Mappa Mundi (47 page)

“A hundred miles away there was a flu outbreak,” Sharrock said. “We tested some samples of sputum swabs taken for the CDC and it
was confirmed.” He nodded with satisfaction, “Harmless when empty, though. Everyone made a rapid and full recovery.”

“Nobody exploded,” Jude was amazed, looking at the rib-shaking, nose-bursting scale of the hacking going on among the soldiers.

“We had to make it a strong enough reaction to fully aerosolize,” Sharrock said mildly and flipped back to the animal screen. “And here what you've got are individually engineered packages. Not only is the payload an improved antigen but the spores are specific to each species, and they can get as specific as you like, right down to dominant genes for markings on the body, hair type and sex.”

Mary glanced at Jude and they shared a look of caution and discomfort.

“So, if for some reason you decided to put the anthrax inside Deliverance, instead of the antigen, then what?” Jude asked. “Doesn't the body start to produce cells to fight the Deliverance infection?”

“Oh, sure it does.” Sharrock nodded. “Sure enough. But the system is too virulent for that to take effect in time. Put anthrax in it and—” he shrugged. “No chance.”

“How about putting in anthrax and tailoring it to kill only wealthy white men older than forty?”

“We can do everything except the rich part, unless there's some study somewhere that shows that money has a chemical effect on the body.”

Jude nodded. “And your empty version, engineered for—what, generic humans?—is out there now, in the wild?”

Sharrock put his head on one side and adopted a patient expression. “I know what you're getting at, Agent. Isn't it going to mutate? Isn't it going to blend in with wild diseases? Isn't it going to start an immune reaction that will forestall using Deliverance in the future? No.”

“Well, how can you be so sure?” Even Mary, advocate of this stuff, didn't sound a hundred percent confident now.

“That test batch had a half-life built in. By now it's all dust. Two, three transmissions and it dies within half an hour. If it made one more—the cell wouldn't be viable.”

“I hate to get all Jurassic Park-y on you,” Jude sighed. “But that sounds better than it runs in my paranoia. If bacteria had a constant behavior that never allowed any of them to conjoin, then we wouldn't be here talking about this. And we know that mutations can occur at any time. All it takes is one change that allows your Delivery boy to live beyond the expected span, maybe one environmental factor, and that's it.”

“The empty test is contained,” Sharrock said, with a direct stare that Jude absorbed without flinching. “There have been no cases in two days. It's gone.”

“Okay.” Jude could see he wasn't going to get any further with that. “What about a real release—when you have your baby and all its engineered immune responses out there in the big microecology, then what?”

“Then we'll have populations with long-lasting resistance to whatever the plague was in the first place,” Sharrock said, going back to the PR.

“Jude.” Mary was nudging his elbow with hers. “Look.”

In the barren field one of the steers had moved across to the feed trough and was slowly eating something, its jaws stop-starting as they eased back into the long rhythm of feeding. As Jude looked it shook its head at the flies. But beneath the awning's dark shadow the marmoset lay dead in the bottom of the cage, its back arched in a rictus, its mouth open, and its eyes staring, spasmed stiff by its last fit.

“Why is it dead?” she asked.

“In the test, as I said, we used engineered versions of Deliverance. Some animals were given a match and some weren't. The monkey was a no-match. The payload was never released.”

“So it did its share of spreading it about, but that's it?” Jude watched Sharrock turning off the picture show.

“That's it.”

“And what was the use of putting that element into this?” he asked. “So you could let some die and not others?”

“So that animals could be carriers but not recipients,” the older man said, sitting back in his chair. “So that if we need to we can be
specific—we can make the spores unreactive altogether, unless they're exposed to the right markers. Animals can carry the Deliverance without being in any way affected, and if it's a human-active version, then they can infect humans. It's part of the infection vector.”

“Okay.” Jude decided to drop it.

“What happens to the animals out there now? Aren't they an infection risk?” Mary was still filling out her checklist for Perez.

“The animals will be destroyed and autopsies performed as usual,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Speaking of which, we have some forensics for your inspection and some witness testimony and some medical experts waiting. I'm sure you'll be convinced by the end of the morning that this is the best system we've got for reacting to terrorism. The threat's very real, I can assure you.”

Jude had seen information passed down by the CIA and he was sure it was, too, with India, Pakistan, and the Middle East proud of their advanced-technology status and as riddled as any other nation with opportunist weapons-dealers. He had no doubt either that the US wasn't going to hesitate if it thought this could work as an effective deterrent in the same way that intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads did. If Deliverance could attack precise targets then it also had potential—massive potential. It was hard in the end to say which he liked the idea of less, Deliverance or Mappaware.

