Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Where was Natalie? He had to explain it to her. He had to tell her about it and fight whatever the fucking Shelagh-witch had put in his head. Yes, he knew it was NervePath all right. Didn't need a scanner now, did he? Obvious. A series of blocks in place much stronger than his own willpower would ever have been able to generate. He was well fucked, and only Natalie could help him. And he had to apologize. That first. She had to forgive him. He didn't like to think about it if she didn't. Joe and the others had called, but they were no good. Friends were what counted and he knew he only really had one.

  Ray Innis had left him some messages about a meeting.

  Dan hadn't gone. Now he had to watch the street. Screen calls. Wonder where it was safe to walk. Standing Ray up was a very uncool idea. At least the undercover men outside and loitering had kept him away from the flat so far. Dan was being closely watched. They were toying with the idea of arresting him formally. He knew that. It was only a matter of time before they got enough evidence together, and then he'd get no chance to see Natalie.

  He paused and tried the numbers again. Engaged signals.

  “Shit!” He threw his Pad into the hot-water bucket and it vanished beneath the bubbles.

  Grumbling about the pain in his knees, he got to his feet and wiped his hands on his trousers. Before he had time to think it over he was getting into his coat, putting on his boots, and then going back to fish the Pad out and put it in his pocket. He went into Natalie's bedroom, opened the window, and climbed out down the fire escape into the back yard, which let out onto a narrow cobblestone alley between one row of houses and the next.

  No doubt he'd been spotted but he didn't pause to find out. Walking as quickly as he could he headed down to the riverside and then along the dark banks of St. George's Field at the water's edge, where the path ran to the bridge. Above him wind moved restlessly in the horse chestnut trees and to his left the river's high waterline flickered in hungry, fast-moving ripples. He saw a couple of cars on the roads ahead, street lights casting their glow down on empty pavements. It was only a mile or so.

  Ahead of him Skeldergate bridge reared its smooth arch and cast black shadows. A movement made him hesitate, but he thought it was only the reflection of the street light on the water reflecting upwards to dance on the brickwork. In any case, it was time to cross the river. He ran out onto the deserted parking lots that covered the land between him and the path to the bridge. A camera, mounted high on a metal post, tracked him silently and he felt safer, though what difference some video of his murder would make he didn't know.

  He was sweating hard by the time he made it to the road, and the coat was unbearably hot, but he felt he needed its weight and protection. Midges scattered in his face as he ducked under the branches of a sycamore. He brushed them away, hands still stinking of soap, and then saw a figure moving towards him from the other side.

  It was coming at a fast walk: a man, in dark clothes, face turned to the footpath, hands in pockets. Dan thought it was the same man who'd waited on the street corner for Natalie, watching her at the church. Different clothes but that bullish, squared look, the mechanical movements…he glanced behind him and two more people were on the pavement, a couple, walking together briskly, holding hands. They were about fifty yards back. No cars came. It was quiet. He could hear their steps. He didn't stop, but his heart began to hurt with anxiety.

  He met the lone man first. He looked up, and it was the same man and he recognized Dan in the same moment that Dan recognized him, the gap between them closing to less than ten feet. Dan sprang into the road with a sideways jump that tore something small in his knee but he kept running for the opposite path. Behind him he heard the man swear and grunt into faster action. But then a woman's voice cried, “Hold it, you there!”

  There were sounds of running now but a hand descended on his collar, heavy as a lead ingot. Dan twisted around, ducking. His coat came off and he squirmed out of the reach of the other huge hand that came for him and found himself up against the railings, looking into the ugly, determined face of the unknown agent. But at the same moment the two behind caught up with them.

  “Who the hell are you?” the woman demanded, flashing some kind of Ministry ID in the weak light.

  The man holding Dan's coat backed off a step and threw it on the ground. His eyes darted back and forth, looking for a way out, but the younger man was holding a gun and so he cautiously raised his hands instead of trying anything and gave them all a cold, searching look.

