In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I know this. There is no doubt in my own mind. It is the tipping point of the war, and it is nearly upon us. And you,’ the commissar said, turning to look at Ori, ‘you and all the other Quick who experienced close encounters with sprites, you’re the key to the mystery. Only I knew what it meant, when reports of those close encounters started to come in. I tracked all of you down and I trained you and devised an intensive programme of research. And now, just when the solution is within my grasp, it has been snatched from me.’

  He breathed in with a violent shudder and turned away and walked around the path to the bower of ferns. Ori stayed absolutely still, averting her gaze as he loomed over her.

  ‘You are the key to the war,’ the commissar said. ‘You and the others. It is no coincidence that the quake happened when it did. The Mind knows. It knows that the Ghosts are coming. And it wants to speak. To us. To them. Your dreams are significant. I am sure of it. But there is nothing to be done. Nothing. You are needed elsewhere. All of you are needed. I fought hard and long against fools who fail to see the entire picture. I tried to make them understand what the enemy wants and why we must make contact first, and now I have been betrayed.

  ‘You are going to be redeployed. All of you, all of my children, will be scattered across the face of this planet. But you will work for me still. If you see any sprites, you will tell me. If you dream about any sprites, you will tell me. Is that clear?’

  ‘This one wants to do her best.’

  ‘Of course you do. And you will. I know it. I chose well, and if there had been enough time . . . Well, there is still time. Go now. The technicians will give you a way of communicating with me. A simple implant that can piggyback on the common net. But know this. It can kill you, too. And it will, if I’m displeased in any way with you. If you do not report to me regularly, I will reach out, and it will all be over,’ the commissar said, and reached out now and set his forefinger in the middle of Ori’s forehead. Then he laughed, and stepped back. ‘But I know it won’t come to that. You are mine, now and always. Go now. When we meet again, it will be to celebrate my triumph.’

  7

  A comet was prominent in the sky above São Gabriel da Cachoeira. A fuzzy green star with a long faint tail from which it hung for an hour each evening before following the sun down into the west. A bad portent for the war, many said, and at every Mass Father Caetano and the other priests said special prayers for the safety of the town and everyone in it.

  The Child told him that some of the refugees had sacrificed a goat to ward off the comet’s bad influence.

  ‘The old religion runs deep in the people. I respect it even if I don’t believe in it. You should respect it too.’

  ‘It’s hard to respect mumbo-jumbo.’

  ‘It’s hard to respect arrogance, too.’

  They were sitting in the warm dark of Father Caetano’s garden. The feed from his telescope glowed between them, showing details of the coma thrown off by the comet’s nucleus: shells of gases larger in diameter than Jupiter, expanding away from the nucleus as the Sun heated it and drove off gases that were ionised by the ultraviolet component of sunlight and driven backwards by the magnetic field associated with the solar wind, creating a tail a hundred thousand kilometres long. The ions glowed because electrons boosted to unstable orbits shed photons as they collapsed back to their original state, and because the comet’s gases were rich in cyanogens and diatomic carbon its glow was dominated by their blue-green emissions.

  All of this was wholly explicable, firmly grounded on basic scientific principles. And yet it was eerie and beautiful, too, completely outside of ordinary human experience, and the Child couldn’t help wondering if the comet really was a portent.

  Her mother and Vidal Francisca had gone to Manaus together. Vidal Francisca to do some business; her mother to have the first holiday she’d enjoyed since taking up her position in the hospital. They’d flown there that morning, in a small plane hired by Vidal Francisca, and would return in three days. The Child dreaded what would happen then; feared the worst.

  Later, after Father Caetano had walked her back to the hospital compound and she had climbed on to the roof of the bungalow, the Child watched shooting stars streak across the starry sky. Radiating out from a central point a little to the east of zenith. The comet had set, but the pale smoke of its tail still streamed up from the west, and the sliver of the new moon was entangled in it like a corpse caught in waving river weed. A star fell. And another. Streaks of light flaring and winking out. The Child made wish after wish, until at last she fell asleep and the last of the comet’s tail fled west, and our little ship, riding backwards on a tail of plasma, fell towards the great belt of dust and icy rocks that circled the star Fomalhaut.

