In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘The enemy,’ Hira said. ‘You delivered us into the hands of the enemy.’

  ‘Run, then,’ Ori said. ‘Run as far and as fast as you can.’

  ‘We’re going to engage and destroy it. And then I’ll come back and deal with you,’ Hira said, and the channel shut off.

  7

  A little before sunrise, the Child woke to hear a deep voice booming above the treetops. It was calling her name.

  Sri Hong-Owen. Sri Hong-Owen. Sri Hong-Owen.

  The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, but the darkness beneath the trees was as yet unbroken. The Child climbed a young tree and sat in its forked bole and scanned the little patches of sky visible here and there in the layered ceiling of the canopy, and at last saw a fat shape drift past about a kilometre away. It was the cargo blimp of the weather wranglers who had tried and failed to bring rain to the little town. It was tricked out in green and gold livery now, the flag of Greater Brazil decorating the tall vane of its rudder, the first light of the rising sun starring a row of portholes in the long cabin slung under its belly as it turned away, trailing its mournful song.

  Sri Hong-Owen. Sri Hong-Owen. Sri Hong-Owen.

  ‘You could call back,’ Jaguar Boy said, and the Child realised that he was squatting on a branch of the tree that stood next to hers.

  ‘They wouldn’t hear me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Did my mother send them?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Vidal Francisca, then.’

  Jaguar Boy shrugged.

  ‘What happens if I call to them?’

  ‘They would take you home.’

  ‘Would you let them do that?’

  ‘I’m not holding you prisoner.’

  ‘You wouldn’t let me leave the lake.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have been able to find your way home by yourself. But the weather wranglers will help you, if you call them. They’ll take you home in a split second, and you’ll forget all this.’

  ‘I’ll wake up, you mean.’

  ‘You aren’t ready for that. Not yet.’

  The Child studied him through a scrim of drought-scorched leaves. ‘You’re very talkative, all of a sudden.’

  ‘When it’s important.’

  ‘Tell me where we’re going next.’

  ‘The Sloth People.’

  ‘My ama told me about them, too.’

  ‘They were preparing you, in their own way.’

  ‘Preparing me for what?’

  Jaguar Boy regarded her for a moment, then yawned and flung himself backwards, hanging from the branch by his crooked knees, swinging to and fro before flinging himself across the air to a branch below the Child and dropping from one to the next to the forest floor. He looked up at her, caught in a long shaft of golden light that set a halo around his small furred head.

  ‘Are you coming with me?’

  You are no doubt wondering why we didn’t end this pilgrimage. Why we allowed the interloper to seduce the Child and divert her from her preordained path. The simple fact is that we had been locked out of the virtual recreation of her childhood home when the drones had been killed on the bank of the river at S[#227;]o Gabriel da Cachoeira. And in that same moment the clockspeed of the viron had been altered, too. Ever since the accident, our resources had been limited. We had been forced to choose between detail and clockspeed, and we had chosen detail, running the viron at much less than one second per second so that we could make it and the agents that inhabited it as realistic and detailed as possible, providing the Child with a rich environment whose physics simulated as closely as possible the real world (there was an editing attachment that ensured that she did not remember any missing detail, continuity problems, lags in refresh time, and so on).

  But now control had been taken away from us, and the viron was no longer a broad scape but a narrow section, and running at a much faster speed. We could not rewrite it from the outside because there was no code to rewrite. It was a holographic totality. Unpick one random thread and everything could unravel. Nor could we halt it until we found out how to regain control. The only option left to us was to shut it down completely. And because we did not have the facility to take a snapshot of its entire state at any particular moment, shutting it down would have been the end of the reborn Child. She would have been lost to us, and there was not enough time to start over. Besides, we were no more than her handmaidens, her humble daughters dedicated to her survival. We could no more kill her than monotheists could murder the avatar of their creator. We could only hope to find her, delete her kidnapper, and restore her to her mother. And to do that, we had to interfere directly with the viron.

