In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  We stood bunched together as the drones shone tight beams of light here and there. I felt that I was being watched; felt that I had committed to a very bad idea and now I had reached the irrevocable point where there was only a way forward, into a world of trouble.

  Prem told the lichen hunters to move out to the left and right and the Horse and I followed her as she started down the slide of rocks. The drones glided through the air ahead of her, pencils of sharp blue light flickering in every direction, and she was suddenly silhouetted by a flash of red light, and a sharp deafening crack filled the black space and echoed back to us in overlapping percussion.

  The lichen hunters called to each other and the Horse and I crouched down, our securities searching the darkness for movement, finding it overhead. Small pale winged things were dropping from perches amongst stalactites that hung down from the roof, passing back and forth overhead, swooping lower and lower.

  ‘Don’t do anything,’ Prem said calmly. ‘They’re only bats.’

  The animals whirled around us, fluttering, darting past, somehow aware of our presence in what to them must have been absolute darkness, spattering us with sharp-smelling dung. Naked bird-things with translucent skin and faces like horrorshow masks, whirling past and gone like smoke sucked up through a flue, the cave absolutely still again. Too still, and too dark: the drones were down.

  Prem said, ‘It was an EMP grenade rigged to some kind of flash-bang. No doubt designed to frighten away the natives.’

  ‘We are not frightened,’ Akoni said.

  ‘They underestimated you,’ Prem said. ‘Isak, are your algorithms and other tricks still working?’

  My mouth was dry and there was grit on my tongue. I had to work up a measure of saliva before I could speak. ‘They are hardened against all kinds of attacks.’

  ‘Then get up, both of you. We’re not turning back. Not now.’

  Prem was standing downslope, pale and slim in the ghostlight of my security’s enhanced vision. Stepping now over stones, moving from one to the next with a smooth and certain gait. She had taken out her pistol, and the Horse and I exchanged glances and started after her, crabbing down the slope, crossing an uneven floor littered with fallen rocks, the lumpy glistening spikes of stalagmites, brimming pools rimmed with slick dripstone. The hunters discovered another explosive device, and another. The Horse destroyed their tiny intelligences with an unnecessarily extravagant gesture, and I stepped close and quietly chided him for showing off.

  ‘I thought it would be a good idea to display some flair to remind them that we’re an important part of this,’ he said.

  ‘I have a feeling that we may be too late to do any good,’ I said.

  ‘But we will do our best, just the same.’

  The cavern narrowed at its far end, funnelling into a passage that twisted and turned much like the one by which we’d entered, until at last a star appeared in the darkness, growing into a wedge of pale glow as we approached it. While the Horse and I waited with the other lichen hunters, Prem and Akoni went ahead, returning after some six hundred seconds.

  ‘No more traps that we can find,’ Prem said. ‘Follow me and keep close.’

  We emerged in a cleft where part of the cave system had collapsed, leaving a winding gash caught between steep walls that led to a lake as round as an ancient coin. The tower stood at its centre, light shining from window slits at various heights; a slender bridge made of some translucent halflife polymer arched above the still black water of the lake and descended to kiss a small oval doorway at the base of the tower. It was very cold, and a few flakes of snow drifted down from the circle of gunmetal sky pinched between the high cliffs.

  The Horse and I parsed the tower and the bridge and found nothing active.

  ‘That doesn’t mean there aren’t any more traps,’ I said. ‘They may be too stupid or too sophisticated for us to detect.’

  Prem called out Yakob’s name, her clear voice echoing back across the dark water. I thought it incredibly foolish, and braced for some kind of cataclysmic reply, but nothing happened. She called several times, and stood with her arms folded, her head moving up and down as she scanned the tower from bottom to top and back again. At last she told all of us to wait, and walked up the arch of the bridge to the oval doorway, ducking under its low lip.

  A moment later her scream cut the air.

  I sprinted across the narrow span of the bridge, my security wrapping tight and hard around me, the Horse and the lichen hunters following at my heels. Usually, the old towers left by the ancestral Quick are more or less empty, open chimneys with platforms of different sizes jutting from the inner walls at random heights and linked by a spiralling ramp (the Redactor Svern based the public entrance of the Library on this design, in homage to the creators of the Library’s virons). But when I ducked through the entrance of this tower, I threw up my arm to protect my eyes at once, because it was full of flame. Huge flames beating with white light and heat, and Prem on fire at my feet, writhing as she burned.

  Or so it seemed. The entrance had been rigged as a translation frame that opened on to a pocket hell. The flames and heat weren’t real, but Prem’s agony was. My security reached out and enveloped her; as I stooped to pick her up, something coalesced from the flames all around and shot towards me like a runaway star. I threw a string at it and the string shrivelled and flared out like a comet, and then the thing was on me in a furious rush that knocked me over. Something punched at my torso, a sharp point plunging over and again. It didn’t penetrate the armoured corselet that Prem had made me wear, but it knocked the wind out of me, and a moment later hard fingers were clawing at my face, at my eyes.

