In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  When she’d been very small, one of her first jobs had been to load cartridges of goo into a sleeve pump attached to one of the tanks that collected the floor-washings of the machine shops. The pump injected the goo into the big tank with a percussive thump, and for a moment a long finger of white goo stood inside the dirty water. And then it began to disperse as the nanobots suspended in it chased down precious flecks and atoms of metal. Whenever the passenger moved forward, Ori thought of that finger of goo. Was frightened that the passenger would disperse inside her brain, chase down and consume every scrap of thought and memory . . .

  The True was talking, telling her that she was going to tell him the whole story all over again. He told her that the window showed her brain activity, pointed out the areas that would light up when she lied. ‘When they do, you’re mine,’ he said.

  Ori had been through struggle sessions before, confessing faults to her crewmates and accepting their criticisms, but this was something else. The True was cool and precise, asking the same questions over and over, taking her story apart sentence by sentence, jumping on every contradiction and uncertainty, asking her to explain and justify every move she’d made.

  She answered as truthfully as she could. Humble and submissive. Hunched into herself, flinching away from the True’s gaze, trying not to look at the flickering patterns of her own brain activity. She felt as if she was being crowded into a smaller and smaller space, caught between fear of the True’s cold disdain and fear of the presence inside her head. Towards the end, she was so worn down that she was about ready to confess to anything and everything, yet an irreducible sliver of stubbornness remained; she continued to insist as politely as possible that the sprite had appeared in front of her and she had felt its intimate scrutiny, and felt some part of it still.

  ‘You showed initiative,’ the True said. ‘Taking command of the probe like that. A lot of people think that’s dangerous. They don’t like the idea of Quicks thinking for themselves.’

  Ori hung her head, waiting for her punishment.

  ‘Why you’re not going to take the long drop right now, someone is interested in you. Because of your close encounter. You’re going to be tested. If you fail, you fall. And even if you pass, you’ll probably fall anyway. Because the man who thinks he has a use for you, he’s crazy,’ the True said, and walked out, stiff as a pair of scissors in the embrace of his exoskeleton.

  The light went out as the door shut on his back and Ori was left alone in the dark. An hour. Two hours. Her bladder ached and sent a hot wire to her groin, and she was exhausted and still horribly afraid, and tired of being afraid. Convinced that she was going to die here because she’d done the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing. But she wasn’t alone. Something was standing at her back. When she twisted around to look at it there wasn’t anything there, of course. Only darkness. But she could feel it.

  At last the light came back on, sudden and stark in the white room, and the door slid back and the two PSCs stepped in and told Ori to come with them.

  They rode down in a big, slow elevator, the kind used to move machines around. Ori wondered if she was being taken to the end cap. Wondered if the True had lied to her; wondered if she was going to be given the long drop. The elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal a hangar space and a small crowd of Quicks inside a rectangle marked with yellow paint on the floor. The PSCs marched Ori across the space, shoved her across the yellow line, told her to find a spot and wait her turn.

  All of the Quicks waiting there had been touched by sprites during the quake. Ori told her story, heard the stories of others. One had been riding a bot that had fallen from the Whale’s skin during the quake – had fallen a long, long way with a sprite wrapped around it. Two others had been confronted by sprites while riding machines in a garage. Two more had been visited while they rode bots hunkered down in a vacuum-organism farm. And so on, and so on. All retained to some degree or other the impression that the sprites they’d encountered were with them still. All were haunted by ghosts in their heads.

  One by one they were taken away for medical examination. Most returned; a few didn’t. It wasn’t clear if those who had returned had passed or failed the tests. It took a long time to process everyone. PSC guards tossed food packs and water bottles into the rectangle every six hours. Everyone had to share two portable shitteries. There was nowhere to sit or sleep but the floor. Not one dared to step across the yellow lines that enclosed them. It was unthinkable to leave without permission.

  At last, Ori was called forward and escorted to the examination area, a space at the far end behind portable screens. She was told to take off her clothes and she was prodded and scanned from scalp to toes by a small team of medics, passed from one to the next like a piece of meat. When the last was finished with her, she was allowed to dress, and escorted back to the rectangle.

  She was one of the last to be examined. The medics packed up and left; the lights dimmed, and most of the Quicks inside the rectangle tried to get some sleep. Ori sat cross-legged, eyes closed, trying to communicate with the presence inside her head. Asking it what it was, what it wanted. Trying to move the centre of her attention to the warm dark at the back of her head where it lived. She jerked awake when the lights in the hangar snapped on. The guards were shouting, telling everyone to wake up.

  ‘Stand up and get into formation! Five lines, right now!’

  ‘Face forward, backs straight!’

  ‘Get ready to meet the commissar!’

  ‘Commissar Doctor Pentangel on deck!’

