In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  I was sweating hard when I had finished telling Lathi Singleton all this, yet felt cold to the marrow of my bones. She pressed a small glass into my hand and told me to drink, and I obediently swallowed the measure of white liquid. Bitter fire hollowed my mouth and its warmth bloomed in my chest, and gradually I stopped shivering, and was able to answer Lathi Singleton’s questions about my work as an itinerant exorcist. I told her about the last hell that the Horse and I had harrowed, just as I’ve told you, and she said that she was pleased by my honesty and the courage.

  ‘Let me match your candour with my own,’ she said. ‘First, I’ll tell you something of my family history. It’s a sorry story, mostly involving untimely deaths. My father and mother are dead, both of them killed in the war. My mother was a warlord, my father a senior member of her staff. Their ship was crippled when the Ghosts pushed forward unexpectedly, and my mother blew it up rather than be captured. Two of my father’s brothers and one of his sisters were likewise killed in battle. My mother’s eldest brother died after his ship lost power, approaching Dis. One of her sisters died in a hunting accident; the other died of an autoimmune disease. A good number of their children died, too – I won’t bore you with the list. And my partner died, in the war, and so did our daughter. She insisted on volunteering against all my advice, and she was killed on some nameless rock when a horde of child-things infiltrated the forward supply station she commanded.

  ‘In short,’ Lathi Singleton said, looking directly at me with no particular expression on her face, ‘I am one of the few survivors of a tragic chapter in our clan’s history. All I have is this little square of dirt, and my son, Yakob. What were you told about him?’

  ‘That he was working for the Office of Public Safety, Majistra. And that he found a hell and afterwards disappeared, while the data miner who helped him killed herself.’

  ‘An accurate but cruelly abrupt summary,’ Lathi Singleton said. ‘Let me tell you about my son. I want you to know what he was like because I believe it may help you to find out why he disappeared. And I want you to see him as a person, too.

  ‘I believed that he could play a large part in restoring the honour and esteem of my family, and for that reason I wanted him to enter politics. For several years he worked as assistant for one of my cousins, an ancient and distinguished representative in Our Thing. But he rebelled against this apprenticeship and in spite of my express wishes and commands he joined the Office of Public Safety – and not as an officer, but an ordinary trooper. I was not happy about this, as you may imagine. The Office of Public Safety protects us from outlaws, criminals, and wreckers, but it is in no way a route to political influence. The only consolation was that Yakob had been something of a dissolute in my cousin’s service, but during his training he buckled down and aced every test, and on graduation started out walking a beat like any ordinary trooper. And this wasn’t some comfortable assignment in a calm and comfortable neighbourhood reserved for cadres and entrepreneurs. No, it was in one of the industrial worldlets, a trashed wasteland littered with manufactories dedicated to organosynthesis, element refining and heavy fabrication, inhabited by convicts, former convicts, and internal exiles.

  ‘Yakob soon distinguished himself by his quick and fearless action in disturbances large and small, by securing the arrest of a gang of corrupt officials, by his patient work in tracking down the criminals who had made and distributed a batch of jeniver that left more than a hundred people blind and brain-damaged, and his help in arresting a serial killer who sold on the black market the meat of Quicks he had murdered and dismembered. His success almost reconciled me to his rebellion. The arrest and execution of the serial killer led to promotion and a move to Thule, where Yakob quickly uncovered a minor case of preferment in an obscure office of the Ministry of Defence that led to the reopening of an old unsolved homicide case and eventually brought down one of Our Thing’s senior advisers. After that, he was involved in a string of less spectacular but equally knotty cases, and won promotion again. And then he discovered the hell, and he disappeared.’

  Lathi Singleton had told me her son’s story very calmly, but her strong hands were twisted together in her lap.

