In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  Three other bots crabbed towards her. One was ridden by Hereata, the others by two drone jockeys, Aata and Ulua. Hereata said that she had seen the impact, and threw a pict at Ori: a deeply foreshortened view of a dark fleck falling beyond the truncated curve of a contrail that was bent into a sinusoidal shape by winds moving at different speeds at different heights in the sky. The fleck slipping sideways in the sky, seeming to skip towards the viewpoint in a series of skidding lunges, growing larger with shocking speed, jerking in and out of frame as the optical system of Hereata’s bot tried to track it, slamming straight through the prow of the ship in a flash of flame.

  ‘It steered straight at the ship,’ Ori said.

  ‘It took out the Trues’ lifepod,’ Ulua said. ‘No one knows where the commander and her officers are.’

  ‘This stuff is growing,’ Aata said, stepping back from the edge.

  ‘I know,’ Ori said. ‘We have to do something about it right away.’

  ‘We have to find someone in charge,’ Ulua said.

  ‘I think we may be in charge now,’ Ori said.

  She seemed to be at the centre of a ringing calm, the way she’d felt riding the probe down through the cloud deck after the quake. Except this was real. She wasn’t safely lodged inside the Whale’s comforting bulk. This was happening to her. She felt a jolt of excitement, and also felt, for the first time in days, her passenger stir behind her eyes.

  ‘Leto and Tche were down there,’ Aata said. ‘They were preparing the last of the drones . . .’

  ‘They might still be down there,’ Ulua said. ‘Trapped between bulkhead doors. We should go down and look for them.’

  ‘I have a better idea,’ Ori said, and launched a fly-by-wire probe, spinning it out and down. The impact had punched through the hull plates and pressure tanking, smashed structural spars. The Trues’ lifepod had been sheared away, two ballonets had ruptured and collapsed across the wreckage of broken spars, and the hangar that had housed the predators was torn open. It was pitch black inside, but the probe detected shifting pulses of infrared around the edges of the rupture. Radar imaging of the hangar itself showed that walkways had collapsed or detached, a jumble of wreckage caught amongst the launch cradles – and then the connection dropped. Something had cut into it, was trying to pump information into the drone’s nervous system. Ori shut off the link and had the bot run a self-check, then picted images and analysis of the damage and the infection to the others.

  ‘We have to cut this away before it spreads,’ she said.

  ‘It is already spreading,’ Hereata said, pointing to a distinct fan of fine black thread that had pushed out from the narrow rim of rot at the border of the gash.

  They sent down more probes to map the damage, and were comparing the wreckage with schematics, trying to work out where they could begin cutting away the damaged and infected parts without compromising the structural integrity of the ship, when without warning the connection to Ori’s drone was cut. She was back in her body, back in the chair, looking up at someone – Lani – who was straddling her chest and holding a cutter to her throat.

  Ori could feel the point of the cutter pricking the soft flesh under her jaw. She lay very still, moving only her eyes, seeing Hereata and the other two jockeys pinned down by other members of Hira’s circle, seeing Hira herself facing off Quicks crowded at the hatch, hearing her say that everything was under control now.

  She had a grim but triumphant look, saying loudly that Ori and her crew had been planning sabotage but they’d been stopped just in time.

  A few people began to protest. Hira stood firm, arms folded, staring them down. Saying, ‘These people are wreckers. Their drones survived the first attack because they are in league with the enemy. Now they have brought the enemy to us. We found them gloating over the damage and planning to make it worse. They would have killed all of you, but I have stopped them.’

  ‘We’re trying to save you,’ Ori said, and winced when Lani pressed down with the point of the cutter. Skin parted with a flare of pain; blood wormed down the side of her neck.

  ‘Let them speak,’ someone said.

  Ori locked gazes with Lani. She had a hot and wild glint in her eyes that Ori didn’t like at all, and she was sweating and there was a faint tremor in the hand that held the cutter. Ori said as calmly as she could, ‘Will you let me up?’ Feeling the point move against the wound in her neck with every word.

  ‘Be quiet or I’ll hurt you bad,’ Lani said, her voice thick.

