Mappa Mundi (19 page)

Natalie was staring at him with concern now, which he liked a lot less than her anger. “Dan?”

“He hit me and I felled him with a knockout blow to the jaw. Iron Dan,” he said, hoping she wouldn't push it.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. Never better. Smashing pills, they are. Where'd you get them from? You could make a fortune.”

“I stole them from work,” she said. “Where do you think? And don't change the subject. Who was following? Why were you—no, forget that, I can imagine the answer. Just tell me.”

Dan finished his coffee and looked into the mug, which didn't tell him anything. “I don't know who he was. A big bloke in a big coat with a big hat on. I asked him for a light, he punched me in the gut. That's it. Why? Is he really an FBI agent?”

“I think so.” She turned around and checked the eggs absently. When she turned back she was frowning.

“Don't scowl. You looked happy before,” Dan suggested. “And you haven't told me what happened. In fact, maybe that could wait.” He'd suddenly remembered what it was he wanted to ask her. But that could wait, too, until they were at work and she had less mental energy to spare on grilling him about anything that might reveal the situation with Shelagh or Ray. She really would go mental if she knew the drugs had gone beyond a bit of weed and that the debts had changed the intensity of their grip on him.

“What?” She buttered some toast and handed it to him. “You're making less sense with every minute. I need you on top form today. No mistakes.”

“I think he was probably from the Home Office or something like that,” Dan said quickly. “Probably just wanting to make sure the star researchers aren't going to be compromised in the tabloids. So, how does he go, this guy?”

Natalie's face altered subtly. He saw its glow.

“Like a train,” she said sweetly and trod on his foot, smiling as she ground her heel onto his toes.

“Your bacon's burning.”

“Shit!” She got the grill tray out, using their one inadequate tea towel, and stood for a second, hopping as she licked her fingers and blew on them. Then she stood on his foot again as he giggled.

Dan wondered if his suspicions about himself and the man on the corner were true. It made it difficult to keep up the lighter side. It made him wonder if that one-way ticket wasn't a better plan than anything here, but then he looked at Natalie and knew that he couldn't go.

“Has he gone back?”

“Who?”

“Who d'you think? The Last of the Mohicans. Has he gone back to the loony bin?”

“Flew this morning. Two rashers?”

“Three, please. Never mind, darling.”

“I don't mind.”

“Ah yeah.” He sliced into a tomato and watched her industriously cutting up her own food, focused right in on it, pretending she was all together and cool. “That's what we all say.”

Mikhail Guskov placed his call to arrive in the United Kingdom at seven forty-five. He looked into the screen of his second, personal Pad as his contact there answered. Neither of them needed to confirm anything about the day's test or their plans. All that was required was Guskov's authority to proceed.

He'd given it a lot of thought since that meeting with Delaney. She liked to fool herself that she had that bunch of players at the Pentagon all in hand, but let her. He admired her balls for having the audacity to try it. But the sudden acceleration that this test had precipitated meant he had harder tasks than keeping her off his back. He had to find out if the Armstrong girl's test project was what he thought it could be. Despite his discreet backing of her, the Ministry there had still denied her a licence—not entirely surprising, given their already heavy involvement in Mappa Mundi and the fact that her work appeared to them to be no more than blue-skying: research that would, at best, produce marginal products and small revenues in the future.

But Guskov wasn't so sure. He had an idea that she might be on to the most radical and far-reaching science of her time, and before he could list his final team he wanted to know if she was going to be in on it. If she was, then maybe, just maybe, he could still stay one jump ahead.

He looked into the face of his contact and said simply, “Today.”

His datapilot reported the line clean and the link was cut.

Calum Armstrong would understand later, even if he wasn't prepared for his experiment to fail so dramatically. Mikhail would talk him round. If he didn't—well, it would be difficult to lose a friend and colleague, but that would be his test.

When Jude had gone through passport control he called White Horse. There was no answer. He wondered if she'd received his earlier note. He left her another. The same.

On the flight back he had forty minutes to think about what had happened in England. He had his information, and didn't he wish he hadn't got it, because now his world didn't make sense. White Horse had said once—insisted—“You can't be two things. You can only be one. Live one way, in one world. You're part white, part Cheyenne. You can't live both. You have to choose.”

Well, he'd been first one and then the other, and now the world of reason that he'd thought was good enough to see him through anything wasn't working.

It was not possible that he had the Ivanov file, although have it he did. But then, if Natalie hadn't told him about NervePath, Mappaware, and that it was possible to watch the flow of a physical action and know its meaning as a thought then that would have seemed equally as impossible a few days ago. But her other theories—that the self and free will were both illusory quantities, the results of imperfect understanding of the function of the brain and mind … he wasn't sure he could go the extra mile on those.

