Mappa Mundi (14 page)

“Papers?” she glanced up at him eagerly. “Really? What did they say?”

“I don't know.” It sounded so ridiculous.

“You're kidding. You didn't look?”

“I thought you were supposed to cynically give me an explanation of how material objects don't manifest out of thin air. To assure me that I was hallucinating.”

“Hah!” She grinned. “I always try to do the unexpected. And you probably
were
hallucinating, unfortunately, although I've always hoped that one day I'd find a patient who wasn't, I mean, that it was real. Still got them?”

Jude stopped. They were on the edge of some main square, standing in the light from a travel agent's window advertising cut-price winter sun excursions to Florida. He held up the case. “D'you want to see?”

She looked deep into his eyes and then whirled around suddenly in a pirouette. “Shit, you're serious!” The fact seemed to delight her and he found himself smiling in a dumb way, starting that laugh again, because the whole world was nuts.

“Ah, you got me,” he said, pretending it had been a joke, to see if she really did believe him or not.

People brushed past them on both sides and someone muttered not very quietly about idiots blocking the pavement. Jude let the case back down and started moving again. A few moments passed and he looked down at her.

She fixed him with a frank stare. “Speaking as a professional, you're an awful liar. And I'm friends with one of the best liars in the business, so I know the breed, and you, you couldn't lie your way into an under-twenty-ones night. So let's get something straight before we go on. You don't try to lie to me and I won't really lie to you. I believe you about the file. You'd better show it to me. But—” she pulled the wretched disk out of her inner pocket and flashed it in front of him “—this is bad news. I didn't believe you about it at first.” She put it back carefully and steered them both down a smaller street where colourful lights were strung and restaurants alternated with small, exclusive boutiques displaying single shoes or fur coats to the drizzle.

They slowed down and Natalie took his arm. She spoke as quietly as she could and he listened hard for the verdict.

“Let's see now. Where to start. First of all, it's written in Mappacode, which is a specially derived language, requires a licence, and is only known by a very small number of programmers. But, of course, that doesn't mean someone couldn't have leaked it and hacked it—but then, they must have all the right compilers and those exist only on specific, nonlinked military machines, so if it
was
leaked it's taken a lot of trouble.”

They turned a corner and had to skirt a small audience who'd gathered around a suitcase circus and were watching an old man juggle fire. Jude noticed it with another part of his brain. At any other time he'd have been delighted to find oddities like that but now it was only wallpaper.

“Second thing. It's not well done. Whoever wrote this isn't good at it. I'd guess that it's a botch—pieces of other programs copied and edited together. I'm sure of it.”

“How come?”

“Because I've found sections of stuff I wrote inside it, that's why. You see, there are different areas of expertise. Some people work on the electrochemicals and the blood-chemistry side, some people on the nonphysical elements—nobody is an expert on everything. I write at the memetic level—the level of concepts. And at the patterning level…” She paused.

“The physical side of thoughts,” Jude filled in. At least his memory was functioning clearly. He'd studied hard on the way over here and he was clear on the technicalities, if not on the fine detail of the subject. It was a gift he had pride in.

“Yes. That's my area. And some of my code is in this bastard thing. I even know the date I wrote it and where it lives inside the genuine article—it's an emotional patterner, a tool for studying and editing emotional responses to, and emotional causes of, specific memes; it tells me what the subject feels and what they're likely to do next as a result. Well, it would in theory. Anyway…”

“This is a patch-up?” He was adding in what she'd said carefully.

“It is. It's a patch-up that takes a normal person and makes them psychopathic. But it's brutal. It isn't the way this technology is supposed to work.”

“Oh, like there's a good kind of psychopathic and a bad kind?” He wanted to laugh but he was thinking of White Horse and what she'd said about Martha Johnson and the laugh didn't get out of the starting stall.

They were passing some other kind of church. The first one was only small. This was huge, pale and ornate. Its stained-glass windows were lit up from the inside, but few people seemed to be about and the iron-studded doors were shut. A cathedral? Jude bent his head lower to hear Natalie as she whispered on, holding on to his arm.

“No. Not exactly. Like, there's a kind of psychopathic that retains personality and logical reason, people who stay coherent as characters, and there's—this. I don't even think it would have a natural analogue. I'm not even sure that you could really call whoever was targeted with this a human being in the end. It's…”

“Like stirring your brain with a spoon?”

“And leaving only the bad bits connected. The identity of the victim is going to be largely erased by this. It's moronic. As well as badly made. I think it was put together by copying pattern sets from someone very disturbed and then trying to duplicate them wholesale as activity lots in the receiver's head. As if this was just a photocopier for brains.”

