Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Natalie was sorry she wasn't going to be staying at the house itself—it would have been just what she needed, some solitary peace—but Guskov led the way into the garage and there all pretence of normality and old-style America vanished.

  The elevator was waiting for them at the top of its smoothly channelled shaft. She and Guskov stepped inside the car and their escort saluted as the doors closed.

  He turned to her. “A tedious journey. I apologize. But we were all most surprised by your … detour.”

  Natalie raised her eyebrows. Let them be surprised. It was none of their business.

  “I'm here now,” she said. “That's what matters.”

  The elevator car dropped them a hundred feet into the antechambers and they passed through the airlock systems without talking. Another elevator skimmed them deeper into the rock and then sideways on tracks that she estimated took them about a quarter-mile north of the actual town overhead. The underground redoubt wasn't a walk-out. A power cut would trap them effectively. She tried not to think too much about that and the fact that she might not stand out in the sun again, but it was difficult. She concentrated on Guskov instead and found that he was worried about her, and not in an entirely scientific and selfish way.

  “You read my messages?” he asked then, as though her attention had prompted him. Perhaps it had: she would have to get to the bottom of what was going on.

  “Yes, thank you.” She was polite. “The Free State of Mind. I read them. Is everyone else here of the same opinion as you are?”

  “No. Some are here under duress. I regret that, but there are times when it is necessary to get a thing done.”

  “And there was I, thinking you had human welfare so much at heart,” she said, meeting his gaze. “But it sounds like utilitarian practicality when you get closer to it.”

  He smiled, wolfish. “Do actions carry with them into the real world the burdens of morality and intention?”

  They stepped out of the second elevator car and into a corridor, as the plans had stated. Like the one running to Jude's apartment it was functional and no more. There was still a smell of carpet glue and paint about it.

  Natalie matched Guskov's look and answered, “Where is the real world, Mika? Answer that and I'll answer your question.”

  He froze on the spot and his face became heavy, eyes glittering with a combination of ego and the intelligent understanding of power that would be extremely dangerous to try and cross. But she wasn't upset.

  “Only my closest friends call me that,” he said.

  “And you didn't ask me in that close. And even they aren't really that close, those who are still alive,” she said and smiled, enjoying her own power as she realized it for that moment. “Yes, I know.”

  Jude walked into the offices at ten past ten. He'd gone home, tidied up, packed the peanut butter cans in thick plastic, boxed them, and taken them to a U-Stor-It, the keys to the room taped underneath the passenger seat of his car. After minor attention to his back with antiseptic he'd changed his clothes and thrown the whole set he'd worn the day before into a Dumpster two alleys down from the U-Stor-It. He felt tired, sore, and his chest physically hurt with a dull ache that persisted no matter how much breath-practice he tried to use to calm down. In the end he bought a can of Gatorade and one of SlimFast and drank them both on the steps outside the Sciences building before getting up and heading in.

  He looked at his watch and then out of his window and across town to the south. He wondered how Natalie was and then made himself sit down and think. That lasted about a minute before Perez herself appeared in the doorway.

  “Hola, Jude,” she said in her preoccupied style, “¿Como estás?”

  “Vale,” he said. They continued to speak in East Coast Spanish.

  “Is it true?” She closed the door behind her and crossed to his desk, touching his elbow. “Your sister?”

  “Yes, it's true.” He looked at his case and its open contents. The file. It was right there if he wanted to spill it all to her and have it lifted out of his hands. The temptation was so strong that he actually took the breath to start—and then let it go in a big sigh.

  “It has something to do with your absence, with your trip home,” she said, not asking. “I thought it would. But if it concerns the department, you can talk to me about it.” Her softly pouched face with its heavy care lines and her white-streaked braids of hair were good for motherly expressions and they held one now—canny but sympathetic. “I will help you.” She squeezed his arm and then let him go.

  “Thank you.” He lifted the file out, set the bags containing the scanner's electronics down on it, and placed his Pad beside them before raising his eyes to meet hers. “But I think that would be a mistake for both of us. I don't have enough evidence for a case, only a lot of disconnected lines. Which is what we've always had on the Russian and I don't expect to tie them up without treading on a government tail. It's hard to say whether it would be worth involving the department.”

  “But if you won't, then I can't give you more time and more money,” she said simply. “Either you and Mary start to show me what we can deal with or you can find another case. I mean it, Jude. It's a waste of your life and talent to pursue this one man and his problems.”

  “But—”

  “But no more buts. I'm telling you. I want to help you. You can take leave. You can take a sabbatical. Ask me for what you need. But don't keep chasing tails if you don't mean to tread on them with the full weight of the law.” She was at his pinboard, looking at his large array of photographs, pictures, and displays. “That I can't sanction, for your own sake, and I can't pay for. I won't be able to fish you out of it if you get into trouble. Do you hear what I'm saying?” She shot him a look from her deep brown eyes that was flinty. Then she softened.

  “I guess your sister is a part of this. But think first, Jude. Be careful. Don't drag us in. It's face first or not at all.”

