Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  She sat on a stone wall outside a terrace plantation on the subcontinent, tea bushes growing calmly around her in the velvety darkness. Behind her the packing factory and its secret heart of NP production machinery ground quietly into action for a long night's work. The scent of jasmine was heady and the sun gone ten minutes. The blue light reminded her of a long ago day, running through a wood and then, just as she felt an important thing was about to be revealed, the memory died.

  She got up and walked a short way between the bushes, the stars overhead so bright, so distant. She watched one blueshifting away, another redshifting in. She still had one task to go. Was it true that time could be backtraced without unstitching her? She doubted that. How could you go back in time but retain your conscious states of memory? They relied on entropy and change in a linear timeline to exist. But the file remained a mystery—otherwise how had Jude got it? And there was that second in the laboratory where Ian had hinted to her that there might be a way back for him, a glimpse into the past when he was still a man with a family—he'd thought maybe he could relearn who he'd been, put himself together again. It was that theory she'd used when she'd tried to retain a copy of Jude in the crossover. But if she was shot full of holes now then he would be, too, his data as useless as the disks themselves.

  Natalie took them out of her pockets, those that remained, and flung them away into the plantation darkness. Across the Earth Jude was already dead. In America it was just starting to be evening and the sun set without him to see it. Dan was gone. She had nothing she wanted to come back for. So, why not try?

  She stared up at the sky. A full moon hung overhead, silent and still, so quiet. Bats flitted across it in a delicate dance and she heard their sonar, felt it track and pulse against her skin. The insects they were hunting hung in ignorance between them, motes of life that flickered as though lit to her, and winked out as they joined the bats' collection, as simply as that.

  She reached out to switch them back on.

  To move through time in a backwards fashion means just one thing for a creature that can form intentions and actions in the forward direction only. You have to be isolated from the reversing process. You have to keep on moving into your future, as everything around you unpicks itself to the level of the past. Otherwise you will unpick yourself as well as the world, and because your understanding is an ongoing process, that will get undone, too. There is no backwards like a film played in reverse, because even that has to be seen in forward time. You might be subjected to a billion rewinds yourself, but you'll never know it, because such a concept of time's movement isn't possible to your one-tracked existence. You wouldn't even notice. How could you?

  Natalie knew this and she had no idea how to isolate herself in a forward pocket, even with the quantum insights that Ian had promised. That there was a fatal contradiction in anything moving forwards and backwards at the same instance. She herself, as she was now, could not travel into any past. Ian had correctly said that time was misunderstood generally. It was an element of space, not a separate entity at all, but it was an element in which the three dimensions of her physical world shifted all together and she wasn't going to escape them taking her with them as long as she remained three dimensional.

  Further, as she toyed with the problem, watching the insects, the mosquitoes and midges, the beetles and moths on the wing, heavy and blundering in their flight, she began to look beyond them to the stars. Redshifters were moving away. Their light was a longer wavelength because they were streaking off, stretching it out. Blueshifters were moving in, approaching, squeezing the waves closer as they came. To look at the night sky anywhere, even the moon, was to look at the past. The moon was milliseconds ahead of its apparent position. The stars were long gone. The light in her eyes that yielded the constellations and their pattern was a combination of billions of years, seeming to land here, in her mind, at a single, unified moment. Which is when she realized how to plot a course in time.

  Complex entities were never going to make it. But information might make it back, and information, when combined into a sequence of directions, a program, activated at the right moment, could rebuild a simulacrum of Natalie Armstrong and execute a few important tasks before it decayed. The puzzle of what she'd written in her big scribble on the back of the Guskov File suddenly became obvious. It was a diagram of motes, travelling against the flow through three-dimensional space. Just as they could be linked across vast spaces and react to each other's states instantaneously, fundamental particles could be linked across time. She didn't need to bring those linked pairs together at any particular moment to create their bond. It could stretch into the past as easily as endure through the future.

  No sooner had she imagined this than what seemed like a memory, not existing until now, but still her own, flooded into her mind.

  It was weeks ago. She was in Washington, in the locked room where Mary Delaney's boss, Rebecca Dix, kept her private files. She was reaching into a drawer and extracting Mikhail's entry. She checked it quickly and then moved through the wall into the outer office, quiet at this hour of the evening. Using a pencil that had been left on the secretary's desk she wrote the date on the back and then sketched, roughly, just enough to jog her mind later on. All this took place in a kind of distant mode, where she was not fully present, but vaguely dreaming.

  She encoded the file as information and restructured it at the guest house in York. Jude lay asleep on the flowery bedcover, as insensible as a lead block. She didn't want to wake him, because what could she have said? She laid the file, only a little damaged by its journey, behind him but then, in a moment of weakness, the look-back she'd not allowed herself in Virginia, she reached out to see if she could touch him one more time.

  Jude, in his unsullied state, before he knew any of what was to come, started to wake up.

  “I'm sorry,” she said, to herself in the future as well as to him. “I'm so sorry.”

