In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘They killed the Trues and saved the Whale,’ Inas said. ‘Not because they were in league with the Ghosts, but because they wanted to save their sisters. They wanted to save us. And they did. Most died fighting the Trues. The rest died fighting the Ghosts. Some say that they’re heroes. I’m not so sure.’

  Inas had changed. She’d been spiky, confident, outgoing, and now she was troubled and vague and confused. As if she was ashamed that she had survived. She told Ori about the flocks of tiny enemy machines that had settled in huge patches that had disintegrated into black nanostuff that spread and transformed the Whale’s skin. They’d been ordered to contain the infection, Inas said, and although it had been like trying to bail out a reservoir with a cup, they’d kept at it until their connections had been cut and they’d found themselves back in their immersion chairs with the enemy crowding around, helping them up, telling them that it was all right, it was all over. Some of the crew had refused to cooperate and they’d been taken away. Everyone else had been converted.

  ‘Most of the Trues were dead by then,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know what to do, so we did as we were told.’

  ‘Did they make you take a new name?’ Ori said.

  Inas nodded. ‘One of their saints. Janejean.’

  ‘I chose that name too!’

  Inas’ smile was weak, there and gone. ‘Don’t think it means anything. There weren’t that many to choose from. Apart from the thing with the names, they’ve mostly left us alone. We still work out on the skin, although we aren’t dispatching probes any more. Mostly, we help to load hoppers, help keep the cable growing. Can’t let that stop. Nothing’s really changed. Except, of course, we’re free now. According to the Ghosts, anyway.’

  ‘Do they watch you?’

  Inas took Ori’s hands in her own. ‘You mean, are we being watched now? No. That’s not how it is.’

  But Inas’ fingers were moving on Ori’s palms, shaping the signs they used to pass on gossip and jokes about Trues while riding bots out on the skin of the Whale.

  They say they don’t watch us, but we can’t be sure.

  ‘We have our work,’ she said. ‘Only now we are responsible for it. We organise ourselves, do what we think we’re supposed to do. It’s challenging.’

  And on Ori’s palms, she tapped out: Some fought back. They all died. A few went crazy, started killing the nearest of the enemy. They died. None of them had a plan. We do.

  ‘I guess I should join you,’ Ori said.

  ‘Word is, you’re marked for something higher.’

  It could be useful to us.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Anyone can know anything. I suppose that’s a difference. The Ghosts, they talk to each other all the time. They’re all linked in this big network. Sharing everything,’ Inas said, tapping the side of her head.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I suppose we’ll be linked in too, eventually. Meanwhile, we can use windows, look at everything and anything. And we have to, to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. No one tells us. We’re free to choose. But if you don’t make the right choice, you get the long drop.’

  ‘Some things haven’t changed, then,’ Ori said.

  The small joke died in the air.

  ‘What has changed, the Ghosts don’t tell you what you should do,’ Inas said. ‘You have to work it out for yourself. And if you don’t, if you make the wrong choices all the time, you’re gone. They don’t want to do it. They just don’t have any way of dealing with people who don’t or won’t do what’s best for everyone else. They expect us to be like them, but they don’t tell us how. It doesn’t occur to them to explain anything. They’ve been united in a single cause for so long that it doesn’t occur to them that other people might not understand what they are doing. As far as they’re concerned, either you’re part of the programme, or you’re a problem.’

  Ori learned that the enemy had no leaders, and none were needed because they were united in a common purpose, and had been for over fifteen hundred years. Tasks weren’t assigned to individuals; individuals volunteered to help according to ability and proximity to the work at hand. And when the work was completed, the group dissolved, so that someone could be directing a fleet of attack ships one day and loading shit into a recycler the next. But while their self-organising society resembled that of one of the anthills of Earth, the enemy were not mindless drones. Each was an individual, with their own talents and weaknesses, desires and dislikes. The only thing they lacked was any trace of sexual desire. They were children, male and female, and because their life span was short, like Quicks, they did not live long enough to become sexually mature, and they lacked all curiosity about it. Their love was universal and unconditional, but it was platonic.

  ‘That’s the worst thing,’ Inas told Ori. ‘Their love. They love us because we joined them. They love those who fail to make the right choices, too. They love everyone. They even love the Trues. They call them their cousins in combat. They say that struggling against the Trues helps them to define themselves. They love to talk about the fight for the Whale, and all the glorious deaths. They say the Trues who died are heroes because they fought for what they believed in. The Trues were wrong, the Ghosts say, but they were sincere. That’s what counts, for them. Sincerity. Truth.’

  ‘I’m beginning to understand what they want from me,’ Ori said.

  And tapped out on Inas’ palm: I think that they think I can help them contact the Mind. Because of what happened, back in the quake.

