Mappa Mundi (54 page)

The tech was rolling up the sleeve of Jude's T-shirt. Jude stared at the hypo. The clear liquid could have been anything but he suddenly thought he knew what it was. If he hadn't been sitting his legs would have given out.

“Em, please.”

The needle bit in. He felt the liquid build in his deltoid and then it was all over, as easy as that.

“You'll become contagious in an hour,” she said, looking down her nose at him, fingers on her arms clenched so tight she must be cutting off all circulation. “Everyone will become infected by midnight. The payload will release in thirty-two hours from now for you, and thirty-two hours from first infection for everyone else. You then have another two hours, max, to come out while we can still save you. After that, nothing.”

“What's the payload?” He was dizzy with nausea. Deliverance. She'd shot him full of that. He was her test subject, her guinea pig. He had no doubt it would work.

“Marburg,” she said tonelessly. “Don't hang around.” But the last phrase gave her away. Her controlled, smooth voice cracked on the last word and she had to bite it back.

Jude made himself stand up and be taller than she was. He moved
closer, closer, as she fought to resist stepping back, until their faces were an inch apart.

He looked into her clear blue eyes and said, breath on her face, “How different this could all have been.” It was all a play, no more than that. He'd lost. But he had the satisfaction of seeing her flinch as he almost kissed her and then turned away.

“Where's the door?”

Natalie thought she'd go and check if her father had taken any more huge doses of codeine. It was late, a day after she'd finished up everything that could be done on Prefer and she'd spent it going through the last rebuild of the whole Mappa system, checking for bugs and fixing them. Her mind felt on the fried side, but her body refused to feel sleepy. All it wanted these days was food, water, and one half-hour of meditative inaction in every four. The schedule was hard to take. She longed for a night of deep, dreamless oblivion in a part of her animal self that must have missed out when Selfware was doing its refit of her capabilities.

She had to admit she'd tried her best to use work as an excuse, but now it was all through and there was nothing left to face except the failure of herself and her father to form any kind of relationship of use. That and the unrewarding, strained relations with Alicia, Nikolai, and the others, all of them sick of the sight of each other, hating their work, hating their lives and themselves. The place stank of despair.

Inside the dispensary the tally on the machine showed that more of the same tablets had been checked out by Calum Armstrong. She was on her way out and trying to figure out how to start talking to him again when her attention was drawn down to the case of MUV. It had been moved.

A closer look revealed that not only had it been moved, the seals were broken. Natalie picked it up and brought it out onto the floor where she could rest it. She opened the flip locks. Two doses were
missing from their positions in the high-density foam packing. The other canisters were still in place but the flashing red lights on their individual valves showed that every last one of them had been opened up and dispersed. They were all empty.

Natalie felt a rush of cold conviction that there was only one scenario in which this action made sense. She closed the case up and stepped immediately back to the dispensary workstation, using her codes to get as high up in the command levels as she could. It wasn't that high but at least it would give her full status readings on the environment's external and internal filtration systems.

“C'mon, c'mon,” she muttered, smacking the side of the monitor with the flat of her hand.

After a longer delay than there should have been the Building Systems Screen came up. It showed readings that were all well within normal limits for gases and microbes. If someone had been in and shut down the alarm system or the filter checks then they'd done it so well that she couldn't tell if this screen was faked. But whether an infection showed up or not she knew it was going to be there.

She sent out a call for a general meeting.

One by one they assembled in the dining area, weary forms in clothes that looked rumpled and old, her father in his full lab suit minus its heavy headgear, Isidore the only one retaining an air of orderly neatness about his person in every detail.

Natalie sat at the head of one of the tables, the case concealed between her feet. When Guskov finally made up the quorum and the vague greeting and catching-up had subsided she lifted the case up and placed it in front of her, facing the others.

They looked at it for the most part with blank expressions. To Natalie's surprise it was not Lucy but Khan who recognized what was about to go down. Her smooth assurance ruptured with the tiniest of hairline cracks in expression running along the left side of her eye and cheek. Unable to help herself, she reviewed the events of her sabotage
in her mind's eye. When she glanced up from the flight case at Natalie she'd got her composure sorted out. It took Nikolai to nudge the rest of them into noticing the powerful gaze between the two of them.

“What is going on?” Guskov demanded.

Natalie waited, but Alicia refused to speak.

“Doctor Khan has sold us out. Money talks,” Natalie said. She flipped the catches and opened the case so that they could all see.

“But there are no biochemical hazards in here,” Isidore pointed out after a second, his measured voice a calm flow of certainty. “Only the NervePath.”

