Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  There was a sound of footsteps at the door and Lucy Desanto walked in on Alicia's moment, hands in the pockets of her slacks, her eyebrows raised beneath the grey and brown sweep of her fringe. “I see the party's started without me,” she said. She greeted them all with a single nod of recognition and a sardonic smile. “All the happy guests, thanks to your sweet invitations, Mikhail. So full of blandishments and pleasant words about my family. You must be pleased with everything you've achieved already.” She sat down in a vacant chair that was just outside the line of the group and folded her hands in her lap. Her gaze was relentless.

  “I sent no such letter.” It was the truth.

  “Your lackey, then. Ms. Delaney from the Department of Defense. What a charming girl. I'm sure she's destined for the top.”

  Her arrival had filmed the atmosphere with a slick of discomfort, as she had intended. Mikhail didn't make the mistake of attempting to disperse it. He waited for them all to accept the situation and to see what their reactions would be. They would have to get a lot more weight off their collective chests before any of them were capable of continuing Mappa Mundi, and the sooner it started, the sooner it would be over.

  “Mary Delaney is one of those who stand directly in the way of achieving anything with this project,” he said, keeping his attitude conversational although his eyes gazed firmly into Desanto's. “The Free State of Mind can never be brought into being as long as she and her compatriots exercise the control they do over us. We are not here to work for her. We are here to free ourselves.”

  “Ah, yes, your crusade,” Desanto replied. “But here we are, locked in a bunker, no outside communications and no escape. We couldn't even get a letter out. I expect that is all in the plan, though, is it?”

  “Is this place bugged?” Alicia was looking around at the walls and ceiling fitments. “And if not, why not?”

  “It's riddled with bugs,” Mikhail assured her, “which we've disabled in here over the course of the last few days. No doubt they will complain, but considering the situation, they will not be replacing the devices.” He was glad that they could speak freely within the confines of the environment. “It was also a condition of my continued support for the United States.”

  “Why? Going to defect again?”

  “Just once more,” he assured her. “But we've run out of drinks. Let's get some more, shall we?”

  The group broke up and went about finding things in the kitchen with shows of relief and small talk. Only Nikolai stayed behind, touching him on the arm.

  “You're very certain of yourself,” he said. “Why do you trust them? They can listen from anywhere.”

  “Because,” he said, “they know that I have all the production facilities in place for a global-scale NervePath output and they don't. They like to believe their security here is faultless, but they know we're smart. I don't trust them, they don't trust me, but they won't come for us until they're certain the product is viable without us, and until then, whether they're listening or not, they can stuff it up their ass. They may as well know the whole plan, because it doesn't change the fact that they need us for now.”

  “Not up to the usual scope of your security and ideas,” Nikolai said and smiled, patting Mikhail on the shoulder. “I see that at last you're like the rest of us.”

  Mikhail waited for him to finish. He'd worked a long time with Nikolai, longer than with anyone else. They'd first had the inklings of Mappa Mundi back in the early 1990s in Germany, working together in the same departments in Berlin. Now their ideas were slowly coming to life, and their lives, simultaneously, moving towards a conclusion. He was sure that Nikolai had an important statement, witty, precise.

  He wasn't disappointed. “Like you?”

  “Yes. Pissing in the wind.” Nikolai laughed asthmatically and coughed once or twice. “At last the playing field is level. I like that. It will be interesting to see what happens, even if none of us ever forgive you.”

  “Forgiveness isn't necessary,” Mikhail said. “Your gratitude will be my reward, the day all this secrecy and lying and deceit and unfairness comes to an end.”

  “Yes, of course it will,” Nikolai said. “And I will paste my thanks to the rear end of a flying pig.” He took his glasses off and wiped them on an optical cloth from his pocket, replacing them carefully afterwards. “You think all human nature is like yours. It isn't.”

  “It will be.”