  ‘My clan is powerful, but I have lost almost everything,’ she said. ‘This platform was once a happy hunting ground for my immediate family. Now I rent most of it out as a place of execution, where wreckers and other traitors are hazed by their peers or put to death by wild animals. I have no influence amongst those who could help, and they have no inclination to help me. If his colleagues know anything, they have not shared it with me. That is why I have turned to your clan for help. In the small hope that something in the hell will give a clue as to his intentions.

  ‘He found it on T. The war worldlet at the outer edge of the archipelago. I know little more than that. Neither his colleagues nor the authorities on T have been helpful. But I do know one thing. It’s the reason why I contacted your clan. Before she killed herself, the data miner who helped Yakob explore the hell said that it contained a back door. One that led to your Library.’

  ‘With respect, Majistra, I don’t think that is likely. We have not completely mapped the Library, but we do know that the fragments from which it was built did not contain any back doors or other connections.’

  ‘I am only telling you what I know. Whether or not it is the truth I cannot say. I was told that Jakob found a back door to some part of your Library, and there he found something he believed to be valuable. I don’t know what it was. He hired a data miner to help him, and she is dead. She killed herself. The Quick who told him about the hell is also dead, or has been disappeared. His colleagues are as vague on that point as on all others. All I know is that after Yakob explored the hell he’d found, he went off to search for something, and he has not returned. Perhaps he is somewhere in the Archipelago or on one of the colony worldlets, exploring some lost habitat of the Quick. He could even be here in Thule, going amongst her citizens in deep disguise. More likely he has ventured beyond the known worldlets, out into the vastness of the dust belt. I want to find out where he went, and what happened to him, and the first and best clue lies in that hell. And that is why you are here.’

  ‘I have been sent to help you, Majistra. And I will do my best.’

  ‘Your clan will benefit by acquiring a new fragment of the Library, or by closing a back door you knew nothing about. And I will know what happened to my son. I do not expect loyalty to me, little monk, but I expect your clan to honour custom and contract.’

  ‘As they have, by sending me here.’

  ‘They have sent someone who has been disgraced and sent into exile. Not the best of their kind, but the least. Why should I not feel insulted?’

  I found it hard to meet her cold, searching gaze. I was in her power. She could kill me by her own hand, or have me killed by one of the animals she had recreated. Few in my clan would mourn me; no one of any importance would question my disappearance.

  ‘I failed once,’ I said. ‘But I have never failed since.’

  ‘And I will make sure that you do not fail me. Look there,’ Lathi Singleton said, and pointed to the dry grassland beyond the slab of rock where we sat. It had grown darker, but a sliver of light lingered at the far end of the platform, casting long shadows across the reddened landscape. After a few moments, I saw something moving past the solitary flat-topped tree that stood in the middle distance. Someone was jogging towards us out of the dusk’s bloodlight, moving at the apex of a long shadow.

  ‘There are few people I can trust,’ Lathi Singleton said. ‘My younger brother’s daughter, Prem, is one of them. She and my son were close, as children, and she has sworn to find him alive, or avenge his death. She’ll go with you. Or rather, you will go with her.’

  She came scrambling up the rocks, Prem Singleton, stepping from one to the next with a flowing grace, vaulting to the lip of the slab where Lathi Singleton and I stood. She was young and slender, barefoot and bare-legged, dressed in a
simple white shirt that fell to her thighs, her bob of glossy black hair highlighted with silvery threads and cut straight across her forehead, just above her eyes. In repose her face would have been merely pretty, but the restless and mischievous intelligence that animated it lent her a striking beauty that reminded me of the eidolon that had led me through the Memory Palace when I had first met Majister Svern. The resemblance wasn’t especially close, but it was enough to undo the laces of my heart.

  She stood there, hands on hips, and looked straight at me. Her eyes were large and dark brown, and I could feel her gaze move over my face.

  Lathi Singleton introduced us, although I scarcely heard what she said.

  ‘Well, then,’ Prem Singleton said to me. ‘Why don’t you show me this famous Library?’

  9

  Commissar Doctor Wilm Pentangel told his new recruits that they had not been selected by him, but by the Mind at the heart of the world.

