In the Mouth of the Whale (18 page)

No, the Child’s world was too rich and strange for linear control. It proceeded with its own logic. We could intervene with what would appear to be miracles, and we could manipulate or possess various characters, but we could not directly interfere with the Child’s consciousness or override her free will. Not only because of the risk of serious damage to the cloud of agents that were the constituent parts of her personality, but also because we had not created the story to take charge of the Child. We had done so out of love and duty. The Child was our mother, born again. And we wanted a true resurrection. We did not want to force her to make the right choice once we reached our destination, because we would have to change her personality, make her more docile, strip her of much of the vital complexity that defined and informed her genius. We could guide her, yes, and instruct her as best we could. But she had to take that final step on her own, or else it would be worthless.

We were not the mistresses of our mother’s story. We were its servants.

The heart may beat more quickly when it responds to a hormonal flood, but what does it know about the confusion of love? Does the small intestine understand the significance of the ritual wafer as it breaks down the wafer’s complex carbohydrates to glucose? Those of us cut to find persistent patterns in human lives and human history recall the stories of the long-ago and ask how much the horse of the humble parfait knight understands of its master’s quest. It knows the road but not the reason it carries its master down that road. It knows the weight of its master and his armour. It knows that each day it sets out on another of an unending series of long and exhausting journeys through strange and new places. It knows the heat of the sun, and the cold whip of winter wind and rain. It knows a plodding routine punctuated by bright and bloody moments of combat or intervals of respite when it shares the stables of some strange castle with others of its kind. And at the end of its master’s quest, when he enters the ancient chapel in the heart of the forest and kneels before the Grail, his horse stands outside, waiting patiently as always. Perhaps the grass it rips from the flower-starred turf is sweeter than mundane grass. Perhaps it feels dim and unknown emotions stir inside it when the pure and holy light of the Grail floods through the open door of the chapel. But does it understand how close it stands to the ineffable? Has it any conception of infinite mercy and wisdom? Is it changed?

We were as a flea in the mane of that horse. As a worm in its gut.

We do not seek to excuse ourselves. There were checks imposed on what we were allowed to know and do, and what we were allowed to think, limitations built into our original design, but that is no excuse either, for we were created to protect our mother and in the end we failed. And even now, in the wreckage of that failure, we do not know if it was a glorious failure or a cruel defeat. There is so much we do not know. We do not even know the limits of what we do not know. This story about our mother’s story is not an excuse or an attempt to exculpate ourselves. It is an attempt to impose a metrical frame on the abyssal depths of our incomprehension.

We do know that by the time the jaguar-headed boy appeared we were irrevocably committed to our plan. Five centuries had passed since the accident in which the original of our mother was lost, but much of that time had been spent repairing and reconstructing the ship and its systems, and shaping it for its final purpose. When at last we quickened the Child’s story, Fomalhaut was the brightest star in our sky, and we were passing through the inner edge of its cloud of long-period comets. When she kept watch over the drowned boy, and first vowed to never die, we were approaching the bow shock, where the scant gases and rare dusts of the interstellar medium, at an average density of a single atom in every cubic centimetre, were stirred and churned by the turbulent front of Fomalhaut’s heliopause. The drought was two years old and the Child had just begun instruction with Father Caetano when we passed through the heliopause itself, the boundary between interstellar space and the bubble of Fomalhaut’s solar wind; when she met the jaguar-headed boy, we had just crossed the termination shock boundary, the point where the average velocity of particles blown outward by Fomalhaut’s solar winds dropped to subsonic speeds as they began to interact with the local interstellar medium.

And now, at last, we were falling through the heliosphere proper, towards the outer edge of Fomalhaut’s great dust belt and the insignificant rock that was our final destination. The rock where we hoped our mother would choose to hide while the war between the clades which had reached Fomalhaut ahead of us played out. Where she would acquire knowledge of her new home before deciding what to do.

That was our plan. We had studied the war as best we could, and had concluded that any attempt to interfere in it without proper preparation would be fatal. Nor could we make an alliance with either of the two sides. One was an old enemy, the Ghosts; they had been comprehensively defeated by our mother before she left the Solar System, and it was their nature to never forget or forgive. The other, the so-called True People, was a crude, cruel, backwards-looking and completely untrustworthy clade which had enslaved descendants of the peaceful posthuman clade which had first settled Fomalhaut. We were certain that if we made ourselves known to them, they would either make our mother their slave, or strip her of every particle of useful knowledge before killing her.

And so we had decided that the best course of action would be to hide, and bide our time. It was a conservative plan, yes, and required stealth and great patience rather than the usual bold, swift strokes by which our mother had so often defeated her enemies. We would have to work hard to teach the Child the qualities required to carry it out, for they were utterly foreign to her nature, but we believed that it was the only way she could survive contact with those who had usurped what was rightfully hers.

So we could not end the Child’s story when it began to deviate from its chosen path because we did not have enough time or resources to start over. We worried that the appearance of the jaguar boy was a spy for one of the warring factions, or that we had failed to completely purge our rebel sisters and all their works from the ship’s systems, and that he was a precusor of a resurgence of the insurrection that we had defeated centuries ago. But although we searched long and hard we could find no trace of him, and in the end we decided that he was no more than a glitch in the matrix that generated the Child’s story, and allowed it to flow on.

For a while, it seemed that it was continuing to move in the right direction. Maria Hong-Owen grew closer to Vidal Francisca after he saved her daughter’s life. Soon enough, they would make the decision that would send the Child to the school in Manaus, where she would be taught everything that would prepare her for her marriage.

We made plans to make sure that it would happen as soon as possible. There was only a little time left. It was time to push the Child towards the right direction.

