In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Swear you will release me,’ it said.

  Prem Singleton pressed her right hand against the tank’s glass and said, ‘I swear I’ll do my duty by you if you give me what I want.’

  ‘Your friend is from the Library of the Homesun.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell him I will let him in.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Prem Singleton said, and looked over her shoulder at me and told me to do my worst.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Where are the data miner’s records?’

  Prem Singleton tapped her fingernails on the tank. They were black, and shaped to sharp points. ‘In his head,’ she said.

  Breaking into the mind of the leader of the Billion Blossoms turned out to be no harder than harrowing a minor hell. A neural net had taken over most of his brain’s functions, as a vine in a jungle worldlet will take over the form and function of the dying tree it enfolds. He might not have been alive at all, in the strict sense: the agents of his personality and consciousness appeared to have migrated or to have been copied into the net. He was a simulacrum. A ghost inhabiting the ruined mansion of its own brain.

  Access was straightforward, then, but the experience was far stranger than any exorcism. It was as if the Horse and I had been plunged into a cloud of ghosts. They pressed in all around us, needy unravelling constructs of cobwebs and fog hung in an empty null space. Everything flat and insipid and so desperately sad. A few briefly parasitised my sensorium and triggered emotions and memories that were not my own; although I managed to dismiss them, the encounters struck at the very core of my sense of self.

  It got to the Horse, too. When we disengaged, after mirroring and studying the package of information that our algorithms had assembled from tagged fragments scattered throughout the ghostly cloud, he looked even paler than before. Saying with affected carelessness, ‘I always wondered what went on inside those unreconstructed brains of yours. Now I know, and I wish I didn’t.’

  ‘He really does want to die,’ I told Prem Singleton. ‘He’s been like that for a very long time. The old woman and the old man weren’t his daughter and son. They were his great-great-grandchildren. He founded the Billion Blossoms and his family would not let him die.’

  ‘You have what we came for.’

  ‘Oh yes. He kept to his side of the bargain.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it’s worse than I thought. A major breach in the Library’s integrity.’

  ‘Show me.’

  I showed her. It was a map of the hell that Yakob Singleton had discovered, before it had been collapsed: a low-resolution copy of a part of the Library known as the Brutal Quarter. I was discomfited that I’d failed to recognise it, but told myself that the resolution was extremely degraded, and I had not been expecting to find anything resembling any part of the Library because no part of the Library had ever been mirrored in any hell that my clan had ever explored and exorcised. Yet there it was: a citadel of towers clad in mirror-glass that reflected a blue sky in which argosies of fluffy white clouds endlessly sailed from nowhere to nowhere. The towers soared above plazas with formal beds of withered shrubs, dry fountains, and sculptures like metal sails or gigantic replicas of internal organs. Everything on an inhuman scale. No sign of life apart from a solitary bird-thing that endlessly circled the top of the tallest tower.

  Viewed from that height, the inhabitants of the original of the Brutal Quarter must have seemed like ants as they had scurried about their business. And like ants they had once been part of a super-organism, an ancient corporation knitted from interlinked machines and people that had survived for some fifty gigaseconds on Earth, growing and changing and adapting. In the end, the only true business of the corporation had been its own survival, and at last it had grown so cumbersome that various parts of it had gone to war against each other, and it had fragmented and fallen apart. Yet part of it survived in the Library: exabytes of ancient records of transactions and commercial skirmishes, accountancy systems and contracts, all of little historical interest and no extrinsic worth, and a simulacrum of its ancient, primal core.

  I took Prem Singleton to the location of the gateway whose trace I’d discovered in the collapsed hell, showed her that it led to the original of the Brutal Quarter in the Library, told her that Yakob had gone through alone, and had not told the data miner what he had found there.