  ‘They bring all the Quicks they’ve captured here,’ Inas said. ‘They turn them loose, and if they don’t get with the programme . . .’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘We survived because we can ride bots,’ Inas said. ‘That gives us a purpose. It makes us useful. We try to keep out of their way. We stay down here. We work at what we’ve always worked at. Not the probes now. They have no use for the probes. We found that out the hard way . . . But they need the cable, and so the cable must be fed. And that’s what we do. Even so, if you stray outside the commons you can get caught up in some tide or other, and if you don’t know what it’s for, that’s it for you. It happened to Hahana. She was caught up in one of those tides, she tried to resist, and they . . .’

  Inas looked away for a moment, above the heads of the Ghosts and Quicks at the other tables. When she looked back, tears stood in her eyes.

  ‘They’re so sorry, so sad, when they have to do someone that way. Because the person has failed, and so has become an unperson. They mourn that, even as they kill you. They don’t kill you because they hate you. They kill you because they love you.’

  ‘One of them told me to come here,’ Ori said. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time because I didn’t understand what they’re like. But I see now that it was a kindness. An extraordinary kindness. They wanted me to know as quickly as possibly how to survive here.’

  Inas said, ‘If they need you so badly they should have told you everything themselves.’

  I’d like to know everything, she tapped. It could be useful.

  I’ll come back and tell you, Ori tapped back. And said, ‘I’ve changed, Inas. I’ve been changed. They know that. They told me.’

  ‘I kept a watch for your name,’ Inas said. ‘I shouldn’t have, but I did.’

  She looked away again. Ori took her hands in hers.

  Inas said at last, ‘I knew you were almost certainly dead, but I hadn’t given up hope. So I asked one of the AIs in their system to keep watch for you, and it pinged me when you were taken. And it gave me the names of others interested in you, and the tags associated with you, too. They definitely want you for special work. Most people don’t have anything associated with them. If they did, we’d know what we were supposed to be doing by looking up our own names. But most of us, and most of them, we’re like general-purpose labourers. Doing whatever’s needed wherever it’s needed whenever it’s needed.’

  �
��Who is interested in me?’

  ‘Some of the Ghosts. And someone you know. Commissar Doctor Wilm Pentangel.’

  Ori felt a chill. ‘I thought all the Trues had been killed.’

  ‘Not him,’ Inas said. ‘He crossed over. He became one with the enemy.’

  Inas helped Ori use the enemy’s data-base to find out where the commissar was working – a workshop down at the base of the Whale, beneath the repurposed hangar where Ori and all the other Quick touched by sprites had trained. It wasn’t too far from the commons, but it took Ori a long time to reach it because she knew now what she hadn’t known when she’d recklessly ridden the elevators, knew that she’d been lucky not to be caught up in one of the groups that wedged their way through the crowds, or suddenly appeared in the middle of them, forming around a notion or a need as a raindrop forms around a speck of dust, gaining mass and direction and sweeping up everyone in its path. And because she didn’t know and had no intention of finding out if the special interest the enemy had in her would protect her from being caught up, she kept to the minor companionways as much as possible, avoiding the main arteries and the serviceways where the enemy scampered along in their customised pressure-suits, laughing and singing. A press of exultant faces like the flowers in Commissar Doctor Pentangel’s garden.

  The worst thing wasn’t the hike down more than a dozen levels. It was the anticipation of seeing the commissar again. Of becoming a possession again, after her brief spell of freedom. Of remembering every detail of what he’d done to her.

  The workshop, where damaged hoppers and freight cars had been repaired and new ones manufactured, along with the rails and switches and track-control gear and all the other stuff associated with the transport of raw materials down the length of the cable, was a tall, annular space set around the upper part of the cable’s collar, with two sets of rail tracks circling it and big airlocks that led to flying buttresses that swooped down to the tracks that ran the length of the cable. There were open spaces where large makers, spinners, tanks, and other machinery associated with fabrication stood. Heavy lifting gear hung overhead, and smaller workspaces clung to the circular cliff of the interior wall in rows and tiers, where finer work was carried out.

  It was in one of these that Ori found Commissar Doctor Pentangel. The long dim room had worktables down one side and several windows hung in the air at the far end; the commissar stood behind the largest, studying diagrams of what looked like energy flows. The shock of seeing him was worse than she thought it would be, and she had to brace herself, had to repress an urge to run, strong as nausea, as he walked, tick-tock, tick-tock, towards her.

  He knelt stiffly in front of her, his exoskeleton’s motors whirring; his face twisted in what seemed to be genuine anguish when she stepped back.

  ‘I used you, cruelly,’ he said. ‘I attempted to dominate you because you possessed something I could never have. It was wrong. It was a crime. I ask forgiveness so that we can put it in the past and move forward together on this great and glorious project.’

  Ori, surprised and frightened and confused, fell back on formal speech. ‘This one regrets that she does not have the power to forgive you.’

  ‘Oh but you do, you do!’

  The commissar shuffled forward on his knees, grabbing at Ori’s hands, his gaze imploring, wretched. She backed away, but he kept coming, until at last her spine was pressed against a wall and she had nowhere to go. He took her hands in his, his grip hot and clammy, and said again that she must forgive him.

