Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Mary closed up the cover and took a drink, tapping the tough ends of her nails against the glass and watching the bubbles rise. “Where's it from?”

  Jude flicked open the top sheet and looked at the stamps. “Pentagon. Somewhere. Think we should take it straight back? I could drop it in the post box, plain envelope.”

  “Your prints are all over it.”

  “Then I can take it back in person and explain.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Well, now, that's a good question.” He closed the folder and grinned at her without humour, although his eyes glittered in a strange way beneath the low blue glow of the Labatt sign's neon.

  “It's probably not going to yield any evidence except changes of identity and movements,” she said, making it sound like a guess. “That won't get us a case.”

  “Was he on the team for Deliverance?” Jude pondered. “I'll bet he was. Think about it. Florida, Atlanta … not so far for a commute or a cover-up. And he is the contact man.”

  “So what you're saying?”

  “It's a big leap.” He finished his first beer and hauled the second closer. “But maybe he wants to ship samples out of the country, using his old network of friends. It'd be worth the gross national product to whoever buys it and gets it working first, specially if they're not keen on us.”

  “Ivanov—” she began.

  “Guskov, his name is now,” Jude corrected her, looking into the infinities of the bourbon optics.

  “Guskov,” Mary repeated, careful, “wouldn't be used here if he had this kind of leakiness. You think the NSC's stupid?”

  “No.” Jude reached over and with his fingers pushed her beer on its mat towards her. He smiled. She recognized that self-destructiveness: it wanted company. “I think it's full of players, and this stack of paper says they're playing with the wrong guy. He is too many people.”

  She didn't know whether to be relieved or not that he hadn't made the right connection and linked everything to point at Mappa Mundi.

  “So, what do you say? Pursue or drop? Your call.”

  Steel-guitar music was playing. Its lonely plains sound rang against her teeth as Mary tried to see which way to go.

  “It's not linked to your sister's case?” she asked, stalling.

  “I don't think so.” He shook his head and his hair, inky and blue-black in the dimness, fell softly along his jaw and against his shoulder. She noticed he hadn't had it cut in a while.

  “The stuff she had, when she had it, was another kind of tech—Micromedica-based. Different. He couldn't be on both those projects.”

  The steel chords slid into one another on the airwaves. Jude had never looked more handsome than now when he was so beat. She could eat him. Mary didn't know what to do about it. Her mind was skimming, planning, fixing, but she couldn't stop looking at him and feeling that hunger she'd often had. Jude had always been unobtainable, but now? And she was an idiot for thinking that.

  She straightened up on her stool and took a sip of her drink, putting it down further from her. She should have kept her idle thoughts in shape on that plane and not given in. What was the point in it? Nothing he'd said so far made him any less of a threat.

  “I think we should take everything we have and hand it across to the CIA,” she said. “He's their boy. They can worry about him.” Watching his nodding, resigned reaction she felt suddenly grateful to him for cooperating his way out of his own death. If he was going to be biddable she might be able to preserve everything here for later, when Guskov was out of the frame and the entire wretched project was wrapped. Her whole never-have-anything-you-can't-walk-away-from attitude was faltering and it made her angry. She was going to lose it if she wasn't careful.

  “And the Micromedica thing?” she asked. Was he going to admit going to England?

  “I had someone look at it.” He finished his second drink. “She said it was some kind of attempt at an emotional control device. Not a good one. She wanted to report it but I said it was something I'd found on investigation, criminal, better keep it all quiet until we'd made our arrests first. We left it at that.”

  “Who?” Which was really pushing it.

  “A Doctor Armstrong. A Brit. She was listed by Nostromo as an expert. I sent it to her.”

  Sent, didn't go. Was that important? It was a lie of a kind.

  “Uh-huh, well, if you don't have it now …”

  “I have a copy. But since it's not an original and there's no identification on it, it doesn't mean anything yet,” he admitted.

  “Can I have a copy?”

  He sent it across to her Pad, just like that.