  Ori stood amongst the others, standing in the middle of the second rank, her heart beating quickly and lightly. The guards snapped to attention as troopers moved across the open space ahead of the tallest True that Ori had ever seen. Very tall and very pale, with a shock of black hair and a beard like an inverted triangle. He wore a long white coat that hung open at the front, showing glimpses of the girdle and arm- and leg-clamps of his exoskeleton as he tick-tocked towards the Quicks standing in orderly rows inside the yellow rectangle painted on the floor.

  He looked at them for a long time, his sharp gaze sweeping back and forth. Smiling at last, saying, ‘My children.’

  7

  The Child lay on her bed, staring up at but not seeing the stars that floated above her in the darkness, listening to the voices of her mother and Vidal Francisca rise and fall in the living room of the bungalow. It was after midnight. They thought she was asleep, but she was not. She was trying to train herself to do without sleep.

  ‘I would never put her in danger,’ Maria said.

  ‘You know that I did not mean it like that,’ Vidal Francisca said. ‘But there is a risk, given the current situation. As you know very well.’

  ‘She helped Stephano at Mass, she helped me in the clinic,’ Maria said. ‘It was good for her in all kinds of ways. Especially, it was good for her to get out of town. You know how much she loves nature.’

  ‘There is nature here. An unfortunate abundance of nature,’ Vidal Francisca said.

  The Child felt a squirm of disgust. She loathed the way the man used jokes to try to trivialise any argument he was losing. She loathed his unctuous manner and his wide smile, so white, so false. His habit of never passing a mirror without looking into it. The slick of black hair brushed back in an attempt to disguise the island of naked scalp on top of his head, and the little pigtail he liked to stroke and twirl. His air of effortless superiority. His unassailable assumptions about the way the world worked.

  Her mother said, ‘I appreciate your concern, Vidal. I do. But I think I know what’s best for my daughter.’

  ‘My concern is as much for you as your daughter,’ Vidal Francesca said. ‘Also for Father Caetano.’

  ‘Stephano would not allow me to go if he thought there was a risk.’

  ‘Those people should come here. At least until the current situation is resolved.’

  ‘The forest is their home.’

  ‘Th
ey don’t live in the forest.’

  ‘They go to and fro. It’s where they get their food. It’s where they do everything that’s important to them.’

  ‘You realise that some of them could be wildsiders,’ Vidal Francisca said. ‘And if wildsiders think you are useful to them . . . I know I don’t have to explain it.’

  ‘Now I understand. This isn’t about my daughter. It’s about me.’

  The Child recognised the tone in her mother’s voice and knew that she was angry and was trying to hide it. And felt a little gleeful thrill, wondering if her mother had finally seen through the man.

  ‘I care for you both.’

  ‘The clinics are an important part of my work, Vidal.’

  ‘The hospital board might take a different view.’

  ‘Is that a warning?’

  Vidal Francisca started to say that he was only trying to explain what others on the board were thinking, but Maria cut him off, saying that he could tell his friends that if they had any concerns about her work they should speak to her directly, saying that she had three operations tomorrow, she needed to review her notes.

  In her dark bedroom, the Child felt a sudden surge of happiness. So solid she could hug it to herself. At last Vidal Francisca had overreached himself. Her mother had taken charge of the course of her life after the death of her husband, and Vidal Francisca had been very careful to respect that freedom. But now he’d shown that he was no better than all the other men who presumed that they knew what was good for women, who believed that women needed the protection of men because women were weak and essentially childish.

  So the Child hoped that this little spat might be the beginning of the end of Vidal Francisca’s patient siege of her mother’s honour. It had begun after he’d been appointed to the hospital board. Soon afterwards, he’d begun to drop by the bungalow to discuss matters related to the running of the hospital and gossip about the affairs and petty rivalries of the town’s prominent citizens. Maria had started to look forward to these visits, tidying the bungalow, dispatching the Child to the care of Ama Paulinho. Soon enough she and her daughter were visiting Vidal’s house, as guests at parties or other social gatherings, or dining in splendid isolation on the terrace that overlooked the sloping garden and the fields of the sugar-cane plantation beyond.

  At first, the Child liked these visits. Vidal expressed what seemed to be genuine fascination with her experiments with fruit flies, and talked about his studies for his degree in agronomy at the University of Manaus. She liked the microscope he gave her for her birthday. She liked the way the rooms of his house swung out from its core and moved to follow the light, and folded at night like the petals of a flower, and she liked its garden, kept green and alive during the drought by an irrigation system that in the evening sprayed water in sweeping arcs that tick-tocked back and forth over flower beds and lawns and stands of trees. She liked wandering there in the warm dusk while Vidal and her mother talked on the terrace. She watched the leathery jostle of the bats that came to feed on the fruit trees. She studied the fireflies dancing over the lawn, identifying three different species by the frequency of their blinking. She checked her beetle traps, picked choice specimens from the weird and monstrous alien life that flocked and clung to the sheet of luminous cloth she’d stretched between two trees.

