Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  He smoothed a piece of her hair down against the side of her head. “Actually, since my last girlfriend upped and left me for a baseball player with two houses in Europe and his own yacht, I've been working, and most of my informants ask for money or police protection instead.”

  “Silly me,” she said, wishing there was a way to apologize. She should be thanking him.

  “I'll leave you ten bucks when I go, if it'll make you feel better.”

  “When's your plane?”

  “Nine.”

  “Then we should get going.”

  “Wait a minute.” He drew his hand back. “What's the matter?”

  “It's not you,” she hated herself. “I'm just not used to—this.” She pulled the covers up to her chin. “I don't do this. I…”

  “Yeah, I know. You're mad.” Jude rubbed his own face and sighed. “You told me. So, when will I see you again?”

  “Don't joke,” she said, trying not to be both pleased and hurt. She wanted any feeling that wasn't accompanied by its opposite.

  “I'm not.”

  “You're playing a game with me.” Why did she say this? Only actresses said lines like that. What did it mean?

  “And what're you doing with me if I am?”

  Natalie stared up into his dark eyes. They were night. And here was the blue of morning. She pushed the worthless parts of herself aside and decided on honesty instead.

  “Well, how stupid would it be to say I've fallen in love with you at first sight, given that you're a hotshot FBI agent and I'm a bonkers woman in a lab coat whose most exciting regular experience is sticking electric shocks up other people's temporal lobes and watching them dance the cancan? That would have been attractive. Oh, and I could have told you about my lonely single woman's life, living with her closest friend, a gay man, in a flat-share that closely resembles the cliché of the age—the only thing missing is the cat and that's because ours ran away. I can see instantly that a man like you would go for that. Like a shot. Pow. Result.”

  “You talk too much,” he said and kissed her.

  “Stop it.” Natalie loved the kiss but turned her head away. She wanted to believe him but there was herself in the way; the information didn't compute with what herself said could be true.

  “What? Changed your mind? Okay, okay.” He lay down again and sighed. “Get lost, Jude.” He rolled over and sat up at the edge of the bed.

  Natalie felt sick. She watched him get up, testing his clothes where they hung on the chair to see if they'd dried out, putting his fabulous body away and out of her reach forever. Worse than that, going away forever. They'd liked each other enough. She'd thought she could tell him about her life and she had. He wasn't making fun. What was she doing? This was pathetic.

  “I didn't mean it. I'm acting like a fool.” Natalie flung the covers back despite the fact that the house was cold and she was naked. “Stop. I mean. Come back. If you're not joking. The situation. I didn't think you could really like me.”

  He turned around, shirt half on, “I know. I listened to you, remember? I saw your Map. I heard your rat's-ass-crazy plan to enlighten everyone in the world by reconfiguring their brains and your weird conviction that given enough of a chance everyone on the planet will become a good person when they understand the Way. I know about the difference between a spiritual experience and physical reality and the validity of both of them, I've seen it on your machine. I've heard it all. I assume you haven't infected me with some software that turns me into your love puppet, so, now, can you see where I have it tattooed that I do everything you say?” He held his arms out to either side and gave her a questing look.

  Natalie stared at him, her lower jaw loose.

  Jude grinned and pointed at her with both hands in gun position, “Now you know what it's like to be on the other end of that. Do I do a good Doctor Armstrong?”

  She nodded, drily. “Your pants are inside out.”

  He looked down at his naked body and she laughed.

  They were dressed by five-thirty. In the kitchen Natalie felt her delight sink down as she saw the file papers. She helped Jude pick them up and put them all back and made a half-hearted attempt to scrape the spilled wax off the tiled floor. As the catches on his flight case snapped closed she stood up and put the knife she'd been using into the sink. It made a dull, bored sound that died quickly. She had heard it a million times, the peculiar tone of metal on metal in that place. The whole of the last twenty-four hours seemed utterly unreal. Being in that house, cluttered with memories, was only the icing on the experience. She looked at Jude and her heart almost stopped. He and she—but he was going. Perhaps that was what had made it so easy after all.

  “Ready?”

  “No,” he said and walked out, sombre, his head bowed.

  She followed him and they went out through the back door and along the side of the house where a small pedestrian gate let them out onto the road. They turned towards the road out of town and walked in the fresh morning light to the hotel at the corner, where Jude got a taxi to the airport.

  As he watched the car pull up he turned to her. “I'll be in touch,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She nodded.

  He was still looking at her, his stare intense. “Take it easy.”

  “You, too.” She closed the car door for him and then knocked on the window. It opened for her automatically, the taxi's engine rising to a waiting hum. “Hey,” she said, “I'm glad you exist.”

  His face broke into a grin. “Ditto,” he said.

  She tapped the window and it closed again, sealing him in.

  Natalie watched his car drive away out of sight. She listened—for shots, for a bomb, for anything. The morning was calm. Her face felt raw in the cool air, where his unshaven face had rubbed it. Her whole body felt raw. She shivered in delight and set off to walk home across the city.

  If this was the way the real world got you to pay, it was worth it.

  Dan woke up to a hammering on his bedroom door.

