Mappa Mundi (29 page)

Her mind didn't seem different to her. Perhaps a little more colourful. But then, all her memories came through this new lens of the altered Selfplex. How would she know if she'd changed? Between being a child and herself now she'd changed, but it was only the difference itself that made it noticeable. The degree. Minds only remembered and noticed significant alterations—everything not in that category caused them to create the illusion that the world was mostly stable. The illusions were the direct result of who dreamed them. As she had changed, they had changed and taken her memory with them.

A faint draught of air stirred against her neck. She felt it signalling to her skin with the exact shape of what had displaced it. Somebody else had entered the room.

“It's worse than you think,” said a voice behind her, quiet and withdrawn, flutelike with an inhuman shallowness of tonal variation. “Or it gets worse.”

“Bobby!” She spun her chair around, caught in a mix of fright and delight.

He was standing there, not in the clinic regulation clothes but in his own T-shirt and jeans, work boots on his feet. He slouched, half corporeal and half a blurred mass of flat colour that shifted idly; a sketch in progress. He gave a limp shrug, to apologize for his sudden appearance. Natalie could see it was a huge effort to sustain even this level of definition. With a pull she could feel in her own bones, the exultant dance of the atoms was trying to drag him into its chaotic glare. The lure of it made him dazed.

“I was right about the information and energy,” he said morosely,
thumbs hooked in his waistband, his head bowed. “The problem is the switching. Take off the information, it's hard to put it back. Too much and—” He paused and looked up at her. “Time's the trouble. You forget.”

The fact that he had materialized wasn't lost on her. But because it was definitely him and because Natalie could understand what had happened to him she wasn't afraid; she marvelled at this even as she had to push it aside to get on with what had to be done.

“What's going on?” she asked, getting up and stepping towards him uncertainly.

Bobby circled and kept his distance, moving as cautiously as a cat trying to stalk, uneasy with his new perceptions.

“Matter,” he said and looked through the window with evident curiosity, as if there was a tank of exotic animals behind it, “is energy plus information. You and I, our bodies are matter. Our minds depend on that. There is no part of mind that is not the flux of information and energy at the classical level. At the classical level matter of certain density may not share space with other matter. You and I cannot cross over. But at the quantum level, all things may pass through each other. But passing through causes a change in states, a change of information. Every change brings loss, creates anomalies. Losses pile up. Anomalies grow. Forgetting occurs. Without the information being isolated from the process, how can what was be made to the same pattern? It is similar, but it is not the same. New organization is possible, but old patterns are gone forever.” He turned back and straightened himself. “The longer you stay at a quantum level, interacting with lower levels of organization, the more you lose. Perhaps it's better.”

He looked around the room, reading it, looked at her, reading her. His face was tired and sad. If there was a person less enamoured of his own vision of reality, she'd yet to see it—and she'd seen many.

“Where do you go—what do you mean? How can you exist at a quantum level?” Natalie asked.

“You can walk through that door,” he said. “I can walk through
things that are solid to you. There's a lot of space, once you understand. At that level, there's all the space in the world.” He grinned in a watered-down way. “The words don't say it right any more. They weren't designed for this.” His gaze said that there was no way he could explain it to her. She wasn't built to understand.

Natalie didn't know what to say. Tragedy seemed to have distilled in him. Something had happened that was more than the actions of Selfware, she knew it. “You went home,” she remembered that much.

He nodded. “Never again.”

“They didn't see you?”

“They did,” he said and shrugged again. “Maybe I am dead. I will be. What's it matter?” He gathered himself with a shake. “But I came to say sorry for causing it to come on you. That was my fault. I didn't know. But it was. I see you've not come as far. That's good. You don't know too much. You don't see it all like I do.” He nodded at her and the trace of a smile ran across his face. “Good.”

