In the Mouth of the Whale (19 page)

The Quick seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut first, the Horse said, but not because it had been the first to leave the Solar System. The True seedship had left long before, but it was slower and less sophisticated, and the Quick seedship had overtaken it. But there was also a third ship, launched long before even the True seedship, and because it was even slower than the other two, both had overtaken it.

‘I’ve heard of that, too,’ I said. ‘But it should have arrived long ago, at about the same time as our seedship.’

‘Four gigaseconds afterwards,’ the Horse said. ‘More or less.’

‘But it didn’t, because it had some kind of accident, and was lost. It exploded and the debris hasn’t yet reached Fomalhaut. Or it failed to stop accelerating and fell past us. Hardly surprising. It was incredibly ancient. One of the first seedships to leave the Solar System.’

‘It began its journey some three and a half teraseconds ago,’ the Horse said. ‘And some people believe that it is still on its way.’

‘Your people. These mystery cultists. Did they find it? Is that the conspiracy Yakob uncovered?’

‘I don’t know. I know they were looking for it. Watching the window of sky it must pass through if it ever approached Fomalhaut.’

‘If it is so old, what use is it?’

‘Spoken like a true True.’

‘I’m trying to think like Yakob Singleton. He broke his contract with the Office of Public Safety. He must have had a better reason than some incredibly historic but intrinsically worthless relic.’

‘I think I have the answer to that,’ the Horse said. ‘The thing about this ship is that it wasn’t a seedship. It’s so old that it actually carried a passenger.’

He opened a window between us: a gas-giant planet banded in autumn colours and gorgeously ringed. Unlike the gigantic rings of Cthuga, these shone with diamond splendour. They were divided by a large gap into a narrow inner circle and a broader outer circle, and those two circles were in turn divided by gaps of various sizes, the whole as intricate and beautiful as a toy.

‘Saturn. A sister planet of Earth,’ the Horse said.

‘That’s where the ship came from?’

‘From one of the moons.’

He reached in and the view expanded towards a portion of the outer edge of those rings. Detail resolved – narrow lanes divided by hair-thin gaps laced together within the broad lanes of luminous material, spokes of darker stuff thin as smoke radiating out across the lanes – and the diffuse edge of the rings slid past and the view centred on a speck that expanded as the viewpoint fell towards it. A rough, battered worldlet, its sunward side stamped with two large craters that sat side by side like eye sockets, giving it the appearance of a lopsided skull. A sharper crater below its sockets like an off-centre mouth open in a gape of surprise. Its forehead rising to a gently lobed crest. Everywhere pocked with smaller craters, spills of black shadow caught inside their rims. Nothing special. Nothing that would look out of place amongst the icy worldlets of the Archipelago.

The Horse explained that it was a co-orbital moon, sharing a very similar orbit with another moon of a similar size. The moon in the lower orbit travelled faster than the one in the higher orbit, and when the first caught up with the second they swapped positions: the second moon drew away from the first, travelling along its new, lower and faster orbit until it caught up with the first moon and they swapped again. This moon, Janus, was where the ship came from. In fact, the ship had been part of Janus, at one point. A chunk that had been carved out of it and grew mass-driver motors and separated and slowly accelerated away and kept accelerating, until it had climbed out of the gravity well of its parent planet and then the gravity well of the Homesun.

‘At a point just beyond the outer edge of the Homesun’s Kuiper Belt it dropped laser stations it had fabricated, and grew sails that the lasers pushed against,’ the Horse said. ‘Perhaps the stations failed at some point; perhaps the sails were damaged or fell into disrepair. For whatever reason, its journey took far longer than it should have.’

‘And its passenger? This gene wizard?’

‘That’s where it gets very interesting. She was an enemy of the Ghosts. She helped to drive them from the Solar System long ago, in the second pan-system war.’

‘Even if she were still alive, it does not mean that she would be a friend to us.’

‘Or to the Quicks. But they hoped she would be. The people watching for her ship.’

‘They hoped she’d save them from the enemy, and from us.’

‘They hoped she would save you from yourselves.’

