Mappa Mundi (12 page)

A keen feeling of danger and anxiety almost made her want to run out of the room. She scanned faces, knowing nothing about what went on behind any of them, and found the plastic shape of the disk with her hand, holding it tightly:
you're going nowhere, son.

Knowing their conclusions, Guskov was saying, “In a few short months everyone's view of the world is going to change. The last frontiers of our inner worlds are about to be laid bare, our truths—general and individual—will be plain for all to see, and our lies, our fables, our myths, and our fears. Do not doubt that this will not be greeted with joy in all quarters. When we know ourselves at last, the truth of certain faiths and beliefs will be undone and fallacies of all kinds will be
brought to light, their perpetrators with them. We will have to face reality as it is, and not as we have believed it to be, or hoped it to be, or wanted it to be. Difficult times lie ahead. No doubt this work will attract its share of destroyers and naysayers and people who want to use it to repress and control others. When that time comes we must be ready.” He paused and stared directly to camera.

Natalie thought he was slightly overstating the case. Mappa Mundi was hardly the end point of the venture, more like the beginning, but grand words got cranked out easily these days, especially when you had five-star generals and corporate project managers from pharmaceutical giants sitting on both sides of you, all of them wanting the good news about where their two hundred billion dollars had gone.

It was a winning speech—a kind of desperate speech, now Natalie thought about it: the sort of thing you said when you had to rally the troops for a final assault on a highly defended fortress and the odds were ten to one against coming out alive. She wondered what it was that prompted it now, when actually the news to report was so incredibly positive. Did nobody else think it peculiar? But around her faces were glued to the screen, suckers to the pitch, every one.

Guskov began speaking about the powerful synergy they had all participated in, the gestalt experience of working as a greater mind with a greater purpose, and Natalie started to worry.

Nobody he was talking to needed a hard sell. They'd all bought in a long time ago, despite their valid fears. So who was he talking to? To the generals and the people from Global NervePath Systems and the counteragents among them from envious foreign powers. He was saying everything and nothing. He was being uninformative to the point of boredom and they listened because nobody loves an adventure story like a hero-in-waiting, and that was what they all secretly wanted to be.

Meanwhile Jude's sister was getting burned alive in her own home.

Natalie got up in disgust, walked down the aisle stairs and out
into the conference-area foyer. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Guskov was chivvying them along into the last great effort. She just didn't understand what the rush was. Then again, she might be holding the reason for it in her hand.

Jude woke very slowly from a sleep of exhaustion that seemed more like a blackout. Waves of unconsciousness beat him back from awareness of the room repeatedly, and the quiet sounds of traffic on the move were blurred by the window and net curtains into whispers just beyond his understanding. Alternating moments of near-waking made him think he could open his eyes and see the street light falling in a yellowed band across his feet, the gleam lighting the room in a dim bronze. He tried to get up, to move his hand, to roll over and he thought he had, even up to feeling the texture of the coverlet under him as his skin moved onto it, but a second later, a black second, he was as he had always been, a gold statue in a bronze frieze, his body as unresponsive as solid metal. Hours passed in the flickering of his mind. A thousand times he tried to wake up, to get up, to create a noise, to pinch himself, to be free, but a thousand and one times he blinked to see that all his victories were imaginary. He was that guy, what was that guy? That guy with the rock who got it to the top of the mountain and turned his back only for it to roll right back to the bottom.

He got up and dressed.

He got up and switched on the lights—they didn't work.

He got up and tried the TV. A horse race came on. The horses ran in slow motion in the dark with RayBan black lenses over their eyes. The
commentary was lucid and clear, like a bell tone, but in no human language he knew. He thought that the commentators might be horses, too.

He got up and called his mother. “Hi, Jude! How's the investigation going, hon?”

“I'm not in Washington, Mom, you know that, I'm in…I'm in…”

He got up and dressed and started to go downstairs to find a restaurant.

He got up.

He got up.

But each time he woke he'd never gotten up. He saw his legs and feet next to each other, willed them to move, but they existed in another universe.

A sense of panic and breathlessness closed its grip slowly on his chest, increasing in intensity with each repeat: each repeat that he never quite remembered was doomed until the next blink, the next awakening into the same room and the same problem. He couldn't remember how to breathe. His body started to twitch with oxygen loss. His lungs were collapsing, there was a pain in his veins that was increasingly slowly but surely, their flimsy casings swelling like fat worms about to burst under their own greedy pressure.

