Guskov put his can down and spread out his hands, looking at their tough, scarred backs and the half-tone skin that might or might not have been his original colour—he couldn't remember.
“Every purpose I have thought of I have rejected, because ultimately, in the Memetic Calculus, all changes made to the Cube create short-term shifts in outlook and perception that then, over time, always converge to the starting conditions. Within individuals great benefits can be seen, certainly, but in terms of large populations and multiple generations the calculus always returns the equilibrium of the origin as its eventual result. For any change of any kind that I have tested against it—nothing has any long-term impact. The Cube is robust. It heals itself. It regenerates lost memes.”
“Doomed,” Natalie said to herself in her cod-Scottish accent, as if Dan were there. “We're all doomed.” She snickered and then heaved a long sigh. “And after all this.”
At the table Guskov slid round in his seat and turned to her. “I hoped that you might be able to think of something.”
“Why?” She was in the middle of biting the cheese again and almost choked.
“Because you're now out at the edge of the Cube. Your perception allows you access to information we've never had before. That means your own Memecube has already begun to shift. Bobby X reacted to it in his own way—he could find no future, because he saw no future for himself. He didn't have the ability to stretch his own Selfplex to accommodate what he saw. In his own words, he was already dead. But you aren't like him. You were always a believer-in-waiting, but with the strength to test your hopes to the limit.”
Natalie explored the idea, moving her head from side to side as though shunting it back and forth. Her headache was in retreat. “Nice words,” she said. “I sound like a hero. But if this is such a great idea, why don't you run the system on yourself? It's your project, and you're the master of mindshifting, not me.”
“Myself, Kropotkin, and your father are already—” he paused and gestured vaguely at his head “—filled up, with older standard NervePath than is required.” He smiled and finished his juice. “You didn't think you were the only one to use yourself as your central subject?”
So, Natalie thought, this is what it comes to. All his planning, the years of calculation, the conviction of a lifetime.
“You should never have come in here,” she said, meaning the Sealed Environment.
“I saw that it might come to this.” He was now crumpling the empty can, crushing the top down onto the bottom. “It wouldn't have been for a long time yet, but for that accident, the stupid Americans and their test.”
“Deer Ridge.” Natalie nodded. Of course, now she had the whole picture. Not wanting to let Guskov have all the power, the US had thoughtfully begun training others and pursuing a parallel program. Their mistake was in getting caught testing prototype systems on unsuspecting civilians. She wondered why they'd risked it, instead of sticking to simulation or else paying volunteers. But volunteers were a risky business. They had lawyers for that kind of thing when even the most basic field trial went astray, and the litigation fees for this scale of damage, plus the media exposure, would have finished the entire scheme.
Now the US government would expect Guskov to hand over a ready-made technology and to train personnel and oversee the production of specific programs for it. His work would be tested and verified before release. From that position there was no way he would be allowed to effect any variation. By staying here and keeping it to himself for as long as possible, his chances were better. There was logic to his plan. She had to admire his strategy. But she still didn't admire its aim.
“Supposing we used Deliverance as you suggest, but with a closeout program giving lifetime immunity,” she said.
“But then all the potential benefits of therapeutic treatments like the one we gave to Ian will be lost,” he replied.
That was not going to be it. She saw that. “Even so, your scheme seems like it can only cause a running battle between writers trying to impose their various maps on everyone else. There has to be some other way.”
“I told myself that.” He threw the remains of the can at the waste bin where it fell squarely on the rim and then slid down into the rubbish. “But I expected it to arise from the combined minds of everyone on the project—a long-term affair. A worldwide enterprise. Not this.”
“And there's no way to get it out, even if we'd written one,” she said, voicing his thought for him, although she already knew the way out. She wondered if he would dare to ask her, but although she knew it had crossed his mind he didn't say it. He had the Deliverance systems, the production capacity for a wide strike, enough stolen NervePath to kick-start it, and all he needed was a program, an idea, the Big Kahuna that would magically change the world.
She thought for a moment or two, watching Guskov. “But there's no way out.”
“Of here?” But he'd known she hadn't meant that. The physical problem was trivial.
“Of ourselves. There is no way to become more than human. Selfware made Ian more of himself. It makes me—me, more of me. I'm not outside the Global Cube at all. I may be free within it, but I can't step outside it. Ian could step outside his own skin, but his problem always was that he couldn't step outside the Cube. When he saw things the Cube didn't address he couldn't fit those things into himself. That may not be true of all people. My yoga teacher said the universe came and sat inside you, the ocean poured into the drop, the drop didn't dissolve in the ocean. But I'm guessing that's easier to experience when it isn't a literal truth.
“It's as Ian said: human beings are macrocreatures with a limited range of perception. Expand it and your whole system can't process it into sense any more. When it becomes your actual world, instead of some knowledge on a page or in your memory, then you don't stick together.” Natalie paused, looking down into her tea mug, sad with what she'd said but sure that it was true. “You jumped through so many hoops, but you can't jump out of your self. You never did. Isn't that so, Hilel?”
