everything has always been just beyond your reach. You need my help. Nobody is buying your fundraising pitch, and you're running out of time. You need the money that I can provide-money that's just sitting in the coffers of Creed Thassel waiting for a worthwhile investment. I can transfer the credits to your Vault account before the hour is up.'
The entrepreneur snorted. 'And what do you get in return?'
'Nothing at all. This is simply a cash loan. Repayment over five years with Vault standard interest rates.'
Natch stared uncomfortably at the plastic teeth of Brone's stump. He could feel the wheels of his mind spinning and spinning but gaining no traction. 'Why would you do that?'
'Because,' replied Brone with maddening calm, 'you need money and I need a foot in the door. If I attached strings to the offer, you wouldn't take it.'
'Let me see the contract,' Natch grunted.
Brone stepped away from the fiefcorp master's side, and gave a sweeping bow towards the window. The twinkling stars of space were replaced with the dull black-and-white text of a legal document. Natch scanned the length of the contract in less than a minute, then read it over twice more to make sure he wasn't missing anything. The contract was conspicuously short and completely free of legal doubletalk or hidden provisos.
'I don't get it,' Natch rasped.
'That is because you have a limited intellect,' said Brone. 'This is an act of trust, Natch. It is a concept beyond your understanding.'
The fiefcorp master looked back and forth between his wraithlike nemesis, the grubby hand on the table, and the blocky letters on the viewscreen. If I had the slightest doubt you could find the money to do this, Margaret had said, you wouldn't be here. He checked his internal calendar and looked once more at the menacingly small block of days remaining until Margaret's planned unveiling of the Phoenix Project.
Suddenly, with his mind's eye, he saw a raging bear in the wilderness. A battered and bleeding boy lying in the back seat of a Falcon hoverbird. An act of trust?
Natch quelled the inner voice screaming dire words of doom. He blocked out the chortling of Figaro Fi and Captain Bolbund and the Patel Brothers that echoed through his head. Then he reached out with his mind and affirmed the contract.
Brone smiled. His detached hand dragged itself painstakingly to the edge of the table and then threw itself to the ground, where it wriggled like a fish out of water.
20
Horvil studied the viewscreen with as much concentration as he gave his bio/logic programs. 'If you ask me-'
'Which I'm not,' muttered Jara.
'If you ask me, daisies would work much better in here than violets.' The engineer put his nose up to the viewscreen as if trying to give individual attention to every pixel. Then, in feng shui mode, he glanced around Jara's apartment with eyes narrowed. 'A garden of violets is going to stick out in here like a sore thumb,' said Horvil. 'But daisies, they're so ... light and ... airy. They'd look terrific with this blank wall effect you have going on here.' He made an expansive gesture at the unadorned white plaster running the length and breadth of the room.
Jara snorted loudly. Was this clod actually serious for once, or was he just being sarcastic? She couldn't tell which option was worse. The fact that Horvil had absolutely no taste or personal style whatsoever only compounded the problem. Then again, Jara thought bitterly, why would you need to have fashion sense if you've got enough money to buy it instead? She remembered the rare ceramic sculpture Horvil had hanging on his wall with a stray glob of peanut butter encrusted on its bottom edge, and she cringed.
The analyst forced herself to stop this dreadful internal monologue. She couldn't blame Horvil for her failure to carve a home out of this tiny apartment. She could only blame herself. And that was why Jara had decided she was going to order a new garden and wall hangings today. Who cared if she could ill afford them on her apprentice's salary. She had to draw the line somewhere. 'I'm going with violets,' she said between tense grinding teeth, and gave the viewscreen a silent command.
In the blink of an eye, the living room wall shifted back a meter to make room for a row of holographic violets that slid up from the floor. Horvil yelped and quickly scooted out of the way. As Jara searched for a suitable layout, he took a seat at the kitchen table and watched the shifting kaleidoscopic patterns on the floor. 'Maybe you could try layout 57, with a few daisies sprinkled in to match th-'
'Horvil, please.'
He shut up. Jara settled on a slight arc that spanned the length of the room, and confirmed the order. Delivery tomorrow at 3:25 pm, the system told her. Somewhere on the Data Sea, computational agents for the tenement building cut a thick slice out of Jara's Vault account.
This was all a diversion anyway, a way to pass the time until they could squeeze some information from Natch about what was going on. He had promised to explain everything in a fiefcorp meeting at seven o'clock. But by the time eight-thirty rolled around with no sign of Natch, the three apprentices decided their fiefcorp master wasn't coming. The same thing had been going on for a week. Horvil tried to get in touch with Serr Vigal, but the neural programmer had predictably prived himself to incoming communication, probably off fundraising. So Horvil and Jara spent the next few hours in Jara's apartment listening to Merri explain what little she knew about the Phoenix Project. The three tossed improbable theories back and forth, and got nowhere. Eventually, Merri decided to cut her connection so she could spend some time tending to her companion Bonneth, who was bed-ridden with another one of her crippling fevers.
Jara was ready to kick Horvil out and get some sleep, when she felt an incoming multi request.
Natch appeared in the room, looking as bothered and beautiful as always. He was already pacing the length of the room before he had completely emerged from the haze of multivoid. 'Horv, I'm going to need you to interview some new engineers and programmers,' he said, as if they had been discussing the topic for hours.
'Are we expanding?' asked Horvil.
'What does it look like?'
Horvil shot a glib look at Jara. 'How many do we need?'
'I don't know,' replied Natch without missing a beat. 'Two. Five. Ten if they're stupid.'
The engineer stood with arms akimbo and sucked in his stomach as if girding for battle. 'I hear and obey, brave commander,' he said, and vanished.
Natch swiveled on the ball of his left foot and stopped directly in front of Jara. The analyst felt the familiar hollow sensation in the pit of her stomach as the entrepreneur locked eyes with her. Sapphires, she thought. 'And you,' said Natch in a feathery voice. 'Why don't you tag along with Merri. She's meeting with Robby Robby to get him up to speed on how we do things around here.'
Jara gulped. 'Who's Robby Robby?'
'Our new channeling partner. He's a bit of a character, but he's got a staff that could sell you the clothes on your back while you're still wearing them.'
The analyst nodded. Her own clothes seemed uncomfortably tight and constricting at the moment. 'All right, I'll do that.' Then, seeing that Natch was about to cut his multi connection, asked: 'So what do you think-violets or daisies?' She tilted her head towards the holographic arch that the fiefcorp master had plowed straight through several times now.
Natch turned and studied the flower arrangement for a moment. 'I'd say daisies,' he announced, and then severed his multi projection without another word.
Jara cancelled the violets and ordered daisies instead.
Natch's thought processes had always been a mystery to Jara, but she soon began to wonder if he was losing his grip on reality. That night, he went on a titanic shopping spree. Natch bought everyone in the fiefcorp a new workbench with expanded MindSpace capabilities and the fanciest set of bio/logic programming bars on the market. He let Horvil loose on the Data Sea to pick out the best code optimization routines and analysis algorithms.
