11
Jara expected to dream of chess that night. She dropped off to sleep with the foolish hope that such a dream might give her some kind of subconscious insight into the identities of the players who had put this game in motion. But instead of chess, she found herself fleeing across a spare, storm-thrashed plain while forces unknown conducted a battle of forked lightning above the clouds. Jara was only one of hundreds running for shelter. Every time she turned to ask someone what was going on, she would find that person engulfed in lethal electricity and then charred to ash.
The fiefcorp master awoke before dawn and broke her fast in the nitro bar across the street from the hotel where she and Horvil were staying. After perusing the news (more Council clashes, TubeCo labor disputes, a baffling dip in the criminal black code traffic on 49th Heaven), Jara woke the engineer up and they prepped themselves for another day in court. She put on her nicest pantsuit, while Horvil splurged on an expensive bio/logic musk for no apparent reason.
“Something’s different today,” said Jara as they left the hotel.
“Like what?” said Horvil, sniffing absently at his wrist.
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
She remembered Natch making bizarre pronouncements like this when he was in charge of the fiefcorp, and she remembered equally well her disdainful reactions to them. How could you feel what the markets were going to do? Why pay heed to a sudden intuition with no logical underpinnings?
And now Jara was experiencing this oracular sixth sense herself. It defied explanation. There were too many officers in the white robe and yellow star on the streets of Andra Pradesh, and they were distributed in a little too random a fashion. Pedestrians seemed to scoot out of the paths of the tube trains at just the right instant, as if performing an intricate choreographed dance. The sun peeked out from behind the morning clouds and bathed the courthouse in its yellow rays right as Jara rounded the corner…
The fiefcorp master stopped, grabbed Horvil by the elbow. “Wait a second.”
Horvil gave her a perplexed look. “What?”
“Martika’s expecting the Surinas to rest their case this morning, right?”
“Right.”
“If Natch does show up as a surprise witness, like John Ridglee thought—wouldn’t today be the day he’s going to do it?” The fiefcorp master pointed ever so slightly in the direction of three Council officers lounging on the opposite corner. They appeared to be on high alert, though given the hostility between Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee, that was hardly surprising. “And if Ridglee knows that Natch is planning to show up here today, isn’t it possible that word might have leaked to the Council too?”
“I suppose,” admitted Horvil dubiously.
“Can you do me a favor?” asked Jara, taking the engineer’s left hand between two of hers. “It’s just a hunch. But can you talk to your Aunt Berilla, see if she’ll send a few of those Creed Élan security people here? You know, the ones that bailed us out of the Tul Jabbor Complex?”
She could tell that Horvil was holding an internal debate about whether to resist her request, or at least ask for a better rationale. But after a few seconds of hesitation, he pursed his lips, stepped over to the shade of a tenement building and slipped into a ConfidentialWhisper conversation. Five minutes later, he was back. “It wasn’t easy,” said Horvil, “but they’ll be here within an hour.”
“Thanks, Horv.”
The two made their way across the street to the courthouse. It was practically a cathedral of Surina family worship, tall and gothic in design with an imposing statue of Sheldon Surina himself standing watch over the entrance. Horvil and Jara entered the building and found their way to the main courtroom. With its multiple balconies and seating for nearly two hundred, it looked more suitable for an opera than a legal hearing. Jara half-expected to see a gaudy wrought-iron chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
Horvil and Jara took their seats at the defense table alongside an obviously peeved Martika Korella. She grunted a terse “Perfection” their way before burying her nose in a document projected on the tabletop. It was doubtful that Merri, Benyamin or Vigal would show up today, which left the three of them to confront the small battalion of lawyers and Surina family attendants sitting with Suheil and Jayze at the plaintiffs’ table. Horvil offered the Surinas a good-morning smile. Jayze pointedly ignored him, while Suheil responded with an ill-humored grimace you might expect from the villain in a Juan Nguyen drama.
Jara turned around and scanned the scores of people who had come to watch the proceedings. There seemed to be more drudges than usual—including the uncharacteristically quiet pair of John Ridglee and Sen Sivv Sor, seated in a prime spot at the front of the drudges’ gallery. She looked for some sign of Natch. If not the man himself, then perhaps a token of the unusual: someone dressed in an inappropriate fashion, someone paying too much attention to something that deserved no such attention. Jara could detect no trace of Natch, but she did see the black-robed and bejeweled Pharisee. Every day since the judges had gaveled the trial to order, he had sat in the last row bothering nobody. But today, he was not only looking Jara’s way; he was striding towards her through the aisle with a determined gleam in his eye.
Jara looked down to the ground and felt her teeth start to chatter. “Horv…” she started.
“I see, I see,” muttered the engineer. She could see his knuckles whiten as he gripped the table harder.
Jara wasn’t sure why she felt so frightened. Despite the Pharisee’s size, she would be hard-pressed to describe him as menacing. Nor was he particularly unkempt, defying the stereotype. What looked like a wild lion’s mane of hair from a distance turned out to be neatly braided and ornamented as he got closer. Part of the oddity of his appearance had to do with his connectible collar, which he wore with more awkwardness than any Islander Jara had ever seen.
