Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  “What is it, then?”

  “That one's called Fuck Off! And this one is Open the Bloody Door, You Bastards. And this one is I'll Get You All, See If I Don't.”

  “I don't suppose you've got one called FU Dan, You Drugged-up Sod, You're Fired.”

  “Well, I have, but I'm not telling you which one it is.”

  She put the pages down and watched him closely. No, Dan wasn't involved in deliberate subterfuge outside, but he had become a pawn in another game. It was clear. How it was clear she couldn't have said in so many words. Since waking the second time she seemed to have new senses without physical analogues. She knew, and that was all. Of course, she might be wrong, or dreaming, or psychotic. Time would tell. She wished they could both go home and get drunk.

  Dan's normally cheerful face fell and he slouched, pushing the pictures to one side. “I'm sorry, Nat.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She patted his hand and they looked away awkwardly from one another for a moment. “Anyway, the tests they're doing at eight should be final. I hope you've cleaned the flat.”

  “Like a new pin.” He gave her an attempt at a cheeky grin and then stood up. He looked tired and his eyes were circled with grey. She knew that he was kidding her. There was no way the Ministry would ever let her back to the flat.

  “You on the soft stuff again?” she asked, looking at the breakdown patterns in his blood. Shot sclera. Puffy face. Dehydration. He was fried. She wished he'd eat a decent meal and get some rest.

  “Not so bad.” He shrugged and broke away from her gaze.

  “What's the Ministry doing?”

  “They've been breeding,” Dan said, moving to scratch his head with difficulty through the suit's tough fabric. “In fact, I don't think there's anyone left here who isn't an agent for someone or other, including the other patients. And the police have all mutated into Special Branch or big green army soldiers with guns. They arrested me, you know, for punching McAlister. Well worth it.” He managed a real quirk of the eyebrows, “The MP was very butch and he wanted my number. I think he might be interested.”

  “You get all the luck.” She smiled, although it cost her something because there was no life in his eyes.

  “Natalie, I…” he began, suddenly serious, staring down at the thick coverings over his shoes.

  She waited but he shook his head, unable to say what was on his mind. As he looked up at her and she gave him a no-problems grin she was suddenly chilled by the kind of gaze he gave her. His fringe didn't hide it.

  Dan had sold her out. She knew it.

  She tried to speak but she couldn't. It hurt, worse than a stab to the chest.

  “Sorry,” he said, and stepped through the door into the airlock without looking back.

  “No, wait!” she cried and got up to jump after him. But she was too late. The door shut in her face and no amount of hammering and kicking it made any difference.

  Shattered, she paced the room, trying to go back to that moment of revelation and pick it apart, to see if there was more, but there wasn't. He'd done a bad thing, something to do with her. Maybe he hadn't wanted to, but he was weak and he'd done it. He hated himself.

  Done what?

  Natalie knew she had to get out of here. She'd go and make him tell her. Was he in worse trouble than she imagined? Could it be something to do with that tosspot excuse for a human being, Ray Innis? But now her head was hurting. It was so bad that she had to go and lie down. If she hadn't been sure there were no sensory nerves in the brain she would have thought she was feeling the NervePath mites kicking up a feeble resistance against their premature silencing. They wanted to stretch out further and see what was to be seen.

  As she agonized about Dan, part of the anguish was for herself. She had just become the world's most important guinea pig. It was a situation that wasn't without its danger. All it would take was one person with a working program and a scanner and she was easy meat for any amount of tests and experiments. The only way out was to physically destroy the NervePath technology in situ and she had no idea how to do it without killing herself. She knew that the only option she had was to play it safe with the Ministry until a chance came up and then to leave and run. And even that was a fairly hopeless-looking scenario.

  For herself Natalie had a theory about what had happened in those seconds in which poor Bobby had become a transubstantiate. She'd been saving it up for when her father got around to visiting. The daughter in her who remembered him signing her off into McKillick wanted to see if it would make his head explode. To her surprise, however, when the time came they didn't talk of it.