“Colonel,” he said as they were getting up to leave the room. “Does the list of these microbes and antigens that you've provided give the only payloads that have successfully been reproduced by the system?”

“Not long enough for you?” Sharrock asked, eyebrow cocked.

Mary was listening quietly at Jude's shoulder. It was her reaction he was tuned to, far more keenly than the colonel's, as he added, “I mean, is it large enough to carry Micromedica, for example, or other nanotechnology? Can it reproduce them
in vivo?”

Sharrock looked at him for a long moment, the question clearly unexpected.

At his side Jude didn't detect any change in Mary. He'd liked to think he knew her moods and responses and this wasn't how she'd have reacted if he'd mentioned something she already knew about and thought he shouldn't know. He
liked
to think that. But then, maybe he didn't know her that well. He turned his head and glanced at her.

She rolled her eyes. “Good question,” she said and gave him a grin.

Maybe. He wasn't decided.

“It
is
a good question,” the colonel said, “and one to which I don't know the answer. Let's go see the team that worked on it. They'll get you an answer, I'm sure.”

Out in the proving fire of midday they crossed the compound and descended into the levels and protection of a new laboratory. Jude watched Mary all the way, but she was herself—calm, efficient, and flirtatious. That was all, until they were on the plane back to the hub at Salt Lake City.

Then she sat next to him when they were alone in the cabin and rested her head and its heavy load of bronze ringlets on his shoulder.

“Those animals,” she said, fear and loathing in her voice. She rubbed her cheek against his collarbone and settled down. On her lap she was flicking through the information. “So, defensive or disguise?”

“Disguise,” he said. “But a good try. Just think about it, with the weapon and the shield in your hand you can lord it over anyone with something as Doomsday as this. Protect your own population, nix the rest of the world. What a shame nobody's found a way of doing that without so much killing everywhere.”

Jude put his arm around Mary's shoulders. Her fingers on the Pad keys had paused, French manicure shining in the cabin lights as the plane taxied out to the runway. The smell of her shampoo, expensive, filled his nostrils instead of the stink of dust. Natalie's mind-reading ability would have been good. As it was, he felt Mary pause and seem to think. When she spoke she was casual.

“Yeah,” she said on an outbreath, musing. “It really is.” She leaned
on his thigh and drew up the file of the battling bacteria again, watching the gates open and the invaders rush in and envelop the anthrax. “Trojan horse,” she said.

“Don't look it in the mouth.”

She sat up and looked into his face. “Jude?”

He let his arm slide down, empty, to his side. “Mmn?”

She was staring very intently into his eyes. Then, of a sudden, she shook her head, “Nothing. Never mind. You've got too much to think about.”

“What?”

“I never really said—about your sister, about White Horse. I'm so sorry. If there's anything I can do.”

He nodded. “There's nothing.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, thanks, it's okay. You didn't know her. I'll be back soon.”

“Yeah.” She leaned against him for a second and then sat back in her own seat, looking at him now and again with the sympathy he didn't want to see.

Jude watched their shadow rise and skate away from them, darting over the Proving Grounds' cursed earth and its programmed suffering. He closed his eyes.

He could feel her watching him until he fell asleep.

Natalie sat in the hot seat inside the test room and looked through the glass partitions to the control centre. It was set up much the same as at the Clinic and was where the rest of the research team were arrayed, working on her readouts. Around her head the huge arms of the supersensitive scan system were silent and dark. She was always disappointed in them. You would have expected them at least to hum or sizzle or have flashing lights but instead, like their handheld counterparts, they were silent to the last.

She hoped that Ian was going to turn up soon, but she didn't know if he would or how to contact him. In the meantime, the Selfware had been doing more to her than she thought. The way it had been altered before its use on Ian had radically changed its theatre of operations.

Way back in a dim past Natalie only knew was hers by the fact that it was all that was in her memory, she'd intended to create a tool for checking the activity states of the minds of people such as her yogis and martial-arts instructors—of anybody who claimed or had reason to think themselves capable of types of thinking and perception that were beyond the ordinary. She had hoped to find a significant difference between these samples and the general population that might be a clue towards a theory of paranormal abilities such as clairvoyance.

Her interest in this area had started the night she and Karen got home
from the woods. Only two weeks later her mother was dead and, despite knowing that it couldn't possibly be true, a part of Natalie's mind had become convinced that her mother's life was the payment for that ill-made contract between herself and twilight. After all, she'd never specified a price for its control of the dark, so it was free to take whatever it could.

It was completely irrational, which made it all the more compelling. Her counsellor would say, “So, is it that you
want
it to be true?”

Natalie had always said, “No!”