  ‘We don’t do this to each other,’ Ori said. ‘We aren’t Trues.’

  Several people repeated this. Hira looked all around, then clapped her hands. ‘Listen to me. Listen. We have only one chance of survival. We must remove these wreckers before they call down the enemy again. Are you with me, or are you with them? Think carefully. Choose the wrong side, and you choose the enemy.’

  Ori looked at Lani and said, ‘I’m going to sit up so that I can talk to Hira. I won’t do anything silly, and you won’t either.’

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do,’ Lani said, and slashed Ori’s cheek, scoring so deep that the point of the cutter went through skin and muscle and Ori felt it grate on a tooth. She yelled to let out the shocking pain, and suddenly people were crowding in. Lani lashed out at them, but someone caught her arm and wrenched the cutter from her grip, and someone else caught her from behind and pulled her to the floor.

  Ori swung out of the chair and planted her feet on the floor and stood. She was trembling all over and was holding her cut cheek. It was beginning to burn, and she could feel blood slick and wet under her palm and blood pooling under her tongue. She spat a mouthful of blood on the floor, wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

  Hira said in the sudden silence, ‘Let her talk. It won’t change anything.’

  Ori looked all around. Hereata and Aata and Ulua were standing too. The place was crowded. Everyone was looking at her. Hira stood amongst her acolytes, arms folded, shrugging away when one of them patted her shoulder.

  Ori spat out more blood, said, ‘Trues have always decided what we should do, and we have always done what the Trues have told us to do. We have always served. But now we’re on our own. For the first time in our lives, we have to decide what to do. It’s hard. It’s frightening. But we must face up to it.’

  ‘She wants you to hand yourselves to the enemy,’ Hira said.

  ‘The enemy is already here,’ Ori said. Feeling her sliced cheek part with each word. ‘We found some kind of disease inside the hole made by the thing that hit us. It’s spreading. Changing the fabric of the ship.’

  Aata put up a window, showing the leprous rim of the hole, the thready infection pulsing in the hull plates, dividing, spreading.

  Hira laughed. ‘This is a trick. Got up so she can take over.’

  Ori said, ‘Go outside. Look for yourselves. But don’t take long, because it’s growing fast.’

  ‘What do we have to do?’ someone said.

  ‘How can we help?’ someone else said.

  Hira pushed through them, stood face to face with Ori. ‘I won’t allow this,’ she said, and suddenly swung her fist, hitting Ori under her eye.

  Ori stumbled backwards, gripped the back of her chair, faced Hira. ‘This isn’t our way,’ she said.

  Hira stepped forward and struck Ori again, and this time Ori lost her footing and went down to her knees. She pushed up, faced Hira. Saying, ‘This isn’t how we decide things.’

  Hira would have hit her again, but two people closed on her and hauled her backwards. She struggled for a moment, then subsided. Glaring at Ori, saying, ‘Your lies will kill us all.’

  And then she was pulled away. Ori felt the room turn around her and she sat down. Her whole face was throbbing to the quick pulse of her heart. Someone pressed a wet cloth to her cheek. Tane, the leader of the maker crew, said, ‘Tell us what to do.’

  Ori realised that everyone was looking at her. Waiting for her to speak. She said, ‘
We need to go back outside and deal with the enemy. And I think we’ll need explosives. Can you spin some?’

  The black necrosis had spread a good two metres around the hole now. Deltas and streaks, feathers and curlicues. Ori and the rest of her crew deployed a small flock of drones that surveyed the infection from every angle, used the data to map where to plant the shaped charges that the maker crew had spun, then walked their bots to the underside of the ship and began to cut through the skin at the rear of the hangar, through plates and deep layers of insulation and pressure tanking, into the structural elements beneath. They worked with feverish haste, knowing that if they cut away too little, the infection wouldn’t be cauterised, but if they cut away too much, the ship’s integrity would be compromised.

  When they had finished, they retreated to the stern and clamped down, and without any ceremony Ori set off the charges.

  Ripples pulsed through the skin of the ship. At the prow, debris flew out in a long line and a cylindrical section dropped clean away, dwindling into the bright gulf of air. Ori’s heart lifted when she saw that. Saw it fall straight down, shedding shards and flecks of debris, dwindling to a mote, a speck. The ship lurched, swung back, rocked to and fro, but it held together.