“It doesn't work like that?” He hadn't been sure about this point. The ideas and the experimental data on it had never looked like they matched up.

“No. It can't. Every brain develops individual patterns and connections from the moment the first cells start dividing. By the time we're adults, although we have a lot of commonality, we're all different. You might get the same outputs from two people when you ask them what a cat is, but how they think about the answer can be totally unique when you look at the patterning inside, the communication between
the different parts of the brain. And even if we made everyone identical, with every moment that passes new and unique experiences are moulding new and unique structures, so they wouldn't stay the same. That's been the biggest problem we've dealt with. But now…” She stopped herself. “I can't tell you that.”

“Now you've figured a way around that,” he guessed, but didn't wait for an answer.

She smiled unhappily, turning her face away to look in the windows of a restaurant where normal people with ordinary problems were eating and drinking.

“And this is a piece of your project. A big military project. For mind control and identity control.” He nodded. “I guess that beats my file story, although I didn't think anyone would top that.”

“But this disk is not part of the project,” she corrected him gently. “This is a…bootleg. This is trash. But someone in the project has done it. And if it's as you say, they've tested this. But whoever it was tested on must be primed with NervePath technology. It doesn't work on a cold brain. And NP is—”

“Controlled medical technology, illegal for use in the USA under the Perfection Bill.”

“And in most countries across the world.”

“You think GlobalPathSystems are in on it?”

“They're the ones who control the manufacture and release.”

“But they're not controlled by the Pentagon.”

“Maybe it's a commercial test?”

Jude stared at her. “There's a market for braindeath?”

She shrugged. “Or your people are testing this as a weapon, which looks a lot more likely. Despite, of course, all their signed pledges never to use it as such.”

She didn't have to say any more. Jude thought it was pretty clear. It didn't even take the vision of White Horse in his mind, saying “We've had their pledges before,” to make him place his bet on which
supposition was going to turn out true. But now he and she had the same problem. They didn't know who else was in on it, and it was going to be very dangerous to find out.

They stopped, realizing that they had walked right out the other side of the town and were facing a major road. Above them was the heavy gateway of Micklegate Bar that had once been decorated with heads on sticks, heads cut off for less serious offences than they were discussing.

The rain had stopped and they were both damp. The rough stone of the arches dripped where it should have sheltered.

Jude realized that all White Horse's suspicions had turned out to be real. He'd come here to prove her wrong and now this God-awful rock had been turned over and he was going to have to do something about what was underneath it.

“I don't know about you, but I could do with a drink,” Natalie said. She was shivering violently.

“Let's go.” He tried to give her his coat but she was already jogging back the way they'd come, towards a lit doorway. He followed, the case heavy in his hand.

Mary Delaney stood in Rebecca Dix's outer office, listening through the open doorway as Dix and her secretary, Irina, had a standoff. Mary had requested a file and Irina hadn't produced it.

“What do you mean, it isn't there?”

“The Ivanov files are missing.” Irina wasn't scared of Dix, and was equally as angry and puzzled as she was.

“It can't be missing. It's the only copy. Maybe Decker took it, d'you think? No, how could he have?”

“I had it only yesterday,” Irina said, becoming calm first. Mary could imagine her attitude, hips jutting assertively, manicured hand to her face with four inch-long replicas of Earthrise from the moon perfectly painted on her nails. “I added the information from our agent in
Moscow and then I put it straight back. The locks have all functioned perfectly. Someone authorized has to have it.” And for Irina that was it.

Dix put her head round the door and beckoned Mary in, allowing Irina to exit before she closed the door.

“I trust you heard all that? Good. Some bastard in the office must be doubling on us. Keep your ears sharp. We've got to get it back, fast. When we nail that Russian bastard to the wall we need to make sure nothing slips.”

Mary knew that it was worse than that. Without the file there was little or no evidence that Ivanov was who they claimed he was. He could walk, easy, and take off with a stack of information in his head that had all been paid for from government funds. For security reasons no copies existed and the detail was all on paper. She had no idea where to start.

Dix looked at her with misgiving. “What made you request it now?”

“I wanted to add the Florida stuff.”

Dix's stare became acute, lizardlike in its patience and depth. “Don't fuck with me over Jude Westhorpe, Agent Delaney.”

Mary frowned. “I don't know where it is.”

“As long as we're clear.”

Of course Dix would have her followed from time to time. There was nothing that went unchecked. She must know they were close.

