Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Getting past the school tours was hard. She shoved more than once, got cursed, found a stairwell and ran down it, looking for an exit. One floor above her she heard the door open. One floor below her another door closed. She leaned over the rail but they were hugging the wall. The well of the stairs disappeared into darkness.

  Behind her a woman came into view. She was tall and tough-looking.

  “Here she is,” the woman said and stopped, looking flat at White Horse. The woman's stance showed she was poised to leap down the flight and tackle her to the ground.

  White Horse spun around and saw a man running up from below, the identical imperative to stop her in his eyes. She grabbed the handrail and kicked out at him as soon as he got within range, a mad gesture that packed more intent than power, but she was panicked now and ran straight into his destabilized body, knocking him aside as she threw herself down and down again.

  She was starting to feel the first surge of relief as she stepped out into the museum foyer again. Then a hand took her arm from the side.

  “No!” White Horse pulled away. She opened her mouth, ready to scream the place down if it would get her enough attention, but only the shocked face of an old man looked up at her. He backed away from her and she wanted to apologize but instead she walked quickly across and joined a group of people just being ushered into a space-simulation ride. Her ticket was good for that. She pushed her way to the end of the seated row as they sat down and heard herself cursed blue by Kentucky accents from one side of the auditorium to the other.

  As the doors were about to be closed she stood up and brushed past the security guard through the exits. She was on a dark ramp, leading her back up to ground level. Hesitantly she walked up and tried to appear confident as she moved towards the doors. Could she have lost them?

  They closed on her as she reached the street, a human knot who hemmed her in on all sides in a practised dance that looked like an ordinary jumble of different people whose paths have just crossed for a moment and in that moment a cold stab pierced the arm of her jacket.

  They were so close that she didn't fall as the drug took hold. The last impression she had was of them sitting her in the seat of a large car, fastening her seat belt judiciously, undoing her treacherous hands from their grip on the bag and lifting it gently away.

  Bobby X was not the real name of Ian John Detteridge but it was his name now. They called him that at the hospital and he answered to it—but he didn't answer them. He answered their voices, which came at him from the shifting, coloured holes in the world.

  At first, when he'd woken out of the anaesthetic and the accident, he thought he'd lost part of his sight. He could make out the shapes of his bed and the equipment hanging around him in swathes of spaghetti tubing. He could see the curtain and the window and the walls of his room and its flickering, badly fitted light on the left. Clear as daylight they were. But then he'd noticed a patch that didn't seem right.

  It was a mass of shifting tones and planes. He thought—a coat … no, a …—but here his thoughts ran out.

  “Mr. Detteridge?” said a voice from behind the blur.

  He tried to see around it, blinked, jogged his eyes about. (That hurt.)

  Something touched his arm and that was part of the shapeless thing, too. It even had a strange colour to it, greyish, like rat fur, like dust. He cringed, “Nurse!” he called hoarsely.

  “Mr. Detteridge?”

  He realized the voice was coming from the grey, alien thing that he couldn't see.

  He screamed.

  It had taken some time to diagnose the problem and, even when they had, he didn't understand it. They said he'd lost the ability to recognize living things. And that grey, mouldy brown aura, that shapeless, undefinable, shifting mass that was a nothing—that was how he saw a living thing now. Didn't seem right that a brain could be mixed up that way just from a bang on the head, but so they said, and because he wanted it to be true Ian agreed with them and went along with it.

  Bobby X was the name he got from going into special therapy. They said they'd fix him now and at last the day had come. They didn't use his real name because he was a kind of volunteer and the therapy was still a secret, just being tested, and he was going to test it for them and be a pioneer, would he like that?

  He wanted things to be normal. Of course he'd said yes. What was the other option? Try to go home to your wife and children who now scared the living daylights out of you and looked—“abominable” was the only word to describe that mixture of revulsion and wrongness.