He woke up and there was a hand on his shoulder. It was warm, but not familiar. It rested on his cold arm and it was weighty, like a real hand, and the fingers squeezed, and he felt his skin and muscles give in and sink down like obedient dogs waiting for the master's word. Jude was damn' grateful to that hand, because at last he was going to wake up for real and remember how to breathe.

There was the warmth of whoever's-it-was body behind him, too, and the drop of the mattress where their knees were digging his back and the stirring of the air from their moving and breathing. The sound of their breathing made him listen hard. It was like his, a slight panic
in it, or maybe a sob, like it was forgetting, too, or like it was being smothered.

“Shit!” he thought. “That's it. The house is burning down and they're here to get me out. I gotta wake up right now. I have to get out of here!”

He smelled smoke; the acrid poison of burning paint and plastics, the boiling tar bite of furniture foam. He heard a splintery crashing of windows and TV screens and the roaring gasp of flames licking around his door. The fire came out of a gigantic mouth, open full as a June rose directly beneath the floor, tongues lashing, ready to swallow.

He was struggling with all of his nervous system at full scream in the effort, when to his horror a soft female voice said,

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…”

He felt a sensation on his cheek that was cool and hot; breath, lips—a kiss.

The floor under the bed collapsed. Jude's heart broke and he screamed in terror as he started to fall, the orange and red fire-mouth laughing him in, up to the billowing wet steam of its eyeballs.

He woke up.

Street light fell in a yellow band across his feet and lit the room in dim bronze, as still as though it had been cast for a hundred years. He tried to move his feet and they parted. He pushed back against the mattress and sat up. Although he could never have explained it, this time he knew it was for real. The other times had been so unlike reality that he couldn't imagine how he'd made the mistake of thinking they were true. This was a hundred times more detailed, more tactile, and the TV worked and it was showing the evening news and what was more he understood every word they were saying.

But he was breathing hard and he could swear that behind that last dream someone had really been there with him.

Jude touched his cheek, almost scared to, in the place where he had felt the kiss. Nothing. Not even a residual flutter in the nerves.

Then he became aware of how cold he was, nearly as cold as the dead. That woman, she had been kind of familiar, right…but he didn't know anyone like that. He didn't recognize her voice, even though she had spoken straight to him in a way that suggested they were—the first thought that came to mind was
lovers.
Was he dead and she alive? Could he have made her up or had she invaded his dream, like a psychic spy? His mind had a lot of tricks it could pull. He'd always told White Horse her “visions” were imaginary things but at this moment he wouldn't have said it with anything like the old certainty.

Jude rubbed his face in his hands and looked around, trying to get some bearing on the rest of the day that wasn't muddied with bizarre beliefs in nonexistent women. He was starting to feel better until he switched on the light next to the bed. With the judder of bad brakes his heart ground to a halt.

There was a paper file lying on the vile chintz counterpane, a manila folder of a shape that he recognized immediately as an American office standard.

The sight of it erased every other scrap of awareness he possessed. He stared at it and was too confused to be afraid. The TV changed its show. The room became blue, with soft lights playing across the bed like tree-shadows moving in moonlight. Jude steeled his nerves and reached out to pick up the folder. His grip wasn't too sure, though, and a slew of blue, pink, and white pages slithered out of its guts. He dropped the rest and put the main room lights on. His hands were shaking. The new brightness made him aware that he was naked. He scrabbled to put his clothes on and not take his eyes off the papers. There were photographs attached and he recognized them as personnel documents. He thought they looked like government issue.

His Pad rang with a six-note, the one he'd set for priority incoming. He picked it off the dressing table and looked at the ID. Natalie Armstrong.

On his knees in front of the bed, half dressed and stunned, he
answered it straight away, running a hand through his hair and hoping he didn't look too bad, although he must have done.

Her face materialized on screen and, with the familiar ease of people who spent a lot of time talking over distance, she wasn't looking at him, but at something in her hand.

“…Whatever this is and where you got it but it's something I want to know more about and I assume that there's no such thing as a secure line considering the situation, so…I'm sure you know where I live and I'll leave here in half an hour. If you catch up with me, we'll talk then.” As she finished she glanced up at her own Pad camera with a quick practical nod, not attempting the false eye contact that would only have been polite, and then her hand came down and switched it off.

Jude had the impression of a messy, cluttered room around her, that she'd been reading something on a display screen, and that in the hard light of its rays her unique face looked sharp, other-worldly and dangerous. He broke from staring at the empty Pad screen a second later and looked up at the files.

