In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  For a while, it seemed that it was continuing to move in the right direction. Maria Hong-Owen grew closer to Vidal Francisca after he saved her daughter’s life. Soon enough, they would make the decision that would send the Child to the school in Manaus, where she would be taught everything that would prepare her for her marriage.

  We made plans to make sure that it would happen as soon as possible. There was only a little time left. It was time to push the Child towards the right direction.

  It was a mistake. But we did not know it then.

  There was so much that we did not know.

  2

  We travelled to T, Prem Singleton, the Horse, and I, on one of the ancient Quick ships: a fragile-looking cluster of bubbles elaborated around the central axis of a motor pod. None of the bubbles were especially large and most were occupied by young scions of the Singleton clan on their way to T for officer training before heading out to the front, making a lot of noise as they celebrated their last hours of civilian life. The Horse and I found a quiet spot in one of the bubbles in the innermost layer, where the scions’ baggage and other cargo was stored, and the squad of Quicks who controlled the ship’s flock of defensive drones were quartered. We tethered ourselves as best we could amongst a clutter of weapon cases, travelling wardrobes and trunks, and linked our securities. It was very likely that we were being watched, and while we couldn’t guarantee that our link was completely unbreakable, it made us feel safe enough to exchange confidences. I gave the Horse a quick precis of my interview with Lathi Singleton; he told me what he’d discovered about her son.

  ‘It’s not exactly a straight story, but I’ll try my best. To begin at the beginning, I did exactly as you asked. I hired someone to act as my proxy and ever so discreetly and carefully search the net. But he didn’t turn up anything beyond the usual gossip and rumour that’s attached to scions of the first families. Trivial feuds and adolescent dalliances, scandals over nothing very much in particular. Most of it put out by so-called rivals and self-styled enemies, inflating the ordinary stuff of life into cosmic drama. I can tell you who Yakob Singleton is supposed to have slept with first, who he may or may not have been sleeping with when he disappeared, who likes him and who only pretends to like him . . .’ The Horse smiled his lopsided smile. ‘But I wouldn’t dare to test your patience.’

  ‘You’re already testing its outer edge. Keep to the point. Prem Singleton already suspects we are colluding behind her back.’

  ‘She’s having too good a time carousing with her doomed cousins to bother with her kholops. Which is what we are, even though you won’t admit it.’

  ‘I know very well what I am, but you seem to have forgotten who you are. Perhaps you can start by explaining where you got those clothes.’

  The Horse had turned up at the ship just a few minutes before it left Thule’s hub, dressed in a yellow tunic of soft buttery leather that fell to his knees, with a high collar and many pockets, all different sizes and colours, and scarlet hose and matching scarlet slippers. Looking clownishly ridiculous and unsettlingly exotic at the same time, and irritatingly pleased with himself.

  Prem had been unaccountably amused by the Horse’s costume, greeting him with genuine courtesy, telling him that he was a valued member of our small crew. She did not possess a kholop or any other kind of servant.

  ‘There are many of us in the army who have fought side by side with Quicks, and have grown to like and respect them,’ she told me, and asked if I found that shocking.

  I told her that my clan was often accused of being too friendly with Quicks, and said that as a result our kholops had an independence others found disgraceful. ‘The Horse is, unfortunately, an extreme example of that independence. Let me know if he ever oversteps the line.’

  ‘Oh, I find his eccentricity charming,’ Prem said.

  Now the Horse told me that there was a very simple explanation for his new clothes. ‘The credit you gave me wasn’t enough to pay for the information you wanted, so I wagered it on a sure thing in one of the fighting pits and more than trebled it. Enough to sprinkle around as required, with a little over to buy something better fitted to the circles I had to move in than our usual gear.’

  ‘I’m failing to imagine any corner of civilisation where your costume could be considered acceptable.’

