In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  The trees grew very tall in T’s shallow gravity, their soaring trunks bursting into fluffy clouds of leaves at the very top. They were linked by walkways and ziplines, and shell-like cabins and lodges occupied platforms slung between them or built around their trunks, to house officers and other senior personnel on leave.

  The Horse and I were lodged in a cabin little bigger than one of the bubbles of the Quick ship that had brought us to T, high up in the canopy of one of the trees. It was comfortable enough, but it was a jail all the same: because the marshal couldn’t prevent me reporting to Lathi Singleton once I left T, he had decided to keep me there until he had discovered who ‘Bree Sixsmith’ really was, and who she was working for.

  The troopers were stationed below the cabin and a small flock of drones and a sentinel net monitored us, but I determined at once that it was easy enough to fool their security, just as my fellow novitiates and I had often fooled the security net of the Permanent Floating Market using gear designed to crack and unriddle the knottier and far more dangerous encryptions of hells and broken networks. Within a few hundred seconds, I had set up illusions of both the Horse and myself, and rendered us invisible to the gaze of the machines – they saw us, but did not register us. We inhabited a floating blind spot.

  ‘That’s all very well, but we’re still stuck on top of a tree,’ the Horse said. ‘We can’t climb down because troopers occupy the platform below ours, and we can’t jump because the fall would be fatal even in gravity as shallow as this. Or do you have wings hidden on your person?’

  ‘I did think about gliding, using fabric ripped from the screens,’ I said. ‘Then I realised that if we can’t climb down this tree, we can climb down another. Or at least, you can. The canopy of this tree meshes with its neighbours.’

  ‘You’re closer to a monkey than I am,’ the Horse said. ‘And even if we escape this tree, we’re still on T.’

  ‘So is Prem Singleton. And as luck would have it, I forgot to tell the marshal about her.’

  There was a moment when I thought my plan wouldn’t work. The Horse clambered along a branch that jutted towards a neighbouring tree, but it grew so thin at its extremity that his meagre weight caused it to bow down through almost ninety degrees. Clinging to it by hands and feet, the Horse looked down and around, glanced up at me and winked, and then threw himself across the gulf, and disappeared in a flurry of foliage.

  I sat down and waited, reviewing what we had found in the remnants of the hell, thinking about the implications. A thousand seconds passed, and another thousand, and another. I was pacing to and fro in the confined space of the cabin, looking out in every direction across the treetops, when I saw a flitter racing towards me. For a moment, I thought the marshal’s prefects had come to take me away for interrogation; then I realised that it was as invisible to the security net as I was. It came to a crash stop and slid sideways until it rested in the air a pace or so from the entrance to the cabin. Its canopy slid back and the Horse said, ‘Where do you want to go?’

  6

  Ori wrote up her dream and the patterns she’d seen in the darkness as part of her daily report. She told herself not to expect a response, but couldn’t help thinking that it would interest the philosopher-soldiers. Perhaps even come to the attention of Commissar Doctor Pentangel. The train would return and take her off-station and return her to the Whale, where she’d be welcomed and rewarded . . .

  But it was a feeble little fantasy. The dream had been no more than a dream. The patterns no more than some kind of hallucination. The growing sense of the passenger inside her skull no more than a desire for companionship. None of it verifiable by the AI or by the surveillance system or by any other external test. But the fantasy kept creeping back. Because wasn’t subjectivity the point? Wasn’t that why she was down here? An observer. An instrument, like any other. It wasn’t what she saw. It was about what she thought she saw.

  She was used to dealing with practical problems. Fixing things. Real work that had an immediate and obvious effect on the real world. She was good at it, and it was satisfying. Either something worked or it didn’t, and if it didn’t you thought about it and tried something else and kept at it until it did. But the dream and the change in her perceptions couldn’t be unriddled by the rough and ready empirical logic that broke down problems in the world of things into easily understood steps. She’d had the dream, and then she’d found that she could see that the darkness had form. The two things were connected: had to be, because one followed straight after the other. But what was the connection? Was the dream a symptom of the change inside her, or a premonition, or was it some kind of signal? Had her passenger, her secret sharer, sent her a symbolic message while she was asleep because that was the only way it could communicate with her?

