In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  And so she was inordinately pleased when Vidal and her mother fell out. It was a crack in the man’s smooth mask; a way to expose his true nature. The next day, she told Ama Paulinho all about the row, and her ama agreed that he had been very foolish.

  ‘Your mother is always slow to forgive. And in matters like this, when her professional honour has been slighted . . . No, she will find it very hard to forgive him, and I do not blame her.’

  Ama Paulinho’s broad smile showed the Child, for a moment, the handsome young woman that she had once been.

  ‘No more Vidal Francisca,’ the Child said, and clapped in delight. ‘He can go to hell.’

  Ama Paulinho chastised her, but it was half-hearted; she had been watching the developing romance with increasing dread, worried that she would lose her job if Maria Hong-Owen married, and she shared the Child’s happiness about this setback. They convinced each other that this was the beginning of the end of Maria’s unfortunate relationship, so the Child was horribly shocked when, a few days later, her mother told her that Vidal would be coming with them on their next trip to Santo João do Rio Negro.

  ‘He will see for himself that it is perfectly safe,’ Maria said. ‘And then he will tell his friends on the hospital board.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’ the Child said. ‘That he wants to help you?’

  ‘I know you don’t like him. But try to imagine that his motives aren’t always bad.’

  But the Child wouldn’t be appeased. ‘It’s another way of trying to take control. You’ll see.’

  8

  Nowhere else in the Archipelago is privilege and status so nakedly displayed as in Thule, the thistledown city, the city of tiers. It was built by swarms of machines long before the first generation of Quicks was created from their seedship’s genetic templates. The machines dropped a superstring of entangled gravitons into the centre of an icy planetesimal to deepen its vestigial gravity (one of the many technologies we have lost or failed to master), blew a roof shell from its surface and spun a forest of fullerene and diamond spines to support it, cooked off an atmosphere and a hydrological cycle, extended platforms from the spines at different levels and landscaped their surfaces. Platforms near the bases of the spines, just above the elaborate interlacing of the buttress roots that clutch the silica rock core, and in the permanent shadow of platforms higher up, support Quick kennels and tank farms, and congeries of machines and makers that recycle waste water and waste material, regulate partial pressure of the various components of the atmosphere and perform other essential maintenance tasks, and spin all kinds of goods, from styluses to skycars. The platform which bears the Permanent Floating Market and the Library of the Homesun is down there too. Above this twilight zone are platforms where free-martin True live and work in dense urban arcologies, and above those are the platforms owned by great clans, where trueborn scions live in sculpted parklands and estates.

  That was where I went to meet Lathi Singleton, travelling alone in a flitter that rose straight up from the park at the tip of the Library’s platform, rising past platform after platform until there was only the roof of the sky above, then angling across empty air towards a parkland platform. I glimpsed a river running through parched grassland and clumps of red rocks, and then the flitter was settling towards a walled courtyard behind a square tower built of black stone and cantilevered out above empty air like the prow of a sea-going ship in one of the primordial sagas.

  I was met by a squad of flunkeys and scanned by a cloud of tiny machines that briefly fluttered around me like so many butterflies before one of the flunkeys stepped forward, dismissed the others, and led me across the courtyard and through an arched gate. I followed her down steps of white stone to a long, broad lawn flanked by black cypress trees and statues of men and women in antique dress. It was a simple, beautiful scene: the lawn a dense uniform green, the cypresses all exactly the same height and trained and clipped into the likeness of twisted flames, the statues carved from clean white stone that seemed to glow with inner light, so skilfully made that it would not have seemed unlikely if they had stepped down from their plinths and taken up their lives.

  The flunkey told me that she had left this part of the platform unchanged, a memorial tribute to her mother and father, and I realised with a shock that my escort was no steward or factor but the woman I had come to meet, Lathi Singleton. She was tall and slender, wore a long green tunic cinched tight at her waist by a broad leather belt, and walked with a long confident stride. I had trouble keeping up with her as she led me towards a fountain set against a backdrop of cypresses at the far end of the lawn.

