In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘History will be changed,’ Commissar Doctor Pentangel had told Ori. ‘Our present, which is far in their founder’s future, will not be erased, but it will become unreachable. He will move away from it and create a new future in which the Ghosts dominate the history of the human species from the beginning.’

  ‘What will happen to us?’

  ‘We will continue as before. But we will not be part of the dominant sheaf of timelines rising from Levi’s present, our past. We will be a rare example of a deviance. That is, if you believe that the classic Many Worlds interpretation is the literal truth. If it isn’t, then everything we know will be unmade. That’s why the Ghosts call themselves Ghosts. Because they believe themselves to be ghosts. The restless dead, striving to correct a great wrong in their past.’

  The Ghosts believed that the so-called Mind lurking at the core of Cthuga was key to sending this message. And so was an ancient starship that they had captured. The starship contained what remained of a passenger who had been alive at the time when things had gone wrong, when history had switched to the wrong path. In fact, she had been at the centre of events that had changed history, a major player in the so-called Quiet War that had briefly given Earth hegemony over the cities and settlements on the moons of the outer planets. According to Commissar Doctor Pentangel, this meant that her light cone extended back to the crucial moment when Levi had received his message, so the Ghosts could use it to send their message and force history on to the correct path.

  ‘They have others from that era,’ the commissar said. ‘Heroes who, like her, live on in virtualities. And their minds will be entangled with the Mind of Cthuga, in due course. But there is a major problem.’

  He looked at Ori, his apt pupil.

  She said dutifully, ‘The Mind does not exist.’

  ‘Not yet. It will, it will. I will see to that. All of us here will see to that, by hard and clever work. Especially you, Ori, and the others like you.’

  Is that what they’re doing? Inas signed, after Ori told her all this. Making the Mind?

  Yes. But first they have to make sprites.

  Commissar Doctor Pentangel had explained this too, in his manic way. Saying that he’d been a fool, an idiot. Saying that he had seen everything front to back. Saying that now he understood how to see things properly because the Ghosts had opened his eyes. And how marvellously simple it was!

  ‘Your ancestors misled me. They misled everyone. At the last, when they knew they were done for, they dropped their seedship into Cthuga, claiming that its mind would unite with the Mind in the core of the world. But there is no Mind. It was a great and glorious deception. A lie that kept us busy for centuries.

  ‘The Mind does not yet exist. And when it does, it will not live in the core of the world. There are quantum effects at the core, yes. But they are both too uniform and too random. Uniform because the core is amazingly uniform. A solid sphere of metallic hydrogen generating everywhere the same effects. And those effects are randomly generated and transient because the core is so hot. Nothing lasts. I had thought that helium raining out of the atmosphere and falling through the core to the planet’s centre of mass would perturb those quantum effects in ways that could be used to support an information-generating network. I spent years investigating this, in theory and in practice. Every failure spurred me to greater effort. For I knew that there must be a Mind, and lacked only an explanation and evidence. And why did I know? Why was I so certain? Because your ancestors lied!’

  The commissar pacing up and down in his long dark room, his exoskeleton clicking and creaking. Telling Ori that sprites were not manifestations of the Mind’s activity, or side-effects of the activity that sustained it. No, he said, they were the components of what would become the Mind.

  ‘Cthuga’s magnetic field is very strong, created by the rotation of its core, which is made entirely of metallic hydrogen leavened with a little helium. And where the field lines intersect with the solar wind of Fomalhaut, knots and vortices are created that propagate backwards, and create knots and vortices deep inside the planetary field. That is what creates the sprites. Millions of them. Billions. We do not know how many because we are still trying to pin down the parameters on which we can base our estimates. In any case, there are huge numbers of them, and they have the capacity to process information. In the wild, they decay because they are unstable. But we are creating stable sprites.’

  They are making these things? Inas signed.

  They are trying to. Down in the deeps. At the base of the troposphere, below the water zone.

  So that’s why they still need the cable.

  That’s why they need us, Ori signed. We interacted with sprites, and some of their properties were imprinted on us. They are using us as templates to make sprites that will somehow form the Mind. And the Mind will be shaped by their heroes, and this old star traveller. And that’s all I know.

  Activity was increasing in the workshop, hour upon hour. There were more and more Ghosts busy there, and they were tireless and unsleeping. Making small pressure-shells packed with all kinds of intricate machinery that were sent down the cable to the inception points where sprites were being created. Testing Ori and the others. Modelling their altered state in virtual neuronal systems. Testing some kind of wide-pipe upload system that was supposed to plug virtual models of human consciousness into a flock of sprites; two of Commissar Doctor Pentangel’s Quicks had been taken away and their brains had been stripped neuron by neuron by bush robots, to upload alternative models into virtuality.

  The commissar showed Ori and the other Quicks the spiky construction or growth that wrapped around the terminus of the cable in the hot dark far below, the way it bent and constricted magnetic lines and tangled them into self-sustaining knots sent whirling off like particles on a flood. Soon, he said, their templates would be used to give those sprites intelligence and volition. The first step in the creation of the Mind.