He looked across the clouds and thought of Natalie. She was singular.
He liked her. She was interesting. If she was crazy, he liked that, too. “I'm glad you exist.” He didn't think he'd had a compliment like that before.

“Champagne, sir?” the attendant asked.

“No, thanks.” He didn't want to drink. He had to get—and keep—a clear head for Washington.

But as he tried to turn his mind onto the notes he was making he found himself thinking about Natalie's lopsided smile and what she'd said about Selfware, the system built to detect ESP, to facilitate intelligent understanding, to expand the mind's potentials to an unknown maximum limit.

To his reasoning self that, too, sounded crazy, like automated insight, like manufacturing spirit or personality. Could that be a good thing? Wasn't it another way for someone else to control you, or for you to do things to yourself that weren't wise at times when your fears got too much and the nights too long?

He knew that the technology could work, because of Deer Ridge. He just couldn't imagine what that would be like. Natalie's own connection to the problem was so personal, he even had sympathy for her father's views that she was too involved, making theories of her own psychoses. But she was only a part of the whole.

Deer Ridge was an early version of something his government had. Would that be good?

He'd like to think that. But deep in his heart he felt an older mistrust.

Even now the old treaties drawn up with his father's People had never been honoured, recompense never paid, admissions of bad judgement never made, and genocidal intent never acknowledged. Against his Cheyenne half the government had no record of good behaviour, just the reverse. If they'd had Mappaware back then there would be no Nation now.

Even if the technology had a good side, he didn't believe that was
the only use it would see in the hands of the USA. Maybe Natalie's technology was a way to end all dissent—we will all be God-fearing, Bible-reading, materialist self-deluders. Everyone could buy in happily and be glad. If they were really happy, would it matter what they were? Wouldn't it be better than the present sorry state of Deer Ridge, with its eighty percent unemployment and a plenary judicial system that got government out of every promised benefit, with one weasel word after another, “respect for ancient ways” being foremost.

And there he was, Jude, channelling White Horse and not believing in the supernatural. He grinned and shook his head. One thing or another? He thought he'd rather have a lot of undecided things, and none of them quite right, than only two choices.

He sent a message to Mary, letting her know that he was coming back in a few hours' time. It was going to be difficult, finding out more without telling her, until he was sure that they needed to make an issue out of whatever it was that was really going on. One thing he had learned since joining the agency was to look before he leaped and he had to get Mary on side before he'd have a chance.

White Horse had no idea she was being followed. That was, she expected it, looked for it without trying to appear antsy, but recognized nothing—not that she knew what she should be seeing either, and that all added up to no idea in her view. Because she'd come that way and knew the roads, she headed back towards the railway station, tagging along behind two Ethiopian schoolkids with identical bright pink lunchboxes sporting the latest cartoon hero from TV, each one talking to its owner in perky tones of enthusiasm and in words she didn't understand.

She walked fast, businesslike, along the Mall, past the Museum area to the long strip where there'd be plenty of people moving and open ground. She liked land where you could see further than to the next block. She wanted to feel she could run.

Because there were six of them, linked by earpiece, expertly shifting roles around her in the morning pedestrian traffic, because they knew how to hunt in these conditions, she missed them all. But one of her senses, working overtime, prompted her to turn in and get a ticket to the Air and Space. Not that she had any love of aeroplanes, and the space programme was dead on its knees, more like a historical quirk than a living science … but she stepped inside and moved quickly towards a packed elevator. Her instincts made her examine the face of everyone coming through the doors towards her. One of them.

The doors closed and she felt the heaviness as she was lifted. Tiny box. She got out at the first opportunity and found herself face to face with a portion of
Enola Gay.
Photographs and montages of screaming, dying people walled her in on every side. She could touch the metal of the thing that had dropped the Hiroshima bomb. She did touch it. It was warm from so many hands, as calmly inert as the machine banging against her side.

Getting past the school tours was hard. She shoved more than once, got cursed, found a stairwell and ran down it, looking for an exit. One floor above her she heard the door open. One floor below her another door closed. She leaned over the rail but they were hugging the wall. The well of the stairs disappeared into darkness.

Behind her a woman came into view. She was tall and tough-looking.

“Here she is,” the woman said and stopped, looking flat at White Horse. The woman's stance showed she was poised to leap down the flight and tackle her to the ground.

White Horse spun around and saw a man running up from below, the identical imperative to stop her in his eyes. She grabbed the handrail and kicked out at him as soon as he got within range, a mad gesture that packed more intent than power, but she was panicked now and ran straight into his destabilized body, knocking him aside as she threw herself down and down again.

She was starting to feel the first surge of relief as she stepped out into the museum foyer again. Then a hand took her arm from the side.

