“Don't forget the fifty million dollars,” Natalie said with a false smile of cheer. “And the real estate.”
Alicia's upper lip curled into a snarl. “You freak!” she spat, but nothing else.
Guskov was furious and because his anger was such a physical force he seemed to become the focus for the rest. He reached across the slim expanse of steel towards Khan and she shrank away from his touch. Standing up at his full bearlike height he stared her down until she became physically smaller but her defiance was smug.
“Desanto is right,” she whispered. “Your idea is wrong. The Bobby X technology has to be kept secret. And it isn't for individuals to decide everybody's fate.”
“And who is it right for then? You?” he said softly. He looked back at the case. “Two missing. I assume you already took one. Where is the other?”
Alicia had clammed up now. She wasn't going to say anything. As they waited they again looked to Natalie, to see if she could divine the answer, hoping that she could. Every single one of them was in shock. The sense of their disorientation and the creeping horror as they began to accept this twist was excruciating to her. On top of it the wild, futile hopes about the chance of salvation made her dizzy—she shut them out and shook her head. And then, in the silence, they heard the sound of the elevator doors operating from the highside entrance where each of them in turn had come in.
Natalie knew who it was. Before anyone had time to speak she was up and running. She negotiated the twists and turns of the corridors, slipping on the tough carpet and catching herself with a hand on the wall or the floor. Around the last corner she saw him walking towards her and her heart lifted in a leap of hope and the sheer pleasure of seeing him again. She flung her arms around him and hugged him close.
Jude was much slower to respond and for an instant he held his face away from her as though he wished they hadn't touched. But then he seemed to become resigned and embraced her in return, sighing.
Natalie looked up into his face and he shook his head fractionally.
She thought for a second that they'd found out about the NP and strove to see if it was true. Then she realized that wasn't it, and the understanding clicked home.
Jude laid out the government's offer in its stark terms. He was already feeling the beginnings of Deliverance's own symptoms: a heavy head, an aching back, his temperature starting to waver between chills and fever, but he ignored them as best he could.
“All of the NervePath hardware and all of the Mappa Mundi programs are to be left here within this network, intact and in working order. Each one of you will collect their personal items and exit, one by one, beginning with Mikhail Guskov. Any attempts to destroy work, or otherwise compromise the integrity of it, and they will not offer you your MUV shot.” He flicked the card that he'd been handed, with its notes, onto the floor and looked up at their exhausted, incredulous faces.
“But they did want me to tell you that if you cooperate their rewards will be generous. Your families will remain unharmed, and you will have a successful career working with them in the future, including getting a place on some goddamned ethical committee they're setting up to ensure that the rest of the world doesn't think they're just following another Pollyanna foreign-interference scheme. Maybe you'd even get a place in the Mental Health Hall of Fame when this goes global.”
“Mary Delaney sent you,” Guskov stated, the most determined of all those here.
“Yeah.” Jude nodded. He thought it was interesting they'd met again in these circumstances, him knowing all about this man and Guskov knowing and caring almost nothing about Jude's past efforts to pin him down. He wasn't as Jude remembered. He was younger, and stronger, more of a fighter.
For the first time, Jude sneezed.
Everyone jerked back in their seats or where they leaned on the wall. A nervous laugh ran between them as they saw their own reactions. Jude tried not to feel the shock of fear. He glanced at Natalie. Her small, heart-shaped face was set in a determined way, the steely colour of her eyes pronounced against her shocking red hair.
“Yes,” she said. She looked at Guskov. “If you've got that other version of Deliverance, the one that can replicate Micromedica, then we have the lab equipment to extract some of the vaccine from Alicia's blood. Can you use it as a payload in a counterinfection? Will that work?”
He nodded. “Maybe. We'd have to start immediately.”
“Alicia? Did you take both of the shots?”
Jude slowly pieced together what must have happened as they all started to organize themselves for action. Despite their antagonisms the sudden imposition of an external threat showed how seamlessly they'd learned to work together, first one and then another taking the initiative as their abilities decided. He and Mary had once been like that, he thought and sneezed again. It was harder this time and now his eyes and sinuses were starting to feel hot. Explosive aerosolization. Jesus Christ.
Natalie was leaning down next to him. She took his hand. “Come on.”
Natalie led him into the control centre. She worked busily, setting up machines, tapping instructions.
Jude watched her, sniffing occasionally, his eyes starting to run. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing things,” she said. “Although how well it turns out is anybody's guess. Still, that's always been the case.” She picked up a handheld scanner, just like the one she'd shown him in her catalogue, pointed it at her own head, and pressed the trigger.
“What was that?”
“I've restarted the Selfware. If I go the same way as Ian then I can get out of here, and take something with me.”
“You're going to go along with his plan?” Jude cleared his throat and then started coughing. There was a dry tickling in his ears and, seemingly, everywhere in his head. Even his lungs itched. “What's he going to do? Make everyone as mad as he is?”
“No. I think any changes will be short-lived but possibly beneficial.” She was doing something else now that he didn't understand, her hands flashing over two keyboards at once. He sneezed again, six times in a row.
