In the Mouth of the Whale (8 page)

It hadn’t come from Earth, like our own seedship and the seedship of the Quick, but from a colony at the nearby star of beta Hydri. Our Thing tried to negotiate with the intruders; they pushed back; we struck out at their nascent settlements; agents and avatars which had infiltrated our information networks struck back, the networks fell over, and the highly distributed nodes and matrices of the Library of the Homesun were poisoned and ripped apart.

After the last of the Ghosts had been destroyed (or so we thought), the leader of our clan, Svern, volunteered to reconstruct and manage what was left of the Library. He believed that the Ghosts had not attacked it on a whim, and was quickly proved right. There was a purpose and a pattern to the damage. The devils, haunts, bogeys, and other monsters which had infiltrated the intricate tapestry of infoscapes had targeted seams and nuggets of scientific, mathematical and philosophical data threaded through yottabytes of antique garbage. But because the Ghosts had lost the first war so quickly and comprehensively, their agents inside the Library hadn’t been able to mirror and transmit most of their discoveries. Anyone who followed their trails and managed to defeat them could win back what they’d found.

Svern organised a reconstruction project that gathered up fragments of the Library and knitted them together inside a hyperlinked informational architecture of his own design, which he’d installed in a disused building in Thule’s twilight zone. And so my clan became librarians, and because Svern had been forced to borrow credit from the common pool to pay for his visionary project, we had to provide free access to information salvaged from the wreckage or wrestled from the Ghosts’ agents. Not just to the other clans, but also to freemartins who won entrance tickets in a public lottery – cowboys and information-leggers armed with attitude and home-brewed agents and gear, obsessives tracking private theories that, according to them, would win the war or make them secret masters of the universe. Although less than twenty per cent of the original Library had been restored, and much of that was junk, with a little luck, considerable judgement and the right analytical gear, there was still plenty of useful information to be gleaned from the ruins, much as mining gliders winnowed precious heavy metals from rainstorms of molten rock on Dis.

So it had been for the past three gigaseconds, between the end of the first war with the Ghosts and the beginning of the second, when legions seeded by a few survivors had risen from nests hidden amongst the myriad worldlets of Fomalhaut’s dust belt and swept towards Cthuga. A war still ongoing; a war in which, after my fall and disgrace, I’d become a minor foot soldier.

Like every librarian, I had been born in the clan’s ectogenetic farm. A selection of genetic information from the clan’s files had been randomly crossed according to law and custom, the resulting genome transcribed into DNA, the DNA spun into artificial chromosomes and inserted into a denucleated ovum, the ovum kick-started into mitotic division, and the embryo (me) grown to full-term in an artificial womb, decanted, and raised and schooled on a farm rock in the bosom of a sturdy foster family. I had learned the virtues of hard work and self-reliance, and far too much about vacuum-organism farming, and at the age of eight years by my foster family’s antique way of counting time – about two hundred and fifty megaseconds – I had been claimed by my clan.

My foster family had given me a name: Isak. When I took my vows I also took the clan’s name, and became Isak Sixsmith, a novice in service of the Library. I expected to live there for the rest of my life, but soon after achieving the rank of navigator I stumbled and fell, and was sent into exile. And now I had been summoned back.

I gave the Horse leave to spend some personal time in the Permanent Floating Market, passed through the checkpoint, with its scanning clouds and data sniffers and guards dressed in scarlet tabards and black hose like mimesists in a mystery, and climbed the broad span that arched above the black water of the moat to the entrance we called the Alexandrian Gate.

It was the first time I had returned to the Library since my disgrace and demotion. The dear, familiar place seemed unchanged yet utterly different, and I realised with a pang of melancholy that it was I who had been changed, by my adventures in the worlds and worldlets of the Archipelago. I was no longer the eager neophyte, with a grand and glorious career ahead of me: I was an itinerant exorcist, bitter and battle-weary, with no home or prospect of advancement, responding with little hope and considerable apprehension to a summons from the only person who could forgive my sins.

A young and shy novice I didn’t recognise met me at the entrance and escorted me across the tall space of the Great Court and up a winding stair to the Redactor Miriam’s office. It was a long room with black walls and floor and ceiling, lit only by the many windows hung in the air. The Redactor Miriam and her three assistants walked amongst them, monitoring everyone currently using the Library. She seemed not to notice when the novice announced my arrival, and I followed her as she moved from window to window, until at last she asked if I had given any more thought to the offer she had made just before the beginning of my exile.

‘I haven’t changed my mind, Majistra.’

‘Even though the work bores you?’

‘I can’t say that I enjoy it, but isn’t that the point?’

‘I’ve seen your reports. You’re growing careless. Cutting corners. Taking pointless risks. Do you think that if a demon kills you it will be an honourable death? That it will redeem you?’

‘I hope that I am already doing all I can to redeem myself.’

The Redactor Miriam turned away from the window she had been studying (showing a long open colonnade somewhere in the vicinity of the Hall of Screaming Statues, where the avatar of a data miner was riffling through a raft of longcase files floating in the dusky air) and walked off to a window at the far end of the room. I followed her. When she had finished tweaking the window’s parameters, she said, ‘We can’t let you back into the Library. No matter what Svern promises you, it isn’t going to happen. He is our leader still, but his word is no longer final. The consensus is that you should never be allowed to return.’

‘Yet he wants to speak to me.’

The Redactor Miriam looked at me for the first time since I had entered her office. She had aged since I had seen her last. The lines at either side of her mouth had deepened and the beak of her nose was more prominent, but her gaze was as sharp and unforgiving as ever.