  “Dad, where's Bobby?”

  “I have no idea,” he said and told her of the call from Bobby's wife he had received, in which she was talking about seeing Bobby round the house, of being haunted, of demanding that it stop. “And you?” He was stern as always, stiff as a post, not rushing in to throw his arms around her or anything wantonly affectionate like that.

  Natalie nodded, matching him calm for calm as payment in kind. “I calculate that I am approximately only forty-eight minutes behind him in terms of the Selfware run. So, if you were to reactivate it, I think I might expect the same to happen to me. I assume that McAlister has already mooted this in some meeting or other?”

  “Cynical of you.” But he nodded slowly. “Of course, I wouldn't sign for it.”

  She waited for him to say something about how it was that Dan had stopped the system, and not him or McAlister. But he avoided her gaze and glanced around the room instead, inspecting it for correctness.

  “So, you're in charge of me now? I'm no longer legally sane, is that it?” But she knew the answer. It was much easier to get everything moving without consulting her about what happened. It wasn't that they were suddenly back to the bad old days. More's the pity, she thought, because then I'd really let rip at you, you old sod. Instead, she said, “But I don't suppose your disagreement will stop them for long. How interesting that the very stuff I thought would once make people that much more themselves has now magically removed my status of personhood in one easy move.”

  Calum looked distracted, and not by her attempts at irony. He turned, glanced at the camera, and then looked back at her and spat an emphatic whisper. “If there was a way out of this, do you think I wouldn't have tried it?”

  “You,” Natalie said slowly, enjoying her moment, which had been many years in the making, “have done many things in the past to change me. There was a time when I would have thought this would be your golden chance to fix me up once and for all: no depression, no mania, no crazy ideas. NervePath would be your toolkit and you'd be some kind of puppet master, chiselling me a new, scientific head.” She paused. His face was grim and he was obviously angry at being spoken to like that. His lip twitched but he didn't speak.

  “But I see I was wrong,” she said and reached out to hold his hand, which he gave her with a glance at it as though it was rebelling against him. “I know there's no way out of this. And it's my own doing. Selfware.”

  “It's not your doing. This is Bill's work,” her father said with a degree of hatred she hadn't realized he was capable of. His fingers clenched on hers to the point of pain. “Guskov.”

  Natalie freed her hand and activated her Pad. “I got a letter from him this morning inviting me to join you all in your American hideaway.” She showed him and he glanced at it. “A closed environment? Times are desperate for the project.”

  Calum glanced down in a blink of confirmation and held his eyes closed a long time, holding her hand. Part of his complicit silence was shame at her condition, because in the past he had wished her different than she had been, and his wish had been granted. He laid his head down on her blanketed knees and sighed.

  “Charlotte,” he said, an appeal to another time.

  Natalie squeezed his fingers. “It's all right, Dad. I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  She didn't know. She didn't understand his kind of silent love, th
e sort that could watch what it loved grow distant and do nothing to stop it, waiting for it to return as though it were a kind of homing pigeon that instinct would bring back to the loft if only there were time enough. And when Charlotte flew the coop he'd kept the gate closed on Natalie in a perfect reverse of the same mistake. But her love wasn't like that. Charlotte. Dan. Jude. It didn't let things die forgotten. And therein was its weakness. It didn't let things go at all. So as he was here with her, but lost in the past, she brought the past with her into the present, a frozen dream, disconnected from the reality where it wanted to exist.

  Natalie could see the truth of that. Everyone is a web of dreams. What we call reality is the master web. But beneath the fragile ropes that connect us, beneath that—her father was an old man, tired and beginning to feel that those things that had seemed important once were perhaps nothing but shadows on his mind. Charlotte left because she couldn't be herself with him. She would never have come back. He'd used his determination to face the hardest truth with logical calm as a shield to insulate himself from what he feared. But the hardest truth wasn't out there in the physical. It existed in the realm of communal fantasy, the world he'd pretended not to enter.

