In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  The Child dreamed of the jaguar boy that night. Dreamed that he was standing in the shadows at the foot of her bed, his eyes blank luminous discs. She stared back, paralysed with terror, trying to scream, unable to breathe. And then he came around the side of the bed, stepping daintily, leaning over her, and she lashed out and woke up, tangled in a sheet, heart racing, and cried out because a tall shadow moved in the doorway. But it was only her mother, coming into the bedroom and sitting on the bed, taking her daughter into her arms, smoothing her hair and telling her that it was all right, she’d had an adventure but it was over now. She was home. She was safe. And the Child started to cry, the first time she’d cried since her so-called rescue. Because she knew that her plan to make Vidal Francisca appear foolish and unreliable had completely backfired. Because she knew that it would be even harder to get rid of him now.

  The jaguar boy came to her every night after that, but none of her dreams were as bad or as vivid as the first. Mostly, she was walking in the forest and he was walking with her, either somewhere ahead, half-glimpsed through trees and slanting beams of sunlight, or no more than a presence at her back. She still had not told anybody about him. He was her own private mystery, a problem to which she applied her naive but rigorous logic. She would drive back the shadows of the other world by the light of reason.

  She had seen someone in the overgrown flood channel. That was a plain hard fact. She had seen a boy; he had been armed with a rifle; he had fired two shots; the shots had brought Vidal Francisca running. The boy had been real, all right, but had he really had the head of a jaguar? Perhaps he’d been wearing a mask after all. Or perhaps he’d been afflicted with some kind of tetralogical deformity that had reduced the size of his head. He’d painted his face with pigment as camouflage or because of some kind of private ritual, and shock and imagination, coupled perhaps with a side-effect of her home-made drug, had done the rest.

  After spending a little time researching wildsiders but finding little to satisfy her curiosity amongst government propaganda and echo chambers of rumour and unsupported assertions, the Child paid a visit to Ama Paulinho’s father, Josua Gonzagão. The old man’s house was crowded with the families of relatives who had fled the drought-stricken countryside, and most of the old garden had been given over to a clapboard dormitory, but Josua was unchanged, gaunt and leathery, bald as a turtle, dressed as always in a white linen shirt and white drawstring trousers, enthroned on the couch in his back room with the big screen pumping out news from every corner of the whole wide world.

  He wanted to know all about the Child’s adventure, and she told him what she’d told everyone else. How she’d been searching for beetles when she’d come across the boy, how he’d fired two shots, perhaps to signal to his friends, and how he’d melted away into the shadows under the trees when Vidal Francisca had come running instead. She didn’t tell Josua that the boy had the head of a jaguar, because it would certainly get back to her mother, and then all the other lies and evasions would come out – her plan to make Vidal Francisca look like a fool, baking military-grade amphetamines, hacking his silly little drone. Instead, she asked the old man if the boy could really have been a wildsider. After all, he hadn’t been any older than she was.

  ‘Some wildsiders are people who lost their land when it was rewilded, but most are bandits and criminals,’ Josua said. ‘But whatever they are, many have families, as we do. They have children, and their children are taught from an early age to fight. Also, they kidnap children, and force them to fight. They indoctrinate them, and give them drugs to make them brave and crazy. They are often very cruel, the children. Two of my friends were taken prisoner, and later we found them . . .’

  The man’s hands, dark and crooked as tree roots, were knotted together and he was looking past the Child, at something from the long-ago.

  ‘Soldiers searched all around the ruins in Santo João do Rio Negro. But they didn’t find anything. It was as if,’ the Child said, choosing her words with care, ‘the boy I saw really had melted away. Like a dream.’

  ‘Well, of course. Wildsiders do not live in one place. They live everywhere, and nowhere. You don’t find wildsiders. They find you. That’s what we always said, on the front line, and it was true. They would appear, and attack, and disappear. Sometimes we would find a place where they had camped, in the forest. Marks on the trees where they had slung their hammocks. Branches cut away. A trampled place by a stream. Nothing else.’

  The old man fell silent, looking at the past again, and the Child, scared and excited, raised the question she’d come to ask. She was wondering, she said as casually as she could, if wildsiders ever wore masks, or if they changed their appearance to look like animals.

  ‘Some of the wildsiders have totem animals,’ Josua said. ‘They believe it gives them strength and courage when they fight. They wear some part of it in a little bag. A claw or a tooth. A hair or a feather. It is a very old magic. Before men were men, such things were believed. There are pictures of animals on certain rocks in the mountains, made by the old ones.’

  ‘Like jaguars?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I read they sometimes make themselves look like their totem animal.’

  The old man thought about that. At last, he said, ‘You hear all kinds of stories about wildsiders. Many of them fantastic, although I suppose some of them might be true. I once saw a little girl . . . But perhaps I should not tell you this.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not a little girl any more.’

  ‘Of course. But when you are as old as I am, when you are half as old, you’ll wish you were.’

  ‘What kind of animal did she look like, this little girl?’

