In the Mouth of the Whale (14 page)

Everyone agreed that even by True standards the commissar was crazy. He was the scion of an obscure clan who had been pursuing a line of research into the origin and behaviour of sprites that had been considered marginal and mostly worthless. His theory that Cthuga had its origins outside the Fomalhaut system, that it was a wanderer captured by the young star, and that it contained an ancient alien intelligence, was widely derided. And then the quake had struck, and the commissar had seen a pattern and seized the opportunity to promote himself and his work. He had correlated and mined records and reports, determined that almost two hundred Quick had been affected by close encounters with sprites, and won the resources to turn as many as possible into living probes.

Even those amongst the Quick recruits who believed that there was a Mind inhabiting Cthuga’s core – and not everyone believed there was – thought him crazy. They claimed that the Mind was derived from the mind of the Quick seedship, which had achieved true self-awareness and flung itself into Cthuga and vastened itself long before the Trues had arrived at Fomalhaut. Some claimed that it was preparing to liberate them from the tyrannies of the True, and they had been touched by the Mind and had received living parts of it as a first step in that liberation. They were holy vessels. They were carrying a holy fire. Others believed that the Mind had grown so vast and strange in its new environment that it had no interest in them apart from a small residual curiosity about its origins; that if it had been intending to free them, it would surely have done so by now, and since it had not, it never would. And others thought that there was no evidence that the sprites had anything to do with the Mind, and were not even evidence of its existence.

Ori was amongst the agnostics. She didn’t believe in the Mind, but she didn’t disbelieve in it, either. All she knew was that something had touched her, had become a part of her. Still, some of the stuff in the indoctrination sessions was entertaining. She learned, for instance, that the sprites were created by fluctuations in Cthuga’s magnetic field so powerful that their induced electrical fields affected the link between bots and drones and their operators, and made neurons fire in the retinas of the operators’ eyes and in their visual cortices. Operators did not ‘see’ sprites through the cameras and other sensors of their bots and drones (which did not record the presence of the sprites) but in their mind’s eye. The cold violet flame that Ori had seen had been an hallucination caused by interaction between her bot’s uplink, the sprite’s intense magnetic field, and her own brain. But there was no explanation as to why the brains of some operators were permanently changed by these encounters while others were not. And if the True philosophers had any ideas about the long-term effects of the changes, they kept them from the recruits.

Ori knew only one of the other recruits in her group, a sour little person named Hira. They’d worked in the machine shops before Ori had been promoted to jockey crew #87. Back then she and Hira had been in neighbouring crews; Ori had played handball and rush and high-low castle against her, and once had comprehensively trumped her in a shadow play. Hira had got into trouble after Ori had moved on to ride bots, and had been demoted to one of the crews that rode the big, dumb machines that patched and healed cancerous and necrotic lesions in the Whale’s halflife skin. She had been working out on the skin when the quake hit, a sprite had sprung up around her like a cold flame and had messed with her head, and here she was, philosopher fodder.

‘You’re nothing special,’ she told Ori at the end of their second day, as they cleaned one of the bathrooms. ‘You might think you’re a hero because of what you did with that probe, but you aren’t any better than me, or anyone else here. We’re experimental animals fooled into thinking we’re being trained to do important work, when really we’re going to end up as bait. Live meat on a hook hung out to attract monsters.’

‘Monsters?’

‘There’s more and more activity around the Whale, and all around Cthuga, too,’ Hira said. ‘I heard it’s because the enemy is coming. The Mind is getting excited about that. It’s reaching out. It wants to make contact. And when it does, when it touches the enemy and learns what they have to offer, it’ll turn on us.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘You know how Trues are. They talk to each other as if we’re not there. And I’ve been talking to people who heard them talk. Why we’re here, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The commissar claims he will use us to make contact with the Mind. His bosses think they can use us to get some insight into how the Mind might attack us, and how they can defend themselves against it. They say they’re training us, but this is really the first of a series of experiments that will test us to destruction.’