  Neither wishes nor prayers did any good. The Child’s mother and Vidal Francisca came back from Manaus and announced their engagement.

  Maria Hong-Owen told the Child before she told anyone else, talking quietly and seriously, saying that she knew that it meant a big change, but it was a good change and she wanted the Child to be happy about it. The Child tried her best. She knew that her mother was in love. She knew that she should be happy that her mother was happy. She knew that she couldn’t stop the marriage, and shouldn’t even if she could; knew that she should concentrate on the positive aspects. But she felt only a hot black knot of anger and fear that kept her apart from the fuss and excitement, exhibited at best a cool indifference that too often was broken by eruptions of defiance and irrational anger. She was always ashamed afterwards, but she couldn’t stop it. It was as if she was possessed, ridden by one of the little gods invoked by the Indians in their hectic ceremonies.

  And then she discovered that there was something worse than the impending marriage. Two weeks later, her mother and Vidal Francisca told the Child that they had arranged for her to take up a place in a school in Manaus. The same school that Vidal Francisca’s daughter had attended. A Catholic academy with an excellent record of dealing with gifted children, well-equipped science laboratories, and a full programme of extracurricular activities.

  And so the Child was trapped by a knight move. Betrayed by everyone around her. With a bleak and empty feeling, she saw the rest of her life laid out in front of her. No more experiments of her own devising. No more freedom. Instead, a rigid timetable, enforced worship of God and Gaia, and at best some dull job in the civil service until she became the possession of a man.

  Up to this point, we had not intervened in any gross way with our mother’s story. Sometimes, we had made some small adjustments (if there ever was a real Father Caetano, it is vanishingly improbable that he would have had such a convenient interest in astronomy), but otherwise the story of her life had been as close as we could make it to the story of her original. But now we changed it. Nudged it towards a predestined point. For although the Child’s mother did marry the supervisor of a sugar-cane plantation, it was not until after the Child had left home. And the Child did not leave home because she was sent to a parochial school in a provincial capital. No, she left at age fourteen because she had won a posting in an obscure agricultural facility owned by the Peixoto family: her way out, the beginning of her brilliant career.

  Athough we were trying to prepare our mother for a life of study and quiet contemplation, to prepare her for long years in which she would hide from the intruders in what was rightfully her domain, and slowly grow in strength and power, it was in the end still her choice to make, of her own free will. We could not make that choice for her, and neither could we force her to make the right choice. We could only urge her towards it, gently, and with all of our love. But we did not have as much time as we would have liked. And besides, her story, and ours, had already been changed in ways beyond our control or comprehension.

  And then it changed again.

  8

  The Horse and I met my contact in a teahouse at the western end of Glitter Gulch. It was a dark little bubble, the teahouse, kitted out in a style p
opular during the first flush of our conquest of the Fomalhaut system. Couches and giant cushions slowly rotated through stands of luminous flowers. At the hub, an orchestra thing played a tinkling serial music. The ceiling was a simulation of T’s black sky.

  Sprawled on a low couch, picking at a bowl of jellied cubes of red tea, I could see the running lights of ships in parking orbits, and the sharp bright stars of several worldlets against the faint, frosty arch of the Belt. It looked so beautifully peaceful, out there. The mine fields, drones, watch stations and hedgehog emplacements that defended T and the rest of the Archipelago were, like the battles and smaller actions as the enemy advanced on several fronts through the Belt, rendered invisible and irrelevant by sheer distance.

  The person I had summoned was late, and I was anxious and sweating inside the casing of my stolen clothes. I was costumed as a myrmidon; when he’d borrowed the flitter, the Horse had also appropriated several uniforms, and this one fit better than the others. The Horse, sitting at my feet, was dressed in the neat grey coveralls and peaked cap of a military bodyservant.

