In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I didn’t fall,’ she said. ‘I flew.’

  The True supervisor who had shut off Ori’s link with her bot stomped into the quarters of crew #87 and found Ori and knocked her down and told her that if she ever did something as dumb as that again she’d be for the long drop. After the True had gone, after Ori had answered her crewmates’ questions as best she could, after the communal supper, Ori and Inas retreated to their bunk and Inas told her that she’d talked with the other senior members of the crew and they’d come to a decision. ‘You have to make a report. You have to tell the bosses everything.’

  ‘They already know about it. I mean, they took control—’ Ori shut up because Inas had leaned forward and touched a finger to her lips.

  They were sitting facing each other in the little niche, cross-legged, knees touching knees. Both of them dressed in halters and shorts, tools hung on loops or stuffed in pouches fastened to their intricately engraved belts, both dark-skinned, hairless, and short and squat: tailored for the gas giant’s strong gravity. But they had surprisingly delicate faces, with large round eyes and snub noses and small mouths, and their hands were slender, with long, tapered fingers, as if their creators had run out of material after sculpting their muscular bodies and had used leftover scraps for their features and extremities.

  Inas said, ‘Doing what you did, you made yourself visible to the bosses. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen any more than you can undo it. You have to explain what you did, and why.’

  ‘I took control,’ Ori said. ‘I flew that probe away from the cable. I’m not pretending I didn’t do it, and I’m glad I did. Because it was the right thing to do.’

  But her euphoric bravado was dwindling. She was unsettled by her bunky’s serious gaze; was beginning to realise that her little adventure had consequences outside the cosy little nest of the commons of jockey crew #87. And she still had the feeling that the sprite had followed her when the connection with her bot had been cut. Several times during the companionable clatter and hum of supper she’d looked around, half-expecting to see its blue flame standing behind her. Realising at last that it wasn’t looking over her shoulder but that it was inside her head, looking out through her eyes. When she’d tried to explain it to Inas, her bunky had been sympathetic but hadn’t really understood what she meant, saying that she was bound to feel weird after what she’d put herself through.

  Saying now, ‘I think what you did was crazy and brave. All of us do. And maybe the bosses will think that too. I hope they do. And I hope they’ll think you did it for all the right reasons. Because if they don’t . . .’

  Ori said, ‘I already took a beating.’

  ‘The supervisor didn’t hit you to punish you. He hit you because he’s frightened of what you did. Of the consequences. He’ll have made a report, and sooner or later someone higher up will notice it.’

  ‘Come on, Inas. Nobody upstairs will be interested in my stupid little adventure.’

  ‘Yes, they will. Because you weren’t supposed to do what you did. And because it involved a sprite. Especially because it involved a sprite. That’s why you have to volunteer your story before they come looking for you. You have to explain what you did, and why. Because if you don’t, it will look as if you have something to hide.’

  Inas’ flat, serious tone chilled Ori’s blood. All around their niche was the usual hustle and bustle of the commons. People sitting alone or in pairs in other niches, people mending clothes and gear, a small group working on puppets made from scrap and spare parts, getting them ready for the big competition between the bot crews. Down at the far end of the main drag, Hahana was crouched on all fours, doing a bot-dance, raising up and scuttling sideways on fingers and toes, stopping, flattening, lifting one hand and rotating it to and fro. They could all do the dance, imitating the way their bots moved, but Hahana was uncannily good, raising her head and scuttling backwards now, while crewmates laughed and whistled. Everything was familiar, everything was normal, but it seemed to Ori that everything had changed. As if she was looking at it from the outside, somehow. As if everything was distorted by the opaque, alien presence in her head.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell my so-called story. As long as you help me.’

  Inas opened a window, told Ori to look straight at it while she made her report. ‘Start from the beginning, when the quake hit. And try not to leave anything out.’