  Maybe there had been some kind of change in her brain function, but she lacked the apparatus to detect or measure it. In the end, she decided that there was no point worrying about it. If you didn’t have the tools to do the job, you could only do what you could with what you had.

  Still, she couldn’t help wondering whether the others in the other observation stations had been changed in the same way. If they had dreamed the same dream, and found that they could see things in the dark that they hadn’t been able to see before.

  Three days later, she had another dream. She was walking through the rooms of the observation post, looking for something she needed. She couldn’t quite remember what it was, or why finding it was so urgent, but as she searched and searched for it a sense of failure, frustration, and impending doom grew inside her. As if she’d swallowed something smooth and hard and indigestible. It seemed that she searched for a long time, in the dream, and at last found a door she hadn’t seen before, its circle outlined by a sliver of violet light. She opened it and saw a white room with a sprite burning in the centre, tall and unwavering and pure and true. Her sprite. It spoke to her, and then she woke up, in the dimness of the observation post, the hum of pumps in the air, on the cool hard floor underneath her.

  Somehow she was in a room in the upper level. Lying there, trying to remember what the sprite had told her, the sense of it already gone and the flavour of it fading too, leaving only a feeling of loss. Immense desolation. As if she had glimpsed another, better world, and knew she would never find it again. She told herself to pull herself together. Talking to herself as if she were Inas, telling herself to get up and check every room, find out why she had woken there on the cold hard floor.

  She checked every room, and every room was empty. There had been no electromagnetic disturbances inside the observation post, or outside it. It had not been a visitation. It had been a dream. Even though she’d expected it, her sense of loss and loneliness increased another notch. She asked the AI for surveillance records of the last six hours and it opened a window and she fast-forwarded through images of herself asleep until she saw herself stir and sit up. The surveillance showed her clambering from her sleeping niche and wandering from room to room. Moving slowly and uncertainly, as if in a place that was utterly unfamiliar. Her eyes open, searching.

  She wrote up a report. She rode a bot outside. The patterns were still there, liminal, shifting, pulsing. Lovely and mysterious and scary and compelling.

  Perhaps she was becoming something else. Her mind changing, the way people’s bodies changed when they became ill, either from a flaw in themselves, some gene or suite of genes mangled when they’d been quickened, or from a change induced by a random confluence of radiation particle and DNA. They became ill and they couldn’t work, and they were culled. It could happen to her. She fell back on her routines, the comfort of work. If she stopped working the AI would cull her. She knew it. Her body would be recycled or it would be given the long drop, and the observation post would receive a new tenant. But as long as she could work she’d be all right.

  She dropped sondes. She dropped probes. She launched ballonets and pulsed the dark with laser arrays and flew drones in patterns all aro
und the cable and further out. She did what she’d been told she’d been chosen to do. But she couldn’t shake the idea that the real reason she’d been sent to the observation post wasn’t anything to do with attracting sprites. No, she’d been locked away down here because she was infected. Because Commissar Doctor Pentangel knew that she would change in dangerous and unpredictable ways, and wanted to study those changes.

  One day she woke to find two philosopher-soldiers standing over her. The same pair who’d ejected her from the train, dressed in the same orange tunics under the black straps and joints of their exoskeletons. For a moment she thought she was dreaming, but then she realised that she could smell their sweat, and the warm silicone lubricants of their exoskeletons’ little motors.

  The train had returned. Her exile was over. It had lasted just twenty-nine days. She had thought it much longer.

  As the train ascended towards the Whale, the pair of philosopher-soldiers subjected Ori to an elaborate round of tests, treating her as usual with callous indifference. She endured it, answered their questions as best she could, and at last they told her to get dressed and report upstairs for debriefing.