‘So they were wreckers of a kind,’ I said.

‘I prefer to think of them as dreamers,’ the Horse said.

‘And Yakob Singleton took them down. And no doubt tortured the location of this hell from one or all of them.’

‘It’s stranger than that. Yakob Singleton and his people had been watching them, hoping some bigger fish would swim into their shoal. A Quick dedicated to violent overthrow of the tyranny of the True, that kind of thing. Several of the cult were in their pay, and Yakob was the one controlling them. And one day all the cultists were killed. They met together and died together.’

‘Who killed them? A rival group?’

‘They attacked each other with broken furniture and their hands and feet and teeth. It was a bloody massacre, famous in certain circles. There was a cover-up, of course. The massacre was blamed on a rival group, everyone supposedly in that rival group was disappeared, and that was that.’

‘They found something. A hell. And a demon got out.’

‘Probably more than one, given how the cultists died.’

‘The same hell that Yakob Singleton opened up, just before he vanished. The one we’re going to harrow.’

‘It’s good, solid information,’ the Horse said. ‘Well worth the price of these fine clothes. Not that you paid for them, of course.’

And how can you be sure you weren’t fed an elaborate piece of fiction?’

I knew very well that the Quicks who performed or drudged in the Permanent Floating Market were bent and twisted by their work. They wanted to be like Trues and they hated us and wanted us gone from their city and their worldlets with equal and opposite force. They lived fast and high: drinking and drugging when not working; dancing to wild music played by musicians who came straight from performing degraded versions of ‘traditional’ Quick music to entertain Trues; betting on free-form wrestling matches and duels with all kinds of bladed weapons. Trues flocked to the fair to sample this kind of colour and raw authenticity, but it was in truth a poor and twisted reflection of our own appetites, our own corruptibility. It was a commonplace that you could buy anything you wanted in the Permanent Floating Market if you had the credit, but you could never guarantee that you would get what you hoped for.

But although I wasn’t entirely convinced about the Horse’s story, it was no surprise to learn that there was more to Yakob Singleton’s work than I’d been told. It was all of a piece with his mother’s desire to manipulate and control me. She’d caught me off guard by pretending to be one of her own flunkeys; she’d asked me to tell the story about the demon when she already knew all about it, and had matched the sunset of the biome where we’d met to the sunset of the Library in an obvious piece of psychological manipulation. And, of course, she’d sent her niece to keep watch over me.

The Horse pretended to be insulted, saying that he might have lost his edge while working out in the boonies and rough edges of the Archipelago, but he was no easy mark for peddlers of grey information.

‘You do have experience in that area,’ I said.

‘And you’re protected and sheltered by the Library, and by the narrow focus of your work. The only people you meet are officials worried that they will be held accountable for an intrusion by enemy forces, and soldiers half-scared to death that they’ll be turned by demons. They might not be pleased to see us, but they need our skills. And we use them to fight in simple conflicts. Good versus evil. Light versus dark. Us versus demons. But Yakob Singleton was involved in something far more ambiguous. Anyway, whether or not you believe it, I’ve told you all I learned, which is all my informant could be persuaded to tell me. If it doesn’t satisfy you, I understand completely, because it doesn’t satisfy me. But there it is.’

I thought about it. ‘Yakob Singleton found evidence that this ancient ship is still functioning, still travelling towards Fomalhaut. Something the mystery cult discovered. Something in this hell we’ve been sent to harrow. He quit his job because he did not want to give it up to this mysterious department, or to the Office of Public Safety. He wanted it for himself. Or for his poor downtrodden family . . .’

The Horse said, ‘It’s a nice story. Why don’t you tell it to your new friend, and ask her if any of it is true?’

‘She may not know any more than me.’

‘Oh, I doubt that. She’s family. You aren’t.’

‘That’s another reason why I don’t want to ask her. Because this is caught up with Yakob Singleton’s family history. His mother made that quite plain. This isn’t just about finding an errant son. She thinks that he found something valuable, too – something that could give his family some advantage, and help it to win back its place in the clan hierarchy. We can’t allow ourselves to be involved in that, because it would seem that my clan is taking sides in the affairs of another.’