  ‘Of course you are. You have led a sheltered life. And you are wise enough to know that, and to send me to deal with matters outside the narrow confines of your upbringing and training. To cut a long and interesting story short, a simple search turned up nothing useful. I had to look elsewhere, which led me to the criminal edges of the city of tiers. And there I learned that although Yakob Singleton worked for the Office of Public Safety, he was no ordinary trooper or investigator. He had been assigned to the Department for Repression of Wreckers, which fabricates conspiracies to draw in Trues it suspects of harbouring wrecker tendencies. When they are deeply enmeshed, it arrests and disappears them.’

  I said that I found it hard to believe that people could be disappeared for doing something they hadn’t done.

  The Horse cocked his head in the bird-like way of Quicks. His eyes gleaming like twin stars in the shadows of the cargo that crammed the bubble. ‘Yakob Singleton and his colleagues were purveyors of fantasy. They fashioned stories for a special kind of audience. Plots involving sabotage and assassination, conspiracy theories . . . All conjured from whole cloth, pieces of fully furnished theatre. The people targeted and ensnared by the department are not selected at random, of course. They are selected because they have wrecker tendencies. That is why they willingly enter into conspiracies instead of walking away from them, as any sensible and honest person would. And so their criminal tendencies are safely channelled into areas that are wholly controlled by the department, and when they are arrested they are guilty of real crimes, and are punished accordingly. After, of course, they have been thoroughly interrogated and have given up the names of everyone they know who might also harbour the same tendencies which drew them into the net in the first place.

  ‘There’s a rumour that all the acts of successful sabotage and assassination carried out by wreckers were hatched by the department, but I’m sure that can’t be true,’ the Horse said. ‘After all, it would mean that there aren’t really any wreckers, and that the department isn’t engaged in protecting public safety but in threatening it so that the public will agree to any and all measures to protect them from harm – even if it means giving up some of the very rights and liberties those measures are supposed to protect. And besides, according to my informant, Yakob Singleton and his colleagues stumbled over a genuine conspiracy just before he disappeared. A mystery cult that believes that one day a ship will appear and free us from the burden of your rule.’

  ‘I’ve heard of such things. They’re harmless fantasies.’

  ‘Most are. But this was an old cult – perhaps one of the oldest. And it wasn’t hoping for a new ship, but a very old one.’

  The Quick seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut first, the Horse said, but not because it had been the first to leave the Solar System. The True seedship had left long before, but it was slower and less sophisticated, and the Quick seedship had overtaken it. But there was also a third ship, launched long before even the True seedship, and because it was even slower than the other two, both had overtaken it.

  ‘I’ve heard of that, too,’ I said. ‘But it should have arrived long ago, at about the same time as our seedship.’

  ‘Four gigaseconds afterwards,’ the Horse said. ‘More or less.’

  ‘But it didn’t, because it had some kind of accident, and was lost. It exploded and the debris hasn’t yet reached Fomalhaut. Or it failed to stop accelerating and fell past us. Hardly surprising. It was incredibly ancient. One of the first seedships to leave the Solar System.’

  ‘It began its journey some three and a half teraseconds ago,’ the Horse said. ‘And some people believe that it is still on its way.’

  �
��Your people. These mystery cultists. Did they find it? Is that the conspiracy Yakob uncovered?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know they were looking for it. Watching the window of sky it must pass through if it ever approached Fomalhaut.’

  ‘If it is so old, what use is it?’

  ‘Spoken like a true True.’

  ‘I’m trying to think like Yakob Singleton. He broke his contract with the Office of Public Safety. He must have had a better reason than some incredibly historic but intrinsically worthless relic.’

  ‘I think I have the answer to that,’ the Horse said. ‘The thing about this ship is that it wasn’t a seedship. It’s so old that it actually carried a passenger.’

  He opened a window between us: a gas-giant planet banded in autumn colours and gorgeously ringed. Unlike the gigantic rings of Cthuga, these shone with diamond splendour. They were divided by a large gap into a narrow inner circle and a broader outer circle, and those two circles were in turn divided by gaps of various sizes, the whole as intricate and beautiful as a toy.