  “And can I take this home tonight, if you get some rest?” She reached out for the file.

  “Sure, be my guest.” He called the barman over again. “Chaser?”

  “No, thanks.” She watched him order Wild Turkey, a double shot, and, when it came, knock the whole thing back in one go. Even his movements were becoming more reckless. Concern made her say, “Take it easy. Early start, remember?”

  “I just want to sleep,” he said and stood up to go.

  On the street she decided to walk with him as far as the main street they had to cross, where she could get a cab. Her shoes were smart and they'd started to hurt. On the corner, in the street light made dappled by the trees they paused to say goodbye. The pavement was uneven and Jude was unsteady. He slipped slightly and Mary found them both suddenly much closer than they had intended, but he didn't move back and neither did she. Since she was tall and in heels, they were at eye level with each other.

  “Em,” he said quietly—she couldn't see his face properly. The nickname was one he hadn't used in a while. She could feel his breath on her face. It was laced with bourbon, fiery. He put his hands out onto her arms, as if he was going to kiss her on the cheek as he often had, but instead he hesitated. Then he was kissing her on the mouth instead.

  Before she knew what she was doing she'd responded, touching his tongue with hers and pressing up against him. He was that mixture of hard and soft, pushy and reactive that she liked the best. The traces of bourbon still in his mouth tasted divine. She was only just wondering what the hell she was doing when abruptly he pushed her away and held her at arm's length.

  “I'm sorry!” he said, backing away another step. “Sorry, Em. I didn't mean to … that was a mistake. The drink. Stupid.”

  “No, no,” she replied, light, silly. “That's fine. It's okay. Really. You're upset and—I know. It's fine. Don't worry about it.” She took a step back. Her heart was racing. Between her legs she felt a burning heat more fierce than she'd known in a long time. She stepped back again. “Forget it.”

  “Shit. Sorry, really.” He raised his hand in a half-wave goodbye, still backing off awkwardly, embarrassment and vulnerability in every step. “I'll see you. Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly, watching him turn his back quickly and walk away from her, head down and shoulders hunched.

  Mary waited until she felt cooler and then she walked home, dazed and feeling foolish. What was that all about? Her thoughts were telling her she was a moron but her heart was singing. She wanted him more than she thought she'd wanted anything.

  It'll pass, you idiot, she told herself.

  Then she opened the door of her apartment and a faint, sickly smell made her hesitate on the threshold. She sniffed the street but in its smell of gasoline and humid earth there was nothing unusual.

  The sensor pads showed that nobody had tried to break in. She assumed she must have left something in the refrigerator that was going off, or maybe one of her flower arrangements was wilting early. She left her shoes in the hall and padded around to look, but they all seemed fine. There was an old tub of half-eaten ricotta cheese in her butter box that she threw out, but it had only just started to green. The smell persisted and it seemed stronger and more … wet … the further into the apartment she got.

  When she turned on the lights in the bedroom she was so fa
st to jump backwards in shock that she hit her head hard on the edge of the door and almost knocked herself out.

  From her hands and knees, mouth open in shock, she could still see the decaying pieces of Dan Connor's body soaking into the hand-embroidered lace coverlet of her bed. Whoever had put him there had reassembled him thoughtfully, and shaped him in a star that looked like a welcoming embrace.

  Jude stood in the white purity of his own shower, with the jets on full, feeling the water sluice and foam against his skin. With his hand on himself he masturbated, eyes closed, leaning on the tiles, feet braced. When his moment came he let go and sank down into a crouch on the floor, watching the swirl of water catch his semen and swirl it down the drain. He leaned on his hands with his head down and cried soundlessly as the flood poured onto his head and back, hot and raw on the gashes that lined his shoulders and ribs. He opened his mouth and silently screamed. He hadn't got any other way to try and keep feeling and he hadn't got any way to let it out.

  He'd never felt more wretched and now he was afraid. It was a relief. Fear. At last, there it was. The knee-buckling terror that drains all purpose and will. Mary had recognized that fucking file. He'd sort of suspected it the other day when she was uninterested in it, and this evening—her face had been so studied.