Guskov snorted and nodded, barely registering that she'd called him by his original name, leaning on the table, his energy still restless. “This old body and mind have been through a lot. If you count self as a continuity of experience, then no, I never made a leap into total unknowns. I was always remaking myself out of the old. Everything is like that. If there's a program that can help people become better navigators of our own Cubes, so that everyone can be free enough to let go of the old when its time has come and to let its boundaries spread, not get smaller, that would be the program I would send.”
Natalie drank her tea and washed up the cup. On her way out she paused, bent down, and kissed his cheek above the rough line of beard.
“And that way we'd get to keep the best and not chuck the baby out with the bathwater.” She straightened and stretched her back. “But you have to consider that there may be no universal solution.”
“No bathwater?” He smiled and shook his head.
“The bathwater may be the best thing about us.”
Mary Delaney could still smell the reek long after the cleanup squad had been through her apartment and scoured, scrubbed, bleached, and purified it down to the last toothpick. Clearly, the purpose of leaving Dan's body there was to destabilize her and let her know that someone who shouldn't have known anything about it was aware of her activities. Angrily, she had to admit to herself that it had been damn' effective. She couldn't stay there any more. She moved into a hotel and put the place up for rent.
The reports on Natalie Armstrong's exit from the bomb-squad truck had arrived. They were ridiculous, and explained nothing. “No detectable method of escape.” What had she done, walked though the wall? But her speculating agents had combined this with the vanishing of Patient X and suggested that the accidents at the York Clinic might account … but Mary didn't have time to waste reading about their suppositions when they had no factual evidence. Corrupted officials were more likely to be guilty th
an superpowers, and if Guskov had decided to bring Armstrong in under his wing—which a tentative message out from the Environment suggested he had—there was enough money in mafia business to bribe anyone.
Several days had passed since Jude had been away for his sister's funeral. He'd returned to work and picked up his caseload slowly, but surely. The steady trade in illegally produced animals—mostly specially bred and patented strains of experimental mice—had taken up most of their time, and the rest had been spent tidying away the trails of the Guskov cases. He hadn't asked for the return of her file and she assumed he'd copied it, but she couldn't prove it when she searched his Pad databases. But Jude could easily have hidden it. They weren't on Special Sciences for nothing. And apart from the odd, joking, embarrassed reference to the other evening, he was almost on normal terms with her.
Meanwhile she waited for the forensic results on Dan's body and had the file itself scanned and dusted. It was when they arrived that she cancelled all meetings and shut herself away in her hotel room to think.
The file had Natalie Armstrong all over it. Including even some scribble on the back of the thing, a big pencilled mess around the very date on which it had vanished from Dix's Pentagon filing cabinet (locked, secured—no visible means, et cetera).
The body had traces of other DNA casually strewn about in it—not her own agents', and so far its owner was unidentified. Not from a United States database. Foreign. A white male Caucasian, aged about fifty years, blue eyes, average IQ, and cell nuclei that had incorporated NervePath structures as part of their mass. She didn't know who that was but she could guess.
She downloaded from Sequoia, Special Sciences' Net agent, all she could get from the Ministry about Patient X. But it left her no wiser. Guskov had Natalie now and Natalie might be more than just a brain with legs. Mary didn't know what to think about that. More important, she didn't know what to do about it. Mappa was her project and she didn't want him whisking it out from under her nose with some weird shit like this.
It was Thursday when Mary checked back with Dix at their regular weekly meeting. Her entire insides became solid stone-cold at the news that the government legal team were to appear in a preliminary hearing for a civil case lodged against them for personal damages for the total sum of ten billion dollars, brought by the Northern Cheyenne Nation and the townspeople of Deer Ridge, Montana.
“You're going to contest it, of course …” she began, looking at Rebecca Dix's grim expression.
“We're going to settle out,” Dix said, almost toneless. “Ten B. No coverage in the press as condition. They'll take it. For Christ's sake, it's more than they'll see in any other lifetime.”
“You offered them ten billion dollars?” Mary's mouth was hanging itself out to dry. “The case is hardly going. They haven't got enough evidence to go to trial. Otherwise, why isn't this a criminal proceeding? They're claiming that—”
“We're prepared to up it to twenty billion, if they hand over everything they've got. The goddamn oil deal on the land. We'll give them fucking Montana, but they have to settle out. Go tell that to your partner, and if there's still a case on Monday—” Dix made a chopping motion across her own neck and her stare at Mary became sharp “—you're out. I'm out. We're all out.”
Mary left in a state of shock. She realized what the case's existence meant. There was only one possibility of a leak, one thing to go wrong. She ran down the corridor, startling the other people walking sedately there, and locked herself in the bathroom.
“Jude, you motherfucking bastard!” It was a gasp rather than a shout but she was so furious that she was almost unaware of slamming the wall with her right fist. The wall was tiled and behind the tiles, concrete. There was a crack as her middle finger broke.
She sat on the toilet seat, watching her hand swell and redden. When it finally began to hurt more than she could bear, she was calm enough to come out and get down to business.