  He claims that once intelligent sprites have been created, the Ghosts will bring one of their ancient heroes to the Whale, Ori told Inas, after she’d flicked several fat data packages from her bot to the bot ridden by her bunky. She will be the seed for the Mind itself.

  How long? Days? Hours?

  I don’t know. Days, maybe. They have to create these intelligent sprites before they can move to the next step.

  It was their third meeting out on the skin of the Whale. Bot signalling to bot in a quiet corner of the bustling marshalling yard.

  There’s talk that Our Thing are planning a counterstrike, Inas said. That they will try to destroy the Whale. Perhaps the Ghosts are taking that seriously.

  I heard that too. Do you think they can do it? Destroy the Whale?

  We can’t count on it.

  I know you’re planning some kind of sabotage, Inas. I want to help.

  Inas didn’t reply. Her bot sat very still with both its forward manipulators raised, the signal that the operator was thinking or otherwise engaged off-line. Ori wondered if – despite her claim that they didn’t know about these conversations – Inas was talking to the rest of the crew. Deciding what to do about the information that Ori had given her. About what to do about Ori.

  Below, streams of hoppers were jostling down rack-and-pinion lines to the big tipplers that loaded the freight cars or climbing back up the skin of the Whale to fetch more construction material from the processors. All over the vertical freight yard the same actions were mirrored, hoppers unloading into freight cars at tipplers, loaded freight cars creeping forward and forming strings that rumbled away towards the flying bridges that led to the main tracks down the cable. High above, the hard bright point of Fomalhaut shone close to the apex of the ring-arch; below, the deck of white ammonia-ice clouds stretched out towards the distant horizon.

  Yes, just another day out on the skin of the Whale . . .

  It was so familiar, and yet different somehow. Thin, insubstantial, like the backdrop for a pageant. An idealised approxim
ation of reality. The world we see is not the world that is, the commissar had once said. Our minds conjure it moment to moment from imperfect and fractional sensory impressions. We are unable to truly comprehend what is because our minds aren’t capable of processing sufficient information. So we inhabit a world of shadows and guesses and fictions. But the Mind will be able to process so much more. Its internalised world will be so much closer to the real world; it will be able to manipulate the raw stuff of reality as we are able to shove around crude blocks of atoms. It will seem to us like one of the gods of the long-ago. In the moment it is kindled, it will change everything. We will become no more than ghosts and shadows, he’d whispered. In fact, because what it will do will echo backwards through the abyss of time, we are already no more than ghosts and shadows . . .

  Inas’ bot was signing again. Telling Ori that her information was useful, and there was much that needed to be processed.

  I think you need to meet someone.

  Who?

  You’ll see.

  What are you planning, Inas? Why don’t you trust me?

  But Inas’ bot had gone off-line. After a moment, it spun around and marched away towards the garage. Ori set her own bot to auto and cut the link, and sat up in the immersion chair. Several people stood around it, people from her crew. Two seized her arms.

  ‘What’s this?’ Ori said.

  Emere said, ‘Inas says that we can trust you. Now it’s time to test that trust.’

  Ahe raised a hand, a patch caught between thumb and forefinger. ‘But we don’t completely trust you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She slapped the patch against Ori’s cheek. Ori’s face went numb in an instant, and darkness crowded in and everything turned over and slid away, and then she was somewhere else. A small, dimly lit space that stank of piss and blood and old sweat. Someone helped her sit up – it was Inas.

  ‘You told me that our conversations were private,’ Ori said. ‘You lied.’

  ‘We weren’t sure if you’d be entirely candid if you knew that everyone knew about them,’ Inas said, and touched a finger to Ori’s lips when she started to ask another question.

  Emere and Ahe and the others crouched on either side, all of them looking towards, but not directly at, a person who lay in a kind of nest of blankets. A True. His right arm was wrapped in a halflife bandage and held across his bare chest by a sling around his neck. His head was bandaged too, and one eye was obscured by a crust of blood and there was a livid burn on his cheek. A sack of clear fluid was taped to the wall above him and a line ran from it to the crook of the elbow of his left arm.

  He looked at Ori, who tried and failed to meet his gaze. ‘The enemy has the Whale for now, but that’s a temporary set back,’ he said. ‘You understand?’

  Ori nodded. She realised now what had kept the crew together, and felt a bitter disappointment. The True was badly injured and survived only because of their care, and yet he commanded them.

  ‘Tell me you understand!’

  Inas nudged Ori, who said dutifully, ‘This one is yours to command.’

  ‘I’m told I can trust you,’ the True said. ‘I’d like to be certain of it.’

  ‘She was one of us before,’ Inas said. ‘She came back to find us, and she gave us the information I gave you.’

  ‘But she works—’

  The True began to cough and couldn’t seem to stop. A racking retching that darkened his face and convulsed his entire body. Emere smoothed a patch on to his chest. As the convulsions began to ease, she dabbed blood from his mouth and nose, and Ahe held a cup to his lips.

  He drank greedily, pushed Emere and Ahe away. ‘I need better drugs,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Majister,’ everyone said.

  ‘What I was saying, she works for them,’ he said. ‘And who knows what they did to her, before they brought her back.’