Of course she did. Who wants to be responsible for killing her own mother in a stupid deal with the ancient gods of darkness? But deep down she did want it to exist, this kind of power that could be hers to wield, because if she had it then she wouldn't have to be weak and afraid. A thousand kids think the same thing. They grow out of it eventually. Natalie was prepared to see herself as a slow developer if that meant Charlotte's departure wasn't her fault.

“It's a classic overcompensation,” she said to the counsellor. “I know that. I want supernatural powers to exist both so that I can have control over things I've no control of and so that I can dump the blame on it when something goes wrong. I know. I know. It's an identity-survival strategy that doesn't pay out as well as it promises.” And she ground her teeth.

She developed Selfware to discover the truth about it once and for all.

Natalie had tested hundreds of claimants, and hundreds more controls. After summing up brainwave energies, crossmatching thought patterns, and analysing the deep structure of the connections between various centres where thought, imagery, and language were processed she had done her tests on the data and come up with no conclusion whatsoever. It could have been random noise. The only feature of interest was that some individuals exhibited larger-than-chance correct scores on sealed-card tests and far-viewing, and some individuals exhibited a larger-than-chance failure on the same—a negative psychic state.

Were they genuine psychics who counteracted their own intuition? Did they have reverse intuition? Were white cats unlucky for them? Had
the high-scoring psychics stolen their unaccountable accuracy from these poor bastards who always got it wrong? She never found out.

The man who was her deepest meditator, a calm Zen guy from Newcastle, looked like he would be a perfect candidate for consciousness studies because he could remain aware and alert with almost no meaningful activity going on in his higher centres at all; a silent human machine, he just sat for hours and could switch that state on and off like a tap. He made no paranormal claims, however. She asked eagerly what use this ability was. He said it kept him grounded and calm, emotionally responsive but intellectually accepting—he had a huge tolerance and patience for everyone, and he liked it that way.

Natalie mapped his brain and studied it assiduously. She formed her first version of Selfware on its model. Selfware became interactive once NervePath was licensed and she could simulate its use in bits of cyberspace. From the people who had scored above and below chance on her tests she attempted to isolate common patterns. Little was common. But this forced her to develop the software to assess and adapt itself to what it found in individual mind structures.

Instead of assuming a generic format it would go through a period of testing for connectivity “fit,” as it was known, and then send back its own map of the person's mind. By extracting information from these maps and matching them across a scaled environment based on crossmatching individual Memecubes, Natalie finally found a feature that did test strongly above chance.

The next version of Selfware worked to enhance that feature, for which she had no name. It was a level of connectivity and communication, with a strong hippocampal bridge component in all subjects that allowed both hemispheres of the brain to communicate more widely than the norm. She had no one to test this on, including herself at the time, since she was only licensed for read-only NervePath systems. So she simulated the results, leasing hours and hours of time on the University's virtual environment at fifty quid an hour, almost using up her whole year's budget.

That was the way she'd continued to work on Selfware until she'd been refused her licence yet again at the Clinic. By then it was able to work within individuals, assess their success rates in terms of cross-centre communication, enhance these, and then test patterns against each other, strengthening links that improved efficiency and reducing the strength of those that caused mistakes. So it had been in that form when they'd thoughtfully altered it and its limits.

Now it had become something else, and the NervePath system it was running on had changed in its capabilities since she'd designed it. Not only that but, from her understanding of Bobby's situation, the software and the hardware had fused as their instruction sets and capacities permitted. This was what the rest of the team were trying to work on, using her real-time information as a base, but she was sure in her own mind that she hadn't gone nearly as far. She'd been careful about the run time.

It was a shock, then, when she saw her own results.

Nikolai Kropotkin and her father talked her through them. They gathered in Kropotkin's office and watched the holographic representations flux and whirl.

“What you have to realize is that when you were infected with this system, it was already a fusion of the hardware and software—because in Bobby X it had run on for hours,” Kropotkin said to her.

Natalie was staring at the diagrammatic outputs, which were telling her that not only her brain and central nervous system but her entire body had been co-opted into working for the ends of the Selfware programme. She kept turning her attention inwards, trying to feel the difference, but there seemed to be no change and that was disturbing.

“I still don't like your explanation of that,” Calum broke in, almost barking in his dislike of the facts. “How can Selfware communicate with the NervePath in this way? It shouldn't be possible.”

“On the contrary, the only requirement for the command code to trigger the NervePath to create physical changes in nonneural cells was that it redefine all cells as potential information exchangers. Once the
brain had been adapted to optimal functioning Bobby was able to perceive the wider truth that, in fact, all our cells do communicate with each other all the time.”

“But that was a change in his mind, not in the systems,” Calum insisted.

