Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  White Horse stood up. Ice-cold pain shot up the core of her right leg and through her lower back. She started running away from the house, coughing, gulping, throat on fire, and in three strides had lost all sense of direction. There would be the fence and then the road.

  The fence hit her at an angle and sent her sprawling to the ground. She landed on the precious bag and something in it broke. The machine. The stench of the gas made her giddy and the voice was suddenly right behind her,

  “Wait up, wait up!” It was laughing.

  White Horse heard the sound of a cigarette lighter being flicked, flint on metal.

  She screamed, and the little frog in her throat whispered, “Help me! Help me!”

  The propane tank behind the house exploded with a gigantic bang and the singing scream of metal fragments spinning through the air. Its fireball gave off a hot burst of blue and orange light that reached through the smoke and showed White Horse the woman standing over her, staring at her lighter with an almost comic perplexity as it refused to catch. Her absorption with it was childishly complete.

  White Horse pushed herself upright, so frightened she could hardly breathe. Snick-snick-snick went the lighter wheel under the woman's heavy thumb. Sparks darted eagerly across to them, as though wanting to help.

  Then, in her only lucky break, White Horse felt the paling against her lower leg move easily and knew she was nowhere near the gate, but by the loose rail, away from the road and the light. She was in the hollow where even the neighbours wouldn't see her, in the dark where the pumpkins sat Halloween-fat in Fall.

  The lighter was still flicking. Snick-snick. It was so familiar. In the part of her mind that wasn't panicking, she knew that sound.

  “Martha?” she croaked out. She couldn't grasp that it was Martha, but as soon as she heard that snick she knew. It matched that silhouette, that voice, if you turned it right-side-out again. Martha Johnson, family friend, storekeeper. Martha Johnson was trying to burn her.

  Instead of trying to get through the fence's easy gap beside her White Horse was paralysed by this realization. It didn't make sense. She'd been in Martha's store the day before yesterday, buying bread. It couldn't be the same woman. This wasn't real.

  “Damn thing,” the voice had changed now. Martha was peevish.

  “Martha …”

  “There we go!”

  In a moment of unconscious and complete necessity White Horse let go of her bag and closed both hands around the end of the loose rail.

  She heard rather than felt herself take light. It was a soft “whump” sound and then a rush of wild, hot wind against her skin. It showed her Martha Johnson's livid, gleeful face holding the lighter and grinning at her own cleverness.

  White Horse swung the rail. All the nails that had failed to hold it into the post sank into the old woman's smile with a jarring crunch that smashed her grip loose.

  Martha Johnson fell silently, without even putting out an arm to save herself.

  White Horse screamed and the fire swooped eagerly into her mouth and down her throat to drown her. For the first time she felt herself starting to burn, and the pain was unbelievable, unbearable.

  Something knocked her over, rolled her into the ground, and crushed her flat.

  She woke up in hospital in Billings four hours later, but it was another two days before she could talk properly, and in that time she decided that she couldn't keep this to herself any more. She had the machine that was responsible for the deaths and the violence. She couldn't make it work, but she knew what it was, and she knew that the men who'd brought it were government because they'd talked in the diner about it when she was waiting tables.

  White Horse was going to have to call her half brother. It was good that she had so long to think it through—she had time to think of all the ways she could start and throw them all away. No lousy Pad call was going to fix things between them.

  A week later she discharged herself and took her leave of her friends. With the bag safely packed up inside a new rucksack and with credit-card clothing all over her and debts she was never going to pay, she left for Washington, DC. In the bag, the object that had cracked didn't look like it was broken enough to be useless. Whatever it was, Jude would know. He'd help. He had to.

  In her hand mirror, as she travelled on the bus, White Horse looked at her reflection, its long hair all gone, replaced with a tight-braided pseudo-African look to hide the fact that most of the hair was fake. Funny, she thought, and giggled, hoarsely, to herself. Cheyenne hiding in African guise. Like her brother, she had two faces now.

