In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  For Georgina

  and for John and Judith Clute

  Man has only one life, and must live it so that he does not recall with pain and regret the aimless lost years, and does not blush with shame over his mean and trivial past, so that when he dies he can say, ‘All my life has been devoted to the struggle for the liberation of mankind.’

  Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered

  It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything.

  Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: BOW SHOCK

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART TWO: TERMINATION SHOCK

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART THREE: THE DUST BELT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART FOUR: CTHUGA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  ESEMPLASY

  1

  2

  3

  PART ONE

  BOW SHOCK

  1

  When the Child was a child, a sturdy toddler not quite two years old, she and her mother moved to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the north-west corner of the Peixoto family’s territory in Greater Brazil. It was an old place, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an old garrison town on the Rio Negro, serving an army base and a depot for workers in the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps. Civilians, mostly descendants of Indians and early settlers, lived in a skewed grid of apartment blocks and bungalows beneath the green breast of the Fortaleza hill. Senior army officers, supervisors, and government officials rented villas along the Praia Grande, where in the dry season between September and January a beach appeared at the edge of the river. There was an airfield and a solar farm to the north, two schools, a hotel and half a dozen bars, a scruffy futbol pitch, a big church built in the brutalist style of the mid-twenty-first century, and a hospital, where the Child’s mother, Maria Hong-Owen, had taken up the position of resident surgeon.

  Maria’s husband had been a captain in the army’s intelligence service, killed when the plane in which he’d been travelling, a routine flight between his base and Brasília, had crashed after being caught in a lightning storm. The Child knew him only through pictures and clips. A handsome young man posing stiff and unsmiling in uniform. Standing bare-chested on a sunny lawn, a halo burning in his cap of blond hair, his face in shadow. Riding a bicycle down a dusty white road, the camera turning as he passed it and dissolved in a flare of light.

  We do not know why Maria, a widow at twenty-eight with a young child to care for, quit her comfortable position in the teaching hospital in Montevideo and took up work in a half-forgotten town in the upper reaches of the basin of the Rio Amazonas. She was a devout Catholic – it was one of the reasons why her daughter severed all contact with her years later – so let us suppose that she decided to dedicate her life to a good cause. To atone for some real or imagined sin that had opened the hole in the world that swallowed her husband. Every day, she attended early-morning Mass and then worked long hours in the hospital, walking the rounds of the wards, helping out at the day clinic, delivering babies, treating fevers and parasitic infections and all kinds of cancers, repairing the cleft palates common amongst the children of the local Indians, dealing with the machete wounds, shattered bones, and other injuries of workers in the sugar-cane, pharm-banana, and tree plantations.

  In short, she had too little time for her daughter, who was educated by a generic AI teaching package and cared for by her nursemaid or ama, Paulinho Gonzagão Silva. We know almost nothing about Ama Paulinho. She is one of the many players in the Child’s story whose life was written on water: we must reconstruct her by approximation, stochastic sampling, and best guesses. So let’s say that she was a full-blooded member of the Ianomâmis tribe, a stocky nut-brown old woman from a large family of some importance in the town, a widow like Maria Hong-Owen.

  The Child quickly came to love Ama Paulinho as much as she loved her mother. They went everywhere together. See them in the jostling market, the pale child riding in a cloth pouch on her ama’s back, clutching the old woman’s woolly grey hair and looking around with an imperious gaze. See the Child sprawled on her tummy on the threadbare lawn in the hospital compound, studying one of her AI teacher’s exercises while Ama Paulinho sits in the shade of a tree, a tablet in her lap, following her chosen thread in a saga. See the Child standing in her ama’s skirts at the edge of a street, the two of them watching army trucks rumble past in a blowing envelope of dust.

  Bright moments shining like stars in a dark and backward abyss. Constructed from file images and fragments of an audio clip discovered in a memory box that the Child created fifteen centuries ago.

  So much has been lost, and we lack the skill and knowledge to retrieve or resurrect most of it. All we can do is string what remains into some kind of order and pattern. Weave informed guesses and extrapolations based on heuristic sampling of historical records into a narrative that, if not accurate, is at least self-consistent. So we proceed, second by second. So the Child, our dear mother, twice dead, twice reborn, dreams herself towards her destiny.

  Ama Paulinho told the Child stories about the people of the town and its history, recounted the legends of the long ago. Once upon a time, a giant snake lived in the Rio Negro, swallowing any who tried to cross the river, until at last two heroes tricked it into coming ashore, where it was turned to stone by the heat of the sun – it could still be seen, a long and disappointingly mundane bump in the avenue that ran through the middle of the town. Once upon a time, a beautiful woman was seen bathing in the shallows of the river by two friends who both fell in love with her at first sight and fought over who would have to right to approach her. Frightened by their ferocious rivalry, the woman struck out for the far shore but was caught in a strong river current and drowned; the two friends swam after her, and when they reached her body it turned into the island Adana, and they became the streams of water passing by on either side.