  My attacker was no ordinary demon; it was a demon cloaking a human being, as my security cloaked me. Stabbing and punching at me while the furnace fire raged at my security, burning its way in past layer after layer of futile-cycle algorithms and deadlock traps.

  Violent action has a strange effect on memory. Moments are preserved with perfect fidelity, but the connections between them are lost. I remember grasping a sharp blade that stung my palm. I remember a blow that jarred my cheekbone, and my sight going black for a long moment. I remember finding a warm human mouth and wrenching at it, and the shocking pain as teeth clamped on my fingers. I have no idea what I was thinking; most likely I wasn’t thinking at all. And I remember a dark shadow emerging from the furnace light raging all around, and I have a memory that may be true and may be false of a bee flying past my face and shattering into an angry swarm that struck my adversary and hurled him away.

  Somehow, I was outside, lying on cold stone in dull pewter light, the Horse kneeling beside me. The lichen hunter, Akoni, emerged from the doorway, Prem limp in his arms. He staggered towards me and knelt and half-lowered, half-dropped her. I remember the hollow thump her head made when it struck the stone.

  I managed to push to my feet. My chest was tattooed with points of pain and blood dripped from the fingers of my gashed hand and one eye was hot and half-closed, but my mind was growing clear as thoughts knitted each to each.

  ‘She’s in shock but I think she’ll live,’ Akoni said. He was kneeling by Prem, looking up at me.

  ‘Who attacked me?’

  ‘I shot him. I picked up Prem’s pistol and shot him,’ the Horse said, and burst into tears.

  There’s not much left to tell of the debacle. I used my security to engage with the translation frame, and after a few tens of seconds worked my way into its kernel and shut it down, and the tower stood as it had always stood. The body of a Quick lichen hunter lay just inside the entrance. It wasn’t one of our party; he must have been caught and turned by Bree Sixsmith, and left to guard the place.

  The Horse and I found Yakob’s body on a platform at the top of the tower, beside an array of comms equipment. The top of his skull was gone and thousands of fine threads had pierced the membrane that wrapped his brain, and had grown through its meat. A bush robot that had been used to interrogate him.r />
  There was no sign of Bree Sixsmith, and we could find no trace of the kernel of the hell that had been lodged here. We were still searching when two flitters dropped out of the mists and discharged troopers who’d come to investigate a strange signal, transmitted when Prem had sprung the trap that Bree Sixsmith had left behind. That was when we discovered that the lichen hunters had left, and had taken Prem with them.

  9

  Ori entered the resupply station through the hatch in the rear of the hangar and searched corridors and rooms until she found a helical ramp that climbed around the core to the diamond-paned dome at the top. There were no traces of any kind of fighting or struggle, and the motion detector of her suit registered no movement anywhere, but she walked warily, watching shadows and doorways, spinning around every ten steps. She was still wearing her helmet because she was afraid that the station’s air might be laced with subtle poisons, biologics, or psychotropics, and she carried a welding pistol she’d found in the hangar, an improvised weapon useful only at close range but comforting to hold as she stalked the deserted station.

  Under the skylight dome, she skirted an abstract sculpture woven from thorny loops, threaded between hydroponic beds of banana plants and fruit bushes, vibrant green under bright suspensor lamps. Because the station was slowly rotating it took her a little while to locate The Eye of the Righteous: a bright star flaring away towards the enemy craft, which was suddenly close to it and suddenly far away again, skipping to and fro as if playing some deadly game of tag. It was much smaller than the ship but much quicker, and Ori was certain that the ship’s lashed-up railguns would be no match for it.

  Run, she thought. Run.

  And felt, at the back of her head, for the first time in days, the passenger stir in her personal dark. Felt it moving forward.

  The Eye of the Righteous was beginning to yaw now, a ponderous attempt to turn broadside. The enemy craft was below it, then off to one side. There were tiny puffs of vapour and white contrails shot past the black craft: the railguns had fired.

  The enemy craft slid backwards very quickly and came to a sudden stop. A tiny mote hung way out across the sky. The Eye of the Righteous was still turning towards it when it drove forward. Ori saw what was going to happen and shouted No! and the enemy craft plunged straight through The Eye of the Righteous, punching through the upper surface and ripping out through the keel in a shower of debris that twinkled away towards the cloud deck as the enemy craft described a graceful circle and halted in the air again as if to survey the damage it had done.

  The Eye of the Righteous wallowed in the air. Another set of contrails raked out from its starboard side, aimed at nothing in particular. It was tilted downwards, stern first. Then a chunk of superstructure dropped away and the rest shot up, unbalanced. The motors flared and died, and then the ship was sinking, nose tipping up as it fell with increasing velocity towards the cloud deck.

  Ori watched, paralysed by horror, as the enemy craft skipped and slid towards the resupply station. When something rustled behind her, she blinked and shuddered and swung around, raising the welding pistol, pointing it at something vaguely human-shaped, woven from black loops and twice her height. It was the statue, reconfigured. An enemy drone. It had a tiny head of loops constricted around a single eye, and two pairs of arms. Three terminated in long saw-toothed blades, the fourth in a broad plate that it held towards Ori. The plate buzzed and gargled, and a deep, pleasant voice asked her to put up her weapon.