  “Where the fuck have you been? I've been on this line ten minutes now and nobody has the good grace to even fucking speak to me and this is supposed to help? For all you know I could've topped myself and you wouldn't fucking care. Who do you think you are? You know what you are? A bunch of fucking prissy, pointy-headed little shits who think they're better than the rest of us telling us what to think and how to act and how much to drink and not to take any drugs and not to feel better—you don't control us! I know you think you do and that's what you'd like to think, you like thinking you're some kind of fucking elite class who can talk down to us from your fucking ivory towers, don't you? Well, I'll tell you what you know about life and reality outside your theories and your fancy talk. You know what you know? Nothing. Fucking nothing…”

  A deep breath is a cleansing breath, Natalie thought, taking one and letting it go as the ranting continued, without pause or loss of volume, for another solid minute. She waited, drawing an angry face on the flatscreen of her Pad, giving it stabby, straight-up hair and sticking-out eyes, a big screaming mouth with a storm of angry bees coming out of it.

  After the day she'd had a few hours on the Clinic helpline was all she needed, but she felt sympathetic. This man on the other end was hopping mad, and she'd been that way, too, all day, but unable to say anything like the stuff he was coming out with. Hearing it said with such sincere violence made her feel a little better. And he was justified, she thought. She was a psychiatric psychologist, with social-science and nanotechnological qualifications coming out her backside, but that didn't mean she knew anything about anything when you came down to it. Then again, maybe she was just brimming with self-pity because her father had told her point-blank that her research was nothing more than a load of superstitious, dangerous rubbish, based on unscientific, invalid data and pie-in-the-sky dreams.

  When the caller paused for breath Natalie said, not meaning to speak aloud, “A-men!”

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “Sorry, sorry!” She quickly erased the strict vicar she'd sketched, his pulpit sprouting directly out of Angry Man's hair, which was doubling as hellfire. “I've had a bitch of a day. Now, you were saying?”

  But after that Angry Man's abuse became a bit sheepish. At last he began talking about how much he missed his kids, who'd gone to Australia with his ex-wife, and how he drank too much and ate chocolate under the bedsheets at night, reading Wonder Woman by torchlight because that was the only way he could get to sleep. As he spoke his voice softened by stages until it had moved from the gruff regret of a stoical man to the disappointed helplessness of a small boy.

  Natalie filled in her parts of the call-log on-screen when he'd gone and dried her face off on the same manky piece of paper towel she'd used earlier to wipe up a coffee spill. She blew her nose on the last dry bit and chucked the vile thing into the wastebin. There was a moment's blissful silence.

  “Goodnight, Dr. Armstrong!” the last of the day nurses called as she passed the open door of the helpline office. Natalie answered, yawned, and thought she might go and try for another coffee—Rita would be in soon to pick up the shift and she could go home.

  The line rang. She picked up the handset. It was a woman, and for five minutes, as the switchboard signalled urgently and Natalie felt the will to live draining out of her, the caller went on and on about how her son's tantrums—strictly humdrum, to Natal
ie's mind—were becoming unbearable and why wasn't there some prescription drug she could give him to make him calmer and more rational?

  “If there was,” Natalie imagined saying, “don't you think we'd all be taking it?”

  She wrote the words in a speech bubble and gave them to a praying mantis to say.

  Natalie said, “It can be very traumatic to experience this, I know, but if you put yourself in his position…”

  As she talked her mind ran another track entirely. It said, “Have you ever had that experience where you're trying hard to make yourself understood to someone and they just don't get it? And you realize, in the middle of whatever the hell it is you were going on about, that they never will, and you get this sudden awful feeling of being completely and utterly alone? But it's more than alone. It's a kind of cosmic Fuck you, there is no God, and even if there were he wouldn't notice you kind of alone. You're talking to thin air. You're making noises that don't mean anything to any other living creature on Earth.”