  ‘My mother loved formal gardens,’ she said. ‘The whole platform was once like this. Staged, manicured . . . We’ll walk a little, while we talk. You’ll see how my tastes differ from hers.’

  Embarrassed by my error, I stammered out some formula about being honoured. I supposed then that she had assumed that I would know who she was, which was why we had not been introduced, but I think now that she wanted to catch me off guard so that she would have the advantage over me, even though her status and privilege gave her all the advantage she would ever need.

  ‘I was told that your library was once a monastery,’ she said. ‘In the decadent era before we arrived, and saved the Quick from themselves.’

  ‘It was empty for many years before my clan found a use for it, Majistra. But before that, it’s true, it was once a refuge for followers of the Two-Fold path.’

  ‘It explains why you look the very picture of a monk. Your shaven head and bare feet. Your plain black clothes. We too often unconsciously ape the memes of the past. Our own past, and the past of the Quick, their so-called Golden Age . . . I suppose you librarians might be especially susceptible, working as you do with their knowledge bases.’

  ‘Some believe so, Majistra. But we are trained to be aware of the hazards of our trade.’

  The Singletons, first amongst the elder clans, were fierce and implacable defenders of the status quo. As far as they were concerned, Quicks deserved slavery because they had turned themselves into subhuman sybarites; slavery was a mercy, in fact, for the only alternative was extinction. That was why I hadn’t brought the Horse with me. Not only would his presence at the meeting have been an insult, implying a status he could never deserve, but Singletons had been known to casually dispatch other people’s servants, attendants and kholops at the slightest provocation. And even on his best behaviour, the Horse was never far from a provocative remark.

  Lathi Singleton studied me. Her dark eyes were narrowly shaped and set close together, like the eyeholes of a duelling mask. Her hair like a silvery helmet. She said, ‘Did you bring the tools of your trade?’

  ‘I carry them with me always, Majistra.’

  ‘They link you to the Library.’

  ‘They contain a copy of a small part of it. A simulation used for training purposes, and to demonstrate our work to clients like you, Majistra. It’s perfectly safe.’

  ‘I understand that the Library itself is not. That even librarians may be harmed, despite their training.’

  It was plainly a reference to my downfall and disgrace. The impulse to ask her what she knew about it suddenly gripped me with a physical force that took me a moment to master.

  I had spent most of the previous evening with Master Navigator Bo, who in his bluff straightforward manner had schooled me in the courtesies and conventions appropriate to someone of Lathi Singleton’s rank. I must never ask her a direct question, he had told me, and I must answer all of her questions as truthfully as possible while imparting the minimum of information. He’d taught me various elliptical formulae and phrases, and tested me until he was satisfied that I’d got them off by heart and knew how to use them.

  ‘Never forget that this is much more than a simple test of your skills,’ he’d said. ‘We must provide whatever help she requires, but she will almost certainly want more than the help we must give her by covenant and custom. She w
ill try to find out our strengths and weaknesses. She will try to enlist your sympathy. She will try to get inside your head. And she will have been given her task because of her talent, not her rank or looks, so do not make the mistake of underestimating her. Remember always that she is far more dangerous than anything you’ll find in the Library.

  ‘So then. Be polite, be deferential, say as little as possible, and apologise for your ignorance if she presses too closely on our secrets. Above all, don’t try and be clever. That’s your main weakness, Isak. You talk too much, and you like to have the last word. But if you let her do most of the talking you’ll be fine. You might even learn something useful. Try to be clever, though, and it’ll be all over for you.’

  Remembering Master Bo’s advice, I answered Lathi Singleton’s gibe with as much humility as I could muster, saying, ‘My clan has worked hard to make the Library safe, but we are few and it is very large, and we still have much to do.’