  But now the time had come he was scared to his bones. He didn't want to do it. What if they only made everything into that rat-coloured nothingness? What if he didn't make it? Then he might be stuck in a mental home forever, living like this, a moron, an embarrassment. They might forget him and he'd die there, mouldering away to rat dust.

  He listened to the TV to keep himself alert. Couldn't watch it, only listen. He turned his head away as the nurse brought in a drink and some toast. He knew it was her, but he couldn't bear to look. It was like knowing wasn't enough any more. He could “know” as hard as he liked, but when they came at him he saw—indescribable things. They said the ratty colour was his own repulsion, an illusion. But he didn't feel that was true. In their odd movements, their incomprehensible lack of sense to him, it was part of them, as real as their loathsome, sudden touch.

  There would be no need for sedation. They'd filled his head with the tiny things that would do the fixing and it wouldn't hurt at all.

  He wasn't sure. He just wasn't sure.

  Bobby X. He'd heard it said so often it was more his name than the real one. Or if he stayed this way, it would be his name forever. Man of mystery, like a revolutionary. He liked the sound of it, but not the reality. If he was going to stay like this—he'd rather die than be alone with these things around him, talking as if they knew him, as if he knew them. If it didn't work, he'd find his way. Save some pills or something. He'd get out.

  The semblance of a plan made him feel better.

  He sipped his tea.

  Natalie watched Bobby from the doorway and took her readings with the handscanner from behind his back. It had a reasonable range and she didn't want to upset him any more than he already was. If it were future days she could probably have pursued the entire treatment without him being any the wiser, but as things were Bobby X was a test animal and he was going to have to jump through the hoops for as long as it took to recalibrate the new tissues of his brain.

  Seeing her father wasn't something Natalie was looking forward to, but she didn't delay it. She fortified herself with memories of the night before and took the results straight to the Therapy Suite where he was already deep in discussions over the last-minute details with Knitted Man, Bill, the systems supervisor. His satellite image was large as life on-screen from his labs in America. Either he or Bill could easily have read her data already from the network, but protocol demanded she announce it herself.

  “The last NP check is ninety-four percent saturation. Ready to go,” she said, breaking in when they reached a pause.

  Her father nodded after a microdelay. “Thanks.” He added, as an afterthought, “Your last paper in Neurotechnology Journal was better than before. But I think you should have given more graphics for the online version. An illustration in real time would have made your argument more conclusive.”

  Natalie raised an eyebrow. High praise indeed, and, as Calum sat down and began fussing self-consciously with already completed routines on the program, she thought she detected a smidgeon of guilt at his neglect of her over the months—no calls, no letters, and the excuse, as always, “a secret project demands absolute security.”

  Bill gave her the double banana of both eyebrows in quick succession and she smiled vaguely at him. He looked undeniably cheerful, instead of stressing out. His confidence was a credit, considering the numbers of Ministry roving about the place. Every corner she'd turned today had seen clutches
of grey-suited officials milling in the lanes, loitering, and muttering into the microphones of their cuffs and lapels; glassy-eyed, they watched her pass, listening in to the neat earpieces that trailed a single wire into the trim lines of their collars. Outside they turned into black-uniformed police and some kind of soldier she didn't know the name of that carried small but effective-looking guns. The cordon was tight. She could almost feel it around her neck.

  “I'll check the room prep,” she said, although neither of them were paying her any attention now. It was the next task that had chimed up on her Pad. Her father looked up at her as she passed the camera.

  “Mrs. Reed says somebody's made a mess of the kitchen up at the house. I take it that was you?”

  God, that woman worked fast, Natalie thought, not too fondly. “It was hardly a mess. I knocked a candle over. I didn't have time to fix it this morning.”

  Fortunately he didn't have the imagination to wonder why she'd used candles instead of the lights. He grunted, “Okay. Now, let's get the patient cued up. It's nearly five to eleven.”