  ‘She looked like a little girl. Just four or five years old. Comrades of mine found her in the badlands. This was hundreds of kilometres to the south. It was all naked rock there. The forest had died and big storms had blown away most of the soil and hard rain had washed away the rest. My comrades were driving in convoy, and when they stopped for the night she tried to sneak inside their perimeter. I suppose she was looking for food or water – there was no water there, you see. Just sand and rock. Nothing growing.’

  ‘How had she got there?’

  ‘That is a good question. She was ragged and starving, poor thing. I suppose she had lost her family, or they had lost her. So my comrades brought her back to their camp, just behind the front line. I saw her myself when I passed through. She had been with them for five weeks by then, and she was healthy enough. A friendly little thing, too. Quite intelligent. The only thing was, she had tusks,’ the old man said, and crooked his forefingers at the corners of his mouth. ‘Like the tusks of a wild pig. Yellow and curved up towards her cheeks.’

  ‘Real ones?’

  ‘If you lose a tooth, they implant a bud that grows into a new one. You understand? All of my teeth have been regrown that way,’ the old man said. ‘I suppose someone had taken out several of her teeth and implanted buds. But not the buds for human teeth.’

  ‘Or tweaked her genome,’ the Child said.

  The old man shrugged. ‘My comrades collected credits amongst themselves, to pay for the surgery to remove them. It was no easy operation. Their roots had grown through the upper jaw, into the cheek bones.’

  The Child nodded, thinking about the kind of surgery required to make someone look like a jaguar.

  Josua said, ‘Apart from the tusks, she was completely normal. They named her Mamoré , after the dead river where she had been found. Little Mamoré . . . I wonder where she is now.’

  ‘Did she have the operation?’

  The old man jerked out of his reverie. ‘Oh no. No. A few weeks after I visited their camp, my comrades were attacked one night. Two of their trucks were blown up, their generator was knocked out, two huts were hit with rockets. Wildsiders rode in out of the dark and killed six men and women and wounded many more. And they took the little girl. Mamoré . I suppose it was her family, come for her. I suppose they tracke
d the convoy back to the camp.’

  ‘I suppose,’ the Child said, although she thought it was quite likely that Mamoré had used the camp’s comms to ask for help. It was her experience that adults always underestimated the capability of children.

  She talked about wildsiders with Roberto, too, in their private little corner of a darknet, and he was helpful and reassuring. Telling her that many wildsiders wore masks, while others made themselves look fiercer with tattoos, plastic surgery, and tweaks. And they often doused themselves with psychoactive pheromones, he said.

  ‘They are immune, of course. But anyone who is in close contact with them is immediately overwhelmed.’

  ‘Francisca is going around saying he saw a whole party of wildsiders,’ the Child said.

  ‘There you are. It’s quite possible to change someone’s reality by changing their perception of it.’

  ‘He says he fired at them. That he rescued me from their clutches. But he didn’t. He grabbed my arm and dragged me through the trees, out of the channel. Then he fired, but he was only firing at foliage and shadows. And then we both ran. I think he was more scared than I was, but somehow he has turned himself into a hero. As far as my stupid mother is concerned, he can’t do anything wrong.’

  They talked about that for a little while, the Child rehearsing her old grievances until Roberto said he had to go. ‘I have a class. Take care. And don’t worry about Vidal Francisca. Sooner or later he’ll show his true colours.’

  The Child didn’t believe that it was as simple as that. Vidal Francisca was a vain and foolish man in many ways, but he knew people, knew how to flatter and amuse them, how to stroke their egos and make them feel good. Watching him smooch and flirt with her mother was disgusting, but the Child knew that she lacked the skills to play him at his own game, knew that she’d have to find another way of showing him up for what he was. Still, at least she had a satisfactory solution to the puzzle of the boy with the jaguar head. He had not been some kind of supernatural apparition, or a monster escaped from the twisted dreams of the past. No, he had been a wildsider with some kind of minor cosmetic modification that her imagination and fear had monstrously magnified. It was no more fantastic than that. She was relieved, and a little disappointed. Part of her, the part of her that wanted to be the first person to live for ever, still believed the stories of her ama. For if there were creatures in the world as fantastic as River Folk or talking ground sloths, then it would not be impossible to cheat death.

  We also knew that the boy with the jaguar head was no supernatural creature. That he was as real as the Child, or her mother, or anyone else in the quotidian world – the world of her lost past, the world we had recreated to the best of our ability. But he should not have been there because we had not invented him. He had appeared from nowhere, without our permission or knowledge.

  You may think that we should have been able to control everything in the Child’s world because we had created it. To erase what was not wanted, or to run events backwards to a critical point and force them into a safer and more predictable course. Indeed, those powers, and many others, were in our gift, and we did in fact freeze the world for a short while (you may have thought it was a figure of speech, in the story we are telling of the Child’s story), while we debated whether or not to intervene. But although we had set the story in motion, it was a very difficult and perilous undertaking to attempt to micromanage events. Everything was interlinked. Everything affected everything else, and not always in predictable ways.

