morning.'
'Why not the other way around?'
'These rumors have to have some foundation before they'll take hold. One carefully planted source is worth more than a hundred pieces of idle gossip. That's why I'm going to have Horvil talk to his family connections at Creed Elan later tonight. How can you get more credible than a creed?'
Natch began a fast-paced circuit around Jara's apartment, but this time it was less an obsessive march than a confident strut. 'I'm impressed, Jara,' he said. It was the first time he had praised her work in months. 'Why the long face?'
Jara scowled. 'Wouldn't you have a long face if you had just called your own mother UNTRUSTWORTHY?'
Her sarcasm ricocheted off him like light off a mirror. 'You really are something, Jara,' he said. 'I don't know how you manage to stay so detached through all this. My emotions have been all over the place the past few weeks. I've been irritable and demanding, I know ... but that's just because I can't seem to find your level of professionalism. In fact, Horvil said to me the other day that you're really the glue holding this fiefcorp together ...'
On and on it went, and Jara found herself responding to his abject flattery in spite of herself. She had a secret weakness for a handsome face and a sugary voice, and Natch could be devastating when he turned on the charm. How does he do that? she cursed silently. Didn't she know by now that Natch's apologies were never sincere, that the honeyed words were just another weapon in his arsenal?
Nevertheless, his strategy worked. Somehow he had discovered her weakness for praise and exploited it. Jara found herself responding to the low, erotic pulse Natch stirred up in her-that he could stir up in anyone, male or female, at his discretion-and hated it. Hated it and hungered for it like she had never hungered for any of the hundred sexual satisfaction programs she had tried in the thirty years since initiation.
Or are you just jealous? she asked herself. He's still in his twenties and he's ready to take over the world. You're past forty, and you're still working as an apprentice.
'We're going to be number one on Primo's tomorrow, Jara, and we couldn't have done it without you,' said Natch with a hand on her shoulder. It was a firm hand, not inappropriate, but still pregnant with possibilities. 'The capitalmen are going to remember this in a few years, when you finally get sick of working for me and venture out on your own again. They're going to beg you to accept their money.'
The analyst ran three fingers self-consciously through her curly mountain of hair. She wished there were an easy way to turn off the sensation of Natch's virtual grasp, but the multi network didn't allow that level of customization. 'Yeah, well, maybe,' she replied lamely.
And then, seconds later, he vanished. His smile remained burned on her retinas.
Jara tiptoed down the hall to make sure Natch had indeed cut his multi connection and not just ducked into the next room to deceive her. You're so paranoid, Jara, she told herself. This is your apartment. Nobody can multi here without your permission. Still, she breathed a sigh of relief after determining that her boss was not in the flat. Natch had been known to perform miracles before.
She glanced back at the ziggurat and nearly retched. There it sat, in three dimensions-the evidence of her final degradation in the bio/logics trade. There has to be some way to stop this from happening.
Jara stood at her window and watched the London evening crowd go about its business. Of course, it wasn't a real window; Jara couldn't afford an apartment with exterior walls on her meager fiefcorp stipend, and had to settle for flat viewscreens. But how easy it was to just tune in an exterior view from the building and pretend. Down below, hundreds of people bustled around the public square, thousands maybe, casually perusing the Data Sea with hardly a thought to the bio/logic programs that ran their lives. Bio/logics regulating their heartbeats, bio/logics keeping their appointment calendars, bio/logics pumping sensory information into their skulls every second.
Jara's mind buzzed with evil possibilities as she fell into the familiar game of what's the worst that could happen. What would happen if panic overtook the market tomorrow and people started pulling money from their Vault accounts? What would happen if Horvil's trepidations became reality and the Pharisees really did launch a black code attack? Or what if-perfection postponed!-some unconnectible lunatics figured out a way to sabotage Dr. Plugenpatch? Jara's eyes darted to some anonymous pedestrian making his way across the cobblestones below, and suddenly he was no longer anonymous.... He was an important businessman who would wake up tomorrow in Beijing or Melbourne or one of the orbital colonies, Allowell maybe.... He tries to grab a batch of stock reports off the Data Sea while he drinks his morning nitro, and nothing happens.... His blood pressure starts rising, he's supposed to close a big deal today. What the heck is he going to do now? ... The OCHREs in his body frantically ping the Plugenpatch medical databases for advice on how to keep his blood pressure down, and what to do about his congenital heart condition. ... But Dr. Plugenpatch doesn't respond.... The room goes dark, the lights go out....