  Natalie wasn't required for this duty. She took the time to go to the staffroom and get a drink. She was thinking over Calum's unusually positive response to her work, wondering what it meant, or whether it was a soft-soap for a later attack, when her sleeve was tugged violently. She realized Dan was at her shoulder,

  “Nat!” he whispered. “Where's the scanner thing?”

  “It's in the Therapy Room, where do you think?”

  “Can you get it back?”

  “Why?” She scowled at him, hesitating with her hand on the door. What lunacy was he thinking of now?

  “I want to borrow it.”

  “What?” Her scowl became a glare. “Don't be silly. Not now. Anyway, what for?”

  “Nothing.” He shifted from foot to foot. “Never mind. Coffee?”

  “Dan!” She grabbed his arm and stopped him as he was halfway into the room. “What's going on?”

  “It's okay. Nothing. I wanted to … look, you're right. Not now, eh?” He pulled away from her with expert grace and made a beeline for the drinks machine.

  She stared after him, stupefied, and then shook her head. Whatever it was he was bothered about it would have to wait until this was over. She hoped it wasn't something to do with that dodgy mate of his, Ray. And speaking of Ray—she stepped up quickly to Dan's side.

  “You haven't got anything in your locker, have you?”

  “Espresso, hon?” He handed her a cup and met her gaze with a firm “no” glare. “I certainly won't have. Are they doing a search?”

  “Oh, Dan, for Christ's sake!” Natalie kept her voice to a whisper, smiling over his shoulder at Charlton, who was giving her a grin. “You said you'd given it up. You can't use at work. We had a deal. Now go get rid of it before some officious prat from London sniffs it out and we all get dragged over the coals. It's my bloody job as well as yours!”

  “Hold that.” He gave her his cup and marched out at a fast clip. She could tell from the way he didn't meet her eyes that he was feeling guilty. Well, he could bloody feel guilty, he should feel it.

  The mug started burning her fingers. She put it down and was immediately cornered by the nervous aftercare technician who wanted to know what they were going to talk to Bobby's family about on the viewing deck, once the show was in progress. Natalie kept looking to the door for when Dan would get back, wanting to follow him and make sure he wasn't caught. But there was to be no escape and he didn't return for what seemed a very long time.

  Dan took a nonchalant stroll down to the cloakrooms and went in, glancing at his watch. He checked the locker area thoroughly—nobody about. Inside his locker he did have an old ounce of the good stuff tucked away, for moments when fortification was required. He hadn't used it for at least … well, at least a week. The practice of fishing it out and slipping it into his pocket, using a half-pack of biscuits as a cover was well worn in. He managed it without a hitch, locked up again, and made for the exit. His Pad rang when he was halfway there.

  He answered it before thinking to check the line and with a sickening jolt saw Shelagh Carter's face looking out at him from the screen. “Er, hi,” he muttered. “I'm at work just now, I can't—”

  “That's fine, Dan,” she interrupted firmly. “This will only take a moment. I understand that you're a good friend of Doctor Natalie Armstrong.”

  Dan's mouth, already a bit blanched from a morning of severe dehydration, went desert dry. He worked his throat for a useless second and croaked, “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “Not to worry.” Shelagh smiled obligingly. “But we've had a report that somebody might have tried to latch onto her in the last week or so. An expert enemy agent, snooping for information on the work at the Clinic, particularly today's experiment. I thought you'd be the person to ask. I wouldn't usually, because it's hard to discuss a friend, I know, but it's for her own benefit. She's one of our best. We don't want anything to cause her trouble, or danger.”

  “No, no, quite,” Dan mumbled, trying to think much faster than his mouth was moving. Maybe he should have told Shelagh earlier about the American. Was he American? What had Natalie told him? There was no way of knowing.

  “Are you sure?” God, that was so weak. She'd know he was stalling.

  “We're ninety percent sure. As you can imagine, the subject, the experiment, the whole field is red-hot at the moment. Anything unusual, Dan. Anybody. You don't have to name names if you don't know them, just any clue.”

