Mappa Mundi (41 page)

Mary stared at the remains of the tea box. Vaguely she had an idea that last time she'd been here with him, curled up on this very spot, drinking tea, Jude rubbing her feet, she'd said something about being down to the last bag. Jude didn't drink it. He wouldn't have remembered because he was a hopeless shopper like that, all impulse and no organization—quite the contrary of his at-home habits. One reason they rarely ate here was because the cupboards held cereal, cocktail olives, tinned tuna, truffle oil, cheese crackers, and precious little else.

Did this ball mean he was angry at her? But why?

She checked with the police records and confirmed that White Horse had been identified more than two hours ago. Jude had left the morgue abruptly, the clerk noted, after asking for a homicide detective to take a statement.

He must have realized the pointlessness of that. Which meant he had a good idea of the scale of what they were both getting mixed up in. So he knew more than he'd told her. For sure. But how much?

Mary ground her teeth in frustration and made an office check with Special Sciences to see what he'd reported from the day before, when he'd gone to Atlanta on that mission for Perez. His entry in the form read, “The contact failed to report at the stated time. His address was located using datapilot service Nostromo. The contact was discovered dead [see CrimeRef 1HX8897] and the body reported to local police, investigation to be continued by FBI and regional. No messages or other evidence related to the contact message [CE9Y7] were found. Awaiting forensic reports.”

Which was nine-tenths jack shit.

Unless Jude was lying, of course.

But she had no way of finding out whether he was or not. To her knowledge he'd never lied before, but as a practised deceiver herself she knew that meant nothing. To get away with a successful secret it was better to be regularly truthful and so never incur suspicion. And he might have thought he had good reasons not to talk—when she'd tried to open him up in the bar his discomfort had been obvious. He might even have thought he was protecting her.

Whatever Jude was doing, as long as it didn't involve Natalie Armstrong she could stand it. But Armstrong was the problem she had to solve right away. Find her and get her back on track. The truck evidence, preposterous as it seemed, had struck a chord—hadn't the other Patient X done something like that? Maybe the video evidence was spot on and he
had
disappeared. If she'd disappeared she might even be dead, or never coming back.

That would almost be the best possible result, Mary thought, and got up. She put the groceries away in the refrigerator and left a note written on the bag: “Jude. Came to see you but you weren't in—obviously! Left you some milk etc. Going to the Beer House down the street to watch the cable sport and wait. If you don't show in an hour or two I'll be at home. Love, Mary. PS Your Pad is in Off mode, did you know?”

Jude and Natalie had hired a car under one of Jude's false identities and driven a short way out of DC to a cheap motel in a small town that looked like it wasn't used for anything except middle-level business conferences and the raising of low-rise suburban children. At Three Pines Lodge there were no AI security systems and no surveillance cameras. The security was entirely human or canine.

Jude had never felt so empty in his life, or so lacking in knowledge of what to say or do. He went through the motions of driving, paying
for the room, getting the keys, walking up the outside steps and along the verandah to the door on automatic, as though the link that kept him attached to a motive had been disconnected. He didn't even know if he wanted to be there. The things she'd told him … he couldn't believe them. There was so much he couldn't come to grips with.

He fumbled the key and stabbed it angrily in the lock. Even his hands didn't work right now.

Natalie's shadow, cast by the glitzy neon rimlights of the hotel sign, flickered over him. It shuddered, although she stayed quite still. He stared inside at the small room and its double bed and was turning to apologize and say he'd asked for two and there must have been a mistake when, before he could turn the lights on, her small but powerful hand had grabbed him by the shirt-front and she was pressed up against him, kissing him on the mouth with frantic urgency, her other hand pulling down the zipper of his trousers.

Her touch was like a flame on a fuse. Before he could think or react he found his hands were all over her, tearing at her clothing, his mouth welded to hers. He picked her up and then they were both on the bed. As he fell back he saw over her shoulder the clear night sky through the open doorway, the dim glow of Washington and the tiny stars, the black claws of the trees that overhung the yard below. The fierce grunt of her triumph as she wriggled out of her leather jeans and kicked her boots into the dark sounded sharply against his ear. She bit it.

The pain was fantastic, amazing. It was real and it hurt. He dug his fingers into the flesh of her bare buttocks and thrashed out of the remains of his own clothing. Then, for several minutes, he had no thoughts, only the sharp, bright, darting awareness of one sensation after another in a huge cascade that primed his hunger ever more as they fed it.

