Mappa Mundi (32 page)

Natalie pulled down a picture of New York and turned it over.

“Dear Nat, a tiring day touring the publisher's and then meeting all the special celebs. Very late now and am just writing this before I call through the copy; saw a great dress today and thought of you—am sending some shoes along by post for you but I'll probably see you before they do! All my love, Mum.”

In between the shelves Charlotte's amateurish photographs of places sat in cheap frames. Natalie looked at a faded print of Reichenbach Falls, an ironic smile trying to rise to her face, and put herself there, behind the eyes that had taken the picture.

Did she know she was going to die when she boarded the airplane?

How could anyone in their right mind take a two-seater around the cape in those conditions? Did she love us? Why wasn't that enough?

Natalie listened to the clock in the kitchen softly chime six-thirty. Somewhere the answers lay, lost to her, hidden in a distant cranny of space-time. In their absence, she'd made up a story from the map of known events. But all maps are patchy and so all understanding is a story and no more. Natalie herself was a story, a construct of reasons and connections and ideas tethered together by narrative links she'd chosen to believe. What if none of those were right?

Natalie put the postcard back, but it wouldn't stick. She laid it on the desk. Everything she'd done from the moment of Charlotte's lightning-lit and fatal sea-ditch had been fashioned by that sudden voltage out of nowhere. It had fused her determination to find the Truth and set
her out to do it. But her counsellor had told her this was only a sublimated wish to recover that lost love, and wasn't that the sad reality? A horrible, random event had shaped her dreams and here she was with a fresh headful of her own handmade denial, dreaming and wondering.

Playing the flirtatious woman with Jude was no more than a clinging reaching-out for love, wasn't it? And Dan was the reality—gone.

She emerged from her reverie in the blink of an eye.

Dan had tried to tell her something before the Bobby test. What was it?

He'd asked before about scanning. Why?

Natalie got up from the seat and went through into her study. She pulled up Jude's files from her disk and looked them over again.

Of course these programs certainly weren't going to be the only ones circulating now such things were possible. Why wait for perfection when a quick hack would serve your purpose? This was madness in a jar and no doubt there were other crude commands: listen and obey…forget…memory erasing would be easy if you didn't care whether the results left functioning minds or not. Add spoon and stir, like Jude said.

If Dan was the victim of this technology then that would explain why he'd done what he'd done. And she was even less safe than she'd thought, sitting around with a brainload of open gear. She had to plug that socket before someone plugged it for her. The trouble was, she didn't know how to do it. Any shutdown orders could probably be hacked open again.

She heard doors opening and closing downstairs. People changing shifts. Soon it would be time to leave. Her opportunities were already limited enough.

In her kit she had a prototype scanner. It was packed but she went to fetch it. As soon as she was ready she loaded it with the latest version of Selfware, typed a specific timed-run command line into it, pointed it at herself, and pressed the trigger. It should take her to a point just short of Bobby's fatal discontinuity.

Soon she'd be smart enough to figure out what to do or spaced out enough not to care. It was a Dan kind of solution. It made her smile with nostalgia, while inside she felt as bitter and angry as she'd ever felt in her life at the unfairness, the stupidity, the greed of it all.

Jude had an early call from Nell, the lab technician, that woke him up. She left him a message asking for him to meet her out on the Mall. It didn't surprise him unduly; she disliked talking about anything remotely unorthodox close to the Special Sciences building and he had no doubt that whatever Tetsuo had put in that vial was going to be that.

He lay in bed, looking at the clock, listening to the distant traffic noise, remembering with a grimace the scene in the Atlanta kitchen. He was good at keeping cool in a situation. Not so good a day after, when it reappeared with all its gruesome disgustingness intact. Not that he'd known Tetsuo personally, except as an associate spoken to very occasionally, paid out of the standard bribe funds, but he'd met him before. The sight of someone who had lived and breathed being reduced to a heap of meat amid their own personal surroundings—it made him nauseous. He didn't want to think about it, but he couldn't help it. And that cat—what a weird animal. But nothing more than an animal, so why did he find it the most repulsive thing he'd ever seen?