  “Dan, you idiot. It's seven thirty! Get up!”

  He recognized Natalie's voice and a glut of relief swept over him, almost dislodging the ferocious hangover for a second. Then he remembered why it was important to get to work early—today they were doing the Bobby X experiment.

  The door opened and Natalie came in, holding out a mug of black coffee and a couple of white tablets. “Come on!”

  “Thanks. What're these?”

  “Just take them. I bought breakfast. Eggs, everything. It's in the kitchen.”

  The thought made him queasy. But he took the tablets and washed them down with scalding mouthfuls of the tarlike stuff in the mug. After only a few moments he started to feel better.

  “What's in them?” he muttered as he dragged himself out of bed and into a dressing gown. Natalie shouted back something about a prescription but he wasn't quite tuned in yet. There was something last night that he'd been desperate to talk to her about. Now, what was it?

  He sat down on the kitchen's only stool and watched her open a pack of bacon, lay the slices on the grill. When she turned around he noticed her face.

  “Shit, Natalie! You got him!”

  “Sound any more surprised and you can wear this spatula.” She brandished it in his face and splattered a few drops of hot fat on his dressing gown, but she was full of an energy that Dan recognized easily and he wasn't impressed.

  “I bet he was good. Was he? I saw you at the … I mean, I missed you at the pub. So, tell me.” The little white tablets were good, he felt almost human.

  She turned to him, “Saw us where? Oh Dan, you weren't…?”

  “Some bloke was following you, or him.” At the memory of it he touched his ribs and felt instant pain. “I got rid of him,” he said proudly.

  Natalie was staring at him with concern now, which he liked a lot less than her anger. “Dan?”

  “He hit me and I felled him with a knockout blow to the jaw. Iron Dan,” he said, hoping she wouldn't push
it.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I'm fine. Never better. Smashing pills, they are. Where'd you get them from? You could make a fortune.”

  “I stole them from work,” she said. “Where do you think? And don't change the subject. Who was following? Why were you—no, forget that, I can imagine the answer. Just tell me.”

  Dan finished his coffee and looked into the mug, which didn't tell him anything. “I don't know who he was. A big bloke in a big coat with a big hat on. I asked him for a light, he punched me in the gut. That's it. Why? Is he really an FBI agent?”

  “I think so.” She turned around and checked the eggs absently. When she turned back she was frowning.

  “Don't scowl. You looked happy before,” Dan suggested. “And you haven't told me what happened. In fact, maybe that could wait.” He'd suddenly remembered what it was he wanted to ask her. But that could wait, too, until they were at work and she had less mental energy to spare on grilling him about anything that might reveal the situation with Shelagh or Ray. She really would go mental if she knew the drugs had gone beyond a bit of weed and that the debts had changed the intensity of their grip on him.

  “What?” She buttered some toast and handed it to him. “You're making less sense with every minute. I need you on top form today. No mistakes.”

  “I think he was probably from the Home Office or something like that,” Dan said quickly. “Probably just wanting to make sure the star researchers aren't going to be compromised in the tabloids. So, how does he go, this guy?”

  Natalie's face altered subtly. He saw its glow.

  “Like a train,” she said sweetly and trod on his foot, smiling as she ground her heel onto his toes.

  “Your bacon's burning.”

  “Shit!” She got the grill tray out, using their one inadequate tea towel, and stood for a second, hopping as she licked her fingers and blew on them. Then she stood on his foot again as he giggled.

  Dan wondered if his suspicions about himself and the man on the corner were true. It made it difficult to keep up the lighter side. It made him wonder if that one-way ticket wasn't a better plan than anything here, but then he looked at Natalie and knew that he couldn't go.

  “Has he gone back?”

  “Who?”

  “Who d'you think? The Last of the Mohicans. Has he gone back to the loony bin?”

  “Flew this morning. Two rashers?”

  “Three, please. Never mind, darling.”

  “I don't mind.”

  “Ah yeah.” He sliced into a tomato and watched her industriously cutting up her own food, focused right in on it, pretending she was all together and cool. “That's what we all say.”

  Mikhail Guskov placed his call to arrive in the United Kingdom at seven forty-five. He looked into the screen of his second, personal Pad as his contact there answered. Neither of them needed to confirm anything about the day's test or their plans. All that was required was Guskov's authority to proceed.

  He'd given it a lot of thought since that meeting with Delaney. She liked to fool herself that she had that bunch of players at the Pentagon all in hand, but let her. He admired her balls for having the audacity to try it. But the sudden acceleration that this test had precipitated meant he had harder tasks than keeping her off his back. He had to find out if the Armstrong girl's test project was what he thought it could be. Despite his discreet backing of her, the Ministry there had still denied her a licence—not entirely surprising, given their already heavy involvement in Mappa Mundi and the fact that her work appeared to them to be no more than blue-skying: research that would, at best, produce marginal products and small revenues in the future.

  But Guskov wasn't so sure. He had an idea that she might be on to the most radical and far-reaching science of her time, and before he could list his final team he wanted to know if she was going to be in on it. If she was, then maybe, just maybe, he could still stay one jump ahead.