Ori remembered now that Hira had got into trouble for spreading gossip about the senior member of another crew. She was insecure because her ambition exceeded her talent; she liked to pretend that she knew more than she did to make herself seem more important, to make herself the centre of attention. Ori made the mistake of teasing Hira, questioning the logic of her assertions, asking why, if the Mind was planning to attack Trues, it hadn’t ever latched on to one of them. Hira was in the middle of recounting a wildly improbable story about Trues who, having been driven insane by contact with the Mind, had been exiled to a secret pelagic station, when one of the supervisors discovered them. They were promptly scourged, assigned to extra shifts of cleaning work, and warned that if they broke regulations again they’d be given the long drop.

Ori tried to keep away from Hira after that. The woman was trouble. Her talk about infection and the malignant intent of the Mind might be silly fantasies, but they skirted close to sedition. The best way to get through this was to ignore all speculations, and buckle down. She didn’t mind the scut work, which was no different to scut work back in the jockeys’ commons, and she tried not to mind the invasive and unpleasant tests, the way the philosopher-soldiers handled her like a piece of meat. Paralysing her with nerve blocks. Inflicting casual pain. Talking about her as if she couldn’t understand them.

Once, they did something that intensified the vague and ghostly presence of the sprite. For a moment it seemed to be standing in front of her as she lay spread-eagled and helpless, and everything around her flared bright and sharp. Then it was gone, and a cold front of endorphin shock rolled across her. The world went completely flat and lifeless and she was sinking away from it into darkness and she didn’t much care. ‘We’re losing her,’ one of the Trues said, and one of the machines around her raised a spidery articulated arm and shot her full of something that slammed her back inside her aching skull, back to the world.

She couldn’t ask the Trues what they had done, but she would have done anything to experience that feeling again. She would even have given up the chance to fly for it.

That was the good part. The flying. It was only in virtuality to begin with, and the drones were stubby and slow, nothing like the swift sleek raptors that Ori had coveted for so long, but it was flying all the same, and she was determined to master every aspect of it as quickly as possible.

The supervisor of Ori’s group, Teo, was a tough, practical, hard-headed old bird who’d been working for the commissar ever since he’d arrived on Cthuga.

‘You have to forget everything,’ Teo told her charges. ‘Everything about your former life. It no longer exists. What you once were no longer matters. All that matters now is the change you’re undergoing, and what you’re going to become when it’s finished. There was no before. There’s only this. This is the world. Our world, sole and entire. And the commissar is our god, like in the old, old stories. He made the world and he made us too. Yes, he did. Everything you think you remember, about a life before this? He made those memories too. And he made the Mind, to give us a purpose. And that purpose is to fly straight and well, and to attract as many sprites as we can. Either you learn how to do that, or you’ll take the long drop. Not for wasting my time, but for wasting the commissar’s.’

To begin with, Ori had to unlearn everything she knew about riding bots. She’d been in daily and intimate contact with her bot for more than three hundred days, a symbiotic relationship that had left deep imprints in her body and the motor centres of her brain. Now she had only a short time to shake off every reflex and habit, and learn how to ride a new and very different body, one that locked her legs together and turned her belly into the maw of a ramjet, and her arms into vanes, binding them to her sides and locking her wrists to her hips; the only freedom of movement that she had was in her hugely enlarged thumbs and fingers. She learned how to think in three dimensions at all times, how to use the drone’s visual, acoustic and radar sensorium to continually sweep out a spherical volume kilometres across. She learned how to tilt and feather the vanes to adjust attitude, how to avoid stalling, and how to surrender to the drone’s autopilot if she did stall, how to activate hover mode.

