Mappa Mundi (35 page)

She sat with Fassmeyer in the back of a limo. It had everything. He opened the drinks cabinet and there was a bottle of champagne he told her was the best in the world. He opened it and laughed and she watched him pour it into the fine, delicate crystal of the glasses.

“I don't drink,” she said, barely breathing in the smooth embrace of the seatbelt.

“Of course you do,” he replied, smiling at her and holding out the narrow stem, nudging it against the tender skin of her burned hand. “Everybody drinks.” The last words were a command.

Her hand took the glass. She stared at her bag, betraying herself. She didn't know what to do. Her Pad—she could call Jude—but it was out of reach. Fassmeyer saw her look at it involuntarily and reached over.

“Let me take that for you.” He chinked his glass against hers as he secured the bag. “To the future.”

She stared at him. He was laughing at her with his salutation. Even the whites of his eyes were brightening out of their African yellowed tinge at his own wit.

“Fuck you,” she said but her hand was shaking too much to throw the glass at him. She saw herself smash it against his face, use the sharp
edges to slash at his neck, staining his white collar with blood, but her hand wouldn't do it. Why not? Why not? Too afraid. Shame filled her. She tried to muster enough saliva to spit but her mouth was dry as sand.

Fassmeyer reached into his jacket and took out a gun. His smile remained, “This is nothing personal, I assure you. Look, even the drink is the finest money can buy. Spared no expense. Now, have a drink. It's good.” He tasted his own and gave her a wink.

You enjoy this
, she thought dimly and her spirit abandoned her. She felt it flee the car and rush out into the street. She took a sip. The champagne
was
good, even she could tell that. Her shaking arm made her spill it over her chin. She swiped at her face and the movement gave her some momentum. She jabbed the glass up towards him.

He caught her wrist, digging his fingers in between the bones to a nerve junction, causing her to gasp in pain.

“Careless,” he said mildly, holding her hand there as he refilled the flute to the top. “I don't want to have to pour it down your throat like lye. What a waste that would be. Now, this time, with some grace, drink up.” Casually, he released the safety catch of the gun and moved the barrel so that it pressed into the muscle of her thigh where the seam on her jeans ran.

White Horse gulped and the bubbles ran up her nose and made tears run into her eyes. The next hour passed in a blur of sights and sounds that didn't link up in her head. The fear between was too great.

They drove a way through the heavy traffic, down to somewhere called Columbia Island Marina. They got out of the car and onto a big, white motor launch. More champagne waited. They got to the third bottle. Fourth. Out on the waters. Brown, silty, filthy waters. A plastic bag floated by, white, crumpled, half submerged.

She thought of her life, because she knew she was incapable of doing anything by then. As the wine went down and her mind began softening she wished she'd been less serious and more funny. She wished she'd had a relationship that lasted and a child or two, maybe
three, maybe more. They'd have been fine kids; the girls strong, the boys proud. And Jude; she'd tell him in time that she'd been an airhead about taking the politics so hard to heart that he got on the wrong side.

Her bag was back in that car.

Fassmeyer topped up her glass. “You're drinkin' the ship dry, honey,” he said and his black face split with a white smile like a fruit bursting in ripeness under the sullen sun.

“I don' wan' to die,” she said to him, her own face in a distorted shape that hurt.

“I know,” he said. “Believe me. Neither do I. But one of us has to and it ain' gonna be me.”

“Why?” she slurred, hardly able to keep her head up.

“Because this world's too big and too ugly,” he said, not joking for once. “That's why.”

He was right. She knew it. She drank her glass to its dregs.

“Not always,” she said, thinking of home.

“What's that?”

“It isn't always so bad.” She couldn't hold the flute any more. It fell out of her hand and broke on the boat's decking. “I remember…” But she didn't.

She hated herself. It was time to be ended. Vaguely she saw buildings pass on the shores, the white boat, the heavy water, the cloudy sky. She tried to love it all but it had no meaning. She tried to feel its presence but it rejected her. She stretched out her mind, hoping to touch something beyond herself, a spirit, a ghost.

