Geosynchron (37 page)

If the black code cartels find Nohwan impossible to reach, the indigent
and destitute of 49th Heaven have no such difficulties. As soon as
Rodrigo has recovered from his coma and returned to the rings, word
about his savior passes through the junkie community with the speed
of electric current.

Before long, Natch has a long list of supplicants from the margins
of society. By challenging the Chomp establishment and tearing a hole
in the social fabric, he now has to contend with all the world's misery
that comes pouring through. Not just black code addicts, but outcasts,
orphans, followers of outre philosophies, and victims of malfeasance
both corporate and governmental-all come to Natch seeking help.

They share only one characteristic: they are the powerless. The
helpless. The pushed.

It is not compassion that drives him to hear their stories and dissect their lives. It's curiosity. Natch sits in the darkened corner of a
bodega, listening to the tales of the trampled while Molloy keeps
watch over the door for signs of trouble. He never goes to the same
bodega twice, if he can help it.

As Natch listens, in his mind he deconstructs the choices they have
made. There are victims aplenty who have fallen afoul of the black code
cartels through no fault of their own. But most of the miserable have
found themselves on dark paths through their own willful misguidance. They have made poor choices. They have overlooked obvious
choices. They have passed over good choices because they are simply
too stupid or too stubborn to recognize them.

Rodrigo sends a woman to him who has sunken into Chomp addiction and sexual servitude, and Natch listens to her story. True, there is
a feckless companion who has egged her on and taken advantage of her
weaknesses. But Natch can see what drives her miserable companion
without even meeting him or seeing his face. He knows this man's
tender spots and vulnerabilities. He can pinpoint the exact moment
when the Chomp-addicted woman could have disemboweled this man and liberated herself from his confines. But instead she did nothing,
choosing to sink further into her black code lethargy.

But is it in fact a choice? Can she be blamed for her ignorance? Is
it her fault that a lifetime of abuse has deadened her to the sunnier possibilities? Where does the victim end and the person begin?

Such ontological questions are beyond Natch. All he cares about is
the practical. What can be done to reverse her victimhood, and is there
anything that can be done to empower her? He thinks instantly of
MultiReal: a tool to give her mastery over the fork in the road. But he
soon realizes that while MultiReal might open up more avenues for her
to choose from, it is no help in telling her which path to pursue. Give
this woman the power of Possibilities, and Natch knows to an absolute
certainty that she will end up in the same ditch over and over again.
Technology will only enable her to get there faster.

Natch decides there's nothing he can do for the woman, and she
disappears into the bottomless mire of Grub Town. What her fate is,
he never discovers.

Ignorance is not the problem of the former black code pusher and
friend of Molloy's who drifts into Natch's orbit. The man is canny and
clever, and up to a point his choices seem unobjectionable at worst,
inspired at best. For a time, he was the top Chomp dealer in the colony.
And then luck began to turn on him.

Every gambler must face the possibility that he will be stuck with
the low card in the deck; Einstein notwithstanding, the universe does
indeed throw dice. Molloy's friend has found himself the victim of
every outlier of possibility from sudden illness to random targeting by
the authorities, from accidental overdose to unpredictable behavior by
his subordinates. Soon, through no real fault of his own, the gambler
has become deeply in debt to other Chomp dealers in Second Ring.
And the other dealers are now calling in their loans.

Natch manages to extract the man from his troubles not by raising
him up, but by drawing his debtors down into the sinkhole with him. In two weeks' time, the black code pushers who had been threatening
Molloy's friend's life come crumbling down-and help Natch cripple
their debtors as well.

It's a reminder to Natch that the world seeks balance. For every
random touch of good fortune it bestows, it inflicts an indiscriminate
bit of misery as well.

Neither stupidity nor hard luck seems to be the problem with the
group of Pharisees that seek out Natch's assistance. Rather they suffer
from an inability to see past their own narrow circumstances.

Natch is surprised to discover that the Pharisees have found 49th
Heaven fertile ground for proselytizing. You can walk the outer rings
any time of day or night and see recruiters on makeshift platforms
espousing the benefits of Sufi Mysticism, the Church of the First Jesus,
Cabbala, and the Hindi path of enlightenment to anyone who will
listen-virtually every ancient philosophy humanity has dreamt up in
its five thousand years of history. The creeds that have sprung up in the
modern era of the Reawakening are even more bizarre. There are cults
devoted to the Demons of the Aether, worshippers of the Surinas,
fortune-tellers who speak of a mystical and omniscient energy
embedded in the circuitry of the Data Sea.

The Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled is as strange as
they come. The order claims to study mystical patterns in the world
for coded messages and portents left behind by the gods. Apparently
it's not financial advice that these gods are dispensing, because the
order has managed to get deeply in hock to the Chomp dealer Chim
Chavez.