  Ori did as she was told, getting caught up in the story all over again. ‘I was barely hanging on,’ she said, at the end. ‘Falling at twenty metres per second squared, wind battering me, the air getting thicker and hotter, and the sprite just stood there. And I swear this on my life, it was looking straight at me. Not at the bot. At me. As if it could follow the connection all the way back to my chair. As if it knew where I was really at, what I really was. As if it was watching what went on inside my head.’

  Inas touched the window and said, ‘I don’t think you need to tell them about that.’

  ‘It was real,’ Ori said. ‘As real as you and me talking here and now.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that it felt real—’

  ‘I know what I know,’ Ori said. ‘Maybe it will fade. Maybe it’s just my imagination. But right now I still feel it. It’s still here. Like it left a little part of itself with me. You wanted me to tell them everything. That’s part of it, too.’

  ‘All right,’ Inas said, and touched the window again.

  Ori described how the sprite had seemed to look straight at her, how the feeling of being watched by it had persisted after the connection to her bot had been cut, how it persisted still. A presence at the back of her head. When she was finished, Inas asked her if she wanted to review her report or change anything.

  ‘It is what it is.’

  Inas touched the window. It blinked twice, then shrank to a dot. The dot vanished.

  ‘What now?’ Ori said.

  ‘Probably nothing.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll promote me, when they realise what I did. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘We were made to serve the Trues, and that’s what we do,’ Inas said. ‘And we do it gladly. And because the Trues made us, Ori, they don’t think of us as people. We are their tools, with no more rights to independence than any of their machines. They can send any one of us on the crew anywhere, without explanation or warning. And we obey them because that’s what we must do. Not because the only alternative is the long drop, but because it is our duty, and nothing else matters. Nothing. Only our duty and our work matters. Everything else, the puppets we make, our dances and our theatre, the murals we paint, the way we decorate our belts and customise our tools and our clothes, your crazy adventure, what we have, you and me, Inas and Ori, in the end, none of that means anything to them.’

  ‘It means something to me,’ Ori said.

  ‘And to me. And that’s why I’m so scared of losing it,’ Inas said, and her expression changed as something inside her let go, and she and Ori fell into each others’ arms.

  Later, the night watch begun and the commons mostly dark and quiet, Ori lay awake in the familiar comfortable niche, her bunky asleep beside her, and wondered why she felt that she was still falling: why she felt that she had a long way yet to fall.

  4

  In the second summer of the long drought, the Child liked to keep caterpillars in jars. She fed them with leaves of the plants on which she’d found them, watched them spin cocoons, marked the hours and days until a butterfly or moth emerged. She dug grubs out of rotten tree trunks and watched them turn into pupae, watched the shapes of adult beetles appear inside the varnished casings. But mostly she studied fruit flies, which were common, could be easily trapped in bottles baited with morsels of banana, and developed from egg to maggot to pupa to adult in a handful of days.

  Her friend Roberto, the son of the hospital director, was disgusted and amused by her new obsession. As far as he was concerned, biology was barely one step up from woo-woo mysticism.
Sure, the principles of Darwinian evolution had an elegant and powerful simplicity, but the patchwork compromises generated by the blind reproductive imperative of genes were ugly, needlessly complex, and, worst of all, indeterminate. When the Child showed him sequences from one of her AI teacher’s files, demonstrating how the body of a fruit-fly maggot liquefied inside the pupal case as all but a few pockets of cells died in a genetically determined sequence of aptosis, how suites of genes were switched on one after the other, controlling growth and development of the body of the adult, Roberto reacted as if it was the most shameful kind of pornography. Saying that it was a slipshod solution to a problem – how to exchange one suit of armour for another – that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

  The Child told him that understanding the ways in which organisms overcame problems of development and survival was the point of biology. It provided a powerful toolkit that gene wizards used to build new kinds of organisms.

  Roberto said, ‘Is that what you want to be? A gene wizard?’

  ‘Or a green saint,’ the Child said, with the unsinkable confidence that only the young and the crazy possess.

