Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  As the scheduled technical scans of Bobby X came to an end and the data began to be processed, it was time for the more traditional method of evaluation—a conversation.

  Guskov walked along the back of the room and tapped Natalie on the shoulder.

  “Since you're his chaperone,” he said and held the door open for her.

  She gave him a nod and went into the test room to clear away the scan gear and bring the other chairs forward so they could all sit in conference together.

  Mikhail followed her and did his share. Bobby—Ian—sat and watched them with a constant and unwavering attention. His expression was unreadable, blank but fully engaged. Mikhail wondered what he saw.

  Jude stood on the lowest bar of the gate at Theo Jones's Two-Fox Ranch and from the shade beneath his hat brim looked out over the corral at the circling horses. Theo was just behind him, sucking on a stem of old grass, letting Jude take his time. The paddock was dry and the grass all but ground up to nothing under the many hooves. Jude kept coming back to a graceful, powerful horse, its mane the same golden chestnut as Mary Delaney's hair. It had a white blaze on its face. There were no pale animals in the herd except a grey, but it was too dark for his purpose.

  “That one?” Jones tipped his own hat back and nodded, extracting the grass stem for a moment. “Best one in the whole damn' herd.” He was aggrieved, but there was nothing he could do. Jude handed over the best part of ten thousand and left an hour later on the nameless animal's back, riding the last ten miles across Jones's well-maintained pastures and woodland, up to the reservation fence line.

  It was a long time since Jude had been in the saddle, but he hadn't forgotten how to ride. The horse, a mare, followed his leads easily and ran light on her feet, eager to be moving and full of the vigour of the bright day. His leathers creaked. He wore his father's necklace and bone-beaded jacket. He wore White Horse's old hat, which had been left at Jenny Black Eagle's house and so had escaped the fire. Good thing she had a head as big as his, he thought, and almost smiled. With the reins in one hand and the other resting easy, the mare's paces rocking and calm, he could have stayed like that forever, crossing the land, always going forward. But within what seemed like minutes they had found the trail that ran along the wire fence and were soon at the gateway and the dusty ride up into Deer Ridge.

  He made her walk the last half mile. They stopped finally, panting in the noon heat, where the charred earth of the old house sat opposite Paul Bearchum's porch. Jude dismounted and tied the pony up to the mailbox. As she began to crop the grass close to it he walked inside, the brief lift of spirit he'd felt in the woods vanished into thin air.

  He sat in the cool kitchen for the next half hour with Paul himself, drinking iced tea and listening to the sound of his mother in the other room, talking to other cousins. He and Paul said nothing, rested their glasses on the blue-and-white-check tablecloth, watched the world outside the open door. The day was sunny and bright with high, white cloud scudding in the distance. Gentle breezes ruffled the long, straggling grass heads that crowded next to the porch steps. Down the road a child played on a bright green tricycle. A chicken hawk sailed over the long, black ground where White Horse's home had stood, hanging on the mild updraught there, moving on.

  “This case,” Paul said at one point. “Will it ever make court?”

  “I don't think so,” Jude replied. They were talking about the case White Horse had tried to put together and which he had asked Paul to testify on. “I've got enough to start with and get a hearing; the program they used and a set of NervePath.” He found himself unconsciously touching his head. “I can demonstrate the effect. But I need witnesses who saw the people that came, who saw them holding the scanner or saw it in their car outside Martha Johnson's store. I need links.”

  “Okay,” Paul said, getting up for more ice. He was sixty-nine now and moved stiffly under his weight, taking his time. His hair still had dark amid the white, but his face showed all the years. “If you ask the others today they might change their minds.”

  “Maybe.” And Jude needed to ID those people in the car. He had descriptions, not very good ones. He kept his mind on these things. They were having the ceremony in an hour.