  At the western point of the town’s promontory was a grassy rise where the trenches of the ancient fort of Morro da Fortaleza could be traced. To the east, the peaks of the Serra da Bela Adormecida mountains sketched the profile of the fairy-tale princess waiting for a handsome prince to kiss her awake. To the north-west was the Neblina Peak, whose slopes ran with icy springs that fed the river, and all around volcanic cones stood up from the patchwork of renewed forest and dry grassland. In several of these, according to Ama Paulinho, dinosaurs, giant sloths, spotted tigers with teeth like knives, and other fabulous animals still lived. Products of the blasphemous technologies that had caused the Overturn. Wildsiders lived there, also. Animals who looked like men; men who looked like animals. River Folk whose sweet songs could cloud the minds of men. Bat people who fed on the blood of cattle and children. Ground sloths who captured unwary travellers and forced them to work in underground galleries, cultivating fungus on fields of rotten wood.

  Ama Paulinho had her own story, her own mythos. She’d been married, once upon a time, although she said that it w
as so long ago that it might as well have been in another life. She and her husband had both been very young. Fifteen and sixteen. Little more than children. Her husband had worked as a general labourer for the R&R Corps. One day, while he was helping the big machines plant trees in a valley folded between two mountains, he had stepped off the road to urinate. When he finished, he saw a beautiful young woman staring at him from the green shade of an old tree that had somehow survived the hyperstorms and droughts and general ruin of the Overturn. She had large dark eyes and her tawny skin was dusted with golden freckles. He started to apologise, she laughed and ran off, and he chased after her, running up the side of the valley through a tract of old-growth forest, running faster than he had ever run before, running with such speed that he outran his human form and found that he had become a jaguar. He was so astonished that he stopped running, and he had been going so fast that when he stopped he tumbled head over tail (whenever she told the story, Ama Paulinho always widened her eyes in mock astonishment at this point, and the Child always laughed). The young woman came back and circled him and in the green light of the old forest he saw her true form: he saw that she was also a jaguar. And so they ran together through the tall and ancient trees, and he never again thought of or remembered the wife he had left behind, except in dreams.

  ‘And that is how I know what happened to him,’ Ama Paulinho said. ‘Because I shared his dreams, for a little while. And because he lives still, I have never looked for another husband, and that is why, little one, I am able to look after you. So you see, it is a sad story with a happy ending.’

  Ama Paulinho’s family possessed a deep knowledge of the forest, handed down from generation to generation. Her uncle and two of her cousins were ethnobotanical advisers to the R&R Corps, which in the past century had made great advances in repairing the ecological damage caused by the Overturn to the forests along the Rio Negros and the Rio Uampés. Her father, Josua Mão de Ferro Almeida Gonzagão, had served on the front line with the R&R Corps for more than forty years. He lived in a rambling single-storey house that was as familiar to the Child as her mother’s bungalow in the hospital compound. A fabulously old man, gaunt and leathery and bald as a turtle, who spent most of his time on a couch in a back room, watching a screen that was always streaming news, and receiving visitors. Old R&R comrades who drank maté with him and talked about the good old days; townspeople who came to ask his advice on business or personal matters, or to ask for small loans, or to pay off the interest on loans he had already given them. The household was run by his sister, widowed like Ama Paulinho. Her son and his wife and daughter lived there, too. The Child played with the daughter and her cousins and friends, and she was fond of Josua Gonzagão, who asked her opinion about various items of news, listened to her talk about her studies, told her that she was destined for great things (which she liked), told her that she should listen to her mother and her ama (which she didn’t), and talked about his work in the R&R Corps, and the properties of trees and lesser plants of the forest, and the lives and uses of its insects and animals. And so the Child began to be shaped into what she would – what she should, what she must – become.

  Maria Hong-Owen’s position in the hospital gave her considerable status, but her manner was severe and abrupt, she showed little interest in gossip, and was innocent of tact. Those who believed they mattered in the town thought her a typical barbarian from the Spanish-speaking south. At first, she was invited to parties and formal dinners and introduced to everyone who was anyone, but the wives were jealous of her independence and feared that she would steal their husbands, and the husbands did not know how to deal with a woman whose professional accomplishments gave her the kind of independence they jealously reserved for themselves. It did not help that, quite soon after her arrival in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Maria had a very public row with the supervisor of the sugar-cane plantation. A pipe in the plantation’s mill fractured; pressurised steam scalded three workers; Maria saved their lives and reconstructed their faces and hands with grafts of cultured skin and collagen, and presented a strongly-worded letter of complaint about work practices in the plantation to the members of the town’s council. They rejected it out of hand, of course, being friends and business associates of the plantation’s supervisor, Vidal Rahai Francisca, but Maria’s headstrong action had an effect she couldn’t have anticipated.