  Ori led the others to the long and ragged edge of the cut to make sure that all the infection had been flensed away. It was unsettling to see the cavernous hole punched clean through the ship, exposing the truncated remains of the garage.

  ‘It seems we aren’t quite done,’ Hereata said, and pointed to a chunk of internal wall that hung from a ropy cable at the edge of the gap, black with infection and rocking to and fro on the wind.

  Ori and Hereata took what was left of the shaped charges and climbed down into the truncated remains of the hangar. Just two predator cradles were left. Strange to see them in sunlight and open air, half-buried in a mash of floor mesh and railings and broken machinery. There could be bodies in there. Leto and her crew. Ori hoped that when they’d died it had been instant. Painless. She pictured the gale that must have punched through the hangar when its integrity had been breached and the external pressure of twenty atmospheres had equalised with the ship’s internal pressure, ripping out walkways and machinery, flinging everything against the far end of the garage . . .

  She and Hereata X-rayed the ceiling around the cable spun by the infection, found that it had gone deeper and further than they had reckoned. They climbed up a wall and edged out across the ceiling, hanging over a gap bitten in the floor, with a view straight down to the cloud deck more than twenty kilometres below. Working on either side of the cable’s attachment point, they pulled out access plates, clambered into narrow inspection spaces and placed explosive charges against structural spars, then climbed out and repeated the process over and again, laying two lines of charges that angled towards each other in a vee shape.

  Probes hovered around them, transmitting everything they did to the rest of the crew. Wind whistled, whirled up twisters of dust that glinted in slanting beams of sunlight, rocking the section of infected plating that dangled from the cable. The cable was definitely thinner, and thin black tentacles were spreading out across the ceiling, dividing and diving at their tips, sending out runs towards the edges of the vee that Ori and Hereata had defined.

  They pulled out the last of the access plates, at the point of the vee. Ori swung her bot into the narrow space and saw black threads laced across on a structural spar, scarcely a metre away. She picted the view to Hereata and said, ‘It’s as if it knows what we’re doing. Trying to grow around us.’

  ‘Perhaps it does,’ Hereata said.

  Her bot passed the last of the explosive charges to Ori’s drone, and Ori fitted them against the infected spar and activated the radio trigger.

  As she backed away across the ceiling, she felt an odd and unsettling whisper of static across the comms.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘The wind?’

  ‘Interference,’ Ori said.

  It was louder. A staccato arrhythmic pulsing. Hereata said something, but her words were garbled by the interference.

  ‘My bot is infected,’ Ori said. ‘Get out now.’

  The pulse drumming, staggering, lopsided. A fluttering in the video feed, and a kind of pressure or surge in the downlink, something trying to cut its way through the filters, probing, pushing.

  It was like being enfolded by someone else’s heart. Squeezed down to a dot by muscular pumping. Ori reached for the command that would trip the explosives, but it was like trying to insert her hand down a pipe that was being crushed and constricted out of existence. As she flailed and pushed, Hereata reached past her.

  Ori felt a hard thump beneath her bot, saw narrow blades of brief fire define the two sides of the vee. For a moment, nothing else happened. Then a big wedge of the ceiling dropped away, falling straight through the gap in the floor. The ship bucked and surged, and Ori went with it, galloping out across the ceiling and dropping into the void, reaching out as she fell and gathering up control of the probes and sending them spinning out into the air.

  Wind snatched at the bot, sent it tumbling. She glimpsed the ship receding into the blue sky, saw a speck falling away from it: Hereata’s bot. Sky and the long distant horizon and the cloudscape below tumbled around and around. A roaring of wind buffeting splayed limbs and manipulators. She could feel something making its way towards her, moving into the core of the bot, and she cut the link and was thrown back into herself. In the immersion chair in the jockeys’ hutch, her pulse pounding in her head, pounding red and black in her eyes, in the stapled wound in her cheek, cramps ripping at the muscles of her arms and legs.

  Someone helped her sit up, fed her sips of chilled water from a pouch. Someone else said, ‘What do we do next?’