  Natalie thought about Jude. Had she been part of a fable for him? Was he nothing more than a romantic illusion for her? What did these questions even mean, when the person who asked was the context of the question itself?

  Outside the high window the lozenge of visible sky was blue, darkening to twilight. Natalie watched it shift through the range of indigo colours and then become black. She placed her hand on her father's head and listened to his quiet, difficult breathing.

  Mary read the reports on the British NervePath experiments and received Guskov's list from Dix's office while she was at the gym at six o'clock the next morning. The thing that stood out from her Pad's audio summary of them both was the name “Natalie Armstrong.” Its unhappy appearance was so surprising, yet not surprising, as it filtered through her earpiece in the Pad's pleasantly chatty style that Mary almost quit cycling halfway up her Appalachian mountain trail. Only a jolt of willpower flipped her concentration back to the moment so that she drove hard with her feet and saved herself from a major bailout, the back wheel spinning and slipping as the Velotheatre simulated a loss of traction on loose dirt.

  She used the bike's controls to switch the pleasant views and motivating scenes of snowy peaks ahead to some long, flat highway instead and then keyed up the reports on the screens in front of her. The words superimposed themselves on the landscape in brilliant colours, highlighted red for links to other information, blue for news that had been culled from secure sources, green for everything else. Dix's squad of investigative writers were lavish with their energies, she thought, remembering her own time of service in those offices, conducting arrays of pilots across the networks, reading up on everything from starfish to pharmaceuticals in a day's work. The FBI stint had been a significant promotion. Even now the flush of pride at being singled out for fast tracking up the power ladder gave her an internal hit of energy strong enough to up her r.p.m. over the ninety.

  She skimmed over the details of Armstrong's daily life she already knew and thumbed the text down onto the guesswork about the Patient X situation, grimacing at the dated stuff her ex-colleagues saw fit to include.

  “Theories of quantum consciousness suggest it is a possibility that…”

  They did nothing of the sort and they'd been discredited years ago as deep improbabilities, Mary knew. The old squad could learn something from the Feds' Special Sciences unit when it came to doing hard homework. Most likely they were including everything they could think of to cover their butts, a not-unintelligent motive in the Defense Department.

  “The tape may be a hoax…created by a foreign agency who have captured Patient X and are using him to conduct their own tests…”

  Now that looked a lot more likely than the guy vanishing into thin air. But there remained the odd coincidence of Natalie Armstrong's condition:

  “Doctor Natalie Armstrong (attending physician) was attempting to sedate Patient X when the incident occurred. As a consequence immediately pursuant—”

  Pursuant? But yes: Shalonda Neuberg, whose icon headed this section, was an ex-legal. Dix was always writing terse little notes to her about writing in plainer American…

  “…Immediately pursuant upon this Dr. Armstrong lost consciousness. Examination using MicroScan revealed that her Grade 2.1 NervePath semi-prototype nanyte structures (installed four years previously under MoD sublicensee program for theoretical researchers) had, at some time since her last examination, been switched for Grade 7.8 NervePath Electrochemical Relayers. This incumbent NP structure was identically programmed to that of Patient X prior to his disappearance, and the system was active. Dr. Armstrong's system was deactivated forty-one minutes after inception, under the authority of Mikhail Guskov, acting through his proxy, Doctor Calum Armstrong…Natalie Armstrong remains in a Q-1 containment…may be our only surviving test subject of an advanced and exhaustive NervePath process…”

  Mary didn't know when she'd stopped pedalling but she found herself stationary, staring at the big screen and wondering if Guskov knew more about this than she'd first thought. It was exactly the kind of idea that made her skin prickle with foreboding. If she screwed up on protecting Mappa Mundi this late in the day, by underestimating him, she was finished.

