In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  I said that I was, and hoped that she was too.

  ‘What we’re doing here, that doesn’t count as work. My real work is at Cthuga,’ Prem said.

  ‘The demons that my clan and I face come from the Ghosts,’ I said. ‘We fight the enemy just as your clan does.’

  ‘You fight for the past. We fight for the future.’ Although she had been partying with her fellow scions ever since the ship had departed from Thule, she did not seem drunk or stoned at all. She spoke lightly, but with a determination I hadn’t heard before. As if she was at last talking about something she felt strongly about. ‘I should be going out there with my cousins. Going back to the war. They don’t know what they’re getting into, and I do. They’re so young . . . I mean, some of them are a lot older than me, but they don’t know anything really. How old are you? Eighteen, nineteen?’

  I translated my age into the obsolete measurement that the Singletons and the other founder clans still used. ‘A little over twenty years,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose you’d say six hundred and thirty megaseconds. Why do you use that metric, by the way?’

  ‘The work we do is clocked at speeds best measured in seconds and fragments of seconds, Majistra.’

  ‘We’re almost the same age, however you measure it. Could practically be twins. Chronologically, I mean. But in every other way I’m so much older than you, and my cousins. I feel as if I aged a million years, out there. And now it’s their turn to go naked into that good night. Which is why our army is in such poor shape. Officers gain experience in the field, but they aren’t allowed to practise it if they survive. No, we have to make way for a new wave of volunteers, with no continuity of experience and operational knowledge. It means that each new generation of officers can vigorously apply innovative tactics and techniques, but it also means that we never learn from our mistakes, and our tactics are driven by short-term thinking. And too often by whatever sentiments are current in the dominant clans, rather than by strategic needs. And meanwhile the enemy never rests, is always driving forward.’

  This was so perilously close to wrecker talk that I thought it best to say nothing.

  ‘You know what’s funny?’ Prem said. ‘There is continuation, of a kind, in the Quicks on the front line. Most new recruits die almost at once, but those who survive get to serve directly as adjuncts for officers. Who if they have any sense, if they want to survive, listen very closely to their seasoned adjuncts. Stage one, when you’ve just arrived, you tell them what needs to be done, ask for their suggestions, then order them to do it that way. That way you might last long enough to get to stage two, when you tell them what has to be done and how to do it, and if they suggest a different way of doing things, then that’s how you roll instead.’ She turned to look at me, her profile a charcoal sketch against the starlight. ‘How do you roll, by the way?’

  I had to ask her what she meant.

  ‘How do you and your kholop decide what to do?’

  ‘I suppose I might be at a version of your stage two. I tell him what to do, and if he suggests an alternative I think about it and decide whether we do it my way or his.’

  ‘That’s what you were doing earlier, down in the hole.’

  ‘We were wondering how to deal with you,’ I said.

  Prem laughed. ‘I bet you were, too. Does that come with the package? Your pathological honesty?’

  ‘We try to tell our clients the truth. Sometimes that involves telling them something they don’t want to hear.’

  ‘Mmm. You know, I can’t tell if you’re a noble man for whom truth is paramount, or a fool who doesn’t know how to tell a lie when necessary.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s little difference between the two.’

  ‘Help me decide. Tell me what you think I don’t want to hear. No, don’t bother. Because I know. You’re worried that I will interfere with your exorcism or harrowing of Yakob’s hell. That I might do something that will put you in danger. Or even worse, stop you fulfilling the contract you made with Lathi. Well, no need to worry. Lathi may not trust you, but I do. Why? Because you have an ideal of honour so old-fashioned that it might have been handed down on a tablet of stone by the very hand of the One God.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Why not? Maybe that’s what it’s meant to be. And besides all that, I have other things to do, and you’ll have other things to worry about. Worse things than me getting in the way of your spells and incantations.’

  It wasn’t until we arrived at T that I realised what she meant.

  3

  The small blister of the observation post was divided into two levels and each level was divided into several compartments. Judging by the number of sleeping niches, it had been meant to house a crew of at least two Trues and sixteen Quick, but Ori had it all to herself. She’d been born and raised in a crowded nursery in the Whale, and when she was five she’d started work in the Whale’s busy upper levels. And even working out on the skin of the Whale, she’d always been surrounded by other bots and immersed in the background chatter of the crew. Now, apart from the post’s AI and the passenger in her head, which had withdrawn into the unseeable darkness at the back of her skull, there was no living person, True or Quick, within twenty kilometres of her, and she was a very long way down the length of the cable, at about the furthest reach of the train. Far below the stratosphere where the Whale floated, far beyond Inas and everyone she had ever known, in the upper region of a searing calm of hydrogen and helium gas that was some two thousand kilometres deep, growing hotter and more and more compressed as it reached down to the zone where helium began to rain out, and beyond that the zone where hydrogen gradually changed from liquid to gas. A vast featureless layer stratified only by temperature and pressure.

