In the Mouth of the Whale (57 page)

Ori and the others lacked the equipment to make any real inroads on the damage the Whale had suffered during the brief fierce civil war between Ghost factions. Most of it was dark, littered with debris, and depressurised. Gales of frigid hydrogen blew down passages and walkways, howled around hangars and factory decks. Ori had organised corpse-parties that had cleared out the dead and given them all, True or Ghost or Quick, a proper farewell before entrusting them to the long drop. The handful of Ghosts who had survived their civil war had either died of their wounds or had willed themselves to die; isolated from their companions, they had turned inwards and shut down like so many defective machines. After Ori’s crews had patched up the Whale’s altitude- and attitude-control systems and secured the two farm decks, there had been little else they could do but conserve their dwindling reserves of power and food, air and potable water, and wait for rescue.

Now Ori, Inas, and all the others gathered before the airlocks they’d rigged. The farm stretching away behind them, a quilt of greenery spread out under brilliant rows of lights. Windows hung in the air showed views of the boarding party stalking down passages and serviceways. Jerky shots captured by static cams that kept blinking out as they were discovered and neutralised. All but one of the party were troopers, clad in bulky armoured pressure suits and armed with pulse and glaser rifles. A variety of combat drones sharked alongside them. The exception was half the height of the others, and dressed in a plain blue p-suit with a gold-filmed visor. Ori hoped that was a good sign, that the boarding party included a Quick. She hoped that it was a sign of respect. She hoped that they wanted to parlay.

At last, the boarding party reached the far side of the bulkhead. Drones scanned the airlocks; troopers assumed defensive positions; the small person in the blue p-suit conferred with a trooper badged as a cornet, then stepped up to the central airlock and spread its empty gloved hands in the universal gesture.

‘They know we’re watching. We’d better let her in before the troopers decide to blast their way in,’ Ori said.

There was a small tense pause as the airlock chuntered through its cycle. Ori ran her palms over her scalp, sucked spit into her dry mouth. It was at times like this that she missed her passenger. The way it would push forward from her innner dark into the centre of her attention. Its simple presence. It hadn’t returned to her after it had confronted Commissar Doctor Pentangel; no doubt it had fled after the other sprites, joined their dance in the chthonic depths. Ori often wondered if it had taken anything of herself with it. She hoped so. She hoped there was still some kind of connection, no matter how tenuous. Not merely out of sentiment: she wanted to tell the Trues that they had a good reason to keep her and her crews alive.

Behind her, the others shuffled and murmured. Beside her, Inas reached out, took her hand.

The door slammed up with a bell-like clang of counterweights and the person in the blue p-suit stepped over the lip, hands raised to shoulder height, then reaching higher, turning the bubble of its helmet with a sharp click, lifting it off, shaking out a bush of flame-coloured hair as she looked about. She was definitely a Quick, but she had an odd, crooked smile, and her face was thinner and more angular than any that Ori had seen.

‘My name is Faia op (8,9 cis 15) Laepe-Nulit,’ the strange Quick said. ‘But you can call me the Horse. Who’s in charge here?’

2

I was reborn, of course. So was Prem. That’s one of the few advantages of being dead. You can die all over again, and come right back.

We’ve made our home in a house in the ancient quarter of the Library, on the island in the middle of the river. A tall narrow place, small rooms with whitewashed walls and striped rugs and simple wooden furniture. Some of its windows overlook the cathedral square, and the bridge. Others look elsewhere.

Much has changed in the Library since the end of the war, but there is still a great deal of work to be done. One of my first tasks when I ascended to the office of Redactor was to turn the far end of the bridge into a portal to the information cloud of Our Thing. I’ve opened up many others since, connecting various parts of the Archipelago to all the quarters of the Library that have been made safe. We are Librarians still, conserving data and driving out demons and making good, but we no longer control access as we once did. True and Quick come and go as they please.

‘People will suspect you’re hiding something, living in such ostentatious simplicity,’ the Horse said, the first time he visited me after my death. ‘They’ll wonder where you’re hiding your wealth, and fantasise about great treasures and strange and terrible secrets, and plan how to steal them.’

‘They are welcome to try. Perhaps they will find something I’ve overlooked.’

‘And meanwhile the Redactor Svern squats next door in that temple. Another magnet for trouble.’

‘It’s not a temple. It’s a cathedral. And he needs the space for his memory palace.’

‘Does he understand that he’s a prisoner?’

‘I’m not sure that he does. But there he is.’

