him. Insisting that she
wasn't capable of dealing with Len Borda. Margaret-she was so bewildered by all the death and all the chaos, she didn't know how to handle
it. She could barely keep up with him. It was all she could do to just
throw the whole MultiReal project in Natch's lap."