In the Mouth of the Whale (16 page)

‘Can we get to where we’re going as quickly as possible? Or do you take some kind of twisted pleasure in boring me to death?’

‘Come this way,’ I said.

We had paused in a colonnaded passage between two scenarios. A neutral space, although there was a trap at the far end, a slow sink into which most novices stumbled. I’d managed to avoid it more by luck than judgement when I’d first been tested, spotting the dust motes that hung unmoving in a beam of red sunlight slanted in front of the archway that led to the next scenario. As long as you kept out of the light by edging along the wall in which hundreds of memorial tablets were set, you could pass safely, but just one touch of the light froze the processing space that supported your avatar and released a minor demon from a trap in the ceiling.

Prem followed me around one of the stone pillars and said, when I opened a door that until I touched it looked no different from the rest of the pillar, ‘Is this another silly trial?’

‘You asked me to get to our destination as quickly as possible. It’s this way.’

Like other navigators, I had tutored apprentices after I had gained my full set of algorithms, and knew how to move quickly from one part to another through jumps, short cuts, and back doors. I took Prem through one of the back doors now, a metal stair that wound in a tight corkscrew up a stone chimney that pierced three floors and emerged on a broad balcony high above the dead garden where we had entered the training suite. Prem walked to the waist-high balustrade and leaned out, taking in the view of crooked roofs and spires and towers stretching away to the horizon.

As I stepped beside her, she grinned at me, and said, ‘It’s so big! I didn’t realise!’

‘Even in its current debased state, the Library contains worlds.’

‘And it looks so very old.’

‘Much of its architecture is based on an ancient city on the home world. The City of a Hundred Spires, otherwise known as the Golden City.’

‘Is it your design?’

‘It is the design of the Quicks, who first made the Library. We are rebuilding it in the image of what it once was.’

‘You cleave to the past instead of making something new.’

Prem’s knowing smile made me feel that I’d said too much, or said the wrong thing. I said, ‘The destruction of the Library at the beginning of the first war was a major setback. We must first return to where we were before we can move forward.’

‘Only if you want to keep moving in the same direction,’ Prem said. ‘Can we get there from here? Is there another secret door?’

‘That is only a representation of one small part of the Library. To reach the real thing, we would have to pass through one of its translation frames. And I am afraid that you would not find the real thing half as pretty. We’ve been working here for four generations, but most of the Library is still ruined or warped. If we’d continued on the tour, you would have seen something of that, in the upper levels.’

‘I hope to see the real thing next time,’ Prem said. She leaned out and looked straight down at the winter garden, with its conifers and white paths. ‘What if I jumped? Would I die?’

‘It would end this session.’

‘Some of those demons would kill me, but the fall wouldn’t?’

‘Your avatar would fall because it is affected by the physics of the Library, which are modelled on the physics of the real world. Demons and the other haunts can harm you because they can infect your mind via the link with the avatar.’

‘Would it hurt?’

‘You would find yourself going mad. Thinking thoughts that you knew were not your own. Or you would lose control of your senses, or of your body.’

‘I mean if I jumped.’

‘I have never tried,’ I said, and saw what she was going to do, but reached for her a moment too late.

She vaulted on to the flat top of the balustrade with such ease that I knew then that this wasn’t the first time she had controlled an avatar. Standing at the very edge, she looked straight down, then glanced over her shoulder at me. Saying, ‘We could try it together.’

‘We could walk back through the suites. There’s something you should see, before you go.’

I was in an agony of indecision. I wanted to stop her doing something stupid, not least because it would reflect badly on me, but because of her status I didn’t dare reach out and lay a hand on her.

‘I’ve seen enough of your silly little frights,’ she said. Poised at the very brink of the vertiginous drop, she looked more desirable than ever. Reckless and bold.

‘I can assure you that what happens in the Library or a hell can have consequences in the real world,’ I said.

‘Let’s see,’ Prem said, and stepped off into the void and dropped straight down, feet together and arms by her side, like a diver entering deep water from a height. I looked away, but the flat final sound of the impact echoed up from the walled garden.

Even using short cuts, it took a good ten minutes to reach the garden and return to the slab of rock in Lathi Singleton’s biome. It was fully night, now. The landscape sketched in shades of black beyond the hearth-glow of small faint lights that spun over the remains of the picnic. The two women, Prem and Lathi Singleton, sat side by side, watching as I stripped off my gear.

‘Is he competent?’ Lathi Singleton said.

Somewhere out in the dark, something howled on a long mournful note that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

‘Oh, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun together,’ Prem said.

12

Ori woke from a dream of falling and heard the voices of the supervisors outside her sleeping niche, ordering everyone to get up and fall in. It seemed that the recruits had been divided into ten teams that would take turns to ride a little way down the cable and fly real drones, out in the real air. Ori was assigned to the tenth team, the last to descend, and although she told herself that going last was good, a sign of trust, she was dismayed to see Hira marching off to the train at the head of the first team. She hadn’t realised until then how much she disliked the woman.

After a long, long wait, Ori’s team was led out of the hangar, through an airlock and a long connecting tunnel to an adjoining hangar, this one very much larger. The team was led past stacked goods of every description, through sectors for sorting and storage where lifters and other machines trundled back and forth, past low rectangular bunkers, some with windows, some without, to a curving inner wall of thick, transparent diamond. It was the sheath that held the cable inside the Whale, and the cable could be dimly seen inside it, black and grooved and latticed. Ori and the others were marched into a big airlock set in the wall of the sheath, crossed a short tunnel beyond, and were processed two by two through a smaller airlock. Ori was one of the last to pass through, into a narrow crescent of a room with a mesh floor. She followed the others up a ladder that rose through a long tube, passing floor after floor, the ladder beginning to vibrate under her fingers and toes as she climbed, until they emerged in a small, low-ceilinged disc of a room in which immersion chairs were arranged like spokes in a wheel. Ori realised then that they were aboard a train, and the deep hum and the vibrations she could feel in the soles of her feet meant that it was under way.