  Only stubborn pride stopped me from leaving; I had nowhere else to go except to return to the tender mercy of the marshal. I ordered another bowl of tea from one of the servitors, and resurveyed for the sixth or seventh time my neighbours as the platforms slowly waltzed around each other. Wondering if any were spies or plants. There weren’t many customers, which was why, no doubt, my contact had chosen this place as a rendezvous. An ill-matched couple, a man about my age and a much older woman, lay on facing couches, talking in low and confidential tones. A ship’s captain in navy silver sucked on the mouthpiece of a waterpipe as she stared up at the virtual rendering of the sky, as if surveying the barbican of an enemy. Two old women were playing some kind of board game, considering each move as if the fate of the universe hinged on them.

  At last, a large gold-skinned woman dressed all in red appeared in the entrance beyond the orchestra thing. Tisin Nemo, queen of T’s data miners. She’d made a fortune after discovering a lode of exotic physics in the Library, had squandered all of it, and then had built up another fortune dealing in black-market information and scraps of enemy gear brought back by front-line officers. I’d worked with her soon after my disgrace, when I’d been brought in to decontaminate a handgun looted from an abandoned Ghost forward position. My clan had an informal arrangement with her. We certified that the gear she dealt in was safe, and made safe any that wasn’t; she kept us informed about hells and other fragments of the original Library discovered by other data miners.

  Our securities met and duelled as she threaded her way through the slow orbits of the platforms towards us. Authentication protocols were exchanged like hostages; attempts to probe deeper on either side were repelled.

  ‘I’m intrigued by your costume,’ she said as she settled, majestically and carefully as a caravel docking, on the end of my couch. ‘Have you finally taken the Redactor Miriam’s advice?’

  I ignored her feint, knowing that she wanted me to ask how she knew about the Library’s internal business, and said, ‘This is a trivial matter, but you are obliged to settle it in full, and to my satisfaction.’

  ‘There’s no need to remind me of my obligations, Isak. I was working for your clan while you were still uncombined codes in the gene bank. Is this “trivial matter” the Library’s business, or something personal?’

  ‘An investigator in the Office of Public Safety, Yakob Singleton, found a hell here. He employed a data miner to get inside it. Afterwards, Singleton disappeared, and the data miner killed herself. I want to know everything about her. How she died. Whether she talked to anyone about her work for Singleton before she died. The names of her friends, and of her enemies. The names of everyone she owed money to, and of everyone who owed money to her.’

  Tisin Nemo picked a cube from my bowl and popped it between her blue-black lips. ‘I heard that you were allowed to inspect the hell.’

  ‘It had been collapsed to a minimum-energy level. There was nothing of use left. If there had been, I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I also heard that it contained a back door to the Library.’

  ‘So the data miner did talk.’

  Tisin Nemo popped another cube into her mouth. ‘This red tea is rather more-ish, isn’t it?’

  Her playful evasiveness was trying my temper. ‘I have nothing to give you. Either you’ll abide by the agreement or you won’t.’

  For a moment Tisin Nemo vanished behind the barrier of her security: a wall of burning obsidian topped with a prickling barricade of offensive protocols. Then the wall dissolved and she laughed. ‘I didn’t come here to fight you, Isak. I came to help you. Let me do it in my own way.’

  ‘How did you know about the back door?’

  ‘It’s common knowledge. You aren’t the only person who wants to know what Yakob Singleton found, and where he went to afterwards. The Office of Public Safety has been asking around, in their clumsy fashion.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Who says they talked to me?’

  ‘Like me, they would have come to you first.’

  She ignored the attempted compliment. ‘Did you really find nothing at all in that hell?’

  ‘I found a trace that suggested it had once contained a link. But I could not reconstruct it.’