  It was goodbye, before it was even hello.

  In the breathing, vivid darkness of the Kerala tea plantation the physical remains of Natalie Katherine Armstrong flew apart. They were caught for an instant, moth dust in moonlight, and then they were gone.

  Mary Delaney, still sore from the operations, and with her right arm plastered and tucked up against her side—ironically protective of and protecting the same rib that had shattered and driven shards through every muscle in her upper body—felt a sense of triumph that was grimmer than the expression on any of the world's great old men troublemakers, who had all taken a black contentment in sending youngsters to their deaths in the name of freedom.

  Superficially she was looking great. The Micromedica technology was a miracle worker. If anything the restructurants and the nanosurgery had improved what fast living and stress had done to her. She felt strong and competent as never before, but it was ruined by the one thing the bullet from Jude had shot out of her, and that was any capacity to feel pleasure.

  She sat in her seat beside Dix in the White House Oval Office, watching the president and his advisers settle themselves for the agenda at hand, and she looked at General Bragg, who met her eye with an unflinching dislike that would have made an earlier version of Mary inwardly quail. But this Mary didn't bother. She stared him down, because she knew very well, in the wake of the upset, who had conspired to take the project and the country back to the Dark Ages and she had proof for whenever it was needed.

  “Ms. Delaney?” the vice president said. “Would you care to begin?”

  And she did, explaining in clear and easy terms the NSC plans for Mappa Mundi. The project was in. She had succeeded. Guskov had lost. They had won.

  After the agreements to proceed were validated and approved she decided to take a walk along the Mall to clear her head. The fall weather had taken a sudden cooler turn and the air was for once fresh and almost invigorating. She was looking towards the Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool, thinking about nothing in particular, when a man sneezed near
her. It was a violent sneeze and it shocked her into a jump that jarred her arm and rib cage together in a painful burst of sensation. She heard him say to a companion in an English accent, “Just got in from Europe. “Flu all over there. Bloody nightmare. Ugh. Mind you don't get it…”

  “Sounds like an epidemic,” the companion said breezily. “They have it in Asia, too.”

  “It always comes from there,” agreed the sneezer and went on to another three violent convulsions.

  Mary didn't know what had happened to Natalie Armstrong but the downloads from the Environment systems conclusively proved the disintegration of Patient X and she'd guessed that the US strike was going to be a counteraction and not the initiative. She quickly took a handkerchief out of her pocketbook and held it over her nose and mouth. Her MUV was still active, but she didn't like the idea of inhaling Deliverance, no matter what form it took.

  On the Avenue she paused to get a taxi to take her back to the Pentagon. A Joint Chiefs meeting was taking place in an hour, as they prepared their strategy to deploy Mappaware. She was standing on the curb and a cab was coming, she was waiting and watching it, when she caught sight of something white and black suddenly approaching her out of the corner of her eye.

  It made her heart jump and she turned rapidly, half expecting, in that horrifying way that happened ever since she'd lost her apartment, that it would be Jude.

  She knew Jude was dead. Twenty-plus shots had made a real mess of him and she hadn't needed to look to verify the result. She had looked, though. She'd made herself glance down, sideways, as she was strapped onto a stretcher under the gentle autumn sky. He lay face down in the dry earth of the driveway. A lake of blood stained his clothes and the ground in vast, near-black marks.

  The entire area had been sprayed, the earth removed, in an attempt to contain the blood and its fatal loads but even now she wasn't a hundred percent sure that they'd managed to get every Deliverance spore out of there. The house and its grounds were sealed off, soaked in bleach and microtech solutions, but so what? All it took was one animal…but she didn't want to think about that. She didn't want to think about Jude being flung into an incinerator, burning like a torch, his face and body shrinking and blistering in the incredible heat needed to destroy the NervePath and the Micromedica. But she did think of it. Every time she saw something in the corner of her eye.

  But although she staggered this time, left hand raised to ward, there was nobody. The cab drew up to her and she reached for the door. She heard a voice, another English one, say “Hola, Mary,” in a sarcastic way, but it seemed to be so close and whispered so quietly she wasn't sure.

  Mary suddenly felt an extreme dizziness take hold of her. She grabbed the seat and the door handle. She couldn't feel her body. The views of the car swam and circled. She felt icy and then burning hot. Her emotions leapt out in a vast glut of inexpressible anger, lust, elation, and misery.

  “Where to?” the Ethiopian cab driver was looking at her in the mirror with some frustration. She heard him, but the words took a strange route through her mind.

  The next second everything was back the way it had been.

  Natalie straightened her skirt, which was both familiar and unfamiliar, and looked down at herself, neatly attired, her case at her side, her gun in place. “Pentagon,” she said, testing her voice, which worked as it always had.

  Natalie/Mary watched the city pass by through the windows with fresh interest, despite the vile, lingering memories of Jude's death. He was gone, but she was still here, and in a position to do something good for a change, just like he, Ian, and Dan would have wanted. The complex question of who she actually was didn't seem very important.

