Free Multireal by David Louis Edelman

form.

    Then that week turned into two and rounded the corner heading
for three. Now, here she lay, thirty-seven minutes after her arrival in
this leather SeeNaRee, and Geronimo was gone. Jara still had twenty
minutes left on the account, and an additional two hours until the next
fiefcorp meeting. She decided to loaf for a while.
    Jara hated to chastise Bonneth for bad advice, but it was becoming
pretty clear that this form of therapy just wasn't working. There was
something intensely sexual about Natch. Yet he kept that virility
under such iron control that Jara could not even tap into it through
fantasy. What would Natch be like if he vented his passions in the bedroom? What if there were no bio/logic fiefcorps, no Primo's ratings, no
MultiReal to distract him? Easier to imagine a bird without wings or
a fish that could not swim.
    The closer Jara got to possessing the fiefcorp master, the more he
seemed to edge away. Achieving his lifetime goal of topping the
Primo's bio/logic investment guide should have loosened him up a
little, given him a sense of accomplishment. But instead, the entrepreneur was retreating farther and farther inside his shell.
    How long would his sanity last?
    It needed to last a while. Jara no longer had the consolation that
this would all be over in eleven months when her apprenticeship
expired. She had chosen to sign on to another apprenticeship, serving a
brand-new company in a wholly untested market. Another few years
wrestling with this peculiar crossbreed of loathing and lust.
    Meanwhile, Horvil was out there somewhere. Sweet, innocent
Horvil, who had opened up his heart on the floor of the Surina Center
for Historic Appreciation while a thousand Council troops marched
through the courtyard. They had managed to avoid being confined
alone ever since. Jara could honestly say she had never thought of
Horvil in a romantic light, and had no idea what to do. Her feelings
were as easy to decipher as cuneiform.
    Confused, emotionally knotted, exhausted, Jara finally logged off the Sigh and waited for the mediocrity of the real world to seep in
again. There was a name for the haze of a mind switching between
multi connections; why wasn't there a word for the postcoital letdown
of logging off the Sigh?

    Jara sat up in bed and looked at her still-white walls. In the living
room sat the pitiful arrangement of daisies she had blown an inappropriately large chunk of her fiefcorp stipend on. She arose, walked into
the breakfast nook, and had the building brew her up some hot nitro.
    When did you lose yourself? the analyst asked her reflection in the
window.
    Was it at Andra Pradesh, when Len Borda's troops were swooping
all around her? Or further back, when she had threatened to quit the
fiefcorp after Natch's little black code stunt? Maybe there wasn't a
single moment. Maybe it was a gradual eroding of self, a twenty-year
process that had started long before she ever heard of Natch or Horvil.
Everything that had happened in her adult life felt like one attenuated
chain reaction to that moment in the hive when her proctor had settled his hand on her thigh, a few centimeters higher than propriety
dictated, and Jara had tried to convince herself that she liked it there.

    7
    The familiar sight of his tenement curving around a Shenandoah
hilltop put a smile on Natch's face that not even black code could dim.
Natch had never felt a sentimental attachment to any of the places he
had called home; he remembered walking out of the hive for initiation
with barely a backward glance. But he had never savored the unique
flavor of returning to a place he had fought to defend either.
    The front doors swished open to greet him. Natch stepped into the
atrium and nearly collided with Horvil.
    The engineer's chubby face instantly sparked into a grin. "You're
back!" he cried, folding the fiefcorp master into a bear hug. Natch
could feel a turgid programming bar pressed against his