  It was utterly dark in every direction, interrupted only by the running lights of the construction trains that went past with monotonous regularity, rising out of the darkness below or falling out of the darkness above. A machine activity that required no intervention and could continue for decades or centuries after human tenants quit the Whale. Ori soon learned to ignore it. She had her own work to do.

  It was exactly like the work she had practised over and over in virtuality, and in truth the AI did most of it, scanning a broad volume around the observation post and monitoring the white noise of the planet’s electrical and magnetic fields for anomalous signals, sorting and cataloguing them, sending anything of interest up the pipe to the train. Ori was little more than a spark of organic intelligence dangling in the hot compressed darkness for the delectation of whatever might come cruising by. Meat on a hook. She dropped sondes and other one-shot probes manufactured in great quantity by the post’s makers, and she launched hot-hydrogen ballonets that were tethered to the post by monofilament lines kilometres long and went floating off on impalpable currents, lights pulsing and flashing in what Commissar Doctor Pentangel and his crew of philosopher-soldiers believed to be mathematically intriguing patterns. She used the station’s laser arrays, too, cutting the dark with calibrated beams, or lighting up the flank of the cable with vast pulsing displays. And every day she fired up one of the drones and took it out into the dark.

  The station’s AI instructed her in the use and deployment of all this equipment, admonished her if she did too little, rewarded her with sweet or tangy treats when she matched the parameters set for each activity. It wasn’t much company, the AI. Exhibiting zero affect, responding only when it was absolutely necessary. Its voice at once halting and monotonous, a mechanical parody of human speech. Ori had met more personable floor cleaners. And there was no direct line to the Whale. All communication went through the AI, and it would not relay any kind of personal message.

  She did her best to stay alert and disciplined, and established a routine on which she could peg passing time, but that routine soon began to drift. She spent a considerable part of her downtime trying to communicate with her passenger. Talking to it, trying to centre herself in
side her own head, trying to draw it out. It was there, she could feel it, but it was silent and still. A watcher in the dark, just like her.

  Once, she grew so frustrated by its mocking silence that she began to scream at it. Pacing up and down, smacking her head with her fists, shouting. Daring it to come out. Threatening to harm herself if it didn’t. When she began to bang her head against a bulkhead the station’s AI puffed tranquilliser into the air, and Ori woke several hours later with a parched mouth and a bad headache and a vile sense of shame.

  She lost herself in reveries about the life she’d left behind. Inas. Falling asleep in each other’s arms. Waking beside her. Her touch and her smell. Her rough laugh, her tender gaze. Their conversations about the small change of life in the commons, over a meal, over a pipe. The way her bot moved, out on the skin of the Whale. The way they worked together and the way they lived together. Inas had told Ori to forget all that, but she couldn’t.

  And at all times she could feel the hot dark pressing in on the diamond-fullerene blister of the dome: a stifling claustrophobia that came in slow, heavy waves. There was little relief to be had from riding the drone. The cable was the only point of reference, a vertical line studded with little lights that gleamed starkly against the absolute darkness, dwindling away above and below. Beyond it, despite the drone’s navigation package, which conjured a grid precise to the nearest centimetre from the planet’s magnetic field, the darkness had no dimension. A void without form or meaning. An ocean of night that could at any moment pinch shut her little bubble of air and light.

  On her first excursion, she circled the cable and moved up and down it, discovering that the observation post was set to one side of a larger structure, one of the garage depots used by the machines that had first extended the cable into the upper edge of the gas giant’s hydrogen sea. A rack of low half-cylinders clamped to the flank of the cable, several of them extending horizontal platforms and spars. Everything was still, empty, quiet. Abandoned in place. One of the cylinders was still pressurised and its heat pumps were still working, maintaining its interior at a comfortable twenty degrees centigrade. Ori liked to check it on her way out and on her way back in, scan for motion inside. Without conscious thought she elaborated a fantasy that it was inhabited by a hermit of fabulous age who had elected to exile herself there, as hermits did in the glory days before the True had arrived.

  There was a hatchway in the floor of one of the compartments of the post. It was sealed, and the AI refused to explain its purpose. Ori began to wonder if it opened on to a passage that ran through the interior of the cable to the garage depot. Sometimes, at night, she woke convinced that she could hear a faint scratching under the floor, or felt that someone had been standing over her. She’d flood the dome with light, her heart hammering, her skin clammy, and look everywhere for the intruder. The AI was no help, claiming that it did not monitor the interior of the post.

  ‘That is not my function.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘That is not my function.’

  ‘But can you do it if I asked you to do it?’

  ‘I am not able to act on your request.’

  Sometimes Ori would lie across the hatch, with her ear pressed to it. Hearing nothing but the whisper of blood cells jostling through the capillaries of her inner ear. She stuck hairs across the fine, almost invisible joint between floor and hatch. Wondered if she could somehow bring a sonde through the airlock and have it watch her while she slept.