  ‘This one is unsure about who she should report to,’ she said.

  ‘Just go all the way to the top.’

  A capsule elevator took her up the spine of the train, past the machinery that recycled air and water, past tanks of spirulina and yeast, to a small crowded garden, lush and green under a glowing ceiling, where Commissar Doctor Wilm Pentangel was waiting for her. He instructed her to tell him everything she could remember about her dreams and not to leave out any detail, no matter how trivial. While she talked, he pottered amongst the plants, tick-tocking stiffly in his exoskeleton, stroking leaves, touching flowers, misting a tangle of roots with a sprayer, nipping off leaves that had browned and shrivelled. His pale face intent under his shock of black hair. The hot dark pressed on the dome above, making the lights inside seem brighter than they were and unreal, as if emphasising the unnaturalness of this garden here, deep inside the furnace heat and pressure of the gas giant’s interior, where the train and everyone and everything aboard was alien and out of place.

  When Ori finished, there was a long silence. She stood as still as she could, her skin flushed and prickling, feeling uncomfortable and out of place while on the other side of a thin screen of dangling stringy plants the commissar bent like a hinge and scrutinised a small animal that scrambled over white protuberances shaped a little like rocket vents. It was about the size of Ori’s thumb, sturdy and armoured, with a fat swollen abdomen furred in yellow and white, three pairs of legs articulated like the commissar’s exoskelton, and a pair of small, glassy wings.

  Ori watched it too, slowly became aware that the commissar was watching her. Meeting his bright blue gaze for a moment, flinching away. The busy little animal backed away from a creamy vent-thing and the commissar extended his forefinger and the animal clung to it, its furry plump abdomen pumping in and out. The commissar raised it to the level of his eyes and studied it.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a bee before,’ he said. ‘Some live collectively in congregations that are almost all of them infertile female workers. A little like you and your friends, yes? And a little like the Ghosts, who live in hive communes in which the needs of the individual are secondary to the needs of the group. But many species of bee are solitary. Like this one. She makes a nest of flower petals and lays eggs there, and collects pollen and nectar from flowers to feed her young until they metamorphose and leave the nest. Ah, but do you know about flowers?’

  ‘This one knows little about plants.’

  ‘These are orchids, only lightly tweaked to grow as vines. The flowers are their sexual organs. Here.’

  The commissar plucked one of the white protuberances and picked it to pieces, naming each part and describing their function. Petals and sepals, stigma, pistil and ovary. He plucked another and held it to Ori’s nose and told her to smell it.

  She breathed in obediently: a prickling sweetness made her sneeze.

  The commissar snorted with amusement, reached out and touched Ori’s face. His cold fingertips trailing down her cheek. She kept absolutely still, her pulses beating in her throat and wrists and ankles. He tucked the flower behind her ear and studied her with a solemn amusement.

  ‘You Quick made yourselves into unnatural things, so my ancestors had no compunction about tweaking you so that you would serve us, and tweaking some of you over again, strengthening your musculature and skeletal structure and your circulatory systems so that you could live and work in Cthuga’s steep gravity. That was my grandmother’s work, mostly. Did you know that? I suppose not.’

  He spoke slowly, as if recalling a story he’d half heard, long ago. His gaze fixed on her, but somehow unfocused. Like Inas, when she and Ori got serious together, but Ori didn’t want to think of that. His hands moved over her face as if endowed with independent life, cupping it, stroking it, moving downwards across her torso. She stayed absolutely still, frozen with fright, convinced that he was going to kill her because she had failed him.

  ‘Your ancestors called themselves posthumans, believing that they were the new improved next best thing,’ he said. ‘A new species, more intelligent, more compassionate. Free of the glitches in thought and instinct that burden humans like me. True human beings, the original species, more or less. And yet we triumphed. The changes your ancestors made to themselves turned out to be of no benefit when it comes to fitness, because intelligence is not by itself a survival trait. And so we merely human Trues easily conquered them, and turned them into a servant race. And then the Ghosts came, and perhaps they’ll conquer us, as we conquered you. The ancestors of the Ghosts were the first of the so-called posthumans, and they retain many of the so-called flaws that make us stronger than you. You might say that they contain the best of the Quick and the best of the True. That is why they are such a formidable enemy.’