“I thought if I could make it straight into the lab I might be able to confine myself before I infected anyone,” he said, swallowing on a throat that hurt.
“And what makes you think they're not pumping it in from outside?” She flashed him a quick, lopsided grin and then her face faltered and she became very still, poised as a cat, watching him as if he were doing a magic trick.
“What?”
“That woman,” she said. “Is that Mary? The woman with the curly red hair?”
He nodded, a cold spark in his chest, and Natalie straightened up, her arms hanging loose at her sides and her mind suddenly very distant. He could almost see it rushing away himself, and he wasn't like her. “Why?”
From being a fast-moving streak of fire she was a small, still creature, hardly big enough or strong enough to do anything. He saw her take hold of the desk for support. Her face was like the wide-open sky.
“She killed Dan.” Slowly the fast mind came back on and reanimated her. Her look became tougher, harder. Jude absorbed the news slowly. He nodded. It didn't even surprise him. His own feelings and thoughts about Mary had had plenty of time to fester in the house above this place.
“Listen, Jude.” Natalie leaned forward and grasped his hands. “This is all a risk, but when we get out of here don't do anything you'll regret.”
He thought she was trying not to do the mind-reading thing and instead was doing her best to be an ordinary human being. Unlike her he had no confidence about the last part—getting out—but he didn't say so. He thought that what she was proposing to do was equivalent to suicide, although he wasn't sure.
“And what about you?”
“I'm going to the dispensary and get you something for this.” She smiled and for an instant he couldn't help but smile back.
But the medicine they had didn't do much against the Deliverance and within another hour Jude felt sicker than he'd e
ver felt in his life. He coughed and sneezed hard enough to rupture blood vessels in his throat and nose and in the lulls lay flat on the floor as around him the arguments and recriminations and the fear boiled together and became part of his fever.
He heard Guskov shouting about there only being enough for one dose to work in time. Calum shouting hoarsely when he found that Natalie had switched the system back on inside herself and her soft explanation that reasoned it was all for the best—hadn't he wanted her to be better? Nikolai and the others railing about the system of the Free State and how it hadn't been planned effectively. Natalie talking about some program she'd written that was going to manage fear, so that reactions of hate and violence would be curtailed.
It all sounded like a lot of very late after-the-fact theorizing. Inside Jude there was a kind of calm, when he wasn't retching or spitting into tissues or watching dark red appear in bigger and brighter stains in the wads of cloth he put to his face in an effort to stop the infection spreading so fast. His bones ached with the chills. He hoped he was going to have enough strength left when the time came to walk outside.
He wondered if the world could be made different by Mappa Mundi. Weeks ago he'd have said that was something that should be left to fate. But it shouldn't be in the hands of people like Mary, that was for sure. And when he thought about it, he didn't know who wasn't like Mary, in their heart of hearts: self-interested, hopeful, driven by fear.
Natalie cornered her father in the dispensary itself. He was in the act of swallowing two capsules when she walked in.
“What are you doing?”
“It's nothing, a headache.”
He was old, she saw that now, because a piece of him had recently given up. He'd failed her.
“You've taken so many.”
“I've had it for years.” He put the rest of the pack in his pocket and sneezed. “Looks like your friend's done his job, too.”
“We're all going out,” Natalie said firmly. She took his arm. “You included.”
“I don't know,” he said. He was rooted to the spot. “If you're going to leave this way. I don't want to go. What's out there? Only more of the same.”
“Dad, there's years of life left for you.” But she was seeing the headache now, the pain of the trapped man inside a mind that had been set in a peculiar fixity for the last twenty years, the old NervePath system inside it a set of inert wrecks, like ships driven ashore to rot. Their malfunction had created a stasis of thought and produced phantom pain that came with it. Neurological damage, and not the fatal disease she'd dreaded, was to blame. He must have been trying out things when she was still in hospital. Trying to find a cure.
He shook his head. “Nothing changes,” he said. “Work, living. It's all the same texture, the same clay.”
“Come on, we can find a way.” But she was talking to herself.
“We?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I think I've done enough. Don't you?”
“Dad, please.” But, with a sinking heart, she knew that he was beyond persuasion. He'd decided and, as with all his decisions, he wasn't going to change.
Stunned, she tried to hold on to him, but he loosened her grip carefully. “Don't worry about me,” he said.
“What about me?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do, knowing I left you here?”
“And what am I supposed to do when you've gone?” he said.
“There's no telling exactly what's going to happen.” She was starting to be angry with him. “I may survive it and you may live to help more people like Ian. Of course, if you'd rather sit around feeling sorry for yourself then you can do that, too.”
He caught her elbow as she was leaving. “Wait on there.” His heavy face was weighted with the seriousness she knew very well. “Didn't you come here to get something for that agent out there?” He reached down a pack of Micromedica restructurant and handed it to her. “This is meant for wounds and the like but it's been known to aid cell growth and healing in other cases, too. It won't hurt to try it.”