She didn't notice when she passed out, realizing only that she must have when the cold water suddenly closed over her head.

White Horse was a good swimmer. She had learned to swim in the creek, with Jude, who stayed out in the deeper water treading it easily, teasing her that she couldn't take her foot off the bottom.

Now she could. There was no bottom.

She swam towards him, wanting to get there and push him under, fling water in his face. She saw him from her hiding place under the water. She would swim there secretly and duck him. He wouldn't see her.

She kicked. The air was lead-heavy and painful in her lungs. Her face and hands burned.

She saw Jude in the clear air. His hands were reaching towards her. She could nearly touch them. She saw her own hands, tight and painful, reaching, stretching to the light and his smile.

“Don't trust her!” White Horse shouted out to him but instead of the words coming out the water eagerly rushed in. Cold fire plunged into her chest, pushing her down, remembering the time she'd escaped it at the house.

She felt Jude's fingertips brush hers like feathers as she sank. She tried to leap up out of her body and escape, but it was a little while before it let her slip away.

Mary Delaney sat in the joint meeting of the Science Advisory Group and the secretary of defense with her Pentagon boss, Dix, and cursed the time they were taking to deliberate; muttering, scratching around in dead ends of idiotic and unscientific worry—
What if this doesn't work? What if Marburg isn't as deadly as it was last week? What if we all jumped off the top of the CN Tower, would we really all die after eighteen hundred feet of acceleration into the hardtop, or should we include a secondary plan for that?
—like a bunch of twittering Microsoft geeks in a retirement village.

She thought the idea of real-world tests on Deliverance, the biochemical carrier system, was stupid, but they'd got it into their heads that only a payload of a deadly disease and extensive animal research was going to convince them that its genetic-recognition capabilities and “maximum fatality density” were real. That wouldn't have been so bad, but because of the secrecy level they were getting ready to go ahead and test without telling any of the military people involved exactly what the risks were. And that, she felt certain, was dumb to the point where they were qualifying for a Darwin.

“The grunts won't treat it with the right care if they don't know,” Rebecca Dix insisted in her last speech, tailoring the words into that bizarre cocktail of basic vocabulary and macho-shit that talking about arms investments and progression seemed to require. “You don't have
to tell the truth. Tell them it's Ebola or some goddamn' hantavirus that's double deadly to humans. Flesh-eating. It doesn't matter.”

“The facility is fully BSL-
₄
equipped,” Ramirez, from the secretary's office said. “It shouldn't make any difference.”

“But people are people and it does,” she insisted, trying not to grind her teeth. “The environments are only as secure as the most careless person in them. And nobody there really wants to be there. They act fast to finish early. They make mistakes. It's only natural. And they know that we aren't telling the truth. So they're resentful. And they're scared and that means their minds aren't all on the job.”

“Then that will be enough of an incentive to take extra care.”

Sometimes Mary wondered how these people around her got into the positions they were in. She wondered what their thoughts were before they fell asleep and what world they lived in that they could be so confident it would react exactly as they expected it to. They knew shit about ordinary people, so she didn't understand why they got to determine national policies on security that involved actual human beings. If it wasn't for the fact that she was going to get her butt into one of their seats soon she'd be tempted to blow the game on all of them. But that was just her temper talking and she'd learned to sit hard on it.

The decision got made despite Dix's vote against it. They were going to proceed.

Ramirez turned to Mary, shifting his bulk like a tanker turning, smarting at Dix's previous statement.

“You're getting careless. You need to turn the Feds right out of the park, not play half-measures. The Chinese already have a series of diseases that can target exact vectors in the population. The Pakistanis have put together prototype NP systems that are effectively religion-as-contagion and we don't have time to mess around. Your finer feelings aren't worth the country.”

“Religion already is a contagion,” she retorted, staring pointedly at his gold cross where it dangled over his tie and collar on a fine chain,
“and it wasn't the failure of our people that let the Mappaware test contaminate the population. That was a leak from your end. Just like it won't be our fault when this gets out and kills whole states.”