  It was a good question.

  4

  Despite the long drought, a shallow lake some ten kilometres long spread under the open sky behind the dam and common lodge of the River Folk, its margins lost in the tall trees on either side, its broad calm surface clogged everywhere with the rimmed circles of giant water-lily pads. Some pads were so big that the Child could lie on their waxy surfaces – beds that conformed to the shape of her body and gently rocked on the face of the water. The air was cool at night, and perfumed with the giant blossom spikes of the lilies, which thrust up like swords between the pads and were attended by bats and giant moths. Above, the starscape swept from horizon to horizon, spanned by a hazily luminous arch somewhat like the Milky Way, except that it was narrower and more diffuse, and intermittent showers of meteors fell, and the red and green hairy stars chased each other down towards dawn.

  The River Folk browsed on the lily pads for much of the night, ploughing ledes of black silky water through the floating fields. During the day, they lay on their backs under the shade of the largest pads and slopped mud on their bellies and dozed or meditated, talking each to each in voices that boomed across the lake. Slow, ponderous conversations with long pauses between sentences and phrases. Their thoughts ran deep and were intricately braided. Mostly they were mathematicians, engaged in unravelling the eleven-dimensional geometry of hyper-Riemann space-time that enclosed the multiverse.

  Three families shared the lake. According to Jaguar Boy they had been working on the same problem for centuries. A great collective achievement that had constructed a gigantic and supremely elegant cathedral of thought. The Child asked how this could be true. Because if it was, the River Folk must have diverged from common stock long before the development of any genetic science capable of reshaping the human form – long before the Industrial Revolution, in fact.

  Jaguar Boy shrugged. ‘There is more history than you yet know.’

  ‘Conspiracies that used advanced sciences in secret?’

  ‘No, it’s simpler than that.’

  ‘Are they aliens, fallen to Earth centuries ago, living in secret all this time?’

  She was wondering if Jaguar Boy was an alien, or perha
ps descended from people who had been captured and reshaped by aliens. Her ama had often told her about flying saucers and cigar-shaped craft that cruised the skies above the forest, searching for human specimens.

  ‘Be patient,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘You’ll soon understand everything.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me now?’

  He shrugged again, said, ‘You still have much to learn.’

  The adult River Folk were as large and fat as cows; like cows, their barrel-shaped bodies were bioreactors that fermented and digested the vast amounts of vegetation they ate every day. They had loose black skin that was velvety to the touch, legs shrunken and broadened into flippers, truncated arms with small hands, delicate fingers with pearlescent fingernails. Their faces were broad, with large, mournful brown eyes and wide, mobile mouths.

  Their children were much smaller, about the Child’s size, agile and playful. They fed and groomed and generally indulged a little school of infants, maintained the dam and the broad dome of the common lodge with the help of snake-like machines that also gardened the floating fields of lily pads, scared off would-be predators, and collected from the fringes of the forest leaves, rocks, dirt and other materials which they fed into their maker. This was a fat black cube packed with microscopic machines that broke down into atoms the stuff that it was fed, and used them to make more snake-machines, the beads and ribbons which the River Folk children used to decorate their hair (they were covered in a fine pelt that thickened into crest-like stripes on top of their heads), the drug that the adult River Folk used to deepen their meditations, and many other things. It produced shorts, sandals, and a short-sleeved shirt for the Child, any kind of food she requested, and a small coracle as light as a soap bubble and as strong as steel.

  The Child slept during the day. At sunset, when the children of the River Folk grew lively and playful, she swam with them, and later, after sunset and her evening meal, she lay on one of the giant lily pads, talking to any who came by. At the beginning of every evening there would be six or seven River Folk children fringing her pad, combing and braiding each other’s crests while they talked and told stories and sang songs (they loved to sing, usually ballads in three-part harmony, chronicling their long and strange history). But they grew distracted as darkness fell, and swam off to play games of tag or experiment with sex, and long before midnight the Child would be left alone, to think about what she had learned. In this fashion, over the days and evenings, she was told fantastic stories of how the River Folk and people like them had come to dominate the human race as it spread out into the Solar System.