Mappa Mundi (49 page)

“Yeah,” she said quietly, watching him turn his back quickly and walk away from her, head down and shoulders hunched.

Mary waited until she felt cooler and then she walked home, dazed and feeling foolish.
What was that all about?
Her thoughts were telling her she was a moron but her heart was singing. She wanted him more than she thought she'd wanted anything.

It'll pass, you idiot
, she told herself.

Then she opened the door of her apartment and a faint, sickly smell made her hesitate on the threshold. She sniffed the street but in its smell of gasoline and humid earth there was nothing unusual.

The sensor pads showed that nobody had tried to break in. She assumed she must have left something in the refrigerator that was going off, or maybe one of her flower arrangements was wilting early. She left her shoes in the hall and padded around to look, but they all seemed fine. There was an old tub of half-eaten ricotta cheese in her butter box that she threw out, but it had only just started to green.
The smell persisted and it seemed stronger and more … wet … the further into the apartment she got.

When she turned on the lights in the bedroom she was so fast to jump backwards in shock that she hit her head hard on the edge of the door and almost knocked herself out.

From her hands and knees, mouth open in shock, she could still see the decaying pieces of Dan Connor's body soaking into the hand-embroidered lace coverlet of her bed. Whoever had put him there had reassembled him thoughtfully, and shaped him in a star that looked like a welcoming embrace.

Jude stood in the white purity of his own shower, with the jets on full, feeling the water sluice and foam against his skin. With his hand on himself he masturbated, eyes closed, leaning on the tiles, feet braced. When his moment came he let go and sank down into a crouch on the floor, watching the swirl of water catch his semen and swirl it down the drain. He leaned on his hands with his head down and cried soundlessly as the flood poured onto his head and back, hot and raw on the gashes that lined his shoulders and ribs. He opened his mouth and silently screamed. He hadn't got any other way to try and keep feeling and he hadn't got any way to let it out.

He'd never felt more wretched and now he was afraid. It was a relief. Fear. At last, there it was. The knee-buckling terror that drains all purpose and will. Mary had recognized that fucking file. He'd sort of suspected it the other day when she was uninterested in it, and this evening—her face had been so studied.

He huddled with his arms around his knees and drew his legs in tight. He sat under the water and rocked back and forth. He'd made his bid. He'd decided to see what he could achieve by telling instead of keeping secrets. Tomorrow and tomorrow it would have to keep going until at last …

Seventy-three percent he was now. What did it mean?

He sent his thoughts out to Natalie, but he didn't even know where she was.

One more second and he'd have begged Em to come back with him, and she would have. He wished she was there. He wished he knew for sure if she was the real Em or not. He wanted White Horse back. He wanted all the things he would never have.

Mikhail Guskov looked at the information spiralling down the lines from Bobby X and knew there and then that his problems with Mappa Mundi were solved. This fusion of the NervePath and Selfware could be used in others the same way—transforming the existing mind into a programmable structure, opening it up for improvements without compromising any of its unique adaptations. It was perfect.

Natalie Armstrong, working alongside him in the lab, turned around and her flat, unsettling gaze made him stop in the midst of transferring his thoughts to the Pad in his hand.

“How convenient,” she said quietly, glancing at what he'd written with the stylus. “You'll have the means in your hand before long. The only question that then remains is, what is this master program you're going to distribute to the waiting world?” Her left eyebrow hooked up into a question mark. “Or haven't you decided yet?”

He glanced along the line of equipment but Isidore and Calum were intent on their work. They hadn't heard her. In the glass chamber, inside the scan system's loose clutch, Bobby X sat, as solid as anyone Guskov had ever seen.

“Sarcasm doesn't suit you,” he said cordially.

“I'll be the judge of that.” She turned and some communication seemed to flash between her and the slumping bulk of Bobby. “I'm betting
it won't be a lock-out. You could write one, you know. A mental immunizer.
I
could write it.”

“It's already on the list.” He grinned at her. “Along with many other off-the-shelf concepts which will be freely available—”

“Ah, when are you going to cut this bullshit?” she whispered, smiling with a real streak of acid in the long line of her mouth. “You know it isn't going to work out in perfect conditions. Most people are going to end up worse than they started. Or do you believe in yourself so much that you've forgotten why you started this in the first place?”

“You'd rather the Americans had their way?”