  We had reached the stone bowl of the fountain. It was considerably larger than the plunge pool in the Library’s communal baths, although much shallower. In its centre, a muscular pulse of water shot high into the air, higher than the tops of the cypresses, splashing into the unquiet pool cupped beneath. The air smelled of iron and electricity. Lathi Singleton dipped a hand in the water lapping at the edge of the bowl and raised it dripping and sipped from her palm. I wondered if I was supposed to do the same, but she was already walking away, and I followed.

  A steady spout of water poured from a notch in the fountain’s bowl, feeding a stream that ran off along a channel cut in the lawn, rippling clear as glass over a bed of white and gold quartz pebbles. We followed it through a rank of cypresses and emerged at the edge of a short steep slope of loose rock and clumps of dry grass. The parkland I had glimpsed from the flitter stretched away beyond, a mosaic of dusty browns and reds enlivened here and there by vivid green stands of trees. The sky had taken on the dusky rose of sunset, and clumps of stones glowed like heated iron in the low and level light. Rounded hills rising on either side hid the margins of the platform: the parkland seemed to stretch away for ever, like the landscapes of sagas set on old Earth.

  Lathi Singleton dismissed my praise of the illusion, saying that it was simple stagecraft. ‘My interest is in the biome itself. The plants and animals, and the patterns and balances they make. This one is modelled on Africa. You have heard of Africa?’

  ‘It’s where we first became what we are, Majistra.’

  ‘I once kept a species of early hominin in this biome. Australopithecus afarensis. The reconstructed genome is contained in the seedship library; it was easy to merge it with Quick templates. And of course we hunted the usual Quick variants as well. But those happy days are long gone,’ Lathi Singleton said, and walked off down the slope, stepping quickly and lightly beside the stream, which dropped down the slope in a ladder of little rills and waterfalls and pools, its course lined with red and black mosses and delicate ferns as perfect as jewels.

  It grew warmer as we descended, and by the time I caught up with Lathi Singleton, at the bottom of the slope, I was out of breath and sweating. The stream emptied into a wide pool of muddy water whose margins had been trampled by many kinds of feet. Scaly logs lay half in and half out of the water on the far side. When one yawned, its mouth two hinged spars longer than a man’s arm and fringed with sharp teeth, I realised that they were a species of animal.

  ‘They won’t hurt you because they can’t see you,’ Lathi Singleton said. It was the first time I had seen her smile. ‘None of the fauna can see or smell anyone unless I want them too. Come along. I’ve arranged a little picnic. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you what I need you to do, and why.’

  We skirted the pool and followed a narrow path through tall dry grass to a pile of red rocks crowned by a slab where cushions had been set around a low table. Beyond a large flat-topped tree, animals a little like the totemic animal of the Horse, striped black and white, grazed on dry grasses. Lathi Singleton told me to sit, and began to unpack plates of sour miso, rice cakes, and dewy slices of fruit from a cooler. ‘You are allowed to eat, I hope.’

  ‘Yes, Majistra.’

  ‘And can you drink? We have beer and wine. Also – this is a favourite of mine – a brandy made from wormwood,’ she said, setting up a small city of bottles in the centre of the table. Her hands were large and square; her fingernails were ragged and crested with red dirt.

  ‘Water would be good, Majistra.’

  ‘Is it part of your discipline, that you can’t drink alcohol?’

  ‘I never acquired the habit.’

  ‘If you want water, you’ll have to trek back to the water hole. Ah, but we have white tea. Will that do?’

  I thanked her and accepted a bowl of jellied cubes, and she settled into a pile of cushions opposite. She said, ‘You harrow hells for a living.’

  ‘It is my duty, Majistra.’

  ‘And you fight demons.’

  ‘When I have to.’

  ‘Tell me about the one that almost killed you, in your Library.’

  I felt a freezing shock.

  Lathi Singleton smiled again. A bright flash, there and gone. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t do some research into the person the Library sent to help me? Did you think I’d just accept you, without finding out all I could? Tell me all about your little accident, or I’ll send you back straight away.’