Truthfully, it wasn’t much more than a point-and-click operation. She could choose the flight path and make gross manoeuvres, but the drone’s autopilot made most of the fine adjustments, gave warnings about rough or choppy air and other dangers, and would take over from her if she ignored those warnings. She was bait – Hira had been right about that, at least. She was riding the machine because her presence in the downlink might attract the attention of sprites, and the drone gave off all kinds of complex, pulsing electromagnetic signals and visual displays designed to attract them, too. But she was also doing what she’d always dreamed of doing. She was flying.

At the end of every session in the immersion chair, Ori had to endure more medical tests, or do hours of housekeeping work before she could climb into her sleeping niche. She had little time to reflect on her new situation, or to miss the familiar, comfortable commons of jockey crew #87, or to wonder what Inas was doing. Her dreams were always about flying, and always ended in the same way: a long tumbling fall, fighting battering winds as she tried and failed to restart her motor, falling and falling into hot crushing darkness from which she woke in a panic, chest heaving as she tried to grab air, heart thumping so loudly that it seemed to echo off the sides of the cramped sleeping niche. She’d reach for Inas’ hot, muscular body and find only air. She’d open her eyes and see light burning at the margins of the niche’s curtain, hear the hum of pumps and the small noises of someone tinkering with a rig, one of the philosopher-soldiers talking, and someone else laughing. She’d remember where she was, and calm down and fall asleep again, and wake when her supervisor ripped back the curtain and told her to move her sorry ass, it was the start of a brand new shift and it was time to get to work.

Teo bullied and cajoled Ori and everyone else in the group; Ori’s own pride and stubbornness made her repeat every action until she got it right, and then repeat it again, over and over, until it was a reflex.

At last, everyone was assembled before Commissar Doctor Pentangel, who told them that their testing was almost over. They would rest tonight, and tomorrow they would complete a final test before they received their assignments.

Ori stood in the last rank this time and was able to count those standing in front of her and to either side. There were at least fifty people missing. Two had failed in her group; many more in others. The official line was that those who’d failed had been returned to their ordinary duties, but everyone knew that they had been given the long drop. Disappeared like a piece of malfunctioning machinery that wasn’t worth repairing, like toxic trash. It could still happen to her.

There were no housekeeping duties afterwards and the recruits were allowed to associate freely as they cooked and served and ate their evening meal. They speculated about where they would go, whether to the train or to one of the pelagic stations. Hira, at the centre of a small group of acolytes, seemed as usual to know more than most. She said that the train was for the best recruits because it faced the most dangers.

‘The further down you go, the more sprites you find,’ she said. ‘Sprites, and other things. Things that can eat you whole, from the inside out.’

‘We used to frighten each other with stories like that when we were little,’ Ori said. ‘Ghouls and ghosts and other horrors.’

‘Just because they were stories told by children doesn’t mean that they aren’t true. Every story must grow from something, after all.’

Hira seemed unreasonably cheerful about the prospect of meeting monsters. She claimed that she had aced her tests, and said that it didn’t matter how well they flew, fast or slow. They only flew to attract sprites. They were all bait.

‘That’s what this last test is about, I bet. Not just about flying, but about what we attract. And if you don’t attract anything . . .’ She held out her hand palm down, thumb up, then slowly turned it down.

10

Vidal Francisca sat in the stern of the skiff with the Child’s mother and Father Caetano, chatting casually, utterly at ease. As if he was the master and commander of the little vessel as it powered upriver. Dressed in a camo blouson and trousers and polished boots laced up to his knees, a pistol holstered at his hip, an aluminium case at his feet.

The Child watched him from the shade of the awning, reviewing her plan. She was surprised at how calm she felt and thought it a good sign. Vidal Francisca wanted to show that he could protect her and her mother. Wanted to prove that they needed him. That they couldn’t do without him. All right, then: she would call him on it. Challenge his arrogant assumption and show him up for the fool that he was. She looked off at the trees crowded above crazed and cracked humpback mudbanks along the edge of the river, hugging her knees, doing her best to hide her glee.