She began to shake—not the shiver he'd had, but convulsively, in whole-body jerks. Her grey-green eyes were glazed. Her mouth was open, her face expressionless, abandoned. It was as though she had left her body and was somewhere outside it, in recoil from the whole of the physical world. Only her finger remained under a conscious control in its sensory touching and retracing of the peculiar lines; a chant of form that was drawing her under its spell.
Looking at her awakened a primitive kind of fear, both for her and for him, because what was he going to do if she cracked up now?
Jude leaned across the table, knocking candles flying, and grabbed her upper arms in his hands with a grip as hard as he could manage. He tried to hold her still by force, shouted her name. “Don't go! Wake up! Natalie!”
Then, as fast as she'd gone, she was looking up at him again from the face that had been empty a second before. The right side of her mouth quivered in a shaky smile. “It's okay,” she said quietly. “I'm sorry. It's fine.”
“Fine.” He shook his head. “No, that it ain't. So what is it? What was that?”
“I used to be mad,” she said, offhand. She detached her arms from his grip with a brisk shrug, and stepped back. “Years ago. That drawing. It made me remember it. That's all. Don't worry. I'm fine.” She moved towards the sink unit, drew up against it, and looked out of the window at the lights of the hotel beyond their garden wall, her back to him.
Jude sat down again and saw that wax had covered a lot of the Guskov picture. On the floor most of the other candles had gone out in thick pools that were slowly congealing. An edge of one page had taken light, but the paper was treated and it hadn't burned far. Three candles remained lit, their flames softly fluttering in the disturbed air, flooding the place with moving shadows.
He shivered and realized that he was cold because he was wet, as well as scared. This goddamned file. He wished he could burn it. He wondered if he should. The kitchen had an old-style, new-world fireplace that looked like it was sturdy. If he piled it all in there it would burn in minutes. He could bury the ash in the garden or whatever lay outside the dark windows and the surviving CIA decals could be sifted out and airmailed to some backwater country. If it had been his house he would have. He peered at the writing. Could she be lying? She had said she was mad.
He had just wasted his entire trip if she was.
He remembered her kissing him under the trees, her cool hands on his face, the fierce hunger she had that wasn't really for him, but for something much less ordinary.
It was all insane.
Natalie was opening cupboards. Jude watched her get out two shot glasses and a half-bottle of whiskey. She poured, clanking the neck of the bottle on the rims hard enough to break both, although neither gave.
“Want one?”
“Yeah.” He crossed the room carefully, not stepping in the wax. He leaned against the units, alongside her, and they looked together at the pages littered in the pool of light.
Jude wondered how mad she meant, and how she could say it like that, like saying she'd once been a cheerleader, or a clerk. She thought he'd change his mind about her now. He didn't want to, but maybe he had. He took a drink and the sharp fire was a relief.
“It's late,” she said. “You must be tired.”
“I don't think I can sleep.” He took another slug and held it in his mouth. The place was freezing and it was summer outside. He was tired. He was exhausted.
“My father never slept,” Natalie said. “So he used to say. He'd go to the study and work. I think he did sleep, in breaks he wasn't aware of. His eyes would be open, but it was like nobody was in there. I used to wonder, where did he go? He was never happy when he came back, not after she died.”
“She?”
“My mother. Charlotte. She was a travel journalist. Died in an air crash with the man she was having an affair with. Somewhere near Cape Town. It was in all the papers.”
“I'm sorry.” Jude didn't know what to make of this revelation, whether it was connected with the writing on the folder or not. Could that be the reason for her madness? It didn't on its own seem like enough. He took another drink and for a moment in his mind he saw a tall man, a lanky man, a cigarette in his mouth like a twig on the trunk of an old pine tree.
“That's okay,” Natalie said, matter-of-fact. He saw her from the corner of his eye knocking back the whole contents of her glass. “I didn't mean that we should sleep.” She glanced up and grinned; a wild, feral kind of expression that was a challenge directly at him. “I've got something to show you.”
She was scary. He had to admit it.
The house had a wide staircase that led up two storeys and they negotiated it by the banister, carefully, his footsteps following in hers, thinking how glad he was that any city house these days was never really dark. On the top floor he made out three rooms. Natalie opened the one on the right and Jude saw nothing, as though she'd opened a door on night itself.
“Blackout blinds,” she explained. “Step in and I'll switch on the light.”
It was harder to do than he thought. His feet tested the carpet gingerly and he felt himself shiver as she closed the door behind them with a dead, muffled sound. He could have been anywhere in the world, with no idea where. His mind skittered with thoughts of serial murders, obsessional photography, collections of body parts, dead animals, or worse. His skin stood up in goose-flesh, not just from the chill of his drying clothes.
The lights were bright, but not blinding. He stared at the room. It was empty, but the walls—white underneath—were entirely covered in tiny, intricate networks of lines like those on the folder and equally tiny, precise writing.
“Welcome to my nightmare?” he hazarded, trying to keep it light.
“No, no,” Natalie said, full of good humour now, apparently at his unease. “Welcome to Natalie Armstrong.”
