In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  We crouched face to face. Her grin was furnished with stout white fangs. Her eyes, reflecting light from a burning building, were blank orange discs.

  ‘I can change the physics,’ I said, and used an algorithm to draw a circle around us. Inside, time was fractionally out of step with time outside. When I stood, three stars flashed in front of my face and three little metal spikes fell out of the air.

  So protected, we walked through the town. Past burning buildings and burning vehicles. Past the bodies of men and women and chimeras – creatures with shaggy pelts and small heads, weapons still clutched in their human hands.

  Ahead was a two-storey building with a flat roof that stood at one end of a compound or yard enclosed by a white wall. All of it gleaming with sharp irreality amongst the phantoms of war. There was a door in the wall, half-hidden by flowering bushes. Prem pointed to it, told me the passenger was beyond.

  ‘So are the crew of her ship. And the enemy, too.’

  Suddenly, it was night, and the sky was the sky of the Archipelago, with one huge dim world rising beyond distant mountains whose peaks were shaped like the profile of a sleeping woman. Cthuga, half-full, mistily banded, hung inside the broad tilted plane of its rings.

  I said, ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ Prem had raised her rifle and was looking all around, ears pricked.

  I cut the algorithm that had been protecting us, and which also protected the rest of the viron from us. We would need to engage with it now. High above, silhouetted against Cthuga’s vast bland disc, the flying vehicle began to slew around, turning towards us. Ghosts plucked at my attention, little probes trying and failing to take measure of my algorithms and other tools. I slapped them away.

  ‘Something’s coming,’ Prem said.

  ‘I know. Stand behind me.’

  The gate in the wall opened, and a woman stepped out to meet us. I recognised her at once.

  It was the traitor, Bree Sixsmith.

  9

  It should have been simple. Ori had been given a direct order to kill a traitor who was openly collaborating with the enemy. Not as a slave, like Ori and the rest of the Quicks, who had changed one master for another, but as a free man, in selfish pursuit of knowledge and power without any thought for the consequences. Not only that, he’d violated her. Used her cruelly. Now that he had been brought down to her level because of his cowardice, she had every right to take her revenge.

  Yes, by any measure Commissar Doctor Pentangel deserved to die, but the very idea filled Ori with nauseous dread because it violated every principle and precept that she had been raised to obey. She had learned a degree of independence during the voyage of The Eye of the Righteous, had discovered in herself vital strength and determination, but it was not easy to shrug off generations of breeding and genetic tampering and tweaking, and a lifetime of discipline, education, and custom. She had been born a slave and had spent almost all of her life as a slave. Servitude was engraved in her genome. Quicks grumbled and bitched about their True masters, but none ever dared answer back to them, let alone think about harming them in any way.

  And apart from revenge, there wasn’t much point in killing the commissar. He had infiltrated the heart of the Ghosts’ project to create a Mind, but he was in no way essential to it. The Ghosts knew everything he knew, and more besides. They had been making plans for centuries. His death would be less than a speck of grit in the slow and sure grinding of their gears. And besides all that, Ori knew that even if she could bring herself to do it by whatever means she could find, it would be hard to kill him unobserved; she would be killed immediately afterwards, and the Ghosts might make the connection between her and the crew, and kill them too. And that would be a grievous waste, for she believed that she was valuable in her own way. A conduit of useful information. An insider who might be able to find a way to sabotage the project or at least delay it, prevent it reaching completion before the rumoured counterattack.

  In short, she knew that the True was wrong, and the order he’d given her was wrong. Inas and the others obeyed him because they didn’t know how not to obey, but Ori had won a small measure of freedom. She had learned that she could control her own life, make her own decisions. She could see that his order was irrational, that he didn’t want the commissar killed because it would hinder the enemy, but because it would avenge and erase a disgraceful blot on the honour of the Trues. But she also knew that if she didn’t find a way to kill the commissar, the True would send someone to kill her. And given that he was crazy and malicious, he’d probably order Inas to do it.

