Geosynchron (23 page)

Definitive answers to these questions and a hundred more were
surprisingly hard to come by on the Data Sea, and Jara did not feel
comfortable asking Quell. In the end, she decided to simply pack
light. Whatever the source of Quell's funding, surely they would pick
up the tab for laundering clothes.

But the issue of gearage was nothing compared to the issue of
transportation.

Marcus Surina had once proclaimed that he would free humanity
from the "tyranny of distance." And while his teleportation technology
may have struck the tyrant a mortal blow, death rattles were still being
felt decades later. Merri, who lived hundreds of thousands of kilometers away on Luna, had been prepared to teleport Terran-side to meet
the fiefcorp in Manila. But TeleCo was experiencing technical difficulties with its long-distance quantum repeaters, so teleportation was out
of the question. Ordinarily that would not be an issue, since multi projection from the moon was both cheap and reliable. But the multi network had been completely banned in the Pacific Islands by Dogmatic
Opposition. And so Merri's only recourse was to spend forty-eight hours incommunicado on one of the misshapen lumps of metal that
OrbiCo called a shuttle, alongside raw materials and industrial supplies. She wouldn't arrive in Manila for almost a full day after the
others. Quell paid for this too.

The last thing Jara had to deal with before taking a hiatus from
civilization was the issue of the settlement. Martika Korella had indeed
gone back to Suheil and Jayze Surina and worked out a compromise.
As expected, the terms weren't nearly as good as they would have been
had Jara skipped the trial altogether. The settlement would take a
hefty chunk out of the funds Margaret had left behind, and hand over
the title to MultiReal as well. But it would mean an end to the legal
wrangling. A clean break from Possibilities. Besides which, Quell's
sizable down payment would assure that the fiefcorp's coffers would
not be empty when they returned from the Islands.

Jara affirmed the agreement. She thought she would be sad at
having gone through the trial for nothing, but all she felt was relief.

Jara's biggest surprise, however, was finding Robby Robby waiting
at the designated TubeCo train, knapsack slung jauntily over one
shoulder. She would never have expected the channeler to take time
out from his busy schedule to accompany them on this mad adventure.

"Are you kiddin', Queen Jara?" he beamed. "Let you guys have all
the fun?"

For some strange reason, she was glad to see him.

Maybe it was because dealing with Robby Robby took Jara's mind
off dealing with Quell. The Islander had seemed like the epitome of calm
and forethought two days ago on the patio of the Ostrich Egg. Now he
had turned his attention inward, where there were evidently rough and
turbulent seas on the horizon. He would answer the fiefcorp's questions
about his homeland with staccato grunts of yes or no, if he answered them
at all. Jara had still not been able to figure out the nature of their consulting gig, and beyond one tantalizing clue, Quell seemed in no mood
to debrief her during their overnight trip to Manila.

That clue came as Jara, Benyamin, and Robby were settling in to
their seats on the tube. The Islander walked past them, heading for a
more private seat he had chosen at the end of the car. "Anything we
should be doing on the way out there?" Jara asked.

Quell stopped, frowned, turned to Jara. "Just get some sleep," he
said. "You'll figure out the situation when you meet my son Josiah.
He's your client, not me." And then the Islander was gone.

Jara and Benyamin spent twenty minutes trying to decipher what
this meant as the train zipped out of the Andra Pradesh station
heading northeast. They tried to locate a picture of Josiah, but the
Data Sea seemed to have been scrubbed of his image, and deliberately
so. Infogather returned an unprecedented zero results.

"You don't think this is a personal consulting job, do you?" said Jara
over Confidential Whisper.

Ben shook his head. "Why would he spend all this money to bail
his kid out of some local trouble?"

"Maybe Josiah's horribly ill. Or maybe he's deformed in some way."

"Can't see how we could help, if that's the case."

"Do you think ... ? Merri said that Quell's son was agitating for
his release from prison, remember? Do you suppose he went too far and
pissed off Len Borda? Or maybe he discovered something about the
orbital prison system the Council doesn't want the public to know?"

"Face it," said Benyamin, burying his head in a pillow tucked
between the window and the seat. "You're grasping at straws. We don't
have enough information to figure this out. We're just gonna have to
wait, like the man said."

"Don't-"

"Get some sleep, Jara."

But the fiefcorp master was too keyed up with questions to drift
off, and she didn't think a chemically triggered QuasiSuspension nap
would do her much good. Not only was there the mystery of Quell's
mission to contend with, but there was the anxiety of adjusting to an entirely different culture. They were actually headed to the Islands.
Source of a thousand mysteries, subject of a thousand childhood speculations. The feeling wasn't unlike that disquieting awe Jara had felt
the night before initiation. But at least with initiation, there had been
a modicum of predictability: OCHREs and bio/logics would not work,
period. The Pacific Islanders had made a much more complex accommodation to the age of bio/logics. Some of the conveniences Jara had
grown accustomed to would work, and some would not. She just had
no idea which ones-and likely would not know until she tried to use
them and failed.

So instead of sleeping, Jara decided to do some research. As the
snores of the other fiefcorpers echoed through the car, she spent the
next few hours flinging Infogathers onto the Data Sea. The more
queries she made, the more she realized how similar the culture in the
Islands was to that of connectible civilization. Perhaps the dialogue
was a bit more coarse and perhaps the breadth of opinion was not as
wide, but it turned out that several hundred million people was plenty
large enough to build a rollicking, diverse culture.