Chavez is easy enough to deal with; Molloy tells Natch that the
man is sleeping with another dealer's companion behind his back.
Natch uses this information as leverage to get Chavez to drastically
lower the Pharisees' debts and to force him to stop dealing Chomp in
the colony altogether. But no sooner is the order clear of Chavez than
the brethren begin searching for new sources of funding.

The local head of the order insists on treating Natch to a sumptuous dinner to thank him, during which they discuss the issues that
continue to lead the organization into financial disaster. The group
seems to have surrendered itself to the fatalism that the world will be
ending soon and so there's no use in looking to the future. "We rely on
the charity of our followers, but every year we lose more of them,"
gripes the chapter head, a trim and bejeweled man of perhaps sixty.
"And every year the expenses go up. It doesn't really matter what we
do. The order has no future."

"I thought I had no future once," says Natch. "Within a few years
of that, I was the top bio/logic programmer in the world."

The Pharisee is curious. "And how did you find your future?"

Natch shakes his head. Too long and complex a tale to tell here. He
sums it up the best he can. "My guardian once told me, Your future is
what you choose to do tomorrow. And the direction you're searching for? Your
direction is where you choose to go. "

Finally there comes a time, a few months after Natch's arrival in the
colony, when he sits back and takes stock of his experiment.

He chose to focus on the Chomp cartels because it seemed like a
goal within reach. Even if it is possible to completely rid the orbital
colony of all the black code dealers, such a feat would be years in the
making. Instead he sought to target a narrow area where he could
definitively change the course of the colony, to find one place where he
could shift a culture running in the red to one running in the black.
He wanted to see if it could be done.

And now Natch has indeed rid the colony of all but one of the
major suppliers of Chomp. Yet what has changed?

The junkies that haunt the corridors in between bodegas trading
sex for black code have not dissipated; they've just moved from Chomp to other equally toxic varieties. He certainly did not expect all the
retailers in 49th Heaven to begin accepting Vault credits overnight, but
he had hoped to have some effect on the currency situation. Instead he
has merely driven the value of Chomp canisters to stratospheric levels.
Grub Town still exists and is still as heavily trafficked as ever. The
drudges insist that, despite the perplexing drop in the Chomp trade,
the incidence of missing persons in the colony has not changed. Even
the boy Rodrigo, whom Natch saved from the clutches of Molloy, has
recently been seen frequenting the bodegas on the lookout for Suffr-G.

Has Natch's crusade against the Chomp dealers had any impact
on the quality of life in 49th Heaven? Has he stoppered the flow of
misery through one pipeline, only to see it reemerge just as strong
somewhere else?

He sits in his hotel room night after night, lights extinguished,
meditating on the interlocking strands of causality between the different schemes he's running. He studies the leading economic indicators
of 49th Heaven published on the Data Sea: stock and commodity prices,
tourism numbers, numbers of arrests and convictions, murder rates. He
walks up and down the colony's central corridor from Seventh Ring
clear through to First Ring, studying the faces of those he passes. He
sits in dark corners of the bodegas with Molloy eyeing the door, and he
listens to the gossip of the OrbiCo workers who stop in for a drink.

And Natch concludes: yes, he has made a difference.

Just as the small bonus he helped provide to the OrbiCo workers
on the Practical did not lift anyone out of poverty, so too his efforts on
49th Heaven are incremental at best. The gains he has made here are
tenuous and constantly in danger of slipping away. But they are real.

There has been an ever-so-slight drop in the number of the colony's
homicides over the past quarter. A legislator in the 49th Heaven LPRACG is garnering votes for a proposal to dismantle Grub Town.
Natch can see a trivial rise in the number of ordinary families trekking
through the outer rings. Almost statistically insignificant progress.

How long would it take to completely cleanse the colony? Will there
ever be a point in time when every single person in 49th Heaven can walk
through every ring free and unafraid and unenslaved by their desires?
Could he do it in two hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand?

Natch realizes he cannot stay here forever. Soon he will return to
the world at large-whether as Natch or Nohwan or some as-yetunknown third identity he doesn't know, but it will happen. And he
wonders, will the tide of misery come flooding back to 49th Heaven
even stronger after I've left? Will the Chomp trade resume? Or will the
colony build on such tenuous beginnings and right itself? Will the
colony still be a cesspool of privation and affliction a hundred years
from now?

He falls into a fitful sleep in his hotel room and wakes to find Margaret Surina standing before him in her blue-and-green robe.

Towards Perfection, Natch, she says. The man who coined that phrase
believed in Perfection. He believed it was attainable by human beings, and he
believed it was the destiny of the human spirit to strive for that summit. In
many ways, you are the very embodiment of the qualities Sheldon Surina sought
to accentuate in the human race: continuous struggle, continuous improvement,
continuous lust for Perfection, regardless of costs or consequences.

You are the guardian of MultiReal. You are its keeper. Do what you think
is right.

Natch tries to close his eyes, tries to banish the apparition away.
But the visage of Margaret Surina remains even in the darkness, even
with eyes closed.

What does she want from him? What is she trying to tell him?
What is he supposed to do now?

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