  His cold hands were underneath her loose coveralls now, prying and prodding and poking. Ori endured it as she had endured the examination by the pair of philosopher-soldiers. Tried to uncouple her mind from what was happening to her, as if her body was a bot and she was riding it . . .

  The commissar pushed her backwards into a bower of ferns, forced her down on to the nest of cushions there and knelt and straddled her, his exoskeleton stiffly clicking. He was murmuring in her ear, telling her that she was such a strange thing, not quite human, not quite animal, so strong, so sturdy, so obedient, so pliant.

  ‘Tell me you’ll do anything I want.’

  ‘This one has done her best to obey instructions.’

  ‘Tell me straight. Don’t use that damned indirect slave speech. Look at me,’ the commissar said, and cupped Ori’s face with one hand, thumb and fingers digging into her cheeks, forcing her to meet his gaze.

  ‘This . . . I will do what you want.’

  ‘That’s better. That’s good. You’re the best of them. The best of my little helpers . . .’

  She could feel his hips grinding against hers, his thighs against her thighs, the straps and rods of his exoskeleton digging into her. He was holding her face with one hand, forcing her to look at him while his other hand was busy between her legs. Then he was moving against her, and the pain was inside her but it was bearable, she could bear it, it wasn’t as bad as the awful intimacy of being forced to look at his face, of breathing in his sour breath. He was breathing hard and his face was congested with blood. And then he shuddered and it was over. He lay still for a moment, his weight pressing full length on Ori. She closed her eyes, waiting for the bullet, the killing shock, the icy tree of poison in her blood, and then he rolled off her and she felt air on her bare skin, felt something seeping out of her.

  When she dared to open her eyes, the commissar had pushed to his feet and wandered off around the garden’s spiral path, poking at plants, touching them, stroking them. Ori pulled her coveralls together and sat up. Sore and bruised
and still frightened. The flower slipped from behind her ear and fell to the cushions.

  ‘It isn’t possible to verify your reports,’ the commissar said, after a while. ‘Not that I don’t believe your accounts of the dreams and the rest. I do. All of the Quick sent down to the observation posts reported similar experiences. They did not see any sprites, but they dreamed about them. And several, like you, saw patterns in the darkness. It is possible that those dreams were no more than hallucinations caused by the failure of your minds to understand and integrate a wholly alien experience. But I think not. I think that they were attempts at communication, or symptoms of some radical, ongoing change in your states of consciousness.

  ‘The quake, the way so many of you were changed by your encounters with sprites – it means something. Something is happening. A change is coming . . . Do you know how many years I have spent, searching for hard evidence that the Mind exists, and is aware of us?’

  Ori didn’t say anything. It was the kind of question Trues asked when they already knew the answer. Usually when they were looking for someone to blame for something.

  ‘Far too long,’ the commissar said. ‘Far too long. Some in my clan consider me a fool and an eccentric. As do many outside of it. I am despised. I am a laughing stock. I am a madman who has squandered his time chasing after a chimera, an illusion. And yet I am right. There is a planetary consciousness. The sprites are its agents. Fractal twists of strong self-generating magnetic fields. Emergent epiphenomena. Manifestations of more complex processes that we have not yet been able to locate, let alone measure. I don’t know what it is or what it wants, but I do know it exists. And I also know it is the reason why the Ghosts are coming here. We beat them back when they first arrived at Fomalhaut, but we failed to extinguish them completely. They hid away and grew, and now they believe that they are strong enough to capture Cthuga. And why do they want to do that? Not because they want to conduct physics experiments. We’ve been doing that for fifty years and have found nothing useful. No, they want to contact the Mind at the heart of the world. And if they do that, all will be lost.