  What she wanted to do was hit him, or laugh, or scream. Do something to shock him. Show him that he wasn’t in charge any more. Because that was what this was all about. He was still asserting his authority. Ordering her to forgive him for crimes he no doubt had been forced to confess, so that he could dismiss them. Well, she wouldn’t let him. And she wouldn’t run, either. She was going to see this through, even though she did not yet have any idea what she was going to do.

  Ori took a breath, took another. Managed to meet his gaze, and the madness behind it. Said, ‘This one will try her best to do what is required of her. But she fears it will not be good enough.’

  ‘You don’t need slave speech. Not with me, or anyone else,’ Commissar Doctor Pentangel said, and let go of her hands and ponderously got to his feet. ‘You are free, and you have been recruited into a great work of science. Because of what happened to you, during my experiments, you are an essential part of it. You and others like you, you have the templates in your heads.’

  ‘This one . . .’

  ‘You don’t understand. Of course you don’t,’ the commissar said. ‘They never explain. They expect you to know everything. It’s very challenging. One must adapt to new ways of thinking, and it’s no small thing. I’m one of the few who could do it. As soon as I was captured, I began to study my captors. I realised how they thought, and how their behaviour is organised. I tried to tell the others that we weren’t prisoners. That we were free to choose. They didn’t understand. And so they refused the freedom they’d been given, and their refusal condemned them, until at last only I was left alive. And once again I am working on what I’ve always been working on. It was taken away from me by short-sighted fools who didn’t understand its significance. You were taken away from me, and all the others like you. But you’re back now. And I am here to work with you.’

  There was something manic in the commissar’s gaze, a sly brightness that Ori hadn’t seen before and didn’t like or trust.

  ‘They are trying to contact the Mind,’ she said. ‘I think they want me to help.’

  ‘They need me, and I need them. And we need you, yes. You and others like you. But this isn’t about contacting the Mind, not exactly. No no no. This,’ the commissar said, with a flourish that reminded Ori of his old ways, ‘is about making the Mind.’

  4

  And so the Child came back to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, standing between the captain and the chief pilot in the little transparent bubble of the bridge of the weather wranglers’ cargo blimp. The green sea of the renewed forest flowing below, and then the sinuous dark channel of the river and the famous profile of the Serra da Bela Adormecida mountains rising against the shimmering blue sky, and the grid of the little town on its promontory coming into view.

  The blimp slowed, came to a halt above the futbol field. People crowded the touchlines. The whole town was there, applauding as dozens of wranglers slid down dangling lines and pegged them to the hard clay with simultaneous blurts of power jacks. The blimp wound itself towards the ground like an ungainly cloud and a long ramp unfolded from a square hatch in the centre of the gondola’s underside and the Child followed the captain of the wranglers down it. There was another wave of applause and cheers; the town’s little band struck up the national anthem as it accompanied the small delegation, led by Maria Hong-Owen, that came out to meet the Child. Ama Paulinho was there, pushing her father in a wheelchair, and Vidal-Francisca, Father Caetano, the head of the hospital, the chief of police, and the colonel who commanded the army base.

  We were there, too. Posing as children, for children were running around everywhere, unnoticed by adults. We were so very glad to see the Child again, and foolishly believed that we had regained control of her story, that the entity that the Child called Jaguar Boy was our only enemy, and that all would be well now that he had been deleted.

  But there were other watchers in the crowd, cool intelligences who were manipulating and guiding us, who were about to make themselves known.

  A few of us followed the small welcoming committee out on to the field, watching as Maria hugged her daughter, lifted her up, whirled her around. Then the Child was set on to a chair and the chair was raised by four soldiers who each held a leg, and she was paraded around the edge of the futbol field in the midst of wild music, cheers and applause, and the crackle of fireworks exploding in the bright sky beyond the looming bulk of the blimp.

  The Child looked all around, dazed and confused.
She was searching for Jaguar Boy, expecting him to step from the people pressing all around, feeling a profound disappointment when he did not. Feeling as if she was the only real person in a great crowd of ghosts.

  She was driven to the hospital in an army jeep and given a brisk medical examination by her mother, ending with a scan of her brain activity that her mother and several of the other doctors studied with grave intensity.

  At last, the Child and Maria were alone. Maria gave her clean clothes, underwear and a white dress with a flounced skirt that dropped to her ankles. Red slippers. Telling her that they had much to talk about, and much to do.

  They were shy and awkward with each other. The Child wanted to tell her mother about her adventures, but the great flood of words was dammed by a prickling caution. Everything was familiar, and everything seemed unreal.

  Her mother said that she understood. ‘You think that your captor was your friend. You don’t want to betray him. That will change. Tomorrow we’ll explain everything. It will all become clear to you. And then you’ll know the true nature and intentions of your so-called friend, and the true nature of those who truly care for you. But first you need to sleep. You need to remember who you really are.’

  ‘He said that, too.’

  ‘Jaguar Boy. Don’t look so surprised. We know his name, and we know how he lied to you and how he wanted to use you, and a lot more besides.’

  ‘Everyone says they know what I want and what I should do. But they don’t.’