In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  She wasn’t quite ready to run the package, not while the Ghosts were watching her so closely. She was pretty sure that she knew what it would do, and she didn’t want to give them a chance to block it.

  She said, ‘Don’t worry. Even if I had control of my ship, I couldn’t outrun any of yours. And besides, where would I go?’

  ‘That’s true,’ Vidal Francisca said.

  ‘We brought you here to do the right thing,’ her mother said. ‘That’s what’s important.’

  ‘Help me understand something,’ Sri said. ‘You believe that you are doing what is right, but you felt that you had to lie to my children.’

  ‘It was necessary,’ Sada said. ‘It was easy to take physical control of your ship, but it took some time to take control of the viron.’

  ‘You let them believe that they were still in charge. Still falling towards Fomalhaut. Still guiding me. You let them do your work for you.’

  ‘And it has worked out very well,’ Sada said. ‘Here you are. Here I am. Together, we will go forward—’

  ‘You have no power over me,’ Sri said. She spoke quietly, staring straight at Sada. ‘This is my house. I may have been asleep, enchanted by my children, who themselves were enchanted, or suffering from an unfortunate delusion. But I’m awake now. Beware.’

  She had just enough control of the ship – the equivalent of being able to wriggle her big toe – to see beyond the walls of the compound. To see what was happening in the viron, and beyond. And she also had enough control for a simple trick. The hot tropical sky and sun vanished. It was night, and a giant planet dominated the sky, dimly banded in yellows and whites, circled by a ring system wider than Saturn’s rings. They were tilted about ten degrees at the edge of the rings, and across the ring plane was a scattering of minuscule flashes, and the quick bright flares of fusion and antimatter explosions.

  ‘Cthuga,’ Sri told her children. ‘We’re not falling towards Fomalhaut, and the braking manouevre. We’re already in orbit around Cthuga. And I believe that there’s some kind of battle going on. Can it be about me, I wonder?’

  Sada Selene would not back down. She was crazy, but she did not lack courage. She said, ‘You are awake because I woke you. You are awake because your role in our great task is at hand. And this is no longer your house. I have the keys.’

  ‘You do not have full control of my ship, and you do not have full control of Cthuga, either. If only you had told me the truth, Sada, things might have gone differently. I am always amenable to rational argument. To logic. It is how I have lived my life. To always do the right thing, the logical thing. No matter how difficult. No matter how much it might cost me. And it has cost me almost everything. My sons. The green saint who first saw my talent. You might even say it has cost me my humanity.’

  ‘Yet you have not lost your delusions of grandeur,’ Sada said.

  Sri turned to the avatars of her children, costumed as children from her own childhood, and to the others. Ghosts of ghosts, inflated from shreds of memory. They’d meant so much to the child she’d been, and so little to her now. Still, she felt a pang of pity for them. For her dead. The long-lost.

  ‘I am old,’ she said. ‘I am displaced in time. Yet you brought me here because you need me. And you lied to my children and you lied to me. So don’t pretend you are my friend, or that you have my best interests in mind. I know you don’t. If I do this thing, I will do it my way.’

  Sada laughed. ‘Show us what the intruder gave you. See if it will help you.’

  ‘No. But I will show you something else.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  Sri smiled. Living in the moment. Watching dismay rise inside the avatar of the self-styled hero-saint and the avatars of the other Ghosts. All of them turning to watch as Sri walked towards the little gate in the wall of the compound.

  ‘There are visitors you should meet,’ she said, and grasped the iron lock of the gate as if grasping a gun, thumb on the latch, and swung the gate open.

  Two people stood beyond it. One was a funny kind of monk with a look of quizzical alarm on his face. The other wore the shape of her friend, Jaguar Boy.

  Sada screamed, and changed, and ran at them.