  Matter is only energy with information and identity was only information after all. Replacing some parts with others was child's play. Mappaware had proved it and she had taken her chance.

  As she reached her office she greeted the secretaries and ordered an English tea—no changes there then. Sitting down she looked around her and reflected how very dull a room this was. Something should be done to brighten it. In the meantime she had work to do, determining that the US attempt to ruin the Free State would not come to any great shakes until the citizens had had the chance to see it for themselves.

  The first thing she did however was to send a message to Mikhail Guskov at the military hospital where he was still undergoing observation to conclude his treatment and the removal of Deliverance from his system.

  She wrote:

  I doubt you can even imagine the full consequences of the system that you and I constructed. I cannot, and I have seen it. The coverage rate for PHC and NF has the greatest takeup of all the systems. Today I saw an article in the Washington Post that mentioned, “This strange uprise in net comms discussion groups about something called Mappaware…” No doubt you will have the new systems ready to release by the time I see you next week. The limitation numbers for the Selfware encoding are included in the attached file (MW1884), along with details of the stages in development each one should confer, including and up to sublimation. Please inform Calum Armstrong of my whereabouts as soon as you see him.

  No longer, Mary Delaney.

  You're walking down the street, enjoying the sunshine and the freshness after a spring rain. You've had a good day at work and now you're returning home along the peaceful, broad sidewalks. It's more than a mile but you like to walk, it's good for you, and you get to pass the shops on the way, the post office and the bank. You can stop at the deli and get fresh fish, and ice cream for dessert. Right now you're passing the park. How beautiful the trees are here!

  You see the group of children playing on the brightly coloured swings. The colours sing. Your son is there, on the blue swing, going higher than all the rest. You stop to look, wondering if you've time to go across and play a little kickball, when a mosquito whines around your head.

  You bat it away, but for a second there you thought it was telling you a story. Something about a girl running out of the woods with her friend. Half-baked stuff they put in them these days—they're supposed to bring urgent news if they sting you for dinner. But at least this one, hopelessly data-corrupted as it is, has left you alone today. Some people will fill them up with any old rubbish.

  Your son asked you for the third time today to get SlideKing. It's a new update, but first he'd need a higher grade of physical development and then the expensive base set of Physical Coordinator 4.2. But you could get it as a package. Maybe for Christmas.

  The state shop is on the way to the deli. You just go in for a quick look in the catalogue. As always on the front cover is their big promotion—Selfware 10.3. It's supposed to be utterly painless, the greatest high, and best of all it's totally free. Nobody wants to die, but when you gotta go who'd want to just flake out instead of transcending the physical?

  It gives you the shivers just to think about it but it's kind of comforting to know that all you have to do is load it and you're on your way. Nobody ever comes back to say whether or not it works, but interviews you've seen with those in the middle of transcending sure make it look good. You've been happy in your life and you know it when you see it.

  Further on the sports gear checks out at a cool five hundred for everything your son hopes for. He'll have to be patient. Earlier on you saw the Adult page and there was a little something on there which even now you're ordering just for you and your lover. It's only ten and it promises a lifetime's orgasmic upgrading. You've had the earlier version and can't resist. Hey, what's life without a little indulgence now and again, eh?

  As you pass the Quiet Space you see your neighbour's family gathered there with their singing bowls and their gongs, playing softly. In the middle of the garden a figure of light is gently rising, and fading as it rises. You think—of course—today is their great-grandfather's Blue Day. You wave at the form, hoping you're not too late, and it seems to wave to you. Your neighbour turns at the sight and sees you, comes to invite you to the party, bring the wh
ole family along. There are tears in his eyes but of joy, not sorrow—he can hear what his father is thinking, can see what he sees. Creepy, but, man, better than the old style.

  The sun is going down, red and large, the heat softening, and the midges crowding as you reach the door of your house. Another mosquito whines past—one of the dissident forms from some hacker breeding pen. It whispers in your mind with stinging doubt—are there wars out there, with killers converting mothers to slayers and children to spies? Somewhere the mosquitoes are telling stories of worse than bears in the wood. Somewhere there are people living lives of starvation and slavery at the hands of cruel masters who enjoy the depravity their technology is able to bring. Yes, somewhere. Believe it.

  Whack! Slam those suckers! Pesky things.

  Such a thought could ruin even the best of days, couldn't it? Used to, before you got a news pilot to filter what you heard and thought. Sometimes there are get-togethers here where you can take off all the programming and experience life raw, firsthand, no censorship, the old style. Sometimes you do this, now and again, but less as time goes on. You used to think it was necessary, shriving even; that it kept you really human and in touch with what mattered. (It embarrasses you to remember.) Aren't we all such assholes when we're so serious and young?

  And these things aren't happening today, to you, right now.

  Comfort yourself.

  Live your life.

  Today is a beautifulYOU*dayALLDAY*.

  * * *

  *The parameters YOU and ALLDAY are used subject to patent law and licensing agreements with the International Free State of Mind Trade Administration.