  Nikolai ignored him. “You know, this Armstrong incident has changed everything. You have to find her before they do. You have to get her on our side.”

  Mikhail sighed heavily. “I think that's out of my hands now,” he said.

  “Pray, then,” Nikolai said, watching through the hatchway that led to the kitchen and its shining stainless steel as the others moved cautiously around each other. “Because if you're right about her and Patient X then you haven't got the power you think in Mappa Mundi on its own.”

  Mikhail watched them, too, Isidore oblivious between the two women on either side of him. Kropotkin was right. Now the power structure had changed. Nothing was as he had planned. All he could do was wait and hope that the few cards still in his hand stayed secret a little longer. The death of Tetsuo Yamamoto might have bought him a few more weeks. It might not. Here there was no knowing what went on in the affairs of the living.

  He made an excuse or two and retired to his own rooms to pour himself a single shot of scotch and stare at the simulation of a window overlooking the harsh Siberian steppe. Its windswept ice made him glad to be inside. For now.

  Ian Detteridge swam in oceans of flux. A place, no name, a play but no game, a chance in a field of chances dancing on the surface of his mind. Nameless places passed through him on their way to somebody else.

  His awareness flickered listlessly in and out of existence. The control he'd once had was gone. He'd thought it would, but that was no comfort now it had. It would and it had, it could and it did, it might—what was the word that would drag it back to his future?

  Like an albatross, by instinct he followed Natalie Armstrong, true to his word, keeping in touch, beneath and above, through and between, sailing the wind of the world.

  He tried to summon an effort of will. The chain of his trying to try stretched out in a yawning distance in every direction and he hung suspended in the zero-g of its centre point, becalmed. He thought he travelled. He thought of nothing, which was not the same as being nothing. He struggled to try, to remember to try, to search for the surface of things.

  He made his way, jiggery, jaggery, uncertain as a child in the dark.

  He decided to reach out.

  He reached into the tough, rough, solid, the dense, loose, light, the hard fixed form.

  He stepped into a truck with a curiously quiet engine and an almost silent, rail-smooth ride. Its walls were grey and fitted out with straps and clips and holding clamps of all kinds. In a soft chair, secured with seat-belt webbing to the floor of the truck, sat Natalie Armstrong like a queen, her flame hair in an explosive disarray, her jacket rumpled, her leather trousers shiny, her tough boots braced, and her long fingers drumming on the armrests, a mambo on the right and a march on the left.

  “Bobby,” she said, smiling a smile that made him feel suddenly good about being again. “I mean Ian. Thank God. You've got to help me get out of this thing before we get wherever we're going.”

  He recognized immediately that the NP system had spread inside her. She was almost completed, but she'd managed to halt it right before the fatal point where it changed, under its own rules, and became free. The results of its actions were still developing in their subtlety, and she was almost like him by now. Almost, but not enough to shift form.

  Ian looked into the structure of the truck's sides and reached into the gaps with fingers that felt their way along the domain lines between the crystalline forms of the metal and separated the lattices at these faults so that he could lift out an entire circle of the wall and put it on the floor. He
turned and Natalie was watching him, her face fearful but a smile lingering on it. He nodded and together they peered out for a few moments, faces into the wind.

  They weren't going too fast and the land outside was barren-looking industrial sites, some disused and decaying, others apparently limping along, still in business. Nobody saw them and they saw no police escort. No point in alarming the public, Ian thought, or perhaps they assumed there'd be no escape from the vehicle.

  “Can you jump?” He glanced at Natalie who was watching the paving and the road slide by. Fleetingly he felt anxiety, as though his body could be damaged by sudden contact at speed with the concrete, but then he realized it was Natalie's fear, not his own.

  “Yes,” she said with confidence. “But let's go out the back so they don't see us straightaway. With luck, we'll be able to hide before they know I'm gone.”

  “Okay.” Ian replaced the panel and realigned it carefully until even the paint seemed as if it had been untouched.