His mind oscillated between Natalie, the file, his dream, and this awful, disgusting, chintz-covered room with its frills and furbelows, tassels and cushions and overblown flowers on every surface surging up at him like tangling thickets of genetically modified people-eating roses. He experienced a sense of disorientation so strong it was worse than zero g. He decided he couldn't stay there.

As fast as he could, Jude started gathering up the papers, stuffing them back in their folder. He put that and the Pad in his case and finished getting dressed in the darkest clothes he had. Natalie was right, he did know where she lived and he was going to get this whole business done and out of the way and go home tomorrow with an answer that would get White Horse off his back. Back to real life. Yes. Definitely.

Jude took the case with him when he left. As he jogged down the steps in his good shoes he thought that he never had to go back, and that made it possible to throw off the whole experience like an old skin
left behind. On the damp street his step lightened as soon as he turned the corner.

Dan was glad that Natalie hadn't said anything about the sandwich and that she seemed to be alive as usual when she got home, shoes in hand, at seven-thirty. Therefore he was able to say, as innocently as possible, “That bloke who came for the upgrade thing that wasn't. That was him, wasn't it?”

Natalie stopped halfway across the living room and turned her head. “You'd know that if you'd not had two hours off for lunch, now wouldn't you?”

“Has he got the hots for you then, or what? Is he mad? Did you send the police after him? You know, I bumped into him as he was leaving, because you can't really miss a guy like that, can you now? And I saw him in town—” But he broke off there because to go on might entail mentioning Ray or coming up with some lie, and she was too good at picking the truth out of them. It was almost like a second-sight thing with her. Dan looked down and pretended to glance at the
Radio Times
that was upside down next to him.

“Where?” was all she said and he knew he'd blown it.

“Just in town. You know. Walking around. Probably sightseeing.” He glanced up carefully and saw that she was losing interest, so it was safe to add, “But smart casual, not in the work suit, and, you know, I often wonder why it is,” and he could lift his head now and grin, “that they issue such awful things as boiler suits for uniforms, I mean, they don't even—”

“It was a BSL-
₄
suit, you moron.” She started moving again, but at the doorway she hesitated and dropped her bags there. She fixed him with an uncomfortable glance and Dan knew he'd scored. “Did he recognize you? Did he say anything?”

“Yeah, he asked me to ask you if you'd go out with him.”

Natalie nodded, face stony. “Piss off and die, Dan.” She turned her back and disappeared into her room.

“You like him!” Dan singsonged. “Yes, you do! A-ha! At last, the ice queen genius of Yorkshire shows she isn't absolute zero.”

Her head reappeared, “You went to see fucking Ray Innis, didn't you?”

He stopped singing.

“I knew it. You're such an idiot. You know that if you ever give him one sniff of anything to do with work you'll end up in jail for the rest of your life?”

Her voice was pleading despite the gunlike assault of its words. Dan knew he was an idiot, but it was only when she was like this that he ever actually felt afraid. His head seemed full of woolly clouds that needed a focus but weren't able to find it by themselves. Natalie never suffered that. It was pure light in her head, razor-bright. She couldn't understand it. He didn't understand it, he only knew that some stuff helped and other stuff made him forget that he was, despite his ability to do his job, fundamentally dumb in a very important way that meant he'd never make the grade.

“I didn't buy anything off him. I didn't give him anything.” At least that was the truth. He could say it and look her in the face and not flinch or giggle, but he sounded like a child, even to his own ears. He smiled at her, winningly, “Want a beer?”

“I've got work to do,” she said. “Maybe later.”

“You're always working.” Ah, this was better ground.

“I like it.” And she'd let him off the hook, he could hear it.

“You need more play,” he said, sliding down into a more comfortable slouch. “You need a night out with Mister Mad American, or whoever. Jude the Obscurity.”

“You stick to those pills, son,” she called in her Old West Doctor voice, and he heard her switching her machines on. “Let me do the prescriptions around here.”

“Tea though?” Maiden Aunt.

“Aye, a'right.” Northern Farmer.

Dan was happy as he got up. He knew that if the American had really been mad there was no way the conversation would have got that far. And did that mean he was some kind of agent? Maybe he should mention it to Shelagh Carter after all? But he thought,
Nah—if Natalie likes him, then he must be okay. She'd spot a phoney in a minute.
Which reminded him…

He took the tea through and set it on her wobbly old desk. “You know what? I saw Knitted Man do something weird today. Funny.”