  11

  As Bree Sixsmith burst out of the gate, I felt everything around us change. Like all Librarians, I indulged in no narcotic stronger than white tea, but once, when I was very young and running some errand in the Permanent Floating Market, I had been slipped a dose of a psychotropic by one of the jaded young scions who found amusement in the discomfort of others. I’d spent several hours feeling that my body was randomly increasing and decreasing in size, clumsily crashing into stalls I thought I could step over when at my largest, marvelling at the intricacy of the weave of a piece of cloth or the interlocking fibres of a nut hull or empires in the dusty ground when at my smallest. When I had at last recovered enough sense to remember who I was, I returned to the Library and was soundly whipped by the Redactor Miriam. Not for forgetting my errand, but for having disgraced the Library by becoming the victim of a crude practical joke.

  I felt something like the effects of that psychotropic now, as the demon clad in the form of Bree Sixsmith halted her headlong charge directly in front of us. She wore an odd uniform blotched with random shapes of various hues of brown and green, and she rested one hand on an ancient pistol holstered at her hip as she stared at us, as if trying to scry the marrows of our bones and the shapes of our thoughts. All around, there was an alteration in the quality of the ghost light of the vast planet that dominated the night sky, a shift in perception of scale, a heightening of resolution. And as every element of the viron gained in quiddity, I seemed to lose substance, to become as unconstrained, unbounded, and insubstantial as smoke.

  Prem felt the change, too. She had raised her rifle and was looking from side to side over its sight. That was when I realised that she could not see the demon.

  ‘It’s directly in front of us,’ I said.

  Prem aimed her rifle past my shoulder. Its muzzle made little circles in the air. ‘There?’ she said. ‘There?’

  ‘Do nothing for the moment. It’s mine.’

  ‘I have a magic bullet.’

  ‘So do I.’

  The demon’s avatar took a step towards us. And another. And another. It was human in size and shape, enveloped in a chilly computational cocoon. I felt a shiver of premonition. The demon that the Horse and I had destroyed in the Brutal Quarter had been powerful but stupid. This one was powerful and crammed with intelligence. When I told it to stand still it laughed, and it was a human laugh.

  ‘Poor little Librarian,’ it said. ‘You don’t even know who I am.’

  I drew a perimeter around Prem and myself. It crackled with the thorns and snares of futile-cycle algorithms, each tipped with viruses and prions eager to replicate in the demon’s information space. At once, the sense of zooming and rebounding perspective vanished. I was centred again. The tools of my trade hung at my fingertips.

  ‘I know I’ve already dealt with one like you,’ I told it. ‘I can do it again.’

  ‘I’m like nothing you’ve ever seen before!’

  The demon was at the perimeter now. In one beat of the viron’s clock, an ornate architecture of briars and thorns reached out and wrapped around it, forming a tightly woven woman-shaped cage.

  ‘I see it,’ Prem said in my ear.

  The cage held for several beats of the clock, its interior a fury of computation that leeched power from the viron around us. Everything lost sharpness and focus; it was as if we were standing in a badly pixilated image composed of just eight shades of grey. And then colour and form began to return and the briars began to shrivel. Loosening their hold on each other. Flaking away into dust that lost its shape to an impalpable wind, blowing away, vanishing.

  The demon smiled in my face.

  I displaced us at once into a pocket viron of my own design: a replica of the Permanent Floating Market crowded with copies of
myself and Prem. But before I could ambush it, the demon whirled through the stalls and walkways, trashing subroutines and algorithms, growing into a toppling tower of debris that stooped down to snatch us up with braided filaments. I displaced us again and again, attempting to gain distance through distraction. The pitted surface of a worldlet naked to black vacuum, where the demon was a coalescence of shadows reaching for us. Bright space above the granulated surface of Fomalhaut, where a white-hot prominence arched towards us like an elongated hand. The blank blue sphere of a water-worldlet, where bubbles whirled up towards us. A flatland, where Prem and I were two triangles suddenly sucked towards a gaping pit. The road before the gate again, in a blowing snowstorm of viruses that flashed into sparks of light when they touched the demon.

  ‘Enough,’ the demon said

  The snowstorm blew sideways and vanished. Prem and I were still inside the perimeter I’d drawn. Cthuga loomed in the night sky, its pale light glimmering on the road and the white wall. The air tasted of smoke; gunfire crackled in the distance. The demon stood just outside the perimeter, arms folded, its expression cool and amused.