“Yes, and by that point his mind and the systems were integrated. The adapted version was allowed to write back to the original NP code. I'd like to know who it was wrote in those additions.” The expression on Kropotkin's wrinkled face darkened as he grew thoughtful, and Natalie saw that he was thinking about Guskov.

“Is he capable of that?” she asked directly. “Writing and testing material like this on unsuspecting people?”

Nikolai shrugged. “Of course he is. You experimented on yourself in earlier days, didn't you, with the Read-Only NP systems?”

“This is different,” she insisted, feeling sick.

“Not when you have a world to save,” Kropotkin said quietly. “Not when you have spent your life, and the payoff is hanging in the balance. Waste it for the sake of an unknown man's life, one life, against so many possibilities?”

“Not his life.”

“His against another's. Yours against mine. This was your life's passion, this work, wasn't it? And would you have given up?”

“My work wasn't in this league.”

“But it was. You just didn't know it.”

Natalie turned to her father. His face was heavy with the weight of worry and anger.

“You knew,” she said. “You knew what he'd done and you didn't tell me.”

His florid face flushed an even deeper red. “It wasn't meant to touch you!” he said, through teeth that clenched and ground against each other. “I wanted you to stay in York and keep out of this whole … mess.”

“But you knew what Selfware meant to me. Or wasn't it you who
said, ‘This work is unscientific, moronic'—wasn't that you? Or did my hearing play up? Hmm?” Her anger was only now boiling to the surface. She hated the hurt in him and the way it made her feel pity for him. “And you knew about this Free State idea and you kept
that
quiet.”

He glanced at her, wounded and cautious, his pale blue eyes deep in their sockets and shrouded beneath lids that tried to protect him from her. She saw herself in that second as he saw her: Natalie, so like her mother, full of the dippiness that Charlotte had had, that kind of violet viewpoint that pushed romance and mystery into every cranny of an orderly and plain world, mucking it up with the dripping lace of imagination when even its ordinariness was a marvel she belittled with her furbelows. Natalie was a fragile flower, unable to cope with the grief of losing her mother, who had been deluded, insane with despair and caught in depression, the ideas that saved her spawning ridiculous fantasies of the mind's workings: beliefs in shamen and shadows. Natalie was his and must be protected. Natalie was his fault and must be fixed. He had thought,
If only NervePath had been working this well years ago when she was fourteen, I'd have sorted her out then, set her straight.

“Good God!” She got up, almost staggered over her own chair, and found herself groping for the door. She glanced back, saw Kropotkin puzzled, her father agonized, and then she was out into the corridor and running down it for the isolation of her own room where there were doors she could slam to shut out this awful source of endless, wretched information and the leaking old vessels that contained it.

Payoff, was that what Kropotkin had said? Maybe there was a price for everything and Ian was right to exact his dues before he left them behind.

Jude woke and found his head resting on Mary's lap. They were still in the plane from Dugway. The cabin lights were low and unmistakably, although very slowly and softly, her hand on his head was stroking his hair. He pretended to be still asleep.

So, the army did not have the version of Deliverance he had possession
of, which meant to him that the Russian was going to use it himself as the obvious method of mass-distributing the Mappaware—he was going to double-cross the government.

Jude wondered what program he was going to give out. The answer must lie in the file, back in his apartment. He would have to go through it in the fine detail he hadn't tried before, to piece together the whole story. Meanwhile, he had to bury his sister and prevaricate here, putting on a show to someone his doubts wouldn't let him trust but whom his loyalties wouldn't let him betray. He'd had less committed love matches than the unconscious faith he'd had in Mary. Maybe Natalie was right when she'd pointed it out. But what was this all about, now? If she were a liar, was this a plan to keep him sweet? If she were honest, was it a show of real tender affection?

The soft brush of her fingertips gave no clue. For no reason he could think of he was suddenly aware of them being alone together in this private cabin; him lying down, her possessive touch. Through the impeccable serge of her skirt he could smell her and it was an arousing scent that, once he'd identified it, stiffened his cock and made his heart start to beat faster.

He made himself lie still on the seats. He counted seconds. He longed to sit up and kiss her and get lost in a moment's stupid desire.

He breathed with the control of a hiding animal, trying not to give itself away.

Ian remembered himself as best he could and composed his physical form into its old shape. It took time and it was difficult. It cost energy he would rather not have used, because his store of it was finite—the only energy he'd ever had—and with each use the store diminished. Soon it would be all gone and he would cease. But his sense of outrage was still good and strong. There wasn't a poetic set of the scales of justice operating in any universe he'd seen, but as long as he was around he had a mind to put that right—after all, what was a mind for if it wasn't to get things in their proper place?