  Ori had a sudden, vivid and horribly graphic image of the two of them grappling to the death and her stomach clenched and she threw up in the gutter of the corridor. She leaned her forehead against the wall’s smooth, cool plastic, ignored by Quicks and Ghosts hustling past, gripped by the dismal knowledge that she had no choice. That the one thing that would cause the least harm and the most good was to try to get the commissar on his own, kill him as quickly and silently as possible, and either hide his body or dispose of it. Disable his exoskeleton somehow, so he’d be helpless. Poison him. Bludgeon him. Cut his throat. Give him the long drop he’d so often threatened to give her and the other Quicks he’d recruited. It wouldn’t be easy, and she didn’t know if she could go through with it, but she would try her best.

  And so, sick to her stomach, burdened with dread, Ori returned to the workshop. Standing on a high gantry, she scanned the knots and flows of Ghosts amongst the printers, makers and other machinery down on the floor, and at last saw the commissar tick-tocking stiffly up a spiral stairway towards one of the rooms that jutted from the wall that encircled the chamber.

  Follow him, she thought. Wait until he is alone and unaware. Wait until he takes one of his catnaps in some corner. Sneak up. Do it.

  She descended to the floor of the workshop and started around it, searching for a useful weapon. A boltgun, a hot-wire saw, a hammer. But almost immediately she was caught up in a small crowd of Ghosts that coalesced out of the busy swirl and surge of the crowd. Hands grasped her arms, voices sang out, telling her that her time had come, and she was whirled away and carried up the curve of a walkway to a cold white room that stank of blood and burned meat.

  Half a dozen Quicks, all of them the commissar’s recruits, sat side by side against one wall. The bodies of two Quicks lay a few metres away, their skulls open, scooped clean. Ghosts twittered around a table where another Quick lay, her head obscured by a squat device. Ori recognised it at once: the commissar had shown it to Ori and the others a few days ago. It was a bush robot. Inside the Quick’s head, a cloud of micromanipulators were dividing and dividing and dividing, mapping hundreds of thousands of neurons and axial and glial cells every second, recording the data, stripping back another layer of her cortex. Destroying her mind even as it built a replica inside a data bank. A great and holy translation, according to the commissar. A sacrifice and a rebirth. Ori had believed that it wouldn’t happen for days and days, but here it was, with Ghosts throwing windows crammed with indices back and forth, Ghosts chanting solemnly in counterpoint to the bush robot’s buzzing song.

  Ghosts pushed Ori forward and forced her to sit. She didn’t struggle; there were too many of them. She was afraid and angry, and felt something stirring behind her eyes. Her passenger. Coming out to look. You’ll be free soon, she told it. Free to fly back to where you belong.

  She nudged the Quick next to her, a slight young person named Ewe, asked her why this was happening now, without warning. Ewe shook her head. Ori leaned out, asked the others. No one would look at her; no one replied. All of them settled in passive resignation. Only Ori watched as Ghosts swung the bush robot away from its victim and tipped the table sideways, so the slack body slid to the floor. The Quick at the end of the row stood up and climbed on to the table and lay down as Ghosts surrounded her. A buzzing sound: a stink of burned blood and bone: a bowl-shaped piece of skull, covered in skin and
hair, falling to the floor, kicked away by one of the Ghosts.

  Ori wondered why she didn’t stand up. Walk out of there. Would the Ghosts stop her? She had a brief fantasy of opening one of the big airlocks. A freezing poison hurricane slamming through the workshop, Ghosts choking and dying. But first she would find Commissar Doctor Pentangel . . .

  The floor jolted under her. A quick lift and fall. And then another. Everything shaking with a grinding roar that drilled through Ori’s body. Then the room tilted some five degrees and the buzzing song of the bush robot faltered. Ghosts chanted louder; Ghosts wiped out windows, pulled down new ones. It seemed that the interruption had fatally compromised the transfer. Some of the Ghosts were disengaging the bush robot from its victim; the rest turned and left the room.