‘There’s so little difference between all of you,’ the Horse said. ‘Yet you make so much of it.’

‘Yes, why can’t we all just get along, like the Quick? How is that working out for you, by the way?’

‘I can see why we’ve been chosen for this. We have the experience, but we are also expendable.’

‘We’re here to do a job. We’ll do that. No more, no less. If we find something that might explain where Yakob Singleton has gone, then it will be a bonus. But his mother can deal with it.’

The Horse smiled. ‘Get in, get out, move on.’

‘It’s worked for us so far. I appreciate the effort you put in to finding out about Yakob Singleton. It maps out problems and complications we must avoid. But in the end this is just another job.’

‘There’s another complication we haven’t considered yet,’ the Horse said. ‘Lathi Singleton sent us to harrow the hell that her son found, but the Office of Public Safety may have a claim on it too.’

Prem Singleton found me after the ship had completed deceleration and was beginning its final approach to T. I was in an empty bubble in the outer layer. Its external surface was completely transparent. T was a lumpy speck revolving in a stately circle off to starboard, and because it was high above the plane of the ecliptic as well as at the leading edge of the Archipelago, there was nothing but stars beyond. I’d killed the bubble’s lights and it seemed that I floated amongst a sea of stars: bright stars and stars dim as dust, stars of all colours. I was so absorbed in them, and scions were making so much noise close by, that I didn’t see or hear Prem Singleton enter until she eclipsed a segment of the starry sky, asking me if I was ready for work.

I said that I was, and hoped that she was too.

‘What we’re doing here, that doesn’t count as work. My real work is at Cthuga,’ Prem said.

‘The demons that my clan and I face come from the Ghosts,’ I said. ‘We fight the enemy just as your clan does.’

‘You fight for the past. We fight for the future.’ Although she had been partying with her fellow scions ever since the ship had departed from Thule, she did not seem drunk or stoned at all. She spoke lightly, but with a determination I hadn’t heard before. As if she was at last talking about something she felt strongly about. ‘I should be going out there with my cousins. Going back to the war. They don’t know what they’re getting into, and I do. They’re so young . . . I mean, some of them are a lot older than me, but they don’t know anything really. How old are you? Eighteen, nineteen?’

I translated my age into the obsolete measurement that the Singletons and the other founder clans still used. ‘A little over twenty years,’ I said.

‘I suppose you’d say six hundred and thirty megaseconds. Why do you use that metric, by the way?’

‘The work we do is clocked at speeds best measured in seconds and fragments of seconds, Majistra.’

‘We’re almost the same age, however you measure it. Could practically be twins. Chronologically, I mean. But in every other way I’m so much older than you, and my cousins. I feel as if I aged a million years, out there. And now it’s their turn to go naked into that good night. Which is why our army is in such poor shape. Officers gain experience in the field, but they aren’t allowed to practise it if they survive. No, we have to make way for a new wave of volunteers, with no continuity of experience and operational knowledge. It means that each new generation of officers can vigorously apply innovative tactics and techniques, but it also means that we never learn from our mistakes, and our tactics are driven by short-term thinking. And too often by whatever sentiments are current in the dominant clans, rather than by strategic needs. And meanwhile the enemy never rests, is always driving forward.’

This was so perilously close to wrecker talk that I thought it best to say nothing.

‘You know what’s funny?’ Prem said. ‘There is continuation, of a kind, in the Quicks on the front line. Most new recruits die almost at once, but those who survive get to serve directly as adjuncts for officers. Who if they have any sense, if
they
want to survive, listen very closely to their seasoned adjuncts. Stage one, when you’ve just arrived, you tell them what needs to be done, ask for their suggestions, then order them to do it that way. That way you might last long enough to get to stage two, when you tell them what has to be done and how to do it, and if they suggest a different way of doing things, then that’s how you roll instead.’ She turned to look at me, her profile a charcoal sketch against the starlight. ‘How do
you
roll, by the way?’