Biting and licking, thrusting like an animal, wrestling, groaning, sliding in sweat he flung himself at her and, as she lay beneath him in one instant and the neon lights lit her, he saw his own savage face
reflected back at him, his own desperation in the wild thrashing of her head and her body as it bucked.

When he came it was like a ferocious electricity that ran in every bone and so powerful that something fragile in him burst. He shouted out. He felt Natalie's fingernails tear his back open and for a second he thought he felt two black and hideous wings of bony hide leap out of the gaps and arch over him in thrumming tension like high wires poised beneath a storm.

They lay, a sludge of human flesh on the tough and unpleasant nylon cover of the bed. Through the door the breeze came in to explore their wet skin. A siren wailed and faded far away, lost forever.

He looked down, suddenly quieted, and saw Natalie crying silently, her face turned away from him, a flat mask. He put his head back down on her limp chest and opened his mouth. He retched drily. Now he'd finally felt something it wouldn't come out. It twisted itself inside his heart, dislodged for sure, but it stayed there, a faint vibration running all the way up to his skin.

They lay until they heard someone come along the verandah walkway, a man and a woman, talking loud, sounding a bit drunk.

Jude became aware of Natalie listening. She held her breath.

“Small-town affair,” she whispered and giggled, sniffing and giggling even harder when her laugh made him finally slip out and a hot rush followed him to stain the cover. “Seedy.”

They heard the man and woman stop at their door, which stood ajar.

“What the …? Are you okay in there, lady?” the man said, a mixture of alarm and confusion and humour in his voice.

“Tyrone!” The woman was much less impressed. Jude thought it was her hand that grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door shut. “Some people jus' like animals. Can't even wait to git alone!” Her outrages faded away and the man went with her, chuckling and muttering childishly, “Well, Nora, what've we come here for if it ain't a bit of fast and dirty—”

“Tyrone,” she said, friendlier now, as their door closed them off from the rest of the universe.

Jude and Natalie moved apart, but not far. They left their legs entwined. He moved so that she could lie and rest her head on his arm. She toyed with his hair.

“Look at your bangs here,” she said. “Nearly as long as Dan's.”

They slept a few hours, so deep in exhaustion that when he woke again and saw dawn they hadn't moved to ease their aching limbs. Jude's legs and hips hurt but he saw that Natalie was still asleep. She was warm. He heard her heart beating, very slow and very even, its rhythm counting down the seconds of her life.

He looked at the rays of the new day and knew that White Horse was gone forever and his last blood connection to that half of the universe with her. He was free.

He saw himself sailing high in the sky on black and white wings. Below him the houses and hills of Montana were so far away. He could only imagine them over the horizon.

Without her, how would he come to fit this skin?

Jude woke up the second time with a crick in his neck and an ache in his chest that no amount of anything was going to cure soon. He shifted and felt with a shock of real physical pain the raw areas on his back as the harsh nylon sheet underneath rubbed them.

Natalie was awake, staring at the ceiling, or so he thought, but she didn't look his way. Her eyes seemed to be part glazed, blinkless.

As he was watching her she lifted her left eyebrow into a half-moon.

“People used to think Dan and I were an item,” Natalie said. “They didn't notice that he'd got none of that reaction towards me or any other woman that would have made it possible. People are blind as bats, but it's all there, right under their noses.”

She turned and faced him, tucking her lower arm under her head before she continued. Jude looked down cautiously at her body, hoping not to see signs of violence on it. The night before was dreamlike, but strong enough that he hadn't forgotten any of it. Guiltily he saw hand marks on her arms, fingers clearly delineated. Her right breast was almost blackened with a huge suction mark. She went on, oblivious.

“He was in trouble and I didn't notice because I was so distracted by Bobby and the stuff that happened with you. That file.” Her face was wretched and he could see she was making an effort not to cry and be self-pitying.

“Oh, that.” Jude glanced involuntarily towards the TV unit where he'd left his briefcase. It was still there, the Russian's file in it, and the vial from the CDC.

He cleared his throat. “It's funny. I'd nearly stopped being freaked out by that. I'd forgotten it. So many things …” But he wasn't sure even now that he could talk about those. He didn't want to think about them. As soon as his mind touched on them they slid out of his grasp with fishtail flicks of icy loathing. Tetsuo. The vial.

“We have to decide what to do,” Natalie said, as much to herself as to him. She sighed and curled herself into more of a ball. “Tough but practical if we want to survive. We have to decide if there's anything we can do about any of what's going on except save our own skins. That means sharing what we know.”