He had to get up and shower to stop the train of thought going any further.

By the time he was out, White Horse was already dressed and making coffee.

“Mary's going to find a good law firm for me,” she said. “And a matching journalist.”

“Mmn hmmn.” He knew Mary could, if anyone could. It was kind of her to offer. He called her, but the answering service and the office detailer told him she'd gone for the day, on home-working retreat, and didn't want to be disturbed. It was okay. It gave him time to talk to Nell.

“What're you doing today?”

“Not much,” White Horse said. “I got a videoconference link to the Deer Ridge community meeting this afternoon. I think I'll take a walk this morning.”

“You should stay here,” he said, uneasy at the idea of her moving about alone.

“Sure,” she agreed, with the look that meant she had no intention of doing any such thing.

“Keep your Pad on all the time. Call me,” he told her, sliding into his jacket and adjusting his gun holster. It pulled sometimes.

“You use that a lot?”

“No,” he said.

“Keep it clean.”

“I do.”

“Good.” She turned back to reading the papers. “It says here that some Micromedica trials in Britain have proved that the NervePath neural technology works
in vivo.”
She glanced up at him as he paused there. “Think that's us?”

“Probably.” The information only made him wonder what the hell was going on over there. There was no new message from Dan, or Natalie, or anyone. He didn't have a contact who would know. He was stuck. He shrugged. “I'll try to find out. Meantime, don't get into a mess.”

She snorted as he left and called out, “By the way, Uncle Paul has sent you some more of that BIA peanut butter surplus. Eat smart, play hard.” She laughed, quoting the Department of Agriculture line. “You won't have that in Washington, he says. I put it with the rest of the tins under the sink. When you gonna eat it? It's only good for another few years.”

“I hate the stuff,” he said, instantly feeling the sensation of gloop stuck to the roof of his mouth, tiny chunks wedged in his molars and gums. “You can find some charity to give it to.”

“You're his charity. It's a care package. Washington has sophisticated
food, not enough calories for you guppies.” She sniggered. They both knew that Paul was tremendously fat due to his views on nutrition as insulation against most of the world's ills.

“I'm grateful, really.” He gave her a cynical wink and closed the door, wondering what on Earth his family were on. He
was
grateful, but confused. Peanut butter. Paul sent a big tub of it every other month. Jude had enough to send on a third world rescue mission. He should find someone who liked it, but he always forgot to.

The newspaper article made him send out Nostromo to find all articles on the subject and get any translations necessary for him. He was just getting a list up when he arrived at the grassy area of the Korean War Memorial and started looking around for Nell. The oversize soldiers had a semidissolved look; they seemed to have emerged from the earth, mud creatures, and to be subsiding back into it at the same time. Close to the man with the radio pack Nell's small, neat figure was walking slowly, eating a Danish out of a paper bag. Jude touched her elbow as he drew alongside.

“Good morning.”

“Jude.” She swallowed quickly and dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin. “Here, before anything else,” and she pressed the vial, warm from her pocket, into his hand. As she met his gaze a look of fear and loathing flitted just under the surface of her good nature. “Don't ever bring that kind of stuff in again,” she whispered. “Not near me. Christ, I didn't even know such a thing existed. Do you realize it took me until this morning to figure out what it does?”

Nell did look grey-faced and haggard, it was true. He apologized and offered to buy her a better breakfast but she declined. She made him put the vial in his jacket and said, “It's not hazardous as it is now, in that state. If you break the glass you won't die of anything.” She threw the uneaten half of her pastry into a wastebin. “But if you combine it with just about anything else you've got a better plague than the Black Death going.”

They began to walk up towards the Capitol. Jude waited for Nell to explain it in her own time.