  Dan dithered. Suddenly he wasn't sure about Jude. Natalie was sharp, but even she could be taken in by the right face, the right line. He knew he could be. What if it was as Shelagh said and maybe Natalie was in danger? But then, he had a reason not to entirely believe everything Shelagh said, either … He wanted to run back to the lounge and discuss it all, but Shelagh was looking at him from the screen and he dare not for fear she'd interpret any delay as tacit guilt.

  “There was someone,” he began. Then he quickly hedged it around with, “But maybe he was genuine. I mean, I don't know, do I?”

  Shelagh nodded.

  Dan decided not to tell the truth. “He was this Asian guy. An engineer from one of the big companies that make our computer system. I think they had dinner. Nothing else.”

  “Are you sure?” She fiddled with the controls on her Pad, momentarily blotting herself from view with her fingertips.

  A heavy wave of blankness swept Dan's mind. It was like a pressure, it flattened his intentions down. He should tell her the truth. It was safer. It was better. He'd feel good again, if only he did.

  “Maybe he was American,” Dan said without any conscious desire to say it. It was as though the words had taken on lives of their own and were tripping off his tongue, pixielike, whether he willed them to or not. “Yes, he was. His name …” Dan fought back, trying to think of something inappropriate—think of any vegetable except a carrot! “J—” … any name, then, Jasper, John, Julius, Justin, Jack, Jonathan, Jason …

  “J-u—d-e.” It was drawn out of him, as though she had caught the hook of the J and wound it up around her finger. “Westhorpe” followed easily, a second later. His head was fishy, swimmy. He might be sick again.

  “Good work, Dan,” Shelagh said cheerfully and he thought for a disoriented second that she was a sturdy WAAF girl in a wartime film, chivvying the boys along when the formation had finally landed, Jerry bombed to bits and only one man missing. It was the voice that was brisk, starchy, English to the core … except … except …

  She must have cut the call from her end. He found himself sitting on the tile floor, the biscuits crushed under his hand. When he tried to remember what had just happened, it drifted out of his reach effortlessly and away into never. He had a vague feeling that he had done something very, very bad.

  The ounce, that was it. He had come to get rid of the ounce.

  With only a small amount of subterfuge he managed to sneak his way into the incinera
tor room where specialist medical waste, not allowed to leave site, was destroyed and popped the offending packet in. A few thousand degrees wouldn't leave enough residue for Scotland Yard to trace.

  As an afterthought he put the biscuits in, too. They'd been open for months.

  Back at the coffee lounge he pushed past one of the junior technicians and gave Natalie the wink. “Done it.”

  She stared at him, “What's the matter with you? You look awful. And what did you want that scanner for?”

  “Scanner?” He didn't remember. “I don't know. I'm sure it'll come back to me if it's important.”

  She shook her head, “Get it together, will you? Honestly. Today of all days.”

  Jude got home and opened the door, immediately looking for his sister.

  “Vohpe'hame'h,” he called out, using her Cheyenne name instead of the English version, thinking it might please her better.

  There was no reply. Her bag was gone, he realized, as he checked all the rooms, in fact, there was no trace of her at all.

  No, that wasn't quite right, she'd left some hairs behind—short, broken-off ones—in the bathroom and on the pillows of her bed, but that didn't tell him for how long she'd been here after he'd left. He'd been away two days, three nights.

  “Shit,” he said softly into the mushy quiet that the triple-glazed windows offered. For a second he was at a loss. He turned around, looked through to the kitchen table or the pinboard for a note, but there was nothing.

  He checked the message backlog:

  “Hi, Jude, this is Mary …”

  “Mr. Westhorpe, this is MasterCredit Customer Accounts calling. We'd like to …”

  “Jude, Steve. Yannick's dropped out of the squash league and I was wondering …”

  “Jude, Perez here. Check in when you get back from Seattle. I want to see you and Mary about the Florida case …”

  “Would you like to know how to make a million …”