'What is this Phoenix Project anyway? Is it a bio/logic program? Something you're going to launch on the Data Sea next week?'
'The Phoenix Project is a bio/logic program, but it's much more than just a bio/logic program. No launch schedules have been decided on yet.'
'Don't you have any specs you can show us? Technical diagrams? Projections? Anything?'
'No.'
'How do we know we can trust you? How do we know you're not just making this all up?'
'If you don't trust me, don't invest.'
By the time Natch wrapped up the discussion a scant fifteen minutes after it had begun, Merri's face had turned to stone. She asked no questions and did not react at all when her master said his goodbyes and cut his multi connection. Merri cut her own connection and walked out to the foyer of her apartment, expecting Natch to await her arrival there. But the apartment was empty.
She found him in his own flat in Shenandoah. Natch was already at the window fiddling with a series of bio/logic price graphs as if nothing had happened. He seemed unaware of Merri's presence until she cleared her throat two minutes later. 'You should catch up on your work while you can,' he said gruffly. 'We've got another one of these in an hour and a half, and then a third one late tonight.'
The channel manager nervously ran her fingers through her milky hair. 'Are you really planning to license a bio/logic program from Margaret Surina?'
'I'm definitely planning to,' replied Natch. 'I'd give 60-40 odds right now that it'll actually happen.'
'And do-do you really think any of those capitalmen are going to invest in you?'
'No.'
Merri blanched. 'No?'
The fiefcorp master turned to his apprentice with an impatient mien, like a hoverbird engineer trying to teach a child how to construct a paper airplane. 'Listen, Merri-I don't expect any of those people to put up a single credit. I'm not going to get any money out of the people we talk to tonight either. That's not what we're doing.'
'So. . .'
'So what are we doing? We're stirring the pot. We're creating noise. The people I invited to these fundraising meetings aren't the high rollers; they're the ones who like to gossip. By the end of the day, I guarantee you the people I really want to hear from will have heard the words Natch, Margaret Surina, and Phoenix Project in the same sentence. Listen, you can't just approach investors and ask them to put up money for this sort of thing. Anyone who's willing to take a risk like this is going to contact me privately and insist on complete secrecy. Not only that, but they have to be convinced that investing in the Phoenix Project is their idea.'
Merri nodded politely though she understood nothing, and left Natch to his bio/logic price graphs.
Rumors about Natch's investor meeting quickly percolated through the Data Sea. Most of the comments he read were laced with the standard pejoratives Natch had seen attached to his name since childhood: cocky, arrogant, insane. He didn't mind. People could insult him to their hearts' content, but now that he had the Primo's title under his belt, they could no longer dismiss him so easily.
The second and third investor groups were better prepared and had more penetrating questions, but Natch would not crack. He kept a cloud of mystery over the entire project; if anything, he became even vaguer with his answers. What could I possibly reveal to these people anyway? he thought. I don't know much more than they do. As for Merri, she seemed to grow more comfortable with her silent performance the longer the night wore on, now that she had convinced herself that Natch was not actively deceiving anyone.
At seven o'clock that evening, word leaked on the Data Sea that Natch was scoping out investors for a new Surina technology that just might be the legendary Phoenix Project. Twenty minutes later, John Ridglee wrangled a terse no comment out of the Creed Surina spokesperson.
An admission or a denial from the Surinas would have been news. Refusal to comment was big news.
By ten o'clock Shenandoah time, the avalanche of messages had begun. It was mostly the same drivel that had tumbled Natch's way after hitting number one on Primo's a few weeks ago. L-PRACG-sanctioned advertisements for financial software. Pleadings for donations to this or that cause. Servile requests from old business associates who once griped about how Natch had ruined them. Greetings from longlost hivemates whose names he had never cared to learn in the first place. Buried in the rubbish were a few legitimate queries from anonymous capitalmen, none of which led anywhere.
Horvil and Jara began shotgunning messages, ConfidentialWhis- pers, and multi requests to Natch by the dozens trying to figure out what was going on. Natch replied calmly that he would explain everything tomorrow night. Then he prived himself to all of their incoming communications and waited.
The Patel Brothers launched a handful of product upgrades just before midnight, further solidifying their number one position on Primo's. Pierre Loget's PulCorp made a surprising leap to second place, bumping Natch down to number three and Sentinel to number four.
And then, at three-thirty in the morning, as Natch was making yet another circuit around the balcony and glaring at the music that wafted up faintly from Shenandoah's entertainment quarters, the message he had been waiting for arrived. Natch did not know what shape or form it would take, but he knew the instant he opened the message that he had found his investor.
Time is luxury. Action is currency.
-Kordez Thassel
You are cordially invited to breakfast with the Bodhisattva of Creed Thassel today, the 25th of November, at 7:45 a.m. Omaha time, in the resplendent Kordez Thassel Complex in the northern reaches of the Twin Cities Megalopolis to discuss mutually beneficial business opportunities.
Natch traced the message signature to a standard administrative account at Creed Thassel. He barely even paused before replying in the affirmative.
Natch lobbed an InfoGather request onto the Data Sea while flipping through his wardrobe for an appropriate suit, then had the results read aloud to him while he dressed.
The creed had been founded almost a hundred years ago by Kordez Thassel, a libertarian philosopher and financier whose only qualification to lead a popular movement was that he had failed at everything else. Somehow, his teachings about the virtues of selfishness had earned him a following in the new breed of fiefcorp power brokers. Then he disappeared from view and left public relations in the hands of anonymous creed spin doctors. For years, Creed Thassel worked diligently to protect its mysteries, going so far as to swear its devotees to secrecy and refusing all but the most cursory participation in the Creeds Coalition. Whispers spoke of blood rites, oaths of fealty, and a mythical master program built by renegade coders.
And then the young drudge Sen Sivv Sor published the expose that made his reputation. Sor's undercover reporting revealed that the blood rites were nothing but parlor tricks, the oaths of fealty were mere confidence schemes, and the mythical master program did not exist. Thasselian membership dwindled, but the core devotees remained. Soon enough, everyone forgot about the scandal, and Creed Thassel abandoned its hokey mystic aura for a more prosaic philosophy of individualism. Membership rolls remained secret, but few cared to pry anymore.
A creed of fools, thought Natch as he walked the early-morning streets of Shenandoah, bound for the hoverbird terminals. But fools who have no love for Creed Surina or the Council. Vigal's words from the previous day rang in his ears: I fear that Margaret has picked you for this enterprise because she thinks she can manipulate you. Natch's blood curdled at the thought of being someone's pawn, and he felt like throttling his guardian for even suggesting it. Nevertheless, he knew it couldn't hurt to have a third party on his side.
The Thasselians' invitation arrived too late for Natch to take the tube, his preferred mode of travel. So instead, he hopped aboard one of the hundreds of hoverbirds that ferried passengers across the continent every hour. His flight from Shenandoah to the Twin Cities was smooth and without incident.
Natch found the Kordez Thassel Complex to be one of the ugliest human constructions he had ever seen. A series of squat, functional buildings skulking among the lowlands, half-hidden in the chill November mist. He followed a narrow bridge from the hoverbird terminal over the Complex's surrounding moat and into the Thasselian headquarters. The inside was no better. Hallways stood at odd angles to one another amidst sloping ceilings and crooked doorways; Natch doubted there was a pair of perpendicular lines anywhere in the place. He knew very little about architecture, but he imagined it took a lot of money and patience to construct such deliberate