  In the hours that it took us to find a way into it, many days had passed inside, and we were having great difficulty maintaining synchrony. In short, our view of the Child’s world was no longer as complete as it had once been. It had acquired an independent agenda, and we had completely lost sight of its most important inhabitant. We can tell you her story now only because of what we found out about it, afterwards. At the time, we could only peer through a keyhole and hiss directions to a few onstage characters.

  In this fashion, we had brought back the weather wranglers, and planted in the mind of its chief pilot detailed memories of meeting with the self-important little cane-sugar grower, Vidal Francisca, who paid a considerable sum of credit up front to search for the kidnapped daughter of his fiancée, with an equal sum promised for her safe return. And while the weather wranglers sailed above patches of forest, shrunken rivers, hills and mountains and dead zones around and about the little town, searching for any trace of the Child, we began to search the interior and the hull of our ancient ship for evidence of sabotage. And in less than a day (far longer, by the clock of the viron) we discovered it.

  8

  Prem told the Horse and me about her nocturnal adventure while we ate breakfast at a low table near the square little cave, filled now by warm yellow flames, in the rock wall of the lodge’s long room. How she’d ridden out into the wilderness and in a secret location had met with a convocation of lichen hunters, and convinced them to reveal the location of an ancient Quick machine which Yakob Singleton and Bree Sixsmith had discovered.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘My new friends say it’s dangerous, and I believe them.’

  I said that it would be prudent to call on the prefect of Ull for reinforcements, or perhaps to ask for the help of Prem’s mysterious friends. But Prem was adamant that we had to move now rather than wait for her friends, who were in any case thinly stretched, and that to use troopers would attract the attention of the wrong kind of people.

  ‘The lichen hunters have already helped me find Yakob,’ she said. ‘They know this world better than any trooper, and they will watch our backs. That’s all we need. That and a little courage. We are almost at the end, Isak.’

  She was tired and dirty, and in a grim mood. She had not said as much, but I believed that she knew now that when she confronted Yakob it would not be a happy reunion.

  ‘I am ready to harrow any hell and fight any demon,’ I said. ‘But I am not sure that I will be able to subdue Bree.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re better than her.’

  ‘But not, perhaps, better than what she may have become.’

  ‘When my master makes an admission like that,’ the Horse said, ‘you should take it seriously.’

  ‘Here it is,’ Prem said. ‘I’ll go with you or without you.’

  ‘I’ll come, of course,’ I said. ‘And do all I can. But I want you to know that it may not be enough.’

  ‘It will have to do,’ Prem said.

  We set out from the lodge within the hour. I had refused Prem’s offer of pistols, telling her that our algorithms gave us sufficient protection, but the Horse and I both wore armoured corselets and rode bikes – little platforms with T-shaped control yokes and fan motors at each corner that easily kept pace with the horses of Prem and
her guide, an old lichen hunter named Akoni.

  He was a strange, hierophantic figure, at once ridiculous and alarming, small and skinny as a starveling child, cheeks seamed with spiral welts, long grey hair drawn up in an elaborate topknot. He wore a ragged vest and trews under a robe stitched from the pelt of a jaguar; a necklace of jaguar claws encircled his bony throat; his ears were pegged with yellow incisors as long and stout as my thumb; a short hollow length of bone pierced with holes hung on his chest from a sinew loop. He told the Horse that he had killed the jaguar himself, with a spear he’d carved from oak wood and tipped with a point of flaked stone, after stalking it for half a hundred of Ull’s short days. He rode beside Prem with a lordly ease, as if he was her equal. As if he was the secret prefect of the world.

  It was a place that I should have understood, being a True, complete with a set of unaltered and primitive psychological templates formed (so we are told) by the hardships of living in wild and dangerous landscapes, but as far as I was concerned it was a cemetery of endless shifting shadow and cold monochrome light. A death world. Akoni and his brothers were free spirits of this cold tomb world. They mostly lived off the land and visited the terminus only to deposit the lichens they’d collected.