He stared around him. On the nearest piece of wall he took a closer look. None of the lines crossed. They were marked with numbers, reminding him of something. “This is a weather map?”
“In a way.” She was smiling now and he wished she'd get on with it and let him in on the joke.
“These are isobars,” she said. “Low-pressure and high-pressure areas, warm fronts, occluded fronts, storm systems—psychological ones. Sadness is a low. Love is a high. Other emotions are more complex figures. The writing and the names were representations, then, of everything that I knew.”
“Then?” Jude moved closer and inspected a patch. He could see why the lights had to be so bright and even, otherwise he couldn't have read anything at all. The writing was minuscule.
“When I was seventeen. I'd just come off the ward. This was part of my cure, I guess you could say.”
Jude was reading. His tiny entry, sited in the midst of an anticyclone, said, “Prakrti: reality of energy manifested as matter, a pocket of local fugue inside the Dance of Shiva.” He had a vague idea that it was something to do with Hinduism.
“Why's this in such a state?” He pointed at its location. She didn't even need to look at it.
“I'm afraid the whole of me was in that state, really. Mum's death threw me a bit overboard on the mystic, though. That part of the wall is all about my feelings and theories on the nature of physical reality and death. Teenager stuff.” She was grinning again, but this time she wasn't so sure of herself. He got the impression there was much more she would have liked to say but that she didn't think he'd want to hear it.
“But reading my ideas isn't why you're here,” she added. “Well, it is. But not because I need an audience. Going back to your stolen program…” She activated a switch, using her Pad, and a section of the ceiling slid back to allow a large projection screen to unroll itself right down to the floor. Another panel in the ceiling silently passed to one side and a three-lensed projector moved into position. The lights dimmed and they moved together automatically, so that they could see the images better.
Natalie cued an image that Jude rec
ognized easily—a coloured image of two brains, animated to show intricate patterns of activity.
“The one on the right is a volunteer, someone picked at random. The one on the left is a Zen Buddhist in deep meditation.”
“Why?”
“Because they have a belief that underneath the shell of your self, all your defining moments, there is another entity that isn't bound by your human lifetime, it's an eternal, immortal thing, and they maintain that by bringing the mind to stillness, while conscious, you can make contact with it.” She stepped up to the screen and plunged her hand deep into the Buddhist's synapses. “You can see the differences, but the key feature isn't just the pattern, it's the resonance. That's the blue in this picture.”
“So what, though? Brainwave variations don't make a soul. Do they?” He glanced at her, striped with colour, and she nodded.
“No, of course not. But here the theta patterns are very pronounced, yet you can also see that this person is awake. And here.” She indicated where and told him about areas where perception took place, processing the raw data of the senses into meaning. “Here, these areas are all in much stronger communication than in this test subject on the right.”
He looked expectantly at her for the explanation and she punched up a film. “This is my subject, the Buddhist,” she said and Jude saw a laboratory room, bare except for the old man on his sitting mat and another person behind him. They both held scimitars. In the corner of the recording the time slowly flipped along. They stood and sat, poised, motionless.
Jude could hear the faint white hiss of the soundtrack, thought he could just make out one of them breathing. Without a noise the man behind began to raise his sword.
“He's a Kendo master,” Natalie said.
The master brought his weapon up for a short blow that would inevitably split the Buddhist's head. The Buddhist did not move. He seemed asleep. Not even a finger twitched where his hand rested open against the handle and the blade of his sword.
“Are those—real?” Jude said.
“I missed off the bit where they chop melons and stuff,” Natalie said, so he wasn't sure if she was joking. “This is the interesting part.”
“And these are test conditions?” He was so glad it wasn't dead bodies in refrigerators in here that he was actually getting interested.
“Oh yeah.”
For an eternity the blade hung. At almost two minutes, with no visible changes taking place, Jude drew a breath to ask her what was going on and the two blades were suddenly together, half an inch from the bald man's head. The clash of metal rang clean and loud and Jude jumped off the floor.
“You've got to be kidding me,” he said, his heart hammering.
Natalie pressed rewind, slowed it down, and played it again, “This from the man with Spontaneous Files,” she murmured. But he was too startled to smile.
This time Jude saw the seconds passing more slowly. He saw, frame by frame on the third and fourth replay, that just before the blade above began to descend the Buddhist's hand took hold of his sword. With preternatural speed and no wavering, it put the metal between his head and the descending weapon, arriving precisely in position and remaining there as it took the shock, only dipping low enough to brush the skin over the man's skull with its blunt back.
“That's like—just a movie thing,” Jude said, shaking his head.
“Yeah,” Natalie agreed, and put the two brain pictures back on. “You see this flash on the left one, there? That's when his arm moved. The response starts simultaneously with the initiation of the movement in the man behind. There's no way any sensory information could have travelled from one to the other.”
“So, this is like what?” He didn't know what to think now. He couldn't believe what he'd seen, but then, that was a common thing lately. He only felt slightly seasick.