It was a mistake. But we did not know it then.

There was so much that we did not know.

2

We travelled to T, Prem Singleton, the Horse, and I, on one of the ancient Quick ships: a fragile-looking cluster of bubbles elaborated around the central axis of a motor pod. None of the bubbles were especially large and most were occupied by young scions of the Singleton clan on their way to T for officer training before heading out to the front, making a lot of noise as they celebrated their last hours of civilian life. The Horse and I found a quiet spot in one of the bubbles in the innermost layer, where the scions’ baggage and other cargo was stored, and the squad of Quicks who controlled the ship’s flock of defensive drones were quartered. We tethered ourselves as best we could amongst a clutter of weapon cases, travelling wardrobes and trunks, and linked our securities. It was very likely that we were being watched, and while we couldn’t guarantee that our link was completely unbreakable, it made us feel safe enough to exchange confidences. I gave the Horse a quick precis of my interview with Lathi Singleton; he told me what he’d discovered about her son.

‘It’s not exactly a straight story, but I’ll try my best. To begin at the beginning, I did exactly as you asked. I hired someone to act as my proxy and ever so discreetly and carefully search the net. But he didn’t turn up anything beyond the usual gossip and rumour that’s attached to scions of the first families. Trivial feuds and adolescent dalliances, scandals over nothing very much in particular. Most of it put out by so-called rivals and self-styled enemies, inflating the ordinary stuff of life into cosmic drama. I can tell you who Yakob Singleton is supposed to have slept with first, who he may or may not have been sleeping with when he disappeared, who likes him and who only pretends to like him . . .’ The Horse smiled his lopsided smile. ‘But I wouldn’t dare to test your patience.’

‘You’re already testing its outer edge. Keep to the point. Prem Singleton already suspects we are colluding behind her back.’

‘She’s having too good a time carousing with her doomed cousins to bother with her kholops. Which is what we are, even though you won’t admit it.’

‘I know very well what I am, but you seem to have forgotten who
you
are. Perhaps you can start by explaining where you got those clothes.’

The Horse had turned up at the ship just a few minutes before it left Thule’s hub, dressed in a yellow tunic of soft buttery leather that fell to his knees, with a high collar and many pockets, all different sizes and colours, and scarlet hose and matching scarlet slippers. Looking clownishly ridiculous and unsettlingly exotic at the same time, and irritatingly pleased with himself.

Prem had been unaccountably amused by the Horse’s costume, greeting him with genuine courtesy, telling him that he was a valued member of our small crew. She did not possess a kholop or any other kind of servant.

‘There are many of us in the army who have fought side by side with Quicks, and have grown to like and respect them,’ she told me, and asked if I found that shocking.

I told her that my clan was often accused of being too friendly with Quicks, and said that as a result our kholops had an independence others found disgraceful. ‘The Horse is, unfortunately, an extreme example of that independence. Let me know if he ever oversteps the line.’

‘Oh, I find his eccentricity charming,’ Prem said.

Now the Horse told me that there was a very simple explanation for his new clothes. ‘The credit you gave me wasn’t enough to pay for the information you wanted, so I wagered it on a sure thing in one of the fighting pits and more than trebled it. Enough to sprinkle around as required, with a little over to buy something better fitted to the circles I had to move in than our usual gear.’

‘I’m failing to imagine any corner of civilisation where your costume could be considered acceptable.’

‘Of course you are. You have led a sheltered life. And you are wise enough to know that, and to send me to deal with matters outside the narrow confines of your upbringing and training. To cut a long and interesting story short, a simple search turned up nothing useful. I had to look elsewhere, which led me to the criminal edges of the city of tiers. And there I learned that although Yakob Singleton worked for the Office of Public Safety, he was no ordinary trooper or investigator. He had been assigned to the Department for Repression of Wreckers, which fabricates conspiracies to draw in Trues it suspects of harbouring wrecker tendencies. When they are deeply enmeshed, it arrests and disappears them.’

I said that I found it hard to believe that people could be disappeared for doing something they hadn’t done.

The Horse cocked his head in the bird-like way of Quicks. His eyes gleaming like twin stars in the shadows of the cargo that crammed the bubble. ‘Yakob Singleton and his colleagues were purveyors of fantasy. They fashioned stories for a special kind of audience. Plots involving sabotage and assassination, conspiracy theories . . . All conjured from whole cloth, pieces of fully furnished theatre. The people targeted and ensnared by the department are not selected at random, of course. They are selected because they have wrecker tendencies. That is why they willingly enter into conspiracies instead of walking away from them, as any sensible and honest person would. And so their criminal tendencies are safely channelled into areas that are wholly controlled by the department, and when they are arrested they are guilty of real crimes, and are punished accordingly. After, of course, they have been thoroughly interrogated and have given up the names of everyone they know who might also harbour the same tendencies which drew them into the net in the first place.

‘There’s a rumour that all the acts of successful sabotage and assassination carried out by wreckers were hatched by the department, but I’m sure that can’t be true,’ the Horse said. ‘After all, it would mean that there aren’t really any wreckers, and that the department isn’t engaged in protecting public safety but in threatening it so that the public will agree to any and all measures to protect them from harm – even if it means giving up some of the very rights and liberties those measures are supposed to protect. And besides, according to my informant, Yakob Singleton and his colleagues stumbled over a genuine conspiracy just before he disappeared. A mystery cult that believes that one day a ship will appear and free us from the burden of your rule.’

‘I’ve heard of such things. They’re harmless fantasies.’

‘Most are. But this was an old cult – perhaps one of the oldest. And it wasn’t hoping for a new ship, but a very old one.’