Jude watched the hired driver taking his car away from the end of the street. The key to the U-Stor-It was still taped under the seat. He'd sent Jenny Black Eagle a message that would tell her what to do if the time came for that. He thought there was no way it would ever get public or go to court, but White Horse's case had at last got a hearing. The car, her new vehicle for the next world, was the last thing he had to take care of, and as it turned the corner and made its way into the northbound traffic he genuinely did feel a sense of lightness for the first time in weeks.
He didn't go back in straight away, but walked along the familiar streets, trying to figure out what to expect. The legal papers would be lodged by now, and if he was right about Mary, then he could anticipate some kind of visit very shortly. Not a friendly one. He'd feel bad about that if it happened. He hoped it wouldn't.
His hopes were dashed as a black and grey BMW pulled up to the curb a half hour later as he was on the return journey. Mary lowered the darkened electric window on the passenger side. She was wearing her sunglasses but her face didn't show any sign of feeling either angry or surprised.
“Get in,” she said.
Jude looked the length of the street towards his apartment. No, there wasn't anything worth going back for. He opened the door and sat down in the soft leather. On the steering wheel he saw that she had two fingers taped up.
They both stared through the windshield. He sensed that she was searching for the right words and wasn't finding them. He had nothing to say either.
In the end she stepped on the gas and pulled away. He wasn't surprised when she crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge and then started to take roads out of town, moving south.
“I guess you've resigned, then,” he said after a time.
She didn't turn her head. “I guess you have, too.”
They didn't speak again. The roads led into Virginia towards the spine of the Appalachians. Finally, as evening drew on, they entered a National Park area, took a diversion off the Skyline Drive, passed two No Thru-road signs, and then the car stopped. Mary, who had driven without a pause, rested her forehead on the wheel as the engine muttered into silence. They were in a small settlement that Jude thought he'd seen signposted as Stone Spring. It meant nothing to him. The car was sitting on blacktop outside the Spring Laundromat. To his left the Bake'n'Bagel had already closed for the day. A stray dog, wiry and with an eye on the car, ran sniffing along the store fronts and then vanished through a clot of weeds on the corner. The place seemed uninhabited.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“End of the road.” She took her gun out of its holster, checked the load, put it back, and nodded at him. “Get out.”
He still had his gun, but not with him. It was back at the apartment, locked in the wall safe. He got out.
The sound of the car doors closing was a shock in the quiet. Apart from this single road he could see a few tracks branching away, perhaps to more secluded lots in the woods. Birdsong and the hum of insects gave the early evening a drowsy feel. The sun was just dropping through the trees on his left.
Mary led the way across the street and up the steps of a big grey clapboard house with white window frames and a turret at its road-facing corner. At her knock the door was opened by a man in a military uniform, although the entrance hall was so dark that Jude didn't see his insignia clearly.
She turned as soon as the door was closed.
“You'll stay here for now.”
Jude glanced around. Apart from the guard on the door there was no sign of life.
“The guard will always be here. There are automated locks and security. If you try to leave you will be shot on sight.” She gestured at his jailer and the man opened the front door again for her.
She held out her hand. “Give me your Pad.”
He gave it to her and she put it in her jacket's inner front pocket.
Seeing that she meant to leave Jude asked, “What am I waiting for?”
Mary didn't pause in her exit, only glanced obliquely over her shoulder, not making
eye contact as she replied, “Don't ask and you won't be disappointed.”
She was halfway through the door when he added, bitterly, “You've got a fucking nerve, playing it like you're the one with a grievance.”
She didn't stop.
The guard closed the door.
The house was very quiet.
Mary sat in the car with her head in her hands. She breathed through her fingers, trying for a long, slow breath, but she didn't get anything except gasping and drowning sensations until long after it was dark.
Natalie sat at her desk, staring into space. It was now three weeks since she had arrived. Ian's data had bridged the critical gaps in the program. She was left with the task Guskov had set her, but since that night when in some misguided moment of emotional breakdown she'd actually felt sorry for the wily old goat/idealistic old fool (delete depending on mood) she'd been doing a lot of thinking. She'd tried to figure out what kind of program she could write for the Mappaware that did everyone some good, nobody any harm, and prevented hostile interventions in the future. It was the equivalent of asking what it was that made people do bad things and trying to factor it out. Obviously, bad things had many definitions depending on which end of them you were at, and many causes—perhaps infinitely many.
She was staring into space because there was nothing to look at and she wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting there. Every so often she progressed and made notes. When she was stuck she sat and did nothing. Eventually solutions rose to the surface and became thoughts; she didn't care where they were coming from.
She thought that once Mappa Mundi was delivered the US and Europeans would go for a preemptive strike. It wasn't like nuclear war: nobody was going to die. In fact, from the joint security and governmental perspective things should improve no end. Human rights and the sanctity of individual personality didn't enter into it because governments had probably already convinced themselves that this was a kind of superdevice that would end all wars and turn the world into a kind of utopia.
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