In the Mouth of the Whale (22 page)

‘Men don’t need to be smart if they are strong.’

‘It’s true. We must live by our wits. As the dispossessed must always do.’ Then the Child’s mother did something she rarely did, these days. Leaned across the table and took the Child’s hands in hers and looked into the Child’s face. Saying, ‘Always remember that. Whatever happens. Remember that we are smarter.’

There.

That’s done, at last.

The lesson the Child never forgot. The golden thread that ran through the warp and weft of her life. Inextricably bonded with her mother’s anxious gaze and her tight dry grip, the sunlight slanting through the window and falling on the table’s breakfast clutter.

The Child had talked about these things with her mother before, of course. She had been brought up in what was then called the old liberal tradition to believe that she was as good as anyone else, to believe that rank did not confer any especial intellectual or moral privilege, to believe that everything should be questioned, and nothing accepted until it had been throughly examined. But later in her life, whenever she thought of her mother and the things her mother had taught her, she always recalled that moment. It was the archetype of many such moments. So lives are shaped backwards, by what we choose to remember.

Maria let go of the Child’s hands now, leaning back, saying, ‘War changes everything. It shifts the balance from intelligence to strength and the willingness to solve problems by violence. That’s how it is here, you see. War makes it so, always.’

The Child thought about it, and said, ‘Daddy wasn’t like that.’

‘He was enlightened. It was coming back, enlightenment among men. And I was lucky to meet one who was more enlightened than most.’

‘Vidal Francisca isn’t like Daddy.’

Her mother looked at her for a long moment, then said, ‘He thinks he is. He thinks that what he is doing is for the best. The best for me, and for you.’

‘So you won’t marry him,’ the Child said, completing her chain of logic.

‘I’m protected,’ her mother said. ‘Because I’m a widow. If I was not, things might be different. As it is, Vidal must respect the memory of your father. Why? Because in a way I am still the property of your father, as far as Vidal is concerned. He can never completely own me because in his view I am already claimed.’

This didn’t entirely satisfy the Child. She wanted to believe her mother, but her suspicion and fear ran too deep. She believed that her mother had betrayed her own principles, had sought the help of Vidal Francisca because, despite all she’d said, she couldn’t protect herself. She was happier, yes, and the Child was happy that her mother was happy. But around Vidal Francisca her mother wasn’t her usual self. She too often talked about silly and trivial things, and listened to the man talk with respect he didn’t deserve. She seemed younger, somehow. She paid more attention to her appearance. Vidal Francisca bought her clothes and jewellery and perfume, and although she told him she couldn’t wear perfume because of her work – some of the sick couldn’t tolerate it – she wore the clothes and jewellery at dinner parties and other social events. Ama Paulinho commented on these changes with approval, but the Child disliked and feared them. Feared the loss of her mother’s proud stubborn independence, and the loss of her own freedom.

The Child vowed again that she would never marry. That she would never allow herself to be encumbered by children. That she would prove herself better than any man. She would protect herself. She would need no one but herself; she would never bind herself to any man. And for a long time she had kept to that vow, until she’d quickened an illegal clone in her own womb and raised him to become a useful ally and accomplice in her dealings with the world. Soon afterwards, out of political expediency, she’d seduced a scion of the Peixoto family and had allowed herself to fall pregnant by natural means. But before they could formalise their relationship her lover had been killed in a silly little action against bandits, and their son had been a grievous disappointment, undisciplined, rebellious, dissipated.

She’d had many other children after that, but all were flesh of her flesh and radically tweaked and cut. Cohorts of servants helping her work towards goals they could not understand. We are no more than the latest iteration of her strange and wonderful family, as willing and unworthy as all the rest.

The mercenary, Sara, more or less agreed with the Child’s mother, saying that while it was true that women fought in the army and worked in manufactories and the R&R Corps alongside men, that did not mean that they were equal.

‘When there’s something worth having, men make sure they take most or all of it. They don’t stop to think about it. As far as they’re concerned it’s their God-given right.’

‘But you are like a man. You fight like a man. You work with them. Don’t they see you as a fighter first, and a woman second?’

‘I fight as a woman,’ Sara said. ‘Not as a woman pretending to be a man. You see the difference?’

The Child nodded. She liked that Sara didn’t care what other people thought of her. That she stood up for herself against men as well as women.

Sara said, ‘In the north, if you are poor and landless, you do what you have to, to survive. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, everyone is in the same shit, with only a few ways out.’

‘Men don’t try to stop you joining the army?’

‘There are more wildsiders in the north. More bandits. And there’s trouble in the cities, too. Too many poor people, too much discontent. And the bosses can’t get enough of the right kind of men. A lot of women can’t hack it, it’s true. The job is tough and men are stronger, mostly. Mostly, but not always,’ Sara said.

As usual, when she wasn’t on patrol, she’d shucked her camo gear and was dressed in shorts and a vest with pockets and pouches that left her arms bare. She flexed her right arm, showing the definition of her muscles, making the snake tattoo that coiled from shoulder to wrist jump.

‘Most of the time it’s the same old same old. The men pretend to think we’re equal, the ones who aren’t assholes, but in their heart of hearts, deep down? They know we’re not. Because everything around them feeds that unconscious assumption, and they’re blind to their own faults. The only time it doesn’t matter what equipment you’re packing between your legs is when you’re in the shit. All that matters then is that you can do what needs to be done, and that your buddies are watching your back, just like you’re watching theirs.’ Sara paused, then said, ‘Your mother mind, you hanging with us rough tough soldiers? Listening to us talk dirty like this?’

‘She doesn’t care what I do,’ the Child said, and felt a sudden pang of sorrow because she realised that she believed it.