Natalie wanted to ask him a million questions. She had no doubt he could have answered everything she'd ever wanted to know about the world and human understanding. As he stood there, however, he swayed a little bit, not only back and forth on his feet, but more profoundly, all his tissues vibrating slowly in the motion of unseen tides. His eyes, meeting her regard, looked on another place at the same time, a place that he created and was destroyed by with every instant that passed: mountain becoming sand.

“What will you do now?” Natalie asked, feeling cold. She crossed her arms, but it was no better. She would have reached out to comfort him but he didn't want it, couldn't have stood it, the whole of his skin said so. Unknown people had stolen his life and, she realized, were on the verge of stealing hers. His answer, all too human, confirmed her perception.

“Make them pay. Be sure they don't have it all their own way. Will you?”

Natalie felt that she didn't know anywhere near enough to make a
decision. But, at the same time, when did anyone know enough to be sure? She thought she had an idea about why Selfware had been run.

Bobby said, “It's a test. To see if it would work on anyone. Your system has the ability to match any mindware system to the brain it finds itself in. They'll use that, because at the moment their work can't fit itself to the subject. It's all but useless except as a rewriting tool that can fit one mind into the same shape as another. That's what they did me for.”

Natalie agreed. He'd just spoken her suspicion aloud. She said, “Not far left to go, then, until Mappa Mundi is completed.” She glanced around and then back at his despondent figure. “Did you read my mind just then?”

“Not really,” he said. “There's a point where the scale of what you notice changes and then it's easy to see.” His bravado of a moment ago seemed to be a futile gesture, she thought, a fist shaken at the back of a victorious enemy, and he agreed.

“I can't think of anything else to do, y'know,” he said, hands outstretched. “Here I am, still alive, in my way. No family. No ties.” He laughed in a hollow, breathy way, experiencing the irony. “I see—but underneath it all, the one that sees is still me. Ian. John. Detteridge. But what does that mean? Nothing, really. He was an idea in my mind. He's dead now, but he can't have been me, because here I am.”

He turned fully to the window and looked out hungrily at the greying sky and the street. “I need something. I want to live.” He grasped the window frame and she saw his skin whiten where it pressed against the painted wood. His breath came faster now and his shoulders trembled, his voice deepening with passion.

“And I want that to mean
something.
I know I could do a decent thing now, given the chance. I would. If I knew what it was. If it'd do some bugger a bit of good. But if that fails then, well, I'll do the next best and give the bastards a seeing-to they won't live to regret. I'll have had a reason. I'll make it make sense. It has to. You know why?”

He turned back, head low as if he was drunk and unable to lift it.

Natalie shook her own head.

“Because the truth is that we're the only fucking things that mean anything. The rest is a dance on nothing and when it's over it won't any of it have mattered a damn.”

He grinned with half his mouth. “That's your answer, isn't it? Right there. Why you made it. You wanted to see if anything existed apart from you. You wanted to know if it was waiting to get you. It ain't, but it'll get you in the end anyway. Ah, fuck it.” He wrenched himself around. “I wasn't going to tell you that. Why did I? You wanted me to. I owe you now.”

“You don't owe me anything, in fact, it's the other—”

“No,” he said. “No. I know what I've done. I'm the end of your dream. That's a kind of killing. Now I owe you and I like that idea. You can tell me what this thing is I'll do that can help. When the time comes.”

Natalie didn't know what he was talking about but his eyes were vacant and his body was slowly losing its shape. She felt as though she'd been punched and hit, such was the shock of what he'd said. She felt sorry for him.

He faded and vanished right before her eyes, shaking his head at her.

Don't pity me, pity you
, she heard him say, the faintest whisper.
You've a way to go yet.

Jude's morning in the office was anything but easy. Perez kept him chewing over the Florida case when he should have been out investigating leads from Mary's still-untouched boxes of paperwork. Then Mary herself arrived, late and crabby from the beauty salon, looking like she'd spent a million dollars to transform her natural prettiness into a take on Mount Rushmore: stony and middle-aged. She wanted to keep the damn' papers to herself for some reason he didn't figure out, and then, when he told her of his potential new lead in Atlanta, she went ballistic about how much time he was spending loafing around on fieldwork and how much admin he'd dumped on her desk
and how she was always having to explain to Perez exactly what they were spending their budget on so fast. And it went on like that for what felt like hours.

