In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  We entered a wide plaza, that stretched away, punctuated only by a gigantic fretted globe balanced on a plinth, towards a tower with narrow windows set in a honeycomb of white concrete. I told the Horse that it wasn’t far to the gate now; a few moments later, he held up a hand and looked all around, turning in a complete circle.

  I felt it too, a granulation in the fabric of reality, and unzipped my kit a picosecond before a hundred little mouths opened in the air around us and disgorged a hundred flapping things that flew at us in stuttering stop-start trajectories like trash blown on errant winds. The nearest recoiled from the perimeter of our securities and we loosed algorithms that chased them down and devoured them on the spot, dissipating their little loads of computational energy in bright fizzes of random calculations.

  ‘That was easy,’ the Horse said.

  He was still turning in slow clockwise circles. I turned widdershins, and on my second revolution spotted and zeroed in on motion at the far end of the plaza, low down inside the tall building. It had a double-height lobby, empty but for a pair of tall stairways hooked at either end like integral signs. Their stepped treads were rising and falling past each other, and someone rode the descending staircase. It was Prem, walking across the lobby, through glass doors that slid apart in front of her.

  ‘It isn’t really her,’ the Horse said.

  ‘I know.’

  But it looked so very much like her. She walked out across the plaza, slender and strong, her dark eyes steady and serious under the straight-cut fringe of her helmet of black hair. Part of me wanted to run towards her, but the impulse was overshadowed by my fear. As she skirted the plinth of the big, fretted globe, she began to grow and lose definition, fading into shadow that grew darker as she expanded. Already taller than the globe, growing taller still with every step, her footfalls thundering across the plaza and echoing from the tall buildings on every side, slabs of stone cracking under her weight and turning black as if charred as she sucked energy from them, their husks splintering away into little whirlwinds of ash.

  The demon was ten storeys high, twenty. Sucking all light from the plaza, stooping over us, reaching out towards our perimeter. Energy moves from a hotter to a cooler place, yet the demon was so cold that it seemed to radiate a chthonic chill as if its absolutely black shape was a gateway on to some place colder than absolute zero: a region of negative energy where atoms had not merely stopped moving, but had lost all integrity and shrivelled into the strings that composed their basic particles, and the strings themselves had frozen and ceased singing.

  The volunteers at the perimeter of the Brutal Quarter were asking what they should do. I told them to hold their positions. The demon towered above, filling the plaza with its darkness. It was huge, and it was stupid. It reached towards the Horse and me, and we threw algorithms that meshed in mid-air and grew a net fashioned from Riemann geometry that snapped shut around the demon’s hand and raced up its arm in an exotic frothing lace that fixed parts of it inside deeply folded dimensions. Its other hand reached up to its shoulder and broke off the infected arm and with a tremendous wrenching motion tossed it backwards. It spun out propeller-wise, shedding fragments of its fabric, and smashed into the tower at the end of the plaza and evaporated. The shock exploded a thousand panes of glass from their concrete sockets and glass and concrete rained down and fell apart into ash and less than ash before hitting the ground.

  One-armed but still growing, the cold black giant reared back and lifted a gigantic foot. It loomed above our feeble protective perimeter like an enemy battleship. And then algorithms spun out of the air all around it, a tangle of thorns and briars that sank into the giant’s flesh. It staggered backward and roared and threshed, but the briars were strong and doubled and redoubled with each blink of the Library’s checksum clock. They bound the giant on the spot in a thorny casing that began to shrink inwards, narrowing to a cable that hung in the air above the shattered plaza and shrank again, at right angles to reality, and vanished.

  The eight journeymen and women hung above us on their skycycles, their kholops clinging behind. One dipped lower. It was Li, the partner of Arden. She had gone in, after the demon had killed him, at the head of the crew that had destroyed it. She stood in the saddle of her skycycle, looking down at the Horse and me with grim amusement, saying, ‘Next time you stand against a demon, bring better mathematics.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘You are carrying them.’

  At the far end of the plaza, there was a tinkling crash as the last of the tall building’s glass fell.