  Then he turned his focus to the rear doors and cut through them, avoiding the alarm and pressure sensors. It was tricky. Their wires ran everywhere, but at last he had a narrow gap she would be able to squeeze through. The bed of the vehicle was high, but he thought it looked easy enough, so long as you knew how to fall.

  “Don't forget to roll,” he said as she balanced in the hole, her hair jiving in the wind, jacket tails rippling.

  She turned to him, an exultant look on her face. “This is madness.”

  He nodded. “Maybe you'll enjoy it more than I have.”

  They slowed and came to a kind of junction at a corner.

  Natalie stepped down silently to the blacktop and said, “Come on. Put that back.”

  “You go. I'll catch up with you,” he said and started to fix up the panels.

  As the bomb truck wound its way through the old industrial estate and carried on with its slow route to the safe area, avoiding housing, Natalie walked the other way, towards the airport, concealing herself with buildings and walls as she went, eventually finding a highway that led into and out of the city.

  She hitched a lift with a salesman, coming home after a tour of the state, and Ian followed her at a distance, several levels below, waiting, conserving what he could for the moment when he would get his chance to do something that mattered.

  Natalie made straight for Jude's address in Eastern Market, surprised to find him within a stone's throw of the Capitol itself, amid handsome streets where mature trees had buckled the paving around them into hills and fissures with their roots. In a pale stone apartment building, on the top floor, his windows had a view of the old city heart. Dusk was coming on and the white buildings shone, with lights illuminating them from the ground. Importance and power were written deep in their architecture. In the homes and rooms close to her Natalie felt other energies moving: the blurred, vague impressions of people shone weakly like reflections in running water.

  She shivered as she stood on the curb and calculated how long it would take them to find her by tracing her taxi-payment transaction. She'd used the best encryption, but there was always a way. She estimated a few hours at the outside and if they'd any brains they might already be here, waiting for her to make an appearance.

  The heat and the smells were exotic. They almost nullified the nightmare of Dan's death with their newness to her. She lingered in the shadow of a ginkgo tree whose leaves trembled on an unfelt breeze, and absorbed the calm of change for an instant, looking unobtrusively around her for spies. There was no one loitering, apart from herself. Without waiting any longer she trotted up the steps to the foyer entrance and buzzed the doorman's attention.

  Her false ID worked on the building AI and she was admitted without any of the simpering interference she'd half dreaded from a place like this—but the doorman didn't believe in snobbery. He liked the idea that human beings could come and go without the third degree. He liked the look of her, even if she was a touch on the goofy side. She smiled at him politely through her exhaustion. Polite he liked, and he opened the lift doors for her and sent her on her way.

  The white corridor was hospital stark, Natalie thought as she stepped out and made for the fourth door along. All it was missing were some tiles, a lino floor, and the eternal stink of urine and it would have been a dead ringer for her psychiatric ward. Apart from its doors and lights it was featureless. It said to anyone—you are in a dead zone between lives, take a door at your peril, but for the sake of sanity, take one. She hadn't come for peril, although she knew now that Jude was certainly deeply in it if he was still here.

  His door had a touchpad service on the jamb and she brushed it with one finger. A beam scanned her face and she heard a chime sound inside.

  She waited almost a minute. Then the door opened and she was about to fall in with relief and anguish and the desperate need to collapse somewhere secure when she saw Jude.

  Although he was trying to appear normal as he held the door it was obvious he was in deep shock. His gaze was slow to fix on her, it wavered erratically and the hand in his hair had stopped midbrush through and seemed to be supporting his skull. His face was haggard his eyes looked sticky and red. More than that, inside his mind she didn't see Jude the competent detective but two other people: a man who was full of rage and despair, and someone who wanted to curl up in a corner and regress to the point where he didn't even know his own name.

  Whatever had happened to him in the days since they'd parted, it must be as bad or worse than what had happened to her. She knew it. Much as she wanted to, now was not her time to unlock her feelings about Dan and Selfware. She was the stronger one and she had to take this on the chin for longer.