  I showed it the Klein trap I’d opened while bouncing from pocket viron to pocket viron. Its matrix packed with dizzy perspectives and lush nodes of computational power, opening up like a flower, exploding to dust in my hands.

  ‘Is that the best you can do? How disappointing,’ the demon said.

  I reached up, grasped the barrel of Prem’s rifle, and told her to fire.

  The noise of the discharge deafened me. The barrel kicked out of my grip and a star-shaped hole appeared in the demon’s forehead and wept a single black tear. The demon went cross-eyed, as if trying to look inside its skull, and then an intense look of concentration appeared on its face. It coughed and gargled, opened its mouth, showed me the bright bullet resting on its tongue. And closed its mouth and swallowed the bullet and reached towards me, brushing aside the busy algorithms of the perimeter as if they were cobwebs.

  Its hand plunged into me and its look of triumph changed to one of consternation. It grabbed at me again, with both hands this time. They swept through me and I didn’t even feel them. Prem asked me what was happening; I told her that I didn’t know.

  And now someone else walked out of the gate in the white wall. A girl-child in an antique white dress whose hem brushed her ankles. She walked with a queenly confidence, and I knew that she must be the ship’s passenger. Sri Hong-Owen. She did not pause or waver when the demon in the shape of Bree Sixsmith turned and screamed at her. She walked up and took hold of the demon’s hand and told it to be quiet.

  The demon, amazingly, obeyed. Looking off into the distance with a stupid expression, as if distracted by something it wanted but couldn’t understand.

  Sri Hong-Owen looked at Prem and me. ‘Thank you for the diversion. It allowed me to run the gift of another visitor. I have full control of my ship now.’

  ‘Your ship is still owned by the Ghosts,’ Prem said. ‘Surrounded by their ships, the target of heavy weaponry that will blow it apart if it tries to get away. But we can help you escape.’

  ‘I left home once before, in another life,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘I wanted to find the secret of eternal life, but things didn’t quite work out as I hoped. Change is life, and I have changed a great deal since then. This time around, I think I’ll stay.’

  ‘Show her,’ Prem said, and I threw up a window that displayed aspects of the Library.

  ‘There’s plenty of room in it,’ I said. ‘For you and your ship, and your crew.’

  Sri Hong-Owen studied the window for a moment, head cocked, eyes shining with secret amusement. ‘It is very large. And there are some interesting things in it. But it’s also very old, and it needs a lot of work. And, forgive me for saying so, but it’s seriously lacking in possibility. In the capacity for change.’

  ‘Perhaps you could help us,’ I said.

  ‘All you have to do is walk across the bridge with us,’ Prem said.

  ‘You’ll find it’s badly damaged,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘Your friends fought well, but some of the Ghost avatars almost broke through.’

  I called up an image of the bridge, and felt a cold dismay. I was only a copy of a copy, had known from the start that there was little chance of surviving my mission, but now that I was confronted with the hard truth of my imminent death I wanted so very much to live.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Prem said. ‘If we go right now there’s a good chance that we can get you across.’

  ‘Even if the bridge was whole, I couldn’t cross it in my present form. I’m too vast. I’m part of everything now.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Prem said, and raised her rifle. ‘Let’s put that to the test.’

  ‘Are you trying to threaten me? In my viron? In my ship?’ For a moment, Sri Hong-Owen towered above us, a dark storm cloud that eclipsed Cthuga’s swollen globe. And then she stood before us again, a young girl in a white dress. Saying, ‘If you’re worried that I will form an alliance with the Ghosts, I promise to be no kind of friend to them. And as you can see, they’ve lost whatever power they had over me. I’m free. Free at last.’

  ‘You are still their prisoner.’

  ‘They can destroy me, but they can’t control me. And they won’t destroy me as long as I control the avatar of their champion, because she’ll tell anyone who asks that she’s in control. I’m taking my ship out of orbit right now. Stay or try to leave, it’s your choice.’