  The bikes were easy to fly, but the terrain was difficult, and as spooky as the Ciborium Quarter. We picked our way through a dark conifer forest, climbed a long stony ridge where the pale shells of ancient Quick towers, shaped like spaceships of the long-ago, reared up amongst graveyards of dead trees and cacti taller than men. Beyond, the crescents of barchan dunes filled the floor of a broad valley like a flock of sleeping animals, and then the land dropped in a maze of deep canyons and rifts brimming with fog, where mosses and lichens grew in sodden carpets on boulders and dripped from overhangs. We were still in this maze when night overtook us, and we ate and slept on a damp ledge in a bubble of light and heat cast by a small radiant stove. Akoni played a strange slow mournful music by blowing through the hollow bone that he wore on his chest. I slept fitfully, worried that fierce animals and desperate escapees armed with home-made and improvised weapons might at any time sneak up on us. As dawnlight curdled the mist we ate a scant breakfast and went on. The Horse was as jumpy as me. Half expecting to be led into an ambush or a trap. Half expecting to be engaged in a firefight at any moment. I’m not trying to excuse what happened when we finally discovered what had happened to Yakob Singleton. I’m trying to explain why what happened happened.

  Our destination was a steep-sided rift that cut the side of a wrinkle ridge. Fog hung in heavy sodden billows between bare rock walls, and snow fell through the fog, driven to and fro by strong and erratic winds. Akoni claimed that this wasn’t normal, said that someone was playing with the weather.

  ‘I can’t locate any machines or points of energy flow,’ the Horse said.

  ‘I know this world better than you, I think,’ Akoni said with lordly calm, and for once the Horse didn’t essay a retort.

  We travelled past the margin of a narrow lake caught between high cliffs, with a cluster of towers standing half-drowned in its centre. Our destination lay beyond its far end, a steep climb up a path that wound up a slope of shaly stone to a little hanging valley where black mosses made fat pillows amongst boulders fallen from tall cliffs.

  There was a crevice under an overhang, where half a dozen lichen hunters and their horses waited in the freezing mist. Akoni conferred with them, and told us that there had been no sign of any activity.

  ‘Are you sure they’re still in there?’ Prem said. ‘They could have found another way through the caves.’

  ‘The watchers on the rim have seen no sign of any movement,’ Akoni said, and shook out a sheet of paper that showed a pict of a tower standing up from the flooded floor of a deep and steep-sided shaft. Lights showed in the tower’s narrow windows, reflected in the dark water all around it.

  Prem had already explained how Akoni and his brothers had discovered where her cousin and Bree Sixsmith had gone to ground. It had not been difficult. The lichen hunters knew of three places where fragments of the Library were lodged on Ull. They were wary of the old machines, but knew that they were curated by several house servants who were almost certainly members of the cult, and also knew that those servants had killed themselves some one point eight megaseconds ago (when Prem had told us this, the Horse had given me a knowing look). Prem, or her friends, had reached out to the lichen hunters when Yakob Singleton and Bree Sixsmith had been tracked to Ull; the lichen hunters had checked each location, and found activity only in this one.

  Prem studied the pict, spinning the view all the way around the tower, and said, ‘Has anyone gone down there?’

  ‘A few of the young ones wanted to prove their courage,’ Akoni said. ‘But none have broken discipline. I am certain your targets do not suspect they are being watched.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Prem said. ‘That’s why we’ll take the back route.’

  I took her aside as the lichen hunters struck their little camp, and told her that I knew who her friends were, and why she was doing this.

  ‘You do, do you?’

  ‘You asked me whether I was a hardliner. I am not. But that doesn’t mean I agree with what you want. You and your friends.’

  ‘Say what you need to say, Isak. Don’t dance around it. There isn’t time, and I don’t have the patience. What exactly don’t you agree with?’

  ‘Overthrowing centuries of consensus about the Quick. Restoring their freedom. Taking control of Our Thing to achieve that. Directly opposing hardliners who want an end to the Quick. In short, revolution.’

  ‘You worked all this out yourself.’