“It's like Micromedica gear, right? But some sort of hybrid thing. It's not just a bit of inert engineering, it's almost alive. On the surface it looks like a small organism, say a kind of a virus, but this is much bigger. It has similar sorts of properties: invade cells, use the host body to replicate big numbers—and that would cause symptoms, just like a virus infection: sneezing, coughing, all that large-scale histamine production, et cetera. Okay, but it has another function. I think this is just like a jacket, you know, a coating to get something else inside the body.”

“A delivery system?”

“Yeah, but a very clever one.” She took a deep breath and let it out steadily. “This thing has an inside big enough to take several viral cells, or a bacterium of quite a size, or some drug molecules, or, you know, anything in that range. But, and here's the kicker—” she glanced up at him with worry lines etching her face “—whenever it replicates itself, it also replicates whatever it's carrying.”

Jude snorted and shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That's not possible. Did you test it?”

“Of course,” Nell said shortly. “I tested quite a few things on it and stuck it in a tissue culture and in a bath of everything from acid to Jello and, believe me, impossible or not, when it has the resource it can make a perfect copy.”

“What do you mean, resource?”

“Anything won't do. Water, saline—it has to have a variety of organic and inorganic components. It needs a bodily host, although it survived a good hour in weak acid. I don't know. It's tough.” She was shaking her head now, digging her hands in her trouser pockets, scuffing the ground with her shoes. “Whoever designed it was like an Einstein of the biologicals. But don't you see the problem? Massive replication—carrying anything? There must be a trigger to release the contents—I don't know what. A certain population density. I don't
know. But this way you can make ordinary bugs into killer infections; released into the body at supersaturation and the immune system has no time to defend. You could die of a cold.”

“But if it was carrying some kind of drug,” he said. “Wouldn't that be a rapid cure for something?”

“Could be,” she agreed. “But you know what? Micromedica applications are small enough to fit inside it, and it replicates them, too.”

They stopped, as one, on the path and stood to one side to let a couple of joggers go past. Jude had to think about it for a minute.

“Is it infectious?”

“You betcha. Droplet, skin contact, contaminated water—the whole range of chances.”

“Is the reaction to it severe?”

She nodded. “You'll be coughing and sneezing hard enough to make a decent aerosol.”

“Mmn. Does it ever die?”

“Jude, this thing has a Micromedica interface. It accepts command lines. It'll die when you tell it to.”

“Programmable disease?”

“Programmable delivery system,” she corrected him. “And think about it, Jude, there's even more. This stuff only targets human beings, nothing else in the animal world. It recognizes gene sequences. It can even tell you from me.”

He stared at her. “You can't do all that with something that size.”

“Biochemical engineering has come a long way since you studied it.” But Nell's face was hard. “I don't know what they're going to use this for but I hope to God it's someone good who gets to decide. Is it ours?”

“I got it via the CDC,” he admitted.

She nodded. “Okay. Okay. That's me done. I'm out. See ya around.” She held up her hands and backed away. “And next time you find something, don't think of me first.”

“Listen, Nell,” he began, “I'm sorry…”

“No problem, man.” She turned and started heading for home.

He watched her go and then moved to sit down on a bench not far away. It was still only warm out, but the sun was rising strongly into blue skies, heating the city into another sluggish, steaming day. No wonder they'd killed Tetsuo for interfering with that; but who? And come to think of it, had they really had to kill him? The vial hadn't been that hard to find. Perhaps Tetsuo was a bit of scheduled maintenance they'd been planning for a while already, so they didn't even know he'd taken anything, they'd just thought he was going to talk.

There was no way to know if he'd been rumbled or not. But the gene sequencing parts and the type of engineering sounded very like what Ivanov might have been doing in Florida, only a bigger operation. No wonder Mary had found nothing if the government had cleared him out prior to her arrival on the site. They really should do a better kind of liaison between departments—but then, nobody talked about this kind of thing. Ever. Was it illegal? Several international treaties said so, but here it was and Jude was pretty sure it was American. It might even have been the thing they'd been invited up to Dugway to preview, the United States' legitimate response system to a bioterrorist threat.