Then Perez took a fresh interest, hearing about the Atlanta tip-off by earwigging around their door, and agreed with him that he
should
go and check it, because after all they'd spent on the case it was only fair to try and salvage something out of it instead of looking like a bunch of losers who couldn't detect their own asses with both hands. Mary took umbrage, thinking this was a criticism of her casework on the laboratory seizure where she hadn't made any arrests, and then they all started arguing about the significance or pointlessness of trying to get hard evidence against the Russian.

Finally Perez shouted over the top of them, “Just cut the crap! Delaney, get your reports done and on my desk. I want all that paperwork screened to the last dot. Westhorpe, get your butt on that Atlanta flight and don't be there one second longer than you have to. I'm sick to death of hearing that goddamn' Ivanov name. I want him in court or out of my life—forever!”

Meanwhile, in the pauses, Jude was trying to contact a lawyer for White Horse.

By the time he did leave for the airport he was wishing he'd not bothered going in at all. The lawyers' office had taken a message. They would call White Horse to discuss the options, although they were prissy about it, because he wasn't able to tell them anything and they thought he was wasting their time. He thought they'd wipe him from their minds as soon as the link dropped. His sister was at his apartment, with orders to go nowhere and do nothing until he got back, but he didn't think she'd obey. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

And then he got the chance to try and decode what it was that Dan was trying to say about Natalie; what was the guy on? Jude couldn't try and contact her directly, he knew that. Instead he'd sent his best datapilot, Nostromo, on a search, using all of his security clearances, to
try and gather information. It came back every half hour, turning up a blank every time.

The flight was mercifully short and uneventful. He reached the meeting point, at Café Primo on Peachtree, ahead of time and waited, tolerating the wet heat with grim patience and frappuccino, but as the minutes ground past and his man didn't show Jude began to sweat. He left it ten minutes and that was enough of feeling conspicuous among the hardened mall shoppers and the table of smartgang girls in the corner, where his suit made him look like an out-of-work actor. Call it spy paranoia, but he'd had enough.

He stepped into the mall itself, into the shelter of a secluded seating area marked off by potted sago palms, and called the number. No reply except his answering service.

At the CDC office line they said Tetsuo had gone out for lunch early but wasn't back yet. Maybe he'd stopped off at the pet store. He had a fussy kind of cat that needed lots of coat products and he was always buying it things. They weren't too bothered, because the lab was running a long-scale test and there was, in any case, nothing for him to be doing right this minute.

Feeling increasing foreboding Jude checked back with Nostromo's secure server where he kept sensitive data on informants and went to the listed address, getting the cab to drop him two blocks south of the building. He didn't expect Tetsuo to be in. He didn't expect to find anything. Wrong on both counts.

Tetsuo's walk-up was open. Not obviously, but Jude saw the slight shuffle of the shadow between door and frame as he got to the top of the step and waited after ringing the bell. A hot breeze, sluggish with exhaust fumes and the smell of rotting fruit, moved past him and into the shadows of the entryway as the door swung inward easily at his touch. The soft burr of the air-conditioners dulled the noises from the street. Jude's nostrils flared as he stood on the threshold, trying to detect anything.

“Tetsuo?”

The door opened onto a long corridor with a room at the end and doors leading off it all along its length. The end room was the kitchen, identifiable by the cupboards on the wall which he could just make out. At the sound of his voice a long-haired, giant-sized, and obviously gene-tickled blue-point padded into view on the threshold. It watched him unblinkingly with golden eyes the size of golf balls in its handsome, black-whiskered face. Jude had never seen such an enormous cat. It was the size of a human child. Its long tail, plumed with glorious silvery and lavender fur, hung low, tip twitching in sudden snaps of annoyance.