  The caller said with reluctance, “Well, quite, that's exactly it. He will not listen to reason. But maybe he can't, like you say…”

  Natalie continued in her mind, blanking out the mother's rationalization.

  “And then, right on the heels of that, the last of the fucking rug gets ripped out from under you because you realize that now, even you don't know what the hell you were trying to say. And because this idiot's not fucking listening, you've lost it forever and it's like you don't exist. That's why two-year-olds throw fits of rage, because they don't get the last part yet, they still think that they're the focus of the universe. And that's why they get shy and twisted at three, ‘cos they figure out that, actually, other people can make them not exist.

  “That's what's happening to your son. That's all. So don't worry, he'll never get over it. He'll live a straight life, no rocking the boat, no confronting salesmen on the doorstep, no taking the first or the last biscuit in the tin. Just like the rest of us. He'll be normal. Which may be good or bad news, depending on the rest of your family.”

  Natalie drew a series of ever-decreasing sheep, until the last one was a dot, crushed under a ballooning fatness of a woman with posh hair and a complacent smile, light aircraft circling for a landing on her stomach.

  Or had she actually said that?

  Natalie sat up suddenly, realizing that there was silence on the other end of the line.

  Had she actually said that stuff? Shit. She didn't want to believe it. Her heart was hammering. It would all be recorded. She could be given the sack…it might get in the papers. She was exhausted, but that was no excuse. Might she, in a moment of microsleep, have forgotten the training and said that?

  “Well, if you think it's normal…” the woman's voice said, very hesitantly. “As you say.” The call ended.

  Natalie kept her hand pressing the handset down and banged her forehead on the tough surface of her desk, once, took a deep breath, thought—a deep breath is a cleansing breath, stay awake, you silly mare—and picked up the next caller from the queue, after which she definitely would have to get coffee, or possibly some form of surgery to stop her mouth running away with her. She smothered a yawn with the back of her hand.

  “I'd like to speak to Doctor Natalie Armstrong,” said a man with a bold American accent.

  The voice was clear and strikingly calm, but hiding inside it were tension and anxiety; the stress of a mind wound so tight that Natalie thought she could hear the creaking of imminent implosion.

  She felt her back prickling. The voice had spoken her name. The helpline was anonymous at both ends to preserve confidentiality and security. They gave only code names on the hotline in order to avoid the constant attentions of the area's chronic fixators. How had he known to ask for her? Maybe he was an ex-patient. Or maybe it was more than that.

  She moved her hand nearer to the Flag Call button, which would ask the police to trace the location. As she hesitated over the button, she said, “Natalie isn't here today. Can I help you?”

  “Oh.”

  Disappointment.

  In the pause Natalie's mind veered off. She wondered whether her flatmate, Dan, would have already eaten the microwave pasta and spent the rent on taking one of his boyfriends out to the pub. Or perhaps the kitchen was gleaming like a new knife and he'd remembered not to switch on the shower because of what it did to the people downstairs. She could have a fantasy, just as well as the next nut.

  “Who am I talking to, please?” Her American had gone cool and efficient on her.

  “This is Jennifer,” Natalie said, and waited.

  The waiting was the worst. Not knowing if you would hear a sudden scream, a whimper, a tirade of abuse, explicit sexual lusts, or detailed stories of mutilation and eventual horrific death—yours, theirs, or someone else's. Or fear. Or, most commonly, despair.

  The silence scared the shit out of her every time, in case whoever was on the other end of the connection was something beyond imagination, a thing that was so virulent and deadly it would travel down the digital band with the smooth effortlessness of a snake and kill her just with the potency of its thoughts and the soft, repetitive sound of its breath.

  “Well, I need to speak to Dr. Armstrong on a professional matter of some urgency, and I'll only be in the UK a while. I'm sorry to call you on the toll-free and I won't take up any more of your time. If you could pass on my name and number I'd be grateful. My name is Jude Westhorpe and I'm a Special Sciences Agent with the FBI.”

