In the Mouth of the Whale (21 page)

The darkness was alive, and only she could see it.

‘All right,’ she said to her passenger. ‘All right. Now show me something else.’

4

Vidal Francisca’s steady and indefatigable campaign to woo Maria Hong-Owen had been strengthened by his having saved her daughter from an unimaginably gruesome fate at the hands of wildsiders, but he still had much to do. He was a vain man, but he was not stupid, and knew that Maria could not be won over by trivial favours and gifts. Instead, he persuaded her to join his committee of concerned citizens, which had got up a militia that patrolled the streets of the town at night, liaised with the army and the R&R Corps, and doled out shelters, cooking implements, sleeping bags and other essentials to refugees. The committee also supplied extra medical supplies to the hospital, which was now working at full stretch to cope with the additional problems caused by the influx of refugees. There had been an outbreak of a vomiting sickness: dozens of young children were being brought to the hospital with high fevers and dangerous levels of dehydration. Many of the refugees had serious endemic health problems, too. Parasites, genetic problems that needed therapies the hospital couldn’t provide, syndromes associated with old age that were likewise untreatable . . . Maria said that it was as if they were back in the twentieth century, before modern medicine had been developed.

Rumours and counter-rumours about the campaign against the wildsiders swept through the little town. Every fresh arrival brought new horror stories. Wildsiders had set up an ambush on the Trans-Amazonian highway and destroyed thirty road trains, setting fire to them and shooting anyone who tried to escape. They strung the ears of their victims in grisly necklaces. They honoured those of their comrades killed in combat by eating part of them, and before going into battle drank blood taken from captives kept especially for the purpose. Their women were worse than their men, and tortured and humiliated soldiers with degrading sexual rites. They were savages, soul-drinkers, spirits of the forest come to take revenge on despoilers. And so on, and so on.

Ancient propaganda ripped from the matrices of the ship’s files, redeployed against the intruder into the Child’s dream of her becoming.

The R&R Corps had stopped all work and dismantled its front-line camps in the forest; only a skeleton crew remained in its depot. The army set up forward positions along the main highway, flitters and drones flew regular patrols above the renewed forest to the north, patrols scouted the hills and the lower slopes of the mountains, and plastic scout boats voyaged up and down the river, all to little purpose. The enemy was mostly unseen, setting traps and ambushes, engaging in brief fierce firefights and abruptly slipping away. It was like fighting ghosts. The army sustained casualties on a daily basis, but although it was certain that the enemy had been hit hard on several occasions no bodies were ever found.

Vidal Francisca hired a crew of mercenaries to protect the sugar-cane plantation. They were from the north, some with skin no different in colour from the browns and blacks of ordinary people, some pale as ghosts. One, a young woman, had red hair and bright blue eyes and freckled skin. Something that the Child had never before seen. It was interesting how very small variations in people’s genetic make-up could have such a pronounced effect on their appearance, and on other people’s attitude towards them.

Most of the mercenaries spoke little or no Portuguese, but they were quiet, efficient, and unfailingly polite. They patrolled the perimeter of the plantation and checked its buildings, escorted Vidal Francisca wherever he went, the man riding in his electric car in his white suit and straw hat like some minor potentate, and they escorted the Child and her mother whenever they travelled the short distance from the hospital to Vidal Francisca’s house. They wore tunics and many-pocketed trousers that were pale green in default mode and when activated bent light around the wearer, turning them into human-shaped distortions like the mirages that shivered above the roads in the bright hot afternoons. Mostly, they sat around the utility barn where they bunked down and had set up an immersion tank that showed a panoptic view of the plantation and the surrounding area, patched from drones which whispered high above.

The mercenaries tolerated the Child’s questions, let her play with the tank. The red-haired woman, Sara, showed her how to strip down her pistol and put it back together. It had two fat short barrels side by side and fired what Sara called SARs – slow autonomous rounds. They were the size of honey bees, possessed a propulsion system based on two chemicals that generated volumes of hot gases when mixed together, sprouted fins that could alter their trajectory, and were different colours according to the load they carried. One kind burst in sticky nets; another delivered powerful electric shocks; a third carried a mix of fluorescent dye and a chemical that according to Sara smelled like a corpse that had been kept in a trash can in the full sun for a week.

‘The dye and the stink are hard to wash off, so we can track and identify the bad guys if they get away,’ Sara told the Child. ‘If they’re stupid, they run back to their friends. And so by letting one fish go we catch many more.’

The mercenaries had weapons that fired deadly rounds, too, and the plantation’s perimeter was sown with smart pop-up mines and patrolled by armed drones. But it was better, Sara explained, to take down any intruders with non-lethal weapons. ‘We need to know what their disposition is. How they travel, how many of them there are, what kind of weapons they have, how many days of food and water they have, what their morale is like. All that stuff.’

‘But you haven’t found any yet.’

‘They know we’re here. And they know that we have better weapons than the army. So they keep away from us. Which tells us what?’

‘They’re smart.’

‘Also that they have good intel. From people embedded in the town, most likely.’

Sara spoke fair Portuguese, and was patient and good-humoured. She pretended to be interested when the Child talked about her small menagerie and the cell cultures she looked after, and she answered as best she could the Child’s questions about the north, and the mercenary life.

One day, the army mounted a big counterattack in the hills on the other side of the Rio Negro. Many of the townspeople climbed to the top of the Fortaleza hill to watch. They made an event of it. Picnics and barbecues, a small maracatú band. The Child went up there with Ama Paulinho and her family. People ate and drank and watched as, beyond the small grid of the town laid out across the promontory, beyond the bend of the river and the low slopes of forest, army flitters manoeuvred above hilltops and poured down streams of tracer-laced rounds or shot off drones that flew in long and controlled arcs towards unseen targets, terminating in satisfying eruptions of red flame and smoke. The Child used a pair of field glasses that she had liberated from Vidal Francisca’s house. At maximum magnification, their infrared feature showed tiny white shapes moving up the dry hills – soldiers, sweeping for any of the enemy who might have survived the aerial bombardment.