  “Mr. Connor, where are you going?” the woman asked in a tired voice.

  “It's a free country,” he said weakly.

  “But you are not a free man,” she informed him. “You may not contact Dr. Armstrong. That is where you were going?”

  Dan felt himself redden, “It's very important that I—”

  “Go home, Mr. Connor,” the man said. “Agent Day will call you a cab.”

  The woman began doing something on her Pad as the man started barking fresh questions at Dan's assailant.

  Dan looked around at the quiet, predawn city. He felt only despair at the idea of going back to the flat and its last untouched square foot. Work and blankness loomed ahead, days and nights of being watched like a dog, tethered, and then caught. Maybe prison. Natalie was going soon.

  While they were all involved with each other he saw his chance. Turning as fast as he could, feeling a sharp, shooting pain in his knee, he took hold of the ironwork balustrade, threw up one leg, pulled the other through, and was suddenly plummeting down.

  Before he knew it he was in the water. It was far colder and more gritty than he'd expected. He thrashed wildly and broke the surface, finding himself close to the far bank. He tried to swim towards it, but his boots were terribly heavy and his knee sent stabs of fire so acute they made tears come to his eyes. Slowly, inexorably, he watched the bridge pass over him. He kept reaching for the bank, but his legs were caught in a faster, deeper current and they spun him around, drawing him further out. Soft, tangling things tugged lazily at his feet.

  Dimly, as he fought to keep his head above water, he thought he heard a shot and some shouting. Then there was another splash.

  It was irrelevant—he had to keep trying for the bank. And he did, all the way past the cycle path and the warehouses until he was parallel with the path's turn to Bishopthorpe. There he managed to catch hold of some reedy things growing in the slow edge of the outer stream and hang there like a fish in the cold, seething current. As he tried to pull himself to the land he saw the inevitable rise and fall of hands and a blunt head drawing towards him through the black water.

  Scrabbling, he found earth and mud under his hands at last and, feet scraping the sharp stones of the bank, got himself out of the water. Ducks, frightened off their night roosts, flurried around him, quacking loudly. Dan stood up and instantly collapsed, knee hot and agonizing as it doubled beneath him.

  He vomited water and shivered. He realised his Pad was back on the bridge. The man was coming.

  He was so bloody angry with himself. What a complete balls-up. What a total, pathetic, stupid, piss-poor waste of time he was. Probably he deserved it. Even so. He didn't give a shit for what he deserved or didn't deserve. Natalie deserved better and he should warn her about Shelagh Carter and her tech before it was all too late for that as well as for himself.

  Turning onto his stomach he got up on hands and one knee and began to crawl towards the distant lights on Bishopthorpe Road.

  He hadn't even reached the hard surface of the tarmac when he heard splashing and grunting behind him. The agent caught up with him easily and, with a stamp of his shoe to Dan's back, slammed him flat against the tough grass.

  “I think you've caused me enough trouble for one night,” said the dull voice, as though nothing could be less interesting.

  Dan braced himself for a kicking but no final blow came. He heard calls being made to arrange for collection and then all the air was knocked out of him as the man sat d
own heavily on his back.

  “Right fucking toerag,” he said, almost amiably, and then sighed. “Shelagh wants to see you.” It was the only phrase that carried any information over and above the content of its words.

  Dan realized that this man was afraid of Shelagh, loathed her even, but he didn't answer. He was fighting to get even a tiny amount of breath. His ribs felt as though they were about to break. He'd lost. As he heard the roar of a van barrelling towards them and then the harsh shriek of its brakes he wished Natalie's system had been capable of creating telepathy.

  Natalie had been sleeping a lot. Since the accident she had slept, she reckoned, at least twelve hours a day and much of it was deep, slow-wave sleep that she couldn't have woken out of if the house had exploded. It was her brain, catching up, she thought, with what the Selfware had done, doing a bit of smoothing work around the edges, tidying, getting used to the new plan. Whatever it was, each time she woke up she was new.