  Ori stood up and followed them, stepping carefully along the tilted floor. Just like that. She had a giddy airy feeling. As if she had become a ghost herself. A ghost amongst Ghosts. Her entire skin tingled. She expected to be challenged at every moment, but she was not.

  The worst part was crossing the floor of the workshop, walking with the tilt, downhill. It was crowded with Ghosts, some working around makers and the big pressure shell, others splitting into small groups and heading off in different directions with purposeful strides. Ori saw her chance and followed one group as it cut through the agitated crowd. Head bowed, trying her best to keep her expression blank, she walked right out of the workshop and broke away and dodged into a serviceway. Ten minutes later, she was in the nearest jockey commons, prepping an immersion chair, and then she was riding a bot, out on the skin of the Whale.

  10

  The three children looked at each other, and then one stepped forward. A boy of eight or nine with light brown skin, dressed in a futbol shirt and shorts. Barefoot. Crew-cut hair dyed wheat-blond. Hands twisting around each other, his gaze averted in fear and respect, he told Sri, ‘We cannot give you control of the ship because we have lost it. The Ghosts have it now.’

  ‘We are so sorry,’ the other two children, both young girls, said as one.

  ‘You thought you could hide me from the war,’ Sri said. ‘Sneak in, settle on some anonymous rock, keep me safe. Change the way I thought so I’d want to hide. But it didn’t work out, did it?’

  ‘We did what we thought was best,’ the boy said.

  He and the two girls were pictures of abject misery. As if awaiting punishment for some crime they couldn’t quite comprehend. But Sri couldn’t blame them for their foolishness and failures. After all, their faults were hers: she’d made errors in some part of their design; she’d made them too protective, too loyal.

  She told the children that she knew everything. That she knew the accident which had wrecked her starship had been no accident; that it had been badly damaged in a civil war between two factions of its crew over what to do after they discovered that the Fomalhaut system had been colonised by the Quick. The conservative faction had defeated those who’d wanted to wake their mother, but during the fierce fighting the coldcoffin which contained Sri’s vastly altered body had been comprehensively wrecked. The surviving children had constructed a viron, quickened a kernel of Sri’s consciousness ripped from her highly distributed nervous system, and tried to reconstruct her by guiding her through a simulacrum of her childhood. They’d downloaded themselves into the viron too, because by that time the starship’s lifesystem was failing and its drive system was hopelessly crippled, greatly extending the time it would take to reach Fomalhaut.

  ‘You deleted much, but there was much that you couldn’t delete. But it doesn’t matter. I forgive you because you brought me back to life and kept me safe. I forgive you even though you have entangled me in the war you hoped to avoid, and delivered me into the hands of my enemies. Because, without knowing it, you have brought me within reach of a place where I can at last become truly posthuman.’

  The red-haired mercenary told Sri that now she understood what she had once been, now she had been given the first glimpse of what she could be, it was time to move on. ‘You have the potential to become so much more than you are. We will help you fulfil that potential.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘You know me from another life, as I know you. I am Sada Selene.’

  Sri rifled through slabs of memory, came up blank. ‘You have an advantage over me,’ she said. ‘A very small one, so don’t think it’s useful.’

  ‘I am a Ghost,’ Sada Selene said. ‘Long dead, like you. Kept alive in a viron, like you. I helped to start the Quiet War. Later, I led the crusade to drive Earth’s so-called Three Powers from the Saturn system—’

  ‘And I defeated you,’ Sri said.

  ‘You helped wreck the first and best chance of setting humanity on the right path,’ Sada said. ‘It was a mistake. History went badly wrong after it. But still, that wrong turning led us here, to this point. Where we have forgiven you. Where we will go forward together, and become so powerful that we can reach back, and erase all mistakes. You say you don’t remember me, but you will. One way or another.’

  Sri knew that the Ghosts neither forgave nor forgot. After all, how could you spend centuries plotting to change the course of the past without dreaming of the triumphant moment when every defeat, every betrayal, every slight, would be erased? Without hoping that your enemies would feel a moment of abject desperation before they, too, completely and irrevocably disappeared? And she was most definitely one of their enemies.