“One more thing goes wrong with this whole project and you're off the case.”

“Yes, ma'am. If I might say something?” Mary didn't like asking permission to speak but Dix was ex-army and she liked things to run that way. “If you look for who authorized the CONTOUR release, you'll find who's causing the trouble on Mappa Mundi.”

“Thanks, Einstein,” Dix said, allowing a smile to soften her face. She waved at Mary to dismiss her, the worry of the theft submerging for a moment as she tried and failed to regret her stern attitude. “I'm on it.”

Back in her day-guise at Special Sciences Mary picked up the heavy glass paperweight of the space shuttle
Columbia
and considered hurling it against the wall, but finally sat down to think instead, the comforting dense, smooth surfaces turning in her hands. Why do anything if nothing could be achieved by it? Throwing was her style, but she didn't need style right now. She needed to see the bigger picture that this sudden absence of the file and the live test of CONTOUR were both parts of.

She doubted that Guskov had had anything to do with the test. On the other hand…he'd screwed with the NSC before and won, and she would bet her last dime that there was even something in this latest genetics deal in Orlando that he was keeping to himself. When they interviewed she never got the final word in with him, nor did Dix, and now all the dirt they'd kept on him over all the years, tracing him back to his roots, finding every thug and pencil pusher he'd ever known—gone.

It was almost funny. She'd used Jude and his interest in this man to do her dirty work for her, snatching the meat from under his nose at the last second every time. And he was still faithful. And now she'd lost it, into thin air, and Jude with it for the time being. What was he up to? How would she divert him if the cursed thing had been placed in his hands?

She replaced the shuttle in pride of place and stared at it, willing it to vanish.

It was enough to make you start believing in the Philadelphia Project, it really was.

Columbia
remained firmly material.

Mary began to hone the work on the details of Florida for the FBI, crafting something out of the almost-nothing she was allowed to use.

A message came through for her online from one of the British agents working for her. She read it several times before she realized the worst possibility had come true. Jude was confirmed sighted in England.
They thought he'd made contact with one of the scientists involved in the project. He had to be investigating it.

In a single motion she swept up the glass shuttle and brought it down again with all her might on the desk. It broke into three pieces and a fine dusting of shards like powdered sugar. The nose section rolled away and fell onto the floor. The tail section had cut her hand.

Seeing it lie in pieces, when only a second ago it had been perfect, made her want to cry.

She didn't.

Dan received the unexpected call from Shelagh Carter in the middle of his second pint. It wasn't a face-to-face, only a text note, so he didn't bother removing himself from the cramped end of the table where he and the nurses were wedged against the curving, low brickwork of the cellars. Music and lights provided a solid background of remorseless bright energy. This did nothing to stop Dan's heart from dropping into his shoes when he read the note's brief enquiry.

“Dan,” it said in an innocuous, comic-style font. “Please register with the answering service if you have seen this man or know his whereabouts.” An image was attached and Dan didn't need to blow it up to full-screen size to recognize it. Natalie's American. He flicked the message off and slid the Pad back into his pocket. The rest of his beer went down fast enough but it was another two minutes before he could squeeze his way to the bar and get some attention for another.

He was glad of the rapid drums and the general hilarity all around him as a hen night got under way. Paper streamers and pop glitter scattered all over him like fairy dust. Some female hand gave his bum an experimental squeeze and he almost spilled the beer as the barman handed it across the two heads in between him and the bar. Normally he'd have been in the thick of this sort of Grade A distraction, loving
every second, but instead he made his way back to his seat and steadily poured the first of two extra lagers down his throat.

“What's matter wi' you?” Nurse Charlton elbowed him in the ribs after a minute or two. “You were all right a minute ago. Seen an old flame?”

Dan shook his head, actually unable to think of an answer for once, and grinned endearingly, which seemed to satisfy her for the time being. For some reason all the female nurses seemed to think his sex life was constantly evolving for their entertainment, envy, or discussion. It irritated him, although, he had to admit, most of the time he played the gay blade just as hard as he could. With his nose halfway down the glass and the drink beginning to take a bit more effect, he felt sick at himself. What was he doing here? And what time was it?

His Pad said half past eight. It would take ten minutes to walk to the Swan. Just time for another couple of drinks if he was quick. He flashed some credit across to Sister Johns, who was getting the next round in, along with a request for a lager and a Scotch.

Johns tilted her elegant brown face at him. “Are you sure? Night's still young.”