  He looked into the face of his contact and said simply, “Today.”

  His datapilot reported the line clean and the link was cut.

  Calum Armstrong would understand later, even if he wasn't prepared for his experiment to fail so dramatically. Mikhail would talk him round. If he didn't—well, it would be difficult to lose a friend and colleague, but that would be his test.

  When Jude had gone through passport control he called White Horse. There was no answer. He wondered if she'd received his earlier note. He left her another. The same.

  On the flight back he had forty minutes to think about what had happened in England. He had his information, and didn't he wish he hadn't got it, because now his world didn't make sense. White Horse had said once—insisted—“You can't be two things. You can only be one. Live one way, in one world. You're part white, part Cheyenne. You can't live both. You have to choose.”

  Well, he'd been first one and then the other, and now the world of reason that he'd thought was good enough to see him through anything wasn't working.

  It was not possible that he had the Ivanov file, although have it he did. But then, if Natalie hadn't told him about NervePath, Mappaware, and that it was possible to watch the flow of a physical action and know its meaning as a thought then that would have seemed equally as impossible a few days ago. But her other theories—that the self and free will were both illusory quantities, the results of imperfect understanding of the function of the brain and mind … he wasn't sure he could go the extra mile on those.

  He looked across the clouds and thought of Natalie. She was singular. He liked her. She was interesting. If she was crazy, he liked that, too. “I'm glad you exist.” He didn't think he'd had a compliment like that before.

  “Champagne, sir?” the attendant asked.

  “No, thanks.” He didn't want to drink. He had to get—and keep—a clear head for Washington.

  But as he tried to turn his mind onto the notes he was making he found himself thinking about Natalie's lopsided smile and what she'd said about Selfware, the system built to detect ESP, to facilitate intelligent understanding, to expand the mind's potentials to an unknown maximum limit.

  To his reasoning self that, too, sounded crazy, like automated insight, like manufacturing spirit or personality. Could that be a good thing? Wasn't it another way for someone else to control you, or for you to do things to yourself that weren't wise at times when your fears got too much and the nights too long?

  He knew that the technology could work, because of Deer Ridge. He just couldn't imagine what that would be like. Natalie's own connection to the problem was so personal, he even had sympathy for her father's views that she was too involved, making theories of her own psychoses. But she was only a part of the whole.

  Deer Ridge was an early version of something his government had. Would that be good?

  He'd like to think that. But deep in his heart he felt an older mistrust.

  Even now the old treaties drawn up with his father's People had never been honoured, recompense never paid, admissions of bad judgement never made, and genocidal intent never acknowledged. Against his Cheyenne half the government had no record of good behaviour, just the reverse. If they'd had Mappaware back then there would be no Nation now.

  Even if the technology had a good side, he didn't believe that was the only use it would see in the hands of the USA. Maybe Natalie's technology was a way to end all dissent—we will all be God-fearing, Bible-reading, materialist self-deluders. Everyone could buy in happily and be glad. If they were really happy, would it matter what they were? Wouldn't it be better than the present sorry state of Deer Ridge, with its eighty percent unemployment and a plenary judicial system that got government out of every promised benefit, with one weasel word after another, “respect for ancient ways” being foremost.

  And there he was, Jude, channelling White Horse and not believing in the supernatural. He grinned and shook his head. One thing or another? He thought he'd rather have a lot of undecided things, and none of them quite rig
ht, than only two choices.

  He sent a message to Mary, letting her know that he was coming back in a few hours' time. It was going to be difficult, finding out more without telling her, until he was sure that they needed to make an issue out of whatever it was that was really going on. One thing he had learned since joining the agency was to look before he leaped and he had to get Mary on side before he'd have a chance.

  White Horse had no idea she was being followed. That was, she expected it, looked for it without trying to appear antsy, but recognized nothing—not that she knew what she should be seeing either, and that all added up to no idea in her view. Because she'd come that way and knew the roads, she headed back towards the railway station, tagging along behind two Ethiopian schoolkids with identical bright pink lunchboxes sporting the latest cartoon hero from TV, each one talking to its owner in perky tones of enthusiasm and in words she didn't understand.

  She walked fast, businesslike, along the Mall, past the Museum area to the long strip where there'd be plenty of people moving and open ground. She liked land where you could see further than to the next block. She wanted to feel she could run.

  Because there were six of them, linked by earpiece, expertly shifting roles around her in the morning pedestrian traffic, because they knew how to hunt in these conditions, she missed them all. But one of her senses, working overtime, prompted her to turn in and get a ticket to the Air and Space. Not that she had any love of aeroplanes, and the space programme was dead on its knees, more like a historical quirk than a living science … but she stepped inside and moved quickly towards a packed elevator. Her instincts made her examine the face of everyone coming through the doors towards her. One of them.

  The doors closed and she felt the heaviness as she was lifted. Tiny box. She got out at the first opportunity and found herself face to face with a portion of Enola Gay. Photographs and montages of screaming, dying people walled her in on every side. She could touch the metal of the thing that had dropped the Hiroshima bomb. She did touch it. It was warm from so many hands, as calmly inert as the machine banging against her side.