  ‘We are your friend. Do no harm and no harm will be done to you.’

  Ori held out the welding pistol, and the drone snatched it away with a flick of one of its arms.

  ‘Wait there. We are coming.’

  The enemy swarmed into the domed garden like guests arriving at a party, full of energy and curiosity, laughing, calling to each other in piping voices, speaking a clacking language that Ori didn’t recognise. They wore hard-shell pressure suits decorated with swirling patterns or stripes or spots, some in black and white, others in bright clashing colours. They were smaller than her, so slender that she reckoned she could snap any one of them over her knee. Most had taken off their helmets, revealing round heads that seemed too big for their slender frames, and large eyes and skin paler than the palms of her hands. Translucent skin tinted pink with the blood beneath. Blond or brown or black hair shaved close to their scalps in patterns of swirls and dots and dashes that echoed the decoration of their pressure suits.

  Ori, who’d been indoctrinated with the idea that the enemy were soulless hive creatures, all alike, all slaved to a central authority, was amazed and alarmed. They were no more than children, running around the aisles of plants in a happy and noisy chaos, tearing off leaves, sniffing them, tasting them.

  Several gathered in front of her and spoke in careful, stilted Portuga one after the other, telling her that she was not their prisoner. No, they had rescued her from bondage. She had been a slave, and now she was free. Free to choose. Free to decide her fate.

  It wasn’t much of a choice, it turned out. Join them, or be worked to death as a prisoner. But it was more than Ori had expected.

  She told them she was with them. What else could she do? They laughed and clapped, and the machine let her go and stepped back as she fell to her knees. The enemy were all around her, helping her up, patting at the visor of her helmet, smiling at her.

  ‘You have joined the company of heroes.’

  ‘You and your companion.’

  ‘The little intelligence that has made its home in your head.’

  ‘Yes, we know about that.’

  ‘We know everything about you. Commissar Doctor Pentangel is one of ours, now.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Ori said.

  ‘First, you must choose a name.’

  ‘You must shed your slave name. Here. Choose.’

  A list scrolled in the air. She chose a name at random. ‘Janejean.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘An old name.’

  ‘A good name.’

  ‘One of the first martyrs.’

  ‘Come with us now. There’s so much to be done.’

  They flowed out of the domed garden at the top of the station, taking Ori with them, carrying samples of plants and dirt in sealed cases. Out through an opening cut in the outer skin of the station, into a transparent bubble divided by a mesh floor at its equator into an open space above and a motor below. The bubble detached and skittered out across the gulf of empty air towards the enemy’s ship, and that was it: Ori had become a Ghost.

  Part Four

  CTHUGA

  1

  We searched long and hard for evidence of sabotage and at last it was found by one of the small robots crawling across the pitted sheath of ice and fullerene that had protected our ship during its voyage: a tiny, complex probe embedded deep in the centre of a small crater marked by a sunburst of bright rays, scarcely larger than an old-fashioned bullet of the kind fired by the ancient rifles carried by some of the wildsiders, weapons handcrafted by their great-grandparents and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. This, though, was a very subtle bullet. It was sheathed in layers of diamond alloy interleaved with layers of impact gel; its interior was packed with microscopic machinery; there was a ring of tiny one-shot motors around its waist.

  Although it had been built to withstand tremendous acceleration and deceleration, the impact had killed it. It had registered on the ship’s log, but had not been checked: the frequency of small collisions had begun to increase as we approached Fomalhaut, even though we were travelling above the plane of the system. Now we sent out robots to check the site of every similar impact, and presently we found another probe. Or rather, what was left of it. This one had survived, and split open like a seed. The machinery inside had spun threads that had sunk into the icy sheath of our ship, mining it for elements used to grow a fractal microwave aerial and a complex pseudohyphal network
that had spread through the sheath and interfaced with the ship’s nervous system.

  We had no doubt that this parasitic system had spawned the intruder and inserted him into the viron, and at once began to map and analyse it. We wanted to reconstruct the matrix from which he’d sprung. We wanted to understand his origin so that we could find him, and the Child. And then we wanted to use that knowledge to destroy him.

  What we failed to see was that we were being manipulated by something more powerful and subtle than the intruder. We failed to detect another network that went deep into the nexus of our interfaces with the systems of the ship. We failed to understand that we were as blind to our true situation as the Child was to hers. And while we were deconstructing the intruder, atom by atom, the Child and Jaguar Boy were walking away from the burrows and galleries of the Sloth People, crossing trackless swales of iron-hard caliche in a dead zone created by deforestation and climate change, when it began to rain.

  They’d lived with the Sloth People for so many days that the Child had lost count of them. They were a gentle, slow, small race, the Sloth People, none taller than the Child’s waist. They spent much of their time sleeping, and most of the rest grooming each other or singing long plaintive songs that could take days to complete, as singer after singer took up the thread of the melody. The songs were all they had of their history, a much degraded mythos that described the cosmos outside their burrows (which they never left) and where they had come from. Songs of a distant Earth.