The Islanders did not have libertarians and governmentalists, but
they did have insulars and assimilationists. The Islanders did not have
creeds, but they did have thousands of active civic groups. The
Islanders did not have fiefcorps, but there was a homegrown programming scene that catered to the Technology Control Board's narrow
specifications. Jara couldn't quite call it a microcosm of the bio/logic fiefcorp sector, because technically the unconnectible companies were
allowed to grow much larger and more established than any fiefcorp
ever could. No carbonization economics for the Islanders. Some of the
programming companies here had literally thousands of employees and
decades of experience, which Jara found rather uncanny. What did all
those people do day after day?

Jara was so preoccupied with her research, she failed to notice that
Robby Robby had roused from sleep and was standing at the far end of the car, watching the darkened Chinese countryside through the
window with a shockingly gloomy expression.

She walked over slowly, giving the channeler plenty of time to
express a preference for solitude. He didn't. "I'm glad you're with us,
Robby," she said. "I have a feeling that we're going to need you out
there. I would've invited you sooner, but I figured you'd be too busy to
come."

Robby's smile was as wan as any she had seen on his face. "Well,
that woulda been the case two or three months ago."

"What happened?"

"Natch." The channeler shifted positions awkwardly as if the very
pronunciation of the name caused him discomfort. "I bet big on your
old boss, Queen Jara. Real big. Thought the Natchster would have us
all sipping wine on the moon before the year was up. Instead I had to
let most of my crew loose. Even Frizitz Quo." He took a deep breath.
"Things didn't turn out like we expected, huh?"

The understatement of the century. "No, I suppose not," said Jara.

"Well, Robby Robby ain't one to hedge his bets. So here I am, still
betting on Natch. Not just betting, doubling down! Still hoping that
this'll all prove worthwhile in the end. Frankly, between you and
me"-he darted a quick glance towards the others to make sure they
were still asleep-"I don't have much left to lose."

The fiefcorp master clapped a comradely hand on the small of
Robby's back. "All I can say is that you're not alone."

Jara finally did collapse into an unsatisfying sleep somewhere around
three a.m., still fretting about what lay ahead. She was so preoccupied
with the challenges she would encounter when they reached the
Islands that it never occurred to her there might be hurdles to jump
before they even got there.

She awoke to a glare of light breaking through the storm clouds of
the Pacific Ocean. They were headed east out of Taiwan, skirting the
borders of Islander territory as treaty required, so at first Jara thought
she might be seeing the rising sun. But as the tube train got closer, she
realized this was no natural source of light; it was some TubeCo crossroads platform bleached white with the presence of the Defense and
Wellness Council. Council officers, Council hoverbirds, Council banners. Everyone in the car was now wide awake.

I can't believe this didn't occur to me, the fiefcorp master reproached
herself. The Council isn't just going to let people amble back and forth to
Manila during a time of war. There was far too much cross-border commerce for them to shut down the tube line altogether, but that didn't
mean they couldn't erect checkpoints and make a few choice arrests
along the way.

As the train stopped and Jara watched a line of officers in the white
robe and yellow star tromp on board, she suddenly wondered if she
might be one of those choice arrests. What they might arrest her for
she couldn't imagine, but there was still so much about this game she
didn't understand.

"What do we do?" whispered Jara aloud.

"It's just a routine inspection," replied Quell in a conversational
tone of voice from his end of the car. "They'll just poke their noses
through our bags and let us on our way. I've seen this a million times."

"Yeah," said Benyamin, "but do you usually carry one of those in
your bags?" He jerked his thumb at the overhead compartment, where
one of the Islander's ebony shock batons was jutting out of his canvas
knapsack.

Quell frowned but said nothing.

Jara could feel sweat pouring down her face as if someone had
turned on a spigot. She was traveling with a man who had recently
been released from orbital prison after thrashing the lieutenant executive of the Council to the edge of the Null Current. What if these were Magan Kai Lee's troops marching into the car with dartrifles cocked?
And would it be any better if these troops held allegiance to Len Borda
instead?

It soon became clear that this was not just a routine inspection; it
was an ambush. Council officers were closing in on them from both
adjoining cars of the train. Before Jara knew what was happening, the
officers had cut off any hope of escape. Not that escape was likely. Jara
glanced out the windows and saw nothing but the platform and the sea
stretching across the horizon.

"I thought this might happen," said Quell in a low voice, barely
audible from across the car. He seemed surprisingly matter-of-fact.
"Don't worry, it's me they're after. Magan Kai Lee will bail me out."

"What do we do?" Jara whispered, repeating her earlier question.

"Get to Manila. Chandler will meet your train, and he'll take you
to Josiah."

"And then what?"

She never received an answer. At that moment, an enormous ogre
of a Council officer trudged into the tube car, swinging the end of his
rifle against his open palm like a nightstick. Jara had to activate a
bio/logic program to stop her teeth from chattering. Ben's face had
turned almost as white as the officer's uniform, and even Robby Robby
looked panic-stricken.

Quell stared out the window affecting nonchalance. Jara noticed
that the shock baton had mysteriously vanished from his bag. The
Islander must have grabbed it when Jara had turned to look at the
Council officers lining up outside. Was that what he was cradling
under his arm? Was Quell preparing for violence?

Jara took another look at the officers blocking the exits. Grim,
impersonal, unyielding. She found herself wishing she still had access
to MultiReal, though even then the odds of escape seemed pathetically
small.

Evidently the Islander realized that too. The ogreish officer stopped in front of him and simply pointed to one of the tube car
doors. Quell rose slowly, his face completely indifferent, and let the
Council officer lead him out the door. The officer grabbed his bag and
followed him out. Jara could now see the wisdom of the Islander
taking a seat on the opposite side of the car; to all appearances, Jara,
Ben, and Robby were nothing more than frightened bystanders.