“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?
Now the last thing he had to fulfil was his duty to pay back the bastards who'd made him into this omnipotent, short-lived wonder. Knowledge hadn't enlightened him to the point where he was so ready to forgive. Human weakness, sure, he could've gone for that, maybe, had the individuals concerned not been so blind to their own motives; a simple show of doubt or remorse might have softened his resolve towards them. But their commitment had convinced him that there were no mistakes in the accountancy of their ethics; they'd screwed him over for the bottom line. His death was to their profit. He knew their sort.
Natalie's state called to him. He could read her signature on the energy face and it was like no other. He surfaced close by. They were alone together in an office; small, cramped, the air unusually full of volatile chemicals, unusually barren of organic particles.
“You shouldn't have run it so long,” he said, launching straight in with helpful advice. She needed to get her head straight if she was going to be useful.
Natalie turned and at first her face was shocked. But then it became thoughtful. “Ian,” she said. “We need to scan you. It's important. Will you come?”
“'S why I came.” He was impressed by her self-control. She'd always been a much more complicated person, a smarter one. No surprises that she could move directly when needed. It was admirable, but he felt lonely because of it.
“You're right.” She was responding to his loneliness, accepting his advice, including him. “I was stupid, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.” She took a jumper out of her bag and put it on. “Have you seen them here?”
“Oh yes. That one whose son was killed. She's got an outside line. Waiting for her moment.”
“The others will all go along with Guskov in the end,” she said, waiting for him to confirm.
“Even your father,” he said. “Got to now. Gone too far.”
The right side of her mouth dragged down in misery. “Of all the people in the world—he was the one who believed in being rational, and here he is like all the rest of us, dragged along in the undertow of their lives, making it up after the fact, doing everything according to the map.” She tapped her head. “And you, too. And me. No bloody escape, even when you can see it happening.”
“It's not the end yet,” he said.
“Soon.” She walked across to the door and opened it for him with the touch of her hand on its sensor. As he passed her she said, “Does it get worse than this?”
“Not much,” he lied. He didn't know how to talk about what it became. He didn't know what it meant, only what it made him understand; he did not matter.
She touched his arm as they stepped out into the corridor. “Did you ever … move anything with you, through space?”
“What, carry something? You mean when I'm—”
“Yes.”
“Once.” He nodded. He looked into her face, careful that she didn't see what it was he'd done. “Part of my payback.”
“Payback!” she repeated and laughed, cynical and disappointed with herself. “Does it all come to that?”
“You tell me, love,” Ian replied. “What else is there?”
“Forgiveness,” she said, but in her heart she didn't feel it. She remembered Dan's death as if it had happened a moment ago.
Ian's stubble-covered jaw toughened. “Not from me.”
Natalie nodded and beckoned for him to follow her. You had it in you, or you didn't. To forgive was to let go, and she and he had a lot to hold on to.
After their arrival in Washington Mary and Jude spent a couple of hours collaborating on a report for Perez and the rest of the Sciences Unit, detailing the significant points of the Deliverance system, how to identify it, what the lab might see in attempts at copies, and who they thought was most likely to try and obtain samples of it. Mary enjoyed their efforts—it was like old times. Except for Jude's undercurrent of sadness it was like any other case she'd written up with him—but this time there was no scrap-paper soccer under the table, no pizza take-outs and surreptitious listening-in to the baseball commentaries. When they were done it was almost midnight.
“Drink?” she suggested.
He nodded and looked at his Pad. “It's late, though, and I've got to get the early flight to Montana.”
“We don't have to go.”
“No, it's okay.” He slipped his jacket on and switched down the systems for the night. “I've got something I want to talk to you about.”
Mary pricked her ears up but didn't inquire any further. They walked a few blocks and caught the Metrorail, watching the late police stalk up and down the cars in their full body armour, like robots. They got off near his apartment and then turned south and through the doors of Mulrooney's, a bar where they'd once used to meet a snitch from the Russian mafia underground, Posey Tavorian. She'd been a mine of information about technology leaks until they found her face down in an abattoir's pile of ready-to-process cattle innards. Out of deference to her memory they'd avoided the place for a few months and staying away had become a habit. Mary wondered if Jude had a special reason to come back.
They ordered beers and got a corner of the bar to
themselves. In the pleasant glow and the soft shushing sounds of the country songs Mulrooney's was famous for she almost couldn't believe it when he took the buff folder out of his case and slapped it onto the mahogany counter between them.
“Someone gave me this,” he said, keeping his fingertips on it for a moment longer. “I don't know who, and I don't know how. One moment it wasn't there and then it was.” He glanced at her and sighed, taking his hand off the folder and letting her touch it.
She had to focus so her hands didn't shake. She'd been right about it. Through a burst of relief and puzzlement she looked blankly at its old, dog-eared pages.
“Where—? You don't know?” She leafed through and made herself say, “It's all about our Russian.”
“Yes,” he said. “All of it.”
She glanced at him through a curtain of hanging ringlets and saw he must have pored over it a long time, figuring that out. “What, even these Bulgarian papers?”
“A man of many identities.” He drank half his beer and swiftly signalled the barman for another one. “A long story.”
“God!” She turned over the familiar cards, the Kodeks entry—Jude read Russian, of course, and she didn't. He must know what it was. “What's this?”
“Admittance to prison,” he said. “A life stretch, but he was out in three years.”
“Why?”
“It's where he met his mafia master and got into the company. Within eighteen months of getting onto the streets they were both dead.”
“Excuse me?”
“He took on another persona and took up science. Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Don't know. I was hoping you and I might figure that out.”
“Well, why didn't you tell me about this before?”
“I wanted to be sure of a few things first.” He shifted on the high stool to a better position, leaning low on the bar top, contemplating his drink. “Like, was it real? Was it connected with White Horse? Was it going to count?”
Mappa Mundi Page 42