  Unlike most of its important citizens, Vidal Francisca had been born in the town. His father had been a teacher in its school; Vidal had studied at the agricultural college in Manaus and returned to take charge of the plantation, which was owned, like much of the town, by a minor scion of the Peixoto family. His beautiful young wife had died suddenly of an aneuryism ten years ago and he hadn’t remarried, although it was rumoured that he kept a mistress in an apartment in Manaus. A clever, vain man, he’d taken on the role of ringmaster to the town’s tiny social set. He had organised several famous events – a firework display the size of a minor war, a boat race, a polo match on the futbol field, especially returfed for the occasion, a performance of Turandot by a touring opera company – and every Independence Day held a celebrated and much anticipated barbecue at his large house.

  After his spat with Doctor Hong-Owen, he had felt insulted at first, and then intrigued. He saw in the woman’s dedication and uncompromising manner something of his younger self, and he sympathised with her plight. Her widowhood and, so he supposed, her loneliness. So he was disappointed when she sent him a polite message declining his invitation to that year’s Independence Day party, excusing herself on the grounds of pressure of work.

  Her absence was noted, of course; most people agreed that she was a ball-breaker too proud and snobbish to associate with people she believed to be no better than country bumpkins. Vidal Francisca found himself defending her on more than one occasion. ‘I know how it is, to lose a loved one, and to raise a child alone,’ he said, at a dinner party. ‘It leaves you with little energy for anything else. And if that is not enough, she is a capable woman very dedicated to her work.’

  ‘If she had any love of her work she should know who pays her salary,’ someone said.

  ‘Do we pay her to abase herself before us,’ Vidal asked, ‘or to do her work?’

  ‘Vidal is in love,’ someone else said, to general laughter.

  Vidal Francisca managed to change the subject, but more and more he found his thoughts turning to the young doctor and her precocious daughter.

  Because her mother was more or less frozen out of the town’s social set, the Child did not mix much with children of her class. She was tutored in mathematics and physics by the teenage son of the hospital director, but that was about it. At first she was too young to know any different, and later she pretended that she did not care.

  Imagine the Child growing up in that small and sleepy outpost, blonde and light-skinned like her father, secretive, sunburned, lanky. She learned how to trap birds with sticky sap and poison fish in a pool with a mash of berries, where edible fungi grew and at what season, which trees had kindly spirits and which were possessed by angry spirits that must be acknowledged and pacified, or else they might drop a branch on your head. She learned to read some of the signs with which the Ianomâmis marked their sacred places, and she collected and catalogued beetles and moths, and discussed the pharmaceutical properties of forest plants and mosses with her mother. And so she passed back and forth between two irreconcilable worlds: the numinous world of her mother’s God and of Ama Paulinho’s ancestral beliefs, where spirits animated the forest, men could shrug off human form, and death was not a full stop but a transformation; and the world of her mother’s profession, where logic unpicked mystery and revealed the common principles and laws by which reality could be tamed and manipulated, where disease was driven back by antibiotics and gene therapy, cancers were defeated by tagged antibodies and engineered viruses, and only death remained unconquered.

  The Child had an early familiarity with death. She kept a small
menagerie of animals collected from the wild places inside the town limits or bought in the market. She had a tank of terrapins, several tanks of river fish. She had an ant farm sandwiched between two plates of glass. She collected several species of stick insect from the forest, and bought a baby sloth from a mestizo boy in the market, but it died because she couldn’t figure out how to wean it. Most of her animals died, sooner or later. One day her fish would be all alive-o in their tanks; the next they’d be floating belly up. The ants deserted their maze. One by one, the stick insects dropped to the bottoms of their wire-mesh cages, as stiff and dry in death as the twigs they had emulated in life. Only the terrapins did not die, no matter how often she forgot to feed them, or how fetid the green soup of their little pond became.

  And because she made herself useful around the hospital, working in the lab, running errands for the nurses and doctors, fetching water and food for patients, and so on, the Child was also familiar with the deep and powerful mystery of human death. One day she’d be chatting with an old woman; the next, the woman’s bed would be empty and stripped to its mattress. Late one sultry night, the Child delivered a bite of supper to her mother as she kept watch on a dying patient in a little room off one of the wards. She saw the man start in his solitary bed and try to rise on his elbows, toothless mouth snapping at the air, his eyes wide and fixed on something far beyond the limits of the room, the hospital, the town, the world. She saw her mother ease him down and talk to him soothingly and fold his hands around a rosary, saw him try to take a breath and fail, and try and fail again, and that was that. Her mother called the Child to her side and they said a prayer over the body. Then her mother rose, her shadow wheeling hugely across the wall and ceiling, and flung open the shutters of the window as if setting something free.

  Yes, the Child had an early education in death, but to begin with she was only mildly interested in it. Animals died, and it was disappointing because it meant that she had failed in some part of their care. People came to the hospital to get better, but sometimes, especially if they were old, nothing could be done for them, and they died. She did not think that it was something that would ever happen to her until she saw the drowned boy.