Geosynchron (29 page)

The hotel Chandler had booked the fiefcorpers in was appropriately
opulent and, better yet, completely paid for. The postprandial coffee
brewing when Jara arrived in her room was vibrant, and the view of the
City Center was spectacular. She regretted wasting such fine accommodations, but there would simply be no time for rest in the next fortyeight hours. So Jara found herself wandering the streets of Manila at
midnight with a small security detail by her side, holding a ConfidentialWhisper chat with Horvil.

"The world's falling apart," she lamented.

"If the world's falling apart," replied the engineer from his room
many kilometers in the sky, "then you and I are at the hinges."

"That bad up there in 49th Heaven?"

"That bad. Richard Taylor refused to get on the hoverbird for an
hour. And then when we arrived here, there were so many things
blinking and flashing and beeping he refused to get off the hoverbird
for three. He's on total sensory overload."

"And Vigal?"

"Almost as useless. He just gawks at everything like a tourist. But
at least his heart's in the right place. I still have no idea what Taylor
really wants."

Jara's nerves were in a similarly frayed state, but this walk was doing its
part to soothe them. The streets were still loaded with pedestrians, despite
the late hour, and everyone seemed to be luxuriating in the mellow tropical
warmth. Jara tried to return the smiles of the passersby, but all she could
think when she saw some carefree youth strutting down the sidewalk was
that he might be lying in a ditch covered in blood in less than forty-eight
hours. Chandler's statements about the city crawling with spies and diplomats caused her to give a suspicious second look to everyone who passed.

Don't let yourself get distracted, Jara told herself. You've got a job to do.

She didn't feel comfortable providing Horvil with too many details
about Chandler's briefing. Nobody had ever successfully cracked the
security of a ConfidentialWhisper, as far as Jara knew, but this was
simply too important for her to make such blithe assumptions. So she
kept things vague. Horvil, to his credit, understood perfectly and did
not press for details.

"I can't believe how much responsibility I've got on my shoulders,"
Jara complained. "It's not just the success or failure of a little fiefcorp
at stake anymore. The well-being of several hundred million people
could depend on whether we give a complete stranger good advice.
No, it's more than that-this could determine the outcome of world
history."

"That's rough," said Horvil sympathetically.

"I know what advice Quell wanted us to give-but honestly, I'm
not sure it's the right advice. He's already made up his mind about
which side he wants to support. But I have no idea how or why he came
to that conclusion."

The engineer was clearly flailing for supportive words to help
guide Jara through this ocean of vagueness. "Well, you've got a good
team with you there, right? That helps."

"It does," said Jara. She had half expected Benyamin and Robby
Robby to shrug off the pressure and slink to their rooms at the first
opportunity. But clearly the sinister flicker of those Council hoverbirds
drifting off the coastline had affected them too. Ben was busy speedreading through every drudge editorial and policy speech he could find
in an attempt to give himself a crash course on Islander politics; Robby
had taken it upon himself to start glad-handing people on the streets
in an attempt to ferret out the real, unfiltered opinions of the Islanders.
Merri's shuttle was due to arrive in two hours, and Jara knew that she
would be equally diligent as soon as she stepped off the dock.

"I wish I could say that I didn't sign up for this crap," grumbled Jara. "But the truth is, I did. I complained that I was feeling irrelevant-and now I'm too relevant."

"You know what they say," answered Horvil. "Don't wish for horses
unless you want the whole farm. "

Merri arrived an hour ahead of schedule, looking dazed and somewhat
claustrophobic from being crammed in a small metal cabin for almost
two days. But the exhaustion went deeper than that. Jara suspected
that the stress of dealing with her perpetually ill companion, Bonneth,
was starting to back up on her, though true to form, Merri refused to
talk about it. Jara felt like taking her aside as a friend and telling her
that she was in no condition to travel several hundred thousand kilometers to play consultant here in the Pacific Islands.

But she couldn't afford to be Merri's friend at the moment. Not with
two Defense and Wellness Council fleets offshore waiting to pounce on
Manila. And so Merri was no sooner off the hoverbird than Jara was hustling her into a quiet room with Bali Chandler, who had agreed to give
her an abbreviated version of the briefing he had given the others.

At ten a.m. that morning, Jara gathered the fiefcorpers together to
discuss the situation. She went around the table asking everyone in turn
to summarize their thoughts and the findings of their research. As each
person spoke, Jara called up Envisage 24.8 and began transcribing.

Benyamin stared with skepticism at the jumble of holographic
words and connections floating over the conference table like a cat's
cradle. "Do you really think that's going to help?" he said.

"Absolutely," replied Jara with conviction. "This is the best macroanalysis program on the market right now. Works on the same principle
as Zeitgeist, but it doesn't start with any preconceived notions of how to
organize your data. And it only uses the information you give it."

"I can vouch for Envisage," said Robby Robby. "Former clients."

"But there's no real intelligence behind those diagrams," retorted
Ben. "You know the law-no Al, no smart software. What kind of
answers do you expect that thing to come up with?"

"None."

The young apprentice was taken aback. "None?"

"Correct," said Jara. "The point isn't to determine the right
answers. The point is to determine the right questions."