  He huddled with his arms around his knees and drew his legs in tight. He sat under the water and rocked back and forth. He'd made his bid. He'd decided to see what he could achieve by telling instead of keeping secrets. Tomorrow and tomorrow it would have to keep going until at last …

  Seventy-three percent he was now. What did it mean?

  He sent his thoughts out to Natalie, but he didn't even know where she was.

  One more second and he'd have begged Em to come back with him, and she would have. He wished she was there. He wished he knew for sure if she was the real Em or not. He wanted White Horse back. He wanted all the things he would never have.

  Mikhail Guskov looked at the information spiralling down the lines from Bobby X and knew there and then that his problems with Mappa Mundi were solved. This fusion of the NervePath and Selfware could be used in others the same way—transforming the existing mind into a programmable structure, opening it up for improvements without compromising any of its unique adaptations. It was perfect.

  Natalie Armstrong, working alongside him in the lab, turned around and her flat, unsettling gaze made him stop in the midst of transferring his thoughts to the Pad in his hand.

  “How convenient,” she said quietly, glancing at what he'd written with the stylus. “You'll have the means in your hand before long. The only question that then remains is, what is this master program you're going to distribute to the waiting world?” Her left eyebrow hooked up into a question mark. “Or haven't you decided yet?”

  He glanced along the line of equipment but Isidore and Calum were intent on their work. They hadn't heard her. In the glass chamber, inside the scan system's loose clutch, Bobby X sat, as solid as anyone Guskov had ever seen.

  “Sarcasm doesn't suit you,” he said cordially.

  “I'll be the judge of that.” She turned and some communication seemed to flash between her and the slumping bulk of Bobby. “I'm betting it won't be a lock-out. You could write one, you know. A mental immunizer. I could write it.”

  “It's already on the list.” He grinned at her. “Along with many other off-the-shelf concepts which will be freely available—”

  “Ah, when are you going to cut this bullshit?” she whispered, smiling with a real streak of acid in the long line of her mouth. “You know it isn't going to work out in perfect conditions. Most people are going to end up worse than they started. Or do you believe in yourself so much that you've forgotten why you started this in the first place?”

  “You'd rather the Americans had their way?”

  “I'd rather none of this had ever happened, but so what? As you claim, the technology demands a response. I say you should nip it in the bud and seal everyone shut against it. You can't control it once it's finished. Even if you did get it distributed and the stuff was free there'd be ten people in as many minutes writing programs for it. They'd learn. Meanwhile you have to play catch-up and race ahead at the same time. No way you can. In a few years everything we know of as our cultural life could have ground to a halt, people shifting in their understanding as the wind changes to different points of the compass. Identity will be written in water. Ideas will invade or leave without your choosing. People will be puppets with no master. It's a travesty, and you know it.”

  “You have a bleak imagination,” he said. The direct force of her words and her stare was unnerving him, and he hadn't felt that way since he couldn't remember when. He liked it. She was a challenge.

  Natalie snorted and glanced down at some of the data from Bobby. “I don't have an imagination any more,” she said to the desk and then turned on her heel and walked away from him, down to the far end of the control centre where she sat down to use another terminal next to the high-shouldered shape of Lucy Desanto.

  Desanto, Guskov thought, she was another problem, and Natalie knew about that as well. He suspected Desanto was here to spy for the US government and had a way he hadn't found out about that would allow her to transmit information freely out of the Environment to them. They'd wait until he was ready and then—what? Probably close in with an army group, threaten to kill them all, or their loved ones, if they didn't cooperate. And meanwhile, on the evidence of that piece of shit from Deer Ridge that Mary'd managed to keep a lid on, they were training their own programmers to use the languages and try out some ideas.