  She liked Vidal’s horses, too; loved riding the smallest, a chestnut gelding that belonged to Vidal’s daughter, along the riverside path, or through the dry forest, or along trails that crossed the vast monotony of the sugar-cane fields. She learned about the various genetic tweaks engineered into the hybrid cane, the insect pests that attacked it, its fungal, viral and bacterial pathogens. She watched the machine that planted billets in raw red earth, learned that the stands which grew from each billet could be harvested up to ten times before decreasing yields justified new planting. She watched the chopper harvesters at work, ungainly machines exactly as wide as a row of cane, cutting the stalks at their bases and stripping leaves from them: the stalks went into one transporter and the leaves went into another. She was given a tour of the sugar-cane mill by the foreman, who had the biggest and whitest moustache she’d ever seen, and a scar that transected the puckered and empty socket of his right eye. He explained that cane had to be transported to the mill as quickly as possible because its sugar content began to decline as soon as it was cut, showed her how each batch was tested for trash percentage and its brix value – the fraction of sugar in aqueous solution. He showed her how the processing line of the mill washed the stalks and chopped and shredded them with revolving knives, and mixed the pulverised material with water and crushed it between a series of rollers to extract the sucrose-rich juices. The residue went to generators that burned it to generate the electricity that ran the plant; the juices went to bioreactors where the sucrose was broken down to glucose, the glucose was turned into ethanol by a simple fermentation process, and the ethanol was dehydrated and turned into biofuel. The leaves were processed separately, to harvest organic precursors used in another set of bioreactors to produce plastics.

  The mill and the bioreactors and refinery plant were impressive, but very low-tech, using principles that predated the Overturn. And although sugar cane exhibited one of the highest natural photosynthetic efficiencies, and the hybrid strains grown on the plantation had been tweaked, a little less than twelve per cent of the many kilowatts of sunlight energy that fell on the plantation’s fields was captured and turned into biomass. Even the cheap biogel that people painted on their roofs was twice as efficient at converting the sunlight that fell on them to electrical power.

  The Child was becoming very interested in photosynthesis. When Roberto had come back from his first semester at the Federal University of São Paulo, he’d shown her how the logic of quantum mechanics integrated with messy biochemistry at the point where light-harvesting centres transferred solar energy to the reaction centres that transformed it to biological energy. Struck by photons, the light-harvesting and reaction centres oscillated with wave-like behaviour, allowing the electrons that transferred energy between them to select the most efficient of all possible paths and minimise energy loss. And these wave-like properties also entangled centres that were not strongly coupled by oscillation, so that everything beat to the same pulse: the heartbeat of the sun. You could think of a field or a forest as a quantum computer, Roberto had said. Able to run every solution to a problem at once, and select the best – the fastest, the simplest – from a myriad entangled possibilities. The molecular couplings at the heart of artificial photosynthetic systems evoked the same kind of quantum entanglement, but were not yet as efficient as those in plants, algae, and photosynthetic bacteria.

  The Child wondered if the solar farm’s photosynthetic system could be coupled with some kind of artificial metabolism that fixed carbon dioxide into glucose and other organic molecules, and discovered work done on nanotech vacuum organisms developed by colonists of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn: an early contact with the work of the gene wizard Avernus, her great rival in years to come.

  All of this was very stimulating, but it led to her first real confrontation with Vidal Francisca. When she tried to explain her ideas about creating artificial organisms that could synthesise from scratch everything his mill and his bioreactors and his refinery currently produced, he was frankly patronising, refusing to look at the spreadsheets she had prepared, telling her that the plantation was supported by government grants that encouraged use of traditional technology in rewilded areas. And besides, he said, no one would underwrite any kind of research based on Outer technology. The Outers were dangerous anarchists who had quit Earth during the Overturn like rats deserting a sinking ship; later, they had mounted a cowardly sneak attack on their former home by diverting the orbit of an asteroid. Earth had saved herself by a vast collective effort that was not yet ended, and it should not be endangered by introducing technology that could undo all that good work. When she was a little older, he said, th
e Child would understand the historical reasons why stability was so important.

  By stability, the Child thought, he meant the status quo that benefited him and men like him. For it was men who ran the world. The president of Greater Brazil was a woman, yes, but she was only president because her first husband had been president before her, and had died young. But for the most part men ran the world, and far too many women collaborated with them. Women like Vidal Francisca’s daughter, a brainless creature more interested in finding a husband than in learning useful skills that she could use as a foundation for a career.

  The Child had never liked Vidal Francisca, but now she had an ideological justification for her visceral animosity. Now she could rationalise and develop her contempt, and dare to express it openly.

  ‘He’s stupid and vain,’ she told her mother. ‘Those clothes he wears. That horrible furniture in his house. And the way he looks at you. The same way he looks at those horses of his.’

  ‘I thought you liked his horses. And anyway, he doesn’t look at me that way.’

  ‘He does,’ the Child said. ‘You don’t see it because he only does it when you aren’t looking at him.’

  ‘A woman knows how a man looks at him,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll learn that when you’re old enough.’

  ‘I’m never going to grow up. And I’m never going to marry.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘He has other ideas,’ the Child said, full of cold contempt at her mother’s stupidity.