  Maria Hong-Owen, pleased by her daughter’s precocious interest in biology, allowed her to use a corner of the hospital’s pathology lab in exchange for help in maintenance of cell cultures. Vidal Francisca, an increasingly unwelcome presence, gave her a microscope for her birthday. The Child was suspicious of the man’s motives, but she loved his gift. It could swing in and out and around every detail of the articulated legs and feathery antennae of insects, the flanges and ridges of their armoured bodies, the hooks and saws of their mouthparts. It could make movies of the swarming animalcules in a drop of pond water, track individual rotifers, paramecia and amoebae. It could zoom into the cytoplasm of living cells and show proteins churning and sliding past each other, reveal the herky-jerky motor at the base of a flagellum, the coiling and uncoiling of DNA in replicating chromosomes.

  Increasingly, the Child worked alone and unsupervised. Her mother was, as usual, preoccupied by her own work; Roberto was amused by her passion but thought it a waste of time; Ama Paulinho couldn’t begin to answer her questions. Only Vidal Francisca pretended to take an interest, but he’d long ago forgotten most of his botanical training, and he was distracted besides by the problems that the drought was causing in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and the surrounding area.

  The river was at its lowest level for a century. Summer thunderstorms brought a little relief, but most of the rain ran off the sun-hardened ground, causing flash-floods that quickly evaporated in the pitiless heat. The work of weather wranglers paid by the town’s council came to nothing, too. They’d arrived in a massive cargo blimp which they tethered in a sorghum field, and every night they rolled through the town, crowding into bars and lanchonetes, causing all kinds of minor mayhem. Maria Hong-Owen was called out in the middle of the night to attend to one of the weather wranglers’ pilots, who’d been stabbed in a brawl with a gang of workers from the tree plantation, and the next evening their captain called at the bungalow with a gift – a bottle of hundred-proof white rum. Dressed in black spidersilk blouson and trousers, a cap with a badge of a fist clutching two lightning bolts and a shiny black bill that shaded her eyes, she looked impossibly romantic to the Child, an avatar that had stepped from one of Ama Paulinho’s sagas. Maria did not invite her in, so she stood on the doorstep and in fractured Portuguese thanked the doctor for saving her comrade’s life, handed over the bottle of rum, winked at the Child, and marched off, slim, straightbacked, imperiously tall.

  Maria warned her daughter to stay away from the wranglers. ‘You saw the badge she wore? Those lightning bolts have nothing to do with weather. It’s an old fascist symbol. The wranglers are freelance now, but once they were part of the militia that overthrew the democratically elected government of our country. The fight last night started when a group of the captain’s “comrades” began to sing one of their battle hymns. They are proud of their past, and the townspeople remember some of it too. Weather was used as a weapon, during the wars after the Overturn. Much of the damage to the forest was caused by natural climate change. But not all of it.’

  ‘But if they use the technology for good—’

  ‘They were bad people then, and they’re haven’t changed,’ Maria said. She was emptying the bottle of rum into the hopper of the kitchen recycler. Her hair was scraped back from her face and there were dark scoops under her eyes. ‘They didn’t come here to save us. They came here to earn credit. Any good they do is secondary to their main purpose. Can you guess what that is? Think of them as an organism.’

  ‘They want to survive and reproduce.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But to what purpose? To keep the past alive? There doesn’t seem much point in that.’

  ‘They think they will be needed again one day,’ Maria said. A light in the recycler’s panel turned from red to green; she dropped the empty bottle into the hopper.

  Every day for a week, a flock of small, arrowhead-shaped airships crossed the sky from west to east, circling the distant peaks of the Serra da Bela Adormecida mountains and returning westward high above the river. Meshes of green laser light flickered between them as they sailed back and forth, faint in the hot sunlight; thin fingers of cloud spread in their wake. The townspeople gathered each night on the beach at the edge of the river and banged drums and pots and pans, rang bells and set off fireworks, but little rain fell, and the clouds always evaporated before dawn. At last the weather wranglers’ blimp lumbered into the air and passed low above the town and dwindled into the hot sky, and the sun shone in solitary triumph day after day after day after day.

