Mappa Mundi (43 page)

“Yeah, I know.” He reached out and squeezed her hands around the plastic shaker. They didn't need to talk about it any more. It was decided.

The waitress came and took their order. Natalie drank all her water. Jude tried in vain to detect anything untoward going on in his head.

“Would this version of it carry what you've got?” he asked.

She put the salt down and pushed all the table salad out of the way, to stop herself fiddling, but immediately her fingers tapped an almost inaudible soft rhythm on the plastic top. “No,” she said, after a minute's thought. “It hasn't got the processing power. This version—” she brushed her fingertips along the line of her right temple “—is about a thousand times more powerful and sophisticated. Yours can't do it.”

He smiled weakly. “I don't know whether to be glad or sad.”

“Be glad,” she said. “Yours is unlikely to kill you.”

“Unless someone hits me with what they used on Dan.”

“Yeah, well, they want to hit me with that, too, and if they're working on your version they won't get me and if they're working on my version they won't get you.” She leaned back as their breakfasts arrived, steaming and gigantic. “That'll give one of us about ten seconds to get revenge.”

“I'll remember that.”

Natalie stared at her stack of pancakes and Jude's mountain of eggs and hash browns with anticipation, picking up her knife and fork.

“You learn to eat like this in the army?”

“Nah,” he said. “These days the army is all health food and computer-guided nutritional balance. This is strictly home.”

She looked at her watch. “It's getting late.”

“Time enough,” he said.

Natalie looked out at the ordinary day, the road full of cars and trucks moving slow. She smiled at a kid who was trying to find some distraction from the boring conversation of his mother and grandma at the next table. She wanted to tell him to enjoy it while it lasted.

He cast her a look of sullen mistrust and went back to kicking his chair legs.

Jude hesitated, still not eating, although Natalie already had her mouth full. She gave the sullen kid a nasty scowl next time he looked over.

“Will they be able to read my mind with this?” he said.

Natalie stopped chewing. She swallowed and blinked and looked him in the eye, “As I said. Not if they don't know it's there.”

“Fuckin' A,” he said and began to work on the hill.

No one was more surprised than Mary Delaney when she heard that Natalie Armstrong had surrendered voluntarily at a police station near the Capitol. The message arrived as a regulated alert from one of her Net pilots and she moved quickly to ensure that Dr. Armstrong was immediately escorted to Fort Detrick, there to await transfer to the Sealed Environment site.

Mary finally got through to Jude.

“I'm so sorry,” she said when he answered and she saw that he was at home. “What did you do? Go to ground somewhere? I came looking but you weren't there.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I went out to the coast and sat looking at the sea, got some air and out of this goddamned place.”

“When's the funeral?”

“Next week. I'm going to take a few days' leave, go back. I'll fill you in on that Atlanta stuff and you can take it over, if that's okay.” He seemed completely uninterested in it, despite his enthusiasm two days before.

Mary asked gently, hoping the answer would be no, “Are you going to take up where White Horse left off?”

“Investigating the Deer Ridge thing?” Jude rubbed his face with both hands, in a washing action. “I don't know. If she had any hard evidence it's been taken or gone. Without that, all that exists are the
doctor's reports and the witness statements, all of which will no doubt be shredded by government lawyers unless I can find some people willing to testify who won't break down under cross-examination. Maybe I could. But then there's all this stuff about the minerals rights on the land and that'll get dragged up. I can see the government and the res both claiming the actions are purely some kind of trouble stirred up to confuse the issues there. It could take years to make a case and get it to trial, and meanwhile—” he glanced dolefully at her “—the secretive elements of the technology could land us in some deep shit. I don't know. I'd like to, but I can't think about that just yet. You know?”

Mary smiled and nodded. She touched the screen where Jude's face was, running her finger down one side of it. “You take care now. I'll come over as soon as I've checked in at the office.”

“No need,” he said. “I'm coming in. I'll see you there.”

She felt so much better after the call; now he was going to tell her what he knew and she could parcel him safely out of the way of the Mappa fallout. The only thing she was falling down at now was her FBI job and she had the whole day to devote to creating enough reports to satisfy Perez that she'd been doing serious homework. That left her no time to see Dr. Armstrong in person, but that was no doubt just as well. She could leave the briefings to Bragg, the general in command of the Environment area, and then Guskov would handle the rest.