She stared him down, because they all knew that he was supposed to be controlling the efforts of the growing anti-Perfection element as it spread through levels of government, and he wasn't succeeding.

“No argument.” Ekaterina Estevez, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sat back in her seat at the head of the table. “We aren't children. The tests must be done. Mary, you will remove the FBI's interests in Mappa Mundi. Juan, you will ensure that the Dark Faction are delayed on any anti-Perfection actions until the Mappa project is fully entombed. Everyone else, you will support and enable both projects. And then, we finally reach the point where we have working systems. The question then will be, to strike or not to strike. We all understand the ramifications. Let us put it off no longer. It's time to vote.”

The silence that followed her words was tinged with an almost visible black edge, so much so that Mary found herself mentally shouting,
Gather, Darkness!
and wanting to giggle. She bit her tongue.

When Mappaware was up and working it could be used to remove the enemies of the United States by simply reinventing them as citizens.

Guskov had given them lengthy and exhausting seminars on the hows and whys, encompassing the theory of memetics, genetics, brain physiology, and thought-formation, not to mention the social psychology and all the other complex bits that had to be considered when you broke down a human personality into its components. None of them at this table understood the half of it, but they did understand that it was a tool that made people mentally into clay that could be endlessly remodelled into any shape desired.

This vote would determine whether or not the USA would take it upon itself to make this effort to unify the world.

Mary believed Guskov when he said that it was possible for a person to remain essentially “themselves” (and that was a minefield of
definitional problems), whilst shifting the core of their identities to a sufficient extent that an Afghani Muslim could experience themself as a part of the United States' diaspora, loyal to the flag, espousing democracy, even tolerating libertarians on the same street, because of the stars and stripes flying overhead. It sounded crazy. It needed testing. But they all believed it, because they'd seen Mikhail Guskov achieve exactly that using only ordinary hypnosis upon one of their own—Sandy Piccirilli, Estevez's personal secretary.

Piccirilli had sat in this very room, at his usual chair, and become variously a Revolutionary Communist, a devout Hindu, a white supremacist, and the King of Siam, all within the space of a couple of hours. Guskov had explained each time that the change required total shifting of the core memeplexes that affected Sandy's entire Meme-cube; the ones through which he unconsciously filtered all his knowledge about the world. The results had been very funny. But even though he vowed with all his heart to smash the bourgeoisie or sacrifice to Shiva, the curious matter was that they could all see that it was still Sandy, just Sandy with some funny ideas.

Piccirilli's new ideas would, of course, have come under severe stress if they'd lasted. The dissonance between his views and the reality around him and as told to him by his friends would have disrupted the ideas eventually, or put him in a nut farm. But Guskov said that with NervePath in place this wouldn't happen. Because the system restructured the whole mind to prefer the new idea strongly its entry into the personality was achieved without internal conflicts arising.

The identity was the last sacrosanct piece of an individual that hadn't yet been interfered with by science at anything other than a conversational level. Now it was going to be open season.

Just as with the physical Perfection technologies, the determining of a “normal” standard and a “desirable” range of values was a subject nobody felt remotely happy about. But as long as they were only talking about making dangerous opponents into allies who could
retain all their “essential” items of otherness (“their color,” Mary thought), they didn't find the discomfort unbearable. In fact, the idea of the globe being peacefully allied under a gentle cloak of democratic congruence was just peachy, especially as the democracy in question would be their model. It looked goddamned ideal.

It reeked like a two-week-dead skunk as well, if you had any kind of ethics left.

Mary thought it was an incredible idea, utterly terrifying. She couldn't see what the point of the human race carrying on would be, once everyone was in agreement about everything that mattered. What kind of homogenized life-in-Stepford was that? What did it mean? Wasn't oppression of the ignorant still a mightily fucking awful oppression? Was it any different from swanning into some country with a big army and saying, “Do as we say or we'll kill you?” Only in the sense that there'd be no hint of resistance. You'd have killed them off already.