  ‘Whoever collapsed it knew what they were doing, then. Obviously it wasn’t the data miner hired by Yakob Singleton. She lacked both the skill and the gear. I did hear a rumour that someone from the Library had harrowed the hell, but I discounted it. After all, Bree Sixsmith is dead. Or am I mistaken?’

  ‘It is possible that the person who harrowed the hell is an imposter.’

  ‘It is also possible that Bree Sixsmith is a traitor who faked her own death.’

  ‘You have no reason to call her a traitor!’

  On the platform moving past ours, the captain broke off her reverie and stared straight at me.

  Tisin Nemo said, ‘Are you angry because of the slur on your cousin’s name, or is it the thought that she might have faked her death and betrayed you that really hurts?’

  ‘Someone like you has no right to accuse someone like her.’

  Tisin Nemo calmly took another cube of red tea. ‘You want me to help you. But if I am to be of any use, I need to know everything you know.’

  ‘I know that Bree Sixsmith is dead. She was contaminated by a demon and walked out of an airlock. My clan received her body, and it was incinerated and the ashes were moulded into a lifemask, and placed in our hall of honour.’

  ‘Someone certainly died,’ Tisin Nemo said. ‘You received a body disfigured by exposure to vacuum and low temperatures. I doubt that anyone troubled to verify that it was Bree Sixsmith’s body because no one expected it to be anything other than hers.’

  ‘I would have to check,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother, because I know I am right. When did this all happen, by the way?’

  ‘Some forty megaseconds ago.’

  ‘About a year,’ Tisin Nemo said. ‘If Bree Sixsmith faked her death and defected a year ago, this trivial little matter of yours goes deeper than Yakob Singleton’s discovery and disappearance, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If you know anything about it, you should tell me. The Library will reward you for any useful information.’

  ‘I’ll give you my best guess, for free. Yakob Singleton found something. His discovery was a threat to someone else. So much so that they had to take a big risk, and moved in and shut it down. You found a back door. Do you have any idea as to where it might lead?’

  ‘It was only a trace. I couldn’t reactivate it. And now that I’ve told you all I know, tell me about the data miner. Tell me what you didn’t tell the Office of Public Safety.’

  ‘She had a bad gambling habit. She was in debt. It’s possible that Yakob Singleton had her silenced, but from what I can tell it isn’t his style. But it’s also possible that she sold information about the
hell to her creditors, and they silenced her so that she could not tell anyone else. If you want to know more, you’ll need to pay a visit to the Billion Blossoms.’ Tisin Nemo flashed a little package of information to me. ‘They’ll want something in return, of course. I suggest you clone and coarsen the amusing little protocol that induces blindsight in surveillance systems.’

  I told her that I would give her advice some thought.

  ‘How is Svern these days?’

  ‘Much the same.’

  ‘That’s one of the problems with being permanently translated,’ Tisin Nemo said, rising in a rustle of scarlet fabric. ‘You don’t ever change. Good luck, Isak. I hope we meet again in happier circumstances.’

  ‘We could be walking into a trap,’ the Horse said. ‘If the Billion Blossoms killed the data miner, they could as easily kill us. And for the same reason. To keep the secret of that hell safe.’

  ‘Tisin Nemo is not exactly a friend of the clan,’ I told him, ‘but she has no good reason to betray us and send us to our deaths. To begin with, it would be bad for business.’

  ‘Your cousin must have believed she had a good reason to betray the Library,’ the Horse said.

  I stopped and turned on him and said, ‘You will not speak of the dead like that.’

  The Horse looked up at me, his eyes blinking independently, and said, with the fake humility he employed when he was upset, ‘This one might have been mistaken about sharing his thoughts on the subject.’

  ‘If you have something worth sharing, share it. But remember that we have no evidence that Bree faked her death. Most likely, someone impersonated her. And if Tisin Nemo is right, the Billion Blossoms know what she found in that hell. They know where the back door leads. And when we go there, we’ll be one step closer to finding out what happened to Yakob Singleton.’