  Paul hadn't seen the car, but he had met one of the men involved when he was in town getting his weekly groceries. He could make an identification. As for the peanut butter, it was distributed via the store on a sign-out basis with the showing of a welfare card. Jude had collected samples of the contaminated batch, having toured that morning using a list of names on the dole register. He hadn't said why exactly, and nobody had pressed him for an explanation. Their dislike of his association with the Feds had mingled with their sorrow about White Horse and the mixture had made them stonily sympathetic. The fresh tins sitting in the back room of the shop on South Main had all tested clear. So he had that. Unfortunately Martha and her husband, who may have been able to confirm that the tins were contaminated while in the shop and not beforehand, were already in the burial ground on the southern face of the valley.

  “You not on your own with this?” Paul asked.

  “Don't worry about that.” Jude still had the bastards who had thought White Horse would do the dirty work for them at the back of his mind. They could do their bit now. He planned to hand it across to one of their lawyers and he or she could stand up and get shot at for a change. But meanwhile he had to get more information.

  In the other room the uneasy relationship between his wealthy white middle-class mother—a summer night's fling—and Magpie's remaining Cheyenne family seemed to have come to a quiet halt. Jude got up and took himself in there.

  Squirrel, his youngest cousin and one of White Horse's closest friends, was sitting nearest the door. She made room for him on the sofa and he creaked down into it, trying to keep to the edge.

  “We heard she drowned,” Squirrel whispered.

  Jude nodded.

  “Drunk and drowned?” Jenny Black Eagle wanted to know, her voice hard and unforgiving.

  “Yes.”

  The atmosphere in the small room bristled with resentment, tension, and anger.

  “Murder?” Squirrel asked, looking up at him, her fashionable long-in-front haircut dropping across her eyes.

  Jude closed his eyes and nodded.

  Someone snorted derisively.

  “Because of the case,” Rob, Red Hat's son, said in his soft-spoken way, always calm. “She must have tried too hard.”

  “I'll follow it up,” Jude said, staring down at his hands and then up into their dark, fierce glances. “I am doing.” He looked at his mother, leaning back in the wicker recliner, her black suit a stoic plain shadow, her face very pale in this room of bright colour and darker tones. Her chestnut-dyed hair was tied up in a bun and on her lap her hat was similarly austere. She smiled at him with her eyes only.

  “Then you'll go, too.” Squirrel took hold of one of his hands unexpectedly and wrapped her own narrow one around it. “It isn't because of the coal oil?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “It's nothing to do with that.”

  “What, then?” Jenny said.

  Jude wasn't sure what to say for the best. He didn't want them to know it was a military arms test for fear of what their reaction might be; mostly a reaction that would cause trouble and get people killed. Not that they would see it that way to begin with. And they'd have right on their side. “I think it's a secret research development. I don't know. I'll find out.”

  Jenny looked at him, her face neither trusting nor mistrusting. Her watch alarm beeped. “Time to go,” she said and glanced at him as she stood up. “Paul told me you want witnesses.”

  He nodded.

  “I'll find you some.” She led the way out through the kitchen and into the street where the flatbed pickup bearing the body had arrived. Jude led the horse behind it, with the rest following them along the minor road that ran down towards the burial ground. He had a lot of people to thank, he thought as they
reached the spot, just a stone's throw from the graves of the Johnsons. Friends and relatives had laboured to dig a pit seven feet wide and fourteen long.

  The pickup stopped on the road and Jude handed the horse to Squirrel to hold as he took the front of the bier and led the way down to the sheltered spot overlooking the river valley. They set the wooden cradle on a stand and the blanket-wrapped body looked like nothing so much as a bundle of old clothes to Jude. He took off the necklace and his father's jacket and put them over it. He took off the hat and laid that across her chest.

  Squirrel came forward and placed on the bier a silver belt she'd made. Jenny Black Eagle gave a book of poems, handwritten. Others came forward with small things: cloth, a cake.