“We may not end up with the same goals,” he said warily. “Just because we have dead people and the opposite edges of a conspiracy in common doesn't mean we're on the same side.”

She pulled a few faces thinking about it. But he could tell that she wasn't convinced by his caution.

“Maybe. Although I don't see what good the results of this research will do either of us and there's every reason under the sun to think that two people against a military superpower and some tough-minded revolutionaries won't be up to much. But we're probably the only people who know enough to make any kind of a difference at all. You still have a chance to go back,” Natalie pointed out. She shivered. “But I think all I can do is go on.”

“Because of the—accident?” He didn't know what to call it. He saw the edge of his shirt and pulled it out, put it over her.

“Yes. And I couldn't go back to York, not now that Dan's gone. Even if I could, Guskov is continuing Mappa Mundi in a sealed environment under US government control, and I know all about what he's doing. If I join it as a working scientist I still have a chance to act, both to affect its outcome and maybe to determine what happens to it
when it's complete. I don't trust the Ministry or your people, and I don't think I trust Guskov either.

“If it weren't for the Selfware they'd probably get rid of me, but at the moment it's an unknown, and when they find out how I got out of the airport it's going to be an unknown they want to get to the bottom of quickly. But if you go AWOL, Jude, then whoever is tailing you will know you've changed sides. You've got no chance once that happens.”

He smiled, trying to show a bit of spirit, and it hurt deep inside. “Oh yeah?”

“You could try recruiting, of course,” Natalie said, her wide, handsome gaze becoming gentler in response to his expression. “But that will only get others killed as well. This is far too hot for mistakes.

“Those people who tried to co-opt your sister were idiots. They want to topple the Democrats with this, that's their whole game—using the Perfection Bill and its global unpopularity to start a moral crusade—but they don't even understand what the stakes are; that they're not even about domestic politics on any scale. It's about all our futures, and whether or not the ideas we have will be our own or someone else's.

“Maybe White Horse could've started a publicity campaign that would ruin the election chances of the party, but this entire technology stream is secretive and badly understood. To inform the public about it and try to get them behind an anti-Perfection camp means blowing everything the civil service and the military have been working for, way above elected goons. They'll never let that happen. They'd use a bad first version of Mappaware on the whole country before that. The attempt to go public will only cause the social-suppression function to be slapped on hard, when that's the last thing it should be used for, and once it's started, there's no getting back. Ergo—” she smiled “—it's a stupid plan that will almost certainly achieve the opposite of what they want. You could talk to them, tell them what you know, maybe even get them to back off for a while.”

“Yeah, that'll work,” Jude said, the sarcasm in his own voice making him angry at himself.

“Or you can stick where you are and see what else you can find out,” Natalie said.

“But as soon as I admit to knowing anything I get my head blown off,” he pointed out. The more he thought it through the more he felt like he could sense the damage the bullet or the knife was going to do when it came for him. His heart was skipping beats.

“So don't admit it. They aren't telepathic.” She sounded like she believed he could pull it off. She smiled at him.

“But if I keep it all to myself, what's the use of it? And what can I do, on my own?” He'd been wondering that a long time. White Horse's dead face came to his mind as an answer—you can get people killed. He should have told Mary days ago, got her to help. He still could.

“I wouldn't,” Natalie said, staring directly into the centre of his mind, just as he'd once imagined she could.

He returned her look, trying for the same, but he didn't see anything except her grey-green eyes, pretty irises almost emerald in places, smoky in others, like marbled paper.

“Don't bullshit yourself about letting her in on it just because you get tired,” she added, yawning widely. “You can't trust anyone.”

Jude saw the empty box of tea, the drift of black dust on his white floor. He couldn't believe that Mary was responsible, not just because of the referral. She wasn't like that.

“She'll have tried to find me there,” he said, moving carefully to try and find a scrap of comfort, but the bed was lumpy and rough as a wild dog. “She's not stupid. Fact, she's about the most devious-minded, suspicious woman I know. Usually right about people, too. At least, the kind of people we end up dealing with.”

“And your closest friend,” Natalie said with a curious expression between envy and caution that he couldn't place. “So you don't want to get her involved.”

She paused and then seemed to give herself permission to say, “You love her.”

“Get out of my head,” he said abruptly but without anger, rolling onto his back and putting his forearm over his face. Thinking about it made him feel guilty, of all things, like he'd betrayed Natalie, even though this nonexistent relationship with Mary would have been in the past.

“I was only asking.” She seemed about to say something else, but didn't.