  Natalie's words had bitten home, however. There was no question that she was now the most intelligent person in the room, although what that amounted to was hard to define. She thought faster, she had access to knowledge that eluded the rest of them, and she'd started out as one of the few NervePath programmers he respected. He didn't know what that made her, but for the first time he felt old. If Selfware had made this out of her, what could a more sophisticated version do for him? And the rest of the world?

  Enlightenment wasn't that far from his ultimate goal.

  But she was right in that maybe his original ideas had been far too grand and immature. At the outset he'd thought that Mappaware would make it possible to remove selected memes from the ecosystem of the Global Common Cube. But there had been the problem of language as a first hurdle—ideas being defined in the terms and limits of specific natural language forms—and although a solution to that looked possible with this new evolution of Bobby X, there was still the certain and proven fact that even if he had managed to erase, say, all beliefs in any form of God, given time this meme would reemerge in the population.

  All memes were recombinations of older memes. As long as the roots of possibility existed within the Global Cube, any idea that could be constructed from their multiple combinations and subtle explorations would surface again. The more attractive and powerful it seemed, the faster it would spread, and the more deeply entrenched it would become in the minds it inhabited. He didn't believe now that it was possible actually to get rid of any ideas by this method. Nor would he want to. It was this cross-pollinating richness that allowed thought to move on from one generation to the next, developing technologies and amassing knowledge as it went. It was this phenomenon that produced the common experience of the zeitgeist and the synchronous evolution of the same new memes at isolated places, but within very brief periods of time. The more that people had free access to the Global Cube, the more frequently this occurred.

  In latter days the more virulent religions and cultures had propagated their particular versions of the GC-Cube very successfully; their own Mappa Mundi were popular and widespread, more homogenous compared with the violently differing Cubes of their older selves that a less communicative population had enjoyed. Or was it endured?

  For him it had been endurance. It was the perpetual Cube War he wanted to end, not free thinking. He had wit
nessed at first hand, and in all walks of life, the petty, banal, heartfelt, and bloody clashes of people with different Maps, different Cubes. What the defining memeplex happened to be was an incidental factor—a religion, a national identity, a public right-of-way, a jointly owned fence line, a water hole … the list was endless, but the result when the clashing Cubes came together was always the same.

  There was even a form of mathematics that he, Isidore, and Alicia had developed between them, the Memetic Calculus, that described and predicted the outcomes of any amount of complicated ideas encountering each other for the first time. They resulted in one of four outcomes: acceptance (changing your own Map according to the new idea), tolerance (not changing it but tacking on the new information to your old Cube as a kind of handy reference), rejection (defining the new Map as utterly misguided and having no more to do with it), and attempted destruction (annihilate the threat of the new Map by killing all its hosts).

  The last two were the ones Guskov hated. Both were triggered by emotions, generated in their own Cubes. Emotion was the master switch that Mappaware must come to play on most heavily. Alter the emotional portrait of a meme and you alter identity without the need for fancy fiddling with the hugely tangled and difficult definitions of neural pattern and synaptic timing.

  His own identity had been a matter of expediency. Most people would have ferociously resisted the changes he had looked for and embraced. Many thousands every year died to protect their sense of identity rather than change and continue a physical existence. The very concept of your own identity was interlinked with the ideas of eternity, unchangeability, sanctity, and rightness. From anorexics to terrorists, the legions ready to throw themselves into annihilation to prevent the extermination of their own Maps was a phenomenon that enraged him with its pointless waste. And as long as the sacred self was enshrined as a concept that must not be tampered with or improved, the futile litany of torture and misery that accompanied it would, of necessity, go on.

  Guskov looked along the lab at his staff, his companions, his conspirators. He didn't think any of them exactly shared his ideas, despite every communicative effort. Some Maps could not agree, no matter how you tried to fit them together. But they had agreed, in theory, that a mutable identity that embraced rational doubt and was prepared to reject any part of itself if proven wrong or unsuitable was preferable to a fixed dogma with no room for change. And he himself knew by experience that there was almost no limit at all to how a person could alter the entire structure of their selves, from values to language, and still remain aware that they were Themselves.