  No, the Child’s world was too rich and strange for linear control. It proceeded with its own logic. We could intervene with what would appear to be miracles, and we could manipulate or possess various characters, but we could not directly interfere with the Child’s consciousness or override her free will. Not only because of the risk of serious damage to the cloud of agents that were the constituent parts of her personality, but also because we had not created the story to take charge of the Child. We had done so out of love and duty. The Child was our mother, born again. And we wanted a true resurrection. We did not want to force her to make the right choice once we reached our destination, because we would have to change her personality, make her more docile, strip her of much of the vital complexity that defined and informed her genius. We could guide her, yes, and instruct her as best we could. But she had to take that final step on her own, or else it would be worthless.

  We were not the mistresses of our mother’s story. We were its servants.

  The heart may beat more quickly when it responds to a hormonal flood, but what does it know about the confusion of love? Does the small intestine understand the significance of the ritual wafer as it breaks down the wafer’s complex carbohydrates to glucose? Those of us cut to find persistent patterns in human lives and human history recall the stories of the long-ago and ask how much the horse of the humble parfait knight understands of its master’s quest. It knows the road but not the reason it carries its master down that road. It knows the weight of its master and his armour. It knows that each day it sets out on another of an unending series of long and exhausting journeys through strange and new places. It knows the heat of the sun, and the cold whip of winter wind and rain. It knows a plodding routine punctuated by bright and bloody moments of combat or intervals of respite when it shares the stables of some strange castle with others of its kind. And at the end of its master’s quest, when he enters the ancient chapel in the heart of the forest and kneels before the Grail, his horse stands outside, waiting patiently as always. Perhaps the grass it rips from the flower-starred turf is sweeter than mundane grass. Perhaps it feels dim and unknown emotions stir inside it when the pure and holy light of the Grail floods through the open door of the chapel. But does it understand how close it stands to the ineffable? Has it any conception of infinite mercy and wisdom? Is it changed?

  We were as a flea in the mane of that horse. As a worm in its gut.

  We do not seek to excuse ourselves. There were checks imposed on what we were allowed to know and do, and what we were allowed to think, limitations built into our original design, but that is no excuse either, for we were created to protect our mother and in the end we failed. And even now, in the wreckage of that failure, we do not know if it was a glorious failure or a cruel defeat. There is so much we do not know. We do not even know the limits of what we do not know. This story about our mother’s story is not an excuse or an attempt to exculpate ourselves. It is an attempt to impose a metrical frame on the abyssal depths of our incomprehension.

  We do know that by the time the jaguar-headed boy appeared we were irrevocably committed to our plan. Five centuries had passed since the accident in which the original of our mother was lost, but much of that time had been spent repairing and reconstructing the ship and its systems, and shaping it for its final purpose. When at last we quickened the Child’s story, Fomalhaut was the brightest star in our sky, and we were passing through the inner edge of its cloud of long-period comets. When she kept watch over the drowned boy, and first vowed to never die, we were approaching the bow shock, where the scant gases and rare dusts of the interstellar medium, at an average density of a single atom in every cubic centimetre, were stirred and churned by the turbulent front of Fomalhaut’s heliopause. The drought was two years old and the Child had just begun instruction with Father Caetano when we passed through the heliopause itself, the boundary between interstellar space and the bubble of Fomalhaut’s solar wind; when she met the jaguar-headed boy, we had just crossed the termination shock boundary, the point where the average velocity of particles blown outward by Fomalhaut’s solar winds dropped to subsonic speeds as they began to interact with the local interstellar medium.

  And now, at last, we were falling through the heliosphere proper, towards the outer edge of Fomalhaut’s great dust belt and the insignificant rock that was our final destination. The rock where we hoped our mother would choose to hide while the war between the clades which had reached Fomalhaut ahe
ad of us played out. Where she would acquire knowledge of her new home before deciding what to do.

  That was our plan. We had studied the war as best we could, and had concluded that any attempt to interfere in it without proper preparation would be fatal. Nor could we make an alliance with either of the two sides. One was an old enemy, the Ghosts; they had been comprehensively defeated by our mother before she left the Solar System, and it was their nature to never forget or forgive. The other, the so-called True People, was a crude, cruel, backwards-looking and completely untrustworthy clade which had enslaved descendants of the peaceful posthuman clade which had first settled Fomalhaut. We were certain that if we made ourselves known to them, they would either make our mother their slave, or strip her of every particle of useful knowledge before killing her.

  And so we had decided that the best course of action would be to hide, and bide our time. It was a conservative plan, yes, and required stealth and great patience rather than the usual bold, swift strokes by which our mother had so often defeated her enemies. We would have to work hard to teach the Child the qualities required to carry it out, for they were utterly foreign to her nature, but we believed that it was the only way she could survive contact with those who had usurped what was rightfully hers.

  So we could not end the Child’s story when it began to deviate from its chosen path because we did not have enough time or resources to start over. We worried that the appearance of the jaguar boy was a spy for one of the warring factions, or that we had failed to completely purge our rebel sisters and all their works from the ship’s systems, and that he was a precusor of a resurgence of the insurrection that we had defeated centuries ago. But although we searched long and hard we could find no trace of him, and in the end we decided that he was no more than a glitch in the matrix that generated the Child’s story, and allowed it to flow on.