  The saboteur at the Clinic had never been apprehended. His handiwork was more than a touch suspicious—implementing an untested and idiosyncratic mindware system that Mary'd never heard of until the day before. A system written by Natalie Armstrong, who was now infected with it. Some odd kind of theory about consciousness that Mary didn't understand lay behind it. She only knew that the Brits had consistently turned it down for development. But by all accounts that woman would be a prime candidate for trying it on herself anyway if only she'd had access to the right level of NervePath, which allegedly she hadn't. But there in cold letters a foot high—Grade 7.8, the latest and best, unlicensed for use outside Defense Department jurisdiction. No way she could have got her hands on it.

  Which made it look as though the whole thing wasn't a hoax, but that somehow Natalie Armstrong had experienced cross-contamination. Could Armstrong have engineered the whole thing? That, too, was possible.

  Mary hated this mass of uncertainty. She got off the bike and towelled herself down, switching the displays back to the alps so that her coach wouldn't realize she'd been working on the job. She took a long drink from her water bottle. A spare drip ran down her chin and tapped, icy, on her chest. Really, she hadn't much doubt that Guskov was involved in this setup. Using him for so many projects and for so long was a big risk that Dix had taken. Until now he'd never put a foot wrong, and that was maybe reason enough to suspect that he was hiding a big private agenda. She'd read the file before it went missing. She knew he was capable of outplaying maybe everyone else in the league—but he wasn't going to outplay her.

  No way was Natalie Armstrong going to join his Mappa Mundi elite team. Not as anything more than a test subject of minor interest. And in the meantime Mary was going to find Patient X and screw the lid down on Guskov so hard he wouldn't be able to breathe without her knowing it.

  With her new information dealt with she was forced to return to thinking about the reason she'd come for the mind-clearing properties of a tough physical workout in the first place. Jude had been to see Armstrong as well.

  Mary knew that from her culpable little mole, Dan Connor, who was the easiest make in the world. With so many natural ways to shape him the NervePath and Contour-ing seemed cruelly excessive. He'd sung for free about Jude's visit when she'd pressed him, and now she was even aware—and, she hated to admit it, bone-crushingly jealous—that Jude had been off sleeping with the Armstrong woman.

  To her certain knowledge he'd been a strict loner since the last girlfriend took flight for fields more lucrative and glamorous: California body
work, butt-length blonde hair, burning ambition and all—her lazy mind had never suited him, although he hadn't noticed it until she'd played the You Don't Pay Me Enough Attention card and had him sent off the pitch. Jude was a focused man, obsessed with work, kind and thoughtful, but no girly girl would ever find him productive in the end. Mary'd thought of seducing him many times, keenly aware every time she saw him of what a crush she'd had on him the first six months on the FBI assignment, but she'd always held back from it. You never knew when that kind of dynamite could blow up in your face, and she'd needed to be sure of him. His going out with Lucinda had been irksome, but understandable—Lucinda was comfortably generic and no threat to Mary in any sphere she cared about. But the idea of him with another woman, especially a smart one who was as theatrically far-out-looking as Armstrong…Mary ground her teeth and poured the rest of the bottle of water down the back of her neck.

  The most aggravating thing was that he'd almost told her everything last night, but he'd clammed up at the last moment and she hadn't dared push him in case he got suspicious. She could try again today, however. He'd looked strung-out to her. He'd have to tell someone soon. She was going to be there when he did, and then she might even find it in herself to feel gracious about him and Armstrong, sympathetic, a pal who could share the locker-room intimacy. She could pull that off—but it would have to be quick, because she'd decided now that the only way to exert sufficient control on this whole situation was to shut down the British end of operations herself. Meanwhile she'd distract Jude with the biological defense viewing, a handy and legitimate venture. She might even strike lucky and Perez herself would find them a new case to look at that took his attention right away from anything that touched on Mappa Mundi.

  Mary opened the door of the Velotheatre and tossed her bottle and towel into the hamper outside. Her coach came rushing up to check times and fat readings but it was all academic to her. She let him earn his money and then left for massage and a full wax with the one therapist who could be relied on not to try and make small talk. Waxing was agony. It was the perfect preparation for a day of sharp action.