  Prem said, ‘Can we go through?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. This is only a copy,’ I said, and displaced our avatars to the edge of the flat roof of the tallest building. There, looking out past the citadel of towers to repetitive grids of information-poor suburbs stretched under a gunmetal sky, I tried to explain the significance of what I’d found. That a back door into the Library of the Homesun was unique in the experience and lore of my clan. And if there was one undiscovered back door, it followed that there must be others hidden in the ruins of Quick machines scattered across the Archipelago. Unregulated and uncontrolled access points through which anything might intrude.

  ‘Your treasury is open to any data miner who happens to stumble across one,’ Prem said, after I had explained this. ‘No wonder you’re upset.’

  ‘Worse than that, they could be used by Ghosts and demons,’ I said.

  I was thinking of the demon I had encountered, of course. The demon that had destroyed Arden and Van. The demon that had been the direct cause of my disgrace and downfall.

  Prem said, ‘If Yakob found one back door, he would have gone on to look for others. Perhaps he found something on the other side of the gateway that pointed towards them.’

  ‘I don’t know what he found, but I do know that he left a message,’ I said, and pointed to the bird-thing that all this while had been circling high above us.

  ‘It’s written on the bird?’

  ‘On a minute package of information lodged like a flea in the generic construct of the bird-thing. All it contains is the name of a worldlet. The worldlet, no doubt, where another back door is located.’

  ‘Which one is it? We’ll go there at once.’

  ‘There’s something else. The packet was addressed to you.’

  ‘To me? Really?’

  ‘Were you and Yakob working together?’

  ‘If we were working together, why would I need your help to find him?’

  ‘You needed someone to open this the copy of the hell. And you knew where it was hidden.’

  ‘I knew that because the Billion Blossoms tried to blackmail my clan. I’m Yakob’s cousin, Isak. And his friend. He would have guessed that Lathi would ask me to look for him if something went wrong.’

  It made sense, but it seemed too pat. As if she’d had the explanation prepared long before I’d asked the question.

  She said, ‘Either we share everything, or we can’t be partners.’

  ‘Avalon,’ I said. ‘That’s where your cousin went. It’s a small and insignificant worldlet under military control.’

  ‘Then it shouldn’t be hard to find out what he did there.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said, and shut down the gate.

  As Prem and I stepped from the translation frame, the mummy-thing’s voice creaked in the air around us.

  ‘Kill me now.’

  Prem looked at me, a hard look that meant she had not finished talking about the clue her cousin had left. Then she turned to the tank and told the mummy-thing, ‘I said I’d do my duty by you and I will. Families are important. They’re what stop us descending into anarchy. I am here to help someone in my family; someone you tried to blackmail. And now I’ve had my satisfaction, I can’t allow you to renege on your responsibilities. I will let you live, and take charge of what’s left of your family.’

  The voice screamed, a thin harrowing sound on one note, growing steadily in volume. I clapped my hands over my ears; Prem Singleton studied the front of the tank and waved her hand in front of one of the lights at its base and the scream cut out.

  I said, ‘He didn’t try to blackmail
your family. His great-grandchildren did. He was their prisoner.’

  ‘Are you always this sentimental, Isak, or do you sympathise with that thing’s plight because you went inside his head? I’m not punishing him; I’m punishing his family. I’m sure that he contains all kinds of information that his family want kept secret, and soon he’ll be in the hands of the Office of Public Safety. Talking of which, they’re beginning to notice the edges of our little action. We have to go.’

  She stepped forwards and kissed me, then pushed me away and darted out of the chamber. I chased after her. I believed then that I had no other choice. I also believed that by withholding the exact location of the second back door, which had been lodged in that little packet addressed to Prem, I had a small but crucial advantage. I was wrong, of course.

  12

  The shifts of the Quick drone jockeys didn’t match Cthuga’s swift diurnal cycle. Sometimes Ori flew over the white plain of the cloud deck, beneath the cold bright spark of the sun and the vast and narrow shadow arch of the rings, which at this equatorial latitude cut the sky more or less in half. And sometimes she flew at night, the cloud deck faintly luminous under a black star-strewn sky.