  He nodded.

  She poked at a colourful sheet of paper. “What is this?”

  “It's a scan of Martha Johnson's brain,” he said. “The storekeeper who tried to burn White Horse to death.”

  Perez smiled and flicked the corner with her poppy-red fingernail.

  She turned to him with a wry, sad smile, “I was going to say how pretty.” She took in his expression. “You won't always feel like this. It's a dangerous time.”

  He knew she wasn't bluffing him. Her husband had been shot in a drive-by three years ago when he was on his way to the post office. She'd been angry since then, but it had mellowed and changed, hardened into a stubborn refusal to give in.

  “Keep talking to me, Jude,” she ordered him. “But get out of here now. Go and do something else for a while.”

  “I'm just sorting out some things,” he assured her, knowing his vagueness was only annoying. “I'll go to Dugway tomorrow with Mary and then I might take some days and go home, to Montana I mean. To Deer Ridge.”

  “Can she go with you? You should have someone.”

  “I'll be fine,” he said. “I'd rather go alone.”

  “She was on her own in Florida when the lab was closed,” Perez said, without changing the tone of her voice. “Isn't that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “No, yes,” she said, shrugging in an elaborate way. “No. You endorsed her reports. Did you read them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know that Tetsuo Yamamoto used to work for Gentrex Labs before the CDC?”

  Jude's mind stalled and then started again, bumpily. Gentrex was a sweet little bulk-sequencing company that contracted to larger investors as basic number crunchers. They'd had a sideline for Ivanov in cross-matching and grading athletes' DNA in a scam to pick and train potential gold-mine pro basketballers, picking them up almost by random sampling from poor and disadvantaged areas of Asia and the eastern republics. It was a moneymaking venture and the science
had been pretty basic, but some teams had paid millions of dollars for the information.

  “I didn't know that,” he said. Worked for Ivanov? Then it made it almost certain that Tetsuo had a good idea of what he was handling when he'd brought that vial for Jude—something illicit that Ivanov/Guskov was now making. Something to do with the mafia side and not the legitimate edge of his dealings. Not that one was ever really detached from the other.

  Jude nodded slowly as he took it in.

  “Okay,” Perez nodded. “Okay. Go and rest.”

  He watched her leave and sat in his chair, mind churning slowly over what she'd said about Mary. Had there been something wrong in the reports? He had read them, that much was true, but he didn't remember the details, he'd already been tangled up in Mappa Mundi by then.

  A familiar hand knocked on the door and pushed it all the way open.

  Mary put her head around and smiled. “Hey,” she said, walking in and moving around his desk, bending down to give him a hug. “Hey, you. Haven't seen you in forever.”

  He hugged her back, feeling how stiff she was, brittle and tense. She stood up and leaned on the edge of his desk, her arms crossed firmly, hands tucked into her armpits. Her normally pale skin was dead white.

  “Are you okay?” When she spoke he knew she was upset because of the breezy way she asked.

  “No,” he said, truthful. “You neither, by the look of it. ¿Qué pasa?”

  She looked down at her feet and worked the toe of one shoe into the carpet, not answering, her arms becoming more rigid. It was so unlike her that a trickle of foreboding started to spread out beneath his ribs. Her gaze wandered up to the top of his desk. She turned and began to prod listlessly at the bags of circuitry, flicking the edge of the file case with her finger before pushing it aside. She cleared her throat and a convulsive twist made her shoulders strain against the seams of her jacket before she forced herself to speak.

  “A couple of weird things happened to me this morning.” Mary glanced at the desk again and added, trying and failing to smile, “I sorta thought someone here might be spiking the drinks, y'know.” Her Charlottesville accent had started to show up, too. She coughed again and tried to meet his gaze, looking suddenly away to the wall behind him. “I was walking here from the computer block and there was this cold spot.”

  She dared a glance at him to see how he was taking the news. “And then I was at my desk, sitting, thinking about whether we should drop this whole Russian thing, when I had a kind of a … blackout.” Her arms flew back to their defensive position as if of their own accord. She shuffled her shoulders and they settled into a higher hunch. “It sounds ridiculous but I wondered if there was some kind of new weapon that could make you unconscious. Or some kind of magnetic effect from all the power cables under the grass that could … God, listen to me.” She rolled her eyes and smiled but the smile died back and was replaced by uncertainty.

  “It's so cold in here.” She walked quickly to the air-flow grille on the far wall and touched the pad next to it. “You don't mind if I turn this down?”

  Jude decided she was serious, even though he felt warm. She was shivering. “This blackout. What was it like?”

  “Well, I didn't fall asleep, I wasn't exactly out. It was more like …” She searched the air above her forehead for the right words, looking left and right. “Like this wave of total black nothing, this enormous emptiness, this sense of great, big, huge space and there were sort of two things in this space but the gap between them was so big that—” she held her hands in front of her, palm to palm, and mimed trying to push them together “—they'll never meet.”

  He nodded. He didn't know what to think.