So he wasn’t quite the intimidating figure she had imagined—but that didn’t mean Jara had any desire to see him any closer. Where were those Creed Élan security people already?
The Pharisee was only about ten meters away when his purposeful stride was interrupted by the arrival of the judges. The three of them walked in from the street entrance, as was customary in modern Indian courtrooms, causing the assembled crowd to rise and clear a path. The unconnectible giant took his cue from the crowd and stepped out of the aisle. Jara slowly exhaled with relief.
Things quickly settled down as the two women and a man reached the judges’ rostrum and gaveled the proceedings to order. Jara took another furtive look at the audience for a sign of Natch. If he was going to appear, it would likely be in the next twenty minutes, after the Surina family rested its case. Still she saw nothing. At least the Pharisee had decided to stay put and not make any more advances towards the defendants’ table.
The Surina lawyers went through fifteen minutes of procedural minutiae—in Andra Pradesh, there was always room for more procedural minutiae—before the judges called on Jayze and Suheil’s lead attorney.
“How stands your case?” asked the senior judge, the traditional prelude to the announcement that one side would rest.
The attorney puffed himself up with self-importance. “If it please the court, we would like to call one more witness to the stand. A witness we had been unable to locate until this morning.”
Jara darted a bewildered look at John Ridglee and Sen Sivv Sor. Wasn’t it their side that was supposed to be calling the surprise witness? But the pair looked just as nonplussed as she felt.
“Call your witness,” replied the senior judge.
“The Surina family trusts would like to call the former head of Andra Pradesh security and the former chief engineer for the Surina Perfection Memecorp,” said the attorney. “Quell of the Pacific Islands.”
* * *
The courtroom imploded into stunned silence. The last the world had seen of Quell, he was being dragged by Defense and Wellness Council officers from the Revelation Spire, presumably on suspicion of murdering Margaret Surina herself. The Council had released no information about his status since, despite repeated inquiries from the drudge sector.
Jara allowed herself to feel a quiet burst of hope. If Quell was no longer languishing in an orbital prison cell, did that mean Len Borda had released him? Surely now that he was standing here before an impartial court of law, he would be free to dispel all of this nonsense about Margaret being the deranged victim of Natch’s manipulation.
But then why was he testifying for Jayze and Suheil Surina? And why was Martika Korella letting out a long, ragged sigh of discouragement?
Quell walked into the courtroom dressed in a stylish pin-striped suit with his long pony-tail impeccably trimmed. Jara was used to seeing him as a barely repressed force of nature that might spill into savagery at any minute, a man who tolerated the silliness of connectible culture only because he did so on his own terms. But today the Islander looked as civilized as any midrange capitalman. His demeanor was calm, almost studious. If he noticed the mistrustful murmurs of the audience and the leering looks of the drudges, he made no sign.
Horvil threw an unabashed grin in the Islander’s direction as he passed. Quell’s eyes ran right over the engineer as if he were simply another bystander.
“It’s not turned on,” said Horvil to Jara over ConfidentialWhisper.
“What are you talking about?” she replied in kind. “What’s not turned on?”
“His connectible collar.”
The fiefcorp master looked at the copper band around Quell’s neck, half concealed by the collar of his suit. “How can you tell?”
“The interior usually gives off a really faint glow. You can see it in the shadows. But not this one. He’s just wearing it for show.” Horvil made a subtle pointing gesture towards his heart. “He’s using one of those coins.”
Jara squinted and noticed the glint from a tiny disc-shaped receiver stuck on the Islander’s breast. Horvil was correct. She didn’t know why any of this was pertinent to the court case at hand, but she duly filed it away for future reference.
By this time, Quell had mounted the steps leading to the witness stand. He stood and placed his hands flat on the podium in the traditional witness pose. His eyes were not focused on either the plaintiffs’ or the defendants’ tables, but rather on some nebulous spot in the air before him.
Suheil and Jayze Surina were grinning like jackals.
And they had good reason. For as soon as Quell opened his mouth, he began to demolish the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp’s defense in a very thorough and methodical fashion. Jara and Horvil could do little but gape in disbelief.
The Surina lawyers started by establishing that Quell knew Margaret better than anyone in the world—better, even, than Suheil and Jayze themselves. “How long did you know Margaret Surina?” asked the lead attorney, a short man with a defiant attitude and enormous eyebrows.
“About forty years,” replied the Islander, without inflection.
“Before she was the bodhisattva of Creed Surina?”
“Yes.”
“Before she founded the Surina Perfection Memecorp?”
A knowing sniff. “The memecorp was my idea to begin with. I was in the room when she asked High Executive Borda for start-up capital.”
The attorney nodded. “So you knew Margaret Surina before she was the honorary chair of the Gandhi University?”
“Yes. I met her before she was the head of anything. When she was a student at the Gandhi University.” Clearly Quell was beginning to find the lawyer’s methodical method of questioning tiresome.
“How old was Margaret when you met her?”
“She was sixteen.”
“So it’s safe to say that you’ve known Margaret Surina since the beginning.”