  ‘I may be naive, Majistra. But I am not stupid. My clan has a deep and abiding respect for Quick achievements because of our work. We look after our kholops and the other servants as best we can. We do not abuse them. Sometimes some form of correction is necessary, but it is never excessive. We’re often criticised for this by outsiders, but it is an ethos we cherish. But we have never tried to impose it on others. Nor will we. But I know that there are many young scions who want to impose their ideas on everyone else. Young scions like yourself, Majistra, who have served and fought alongside Quicks in the war.’

  Prem stared at me with a mixture of contempt and exasperation. Her eye sockets were bruised from lack of sleep and her wet hair straggled across her forehead. ‘That’s an astonishingly simplistic view.’

  ‘Yet you do not deny it.’

  ‘All I ever expected from you was to harrow any hells I uncovered while looking for Yakob. No more, no less. What I do after that is my business. And you have your own reason for helping me, don’t you? Those back doors you’re so scared of, and the forgiveness of your clan you hope to win by locating them. When this is over, you can go your way and I’ll go mine. Why don’t we leave it that?’

  I was as tired, and as unreasonably angry as Prem. And scared, too. Of what we were about to face. Of what might happen if we failed, and the consequences if we succeeded. I said, ‘We agreed to be equal partners, but you have not held your end of the bargain. You have never told me the whole truth. Perhaps you didn’t trust me. Perhaps because you thought I would not follow or help you if I knew your real intentions. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been led into something deep and dark and dangerous. And that means my clan is implicated too.’

  ‘If you don’t like this, you should go,’ Prem said.

  She turned from me and walked to the edge of the steep drop down to the lake. A small, defiant figure, half-lost in blowing scarves of mist. When I came up behind her, she did not turn.

  ‘You should have trusted me,’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t about your wounded dignity.’

  ‘When you lack power or wealth, dignity is important. Not just because it is hard-won, but because you have little else by which to measure your status.’

  ‘You think too much about what other people think about you, Isak. You worry that they think y
ou insignificant. I can assure you that I don’t.’ She turned then. Droplets of water starred the fur of the collar she’d raised about her face, and clung to her wet hair. ‘I could say that I didn’t tell you the whole truth because I was trying to protect you. But it would be a lie. I did it because I didn’t entirely trust you. Because, I suppose, I underestimated you. Because I need you, Isak, and I was frightened that if I told you the truth you’d quit the search.’

  Her small cold hands found mine. ‘You think we’ll fail, my friends and I. You’re worried that you’ll be implicated in that failure. That you’ll be unfairly punished. Don’t worry. This is a very small part of something very much larger. It’s so insignificant, in fact, that I’m pursuing it contrary to all counsel and advice. Most of my friends don’t think it’s very important. The Quick do. They know. They understand. But almost everyone else . . . Well, I won’t deny that I’ll be in trouble if I’m caught, but I promise I’ll do my best to convince everyone that you were a fool I led astray. Someone who had no idea about what I was really chasing. That’s more or less the truth, after all. And think about this. What if we succeed?’

  I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t think of returning to the Library in glory, of elevating my clan to a central place in a new order, but I was mostly aware of Prem’s hands in mine, her dark and solemn gaze.

  ‘You’re free to go back right now,’ she said. ‘But I hope you’ll be true to your promise, and help me finish this. For whatever reason.’

  Akoni and two of the other lichen hunters followed us into the crevice; the rest stayed behind to keep watch in case the prefect’s troopers worked out where we were and what we were about. A long gullet of rough rock sloped down and down, a ragged and irregular passage so narrow that we had to go in single file, sometimes climbing over rockfalls, sometimes stooping where the ceiling dipped or the floor rose. A handful of drones moved with us, shedding an envelope of bluish light, and several more flew ahead, searching for traps and sensors. All around lay a lightless universe of rock. Masses balanced precariously, ready to shift and crush us out of existence. We picked our way over and around fallen rocks, squatted and shuffled crabwise through a long low passage and emerged at the top of a slope that ran down to the floor of a cathedral void. Behind us was a bulging wall sheened with wet pink and purple mineral deposits. Water dripped from the ends of stalactites high above and fell into cold pools, like so many clocks ticking away eternity.