  ‘She works for Commissar Doctor Pentangel so that she can tell us everything he is doing,’ Inas said.

  ‘Yes, the traitor. She was one of his before it all went to shit, and she’s still one of his. That’s what I mean about trust. I don’t like this. If you let her go she could tell them about you, and if the enemy put you to the question, one of you would talk. I know you would.’

  Everyone around Ori denied it.

  ‘Or they’d watch you, find out about me that way,’ the True said. ‘Easiest way of dealing with this problem, you kill your little friend.’

  Ori said, ‘What do you want?’

  The True looked at her.

  She said, ‘Do you want to regain control of the Whale, or do you want to destroy it?’

  ‘If you know of a way of killing all the enemy without destroying the Whale, I’d like to hear it.’

  ‘I know what the enemy wants to do. They want to create a Mind. That’s the only reason they came to Cthuga. Suppose I can help you stop that?’

  It was pure bravado. She felt her pulse behind her eyes as she met the True’s bloodshot gaze and waited for judgement.

  At last, the True laughed. ‘At least one of you has a spine.’

  Emere said, ‘Our lives are yours, Majister.’

  The True ignored her, saying to Ori, ‘How closely do you work with the traitor?’

  ‘He talks to me from time to time.’

  ‘Then you can prove your loyalty, and sabotage their plans, all at once,’ the True said. ‘Kill the traitor. Kill Commissar Doctor Pentangel. Do it by the end of today. If you don’t, I’ll have your friends kill you.’

  7

  The Child dreamed while she slept. A dream inside her dream of becoming. A dream of what she had once been and what she would be once more.

  It was not our doing. Yet again, we had been shut out of full access to the viron, this time by those who had been lurking at the margins of our mother’s story while they developed deep links with the systems that controlled the ship and subtly influenced every kind of sensor, so that we saw only what they wanted us to see. Now they made their presence known because they needed our mother to complete their project and their enemy was mounting a counterattack on the vital facility they had captured and they feared that they would lose it. As far as they were concerned, there was no time left for any kind of instruction but a brutal and swift force-feeding.

  And so the Child dreamed her way back into her adult self. A great flickering download of information. An entire library opening inside her head. Scenes from the life of her first iteration, strung together by emotional cues. If a caterpillar dreams of becoming a butterfly, that was the kind of dream she had. Of leaving São Gabriel da Cachoeira and travelling downriver to take up a menial position at a minor agricultural research facility. The bitter revelation that talent and ambition counted for less than accidents of birth. And worse, that she was a woman in a patriarchal society where women were considered most useful as the servants of men and the bearers of their children. And then her lucky break. Her discovery by the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos, who gifted her with a scholarship that gave her the time and resources to elaborate her first truly original ideas, and to understand how she must shape herself and her career so that she could win from the world her heart’s desire.

  In a flicker of images culled from the archives we had so painstakingly reconstructed, she dreamed of her growing success. Of developing a novel artificial photosynthesis system more efficient than any other then known, including those created by the greatest gene wizard of all, the Outer, Avernus. Of running a research facility that designed biological weapons; of taking Oscar Finnegan Ramos’ place when he retired, and becoming the Peixoto family’s chief gene wizard. Of her brief liaison with Stamount Horne, a one-eighth-consanguineous member of the Peixoto family and second-in-command of their security service, who before they could consummate their relationship in marriage had been killed in one of the interminable brush wars with bandits. Sri had allowed Stamount’s son to come to term, a companion for her firstborn, Alder, who’d been cloned from her own flesh. T
he two growing up together in her private Antarctic research facility. Alder and Berry. Alder brilliant and resourceful; Berry sullen and troubled. She dreamed of them playing in a forest of dwarf beech trees. Blond head by dark.

  And she dreamed of the war between Earth’s three great power blocs and the city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The Quiet War. A war of stealth and sabotage, infiltration, economic destabilisation, diplomatic manoeuvres. A war with no real beginning, developing in a cascade of consequences as the symptoms of a genetic syndrome unfold from a single misplaced base. A war that had determined the future of the entire human species. A war to which she had contributed so much, and which had entangled her, almost fatally, in the internal politics of the Peixoto family: she’d been forced to murder her old mentor and flee Greater Brazil, and Earth, taking Berry with her, leaving Alder behind.

  The war had ended in the defeat of the Outers and the escape of their great gene wizard, Avernus. And Sri had grown ever more powerful, synthesising new wonders based on techniques harvested from Outer knowledge bases and her discoveries in gardens created and abandoned by Avernus. She dreamed of her first attempt at becoming more than human. Her withdrawal from all the worlds on which she had influence; a retreat to Janus, one of Saturn’s icy little moons, where she built a unique habitat and spent most of her time trying to learn how to outwit death. An experiment had backfired. She’d grown vast because of an incurable cancer, and then she’d become that cancer – or perhaps it had become her. For many years she’d been confined in a vat in her secret garden, beneath the surface of Janus. Estranged from her sons, from the rest of humanity. Dependent on the kindness of her new children: children she’d grown using her own genome as a template.