  The R&R Corps and the plantations laid off many workers. Small independent farms failed. The town’s population was swollen by people from outlying villages and settlements; food was rationed; there were outbreaks of malaria and typhus; the army imposed martial law because of increased wildsider activity. Someone tried to shoot down an army plane with a smart missile. The town suffered shortages of food and other supplies because of attacks on road and river traffic, and after several bombs exploded in the solar farm and halved its capacity there were irregular blackouts during the day and no electricity at all between six in the evening and eight in the morning.

  We were preparing the Child for the war that lay ahead of her. The Fomalhaut system, which by precedence and natural justice should have been her dominion, had been settled by no less than three upstart clades whose ships had overtaken our slow and badly damaged vessel, and now all three were involved in a war in and around Fomalhaut’s solitary gas giant, and in the big circumstellar dust ring beyond it. We still had much to learn about the cause of the war and the nature of the clades embroiled in it, but we were certain about one thing: it would be a fatal mistake to become involved.

  The Child quickly became used to the hardships and restrictions caused by drought and the conflict with the wildsiders. Because the wildsiders had declared that hospital workers and their families were, like schoolteachers, plantation supervisors, workers in the R&R Corps, and anyone else associated with the government, legitimate targets in the struggle for liberation, she could no longer go to the market with Ama Paulinho, she was forbidden to go on collecting expeditions along the river’s edge and into the nearby forest, and her visits to Ama Paulinho’s family were curtailed. But she did not much mind. She had her work in the hospital, and she also had her own work: the life of her own mind, growing in strange directions.

  After the boy had drowned in plain sight of almost the entire town, she had realised that death could happen to anyone at any time. Even to her. It was not like the change between maggot and fly. It was not really a change at all, but a loss. The body failed and that failure freed the soul – but what was the soul, and where did it go? Ama Paulinho told her that it flew up to Heaven, where it would live for ever in the grace and glory of God. Her mother told her that the soul was immaterial, made not o
f matter but of spirit, which could not be measured by any scientific instrument, but this was no help because it simply moved the question behind a veil of mystery.

  The Child began to wonder if all this talk about the soul leaving the body like a lifeboat leaving a sinking ship was meant to dodge or obscure the stark fact that death was the end. And she began to understand that the stories her ama told her, of spirits that animated the forest and made the trees grow in their appointed places and maintained the intricate balances of every kind of life, were no more than stories. It was not so very different from the sermons of the priests, who also invoked spirits to explain the mysteries of the world. There was God the saviour, who was everywhere in the world, as invisible and impalpable as the sleet of neutrinos shed by the sun. There was his son Jesus Christ, who had died to redeem the sins of every human being, and would one day return to finish his work. There was the Holy Spirit, who gave access to the salvation that was manifest in Jesus. And there was the handmaiden to the Trinity, Gaia, a version or aspect of the Virgin Mary who contained the entirety of the world’s intricate cycles and epicycles of climate and ecology. According to the Church, it was the holy duty of the human race to help Gaia heal the scars of the Overturn, but the Child thought she knew better. She knew about ecological niches and ecotypes, non-equilibrium dynamics and resilience, the relationship between diversity and energy flows. She knew about survival of the fittest and the lesson of the intricate diversity of Darwin’s tangled hedgerow. She knew about the hard work needed to bring the forest back to life – the plastic tunnels where cloned seedlings were nurtured, the reactors that brewed living soil to replace the alkaline hardpan in dead zones, and so on. The miracle was not that it was a miracle, but that it could be done by ordinary men and women.

  There were no miracles, no absolute mysteries, only problems which had not yet been solved. The blooming burgeoning complexity of the world proceeded not from a Word but from the interaction of simple chemicals that in the right conditions could create increasingly complex domains of self-regulating order. Drowned women did not turn into islands; husbands did not run away and become jaguars. There was no bridge between the world of things and the world of spirit because there was only one world. The world in which she lived. The everyday world where death hung like a little dark cloud in a corner of the blue and blameless sky. The trick was not to survive it, but to avoid it.