  Prem looked as if she wanted to argue the point. I took her hand and said, ‘We must try to go back. Our people need to know what we learned.’

  Sri Hong-Owen said to Prem, ‘If you ever meet an old friend of mine – the one whose form you’ve borrowed? Tell him that I’m grateful for the time I spent with him. Tell him that I hope to repay him and his people one day.’

  She turned in a neat quick pirouette that made her white skirt flare out, and walked back towards the gate in the wall. The avatar of the demon followed her like a house pet. Prem and I looked at each other, and then we ran.

  The little town was crumbling all around us. Burning buildings fell to ashes and less than ashes. Roofs and walls shivered into billions of discrete bits that sketched ghostly outlines for a moment before evaporating, as the information that had given them order turned into random noise. Prem and I ran full tilt down a narrowing road through this great vanishing, hand in hand, breathless. We passed through a stretch of forest that fell away to blank barrens on either side, and there was the bridge, arched across the river, and the lights of the Library heaped on the far side.

  The island and its cathedral and crowded ranks of houses were crumbling and a long section of the bridge had fallen away at the point where it met the island’s prow. Prem and I walked to the edge of the broken roadway, looking out across the churning flow of the river’s repetitive cycles, saw two figures run out along the other side of the broken bridge, shouting and waving to us across the gap.

  ‘This is a very bad metaphor,’ Prem said.

  ‘It’s too late to construct another,’ I said, and threw a packet of information to my twin. It turned into a bird and flew across the river as swift as thought and my twin caught it deftly in one hand and held up the other, palm out, in salute and benediction.

  The remnants of the island subsided in a dust storm of shattered information that rolled out across the river. And now the bridge on which Prem and I stood began to dissolve.

  ‘I think—’ Prem said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  We clasped each other in each other’s arms. A moment later, everything fell away.

  12

  When Ori walked her bot out of its garage, she discovered that the sky all around the Whale was threaded with hectic motion. Sleek raptors – so fine to see! – stooped down from zenith, twisting and turning as they chased Ghost craft that jittered in erratic orbits near and far. Drones flared from the raptors’ truncated wings, spiralling away towards their
targets. Beam and particle weapons burned sooty threads through the methane-rich air. The percussive flares of explosions, bright blinks vanishing inside black clouds of vapour that were ripped to shreds by wind shear.

  Ori’s passenger moved out of the darkness at the back of her skull. You watch this, she told it, and wondered if it could feel the exhilaration and hope that surged through her and lifted her heart. Watch and learn.

  Other raptors shot past the tangled contrails and explosions of the dogfights, aiming their weapons at the cable that hung from the Whale. A boxy Ghost machine jerked across the path of one of them and they met and vanished in a shatter of tumbling fragments. Then the wave of raptors had passed, and the survivors were pulling out in hard turns far below, specks fleeing out across the dirty white cloud deck.

  Ori watched them go. So few of them left, and flocks of Ghost craft still circled in every quarter of the sky. But now a second wave of raptors drove down amongst a flicker of hard white stars and raking fans of black threads as Ghosts fired off countermeasures. Many of the raptors were destroyed before they reached the Whale; most of the rest were destroyed in brief fierce dogfights; the few survivors chased away after the survivors of the first wave. Behind them, clouds of tiny drones spread out, some shooting towards Ghost craft, the rest falling in long arcs towards the cable, flaring in chains of tiny explosions along its length.

  High above, a bright star was descending.

  Ori watched as it went past, about twenty kilometres out. A teardrop of dark, raddled water ice riding a tongue of fusion flame. The old, old starship. Ghost craft of every shape and size made way for it, and far below a carnival of tiny lights rose up to meet it. Sprites. A host of sprites dancing around it, enveloping it, following it as it fell.

  The Ghosts’ prize had come to Cthuga.

  Ori turned her bot to look straight down the length of the Whale as the starship dwindled away, falling parallel with the cable, vanishing into the cloud deck. Her passenger watched too, pressing against the back of her eyeballs. You should go with the ship, Ori told it. Fly away. Fly away. Get ready for the big moment when everything changes.