  On the day she and her father were due to travel to America she woke at five in the morning, feeling alert. The old house was quiet and the street silent, but she had the sensation of her ears ringing in the aftermath of a sharp outcry—foxes or cats? A voice, she seemed to remember, a shout.

  She got out of bed and went to the window, listening, looking out. Her room faced the garden. This was the wrong direction.

  Sliding out of her nightshirt she found jeans and a T-shirt, socks and shoes, and padded downstairs. The hall night lights were on and the security guard by the outside door was asleep in his armchair, lightly snoring. Beneath her father's study door the light shone brightly and she heard his old keyboard tapping in fitful deathwatch rushes. She paused on the last step to tie her shoes and then quietly opened the door and went out.

  She could smell grass and the river as the wind blew over her after its journey across the racecourse. The sound of cars was just audible from the major roads a mile away where trucks and cargo land-trains moved rapidly under the last of the night. At the gate a weary dark-suited figure came to meet her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out for a walk. If you're going to come you'd better stay quiet and at least twenty yards behind me,” she informed him crisply. She had no doubt that he would obey her and so he did, trailing after her with all the enthusiastic spirit of a popped balloon.

  The dying echoes of the dream sound were very faint. Natalie followed them without questioning how she knew that one turn was better than another when they came to a crossroads. They quickly covered the long grass of the Knavesmire and then moved through close-built terraces of red-brick housing to the main road where the tanker from the brewery was just pulling in to the Winning Post's parking lot with a stiff sound of hydraulic brakes. Natalie crossed it without hesitation, passed a laundry and a baker's, a Pad shop with its shutters down, and began to jog along the cycle track by the riverside. Here, where the path bent along the bankside, her intuition went dead on her, as abruptly as if its batteries had run out. The trees, the movement of a pair of lone ducks, and the trudge of bored walking as her minder arrived were the only sounds.

  She saw that the grass here was wet and there was a muddy slide between it and the bank. Feet and hands had moved in it. There was a recent tire track. Nothing more. She glanced up at the bridge, some two hundred yards off, and saw a police van there, parked up, its lights dull.

  She wondered what she was doing out here in the early hours and looked across at the opposite bank towards her old flat. Since she was so close she thought she might as well go further down to the footbridge and see if Dan was in. It would be her only chance, said the older section of her mind. A new part said that Dan wasn't even in York any more. The muddy grass was the closest she could get to him now.

  Ignoring that intuition and the guard she turned downriver and carried on with her walk. She was still a way off from her own street when she saw police cars parked there in a thick cluster at the corner, with figures standing around. She wanted to go and ask questions but a strong feeling of unease made her avoid taking that turn at the last moment. Instead, she went along a parallel road and began making for home again, listening to her pursuer scamper each time she reached a corner and went out of sight.

  She knew that Dan wasn't at the flat. She thought he might have gone to the shop and went to look there, but the only inhabitants were the clerk and the cleaner, sweeping listlessly along the magazine racks. They said hello and, knowing with certainty that she would never see them again, she found it hard to close the door after her and step outside.

  So, she thought, are you going to admit it at last? He's gone. Gone. A shiver racked her from head to toe. If the police didn't have him, then where could he be?

  Dawn was bright as she reached the house on the Mount. Natalie was puzzled, uncomfortable, and cold. She took her shoes off, left them in the hall, and walked up to her mother's old room, which had a bay window that overlooked the race course. The bay had a small, cushioned seat and Natalie took it, staring over the ground she had walked, trying to understand what was going on, wordless and trackless, in her own mind. She kept returning to the image of the black water and the mud-streaked ground, the smell of soaking earth and…floor cleaner. Yes, industrial soap, that's what it was. It had a clinging perfume, like sickly sweet flowers.

  Where was Dan? She had no answer. She began to construct a reason to return to the Clinic before they departed. She would find a way to get a message to him and reassure him that whatever he'd done…but what was it?