Kropotkin and Guskov paid no attention to his naivety. Her father stared at the lights. Lucy was the first to turn. She whipped around in her seat.

“Why have you done this?”

“What, sorry you were beaten to it?” Alicia snapped, sitting down, her shoulders high and her chin lifted defiantly, although Natalie knew she was scared now. So she should be.

Lucy was stunned. She glanced around, checking to see if everyone else thought the same of her. “All right now.” She held up her hands. “I never believed in your plan, Mikhail, and yes, I sent some information out to keep the government up to date. What you're intending to do is absolutely wrong. But—” she turned back to Khan, more hurt than angry, and gestured at the case “—what's this?”

“I have two boys,” Khan replied with the assured righteousness that she adopted during a demonstration of her work. “I have a husband. My parents are still alive.” Her dark irises flashed at each of them—they had all been under the same threat.

“Don't forget the fifty million dollars,” Natalie said with a false smile of cheer. “And the real estate.”

Alicia's upper lip curled into a snarl. “You freak!” she spat, but nothing else.

Guskov was furious and because his anger was such a physical force
he seemed to become the focus for the rest. He reached across the slim expanse of steel towards Khan and she shrank away from his touch. Standing up at his full bearlike height he stared her down until she became physically smaller but her defiance was smug.

“Desanto is right,” she whispered. “Your idea is wrong. The Bobby X technology has to be kept secret. And it isn't for individuals to decide everybody's fate.”

“And who is it right for then? You?” he said softly. He looked back at the case. “Two missing. I assume you already took one. Where is the other?”

Alicia had clammed up now. She wasn't going to say anything. As they waited they again looked to Natalie, to see if she could divine the answer, hoping that she could. Every single one of them was in shock. The sense of their disorientation and the creeping horror as they began to accept this twist was excruciating to her. On top of it the wild, futile hopes about the chance of salvation made her dizzy—she shut them out and shook her head. And then, in the silence, they heard the sound of the elevator doors operating from the highside entrance where each of them in turn had come in.

Natalie knew who it was. Before anyone had time to speak she was up and running. She negotiated the twists and turns of the corridors, slipping on the tough carpet and catching herself with a hand on the wall or the floor. Around the last corner she saw him walking towards her and her heart lifted in a leap of hope and the sheer pleasure of seeing him again. She flung her arms around him and hugged him close.

Jude was much slower to respond and for an instant he held his face away from her as though he wished they hadn't touched. But then he seemed to become resigned and embraced her in return, sighing.

Natalie looked up into his face and he shook his head fractionally.

She thought for a second that they'd found out about the NP and strove to see if it was true. Then she realized that wasn't it, and the understanding clicked home.

Jude laid out the government's offer in its stark terms. He was already feeling the beginnings of Deliverance's own symptoms: a heavy head, an aching back, his temperature starting to waver between chills and fever, but he ignored them as best he could.

“All of the NervePath hardware and all of the Mappa Mundi programs are to be left here within this network, intact and in working order. Each one of you will collect their personal items and exit, one by one, beginning with Mikhail Guskov. Any attempts to destroy work, or otherwise compromise the integrity of it, and they will not offer you your MUV shot.” He flicked the card that he'd been handed, with its notes, onto the floor and looked up at their exhausted, incredulous faces.

“But they did want me to tell you that if you cooperate their rewards will be generous. Your families will remain unharmed, and you will have a successful career working with them in the future, including getting a place on some goddamned ethical committee they're setting up to ensure that the rest of the world doesn't think they're just following another Pollyanna foreign-interference scheme. Maybe you'd even get a place in the Mental Health Hall of Fame when this goes global.”

“Mary Delaney sent you,” Guskov stated, the most determined of all those here.

“Yeah.” Jude nodded. He thought it was interesting they'd met again in these circumstances, him knowing all about this man and Guskov knowing and caring almost nothing about Jude's past efforts to pin him down. He wasn't as Jude remembered. He was younger, and stronger, more of a fighter.

For the first time, Jude sneezed.

Everyone jerked back in their seats or where they leaned on the wall. A nervous laugh ran between them as they saw their own reactions. Jude tried not to feel the shock of fear. He glanced at Natalie. Her small, heart-shaped face was set in a determined way, the steely colour of her eyes pronounced against her shocking red hair.

“Yes,” she said. She looked at Guskov. “If you've got that other version of Deliverance, the one that can replicate Micromedica, then we have the lab equipment to extract some of the vaccine from Alicia's blood. Can you use it as a payload in a counterinfection? Will that work?”