“This is part of my project into human consciousness,” Natalie said. “It relates to your programme because I've been developing a theory and a system—a programme of my own—that could, maybe, initialize this kind of deep perception in an ordinary subject at will. Part of that programme, a very little part, was in your file.”
“What part?”
“The part that cross-links specific sensory processing areas. I'm guessing that the effect would be a bit like taking a shitload of acid or something like that. You'd get synaesthesia, but maybe worse; I don't really know, to be honest. My project requires precision. And it's never been tested. Other parts of it … are of interest at the moment, to your government.”
“I'm not surprised,” he snorted. “Can you show me what the whole thing can do?”
“Maybe.” She switched off the projector and had it put itself away.
“Ah, maybe.” He folded his arms. “Name the price then.”
“The price is—” she paused, placing her Pad back on standby, “—that you don't mention me or anything I've told you to anybody else. I'm not an idiot. Someone's bound to know we've talked by now and they'll guess the rest soon enough. God,” she sighed and shook her head. “I always thought the project would produce its share of shit, but it just goes to show what a fool you can be when you want to fool yourself. I didn't think of this and here it is. I don't know what the program is supposed to prove, and I don't know why they zapped people around your sister but it looks like less than chance odds to me, and I'm real good at statistics.”
He wondered how he could ever have thought her crazy. Her fiery intelligence was right back, burning its way out of her face towards him, even making his freezing body feel warm.
“Something's gone wrong somewhere,” she said and jammed her hands in her jacket pockets. He assumed she was referring to the file and its appearance, her writing; there was a mistake in the Universe. The harsh white glare of the room made her seem very small, very sharply coloured. “Although, given the odds against it, who could be surprised?” She grinned at his lack of comprehension. “I mean, looking at the project in the context of the world as we know it, of course something's gone wrong. Mathematically you could have computed the likely moment if you'd had the right data. Human behaviour is capable of being modelled very accurately, especially when it's large populations we're talking about, and not individuals.”
“This is another part of your work?”
“No, just Sod's Law.” She turned and looked at the room. “The past and the future exist only in our minds. That's part of my work now. The past and the imagination and the future, fusing identity out of experience and fantasy. Every one of us a unique product, constantly evolving along a narrative storyline that chooses us, as we once chose it, without knowing.”
“I'm sorry?”
Natalie turned. Her smile flickered, feral one moment, self-mocking the next. It was mesmerizing. Her eyes were huge and intent. He stood still as she walked up to him, took her hands out of her pockets and put them gently on either side of his face. Her fingertips were icy. The third finger of her right hand touched the scar behind his ear.
“This gesture,” she said, “is already part of my story and yours, you and me, it is one thing that we share. Third time today.” She moved closer until he could feel the heat of her body. He was fixated, staring into her grey eyes, not knowing if they were more blue or more green, unable to find a name for the colour.
“But whatever it means to you,” she said, long mouth wrapping the words before it sent them out, packaged like presents, into his consciousness, “I bet it doesn't mean the same to me. In reality, it's one thing. But we see it quite differently.”
Jude smiled slowly. “Try me.”
She stood on her toes and moved closer, until their faces were only inches apart. He felt her lean against him, her pelvis coming into firm contact with his. Her gaze never faltered and from inside its clear depths she watched for any sign of a change in him, a backslide, which he knew wasn't coming, then or ever. There was a peculiar sensation in the centre of his sternum, like something long and sharp was stuck there, vibrating.
“I've got a better idea,” he said, every nerve ending in his face alert to the closeness of her. He put his hands inside her damp jacket, against the sticky fabric of her shirt. Underneath it her body was hot.
“Oh?”
He leaned back with his shoulder for the light switch. Pitch darkness enveloped them suddenly. “Want me to draw you a map?”
She felt along the scar just as she'd traced the lines on the file, careful, curious.
“Where's this?”
“Where we are,” he said.
She laughed and then the cool vice around his head tightened. She kissed him and a shock ran through to the back of his skull, like the reverse of a blow from the butt of a carbine.
White Horse opened the venetian blinds with her fingers and peered down into the street, watching the traffic prowl by in restless fits and starts: one speed, then faster, then stopping again. It reminded her of a video she'd seen once in Medical 1 at college, of red blood cells moving along in a vein, but there was no life in the road or the city that she could see or feel to match this analogy. If it has a heart, White Horse thought, then where is it beating?
It disturbed her. She knew, she felt, that life's patterns moved together, the life of each individual only a part of life as a whole, but this surge and trickle wasn't the pulse of that kind of feeling. Something much more restless and unhappy impelled that endless energy that went nowhere. This was why she hated the city. It was the embodiment of the pointlessness of eternal activity, motion without purpose, purpose without feeling, feeling without a clear thought behind it, only the impenetrable leviathan of the Capitol, dead from the dollargland on down.
Washington, DC, she hated in particular. It seemed to ferment every corruption she could think of, like she imagined ancient Rome had done, crushing out the virtues of the people under the weight of its press, feeding the juice in as a wine to be drunk again—spirit death by distillation. She knew alcohol. On the res too many of her friends thought that they'd escape through the bottom of a bottle. Washington was the production centre of their despair as she saw it.
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