Mappa Mundi (38 page)

“Unless they are no longer human. Would that create less difficulty?” Guskov asked.

“No,” Kropotkin said sharply. “Anything that is not a machine equipped and built specifically for the task is too great a leap of belief for me. People are animals that live on the classical Newtonian scale and all their senses and structures operate within an extremely small window of the Information Hypercube. They don't even have direct contact with reality at a conscious level: their entire map and perception of the world around them is a fabrication created by the brain to allow successful living in a complex world. This theory of yours that suggests that somehow this person has altered so greatly that their cells have become capable of direct quantum detection and manipulation is ridiculous. The fact I have no other explanation doesn't mean that I am any more inclined to believe yours.”

“It doesn't have to be that strong,” Goldfarb suggested, carefully modulating his voice so that it didn't appear too flat. “It's more likely that the quantum-state interactions between the patient and the universe take place at a subconscious level. Consciousness is the emergent product of a complex and discrete set of actions in the brain. It is the narrative story that comes a fraction of a second after the subconscious mind has already made its decisions and taken its actions. It is a macro-level event. But the quantum manipulation may be a very low-level
event, taking place far beneath even the subconscious, with effects and awareness of it only occurring spasmodically, or maybe never, at the conscious level.”

“And the effect of the will?” Guskov asked him, pleased with his response.

“A conscious desire to act,” Goldfarb said, “which is really a late understanding of a subconscious decision, could conceivably have a downward filtering action, just as it does when we move physically. Like walking downstairs, all the patient would be aware of is that he wants to go down and his feet take him down—he doesn't have to work every muscle in his legs to do it. In this case Patient X may simply wish to vanish, and so he does, without understanding exactly how he is doing it.”

“Nikolai?” Guskov turned back to his old friend and colleague. “Still too difficult?”

“Yes, yes,” Kropotkin nodded. “I see your points. But I do not see how an organic creature can achieve interaction with fermions and bosons, as would be required to achieve this complete matter-transformation that you seem to think so easy.

“Fermions are the stuff of matter and bosons the stuff of fields, together forming the fabric of the universe. How could consciousness, a product of organic chemistry, reach down to that level and manipulate it? More, how could it do so without altering itself in the process? The changes you're talking of involve Patient X's entire structure and so, necessarily, his mind. How can the information of what he is, physically, survive that complete change? Where is it stored and how is he restored?
Has
he been restored? That would go a long way to convince me, at least, but you have nothing, not a single cell remains. Even supposing you are right, the act of vanishing seems as though it would be a final act.”

“Good afternoon,” said a voice from the doorway, a light, female voice with the verve and authority that suggested it was used to facing
interrogative panels and grant committees and getting its own way. “Wasting no time, I see.”

“Doctor Khan.” Guskov got up to introduce her to the others. “I hope you've settled in well.”

“It's hardly the Ritz,” she said and shook hands with Goldfarb and Kropotkin in turn as they stood up to greet her. “Alicia, please,” she added, including them all in the sweep of her amber eyes. “I am your statistician and probability guru for the duration. I hope you won't all be too long about it, either. I've left a stew in the oven.” She smiled, an infectious smile that Mikhail and Nikolai responded warmly to and Isidore copied faithfully back at her. Mikhail had never met her before but he formed an instant dislike for her in that moment.

There was a sound of footsteps at the door and Lucy Desanto walked in on Alicia's moment, hands in the pockets of her slacks, her eyebrows raised beneath the grey and brown sweep of her fringe. “I see the party's started without me,” she said. She greeted them all with a single nod of recognition and a sardonic smile. “All the happy guests, thanks to your sweet invitations, Mikhail. So full of blandishments and pleasant words about my family. You must be pleased with everything you've achieved already.” She sat down in a vacant chair that was just outside the line of the group and folded her hands in her lap. Her gaze was relentless.

“I sent no such letter.” It was the truth.

“Your lackey, then. Ms. Delaney from the Department of Defense. What a charming girl. I'm sure she's destined for the top.”