On the nights that her mother visited Vidal Francisca straight after finishing her work at the hospital, the Child stayed behind with Ama Paulinho. Her ama went to bed early and slept soundly, and the Child often climbed on to the roof of the bungalow and looked up at the stars or watched the lights of the town flicker amongst the trees. Dreaming of escape. One night, a week or so after her talk with her mother, she was sitting cross-legged in the warm dark when she felt a presence behind her and turned. A figure stood on the edge of the roof. He was slight and bare-chested, dressed in ragged trousers tied at his waist with a rope, and he had the head of a jaguar.

The Child felt her heart catch. Felt a cool electric tide rise inside her. Felt the hairs on the back of her neck and the soft down on her forearms stand up. She got to her feet, moving slowly and carefully, as if he was an animal that might take fright. Tried to speak and found her mouth was dry. Swallowed, tried again.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

The boy raised his hands to the height of his chest, held them out on either side, palms up. As if cupping invisible weights.

The Child said, ‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’

The boy moved his strange sleek head up and down.

The Child glanced at the little screen on her wrist. She had by then hacked into the hospital’s security. She could see herself in infrared but could see no trace of the boy at all. But there he was.

‘Are you a wildsider?’

The boy moved his head from side to side.

‘Did they make you? Did you escape from them? Where did you come from?’

The boy shook his head again, and stepped up on to something unseen and climbed into the sky on invisible corkscrew steps, turning faster and faster until he was a tiny pale blur shooting away into the zenith of the starry sky to a place where we could not follow him.

The next morning, waking in her bed, the Child wondered if she’d dreamed the encounter, but she had the distinct memory of sitting up on the roof for a long time afterwards, watching the rigid span of stars that glittered and twinkled overhead, and the swift points of satellites and ships moving from west to east. She’d stayed there until she heard the noise of a vehicle outside the hospital compound wall, realised that her mother had returned from Vidal Francisca’s house, and quickly climbed down into her bedroom. And then, yes, fell asleep: but only then.

She used the back door she’d inserted into the hospital’s security and reviewed the footage. Saw herself, sitting on the roof, standing, talking. Played the segment again, zooming in on her face. She was awake. Her eyes were open. Blinking. She looked scared, more scared than she remembered feeling. Looking up, as if following something as it rose. Yes. Exactly as she remembered, except there was no trace of the boy.

We could find no trace of him, either. He had appeared before the Child, and then he had vanished through a back door – and that had vanished, too. We had conjured up a small action against wildsiders to make sure that the Child could not leave the town, and thrown up strong defences around her, and he had bypassed everything.

The Child’s story was beginning to deviate significantly from what was known, and we knew now that the jaguar boy was no glitch but an intruder whose origin and powers and purpose were unknown, but we were in too deep to turn back. The outer edge of the dust belt spanned the sky from horizon to horizon, with Fomalhaut’s bright spark caught in its centre. There was not enough time to start over. We had to press on. And so, early one evening in the garden of Vidal Francisca’s house, the Child was coming back from her light trap, carrying several choice specimens in cages she’d woven out of dry grass (a skill her ama had taught her), when she heard her mother and Vidal Francisca talking on the terrace. The Child had been walking straight towards the soft glow of the terrace along a path edged with a luminous rope; now she slipped sideways into darkness and moved stealthily across the dark lawn.

She was still buzzing from a dose of her home-brewed stimulant, which had helped her to vanish inside the flickering school of her thoughts for most of the long and boring dinner and the two adults’ conversation about things and people the Child had no interest in. Everything around her seemed sharp and slightly separate. The flow of warm air on her skin, blades of grass yielding under her sandals, the heavy flutter of a hand-sized lunar moth in one of the cages at her hip, the scratching of a beetle in another, the whisper of a drone somewhere above the house. A chain of suspended moments like stepping stones across a stream, one yielding to the next as she wove between the trimmed shapes of the bushes planted below the terrace. She pressed the length of her body against warm stone and listened to her mother and Vidal Francisca talking about their plans to visit Manaus, and what to tell the Child, who knew that it was coming, the worst thing, unstoppable.

Soon, everything would change. We would reach our refuge, everything wrong would be made right, and our mother would be made safe until she could rise, renewed. It was our last best contrivance, and we had to engineer it carefully and make sure that every part of it was consistent with the story we had spun round the Child. Meanwhile, we could only hope that the jaguar boy would not come again until we were ready to deal with him.

5

T was the main arsenal for the war effort, the centre of the Archipelago’s defences, and a singular body besides: a rocky asteroid that, after it had been ejected from the wreckage of Fomalhaut’s inner system, had been captured by the 2:3 orbital resonance with Cthuga shared by the planetoids and worldlets of the Archipelago. It had been smashed apart at least once, and most of the fragments had fallen back together under their own gravity into the shape of a lumpy peanut. The larger of its two lobes was slashed with a long and irregular rift that meandered from pole to equator, its surface was heavily cratered, and the edges of the craters were still raw and sharp.

The Quicks and their machines hadn’t touched T, but we had settled on it at the beginning of the first war with the Ghosts, and our mining machines had cut an intricate network of tunnels through its regolith, searching out seams of silicates and traces of metals, and these tunnels were now threaded with adamantine fullerene cables that reinforced the asteroid’s structural integrity. Its minor lobe was covered in a sprawling carpet of barracks and manufactories, refineries and graving yards and docks; its major lobe was patched with training grounds of every description, where troops practised infiltration and combat methods in mocked-up habitats and farms. And its deep rift had been roofed over and pressurised and landscaped, creating a habitat where the cadres in charge of T and their families made their homes, and officers and veteran troops, specialists and philosophers, could enjoy their leaves in a variety of sanctioned playgrounds.