“I'd rather none of this had ever happened, but so what? As you claim, the technology demands a response. I say you should nip it in the bud and seal everyone shut against it. You can't control it once it's finished. Even if you did get it distributed and the stuff was free there'd be ten people in as many minutes writing programs for it. They'd learn. Meanwhile you have to play catch-up and race ahead at the same time. No way you can. In a few years everything we know of as our cultural life could have ground to a halt, people shifting in their understanding as the wind changes to different points of the compass. Identity will be written in water. Ideas will invade or leave without your choosing. People will be puppets with no master. It's a travesty, and you know it.”

“You have a bleak imagination,” he said. The direct force of her words and her stare was unnerving him, and he hadn't felt that way since he couldn't remember when. He liked it. She was a challenge.

Natalie snorted and glanced down at some of the data from Bobby. “I don't have an imagination any more,” she said to the desk and then turned on her heel and walked away from him, down to the far end of the control centre where she sat down to use another terminal next to the high-shouldered shape of Lucy Desanto.

Desanto, Guskov thought, she was another problem, and Natalie knew about that as well. He suspected Desanto was here to spy for the US government and had a way he hadn't found out about that would
allow her to transmit information freely out of the Environment to them. They'd wait until he was ready and then—what? Probably close in with an army group, threaten to kill them all, or their loved ones, if they didn't cooperate. And meanwhile, on the evidence of that piece of shit from Deer Ridge that Mary'd managed to keep a lid on, they were training their own programmers to use the languages and try out some ideas.

Natalie's words had bitten home, however. There was no question that she was now the most intelligent person in the room, although what that amounted to was hard to define. She thought faster, she had access to knowledge that eluded the rest of them, and she'd started out as one of the few NervePath programmers he respected. He didn't know what that made her, but for the first time he felt old. If Selfware had made this out of her, what could a more sophisticated version do for him? And the rest of the world?

Enlightenment wasn't that far from his ultimate goal.

But she was right in that maybe his original ideas had been far too grand and immature. At the outset he'd thought that Mappaware would make it possible to remove selected memes from the ecosystem of the Global Common Cube. But there had been the problem of language as a first hurdle—ideas being defined in the terms and limits of specific natural language forms—and although a solution to that looked possible with this new evolution of Bobby X, there was still the certain and proven fact that even if he had managed to erase, say, all beliefs in any form of God, given time this meme would reemerge in the population.

All memes were recombinations of older memes. As long as the roots of possibility existed within the Global Cube, any idea that could be constructed from their multiple combinations and subtle explorations would surface again. The more attractive and powerful it seemed, the faster it would spread, and the more deeply entrenched it would become in the minds it inhabited. He didn't believe now that it was possible actually to get rid of any ideas by this method. Nor would he want to. It was this cross-pollinating richness that allowed
thought to move on from one generation to the next, developing technologies and amassing knowledge as it went. It was this phenomenon that produced the common experience of the zeitgeist and the synchronous evolution of the same new memes at isolated places, but within very brief periods of time. The more that people had free access to the Global Cube, the more frequently this occurred.

In latter days the more virulent religions and cultures had propagated their particular versions of the GC-Cube very successfully; their own Mappa Mundi were popular and widespread, more homogenous compared with the violently differing Cubes of their older selves that a less communicative population had enjoyed. Or was it endured?

For him it had been endurance. It was the perpetual Cube War he wanted to end, not free thinking. He had witnessed at first hand, and in all walks of life, the petty, banal, heartfelt, and bloody clashes of people with different Maps, different Cubes. What the defining memeplex happened to be was an incidental factor—a religion, a national identity, a public right-of-way, a jointly owned fence line, a water hole … the list was endless, but the result when the clashing Cubes came together was always the same.

There was even a form of mathematics that he, Isidore, and Alicia had developed between them, the Memetic Calculus, that described and predicted the outcomes of any amount of complicated ideas encountering each other for the first time. They resulted in one of four outcomes: acceptance (changing your own Map according to the new idea), tolerance (not changing it but tacking on the new information to your old Cube as a kind of handy reference), rejection (defining the new Map as utterly misguided and having no more to do with it), and attempted destruction (annihilate the threat of the new Map by killing all its hosts).

The last two were the ones Guskov hated. Both were triggered by emotions, generated in their own Cubes. Emotion was the master switch that Mappaware must come to play on most heavily. Alter the emotional portrait of a meme and you alter identity without the need
for fancy fiddling with the hugely tangled and difficult definitions of neural pattern and synaptic timing.