“Thanks.” She took it.
“Friend of yours, is he?”
“Tried to be,” she said.
“Go on, then.”
It was so hard to leave him. She didn't know what to say. After a moment or two of nothing she turned on her heel and went. A curious dizziness almost stopped her halfway back to the dining room, but it passed. Then she started to sneeze.
Everyone had packed their things and was waiting to leave. The departure schedule listed that Guskov should exit first, then Natalie. But when they noticed she was missing they might change their minds. It was only fair to put this to the vote.
“What's the final program? Are you going to try for the Free State or have we met our match?” Nikolai Kropotkin asked as Guskov and Calum joined them last of all. Natalie sat next to Jude, who leaned into the back of his chair with his eyes shut, breathing heavily and shivering. He was wearing a borrowed sweater, but it made no difference. Everyone except Alicia was also in the middle of the primary stages. Shunned, Khan sat on the far end of the farthest table.
“Has everyone looked at the options?” Isidore was calm, wiping his nose on a tissue as if his illness was only to be a summer cold. “We should vote.”
“We can use all the programs,” Natalie interrupted as they began to talk around the variations of Guskov's ideas. “They can be the first options available. If your global network isn't so corrupt they've already decided to turn the entire system into a racket for making fast cash.” She glanced at Mikhail. “Total immunization would be one. Selfware could be another, in a limited version.”
“And send the NervePath out as an open system?” Kropotkin shook his head. “Then all that someone has to do is zap them.”
“But that's all they have to do anyway,” she retorted. “And their technology and programming is way behind. You can offer these straight away. We can soften the ground up, too, if we look for the short-term gains of using Prefer Compromise and No Fear across a wide spectrum of the population. And I thought, instead of sending it out empty, we can add information that can be downloaded complete to the user; a full knowledge of what it is and how it works. That way everyone is instantly informed about the Free State principles, so nobody can prevent them finding out they're infected. It can include localized knowledge about where and how to find new programs and how to prevent counterinfection.”
She knew, as she'd said this, that it was news to most of them. They hadn't planned this far ahead—getting Mappaware to work had been the goal for so long that future developments had been something to muse about in idle hours, of which there'd been none. But she'd had the sleepless nights in which to think, and she'd put her mind to work. She knew that this could take a hold before the US and European agencies could prevent it. They, too, would be co-opted by its insidious spread, and then there would be, as Guskov had so rightly predicted, no worthwhile opposition to his ideas. In the years that followed what would come was unpredictable, but that was also true for the reverse situation, where the US got to wave its wand. All the options were bad, but she believed this one was the least rotten at its heart.
“And you've tinkered with this so that it won't cause a mass panic?” Kropotkin asked, acidic, but not entirely unimpressed.
“It comes with comfortable acceptance as standard,” she said dryly, knowing how much she sounded like a cheap ad for cars. “Nobody is going to start a revolution. Nobody is going to go bananas and start cutting people's heads off.”
She was interrupted by Jude starting another violent outburst of coughing that could have been laughing. The spasms were so violent that they would have thrown him out of a less stable seat. He held the wad of tissue that he'd been using for a while to his mouth and they all saw a sudden bright scarlet tint appear on it. He groaned as the coughing bout finally came to an end.
“What about the people who aren't infected, but know it's out there? How will you stop them?” he managed to whisper.
Natalie watched him with growing concern. The disease wasn't as bad as it looked—that would come when it opened its millions of tiny flowerets and released the Marburg virus. His question was a good one and she didn't know the answer.
“Jude,” she said. “I'm going to leave soon. When I do, you should go out first and stall for time. Any lead I can get will be important. Then Guskov can go, and then the people left here can make excuses for me until it's obviously too late.”
“We should all go out together,” Jude said, with an effort. “Guskov in the front, but together. Otherwise they'll probably kill whoever is left in here. They won't wait if they think you've destroyed the information. They'll just come in shooting and ask later.”
Alicia Khan spoke holding her arm where they'd taken a sample of blood as though it hurt. “I can't believe you're going to try this. What if it all goes wrong? The risk calculations are astronomically high. There are too many unknowable factors.”
“In which case risk calculations are impossible,” Natalie agreed. “Give us another choice that isn't like that and we'll take it.”
“In the nineteen eighties everyone was convinced there was going to be nuclear war,” Khan replied. “But it never happened. The strategic defence initiatives and the Cold War situation worked out. Nobody fired. Didn't you consider that this might be a technology situation like that one? Everyone has it, but nobody uses it? You sending this out there, untested, unverified—it's like Hiroshima. You don't know what it's going to do.”
“They're already using it,” Jude said from the floor. “Just like Hiroshima. It's already out there. I've seen it.”
“I think we hardly need point out which nation was the only one to use a nuclear warhead aggressively,” Guskov added, staring with the tight lips of contempt at Alicia and her second-rate head. “You have a history of shooting first against enemies with lesser power.”
She rolled her eyes at this, thinking it a cheap shot worthy only of the standard response. “It ended the war.”
Mappa Mundi Page 48