“No!” White Horse pulled away. She opened her mouth, ready to scream the place down if it would get her enough attention, but only the shocked face of an old man looked up at her. He backed away from her and she wanted to apologize but instead she walked quickly across and joined a group of people just being ushered into a space-simulation ride. Her ticket was good for that. She pushed her way to the end of the seated row as they sat down and heard herself cursed blue by Kentucky accents from one side of the auditorium to the other.

As the doors were about to be closed she stood up and brushed past the security guard through the exits. She was on a dark ramp, leading her back up to ground level. Hesitantly she walked up and tried to appear confident as she moved towards the doors. Could she have lost them?

They closed on her as she reached the street, a human knot who hemmed her in on all sides in a practised dance that looked like an ordinary jumble of different people whose paths have just crossed for a moment and in that moment a cold stab pierced the arm of her jacket.

They were so close that she didn't fall as the drug took hold. The last impression she had was of them sitting her in the seat of a large car, fastening her seat belt judiciously, undoing her treacherous hands from their grip on the bag and lifting it gently away.

Bobby X was not the real name of Ian John Detteridge but it was his name now. They called him that at the hospital and he answered to it—but he didn't answer them. He answered their voices, which came at him from the shifting, coloured holes in the world.

At first, when he'd woken out of the anaesthetic and the accident, he thought he'd lost part of his sight. He could make out the shapes of his bed and the equipment hanging around him in swathes of spaghetti tubing. He could see the curtain and the window and the walls of his room and its flickering, badly fitted light on the left. Clear
as daylight they were. But then he'd noticed a patch that didn't seem right.

It was a mass of shifting tones and planes. He thought—a coat … no, a …—but here his thoughts ran out.

“Mr. Detteridge?” said a voice from behind the blur.

He tried to see around it, blinked, jogged his eyes about. (That hurt.)

Something touched his arm and that was part of the shapeless thing, too. It even had a strange colour to it, greyish, like rat fur, like dust. He cringed, “Nurse!” he called hoarsely.

“Mr. Detteridge?”

He realized the voice was coming from the grey, alien thing that he couldn't see.

He screamed.

It had taken some time to diagnose the problem and, even when they had, he didn't understand it. They said he'd lost the ability to recognize living things. And that grey, mouldy brown aura, that shapeless, undefinable, shifting mass that was a nothing—that was how he saw a living thing now. Didn't seem right that a brain could be mixed up that way just from a bang on the head, but so they said, and because he wanted it to be true Ian agreed with them and went along with it.

Bobby X was the name he got from going into special therapy. They said they'd fix him now and at last the day had come. They didn't use his real name because he was a kind of volunteer and the therapy was still a secret, just being tested, and he was going to test it for them and be a pioneer, would he like that?

He wanted things to be normal. Of course he'd said yes. What was the other option? Try to go home to your wife and children who now scared the living daylights out of you and looked—“abominable” was the only word to describe that mixture of revulsion and wrongness.

But now the time had come he was scared to his bones. He didn't want to do it. What if they only made everything into that rat-coloured nothingness? What if he didn't make it? Then he might be stuck in a
mental home forever, living like this, a moron, an embarrassment. They might forget him and he'd die there, mouldering away to rat dust.

He listened to the TV to keep himself alert. Couldn't watch it, only listen. He turned his head away as the nurse brought in a drink and some toast. He knew it was her, but he couldn't bear to look. It was like knowing wasn't enough any more. He could “know” as hard as he liked, but when they came at him he saw—indescribable things. They said the ratty colour was his own repulsion, an illusion. But he didn't feel that was true. In their odd movements, their incomprehensible lack of sense to him, it was part of them, as real as their loathsome, sudden touch.

There would be no need for sedation. They'd filled his head with the tiny things that would do the fixing and it wouldn't hurt at all.

He wasn't sure. He just wasn't sure.

Bobby X. He'd heard it said so often it was more his name than the real one. Or if he stayed this way, it would be his name forever. Man of mystery, like a revolutionary. He liked the sound of it, but not the reality. If he was going to stay like this—he'd rather die than be alone with these things around him, talking as if they knew him, as if he knew them. If it didn't work, he'd find his way. Save some pills or something. He'd get out.

The semblance of a plan made him feel better.

He sipped his tea.

Natalie watched Bobby from the doorway and took her readings with the handscanner from behind his back. It had a reasonable range and she didn't want to upset him any more than he already was. If it were future days she could probably have pursued the entire treatment without him being any the wiser, but as things were Bobby X was a test animal and he was going to have to jump through the hoops for as long as it took to recalibrate the new tissues of his brain.

Seeing her father wasn't something Natalie was looking forward to, but she didn't delay it. She fortified herself with memories of the
night before and took the results straight to the Therapy Suite where he was already deep in discussions over the last-minute details with Knitted Man, Bill, the systems supervisor. His satellite image was large as life on-screen from his labs in America. Either he or Bill could easily have read her data already from the network, but protocol demanded she announce it herself.