  Jude went down into the earth with it and saw that everything was set properly. He hauled himself out of it and stood on the side. Jenny put the pony's saddle in. Squirrel handed him the pony's rein. Everyone stood silently, even the priest, Father Younger, who'd come up from Missoula in case they had a last-second change of heart. Jude caught sight of his mother's face. She was shocked. Of them all, she was the only one who hadn't anticipated what was coming next.

  He led the horse to the edge of the hole. It didn't want to go, but its pleasure in the day and its docility made it step close to when he offered it a mint from his pocket. From the back of his waistband he pulled out his gun. The click made the mare cock her ear in curiosity. She lipped his hand, looking for another sweet.

  Jude hesitated. White Horse would never have shot an animal. She'd rather have died. Perhaps he'd have been smarter buying her a Subaru instead, but the warrior burial said horses for the next life and she'd been committed to that path. He brought the gun up where the horse couldn't see, and patted its neck with the same hand, starting to release the straps of the bridle from its ears.

  But he didn't believe in any part of him that this was going to help. Of everyone standing there this horse was the best animal among them. He'd seen it run, felt its simple joy in life. It deserved to live, and he didn't believe there was any other world in which he and White Horse would get to ride it again.

  Across the horse's sweat-marked back he saw the cousins, Paul, and the Tribal Chief watching him, their faces impassive, merely waiting. His mother had steeled herself and was rigid. Behind him Squirrel had taken a brace breath and was holding it. Jenny Black Eagle, who had once spat at him on the day he'd left to join the FBI, was at his other shoulder.

  Jude looked down into the grave and up at the wild, blue sky.

  He pulled the trigger.

  At close quarters the shot was almost deafening. The crack made them all jolt, none more than the fire-coloured horse which took off in a gigantic leap over the grave, scattering Jude's cousins like ninepins.

  Jude threw the limp leather straps of the bridle into the pit where the saddle rested and instead reached into his pocket, took out the keys to his Porsche, and tossed them in instead. Across the cemetery and the long sweep of field that ran down towards the lowlands everyone watched as the horse danced and leapt its way like a Chinese cracker, bounded over the low rail that marked Hawk and Joseph Benson's new vineyard boundary, and disappeared among the tall rows of trained grapes that traced across the ridgeline, following the sun.

  Somebody, he thought it was Squirrel, giggled nervously and Jude himself started to laugh. He turned to see the cousins struggling to their feet, dusting themselves off. His mother had her hand clamped across her mouth, although he thought it was to hide a smile.

  He jerked his head in the direction of the horse. “She never did wait to hear what I had to say.”

  Everyone except the Catholic priest was smiling or hiding a laugh behind their hands.

  Jude stuck the gun back into the waistband of his jeans, bent down, and threw the first handful of earth. “Vohpe'hame'e,” he said, his sister's name, the last time he would say it. They waited in case he had more to say, but it was Paul and the Chief himself who spoke the ceremony to free her spirit in the end. Jude got up and turned when it was done and the other hands had begun their work of scattering earth. His knees were painful and he was saddle-sore, ready to face whatever angry crap Jenny and the others were ready to throw about him ruining things. But as he staggered it was Jenny's hand that caught his arm to steady him.

  “Come on,” she said, a smile on her face that had lingered from the spectacle of the cousins gathering their dignity. “Let's go home.”

  “There's no difference,” Ian was saying as the full team crowded around him in the testing area of the Sealed Environment. “Fundamentally all mass is energy and the quantum is the basic unit of information. When you see that, you realize the simple structure of the universe. Complexity is built of simple fundamentals, acting within information arrays whose range is determined by macrostructure.”

  “Whoa.” Desanto, the cyberneticist and systems expert, held up her hand. Like the rest she couldn't help but bend closer to him, to see, to hear, to believe. “You're saying that particles at the quantum level are somehow restrained in their interactions by events on the Classical scale?”