He nodded. “Maybe. We'd have to start immediately.”

“Alicia? Did you take both of the shots?”

Jude slowly pieced together what must have happened as they all started to organize themselves for action. Despite their antagonisms the sudden imposition of an external threat showed how seamlessly they'd learned to work together, first one and then another taking the initiative as their abilities decided. He and Mary had once been like that, he thought and sneezed again. It was harder this time and now his eyes and sinuses were starting to feel hot. Explosive aerosolization. Jesus Christ.

Natalie was leaning down next to him. She took his hand. “Come on.”

Natalie led him into the control centre. She worked busily, setting up machines, tapping instructions.

Jude watched her, sniffing occasionally, his eyes starting to run. “What are you doing?”

“Fixing things,” she said. “Although how well it turns out is anybody's guess. Still, that's always been the case.” She picked up a handheld
scanner, just like the one she'd shown him in her catalogue, pointed it at her own head, and pressed the trigger.

“What was that?”

“I've restarted the Selfware. If I go the same way as Ian then I can get out of here, and take something with me.”

“You're going to go along with his plan?” Jude cleared his throat and then started coughing. There was a dry tickling in his ears and, seemingly, everywhere in his head. Even his lungs itched. “What's he going to do? Make everyone as mad as he is?”

“No. I think any changes will be short-lived but possibly beneficial.” She was doing something else now that he didn't understand, her hands flashing over two keyboards at once. He sneezed again, six times in a row.

“I thought if I could make it straight into the lab I might be able to confine myself before I infected anyone,” he said, swallowing on a throat that hurt.

“And what makes you think they're not pumping it in from outside?” She flashed him a quick, lopsided grin and then her face faltered and she became very still, poised as a cat, watching him as if he were doing a magic trick.

“What?”

“That woman,” she said. “Is that Mary? The woman with the curly red hair?”

He nodded, a cold spark in his chest, and Natalie straightened up, her arms hanging loose at her sides and her mind suddenly very distant. He could almost see it rushing away himself, and he wasn't like her. “Why?”

From being a fast-moving streak of fire she was a small, still creature, hardly big enough or strong enough to do anything. He saw her take hold of the desk for support. Her face was like the wide-open sky.

“She killed Dan.” Slowly the fast mind came back on and reanimated her. Her look became tougher, harder. Jude absorbed the news slowly. He
nodded. It didn't even surprise him. His own feelings and thoughts about Mary had had plenty of time to fester in the house above this place.

“Listen, Jude.” Natalie leaned forward and grasped his hands. “This is all a risk, but when we get out of here don't do anything you'll regret.”

He thought she was trying not to do the mind-reading thing and instead was doing her best to be an ordinary human being. Unlike her he had no confidence about the last part—getting out—but he didn't say so. He thought that what she was proposing to do was equivalent to suicide, although he wasn't sure.

“And what about you?”

“I'm going to the dispensary and get you something for this.” She smiled and for an instant he couldn't help but smile back.

But the medicine they had didn't do much against the Deliverance and within another hour Jude felt sicker than he'd ever felt in his life. He coughed and sneezed hard enough to rupture blood vessels in his throat and nose and in the lulls lay flat on the floor as around him the arguments and recriminations and the fear boiled together and became part of his fever.

He heard Guskov shouting about there only being enough for one dose to work in time. Calum shouting hoarsely when he found that Natalie had switched the system back on inside herself and her soft explanation that reasoned it was all for the best—hadn't he wanted her to be better? Nikolai and the others railing about the system of the Free State and how it hadn't been planned effectively. Natalie talking about some program she'd written that was going to manage fear, so that reactions of hate and violence would be curtailed.

It all sounded like a lot of very late after-the-fact theorizing. Inside Jude there was a kind of calm, when he wasn't retching or spitting into tissues or watching dark red appear in bigger and brighter stains in the wads of cloth he put to his face in an effort to stop the infection spreading so fast. His bones ached with the chills. He hoped he was going to have enough strength left when the time came to walk outside.

He wondered if the world could be made different by Mappa Mundi. Weeks ago he'd have said that was something that should be left to fate. But it shouldn't be in the hands of people like Mary, that was for sure. And when he thought about it, he didn't know who wasn't like Mary, in their heart of hearts: self-interested, hopeful, driven by fear.

Natalie cornered her father in the dispensary itself. He was in the act of swallowing two capsules when she walked in.

“What are you doing?”

“It's nothing, a headache.”