Her arrival had filmed the atmosphere with a slick of discomfort, as she had intended. Mikhail didn't make the mistake of attempting to disperse it. He waited for them all to accept the situation and to see what their reactions would be. They would have to get a lot more weight off their collective chests before any of them were capable of continuing Mappa Mundi, and the sooner it started, the sooner it would be over.

“Mary Delaney is one of those who stand directly in the way of
achieving anything with this project,” he said, keeping his attitude conversational although his eyes gazed firmly into Desanto's. “The Free State of Mind can never be brought into being as long as she and her compatriots exercise the control they do over us. We are not here to work for her. We are here to free ourselves.”

“Ah, yes, your crusade,” Desanto replied. “But here we are, locked in a bunker, no outside communications and no escape. We couldn't even get a letter out. I expect that is all in the plan, though, is it?”

“Is this place bugged?” Alicia was looking around at the walls and ceiling fitments. “And if not, why not?”

“It's riddled with bugs,” Mikhail assured her, “which we've disabled in here over the course of the last few days. No doubt they will complain, but considering the situation, they will not be replacing the devices.” He was glad that they could speak freely within the confines of the environment. “It was also a condition of my continued support for the United States.”

“Why? Going to defect again?”

“Just once more,” he assured her. “But we've run out of drinks. Let's get some more, shall we?”

The group broke up and went about finding things in the kitchen with shows of relief and small talk. Only Nikolai stayed behind, touching him on the arm.

“You're very certain of yourself,” he said. “Why do you trust them? They can listen from anywhere.”

“Because,” he said, “they know that I have all the production facilities in place for a global-scale NervePath output and they don't. They like to believe their security here is faultless, but they know we're smart. I don't trust them, they don't trust me, but they won't come for us until they're certain the product is viable without us, and until then, whether they're listening or not, they can stuff it up their ass. They may as well know the whole plan, because it doesn't change the fact that they need us for now.”

“Not up to the usual scope of your security and ideas,” Nikolai said and smiled, patting Mikhail on the shoulder. “I see that at last you're like the rest of us.”

Mikhail waited for him to finish. He'd worked a long time with Nikolai, longer than with anyone else. They'd first had the inklings of Mappa Mundi back in the early 1990s in Germany, working together in the same departments in Berlin. Now their ideas were slowly coming to life, and their lives, simultaneously, moving towards a conclusion. He was sure that Nikolai had an important statement, witty, precise.

He wasn't disappointed. “Like you?”

“Yes. Pissing in the wind.” Nikolai laughed asthmatically and coughed once or twice. “At last the playing field is level. I like that. It will be interesting to see what happens, even if none of us ever forgive you.”

“Forgiveness isn't necessary,” Mikhail said. “Your gratitude will be my reward, the day all this secrecy and lying and deceit and unfairness comes to an end.”

“Yes, of course it will,” Nikolai said. “And I will paste my thanks to the rear end of a flying pig.” He took his glasses off and wiped them on an optical cloth from his pocket, replacing them carefully afterwards. “You think all human nature is like yours. It isn't.”

“It will be.”

Nikolai ignored him. “You know, this Armstrong incident has changed everything. You have to find her before they do. You have to get her on our side.”

Mikhail sighed heavily. “I think that's out of my hands now,” he said.

“Pray, then,” Nikolai said, watching through the hatchway that led to the kitchen and its shining stainless steel as the others moved cautiously around each other. “Because if you're right about her and Patient X then you haven't got the power you think in Mappa Mundi on its own.”

Mikhail watched them, too, Isidore oblivious between the two women on either side of him. Kropotkin was right. Now the power structure had changed. Nothing was as he had planned. All he could do was wait and hope that the few cards still in his hand stayed secret a little longer. The death of Tetsuo Yamamoto might have bought him a few more weeks. It might not. Here there was no knowing what went on in the affairs of the living.