  ‘You were all visited by so-called sprites during the recent event, and the experience has imprinted all of you with an indelible signature. As others have been touched in the past, so you have been touched now. The Mind is trying to communicate with us.

  We do not yet fully understand what it wants, but you will all help advance that understanding. ‘We are at a tipping point in history. The Ghosts were driven back from Cthuga at the beginning of the war, and now they are reaching out towards Cthuga again. It is clear that they came to Fomalhaut because they wish to communicate with the Mind. We do not know if it wishes to communicate with them, but we do know that it wishes to communicate with us. I have been working long and hard to make full contact. That so many of you stand here today proves that the day when I achieve my aims is close at hand. All of you have been touched. All of you have been selected. Every one of you possesses some quality that attracted the Mind, and now a small part of it resides in your consciousness. Every one of you has the potential to change the war, and so change the course of history. Remember that always.’

  The commissar paused, standing tall inside his long white coat and his exoskeleton. His sharp glittering gaze passing over the ranks of Quick. Ori tried not to flinch when he looked at her for a second, and lowered her own gaze and did not look up until he started to speak again.

  Saying that they had much work to do and only a little time to do it. ‘You will all be thoroughly tested, and you will all be thoroughly trained. I must remake all of you in a handful of days. Some will fail me. It is inevitable. The rest will have the honour of knowing that they will have contributed to denying the enemy what it desires and ending the war. Now my assistants and kholops will organise you into groups, and tell you what needs to be done. To work!’

  They were divided into five groups, and used standard kits to build five commons around the edge of the hangar space. They assembled partitions, divided the central space into training and testing areas, and set up and tested immersion chairs and the other equipment. When the philosopher-soldiers of the commissar’s crew were satisfied that everything was in order, the punishing routines began. Neurological tests of every kind; taking turns in immersion chairs, where they learned how to handle drones in virtual simulations; indoctrination sessions; housekeeping tasks – cleaning and polishing decks and partitions, preparing and serving meals, and routine maintenance of the hangar’s recycling systems – and six hours sleep.

  It was intense and exhausting. Ori and the other recruits were forbidden to talk to one another, but it was possible to have brief, whispered conversations while doing scut work, swap stories about their encounters with sprites, speculate about what would happen to them after they finished training.

  Everyone agreed that even by True standards the commissar was crazy. He was the scion of an obscure clan who had been pursuing a line of research into the origin and behaviour of sprites that had been considered marginal and mostly worthless. His theory that Cthuga had its origins outside the Fomalhaut system, that it was a wanderer captured by the young star, and that it contained an ancient alien intelligence, was widely derided. And then the quake had struck, and the commissar had seen a pattern and seized the opportunity to promote himself and his work. He had correlated and mined records and reports, determined that almost two hundred Quick had been affected by close encounters with sprites, and won the resources to turn as many as possible into living probes.

  Even those amongst the Quick recruits who believed that there was a Mind inhabiting Cthuga’s core – and not everyone believed there was – thought him crazy. They claimed that the Mind was derived from the mind of the Quick seedship, which had achieved true self-awareness and flung itself into Cthuga and vastened itself long before the Trues had arrived at Fomalhaut. Some claimed that it was preparing to liberate them from the tyrannies of the True, and they had been touched by the Mind and had received living parts of it as a first step in that liberation. They were holy vessels. They were carrying a holy fire. Others believed that the Mind had grown so vast and strange in its new environment that it had no interest in them apart from a small residual curiosity about its origins; that if it had been intending to free them, it would surely have done so by now, and since it had not, it never would. And others thought that there was no evidence that the sprites had anything to do with the Mind, and were not even evidence of its existence.