  “Come in,” he said, blinking as though the light hurt his eyes.

  When the door was shut she put her hand out to his arm and held it as he was turning away from her, slumping with shoulders forward in a semiprotective posture. He rotated towards her, still closed up, and she said, quietly, “What happened?”

  “My sister …” he began, but then forgot how to continue and simply stared at her with the flat dullness of imbecility.

  If she hadn't known otherwise from his breath and the absence of any giveaway smell she would have thought he'd been drinking heavily. She realized she had to help him.

  “Come on, let's sit down.” After the entryway the apartment branched out into a big white room with what looked like comfortable furniture. Jude let her guide him and sat passively on the edge of a couch, resting his elbows on his knees.

  He rallied to say, “I should be asking you, shouldn't I? I heard about something. An accident at the Clinic. Was that you?”

  She was gratified for the instant that he searched her face with real sensitivity, trying to listen for her answer.

  “It was, but that's not important right this minute. I'm still here, see?” She spoke in her professional voice, the calm, warm tone she used to use for trauma patients and victims of violent crime. His whole behaviour suggested that he'd seen or been involved in something like that very recently. She thought about what he'd said—his sister—and became convinced that there was a horrible and fatal story in the offing.

  “Can I get you a drink?” she asked, crouching down at his side, all the time assessing him. He took a moment to answer.

  “Tea,” he said and made an effort to smile. “That's what the English do, right? Tea for all problems.”

  “Universal cure,” she agreed. “I'll be right back.”

  The white lounge, vast and airy, studded with diamond energy-saver lights, narrowed on one side and became a small kitchen, again full of white marble, shiny metal, and brilliance. The effect was like living inside Tiffany's front window, she thought, and shivered—how very odd to find him in a place like this. It didn't fit him. It was a show home, a designer “poof's palace” as Dan would have called it. But then, she wasn't thinking about Dan.

  She opened and shut cupboards until she'd located cups and the red pack of Twining's E
nglish Breakfast tea bags. It was very light and when she looked inside only tea dust remained. There were no other boxes in sight.

  “Shit,” she said, “you're all out of tea.”

  “No, there was one left,” he said and, exhausted, got up to show her.

  He took the box and confidently turned it, only to stop dead as he saw the inside.

  “That's odd,” he said. “I could have sworn I had … I must have.” He paused and swayed so suddenly that Natalie grabbed his arm to stop him falling. She thought he was fainting but he shot a hand out to the breakfast bar and steadied himself.

  “What is it? Don't worry. We can have something else.”

  “No,” he said, forcefully. He pushed himself off from the bar and staggered into the lounge, the box still in his hand. She didn't understand why he was fixated on it, but he didn't seem to have lost the plot entirely, so he probably wasn't suffering a paranoid delusion.

  He turned and balanced, speaking carefully, in control again, “White Horse doesn't drink anything except tarpit coffee and herbal tea. I don't drink tea. You do. Mary does. Last time that Mary was here she made herself a cup and said there was only one left and not to forget it next time I went to the store.”

  Natalie waited for him to conclude. Her own desperation and tiredness threatened to fight her to the floor but she stood nonchalantly and looked interested.

  Jude looked around him and Natalie followed his gaze that lingered on a handsomely mounted piece of Native American art and some kind of jewellery or beaded shirt display. “Mary must have been here when I wasn't. White Horse said she'd spoken to her and that Mary had told her about a lawyer. But I thought … I thought she meant they'd spoken on the phone, I don't know why. But she was here, and she didn't mention it.”

  “Who's Mary?” Natalie asked. Behind her the kettle chimed and switched itself off.

  “Mary, my partner,” Jude said, distracted. He sat down and turned the cardboard tea box in his hands, letting the dust sift out onto the immaculate carpet. “We've worked together four, five years.”