Gradually, a pall of smoke from explosions and fires set in the dry forest spread out and obscured the lower slopes of the hills. As the setting sun glowered through layers of smoke, cruise missiles began to slam into the tops of the hills and the folded valleys between, a chain of explosions that sent columns of black smoke rising high into the hot still air. And then fighters from the base in Barcelos screamed in from the east, flying between the hills and the mountains and flashing in the sun’s red light as they tore through columns and veils of smoke. Six, eight, twelve of them. Raptors, according to one of Ama Paulinho’s cousins. As the thin shriek of their engines reached the watchers on the Fortaleza hill, fire erupted in their wake, a long curtain of orange flame boiling through the folded landscape, falling back before flaring up again with renewed strength.

‘That’s that for the poor bastards,’ the cousin said, and along the brow of the Fortaleza hill people clapped and cheered, and the maracatú band struck up a military polka.

The fires on the hills across the river burned all night, and a filthy snow of carbon flakes fell on Saõ Gabriel da Cachoeira. The next day, army patrols combed the blackened hills across the river, and found not a single corpse. And so we continued our war against the intruder.

Meanwhile, the Child was preoccupied with her own private war. It was clear that Vidal Francisca was conducting his campaign of seduction on several fronts. Even Ama Paulinho was being seduced. Vidal Francisca had persuaded her father to join his committee of concerned citizens, and several of her cousins patrolled with the militia.

The Child, having learned hard lessons about power and the psychology of seduction, the uses of flattery and engaging self-interest, of indirectly buying your way into someone’s trust, of giving to receive, tried to make herself useful. She devised plans to test the river water for parasites and pathogens, drew up schemes to plant out gardens in what had been the futbol field to augment the refugees’ diet, and created a virtual prototype of a simple culture system for a tweaked strain of chlorella algae rich in vitamins and essential amino acids. She knew that these schemes would work, they were timely, they could save lives, but nothing came of them because she was a child, and no one took her seriously. Not even her mother, who praised her for her hard work, and said that she should focus all that energy on her education. Even worse, her mother showed the plans to Vidal Francisca, who showered the Child with unwelcome and patronising flattery about her intelligence and vivid imagination.

At last, the Child finally mustered the necessary amount of courage to put the question she absolutely needed to ask. One pleasantly warm sunny morning at breakfast, she asked her mother if she was going to marry Vidal Francisca.

Her mother’s reaction was completely unexpected. She laughed.

The Child persisted. Now she was set on the path, she would see it through to the end. Saying, ‘It’s as if you are already married.’

Her mother looked at her with sober appraisal. ‘Because he acts as if he owns me, you mean.’

‘Because you spend so much time with him.’

It was as close as she could come to asking about whether or not her mother and Vidal Francisca were sleeping together. The idea sat inside her like a cold stone.

Her mother said, using a soft and reasonable tone of voice that the Child hadn’t heard for some time, ‘Do you know what emancipation means?’

‘It’s what happened to the slaves. They were freed from bondage. From the power of others.’

‘As were women. Once upon a time, women were the equals of men. Not only by law, although that was important, and the result of many hard-fought and difficult battles. But also by culture and by custom. Men came to accept that women should have the same rights of self-determination that they enjoyed. But then there was the Overturn, and the great crisis caused by sudden and catastrophic climate change. Famines, resource wars and plain ordinary wars. The collapse of the global economy and shifts in power.’

‘People went up to the Moon.’

‘The rich, yes.’

‘They fled to places like New Zealand at first,’ the Child said. She wanted to show that she knew all about history. ‘Places that weren’t badly affected by the Overturn. But there were too many refugees, so they went to the Moon. And then to Mars and to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We had a war with Mars.’

‘Yes, we did. And on Earth there was a war between men and women. And women lost. You won’t see it in the history texts, but it is true all the same. As true and real as any war fought over boundaries or oil or water,’ the Child’s mother said. ‘Women were free, and then they were not free.’

‘We’re free now, aren’t we? And the president, she’s a woman. She rules over everyone, man and woman.’

‘She was the wife of the president before her,’ the Child’s mother said. ‘When he died, it was useful to her family and his family that she took his place and continued to rule as he had. Continued to make sure that his policies and political positions were upheld. Also, she is very intelligent, and as cruel and ruthless as any man. She removed enemies who opposed her, and she married again so that she would seem to be under the nominal control of a man. Although her second husband is, like her first, much weaker than her. An exceptional woman in every way, yes. But hardly typical.

‘In times of crisis, the strong always take control of the weak. They are no longer constrained by law or by custom. They claim that they are protecting the weak, but they are in truth exploiting them. Using them. That’s what happened during the Overturn. The rich went to the Moon and abandoned the poor, here on Earth. And in Greater Brazil and elsewhere, democracy was overthrown. Gangsters took over, with the help of the military. Foreign interests. Although by then, the difference between the two was hard to distinguish. And that was the end of democracy, and two centuries of enlightenment and emancipation. Women were no longer partners of men. They became the property of men. Keepers of the houses of men. Incubators of the children of men. With no rights to property of their own, or to the children they gave birth to.’

‘Why? Why did they let it happen?’

‘They didn’t. Men took control by force. As men do, when unrestrained by what we like to call civilisation. Not all men, but a majority. Because they are stronger. Because they are unencumbered by pregnancy and maternal instinct. Because they are fundamentally irrational, by the standards of civilisation. Biological imperative makes them so, as biological imperative makes us irrational, in a different way. But we are smarter than men. Do you know why?’