  If Dan had been in the river and was gone—but she didn't think he was dead. She didn't get that sick, gut-deep plunge she'd felt when she'd heard about her mother; even before the rest of the message had arrived, with the first word of it, she'd known then. The reasons had been trivia, nonsensical detail around a great, hard fact. Later, the reasons and the detail became the only important things; the final connections and explanations that capped a story told in full at last, the ending so unexpected and brief that anything to lift its sheer banality was something precious.

  Natalie turned her attention away from the window and looked around the room, its grey softness just beginning to colour with warmth.

  There was an ornate set of shelves, carved with mice and grapevines, which held an almost complete collection of Tatlers since 1980. Vogue was crated and stored in the loft space above. The journals that Charlotte wrote for—Hello! and Abroad—were not so privileged and lay in untidy heaps and cardboard boxes filmed with dust because the cleaner had been warned exactly by her father as to what should and should not be touched and had taken his strict advice absolutely to the letter.

  Postcards from all over the world were stuck to the wallpaper with ancient Blu-tack. Natalie, as a child, had arranged them there as reminders, so that when her mother returned from her frequent trips she might see them and some of her restless spirit would be calmed and allow her to stay at home. It was a spell that hadn't worked.

  Natalie pulled down a picture of New York and turned it over.

  “Dear Nat, a tiring day touring the publisher's and then meeting all the special celebs. Very late now and am just writing this before I call through the copy; saw a great dress today and thought of you—am sending some shoes along by post for you but I'll probably see you before they do! All my love, Mum.”

  In between the shelves Charlotte's amateurish photographs of places sat in cheap frames. Natalie looked at a faded print of Reichenbach Falls, an ironic smile trying to rise to her face, and put herself there, behind the eyes that had taken the picture.

  Did she know she was going to die when she boarded the airplane?

  How could anyone in their right mind take a two-seater around the cape in those conditions? Did she love us? Why wasn't that enough?

  Natalie listened to the clock in the kitchen softly chime six-thirty. Somewhere the answers lay, lost to her, hidden in a distant cranny of space-time. In their absence, she'd made up a story from the map of known events.
But all maps are patchy and so all understanding is a story and no more. Natalie herself was a story, a construct of reasons and connections and ideas tethered together by narrative links she'd chosen to believe. What if none of those were right?

  Natalie put the postcard back, but it wouldn't stick. She laid it on the desk. Everything she'd done from the moment of Charlotte's lightning-lit and fatal sea-ditch had been fashioned by that sudden voltage out of nowhere. It had fused her determination to find the Truth and set her out to do it. But her counsellor had told her this was only a sublimated wish to recover that lost love, and wasn't that the sad reality? A horrible, random event had shaped her dreams and here she was with a fresh headful of her own handmade denial, dreaming and wondering.

  Playing the flirtatious woman with Jude was no more than a clinging reaching-out for love, wasn't it? And Dan was the reality—gone.

  She emerged from her reverie in the blink of an eye.

  Dan had tried to tell her something before the Bobby test. What was it?

  He'd asked before about scanning. Why?

  Natalie got up from the seat and went through into her study. She pulled up Jude's files from her disk and looked them over again.

  Of course these programs certainly weren't going to be the only ones circulating now such things were possible. Why wait for perfection when a quick hack would serve your purpose? This was madness in a jar and no doubt there were other crude commands: listen and obey…forget…memory erasing would be easy if you didn't care whether the results left functioning minds or not. Add spoon and stir, like Jude said.

  If Dan was the victim of this technology then that would explain why he'd done what he'd done. And she was even less safe than she'd thought, sitting around with a brainload of open gear. She had to plug that socket before someone plugged it for her. The trouble was, she didn't know how to do it. Any shutdown orders could probably be hacked open again.

  She heard doors opening and closing downstairs. People changing shifts. Soon it would be time to leave. Her opportunities were already limited enough.