"What I worry about," said Merri, "is that we're trying to advise
our client without having all the relevant facts. I mean, none of us has
more than seventy-two hours of experience in the Islands. I haven't
even been here an entire morning yet. And here we are trying to help
determine their future." She nervously fingered the Creed Objective
emblem on her lapel as if it might ward off the taint of half-truth.

"One hundred percent correct, Merri," said Robby brightly.
"Haven't you ever heard of intervention consulting?"

Merri shook her head, as did Benyamin. Jara gestured for Robby to
continue.

"The goal is to shake up established thinking. To shatter hardened
positions. And one way to do that is to swoop down on a situation
without knowing the facts. You jump in and reestablish first impressions, reconsider points of view that might have gotten shoved aside
prematurely. Think around taboos. Trust me, it's great stuff."

"But aren't you just going to end up with uninformed opinions?"
asked Merri, not sold by Robby's description.

"Sometimes. But if you do it the right way and use the right software, you can also break through deadlocks and find new solutions."

Jara nodded sagely. She had studied intervention consulting; in
fact, she had taken an entire course on it two years back at Natch's
direction. She hadn't consciously been trying to apply that philosophy
today, though she supposed it must have been lurking in the back of
her mind. Jara gave Robby a silent thank you and dove back into the
Envisage program with renewed energy.

But the fiefcorp master wasn't used to working in the Islands,
where technology often sat behind barbed fences. She kept running
afoul of these peculiar unconnectible user interfaces, replete with unlabeled buttons and tactile-response surfaces that worked off a completely alien set of rules. It felt like a grown-up version of initiation.
After another hour of mostly silent concentration along with the occasional bout of fiefcorp bickering, Jara decided to walk the City Center
in search of something to eat. Merri, who had consumed nothing but
inedible OrbiCo bundled "meals" for two days, went with her.

"So how's Bonneth?" inquired Jara, struggling to find polite small
talk as they strode through the square, again with a security detail
shadowing their every step.

"Stubborn as always," said Merri with a shrug.

"What is it this time?"

The channel manager seemed to be wrestling with how much
detail to give. She glanced around at the enormity of the square and
apparently decided they would be out here for a few minutes. "Well,
I've been trying to convince her to move back Terran-side, like she
promised a few years ago. You know how inconvenient it is to live up
there if you're not one of the tycoons. Living on Luna was only supposed to be a temporary solution until we had her Mai-Lo Syndrome
under control. But now Bonneth's decided she wants to stay."

Jara hurriedly found a bio/logic program to stifle her impending
yawn. "Sounds like quite a dilemma."

"I think I've found a reasonable compromise, but Bonneth doesn't
want to hear about it. Ever heard of `dualists'?" The fiefcorp manager
shook her head. "It's a new trend for long-distance relationships that
Creed Objectivv is all abuzz over. Instead of trying to move one place
or another, we'd rent two apartments, one on Earth and one on Luna.
Each of us would live in the apartment we wanted, and we'd trade off
days in multi."

Jara tried to imagine such a solution with Horvil, if they ever decided to take that next step in their relationship. "So what does this
have to do with Creed Objectivv?" she said, suddenly intrigued.

"Well, take a look at the logo." Merri withdrew the pin with the
trademark Objectivv swirl from the left breast pocket of her coat and held
it up. "Black and white, distinct, unmuddied. Each one strong and clear.
It ties into the whole creed philosophy about dealing with conflicting
truths-you don't choose either black or white over the other ... and you
don't dilute the whole thing into a mess of gray. Truth has many facets,
that's what the Bodhisattva said. So you find a way to respect the black
and the white, both at the same time. That's the dualism trend in a nutshell. Each companion gets to live where he or she wants. There's compromise, but you don't really even have to meet your partner halfway."

Jara stopped in the middle of the square, causing the three men of
their security detail to suddenly put their hands on their weapons. The
fiefcorp master felt as if a clarifying lens had suddenly snapped into
place in her thoughts.

Islanders and connectibles. Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee. Quell
and Margaret Surina. Josiah.

A new solution.

The fiefcorpers gathered with the Islanders in a room that might have
been designed as an object lesson in state propaganda. An enormous
mural to Jara's left depicted the founding of the Free Republic of the
Pacific Islands in a romantic and surely exaggerated fashion, with the
Band of Twelve standing in defiant, self-important poses. An equally
impressive mural to her right showed a highly stylized rendering of
the Technology Control Board at work, with several sharply dressed
bureaucrats making simultaneous speeches to an assembled committee. Apparently the business of regulating technology involved a
lot of grandiloquent hand waving.

Jara folded her own hands on the sizable conference table and
studied Quell's son. Had this been any other man at the dawn of his
twenties, Jara might have wondered whether he was prepared to step
in front of several hundred million people and attempt to sway the
course of an entire civilization. But not Josiah. He possessed that precocious look that the Surinas all possessed, a look that conveyed the
ability to see beyond the Earthly scope of any human endeavor-or at
least, to appear that way.

"I realize you're not typical consultants," said Josiah, all piety and
seriousness. "My father trusts you. He brought you out here at great
expense, and it's clear to me that he thought your opinion in this
matter would be worthwhile."