I had tasked the Redactor Miriam to look after him, to catalogue his memory palace, and to discover the truth about his entanglement with the Singleton clan. I doubted that she would ever find anything useful, and do not think me petty if I confess that it gave me a small, thin pleasure to see her come and go each day, and to accept her reports. She had failed or refused to see the danger that the Library had faced, and it was a kinder punishment than exile.

‘Both of them in the past,’ the Horse said. ‘Reliving past glories and failures without being able to change any one of them. You, on the other hand,
have
changed. You’ve grown up.’

‘It would be nice to think so, but I’m under no illusions about my limitations. Still, I hope that I have been able to change the Library for the better. I hope, one day, when all repairs and reparations have been made, that I will be able to hand it over to your people.’

‘Oh, we’re not interested in the past,’ the Horse said. ‘We look to the future, now that we have one.’

My old friend does not visit as often as he once did. He’s busy, out there in the worlds. Spending most of his time on the Whale, which has been repaired and repurposed, engaged now in monitoring and trying to understand the changes that Sri Hong-Owen is undergoing, and what she is creating at the boundary of Cthuga’s sea of metallic hydrogen.

I try to keep track, but there’s still much to be done here in the Library, and Prem is entangled with truth-and-reconciliation hearings that may last another generation. There are so many crimes for which we Trues must ask forgiveness, and there are so many of us who refuse to answer for all that we have done. Change does not come easily to us, who have made a point of refusing it for so long. There were many atrocities and massacres in the megaseconds immediately after the end of the war. Scattered rebellions against Prem and her allies, as they used the power they’d gained in victory to impose a new order on things, almost coalesced into outright civil war, and it was the Quicks who suffered the most, for they had the most to gain and we had the most to lose. And then there is everything before that, beginning with the arrival of the True seedship in the Fomalhaut system, and the murders committed on first contact with the Quick.

It is no easy task, and there may be no good or happy or neat ending to it. Already, many Quick are moving away from the Archipelago and establishing new settlements and cities everywhere in the dust belt. And Sri Hong-Owen continues to change, at an ever-increasing rate. We do not know what she is becoming. Perhaps we will never know. Perhaps she is already beyond our comprehension.

So I’m grateful that every so often the Horse spares the time to come down the pipe and walk across the bridge and tell me the latest speculations about Sri’s transformation, and swap rumours and gossip. The last time he came, he brought his son. A delightful young thing full of energy and random enthusiasms, amazed that he could run and run and never grow tired or breathless, demanding to be taken for a walk through the old quarter. And so we did. The child running ahead and running back to tell us about the wonders he’d found, the Horse and I talking about the grind of making good, and the latest changes in the depths of Cthuga.

The Horse’s son was born after randomly crossing his genetic files with those of his partner, who before everything changed had been working in the Permanent Floating Market – he and the Horse had pledged themselves to each other long ago, all unknown to me and anyone else in the Library, and he had been the source of much of the information that the Horse relayed to me.

‘And so for him at least it was a happy ending,’ I told Prem, later.

‘We could have children, you know. We may be dead, but our genetic files are still extant.’

‘What kind of child would want ghosts for parents?’

‘You had no parents at all, and turned out fine.’

‘I had foster parents, like all Librarians.’

‘Our children could have foster parents too, if they needed them. But I doubt that they would.’

‘It would be a poor fantasy to think that we could live through our children,’ I said.

‘Perhaps we can live because of them,’ Prem said.

I thought about that, and said, ‘Do you think it would change us?’

And we talked about it for a long time.

3

We live in the little town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, on a bend in the Rio Negro, with mountains to the west and the renewed and trackless forest all around. These are the steadfast walls of our prison; the happening world is hidden beyond their close horizons. But sometimes she returns to us. Our mother. She walks up the green breast of the Fortaleza hill in a cloud of bees and butterflies, and we follow her through the tall sunstruck grass, and she tells us stories of her Becoming.

We do not know everything about her. We never will. But we want to know and understand as much as possible, and that’s why we’ve made this. A virtual model of what happened when we arrived at Fomalhaut and met some people there, presented from our limited and distorted point of view, and that of two of the people who contributed to our mother’s triumph.

This is our story, and theirs. But it is not, of course, the whole story. No one can know everything.

And meanwhile our mother grows in strange ways, blazing with holy candescence as she expands into the great unknown. We live and love in the terror of her beauty.

Fomalhaut is still the brightest star in our sky. But not, we think, for much longer.

Also by Paul McAuley from Gollancz:

Cowboy Angels

Eternal Light

Fairyland Pasquale’s Angel

Red Dust

Gardens of the Sun

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Paul McAuley 2012
All rights reserved.

The right of Paul McAuley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2012 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 10076 3

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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