  “Gravity would be the case in point,” Ian said, leaning back in his seat and wishing, at this moment, that he had a fat cigar to wag between his fingers. Never in his life had he had such an attentive, respectful audience. He wished his wife could have seen this, instead of the beery pub reminiscences that used to be the best talks he ever gave. But all she would have cared about gravity was that it kept her feet on the floor. Washing machines were more important. Actually, even now, the fragment of him that had stuck around in spite of his expansion wasn't sure that they weren't.

  Isidore stumbled over his words. “G-gravity? You understand that?”

  “Densely packed quanta develop a strong transdimensional harmony between them that propagates waves of attraction,” Ian said, keeping the words simple, although they were inadequate.

  The room was quiet. They were all looking at one another, but none of them were experts in the field. They couldn't naysay him and they didn't know if they dared agree. Nobody had so far come up with a theory of gravity that fitted both the theories of quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity. If they had, then the Theory of Everything would be in their reach and macro and micro universes fused into a model that predicted on both scales. It was worth … well, Ian thought it was worth at least a Nobel and a place in history. When he'd first realized what he was doing, sifting through matter and himself, he'd thought that maybe he'd quite like to have that. Now it was irrelevant on such a scale … He laughed.

  “Have you got the figures on this?” Isidore was writing hastily.

  “Not exactly,” Ian admitted. “I don't do maths. I just … experience it.”

  “And is it right that the effect of an observer really changes the particles as though they're conscious?” Kropotkin asked tentatively.

  “Consciousness is a macrophenomenon,” Ian said, “which is why it's so difficult to take it apart and fix it up again. Macrostructures: once you've undone them, their complexity is thermodynamically susceptible, so you never do them up again exactly the same. You always lose bits. Particularly the longer you're—”

  “Submerged?” Natalie suggested.

  Ian nodded and his face became very heavy. “Yeah. The places where you have to put your information are themselves interacting all the time with the rest of the universe. Leave it too long and you drown, I guess that's the way to think of it. The little guys forget what they were doing.” He grinned weakly at her. He wasn't feeling so great. It actually took concentration to maintain himself, like the effort of looking hard at one spot all the time. When he started to lose parts then he started to feel ill, and frightened. He longed to sink back under and drift in the endlessly changing, moving swirl, where it was safe and he would be allowed to forget.

  “Mister Detteridge,” Guskov said. “Would you demonstrate for us?”

  Ian looked at him. Detteridge. Yes, he'd forgotten that. He nodded
, glum, resigned. This wasn't the kind of thing he'd been thinking of, this performing-seal thing. He'd wanted a big showdown where he got his say and the white-livered scientists involved got to cower and be sorry … it was a dumb kid's fantasy, really. He felt ashamed of it. But he wasn't sorry about Dan Connor's body. That bitch had it coming.

  Now he looked up into Mikhail Guskov's face and saw a person very alien to the one he himself had been when he was really Ian. This one had always been at arm's length from reality and other people. He was almost like Isidore there in that respect, but the quality of his distance was more intellectual than simply the result of a differently wired brain. He'd learned that people were predictable, that they had emotional buttons you could press to get what you wanted in a constantly reliable pattern. He'd understood that about himself and set about becoming invulnerable to such interference by holding no dream too close, no value too strongly. At the same time his manipulation of others had become an art. The best thing you could say of him was that he hadn't come to despise those who buckled under his pressures, and the worst was that he had realized the futility of attempting to escape the rules of his own unorthodox mind, but he wasn't going to give up trying.

  “You don't know when you're beat, mate,” Ian said to him, quietly, so that only the two of them and Natalie could hear it.

  Guskov looked straight at her to see her reaction. She agreed.

  “That's what I was trying to say before. You have to have some kind of map, at any given point in time. There's no such thing as the objective view from nowhere. And the map will always be an approximation. Even if you get it dead right, you'll never know that for sure—” She glanced at Ian and he nodded because the uncertainty of the universe went all the way down. She fixed her wonky smile on Guskov again, hopeful that he'd agree, knowing he wasn't going to because he couldn't.