  ‘Saturn. A sister planet of Earth,’ the Horse said.

  ‘That’s where the ship came from?’

  ‘From one of the moons.’

  He reached in and the view expanded towards a portion of the outer edge of those rings. Detail resolved – narrow lanes divided by hair-thin gaps laced together within the broad lanes of luminous material, spokes of darker stuff thin as smoke radiating out across the lanes – and the diffuse edge of the rings slid past and the view centred on a speck that expanded as the viewpoint fell towards it. A rough, battered worldlet, its sunward side stamped with two large craters that sat side by side like eye sockets, giving it the appearance of a lopsided skull. A sharper crater below its sockets like an off-centre mouth open in a gape of surprise. Its forehead rising to a gently lobed crest. Everywhere pocked with smaller craters, spills of black shadow caught inside their rims. Nothing special. Nothing that would look out of place amongst the icy worldlets of the Archipelago.

  The Horse explained that it was a co-orbital moon, sharing a very similar orbit with another moon of a similar size. The moon in the lower orbit travelled faster than the one in the higher orbit, and when the first caught up with the second they swapped positions: the second moon drew away from the first, travelling along its new, lower and faster orbit until it caught up with the first moon and they swapped again. This moon, Janus, was where the ship came from. In fact, the ship had been part of Janus, at one point. A chunk that had been carved out of it and grew mass-driver motors and separated and slowly accelerated away and kept accelerating, until it had climbed out of the gravity well of its parent planet and then the gravity well of the Homesun.

  ‘At a point just beyond the outer edge of the Homesun’s Kuiper Belt it dropped laser stations it had fabricated, and grew sails that the lasers pushed against,’ the Horse said. ‘Perhaps the stations failed at some point; perhaps the sails were damaged or fell into disrepair. For whatever reason, its journey took far longer than it should have.’

  ‘And its passenger? This gene wizard?’

  ‘That’s where it gets very interesting. She was an enemy of the Ghosts. She helped to drive them from the Solar System long ago, in the second pan-system war.’

  ‘Even if she were still alive, it does not mean that she would be a friend to us.’

  ‘Or to the Quicks. But they hoped she would be. The people watching for her ship.’

  ‘They hoped she’d save them from the enemy, and from us.’

  ‘They hoped she would save you from yourselves.’

  ‘So they were wreckers of a kind,’ I said.

  ‘I prefer to think of them as dreamers,’ the Horse said.

  ‘And Yakob Singleton took them down. And no doubt tortured the location of this hell from one or all of them.’

  ‘It’s stranger than that. Yakob Singleton and his people had been watching them, hoping some bigger fish would swim into their shoal. A Quick dedicated to violent overthrow of the tyranny of the True, that kind of thing. Several of the cult were in their pay, and Yakob was the one controlling them. And one day all the cultists were killed. They met together and died together.’

  ‘Who killed them? A rival group?’

  ‘They attacked each other with broken furniture and their hands and feet and teeth. It was a bloody massacre, famous in certain circles. There was a cover-up, of course. The massacre was blamed on a rival group, everyone supposedly in that rival group was disappeared, and that was that.’

  ‘They found something. A hell. And a demon got out.’

  ‘Probably more than one, given how the cultists died.’

  ‘The same hell that Yakob Singleton opened up, just before he vanished. The one we’re going to harrow.’

  ‘It’s good, solid information,’ the Horse said. ‘Well worth the price of these fine clothes. Not that you paid for them, of course.’

  And how can you be sure you weren’t fed an elaborate piece of fiction?’

  I knew very well that the Quicks who performed or drudged in the Permanent Floating Market were bent and twisted by their work. They wanted to be like Trues and they hated us and wanted us gone from their city and their worldlets with equal and opposite force. They lived fast and high: drinking and drugging when not working; dancing to wild music played by musicians who came straight from performing degraded versions of ‘traditional’ Quick music to entertain Trues; betting on free-form wrestling matches and duels with all kinds of bladed weapons. Trues flocked to the fair to sample this kind of colour and raw authenticity, but it was in truth a poor and twisted reflection of our own appetites, our own corruptibility. It was a commonplace that you could buy anything you wanted in the Permanent Floating Market if you had the credit, but you could never guarantee that you would get what you hoped for.