  Ori was amongst the agnostics. She didn’t believe in the Mind, but she didn’t disbelieve in it, either. All she knew was that something had touched her, had become a part of her. Still, some of the stuff in the indoctrination sessions was entertaining. She learned, for instance, that the sprites were created by fluctuations in Cthuga’s magnetic field so powerful that their induced electrical fields affected the link between bots and drones and their operators, and made neurons fire in the retinas of the operators’ eyes and in their visual cortices. Operators did not ‘see’ sprites through the cameras and other sensors of their bots and drones (which did not record the presence of the sprites) but in their mind’s eye. The cold violet flame that Ori had seen had been an hallucination caused by interaction between her bot’s uplink, the sprite’s intense magnetic field, and her own brain. But there was no explanation as to why the brains of some operators were permanently changed by these encounters while others were not. And if the True philosophers had any ideas about the long-term effects of the changes, they kept them from the recruits.

  Ori knew only one of the other recruits in her group, a sour little person named Hira. They’d worked in the machine shops before Ori had been promoted to jockey crew #87. Back then she and Hira had been in neighbouring crews; Ori had played handball and rush and high-low castle against her, and once had comprehensively trumped her in a shadow play. Hira had got into trouble after Ori had moved on to ride bots, and had been demoted to one of the crews that rode the big, dumb machines that patched and healed cancerous and necrotic lesions in the Whale’s halflife skin. She had been working out on the skin when the quake hit, a sprite had sprung up around her like a cold flame and had messed with her head, and here she was, philosopher fodder.

  ‘You’re nothing special,’ she told Ori at the end of their second day, as they cleaned one of the bathrooms. ‘You might think you’re a hero because of what you did with that probe, but you aren’t any better than me, or anyone else here. We’re experimental animals fooled into thinking we’re being trained to do important work, when really we’re going to end up as bait. Live meat on a hook hung out to attract monsters.’

  ‘Monsters?’

  ‘There’s more and more activity around the Whale, and all around Cthuga, too,’ Hira said. ‘I heard it’s because the enemy is coming. The Mind is getting excited about that. It’s reaching out. It wants to make contact. And when it does, when it touches the enemy and learns what they have to offer, it’ll turn on us.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘You know how Trues are. They talk to each other as if we’re not there. And I’ve been talking to people who heard them talk
. Why we’re here, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The commissar claims he will use us to make contact with the Mind. His bosses think they can use us to get some insight into how the Mind might attack us, and how they can defend themselves against it. They say they’re training us, but this is really the first of a series of experiments that will test us to destruction.’

  Ori remembered now that Hira had got into trouble for spreading gossip about the senior member of another crew. She was insecure because her ambition exceeded her talent; she liked to pretend that she knew more than she did to make herself seem more important, to make herself the centre of attention. Ori made the mistake of teasing Hira, questioning the logic of her assertions, asking why, if the Mind was planning to attack Trues, it hadn’t ever latched on to one of them. Hira was in the middle of recounting a wildly improbable story about Trues who, having been driven insane by contact with the Mind, had been exiled to a secret pelagic station, when one of the supervisors discovered them. They were promptly scourged, assigned to extra shifts of cleaning work, and warned that if they broke regulations again they’d be given the long drop.

  Ori tried to keep away from Hira after that. The woman was trouble. Her talk about infection and the malignant intent of the Mind might be silly fantasies, but they skirted close to sedition. The best way to get through this was to ignore all speculations, and buckle down. She didn’t mind the scut work, which was no different to scut work back in the jockeys’ commons, and she tried not to mind the invasive and unpleasant tests, the way the philosopher-soldiers handled her like a piece of meat. Paralysing her with nerve blocks. Inflicting casual pain. Talking about her as if she couldn’t understand them.

  Once, they did something that intensified the vague and ghostly presence of the sprite. For a moment it seemed to be standing in front of her as she lay spread-eagled and helpless, and everything around her flared bright and sharp. Then it was gone, and a cold front of endorphin shock rolled across her. The world went completely flat and lifeless and she was sinking away from it into darkness and she didn’t much care. ‘We’re losing her,’ one of the Trues said, and one of the machines around her raised a spidery articulated arm and shot her full of something that slammed her back inside her aching skull, back to the world.