  She knew that these fantasies were dangerous. An expression of her deep desire for escape. And she knew that she was being watched. That if she deviated from expected behaviour patterns or failed to carry out her assigned tasks she would face the long drop. But she couldn’t help going through the routine of checking the hatch every morning, of swinging past the abandoned depot on her way out and on her way back, and by and by began to fabricate another fantasy: that the sprite which had ridden with her would find her again. They had a connection, after all, that was why she had been recruited. Perhaps this connection, impalpable yet unbreakable, would draw the sprite to her, and its manifestation would redeem her weakness. She would prove that she was unique, a lightning rod for the ineffable. The sprite would come to her, and she would bind it. She wasn’t sure how, but first she had to make sure that it could find her. She had to call to it. Pierce the veil of the unforgiving dark.

  Now that she had a purpose, she worked with vigour. Drawing up tables and schedules of activity, making sure that random patterns were truly random, and thinking up patterns that were obviously patterns by basing them on sequences of prime numbers. She tried to imagine what sprites wanted. Why they were drawn to Quicks. Why that one particular sprite had been drawn to her.

  Like all her sisters, Ori could call up memories and examine them as a True might examine a picture. She fell inside herself many times, conjuring the chain of stark bright instants that had begun when the probe had pitched away from the launch cradle. Turning everything over and around. Looking at the way the bot had been splayed on the probe, at the moves she’d made, and the moves she hadn’t made. She went out and duplicated that dying fall, letting the drone drop as far as she dared, until at around a hundred and fifty kilometres below the obervation post the limits of the little machine’s tolerances were reached and she had to pull up before it was crushed and incinerated by increasing temperature and pressure.

  She did this over and again. Falling close to the cable and at varying distances from it. Falling silently. Falling while broadcasting patterns. But still she saw nothing, and if the AI sifted anything unusual from the planet’s radio noise, the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, subtle shifts in atmospheric circulation around the cable, and all the other parameters it was monitoring, it did not tell her. It would not even tell her if anyone else had ever seen a sprite here. Ori supposed that they must have done, for although sprites were uncommon, they were not rare. And she also began to think that her failure to spot any manifestation or detect any other evidence of unusual activity was in itself significant. That the absence of any activity was useful evidence was her only hope of passing this test.

  She took the drone out and tried again.

  And again.

  And again.

  One night she dreamed a dream of floating outside the observation post. She was not riding a drone, but she was somehow present. A viewpoint without form or dimension hung a little way from the vertical stroke of the cable. She could see the cable perfectly well, and the rack of the garage’s half-cylinders, and the blister of the post, which was crowned with flickering light. Sprites, circling like dancers joined hand to hand. There were too many to count, but Ori felt that there was only one, stitched through brief intervals of time, joining hands with itself. Flickering in and out. She tried to move towards it and could not, and woke on the hard pad of her sleeping niche, dim light brightening as she sat up. She called up a window that showed an external view of the observation post and clicked from camera to camera but saw nothing unusual. Curves and angles ghostly in infrared against grainy dark. Frames of still life. She ran them backwards, and saw nothing. Knowing that she was being stupid, knowing that it had been a dream, and even if it had been real the cameras wouldn’t show anything. She called up other records, found no nodes of magnetic activity or electromagnetic spikes. A hump in background noise as a train went by, nothing else.

  She was fully awake now. The hypnogogic state where anything seemed possible had dwindled away. Everything was no more than itself. The clean bare walls, the stalk of a stool by the kitchen shelf and the square black box of the maker, her hands, the passenger inside her skull, in the dark behind her eyes, behind the place where she lived.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, startling herself, and the AI asked her what she meant.

  ‘I want to check something.’

  She sent a drone out. The lights of the cable rising above, dwindling away below. The dark all around, and the thing she hadn�
��t noticed before, shifting cells of different shades of darkness, all sizes, swarming around each other like the patterns she saw when she closed her eyes. She watched them for a long time. She tried and failed to crossmatch and correlate them with the drone’s instrumentation.

  The darkness was alive, and only she could see it.

  ‘All right,’ she said to her passenger. ‘All right. Now show me something else.’

  4

  Vidal Francisca’s steady and indefatigable campaign to woo Maria Hong-Owen had been strengthened by his having saved her daughter from an unimaginably gruesome fate at the hands of wildsiders, but he still had much to do. He was a vain man, but he was not stupid, and knew that Maria could not be won over by trivial favours and gifts. Instead, he persuaded her to join his committee of concerned citizens, which had got up a militia that patrolled the streets of the town at night, liaised with the army and the R&R Corps, and doled out shelters, cooking implements, sleeping bags and other essentials to refugees. The committee also supplied extra medical supplies to the hospital, which was now working at full stretch to cope with the additional problems caused by the influx of refugees. There had been an outbreak of a vomiting sickness: dozens of young children were being brought to the hospital with high fevers and dangerous levels of dehydration. Many of the refugees had serious endemic health problems, too. Parasites, genetic problems that needed therapies the hospital couldn’t provide, syndromes associated with old age that were likewise untreatable . . . Maria said that it was as if they were back in the twentieth century, before modern medicine had been developed.