‘A trueborn scion has asked for our help,’ she said. ‘Such requests are not only inconvenient distractions; they are also dangerous. If you succeed, it will change nothing. You will go back to harrowing hells. But if you fail, there will be a reckoning we cannot afford. And frankly, I have no doubt that you will fail, as you have failed before. Svern chose you and I can do nothing about it. About the only power he has left is to choose who to send to help other clans, and he retains it only because no one has ever before asked for our help. But I can ask you to think of the greater good. If you still love the Library, refuse to help this scion.’

‘I cannot disobey him, Majistra.’

‘We are not excused the tithe, even though we contribute to the war effort by making the Library available to all. You could make a significant contribution by joining the army. The arrangements I made are still in place. You would receive a rank equivalent to full navigator, and you would leave your unfortunate history behind. You might even win some measure of glory.’

‘But I could not win back my place here.’

‘You would win our gratitude. It’s no small thing.’

Like many who have sacrificed everything to an institution or cause, the Redactor drove herself hard and was unable to forgive or forget the errors of those she believed to be less capable or committed than herself. And she also believed that her wishes were entirely congruent with the best interests of the Library. There was no doubt in my mind that I deserved my punishment, but I also believed that it had become a token in the struggle between the Redactor Svern and the Redactor Miriam, who felt that it was unseemly and dangerous that he should continue to have so much influence after his translation. I resented her for that, and hoped to prove that she was wrong. I was, as the Horse so often said, exceedingly stubborn. And I have to admit that it gave me some small satisfaction to see a moment of anger and uncertainty in her gaze when I said, ‘I have always valued your advice, Majistra. But now I think I should find out what the Redactor Svern wants of me.’

‘Do as you will, then,’ she said. ‘But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

The young novice was waiting for me outside. ‘I have to take you to the Redactor Svern,’ she said. ‘You aren’t supposed to wander about on your own.’

‘Have you been there before?’

She nodded, solemn and serious as young children are, when burdened with a task they don’t fully understand. ‘When I first arrived.’

‘Then I know you will remember the way. Lead on.’

The translation frame was kept in the Redactor Svern’s old office, a square room with a vaulted ceiling down in the basement level. It was otherwise empty, lit only by a horizontal slit of window that gave a view of watery shadows and the silken carpet of silt at the bottom of the moat – the ancient machines that were the heart of the reconstructed Library resided in the basement, and the moat absorbed waste heat generated by their constant activity. The frame stood in the centre of the room, a square window of depthless black that came alive with swarming white glyphs as the novice led me towards it. A moment later I was standing in the courtyard at the entrance to the memory palace inhabited by what was left of the Redactor Svern after his permanent translation.

As always, it was snowing. Snow sifting out of a black square of sky hemmed by high and windowless stone walls, settling on the cobbles on which I stood, defining the edges of the square-cut stones so that the patterns in which they had been laid were as clear and bright as if outlined in neon. Snow capping the heads and shoulders of the stone lions that stood on either side of the arch that framed a view of a gravelled road lined with stark and leafless trees.

When I had first been invited there, a novice no older than the girl who had been my escort, I had turned from that view and found a woman standing behind me. She held a flaming brand that burned potassium red, sizzling and crackling as snow touched it, and wore a blue silk dress that lifted and displayed her breasts, pinched her waist, and fell in elaborate flounces and folds to her feet. The silvery pelt of a small animal was wrapped around her shoulders, its narrow head resting above the deep cleft between her breasts, the tip of its short, black-furred tail caught between its sharp teeth. Her face was white with powder, the shape of her eyes was exaggerated with black pigment, and her lips were dyed black. The effect was both disturbing and arousing. She answered my stare with a smile and turned – the back of her dress was cut to the beginning of the swell of her buttocks – and stepped to the narrow iron door set in the stone wall, which slid aside with a soft rumble. I followed her across the threshold, and through the rooms beyond. She walked like a dancer, never once looking back to see if I was following, the pale and lovely column of her bare back glimmering in the red flicker of her torch.

I knew very well that she was only an eidolon, an illusion created by the same machines that maintained the illusion of the memory palace, but I fell in love with her all the same. I never again saw her, but every time I was summoned to talk with the Redactor Svern, I always hoped that I would turn from the stone arch and find her waiting for me. I turned now, and found myself alone in the snowy dark. Alone, I crossed the courtyard, touched the iron door and passed through, and followed the familiar route through the chambers of the memory palace.

The first was crowded with statues carved from a translucent white stone that reminded me of the complexion of the eidolon (on my second visit I had paused to examine each of them, but although several were a little like her, she was not there). The walls of the next were pierced with arched windows that showed views of other worlds and other times. There was a chamber cluttered with machines: a pile of black cubes set with thousands of red, blinking lights; an ordinary tractor of the type used by my family to travel around the vacuum organism farms; an ancient spacecraft, its white upper half pouched and angled like the head of a monstrous insect, its lower half partly wrapped in golden foil, the whole perched on four silver, spidery legs. A chamber with rough rock walls hung with flags and banners, and every kind of armour ranked beneath them, some pieces twice as tall as me, some less than half my height, with helmets shaped like the heads of animals or globes with gold or silver visors. Most stood motionless, but several turned to watch as I went past. A chamber whose walls were inset with dioramas of animals and birds in various habitats. A chamber crowded with the skeletons of enormous animals, the largest shaped like a spacecraft streamlined for atmospheric entry, and hung from the ceiling. A chamber filled with big glass models of viruses. An empty chamber whose floor was paved with polished limestone flags, each containing the dark, foetal form of a fossil. A chamber of ranked cases that each displayed a single handweapon. A chamber whose walls were crowded with portraits of people in strange and antique dress.

And so on, and so on. A string of marvels, with other strings leading off left and right from crossways and apses. But I walked straight on, as always, until at last I reached the chamber that usually contained orreries modelling settled systems, their clockwork mechanisms swinging brass and silver and ivory globes and swarms of asteroids and planetoids around golden suns.