It did not travel far. By the time Ori and the rest of the team had checked out and activated the immersion chairs they’d been assigned, it had halted. Teo told her to take it easy and follow the instructions, but Ori hardly heard her. The drone was coming online and she was extending into it, and when the mask clamped down and the sensory feed kicked in she was
there
, clamped in a launch cradle that everted from the hangar pod and swung out and up into daylight.

She was hanging prone, head down, the hangar carriage beneath her belly, a drone sitting in a cradle on her left. Just like the beginning of every simulation, except that the simulations had always been set in infinite volumes of clear and empty air, and now she was looking straight down at a deck of pale white cloud that sheeted the sky for as far as she could see, sculpted into mountains and valleys and great continents. Flotillas of smaller clouds hung here and there above the cloud deck, more or less at the level she hung. The small clouds cast perfectly defined shadows on the cloud deck, and a sharp narrow line haloed with rainbows of refracted sunlight cut through them, running off towards the flat horizon: the shadow of the cable on which the train rode.

Ori switched to the drone’s rear sensors (it was a little like turning her neck) and saw the cable rising above, dwindling into a narrow thread, crossing the great filmy shadow of the ring-arch and vanishing into the zenith of the blue-green sky. Somewhere up there, its vast bulk lost in vast perspectives and sunlight dazzle, was the Whale and everything she had known in her life. The tank farm and the nursery where she’d spent her brief childhood. The machine shop where she’d worked first, the air-conditioning plant, the commons of jockey crew #87 and the marshalling yard spread across the flank of the Whale. Where Inas and the rest of the crew were probably working right now, prepping drones for the long drop. Ori felt a swell of hopeless longing pass through her, and then, with a kind of jolt, the rest of the drone’s systems came online. Its internal checksum showed that its power, guidance, and navigation packages were all working. A clock started up, running back from thirty to zero; off in the distance, a red dot appeared, a virtual marker floating above the cloud deck five klicks away.

‘There and back,’ Teo’s voice advised her. ‘Try not to screw up.’

The counter reached zero and started to flash; the drone beside Ori flared away from its cradle, its blunt triangles dwindling into frigid sunlit air. Ori followed more cautiously, puttering along at a shade under a hundred kilometres per hour in a dead straight course as the other drone dwindled away towards the red dot. Cross-currents buffeted her when she left the shadow of the cable, juddering in little vortices along the control surfaces of her vanes, introducing a significant vibration into the drone’s stubby wings. The autopilot flashed a warning, but she kicked up her speed a little and was able to stay in control, driving straight on at a steady pace. The other drone flashed past, travelling in the opposite direction, as she neared the red blotch of the way point. She swung around it and headed back, towards the vertical pillar of the cable. The train looked toy-like against the cable’s bulk, clinging to a track that was no more than a faint vertical line. As the cable began to fill Ori’s forward vision and the sun went behind it, the autopilot locked her out and the drone pitched up in a sharp J-turn, balancing on its thrust as it fell with clean machine precision towards the cradle of its pod and the link cut off and Ori was back in the immersion chair, her first and last practice flight over.

Teo told Ori and the rest of the team that they had all done well. That they wouldn’t return to the Whale, but would ride down on the train to the place where they would start work at once.

Ori felt a little flare of triumph. She’d been right: the Trues had saved the best until last. The rest of the team were happy too. They fetched bowls of tea from the cramped kitchen niche and sat on the floor around the immersion chairs and joked about the flocks of sprites they’d attract, the wonders they’d see.

The train descended a long way, stopping several times in refuge loops to allow trains carrying raw materials to the tip of the cable to pass before moving on again. Ori experienced a dropping sensation like riding an elevator, mixed up with her relief and happiness. Felt as if she was floating, leaving behind her old life, yes, but beginning a new and glorious chapter.

The air grew warm and humid, despite the roaring fans of the air-conditioning system. There were creaks and groans in the walls and bulkheads, sudden alarming cracks and snaps, as atmospheric pressure gloved the train ever tighter.

At last, the train stopped and Teo selected one of the recruits and sent her down the companionway, told the others to sit quiet and wait their turn. Ori wondered if everyone else was pretending that they weren’t afraid of what lay ahead. A few minutes later, the train started up again, descending, slowing, stopping, and the next recruit was dispatched. So it went until it was Ori’s turn. She followed a floating arrow down to the service level above the drone hangars, where two philosopher-soldiers, dressed in yellow coverall uniforms under their exoskeletons, were waiting by the open door of an airlock.

Ori felt a sense of stolid resignation clamp over her – the survival mechanism for her people, who had no say in their fate, who could at any moment be uprooted from their niche at the whim of any True. Despite Teo’s assurances, it was possible that she had failed after all. Perhaps she was about to be expelled into the frigid and poisonous air, and the long fall to the sea of hydrogen that wrapped the core. Although she’d burn up long before she reached it, her body mashed by pressure and charred and fragmented and blown to ashes and the vast world’s four quarters. She did not struggle. There was no point in trying to struggle. She straightened her back and did as she was told and marched into the airlock, and at once the halves of the outer door parted, exhaling a gust of cold stale air, revealing a small, dimly lit chamber.

‘You’ll serve here for ten days. The station’s AI will tell you what to do. Try not to kill yourself. The commissar hates it when that happens,’ one of the philosopher-soldiers said, and shoved her hard in the small of her back.