It was as Mary was walking to work across the long lawns that separated their building from the labs that she felt the unmistakable sensation of being watched. It was so strong that she turned around to see who was behind her.

Over the manicured, short grass all she could see was the faint shimmer of rising warm air. The trees to her right were still, and the computer-centre windows were blacked out with heat-reflecting cool glass. Nobody was in the quad with her. But the sensation only grew, an invisible itch between her shoulders. She cued her Pad to check the area but it came up with nothing more than a few security cameras on auto.

Shaking herself down, she turned and resumed walking. Without warning she was suddenly enveloped in a cold pocket that made her breath mist and turned the warm air around her into a penetrating damp like an early morning New England fall. She gasped with surprise and stopped dead, looking in all directions, but, again, there was no sign of anything untoward. In a few seconds the air was as hot as ever and she had begun to perspire freely.

Mary thought it must just be to do with the ground, even though she was out in the full light of the sun. Trapped underground air venting up through some small holes. It was possible, wasn't it? She'd seen that happen in Centralia, where the underground coal was on fire.

She walked on, slower and more cautiously, speeding up as she neared the path.

A figure made out of air and bent light shot past her nose. She caught the impression of a human body, but streaked in long lines, as though it was moving so fast it was trailing light. In its wake she heard voices, quite a few of them, hostile and hissing. In the midst of them, unquestionably, was the sound of Daniel Connor's last speech—“Check it out!”—followed by a volley of ringing laughter that distorted rapidly into a screeching squeak that hurt her ears.

Silence followed as cool tendrils of backwash furled close against the skin of Mary's face. She tensed, bolt upright, muscles rigid.

The sense of a watcher was gone. The day around her bloomed hotter again, stifling as an oven. From the corner of her eye she saw a woman in a red suit begin to cross the quadrangle, a heavy briefcase swinging in her hand.

Mary ran the rest of the way, up the steps and through the doors of the Sciences block, and ignored the security guard's remarks about being hot and bothered as she swept into the air-conditioned factory coolness of the atrium. There, clutching the side of the marble fountain, she caught her breath and pushed her emotions to “Hold” until she was calm enough to review events without reacting.

“All right, Mary?” It was David from the next floor.

She straightened her back and turned.

“Just gathering my thoughts.” She grinned and walked with him towards the elevators, but her heart continued beating out of time until long after she had sat down at her desk and begun pretending to type.

Bobby X, who had forgotten his own name—was it Ian something and then a word like “ridge”… ah, Derridge, yes—followed Mary, easily tracking her unique event-wake in the continuum like a hunting dog. He had no name for the senses he used, and didn't care to give them one. There was no need for words and their slow limits.

He was furled like a series of whirlpool eddies, and in each curl was the brief, human pleasure of having given her a good scare. Along the outer edges of the waves his anger and resentment shimmered. He'd been back to see Dan Connor and the manner of his death. The going and return had weakened him much more than he'd expected. He felt himself on the point of dissolving. One more appearance, one more return to the slow processes of biology, if he could manage that—if not, the illusion would do.

Meanwhile, he had his revenges.

It was a petty thing. Tiny. Insignificant. Ultimately, pointless on any scale other than that of the mediocre human being he had been.

He watched Mary sit at her desk, try to understand—and fail.

He saw the flow of energies and their states that made her and wondered how it was that something so beautiful could be so banal and bollock-awful. Her and him both.

Give them the universe and it meant nothing without a dream or a motive, without a framework of limits to set it in. He'd expected the wonder. He'd maybe anticipated a meeting with God or, at any rate, something more than a bog-standard life-form wandering lost in an unremarkable galaxy. But there was nothing of that sort and to look
back and understand exactly how much of their world was made up solely from pitiful dregs of information, misunderstood, badly processed, and then sewn together with comforting delusion into a tissue of fictions … He would have cried if he'd had the organs to do it with. A small, planet-bound animal in a vast, vast—no words for any of that either. If he'd been a poet maybe he'd have found the way, but his transformation had made him aware, not talented.

Words. He wished for direct experience to be made words, but wishing didn't make it so. He'd send Mary a thought for the day, however. Minds took information out of many more things than words, and all paths were useful.