“Of course,” groused the Islander. “Weren’t you listening to anything I just said?”
Jara couldn’t help but break out in a smile. At least we know he hasn’t been brainwashed by some Council black code, she thought.
After demonstrating the length of Quell’s acquaintance with the late bodhisattva, the Surina attorneys quickly worked to dispel any taint of his arrest and any suspicion of his involvement in Margaret’s death. “Nobody even accused me of hurting Margaret,” said the Islander, sounding affronted at the very suggestion. “I don’t know why anybody would think otherwise.”
“So you were arrested for assaulting a Council officer, isn’t that correct?” said the lawyer.
“No,” replied Quell. “I was arrested for assaulting twelve of them.”
Someone in the audience whistled. The judges quickly gaveled for silence.
“And what happened?” continued the lawyer.
“They lived. They all recovered. I served my time.”
The Surinas’ attorney made a show of entering a beacon into the court record that led to the official Defense and Wellness Council sentencing report. Jara scrutinized it briefly and saw mention of a military trial and a two-month sentence. It seemed legitimate. She didn’t need to run a Zeitgeist program to see that the audience and the judges bought his story too. The atmosphere in the courtroom visibly relaxed.
The courtroom’s suspicion of murder dealt with, the Surina team began laying down a pattern of the Islander’s continued involvement in her life. When Margaret had begun work on her Phoenix Project, Quell had been there. When she had engaged in her quixotic purge of the faculty at the Gandhi University, Quell had offered her advice. When she had taken each of her several public tours of the Pacific Islands, Quell had acted as chaperone. And when their work on MultiReal had begun to achieve a critical mass, when High Executive Len Borda had begun stepping up his campaign of fear and intimidation against Andra Pradesh, it was Quell who had suggested a partnership with a private fiefcorp.
Jara felt a keen sense of embarrassment that she knew so little of this history herself. How long had the Islander been an active member of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp—five weeks? Longer? Yes, they had all been distracted by Natch’s cat-and-mouse game with Magan Kai Lee and the attention of the drudges. But couldn’t she have spared an hour to find out more about Quell’s background and his connection to Margaret?
Yet despite all these new details to fill the gaps in the Islander’s life story, Jara was nagged by the feeling that she still didn’t know all the pertinent facts. Some crucial aspect to the story was missing. Why had Quell done all these things for Margaret over the years? What was an Islander doing living in Andra Pradesh in the first place? Who was he really working for? Whose side was Quell on?
The fiefcorp master shook her head and turned her attention back to the trial, where Jayze and Suheil’s legal team was using Quell to insinuate that Margaret had suffered a massive mental breakdown in her final months.
“When did you first see signs of the bodhisattva’s unusual behavior?” asked one of the junior attorneys.
“I’d say about five years ago,” said Quell, eyes downcast as if scanning through old memory. “She started having these—episodes, I guess you’d call them.”
“Episodes?”
“She’d blank out. Stare straight ahead for ten, fifteen minutes at a stretch. You’d try to say something to her, and she wouldn’t answer. Like she couldn’t hear you. I had to… watch out for her when she went into the world. Make sure she didn’t black out in public or fall down and embarrass herself.”
“And this had an effect on her work?”
The Islander shifted from foot to foot, looking thoroughly uncomfortable. “Definitely. She started going off on tangents. Connecting things in the bio/logic code that didn’t make any sense. Keeping things from me. Just like in her personal life, I’d have to run around behind the scenes and clean up after her. It started taking more and more of my time.”
“But Margaret thought she had come up with a solution, didn’t she?”
“Yes. Natch.” The Islander managed to make the slightest of gestures towards the defense side of the courtroom without actually looking in that direction. “After one meeting with him, she decided that he could solve all her problems. Overnight. She stopped paying attention to the coding and handed everything to Natch.”
“And Natch took advantage of this.”
“Of course he did. You’ve heard the stories about him, haven’t you?” A knowing murmur made its way around the courtroom, even through the judges’ table, to Jara’s horror. Martika half-raised her hand as if about to make an objection—the first time she had done anything substantive besides stare at the table since Quell had taken the stand. But evidently she thought better of it and put her hand back in her lap. “Natch pounced on her,” Quell continued with some bitterness. “Margaret had just unveiled the Phoenix Project before the world. The first infoquake had just struck, people were dying left and right. And there’s Natch, in her office at the top of the Revelation Spire, insisting that she sign over ownership of the program to him. Insisting that she wasn’t capable of dealing with Len Borda. Margaret—she was so bewildered by all the death and all the chaos, she didn’t know how to handle it. She could barely keep up with him. It was all she could do to just throw the whole MultiReal project in Natch’s lap.”
Jara felt the ping of a ConfidentialWhisper request. “He’s lying,” said Horvil, confused. “Why the heck is he lying?”
She didn’t know. All she knew was that, by the looks on the faces of the drudges, of Suheil and Jayze Surina, of the judges, of Martika Korella, the fiefcorp had just lost its case. Jara turned to the engineer with her forehead buried in her palm. “Check and mate,” she said with a sigh.