  Li turned to look, looked all around. ‘The demon was guarding the gate. Where is it?’

  It was just two blocks away. I recognised the originals of the buildings in the data miner’s sketchy simulacrum, and in the basement garage of the mirror-clad tower the Horse and I located the collapsed traces of the back door gateway. In the simulacrum it had been no more than a place marker; here, it still retained certain properties that, by use of a simple root kit, could be read and reconstructed from the matrix in which it had been embedded.

  Within minutes, we had the locations of all the back doors in the Library. There were not as many as I had expected, but as Li pointed out, even one back door was one too many. I wasn’t surprised to see that one was located in the undistinguished quarter where the demon had killed Arden and Van and destroyed my reputation; the demon that had ridden the poor data miner at the ruined tower on Avalon had been a low-grade copy of that same demon.

  It would have taken several gigaseconds to explore and make safe all of them, and track down the information which those who had used the back doors had been sampling and copying. I chose instead to go to the one that had been used most recently.

  It was in the Grey Havens. A quarter of docks and shipyards that stretched either side of a reach of water where waves patched from a simple equation rolled endlessly past every kind of ship at anchor. There was a demon here, too. It came roaring out of a warehouse like a comet set on fire and the Horse and I took it down together, binding its raging decoherence into a cube of pure iron scarcely larger than a crystal of salt.

  I had been expecting it, or something like it. If we could track all the back doors using a root kit, so could Bree – or the thing that rode her – and it was inevitable that she would have set guardians at each one. Even so, I was badly shaken.

  ‘Just like any exorcism,’ the Horse said. He was shaken too. And, like me, smudged with carbon soot.

  All around us was a circle of devastation. A wooden trireme on fire from stem to stern on one side; two mangled and half-melted travelling cranes and the smashed ruin of a warehouse on the other. Above us, the riders of the skycycles were scouting the rest of the territory for demon traces, questing in a grid pattern over the roofs of warehouses, amongst the beaks of cranes and the masts and superstructures of ships. Tiny shapes against the vast sunset that bloodied the waves endlessly rolling up the reach of water.

  ‘I think we’re getting better at this,’ I said.

  ‘We’d better be, if it’s going to be like this at every back door,’ the Horse said.

  ‘I think we can find what we want here.’

  ‘They’re probably dead, the people who used it. Either Bree reached them, or they didn’t realise she’d turned their back door into a trap. Anyone who came through would have been possessed, and then the screaming and the stabbing would have started. Just like the cultists Yakob Singleton found, and all the others.’

  ‘That’s why we have to find any survivors as soon as possible.’

  While the volunteers tracked the back door’s connection through the Archipelago’s network, the Horse and I set to work uncovering the footprints and fingerprints of its users. They led us to an antique office in a low building that overlooked the hulk of a half-built ship in dry dock. On a drafting table were diagrams hand-drawn in white ink on blue paper: information about construction of a laser array and its orbital dynamics, and tiny drones that were, ac
cording to Yenna Singleton and the Redactor Svern, when I showed them what we’d discovered, the kind used to scout enemy territory.

  ‘They can withstand tremendous accelerations, so can be fired by railguns for fast fly-bys,’ the Redactor Svern said.

  I said, ‘Could they intercept a ship travelling at high speed?’

  ‘Hit it, you mean? Of course.’

  ‘You’re wondering if the cultists tried to contact the ship,’ Yenna Singleton said.

  ‘He has a point,’ the Redactor Svern said. ‘If the probes can survive the high acceleration caused by a railgun, they could survive high deceleration, too. And deliver some kind of message, or establish a comms node.’

  ‘It’s a trivial question, and one that will be answered soon enough,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘Once we take control of the laser array, we will have control of the ship. We’ll know everything about it then.’

  ‘As for that, I have another task for you, Isak,’ the Redactor Svern said. ‘I want you to join the assault force.’

  ‘For the greater good of the clan, I suppose.’

  ‘For the greater good of everyone,’ Yenna Singleton said.