  I had told the story many times before, of course. To the Redactor Svern. To those senior members of our clan who had judged and sentenced me, and in formal confession to my peers. I had thought about every moment, every detail, over and over; there was not a day since when I had not thought about it. Even so, I did not find it easy to tell it to Lathi Singleton, but I did my best to lay it out as truthfully as I could. I had no other choice.

  It had started out as a routine task in an obscure sector of the Library known as the Forum. My clan has been restoring what is left of the Library for a long time, but large areas are still unexplored. Most contain little of interest and nothing of any especial danger, but some hide voids where information processing halts, or leechpits that steal processing power, and others are infested with demons, haunts, and various other malignancies. All of these are fixed within particular niches and locations: free-roaming demons had been exorcised long ago. At least, that was what we believed. And because the Forum was well inside the boundary between the known and unknown, we had not been expecting to encounter anything dangerous when we set out to investigate unusual activity encountered by a data miner.

  There were six of us, Arden and Van and myself, and our kholops. We were engaged in the basic, repetitive task known as ‘running the runes’: using a set of simple algorithms to peg down any anomalies in the sector. It contained little of interest. Streets of small blockhouses converging on a large drum-shaped building faced with columns and statues standing in niches. Yottabytes of data encoding narrative art forms many gigaseconds old, much corrupted, the rest of no use to anyone now living except for a few specialist historians and memorialists.

  We worked slowly and steadily, defining blockhouse after blockhouse of discrete yet very similar units of data, and at last reached the small square in front of the large building which gave the sector its name. It stood more than twice as high as the slovenly blockhouses crowding around it. It was always sunset, in the Library, the light red and horizontal, the shadows long and deep. The Forum was silhouetted by the sun, which was half-eaten by the horizon. So big that if you looked at one edge you couldn’t see the other, granulated with the black freckles of sun spots, and fringed on its western side by the fiery arch of a prominence.

  Arden was the first to notice the fine detail of the Forum’s statues, columns, pediments, and other decorations: a clear warning that something was wrong, that something operating at a very high processing level had forced this part of the sector to jump to a higher resolution. The Horse flung me an audit and I shouted a warning, and at the same instant
the demon burst out of the Forum’s square entrance.

  When you enter an unoccupied room and the lights come on, you may be momentarily blinded by what seems an intolerable brightness. The demon was far brighter than that. It was as if a new star had been kindled in front of us, burning an intolerably brilliant hole in reality.

  In one instant it stood before us. The next, before we could recover from the shock, it was on us. We tried to establish a perimeter, and we failed. Loops of raw processing power flicked out all around; flagstones exploded to dust everywhere they grounded, and the dust whirled in complex reiterated figures. We barely managed to counter the first attack; the second overwhelmed us. Van went first, and his kholop tried to run and was caught too. Both of them frozen shadows in swirls of burning dust, blinking out as their links to the translation frames were cut, but too late, too late. The Horse and I looked at each other, and knew that there was no time to throw up any kind of shield. The demon was too quick, too powerful. We ran, and Arden and her kholop chased after us and were caught by dust and consumed. In that brief interval, the Horse and I were able to break into a blockhouse and safely disconnect while the demon raved beyond the slabs of dumb and stubbornly inert data.

  All this in a little less than a millisecond.

  Van and his kholop died almost at once. The demon had traced the links back to their translation frames, punching through firewalls, overwhelming counterstrikes, getting inside their skulls and overloading the electrical activity of their brains. They suffered a series of massive seizures before they could be extracted from the translation frames, and although they were placed on life-support their brain activity was permanently flatlined. Arden and her kholop lived a little longer, driven insane by malignant subroutines. The Horse and I were quarantined, and, after the alienists were satisfied that we had not been infected, I was interviewed by the Redactor Miriam and then brought up before the full council of the Library and tried and sentenced.