He was old, she saw that now, because a piece of him had recently given up. He'd failed her.

“You've taken so many.”

“I've had it for years.” He put the rest of the pack in his pocket and sneezed. “Looks like your friend's done his job, too.”

“We're all going out,” Natalie said firmly. She took his arm. “You included.”

“I don't know,” he said. He was rooted to the spot. “If you're going to leave this way. I don't want to go. What's out there? Only more of the same.”

“Dad, there's years of life left for you.” But she was seeing the headache now, the pain of the trapped man inside a mind that had been set in a peculiar fixity for the last twenty years, the old NervePath system inside it a set of inert wrecks, like ships driven ashore to rot. Their malfunction had created a stasis of thought and produced phantom pain that came with it. Neurological damage, and not the fatal disease she'd dreaded, was to blame. He must have been trying out things when she was still in hospital. Trying to find a cure.

He shook his head. “Nothing changes,” he said. “Work, living. It's all the same texture, the same clay.”

“Come on, we can find a way.” But she was talking to herself.

“We?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I think I've done enough. Don't you?”

“Dad, please.” But, with a sinking heart, she knew that he was beyond persuasion. He'd decided and, as with all his decisions, he wasn't going to change.

Stunned, she tried to hold on to him, but he loosened her grip carefully. “Don't worry about me,” he said.

“What about me?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do, knowing I left you here?”

“And what am I supposed to do when you've gone?” he said.

“There's no telling exactly what's going to happen.” She was starting to be angry with him. “I may survive it and you may live to help more people like Ian. Of course, if you'd rather sit around feeling sorry for yourself then you can do that, too.”

He caught her elbow as she was leaving. “Wait on there.” His heavy face was weighted with the seriousness she knew very well. “Didn't you come here to get something for that agent out there?” He reached down a pack of Micromedica restructurant and handed it to her. “This is meant for wounds and the like but it's been known to aid cell growth and healing in other cases, too. It won't hurt to try it.”

“Thanks.” She took it.

“Friend of yours, is he?”

“Tried to be,” she said.

“Go on, then.”

It was so hard to leave him. She didn't know what to say. After a moment or two of nothing she turned on her heel and went. A curious dizziness almost stopped her halfway back to the dining room, but it passed. Then she started to sneeze.

Everyone had packed their things and was waiting to leave. The departure schedule listed that Guskov should exit first, then Natalie. But when they noticed she was missing they might change their minds. It was only fair to put this to the vote.

“What's the final program? Are you going to try for the Free State or have we met our match?” Nikolai Kropotkin asked as Guskov and Calum joined them last of all. Natalie sat next to Jude, who leaned into the back of his chair with his eyes shut, breathing heavily and shivering. He was wearing a borrowed sweater, but it made no difference. Everyone except Alicia was also in the middle of the primary stages. Shunned, Khan sat on the far end of the farthest table.

“Has everyone looked at the options?” Isidore was calm, wiping his nose on a tissue as if his illness was only to be a summer cold. “We should vote.”

“We can use all the programs,” Natalie interrupted as they began to talk around the variations of Guskov's ideas. “They can be the first options available. If your global network isn't so corrupt they've already decided to turn the entire system into a racket for making fast cash.” She glanced at Mikhail. “Total immunization would be one. Selfware could be another, in a limited version.”

“And send the NervePath out as an open system?” Kropotkin shook his head. “Then all that someone has to do is zap them.”

“But that's all they have to do anyway,” she retorted. “And their technology and programming is way behind. You can offer these straight away. We can soften the ground up, too, if we look for the short-term gains of using Prefer Compromise and No Fear across a wide spectrum of the population. And I thought, instead of sending it out empty, we can add information that can be downloaded complete to the user; a full knowledge of what it is and how it works. That way everyone is instantly informed about the Free State principles, so nobody can prevent them finding out they're infected. It can include localized knowledge about where and how to find new programs and how to prevent counterinfection.”

She knew, as she'd said this, that it was news to most of them. They hadn't planned this far ahead—getting Mappaware to work had been the goal for so long that future developments had been something to
muse about in idle hours, of which there'd been none. But she'd had the sleepless nights in which to think, and she'd put her mind to work. She knew that this could take a hold before the US and European agencies could prevent it. They, too, would be co-opted by its insidious spread, and then there would be, as Guskov had so rightly predicted, no worthwhile opposition to his ideas. In the years that followed what would come was unpredictable, but that was also true for the reverse situation, where the US got to wave its wand. All the options were bad, but she believed this one was the least rotten at its heart.