  3

  The enemy ship punched out of the atmosphere in an arc that took it halfway around the waist of Cthuga before it re-entered, shedding shells of superheated plasma, gliding towards the calm atmospheric layer where the Whale hung. Ori watched all this on one of the windows set before her face. She was wrapped in a cocoon that not only protected her from abrupt changes in gravity but also effectively imprisoned her, but she was allowed access to the vertiginous indices of the ship’s knowledge base and a zoo of blobjects that conveyed the status of various systems by their shapes and changes in colour, pulsations, and the pitch of their simple songs. She could trace links with other ships, too. Ships in orbit and ships trawling and transiting the atmosphere, and stations and rocks spread across the dust belt. So many of them. The enemy seemed to have moved everything they had to Cthuga.

  Her captors were monitoring her all the while. Explaining that everything was open to all, that nothing was hidden. Guiding her to places and things they wanted her to see. Showing off their favourites with the innocent open pride of young children to whom everything is precious because everything is new, and everything is true. Streaming a dizzy kaleidoscope of vids and picts that gave Ori a headache and a kind of oceanic state of fear. Individually, each of the enemy was little more than a child. Collectively, knit by this open-access thing of theirs, united by a common purpose focused on a single goal, they were a Power. Ruthless. Implacable.

  They wanted her to know the truth, they said. They wanted her to understand the true history of the human species. Where it had come from, what it had become, where it had gone wrong and how they were going to fix that. Once she understood all of this, she would know that she had made the right choice.

  As the ship glided in towards the Whale, Ori saw how foolish she’d been, thinking that somehow she could contribute to its defence. For it had been taken and was being transformed. Hung at the centre of a great flock of platforms and towers and other structures floating under clusters of balloons, and swarms of ships and smaller craft that moved between them, it seemed superficially intact, and the cable still hung below it, dwindling away to the cloud deck. Ori could even see a train moving up the cable towards the inverted tree of the marshalling yard, returning for a fresh load of material to feed the never-ending work of construction and repair far below. But as the ship in which she rode skittered towards the upper flank of the Whale, she saw areas where the skin had been peeled back by explosions, and gaping holes burned into it, and black patches and scabs mottling it, growing into each other.

  The ship docked above one such patch. It extended for a kilometre down the skin of the Whale, flat in some places, erupting in clusters of latticework spires in others. Some of the spires were several hundred metres long, and small lightnings stuttered around their tips. Then the window shut and the cocoon around Ori relaxed. She clambered out of its slick embrace. All around her the enemy were twittering and laughing as if at the end of some hugely entertaining joyride. Most ignored her, and for a moment she wondered what she was supposed to do, and was more afraid than ever, as if she was exposed on a high pinnacle, where a single misstep could send her plunging down in a long, long drop.

  Then someone touched her elbow, told her that she shouldn’t be afraid.

  ‘You’re with us now. You’re free.’

  The way they spoke, it was as if they were sight-reading unfamiliar words. Perhaps they were – perhaps some AI function was translating for them, putting up what they needed to say to her.

  She said, ‘What do you want me to do?’

  The enemy studied her. A grave little thing, with olive skin and dark brown eyes and a spray of pigmented spots over its snub nose. Ori realised that she didn’t know if it was male or female or something else. It smiled, and said, ‘Why don’t you find your friends first? They’ll help you understand what you need to do.’

  ‘My friends?’

  ‘In what used to be called the commons of jockey crew #87.’

  It was a strange, heartbreaking homecoming. The interior of the Whale was hardly changed at all, apart from the enemy swarming cheerfully and purposefully down the main companionways. They made a tremendous noise, talking to each other, exchanging greetings, taking up snatches of wordless songs – high weird ululations, chanted streams of nonsense syllables with simple rhyming schemes – and there were so many of them. If the Whale was as crowded everywhere else as here, Ori thought, its captors easily outnumbered the original crew by at least ten to one.