He showed her the Universe.

Natalie found it a relief to have all decision making taken away from her for the hours she had to sit in the army jeep and then in the holding areas at the base. Around her uniformed officers did their duties and she followed. Since her surrender to the police life had been a holiday from stress. The only down note had sounded when she'd said goodbye to Jude for what was possibly the last time, standing on the platform at the station and watching him walk away, tall and strong, into a life that was now balanced on a knife-edge.

Hers was arguably no better, but she felt more able to deal with that. In her pocket the old Pad was programmed for encrypted transactions with his, using secured lines and series of faithful datapilots they trusted. But this wasn't watertight and it might not have survived the army's search strategies when they inspected it. She'd said, “Send me your thoughts and I'll know.” Sort of joking.

“I will.” He was serious.

She had no idea if that was possible, but already, sitting in her cell and looking at the mirrored window, she knew that behind it sat three curious officers, one who knew about her situation and the others who didn't.

Natalie used her time to rest and consider that fact, which was curious.

She was disturbed thirty minutes after arriving by the door opening.

Mikhail Guskov, accompanied by an aide, stepped into the room.

He looked much broader and more powerful in real life than on any screen. Natalie was impressed immediately by his physical presence and its vigour, expressed in his thick, greying beard and intense, direct gaze. He offered her his hand.

“Doctor Armstrong.”

“Professor,” she said and they shook. There were layers and layers of carefully accumulated cautions in him that made him very difficult to assess. The strength with which he projected the persona he wanted to was so powerful that she felt it was an almost physical rebuff to her involuntary attempt to see the truth of him.

“I was so sorry to hear of the events at York,” he said, his voice loud and deep in the confined space, as though he didn't care who heard him. “Are you well?”

“I'm fine.” She took her hand back from his solicitous grip and nodded.

He produced a scanner in his hand, the sort she was familiar with. “I trust you will not mind if I …”

“Carry on.” She shrugged. “It won't be the last.” She watched with amusement as his face reflected his concern and disbelief at the readouts, although he must have received data from the Clinic.

“Forgive me,” he said after a moment had passed. “I hadn't entirely believed the scale of it, until now.” He switched the machine off and passed it back to his aide without a glance, reserving his attention for Natalie. “Do you know what happened to the other man? Patient X?”

“Ian Detteridge,” she corrected gently. “Yes, I do.” She glanced at the mirror wall and then back at Guskov, who gave a minute nod. His thick hair moved like a lion's mane. She was convinced that every strand of it was exactly managed for effect. Every piece of his skin, every article of clothing, every nod, blink, and smile. He was an expert.

“Excellent. Then we have much to discuss and to learn. You will come?” Asking as though she had a real choice. She rather liked that.

“Yes.”

“Let's go, then.” He gestured for her to precede him and she followed his aide into the corridor.

During the formalities of her discharge and briefing for the BSL-
_4 
secure environment she paid no attention to the surfaces of what was going on, but watched the individuals around her instead. There was no doubt. Since her last Selfware run, something beyond “mere” enhancement of the ordinary had happened.

The general for instance, General Bragg. Below his professional manner and the sound knowledge he was giving to her about air exchangers and the emergency exit routines and the scrub-down facilities he was deeply disturbed by Natalie's own presence. He knew that she had been changed in some way and was fascinated and repulsed, partly because of his religious convictions—a general Christian devotion that wasn't to any particular church, but sincere nonetheless—and partly because he knew about Mappa Mundi. His convictions aside, he was about as keen on the idea of having some enemy walking through his mind as he was about having them overrun the country. Less so, in fact.

Natalie sympathized, but she knew that Bragg's loathing had gone further than personal feelings. He was remembering as he spoke, seeing brief flickers of a past moment when another woman had been here and they had dealt with this matter. And he was also mindful of pressure from his superiors and this made his anxieties very complex. As he flicked steadily through the presentation slides, showing her layouts and access and maintenance and the rest, Natalie knew that he was himself thinking of ways that control of the Environment could be subverted by those within it and of ways in which he could prevent that happening. He wondered how easy it would be to kill them all. He was wondering if he should, and immediately overriding that thought with less terrifying ones in which the colleagues who shared
his conspiracy to stop the technology being used or disseminated would take a share of the action and the consequences.