He nodded vigorously and felt nauseous. He didn't want to have seen Carter's message. He didn't know what it meant, and if he drank a lot now he'd be able to forget it. It seemed to mean that Westhorpe was a kind of bad guy, but Natalie wouldn't have anything to do with one of those, so it couldn't be. Which meant that maybe Carter … but here his mind kept taking a U-turn all of its own accord. He tried to sort his thoughts out about the Ministry woman and it was like being magnetically repelled. He liked Shelagh Carter. Shelagh Carter was OK, a good guy, on the right side. He felt that very strongly.

But Natalie and the American … and there it was again. It was just like that sensation of levitation that he sometimes got when falling asleep. Floating just above the ground he'd be, and then, triggered by an image of a step off a cliff or a pavement, he'd plummet away into a
terrifying fall and come to with a jolt. There was a fuzzy second of nothing. Then the only thing left in his gut and his mind was that Shelagh was right and he was wrong. He trusted her absolutely.

Except that he also trusted Natalie absolutely and the two would not, could not fit together any more. Dan thought of Natalie and knew she was smarter than he was. He could tell her about this—but no, a closed fist around his insides forbade him even to think it. He wasn't able to tell anyone about Shelagh. It was an Important Secret. Part of the government. It was vital not to tell.

In the back of his mind, in some unused pocket (and, he thought, there were plenty of those), Dan was dimly aware that he didn't usually think like this. He didn't normally have an impulse and then have another right on top of it that was contrary. He wasn't that quick or that complicated. Even Bad Dan only acted out one thing at a time.

Johns put his drinks down and he worked through both of them, even joining in the conversation until it was time to go. He said he had to meet Natalie and left, not remembering anything they'd just spoken about. As the cold air hit him he felt instantly that he was going to be very sick, but he didn't want to be because the alcohol was smoothing out the switchbacks that his head was trying to take. Through a haze of misery it was beginning to dawn on him that he knew what this was, he just didn't want to admit it as even possible. The symptoms, the reactions, the emotional jerking—they fitted the classic model. But he couldn't believe that it was true. This stuff wasn't in use yet. The project was hardly a third done. So it couldn't be that.

He had to get to Natalie and she would prove it wrong.

Dan was halfway to the Black Swan, managing to keep his stomach in order, insulated against the worst by his blood alcohol, when Natalie called him.

“Dan!” Her voice sounded agitated and it was sharp so that he couldn't protest. “I'm going to the old house instead tonight. I can't make it. I'll see you tomorrow.”

Tomorrow was Saturday. Shelagh Carter would expect her call by then.

Dan vacillated, wandering in his patch of pavement as his focus left him.

“Dan, is everything all right? You look awful. Why don't you get a cab and come over, too?”

But his brain was slowly getting the hint. If she was going to the old house with whatsisname, then she probably had a plan that entailed being left well alone, especially by well-meaning meddlers like him. Natalie hadn't had a sniff of a date in eight months and he couldn't even remember the last time anyone had stayed over. His heart was full of pity for her, and a warm, affectionate feeling, even if the date did turn out to be an international spy or terrorist. Surely he must be a good one.

“No, no,” Dan said, smiling and enunciating perfectly. “That's all right. I'm off home already. I'll see you tomorrow.” Whatever was wrong with him could wait until she was back to help. He must have had it quite a while already, and he was still relatively okay.

With that decided he hung up and turned to his left where a raised flower bed had been conveniently positioned for inadequates to spew their guts into.

Mary Delaney played tennis on those Saturdays when she was in Washington, at the Lansdale Racquets and Clubs. It was an exclusive venue and membership was severely restricted. She felt proud to drive up through the gates and along the impressive gravel entryway, because in her childhood she'd played on courts more weed than clay, with balls that hardly bounced and no net except a washing line so narrow it was barely visible from either end of the playground.

Her morning fixture was regular, at ten, and always presaged some more businesslike meeting to be taken over lunch. There, amid the five-star dining rooms, or sequestered in a private suite lined with
English oak panelling, where floor-to-ceiling windows of bulletproof glass looked out over the vast greens of the eighteen-hole golf course, Mary felt most herself.

Out on court this morning she cracked the seal on an icy bottle of mineral water from the cooler and took a few sips as the condensation on its outside wetted her hand. She dried this on a towel and tested the grip on her racket as she waited for her opponent, Miles Roseck of the Montana Senatorial office, to double-tie his shoelaces.