  But although I wasn’t entirely convinced about the Horse’s story, it was no surprise to learn that there was more to Yakob Singleton’s work than I’d been told. It was all of a piece with his mother’s desire to manipulate and control me. She’d caught me off guard by pretending to be one of her own flunkeys; she’d asked me to tell the story about the demon when she already knew all about it, and had matched the sunset of the biome where we’d met to the sunset of the Library in an obvious piece of psychological manipulation. And, of course, she’d sent her niece to keep watch over me.

  The Horse pretended to be insulted, saying that he might have lost his edge while working out in the boonies and rough edges of the Archipelago, but he was no easy mark for peddlers of grey information.

  ‘You do have experience in that area,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re protected and sheltered by the Library, and by the narrow focus of your work. The only people you meet are officials worried that they will be held accountable for an intrusion by enemy forces, and soldiers half-scared to death that they’ll be turned by demons. They might not be pleased to see us, but they need our skills. And we use them to fight in simple conflicts. Good versus evil. Light versus dark. Us versus demons. But Yakob Singleton was involved in something far more ambiguous. Anyway, whether or not you believe it, I’ve told you all I learned, which is all my informant could be persuaded to tell me. If it doesn’t satisfy you, I understand completely, because it doesn’t satisfy me. But there it is.’

  I thought about it. ‘Yakob Singleton found evidence that this ancient ship is still functioning, still travelling towards Fomalhaut. Something the mystery cult discovered. Something in this hell we’ve been sent to harrow. He quit his job because he did not want to give it up to this mysterious department, or to the Office of Public Safety. He wanted it for himself. Or for his poor downtrodden family . . .’

  The Horse said, ‘It’s a nice story. Why don’t you tell it to your new friend, and ask her if any of it is true?’

  ‘She may not know any more than me.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt that. She’s family. You aren’t.’

  ‘That’s another reason why
I don’t want to ask her. Because this is caught up with Yakob Singleton’s family history. His mother made that quite plain. This isn’t just about finding an errant son. She thinks that he found something valuable, too – something that could give his family some advantage, and help it to win back its place in the clan hierarchy. We can’t allow ourselves to be involved in that, because it would seem that my clan is taking sides in the affairs of another.’

  ‘There’s so little difference between all of you,’ the Horse said. ‘Yet you make so much of it.’

  ‘Yes, why can’t we all just get along, like the Quick? How is that working out for you, by the way?’

  ‘I can see why we’ve been chosen for this. We have the experience, but we are also expendable.’

  ‘We’re here to do a job. We’ll do that. No more, no less. If we find something that might explain where Yakob Singleton has gone, then it will be a bonus. But his mother can deal with it.’

  The Horse smiled. ‘Get in, get out, move on.’

  ‘It’s worked for us so far. I appreciate the effort you put in to finding out about Yakob Singleton. It maps out problems and complications we must avoid. But in the end this is just another job.’

  ‘There’s another complication we haven’t considered yet,’ the Horse said. ‘Lathi Singleton sent us to harrow the hell that her son found, but the Office of Public Safety may have a claim on it too.’

  Prem Singleton found me after the ship had completed deceleration and was beginning its final approach to T. I was in an empty bubble in the outer layer. Its external surface was completely transparent. T was a lumpy speck revolving in a stately circle off to starboard, and because it was high above the plane of the ecliptic as well as at the leading edge of the Archipelago, there was nothing but stars beyond. I’d killed the bubble’s lights and it seemed that I floated amongst a sea of stars: bright stars and stars dim as dust, stars of all colours. I was so absorbed in them, and scions were making so much noise close by, that I didn’t see or hear Prem Singleton enter until she eclipsed a segment of the starry sky, asking me if I was ready for work.