“It wouldn't be like that,” Guskov had assured her. “Neighbours will still fight over where to put the fence. Inequalities will be everywhere, class divides, rich and poor. As the initial surge of loyalty passes, within hours people will begin to deviate from the standard set by the software. They'll think for themselves. They'll change. But the biggest differences, the nation-killer ideas of what life means and what's important—these will be brought into line by the NP system for long enough that whole populations will come to agree, broadly. Then dissent that tends towards serious violence can be controlled humanely with booster programs, minor adjustments.” He didn't say what template of the world, or more important, whose, he was going to use for this trick. That was a matter for presidential and NSC discussion to come.

Well, yadda yadda
, Mary thought,
easy to say that, harder to live it, and if the only test ever run is Deer Ridge then God help us all.
But despite her reservations
(ha ha)
how could she vote “No” when she and others
in the CIA already used the prototypes of Mappaware to run their own unofficial people?

Mary knew it worked. They didn't like her instructions, sure, but they couldn't stop obeying. They were miserable, but they did their jobs and then, because of the natural quirk of a delay between an action and consciousness of it, they rationalized their reasons and thought it was all their own doing. It was quite brilliant.

She wouldn't want that for everyone, but it helped things go so much better than they had in the past. Nobody ratted when ratting wasn't possible. Besides, if anybody else got their hands on it she didn't want herself going all Japanese or Arabic in the depths of her grey matter, handing over the entire security plan for the state with a smile and a Have a Nice Day. No, it was no time to be squeamish.

She raised her hand with Dix's group among the “Ayes.”

The action was voted in.

Nobody was against. Ramirez and a few others abstained. She knew they hated the existence of Guskov and all his engines, but they had too much political smarts to show a “Nay.” She'd have to watch out for them. People with gigantic contradictions sitting happily in their heads were people who could successfully fragment their personalities for maximum efficiency. Like her. Like Mikhail. They could get anything done.

As they were breaking up the meeting and recovering their Pads from the offices outside—all such meetings took place in private with no records made—she found three new messages. One from Fassmeyer, blank. One from Jude.

She knew what it was going to say, poor guy. She didn't want to think about him right now. She hadn't felt any plunge of shame or guilt when she saw his name an instant ago. No, that was too much lettuce at lunch.

The last was an urgent flag from the Euro Defence contact.

As she read it her heart genuinely sank and a cold fury washed
through her. Why was it her job to deal with all the shitty ends of all the sticks in this business?

“Dr. Natalie Armstrong defected. Contact lost. She may be en route to DC. Considered dangerous.”

How could they have been so inept? One woman, on her own, head full of NP and no special assistance and they lost her. Dangerous? They must be kidding.

Mary would show her dangerous.

Dan was a long way from home. He didn't know where he was and it could have been almost anywhere; he'd been blindfolded and tied up for what he thought was about six or eight hours, moved from a van into another vehicle and then put in a trunk and taken through what sounded like an airport. He had flown and then there'd been another car, a long wait in silence, and finally a transfer into this room where he was allowed to walk around and where he sat and stared at the curtains drawn across the window.

He drank from a jug of water they'd left him. There was a TV, which didn't work. He'd tried it. There was no escape, he'd tried that and got a shouted warning from the heavy who'd nearly broken his back last night at the river. He sat, looked at the cheap, nasty surroundings, and picked at the mud on his hands and trousers. His Pad was gone. In its absence, he composed messages to Natalie: pleas for help amid apologies, because if he hadn't been such a hopeless git none of this would have happened. Probably.

His stomach growled with hunger and then knotted itself up again with fear. He sat down, paced three strides from one wall to the next, sat down. There was a bed but it was covered in such a tatty blue nylon cover, full of cigarette holes, that he didn't want to touch it. Pubic hairs, not a few, were stuck fast all over its surface. Smears of food or other things lay in crusted patches here and there. The chair was marked with a footprint, but at least it didn't smell or look like it had
fleas. It was the end of places, the arse end, a hole where nobody expected anything good and they got it by the bucketful.