His own identity had been a matter of expediency. Most people would have ferociously resisted the changes he had looked for and embraced. Many thousands every year died to protect their sense of identity rather than change and continue a physical existence. The very concept of your own identity was interlinked with the ideas of eternity, unchangeability, sanctity, and rightness. From anorexics to terrorists, the legions ready to throw themselves into annihilation to prevent the extermination of their own Maps was a phenomenon that enraged him with its pointless waste. And as long as the sacred self was enshrined as a concept that must not be tampered with or improved, the futile litany of torture and misery that accompanied it would, of necessity, go on.

Guskov looked along the lab at his staff, his companions, his conspirators. He didn't think any of them exactly shared his ideas, despite every communicative effort. Some Maps could not agree, no matter how you tried to fit them together. But they had agreed, in theory, that a mutable identity that embraced rational doubt and was prepared to reject any part of itself if proven wrong or unsuitable was preferable to a fixed dogma with no room for change. And he himself knew by experience that there was almost no limit at all to how a person could alter the entire structure of their selves, from values to language, and still remain aware that they were Themselves.

As the scheduled technical scans of Bobby X came to an end and the data began to be processed, it was time for the more traditional method of evaluation—a conversation.

Guskov walked along the back of the room and tapped Natalie on the shoulder.

“Since you're his chaperone,” he said and held the door open for her.

She gave him a nod and went into the test room to clear away the scan gear and bring the other chairs forward so they could all sit in conference together.

Mikhail followed her and did his share. Bobby—Ian—sat and watched them with a constant and unwavering attention. His expression was unreadable, blank but fully engaged. Mikhail wondered what he saw.

Jude stood on the lowest bar of the gate at Theo Jones's Two-Fox Ranch and from the shade beneath his hat brim looked out over the corral at the circling horses. Theo was just behind him, sucking on a stem of old grass, letting Jude take his time. The paddock was dry and the grass all but ground up to nothing under the many hooves. Jude kept coming back to a graceful, powerful horse, its mane the same golden chestnut as Mary Delaney's hair. It had a white blaze on its face. There were no pale animals in the herd except a grey, but it was too dark for his purpose.

“That one?” Jones tipped his own hat back and nodded, extracting the grass stem for a moment. “Best one in the whole damn' herd.” He was aggrieved, but there was nothing he could do. Jude handed over the best part of ten thousand and left an hour later on the nameless animal's back, riding the last ten miles across Jones's well-maintained pastures and woodland, up to the reservation fence line.

It was a long time since Jude had been in the saddle, but he hadn't forgotten how to ride. The horse, a mare, followed his leads easily and ran light on her feet, eager to be moving and full of the vigour of the bright day. His leathers creaked. He wore his father's necklace and bone-beaded jacket. He wore White Horse's old hat, which had been left at Jenny Black Eagle's house and so had escaped the fire. Good thing she had a head as big as his, he thought, and almost smiled. With the reins in one hand and the other resting easy, the mare's paces rocking and calm, he could have stayed like that forever, crossing the land, always going forward. But within what seemed like minutes they had found the trail that ran along the wire fence and were soon at the gateway and the dusty ride up into Deer Ridge.

He made her walk the last half mile. They stopped finally, panting in the noon heat, where the charred earth of the old house sat opposite Paul Bearchum's porch. Jude dismounted and tied the pony up to the mailbox. As she began to crop the grass close to it he walked inside, the brief lift of spirit he'd felt in the woods vanished into thin air.

He sat in the cool kitchen for the next half hour with Paul himself, drinking iced tea and listening to the sound of his mother in the other room, talking to other cousins. He and Paul said nothing, rested their glasses on the blue-and-white-check tablecloth, watched the world outside the open door. The day was sunny and bright with high, white cloud scudding in the distance. Gentle breezes ruffled the long, straggling grass heads that crowded next to the porch steps. Down the road a child played on a bright green tricycle. A chicken hawk sailed over the long, black ground where White Horse's home had stood, hanging on the mild updraught there, moving on.

“This case,” Paul said at one point. “Will it ever make court?”

“I don't think so,” Jude replied. They were talking about the case White Horse had tried to put together and which he had asked Paul to testify on. “I've got enough to start with and get a hearing; the program they used and a set of NervePath.” He found himself unconsciously touching his head. “I can demonstrate the effect. But I need witnesses who saw the people that came, who saw them holding the scanner or saw it in their car outside Martha Johnson's store. I need links.”

“Okay,” Paul said, getting up for more ice. He was sixty-nine now and moved stiffly under his weight, taking his time. His hair still had dark amid the white, but his face showed all the years. “If you ask the others today they might change their minds.”