He made an excuse or two and retired to his own rooms to pour himself a single shot of scotch and stare at the simulation of a window overlooking the harsh Siberian steppe. Its windswept ice made him glad to be inside. For now.

Ian Detteridge swam in oceans of flux. A place, no name, a play but no game, a chance in a field of chances dancing on the surface of his mind. Nameless places passed through him on their way to somebody else.

His awareness flickered listlessly in and out of existence. The control he'd once had was gone. He'd thought it would, but that was no comfort now it had. It would and it had, it could and it did, it might—what was the word that would drag it back to his future?

Like an albatross, by instinct he followed Natalie Armstrong, true to his word, keeping in touch, beneath and above, through and between, sailing the wind of the world.

He tried to summon an effort of will. The chain of his trying to try stretched out in a yawning distance in every direction and he hung suspended in the zero-g of its centre point, becalmed. He thought he travelled. He thought of nothing, which was not the same as being nothing. He struggled to try, to remember to try, to search for the surface of things.

He made his way, jiggery, jaggery, uncertain as a child in the dark.

He decided to reach out.

He reached into the tough, rough, solid, the dense, loose, light, the hard fixed form.

He stepped into a truck with a curiously quiet engine and an almost silent, rail-smooth ride. Its walls were grey and fitted out with straps and clips and holding clamps of all kinds. In a soft chair, secured with seat-belt webbing to the floor of the truck, sat Natalie Armstrong like a queen, her flame hair in an explosive disarray, her jacket rumpled, her leather trousers shiny, her tough boots braced, and her long fingers drumming on the armrests, a mambo on the right and a march on the left.

“Bobby,” she said, smiling a smile that made him feel suddenly good about being again. “I mean Ian. Thank God. You've got to help me get out of this thing before we get wherever we're going.”

He recognized immediately that the NP system had spread inside her. She was almost completed, but she'd managed to halt it right before the fatal point where it changed, under its own rules, and became free. The results of its actions were still developing in their subtlety, and she was almost like him by now. Almost, but not enough to shift form.

Ian looked into the structure of the truck's sides and reached into the gaps with fingers that felt their way along the domain lines between the crystalline forms of the metal and separated the lattices at these faults so that he could lift out an entire circle of the wall and put it on the floor. He turned and Natalie was watching him, her face fearful but a smile lingering on it. He nodded and together they peered out for a few moments, faces into the wind.

They weren't going too fast and the land outside was barren-looking industrial sites, some disused and decaying, others apparently limping along, still in business. Nobody saw them and they saw no police escort. No point in alarming the public, Ian thought, or perhaps they assumed there'd be no escape from the vehicle.

“Can you jump?” He glanced at Natalie who was watching the paving and the road slide by. Fleetingly he felt anxiety, as though his body could be damaged by sudden contact at speed with the concrete, but then he realized it was Natalie's fear, not his own.

“Yes,” she said with confidence. “But let's go out the back so they don't see us straightaway. With luck, we'll be able to hide before they know I'm gone.”

“Okay.” Ian replaced the panel and realigned it carefully until even the paint seemed as if it had been untouched.

Then he turned his focus to the rear doors and cut through them, avoiding the alarm and pressure sensors. It was tricky. Their wires ran everywhere, but at last he had a narrow gap she would be able to squeeze through. The bed of the vehicle was high, but he thought it looked easy enough, so long as you knew how to fall.

“Don't forget to roll,” he said as she balanced in the hole, her hair jiving in the wind, jacket tails rippling.

She turned to him, an exultant look on her face. “This is madness.”

He nodded. “Maybe you'll enjoy it more than I have.”

They slowed and came to a kind of junction at a corner.

Natalie stepped down silently to the blacktop and said, “Come on. Put that back.”

“You go. I'll catch up with you,” he said and started to fix up the panels.

As the bomb truck wound its way through the old industrial estate and carried on with its slow route to the safe area, avoiding housing, Natalie walked the other way, towards the airport, concealing herself with buildings and walls as she went, eventually finding a highway that led into and out of the city.