  Ori was taller than any of them and slower than most, and wondered if this was what Trues felt like, in a crowd of Quick. She found her way to one of the elevator shafts and descended past the docking areas and got off and rode another elevator down past the manufactory levels and got off again, and took a third elevator down to the zone of the crew commons. She saw a few Quicks on the way, clumping along amidst the slight figures of the enemy, no Trues. She supposed that all the Trues had died in the fighting, or had committed suicide rather than be captured, or had been given the long drop.

  The crowds thinned out as she made her way through familiar companionways towards the commons, passing murals she remembered being painted, a big mobile sculpture made from old tools strung on wire below an airshaft, turning in the faint breeze of the air conditioning. The commons was empty. Everyone was on shift, she supposed, as the rush of recognition hit her. A blow to the heart. It was as if she had stepped out just a few minutes before. The tubular space lit by the yellowish glow of panels in the low ceiling. The soft, scuffed black floor. Niches in offset rows down either side. Low tables, seatpads, the casual detritus of living.

  Something salty slid down the back of Ori’s throat and she realised that she was crying. She snuffled, wiped tears with the back of her hand. She’d come all the way around the world, had lost good companions, had been captured and told she’d been freed, and now she was back, and she had no idea what to do next.

  Someone was standing behind her and she turned but no one was there. It was the sprite, of course. The passenger in her head. Her silent sharer.

  She climbed into the niche she’d shared with Inas, into the old familiar smell, the double groove in the temperfoam, and although she didn’t think it would be possible, she fell asleep. And when she woke, people were watching her. A small group, standing back as she swung out of the niche. She recognised them all. There were far fewer than there had been, but she was glad to see them, and there was Inas, and they fell into each other’s arms, and Ori started to cry all over again.

  Inas touched the half-healed wound in her cheek; Ori said it was nothing.

  ‘I underestimated the malice of someone who disagreed with me. She’s dead, now. They’re all dead, Inas. Only I survived . . .’

  Emere, the oldest of the crew, said, ‘You can’t stay here. I’m sor
ry, but there it is.’

  ‘They told me to come here,’ Ori said, looking at her across Inas’ shoulder.

  ‘That’s why you can’t stay,’ Emere said. She had a strained expression that was mirrored in the faces of the others. Anxiety. Disapproval.

  ‘I’m not one of them.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says,’ one of the others, Ahe, said.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ Emere said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Where else would she go?’ Inas said. ‘Aren’t we her friends and comrades?’

  ‘Are we?’ Ahe said.

  ‘I’ll go.’ Ori uncoupled from Inas’ embrace. She was upset and angry at this naked rejection, but resigned too. She should have realised how different things were, now. That there was no going home again. She said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise that I was putting you in danger. If I did, I wouldn’t have come here.’

  She hadn’t gone far when she heard someone hurrying after her, heard Inas calling her name. ‘We agreed that you need to know what happened here,’ Inas said. ‘I can tell you that, and I think I can tell you what the Ghosts want from you, too. But don’t ask any questions. Even if I know the answers, I can’t deal with them.’

  ‘I understand. You’re afraid that I’m a spy.’

  ‘We’re all of us afraid all of the time,’ Inas said. ‘You’ll see why, soon enough.’

  They talked in a crowded commons where Quicks and Ghosts ate at long tables, the Ghosts noisy and ebullient, the Quicks hunched and subdued. The food was strange. Smoky or bitter gruels, bowls of tasteless, slippery red ribbons, little nodules that crumbled to a grainy sweetness on the tongue. Ghost food.

  Ori told Inas about her sojourn in the station down below, her transfer to The Eye of the Righteous and the terror of the invasion and the long voyage that had ended at the pelagic station, where she’d been captured and brought here. Inas told her about how she and the other jockeys had been riding their bots out on the skin of the Whale when the enemy had invested it, so they’d had a grandstand view of the battle. The loss of the raptors, enemy ships settling all around the Whale, Trues flying sleds and flitters loaded with explosives at the ships, Trues and the enemy fighting in hand-to-hand combat after the enemy broke into the Whale’s modules and compartments, how a gang of Trues had attempted to blow most of the ballonets and send the Whale plunging down, and how some Quicks had rebelled against them.