Jude looked through a slit in his eyelids and saw Natalie taking him all in. She seemed pleased with what she saw—God only knew what that was.

“It's none of your business,” he said primly.
Shut the door, Jude. Well done. Just the action advised in the book of Post-Grief Fuck Etiquette. Why, it's like you don't almost feel that way yourself.

“It is,” she said. “You're the only person apart from Dan who ever let me talk a lot of self-pitying crap and then sent me up for it. And I may be rebounding so hard from Dan this is just rubberized desperation talking, but I consider you more than a friend, so you don't get off the hook.”

Jude turned his head and examined her face minutely, looking for mockery or an effort to control him. He saw her face, elfin and a little wild-looking. The darting elusiveness that had once been its common occupant was now replaced with a strong, direct force that was confident enough not to need to lie.

Jude put his hand out and touched her face, a kind of thanks. He realized why she'd talked about Dan, seemingly apropos of nothing—because she had to tell him something. He had something to tell himself.

“My sister thought of herself, deep down, as a Cheyenne dog soldier,” he said, making an ambivalent face and shaking his head as he recalled just how that serious side of her had eaten away the happier girl she used to be.

“Tough. Hard. Fierce. Everything for the People. She had a strong sense of justice and she got stuck in nostalgia. She did the Sundance on her twenty-first birthday; hung her whole bodyweight off two hooks in her chest for twelve hours, until the skin broke free. I thought she'd totally lost it. I'd just joined the marines at the time. It was like—I didn't even write to her for months. I didn't know what to say. She was so extreme. It was like she was another person.”

The scars would be there even now, on the slab; those skewers truly embedded, dragging her to her death …

Jude shook his head. “She understood what she wanted to be, even if it was going to cost a lot. Stayed at home. Lived every minute in the right way, according to her rules. I never knew what I wanted to be, except that it had to be as good as that, so that I could show her she wasn't the only one who could do right. She didn't have any business thinking of me as second-class because I didn't want the same things as she did.”

“You felt that she showed you up,” Natalie said, guessing.

Jude sighed and screwed his face up because it was painful to admit. “I talked to her about what a great multicultural world it was and how I was having a fine time; white and red in one body, hell, not even caring about what skin or background meant. But all the time her passion was this mark she'd set that I was trying to match; her ideas I was living in. She was definite and I'm … not yet defined. I don't commit to anything. I never liked the idea of being identified with something as random as my genes.” He paused, aware that he was talking around what he wanted to say.

“If I'd been less of a control asshole who wanted to be right and told her more of what I knew she might not have gone out alone to die.”

Said it.
It sounded like a movie line. It was there in his mouth because he'd heard it said before by a tough guy doing remorse, when instead Jude had this sensation of a wave poised always overhead, not knowing when or who it would choose to fall on, or why. It had crashed on her and he felt it should have been him.

“Don't worry about your survivor guilt, you won't live long enough to enjoy it,” Natalie said suddenly, imitating exactly the voice of the movie hard man he'd been thinking about. She risked a smile, tentatively.

Jude laughed soundlessly and found that his ribs hurt as well.

Natalie brushed his hair out of his face carefully and then pushed herself up with purpose. “I'm going to take a shower. In the meantime you might like to read this.” She picked up her Pad from the side table and cued a file.

Jude watched her go, a momentary retreat from the field. She was so small, he thought. But perfectly made. He wondered how much of her had really gone with Dan—the man who'd nearly knocked him over outside the Clinic that day. Jude couldn't even remember what he'd looked like.

He got up and went to the window, tugging back the net to look out over the courtyard and the road. Pickup trucks moved slowly around the diner across the way, like heavy beetles. He listened to the water running in the bathroom.

Life did go on. That was the worst and best of it. Parts dropped off, but it kept on going. If it had a larger meaning then Jude didn't see it now, any more than he ever had. He was glad about that. It was a validation of a kind and it meant that whatever influence he had was small and mostly unimportant, which was a good thing.

He decided to look at Natalie's file and get some relief from being himself. He threw the bedcovers back so he could at least rest on something softer than the coverlet, picked up the Pad, and read.

The Mappa Mundi project has only recently become a unified enterprise. It rests on two sets of theories.

The first concerns the physiology of the brain, the physics of thought.

The second concerns the nature of consciousness and the structure of the mind.

The first one is empirical—you can poke it and see if you're right. You
can make maps and pictures of what actually happens in a brain and analyse the data. It's firmly fixed in the real world.