He was a precise, intelligent guy who knew her in her role as a Special Sciences Agent, and he would be expecting her to discuss the state's reaction to the FBI investigation on Deer Ridge. She admired the strong curve of his quadriceps as he straightened; no doubt he planned a similar cross-examination for her. For now, however, it was enough to focus on the red clay, the feel of the ball, and getting out her aggression by hitting as hard as she could. That bastard who stole the file and Dix's subsequent pressure had done much for her energy levels.

They began the warm-up and she put together her game plan for the afternoon.

Mary had had to read the files on the Deer Ridge Accelerated Test (CONTOUR) twice before she realized that the entire situation surrounding Mappa Mundi had already moved into a new theatre of engagement.

This time it was not the Iraqi progress with NervePath, nor the Chinese successes with their animal-behaviour programmes (hamsters now served drinks in Beijing bars, balancing glasses on their backs, and in Guangzhou fish leaped straight from aquarium to frying pan through hoops of coloured flame), nor the steady leak-and-pilfer occurring within the community of larger military powers that had become such a commonplace that nobody bothered to conceal it.

The Deer Ridge Test was much more sinister than that. It was a strike aimed at bringing Mappa Mundi into the open and causing a scandal. It was set up for Jude to uncover and, in that crusading way
he had, bring to the attention of the people. Then all hell would break loose.

Mary finished one of Miles's easy short balls with a punishing forehand that was pretty unsporting of her considering they were only making a rally. He got the kind of fixed grin on his face that indicated he figured she was already on a ball-breaking trip. She frowned and played some gentle, pathetic pops into his backhand. They came politely back, bouncing to her strings without her having to break a sweat. She missed the next one, clipping it into the net. Her mind would have to speed up if it wanted to think and play.

The current government could easily be toppled by the Republicans after that kind of revelation, dragging the military into the mud alongside it. The attempts at creating destabilizing political splits between pro- and anticorporate interest groups would be foiled and they would unite in outrage against Mappaware's potential for ending all that the Declaration of Independence stood for, particularly free will. The bubbling-under resentments of the computer-illiterate underclass would be stalled in their tracks and there would be an antitechnology backlash and a return to the “common values” of right-wing religious conservatism. A presidential impeachment would be forced.

It would also discredit the USA internationally. Despite the fact that everyone else was busy as bees on the same technology they would leap like sharks in a feeding frenzy to condemn the “inhumane control freakery” and “cultural colonization turning into invading ideology,” thus diverting attention from their own identical efforts. It would provide impetus for a new wave of the powerfully effective reactionary factions to clog together under the banner of religion-fuelled anti-Perfectionism and demand a halt to all mindware research and biological innovations: exploiting the public horror over what had happened in Montana, they'd probably make the votes on that easily and pass a bill to outlaw it. If that happened, then the USA was finished in the race to get one step ahead with this stuff and there was a simple extrapolation
Mary could use to predict where they would end up then: nowhere.

Furious development of those same technologies elsewhere would mean that they could not be first to market, and the first to market was sure to be the winner in this particular league. Such a consideration was, however, beyond the immediate comprehension of Mappaware's detractors. Few people in the world knew about the full potential of what they were creating, and Mary's bosses in the NSC wanted it to stay that way.

Miles came up to the net after they had rallied for a while, and Mary obliged him with a few easy balls to volley. They smacked down into the dirt on either side of her, not too ambitious and with only a little spin. Perhaps he would be holding back on things she didn't know about? Perhaps he was only pretending to play straight, but was really already involved with one of the factions opposed to military control of such projects, as an advocate?

She grinned at him and pocketed a couple of strays near her feet as their ballgirl ran to fetch the others. Miles wasn't even aware of such a split in the government as far as she knew. It was something like a secret society, and only those closest to the centre were in on the news. She couldn't ask him about that outright.

He moved back and she sailed a few high ones up for him to smash. The first one struck the edge of his racket and soared out of court. She saw him colour faintly pink and smiled inside, where it didn't show. The next four got killed with effective, careful blows.

She and Miles backed off towards the baseline to practise a few serves.

As she bounced her first ball Mary wondered how much power she really had. If she failed to control the situation then her expulsion from grace would be swift and fatal. She had enough authority via Dix's mandate to do a great deal, but coming down like a ton of bricks might not be the best way. She looked up, past a stray coil of hair, to Miles, who pummelled a straight shot down a few inches into the service box. The ball skipped on and made the netting rattle.

Mary threw hers high against the pure blue vault of the sky, her contacts altering immediately to protect her eyes from the hard sunlight, and sliced it hard. It swung violently out of court. Maybe this was going to be Miles's lucky day.