  “Oh, J, I'm sorry.” She shook herself. “Bad timing. You must feel miserable.”

  “I was going to say it sounds like depression,” he said and decided to brazen it out. “You've been working too hard. You need a vacation in Costa Rica. Some sun. A nice beach. A few cocktails. A new boyfriend.”

  “Are you offering?”

  Jude was surprised at the come-on and at his reaction to it—anger. He smiled against his will, pretending she wasn't serious.

  “Not this week,” he said. “I've got to get back for the funeral.” Now he felt angry with himself. What was the matter? A few bits of circumstantial and he was flipping out all over, suspecting everyone.

  “The dead guy in Atlanta.” He drew the conversation back to work, where it was safer for the moment. “He had some information about a viral engineering project. I think it may be related to the stuff at Dugway. I'll send you the files and you see what you think.”

  “Sure.” She stood back and reached down to the papers on his desk, her hand loose and shaky. “Is that—?”

  “White Horse's paperwork,” he said, putting his hand on top of the brown folder before she could open it and see the top page. “Gotta fill it in this morning. Insurance stuff.”

  Mary moved back and looked at him in apology. “Oh. Listen, you want coffee? Anything like that? I need sugar.”

  “Sure, double latte,” he said, giving her the apology-accepted smile.

  She walked out, back straight and taut with what he thought was embarrassment.

  Jude let his hand move from its protective position and picked the file up, sliding it into a drawer. He stared at his desk and reread the outlines of what he'd written on the vial analysis. If it showed up at Dugway tomorrow but without the capacity to replicate Micromedica internally, then Tetsuo was a much weaker choice of servant than Guskov usually made.

  Jude checked on the local investigation into Tetsuo's murder and wasn't surprised to find the case open, pending further enquiry. If he'd been a government hit, like White Horse, then Jude didn't know if holding the story back from public attention was worth waiting on any longer, despite what Natalie'd said. She might have the ability to change things, but he doubted he was going to get anywhere other than six feet under. He felt beyond tired. He knew he was going to make a mistake soon, if he hadn't already.

  Mary, in her own office, leaned against the shut door and tried to get her wits together. She was sure, just by its weight and shape and the colours of the pages in it, that the thing on Jude's desk was her goddamned Pentagon file on Mikhail Guskov. If it was, then Jude was all the way in there and she was up to her neck in trouble—he hadn't got it on his own, he must have contacts close to her. He must know about her. He must. But if he did he was a way better actor than she'd ever have believed. And who were his allies? Who was with him on it? God, she didn't want it to be true.

  And then again, she'd been on this road before and baulked it. That had to change.

  Her mind was still shocked by the event of the morning. She'd told him about it, just to get some relief and have another opinion. She hadn't told him how scared and helpless she'd felt as it was happening, as she was losing control of herself. Maybe it was stress. Could that make you crazy this way? The irony of it happening to her, who'd done similar things to others, wasn't lost on her.

  She opened her eyes and stared through her windows, seeing nothing.

  I won't kill him, she thought, flattening the part of her that told her she was being weak. I'll watch him closely. If it is the Pentagon file then I need to know who he's with, don't I? Any rash moves and I might miss the rest of the conspiracy.

  She found herself gasping for air, almost like laughing although nothing was funny. The decision felt like a punch to the gut. Disappointment welled up in her, at her own weakness and how easily she gave in to it.

  Why did it have to be him? Why did it have to be Deer Ridge, of all forsaken places? Why? She wanted, needed, to answer those questions—chance was not enough.

  The Sealed Environment was exactly as dull and uninspiring as Natalie had dreaded. She assumed, judging by the constant appearances of shoddily finished edges, splashed paint, and the smells of solvents, that most of it had been kitted out in a great rush. Certain zones, including the test areas, were b
eautifully done, with no detail spared. They must have been completed when the work was still going to schedule. But then some event had forced everything to be brought forward. It could have been many things, of course, but she was prepared to bet that it was the work at Deer Ridge and the actions of White Horse that had started this rush.

  Fundamentally she was not happy or confident that the whole unit was sealed and conditioned as it should be. But that was not her problem.

  She had ten minutes to settle into her room—a cube that wouldn't have disgraced some 1990s programming shed with a bed instead of a desk—but it had all mod cons including workstation, wallscreen, and even running water. She took five minutes, and that was spent wrestling with nostalgia as she unpacked her bags and saw things that, in all innocence, with Dan still alive and her mind more her own, she'd packed days ago. Natalie smothered her face in them and for an instant smelled home.

  She was caught up in examining the stress points on the threads that made up a jersey T-shirt when her alarm sounded to tell her to go and meet her workmates. Head still fascinated by the shear-stress variations in the filaments that had been caused by the knitting process, she almost fell over her own feet. She had to shake like a dog to get back into a kind of normality and realize, late, that she'd no memory or awareness of the transition between ordinary thinking and that peculiar, total absorption in something she'd never even noticed before. Couldn't have noticed before.

  When she saw the others and shook their hands, the talent seemed to have stuck.