this kind of privilege.
Her reverie was interrupted by a reedy voice Merri had heard all too often over the past few days. 'Say you run an assembly-line programming floor, and you're on a tight deadline. You don't have time to make mistakes.' Merri zeroed in on the source of the voice, and saw Frizitz Quo not three meters away, holding court before an audience of Meme Cooperative officials. 'Every time one of your workers fumbles a connection, that's a few precious minutes you've wasted. A few credits MultiReal could have saved you. Now multiply that by a few hundred workers, and that's real money....'
Merri tuned out the sprightly Asian and called up the grid that would show her the location of Robby Robby's entire team of cubeheaded channelers. A diagram of the arena appeared in the air before her, speckled with purple dots to indicate the coordinates of each team member. A legend in the corner of the diagram silently tallied up audience demographics.
Robby Robby himself had roped together an ad hoc group of nearly six thousand orbital colony residents, and was busy preaching the gospel of-something. Merri tuned in a video feed. 'We know what you're going through out there,' exclaimed Robby, his idiotic grin wobbling sympathetically. 'The last to know. The last to hear. The last to be noticed. Right?'
A lukewarm cheer from the crowd.
'Who suffered during the infoquake last week? Was it the terrans? Was it the lunars? No, of course not-it was you. Am I right? You citizens of Allowell, of Patronell, of Furtoid, of 49th Heaven, of Nova Ceti, and all the rest- it was you who bore the brunt of that terrible catastrophe, wasn't it?'
A righteous buzz of discontent. A few raised fists.
'Well, keep those multi connections right here in Andra Pradesh, ladies and gentlemen, because tonight the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp is gonna show you a whole new dawn for orbital colonists ...'
Merri cut off the feed and shook her head. Robby and his channelers had been wandering all over the map during the past few hours, voicing new sales motifs at every exchange. Her instincts told her she should rein Robby in, insist he stay on message. But did it really matter what the channelers said at this point? They were pitching a technology nobody understood to crowds that had no idea whether they should or should not care. Merri couldn't really ask any more of Robby's staff than to keep the audience interested and upbeat.
She was about to head backstage for a much-needed break when she felt a tug at her elbow. 'There you are!' cried a worried Benyamin. 'I've got to show you this. You won't believe-'
Merri put a calming hand over Ben's. 'Slow down,' she said. 'Take a deep breath. How's the assembly-line going?'
'Almost done. They're putting the final touches on right now. But this is more important.'
The channel manager let him drag her across the stage and up into the mezzanine. She was feeling the first twinges of impatience when the word Petrucio caught her ear.
'Yes, yes, yes, of course it's true that the Patels are licensing MultiReal from Surina/Natch,' stated a rail- thin woman of Polynesian descent, who stood on a makeshift podium fielding questions from several thousand fiefcorp masters. 'Why bother to deny it? The MultiReal you're going to see here today is the same MultiReal Frederic and Petrucio will be demonstrating later tonight. Same product, different brand.'
Merri fed the woman's face into the public directory and soon verified her suspicions. She had never actually seen Xi Xong outside a viewscreen, where her emaciated frame often sat alongside Robby Robby, Phrancoliape and The Felwidge Group in drudge roundups of the top channeling firms. But given the amount of work Xong did for the Patel Brothers, Merri should have expected her appearance here tonight.
'There have to be some kind of Meme Cooperative regulations against this,' 'Whispered Benyamin. 'That woman can't just come here into our audience and start stealing customers, can she?'
'I'm afraid she can,' replied Merri with a sigh. 'There's not really much we can do about it. If we kick her out, she'll only draw more attention.'
As it was, Xong did not seem to have any trouble attracting attention. With her opal-bedecked kimono and her glittering nail polish, she presented quite an elegant contrast to Robby's slick hucksterism. 'The Patels look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with Margaret and Natch,' continued Xi Xong, responding to a muffled question from the crowd. 'Competitors? Why, certainly the Patels have had a little friendly competition with Natch over the years. What of it?'
'Friendly?' protested one of the onlookers. 'They've done everything but try to kill each other.'
A frothy laugh bubbled from Xong's china doll lips. 'Don't believe everything you hear from the drudges!' she said with a dark twinkle in her eye. 'So there's no love lost between Natch and my clients. What does that matter? MultiReal is a wide-open market, and there will be more than enough room for two fiefcorps here. Besides, don't they say that a rising tide lifts all boats? As long as that tide pushes a few boats towards our safe shores, then everyone wins.'
Merri couldn't help but admire the woman's poise, even if her wardrobe was too gaudy for the channel manager's taste. She caught sight of one of Robby's boyish cube-heads bounding up the aisles, and for a split- second wished she could exchange sales teams.
'Do you want to know what the worst part is?' said Benyamin. 'She's not the only one here trying to poison Natch's reputation.'
Merri frowned. 'Who else?'
'You might as well ask who isn't here. Lucas Sentinel has a whole group here spreading lies. PulCorp, Billy Sterno, Bolliwar Tuban, the Serlys, the Deuterons, Studio Fitzgerald-they've all got their own people mouthing off in the wings.'
'Jara was right.'
'About what?'
'It's too late to cancel. With all these fiefcorps looking for blood, we've got to pull this demonstration off, or we're finished in this business.'
Jara tried on several courses of action in her head, but none of them fit. She could run, but there really wasn't anywhere to run to. She could hide, but that would be utterly futile given the surveillance technology at the Council's disposal. Jara thought about what the protagonists of the dramas did in these kinds of situations. They relied on glib words and cool detachment, of course, two things that Jara did not possess. What would Natch do?
A low crescendo of thunder swept across the courtyard and set the window panes vibrating. Rhythmic thumps. Boom boom, boom boom. It took her a few minutes to decipher the sound as that of a thousand boots marching on travertine in perfect synchronization. She listened intently for signs of battle-the high-pitched whine of continuous dartgun fire, the muffled boom of disruptors, all the war noises the dramas had trained her to recognize over the years. But if there was indeed a skirmish going on outside, none of it was reaching Jara's ears.
The tourists who had been kicked out of the atrium half an hour earlier came scurrying by. Over her mother's shoulder, a toddler gave Jara a curious look as they fled past Albert Einstein into Relativity Hall. They were followed shortly by a phalanx of panicked green-andblue Surina guards, fumbling with their dartguns as they scrambled to reach some defensive checkpoint. Jara dissolved as much as possible into Sheldon Surina's open-toed sandals, but nobody paid her any attention. Obviously, Len Borda had not even bothered repeating his fiction about protecting the scientist statues this time.
Outside, the first row of Defense and Wellness Council officers strode past the window. Their white robes looked positively spectral in the cloudy afternoon light, an affront to the notion of camouflage. Their faces bore the kind of stone-like neutrality that only bio/logics could produce. They were aiming squarely for the Revelation Spire, where Margaret was presumably holed up in a high story awaiting some kind of apocalyptic showdown. Jara peered out another window that gave her a view closer to the Spire. She had seen a squadron of Surina security forces there earlier, but now they had vanished.
What would Natch do under these circumstances? Jara knew exactly what he would do: he would go ahead and give the presenta tion anyway, until someone physically dragged him off the stage or blew him into a million pieces.
An idea popped into Jara's head, an idea that had been percolating for hours even though she had refused to acknowledge it.
Why couldn't she deliver the presentation?