  Best of all were the dawn flights. As the bright point of the sun levered itself above the distant horizon, every insubstantial tower and ridge in the cloudscape threw immense shadows westward, rainbows conjured from feathery spindrifts of ammonium-ice crystals suddenly bridged neighbouring towers, and everything seemed to gain solidity in the hard pinkish light, until the sun rose further and the shadows shrank and the clouds became clouds again.

  Ori and the others in her crew flew their drones a long way out from the pelagic station: a thousand kilometres wasn’t out of the ordinary. They flew a lot of practice runs, and did a lot of work in simulations, too. Their combat drones were much faster and less forgiving than the drones of the observation station, and the flying was trickier than in the searing black calm of the depths. Everything was travelling east in a river of frigid poisonous air at about three hundred kilometres per hour, but there were subtly clashing currents and vortices that dragged and plucked at Ori’s drone, sometimes flinging it hundreds of metres above its course, sometimes carving out pockets of lower pressure that dropped the drone a kilometre or more, into the streaming vapours of the cloud deck.

  Predators flew even further. They were an ancient design, fast and quick, flying right on the edge of stability. If it wasn’t for the AIs that constantly trimmed and adjusted the angle of attack along the edges of their wings and micromanaged the profile properties of their skins, controlling the laminar flow over their entire surface, they would fall out of the sky at cruising speed even in clear air. They only came into their own in combat mode, during the brief powerful surges when they flew at multiples of the speed of sound.

  So far, there’d been no contact with the enemy. Ori knew about combat only from simulations. The enemy dropped probes at random intervals in random places; no patterns had been deduced from the plethora of contacts. Their ships approached Cthuga at high relative velocities to minimise contact with the defensive pickets scattered ahead of and behind the gas giant as well as in orbit around it, and performed braking manoeuvres that cut through the outer edge of the atmosphere several times before they had shed enough delta vee to enter safely without burning up. Orbital drones attempted to intercept enemy ships as they skipped in and out of Cthuga’s atmosphere, the security net predicted likely entry points, and the closest of the pelagic stations dispatched their predators in hot pursuit while their drones simulated the electronic and radar signals of large structures to tempt enemy probes into traps.

  Some of the enemy probes dropped straight down, deploying chutes to control their fall: these were the hardest to take out because the window for interception was usually less than an hour between the time the probe entered the atmosphere and the time it fell beyond the reach of the predators and their missiles and drones. Others flew extended missions, shedding secondary probes or attacking picket ships or aerostat stations. A few, not many, made sorties against the Whale, which had its own defences. Everyone knew that the enemy didn’t want to destroy the Whale because they wanted to use it. If the enemy ever overwhelmed the defensive network, the Whale would be destroyed in place, to deny the enemy its prize. And if that happened, Commander Tenkiller told her crew, everyone on every pelagic station would be stained indelibly with shame, and even dying in battle would be no redemption.

  One day, The Eye of the Righteous began to alter its configuration. Its lower half flattened and spread out, turning the station from a fat, inverted teardrop to a stout and somewhat ungainly triangular wedge, and the four clusters of thrusters at its waist migrated towards the stern. Inside, clusters of hot-hydrogen ballonets and pods and hangars disconnected from each other and swung through ninety degrees and reeled inward, moving out of the way as structural spars lengthened or contracted like muscles. The blisters of the lifesystem migrated to the midsection of the dorsal side, which was now a blunt prow, and the drone and predator hangars shifted forward, coming to rest at either side of the central spine. By now, the station had lost headway and was drifting with the wind. It was beginning to rise, too. And it was no longer a station. It was a ship.

  Inside the lifesystem, the alarming thumps, gratings, pops and twangs of the reconstruction ceased. The abrupt bouts of tilting and sliding stopped too; there was only a slow and steady rocking as the ship ascended. Ori and the other drone jockeys had been busy for most of the day, packing away everything loose in the living quarters and mopping up spills. Now the transformation was complete, they were able to take in the view.