  Of course you are, Natalie thought, comforted that he wasn't going to blow tonight. She picked up her pen and began adding to the doodles. He was just a fantasist. Sounded relatively harmless. Probably keen on police procedural, crop circles, and extraterrestrials. He might even be entertaining, although she should try to get rid of him in case the next one in line was seconds away from jumping off the top floor of a high-rise.

  She began to draw a cowboy hat.

  “Can you take this down or is it recorded?”

  “Oh, it's recorded,” she said in her most warm and comforting doctor-tone. “One week turnaround, then it's erased once it's been checked. But I'm ready to go here with the pen. Fire away.”

  “My personal number,” he announced and a rapid series of tones dashed into her ear as his Pad transmitted.

  She wrote the numbers down automatically by hand, as she'd been trained to do in her student-job days as a night-shift 999 operator. It was a hard habit to break and it made her spoil the fancy hatband and feather she'd been colouring in. She scowled but said “Mmn” with interested politeness.

  “And I'm staying at the Hilton in town.” He hesitated.

  She thought that he was waiting to see if she could swallow that or was about to try and call his bluff. Classy fantasy, she thought. Rather like the old guy who keeps calling me Miss Moneypenny. Which is an improvement after some of the names I've had today.

  Natalie decided to let him off. He wasn't hurting anyone as far as she could judge. Probably lived at home with his aging mother and never went out of the house except to sign on at the social and verify his continued existence to someone in authority. The cowboy received two dots and a flat, short line for eyes and mouth.

  “When will you be able to pass this message on?”

  “I'll do it right now,” Natalie said, admiring his consistency. She slowly scrubbed out the numbers with the round end of her stylus, and replaced the hat with a black crow flying clumsily across the twirly landscape of scribble—Jude Westhorpe. What a name! Very old-rural. It spoke of incest and barn-burnings and the grinding love of toil.

  “If I need to call again is there some other office number you can give me?”

  Safe ground now, he was having trouble finding excuses to hang on.

  “I'm sorry, we aren't allowed to—”

  “Okay, okay. Just pass it on as quickly as you can, Jennifer. And thanks. You're doing a great job.”

  He hung up.

  Natalie heard th
e click with a mild surprise. That was pretty concise, for a dreamer. He must really be tripping out on it. He'd got the accent—although he could be a real American, no reason they couldn't be as insane as the rest. Professional-sounding. Very polite. Only slightly controlling with that last compliment and the use of her name, and he'd even managed to say it like he could have meant it. No hints of masturbation in the background. Nice. She could even look forward to hearing from him again.

  “I'm doing a grr-eat job here!” she told the desk and the walls, trying to mimic his accent. Where was it from? Not New York. Not Texas. No, she didn't know.

  Natalie signed against the call details and glanced at the clock. It was ten to nine. She should have finished ten minutes ago but she couldn't go when it was like this—the switchboard lights flashing in that red, bloody-dot morse: SOS. She yawned, picked up her handset. A deep breath is a cleansing breath.

  Natalie reached the flat at ten to midnight. She made her Keycard swipe with the clumsy stabbing action of a casual maniac. The light flashed green—here's your chance, lady!—and she shoved the door with her shoulder, but it was swollen with all the unseasonal June rain and all it did was judder against her with a shiver of repulsion and then jam tight on the hall tiles.

  Natalie took a step back into the puddle that was the top step and heel-toed off her good shoes. Balancing on her left leg she karate-kicked the door on its fattest part, just by the handle. Her foot throbbed with protest, but the door swung back and slapped the wall with a noise like a gunshot that echoed in the hall and down the street. If she hadn't been doing it every day for two weeks it would have shocked the daylights out of her. It was easier to shut—she heaved against it with her bottom, her wet feet slipping on the cold floor. She leaned on the angry wood and rested. Only the stairs now—six flights, but carpeted.

  Her fantasy of domestic bliss had not come true. She could tell that much just by standing in the tiny hall and looking through the various doorways.