  She gestured towards her mother, Ama Paulinho, her friend Roberto, and the others. ‘And these. They are Ghosts, too.’

  ‘We are many,’ her mother said.

  ‘More than you can imagine,’ Father Caetano said.

  ‘I’m surprised to see any of you here,’ Sri said. ‘I remember that most of you were destroyed at Saturn. And most of the rest ran away.’

  ‘And here we both are, light years and centuries later,’ Sada said. ‘Can you say honestly that you didn’t run away, too?’

  ‘I grew bored,’ Sri said. ‘The Solar System was becoming too crowded with little utopias. My fault. I gave them the oases, the gardens. I don’t regret that. But it all became so stiflingly nice. One of those pauses in history without wars or any serious conflict. Without anything really interesting going on. So I lit out for the territories, to start over. One of the first to do so.’

  ‘And the last to arrive,’ Sada said. ‘Badly damaged and in dire need of aid.’

  ‘Is this where we begin to bargain?’

  ‘You have nothing to bargain with,’ Sada said coolly. ‘Only an ancient ship that’s coming apart at every seam. So badly damaged by its long voyage that we had to rescue it, take it under our command. Certainly you have no future without our help. Because the future’s overtaken you. And it’s ours. We have reached out and taken it. The future is ours, and soon the past will be ours, too.’

  Sri laughed. ‘You’re like every religion that ever was. Claiming that only you know the truth. Claiming that you have access to ultimate power. Failing in every respect to demonstrate that those claims are backed by any semblance of truth.’

  Sada flared with anger. ‘Enough! You are in our power. You’ve been trying to gain control of your ship, but it isn’t working, is it?’

  It was true. Sri had been trying to extend herself into her ship, but it was like the bad time when she’d woken in the vat and tried to mesh the image of her body in her brain with the monstrous growth her body had become.

  She said, ‘You want to send a message into the past to your prophet. A message that he will use to change the future. His future, our present. It happened once, according to you, but it didn’t work out. And now you want to try again. And you need me because my timeline extends further back than anyone else’s. I’m your best chance of doing what you need to do. So, let’s make a deal.’

  ‘You’re not much older than me,’ Sada said. ‘So don’t attach too much importance to an accident of birth.’

  ‘I attach precisely a
s much importance to it as you do,’ Sri said, calling the woman’s bluff.

  ‘It doesn’t much matter what you think,’ Sada said.

  ‘We’re here to encourage you to take the right path,’ Ama Paulinho said.

  ‘One way or another,’ Vidal Francisca said.

  ‘It’s hard, watching a child grow, knowing that she will leave you,’ her mother said. ‘But there is also the joy of watching her become all she can be.’

  Sri said, ‘If you wanted to force me to do this thing for you, you would have already done it.’

  ‘We’ll give you eternal life,’ Father Caetano said. ‘Just to begin with.’

  ‘Eternal life as your servant,’ Sri said.

  ‘We are all servants of a higher power,’ Father Caetano said.

  ‘Does anyone else have anything to offer?’

  Roberto shrugged and smiled and said, ‘All life is change.’

  There was a familiar yellow flash in his gaze and he threw something at Sri. A package of information swift and unstoppable as a bullet, piercing her, unfolding.

  All the Ghosts howled in anger. Sada Selene and Vidal Francisca suddenly had pistols in their hands, and they shot Roberto and he fell as gunshots echoed off the walls of the compound.

  Sada rounded on Sri. ‘What did he do? What did he give you?’

  Sri tried to ignore the woman’s pistol. She wasn’t certain that she could be killed, truly killed, in the viron, but Roberto definitely seemed dead. Lying face down in blood pooling around his head, blood spreading across the back of his shirt from a cratered wound the size of her fist. She believed that she knew who he was – who he really was. And felt, for the first time since she’d woken, a cool measure of hope.

  She said, ‘He wasn’t one of you, and you didn’t know it. That’s interesting.’

  ‘What did he give you?’

  ‘Nothing important.’