  The Eye of the Righteous was rising high above the cloud deck. The sky was darkening to a hard indigo; the great ring-arch that divided it in two glistened like grapheme. The sharp white stars of two orbital forts were rising in the east, one above the other, and the southern border of the equatorial band, a stormy ribbon of vortices and fretted curves generated by friction with the neighbouring band, which rotated around the gas giant in the opposite direction, was coming into view dead ahead, a range of low dark plateaus and mesas floating out at the edge of the world.

  Presently, the main engines ignited. The ship had reached cruising altitude and was beginning to move south.

  Every crew member, True and Quick, was animated and electrified. The transformation could mean only one thing: action was coming. After evening prayers, Commander Tenkiller explained that a pod of enemy ships had been detected three hundred thousand kilometres out from the planet. They would arrive in ninety-eight hours and their most probable point of entry was somewhere in the boundary layers of the south equatorial band. This was a recent tactic, Commander Tenkiller said. Although most of the enemy probes were lost when they hit the permanent storms and vortices of the boundary layers between two counter-rotating bands, predators and drones couldn’t chase down the survivors until they reached calmer regions, and by that time they would be scattered all around the planet.

  ‘The enemy don’t care about their losses,’ she said. ‘They only care about ours. Remember that always.’

  The Eye of the Righteous reached a way point shortly after midnight. Ori woke to an alarming absence, realised that the motors had cut off and the ship was rocking, gently rocking. Drifting on the great current of air again. She couldn’t get back to sleep, and at last levered herself out of her niche and rode the elevator down and clambered along the companionway to the drone hangar, now more than twice as long as it had been before the ship had reconfigured itself.

  She was checking her drone’s motor when one of the old hands, Lato, found her.

  ‘Fighting fever, we call it,’ Lato said. ‘People can’t sleep, thinking about what lies ahead. And because they haven’t slept, they can’t fight properly when the time comes to fight.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Ori said.

  ‘And you want to do right, because you’ve the taint of being different.’
<
br />   Lato was slightly built for a Quick, which meant that she was a little taller than she was broad. Her shaven scalp was covered in glistening tattoos, interlocking patterns of geometric figures. She rarely smiled, but she did now.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come down here to spy on you or accuse you. I’m not worried about what people think. I only worry about how they do, and you do all right. No, I want to share something, and as you’re the only one in our shift awake . . .’

  She threw a packet at Ori, and they were no longer in the hangar but hung somewhere above the ship. Looking up at a black sky full of stars, with the shadow of the ring-arch slung from east to west.

  Ori was by now used to these abrupt transitions from reality to a battle scenario or, as here, a view patched from the ship’s external eyes. She lowered herself carefully to the hard rubber floor of the catwalk and asked what she should be looking for.

  ‘Follow the ring-arch up from the western horizon,’ Lato said. Her voice seemed to come out of nowhere, close to Ori’s left ear. ‘There’s a bright star about three-quarters of the way up. Sirius. See it?’

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘Do you see a faint line crossing the sky just below it, like a shadow or reflection of the ring-arch?’

  ‘Like a thin haze of cloud?’

  ‘That’s the belt. All the dust and other junk that orbits further out than Cthuga. Now, think about this: Cthuga and the belt both orbit the sun, and the rings orbit Cthuga’s equator, but why are the ring-arch and the belt in different places in the sky?’

  ‘It’s summer, in this hemisphere. So the axis of Cthuga is tipped at an angle to the sun.’

  ‘That’s part of it. What else?’

  Ori tried to think of an answer, said at last that she didn’t know.

  ‘Most don’t. We aren’t told about it, and we aren’t curious, most of us. We aren’t bred to be. But this is important – maybe you can work out why when I tell you the answer,’ Lato said. ‘What it is, the belt and everything else apart from Cthuga orbits the sun in the same plane. But Cthuga’s orbit is tilted with respect to that plane. You follow?’