Get a hold of yourself! Jara thought. You're giving Natch way too much credit. One man can't bring the whole Data Sea crashing to a halt on a whim. The Pharisees aren't going to launch a black code attack tomorrow. What's the worst that could happen? A few fiefcorps will lie low for the day, that's all.
She switched the window display to a peaceful Irish countryside and tried to get back to work. The three- dimensional flowchart on the table silently mocked her: GULLIBLE. UNTRUSTWORTHY. UNDEPENDABLE.
'Fuck fuck fuck!' Jara cried aloud, slamming her hand against the bare walls. She couldn't just sit back and let this happen. Natch had to be stopped. He had to.
'I'm telling you,' said Horvil, 'they're talking about it all over the gossip networks. I'm not making this up! Go check it out for yourself if you don't believe me.'
The woman pursed her lips skeptically and regarded Horvil with a penetrating look. It was the kind of dubious stare that muckety-mucks from the creeds had been giving him his entire life, long before he was old enough to deserve them. Then she cast a spiteful glance at Horvil's apartment, which the engineer had carefully arranged in a tableau of dishevelment: half-eaten sandwiches mingling freely on the floor with dirty clothes, pieces of broken furniture, and the occasional bio/logic programming bar. The elderly woman sighed and turned back to smoothing the wrinkles on her purple suede robe. The state of the robe seemed more important to her than Horvil's dire warnings of enemy attack.
'Creed Elan has contacts in the Defense and Wellness Council,' she said. 'We have people in the Meme Cooperative. If everyone is panicking about Pharisee black code, why haven't we heard about it?'
'Heck, I don't know. I'm not a Council officer. Who knows how a wave of rumors like this gets started?'
'I don't care how a wave of rumors like this gets started,' she mimicked cruelly. 'I'm more interested in knowig how you, of all people, end up on the crest of it.'
The woman's name was Marulana-at least, Horvil thought her name was Marulana. These rich old crones from Creed Elan were all interchangeable. They scrapped amongst themselves to be the first to solicit your donation for their silly charity events, but when it came time for you to ask a favor of them, they were nowhere to be found. All Horvil knew for sure was that she was a bigwig in Creed Elan-one of the handful of minor bodhisattvas that ran the organization. She was also one of the women his Aunt Berilla frequently had over for lunch in that gaudy calcified estate of hers on the West End.
He could have verified her name in a heartbeat on the public directory, but it didn't really matter. Horvil knew this was going to be a short conversation anyway.
'You want to know how I heard about this?' Horvil gulped, looking for a quick way to foist Marulana's suspicions on someone else. 'Natch told me.' He gave her a conspiratorial shrug as if to say, Crazy world. You never know when you're going to get swept up in another rumor or scandal. But what can you do?
'Oh, Natch told you,' replied the creed official with deepening suspicion. 'Somehow that doesn't surprise me.' Horvil had no doubt she would recognize the name. Ever since he had signed on with the fiefcorp, Natch's name had been spreading among the Elanners like a virulent cancer. Aunt Berilla's influence, no doubt. 'So you hear that a major black code attack is imminent, and your first instinct is to contact your spiritual mentors at Creed Elan. Is that it, Horvil?'
The sarcasm in her voice was palpable, almost a third participant in the conversation. 'Listen, your holy creedfulness,' said Horvil. 'I don't expect you to panic every time you hear a strange rumor. But this is me talking! You guys know me. My family's been shelling out credits to support Creed Elan since the beginning of time.' And I haven't paid any attention to your dumb creed activities since I was a kid. I don't even pretend to understand what kind of morals and values you people teach anymore. I'm not sure I ever did. 'I'd just hate to see your fine
