In the Mouth of the Whale (26 page)

‘So the data miner did talk.’

Tisin Nemo popped another cube into her mouth. ‘This red tea is rather more-ish, isn’t it?’

Her playful evasiveness was trying my temper. ‘I have nothing to give you. Either you’ll abide by the agreement or you won’t.’

For a moment Tisin Nemo vanished behind the barrier of her security: a wall of burning obsidian topped with a prickling barricade of offensive protocols. Then the wall dissolved and she laughed. ‘I didn’t come here to fight you, Isak. I came to help you. Let me do it in my own way.’

‘How did you know about the back door?’

‘It’s common knowledge. You aren’t the only person who wants to know what Yakob Singleton found, and where he went to afterwards. The Office of Public Safety has been asking around, in their clumsy fashion.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘Who says they talked to me?’

‘Like me, they would have come to you first.’

She ignored the attempted compliment. ‘Did you really find nothing at all in that hell?’

‘I found a trace that suggested it had once contained a link. But I could not reconstruct it.’

‘Whoever collapsed it knew what they were doing, then. Obviously it wasn’t the data miner hired by Yakob Singleton. She lacked both the skill and the gear. I did hear a rumour that someone from the Library had harrowed the hell, but I discounted it. After all, Bree Sixsmith is dead. Or am I mistaken?’

‘It is possible that the person who harrowed the hell is an imposter.’

‘It is also possible that Bree Sixsmith is a traitor who faked her own death.’

‘You have no reason to call her a traitor!’

On the platform moving past ours, the captain broke off her reverie and stared straight at me.

Tisin Nemo said, ‘Are you angry because of the slur on your cousin’s name, or is it the thought that she might have faked her death and betrayed you that really hurts?’

‘Someone like you has no right to accuse someone like her.’

Tisin Nemo calmly took another cube of red tea. ‘You want me to help you. But if I am to be of any use, I need to know everything you know.’

‘I know that Bree Sixsmith is dead. She was contaminated by a demon and walked out of an airlock. My clan received her body, and it was incinerated and the ashes were moulded into a lifemask, and placed in our hall of honour.’

‘Someone certainly died,’ Tisin Nemo said. ‘You received a body disfigured by exposure to vacuum and low temperatures. I doubt that anyone troubled to verify that it was Bree Sixsmith’s body because no one expected it to be anything other than hers.’

‘I would have to check,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t bother, because I know I am right. When did this all happen, by the way?’

‘Some forty megaseconds ago.’

‘About a year,’ Tisin Nemo said. ‘If Bree Sixsmith faked her death and defected a year ago, this trivial little matter of yours goes deeper than Yakob Singleton’s discovery and disappearance, doesn’t it?’

‘If you know anything about it, you should tell me. The Library will reward you for any useful information.’

‘I’ll give you my best guess, for free. Yakob Singleton found something. His discovery was a threat to someone else. So much so that they had to take a big risk, and moved in and shut it down. You found a back door. Do you have any idea as to where it might lead?’

‘It was only a trace. I couldn’t reactivate it. And now that I’ve told you all I know, tell me about the data miner. Tell me what you didn’t tell the Office of Public Safety.’

‘She had a bad gambling habit. She was in debt. It’s possible that Yakob Singleton had her silenced, but from what I can tell it isn’t his style. But it’s also possible that she sold information about the hell to her creditors, and they silenced her so that she could not tell anyone else. If you want to know more, you’ll need to pay a visit to the Billion Blossoms.’ Tisin Nemo flashed a little package of information to me. ‘They’ll want something in return, of course. I suggest you clone and coarsen the amusing little protocol that induces blindsight in surveillance systems.’

I told her that I would give her advice some thought.

‘How is Svern these days?’

‘Much the same.’

‘That’s one of the problems with being permanently translated,’ Tisin Nemo said, rising in a rustle of scarlet fabric. ‘You don’t ever change. Good luck, Isak. I hope we meet again in happier circumstances.’

‘We could be walking into a trap,’ the Horse said. ‘If the Billion Blossoms killed the data miner, they could as easily kill us. And for the same reason. To keep the secret of that hell safe.’

‘Tisin Nemo is not exactly a friend of the clan,’ I told him, ‘but she has no good reason to betray us and send us to our deaths. To begin with, it would be bad for business.’

‘Your cousin must have believed she had a good reason to betray the Library,’ the Horse said.

I stopped and turned on him and said, ‘You will not speak of the dead like that.’

The Horse looked up at me, his eyes blinking independently, and said, with the fake humility he employed when he was upset, ‘This one might have been mistaken about sharing his thoughts on the subject.’

‘If you have something worth sharing, share it. But remember that we have no evidence that Bree faked her death. Most likely, someone impersonated her. And if Tisin Nemo is right, the Billion Blossoms know what she found in that hell. They know where the back door leads. And when we go there, we’ll be one step closer to finding out what happened to Yakob Singleton.’

‘Maybe the Billion Blossoms killed him
and
the data miner,’ the Horse said.

We were moving towards the eastern end of Glitter Gulch, taking a long and complicated route through narrow streets and courtyards off the main drag. Past gambling joints, past tattoo parlours and chophouses, past saloons and bars where soldiers knocked back shots of ethyl alcohol chilled with drops of liquid nitrogen and enlivened with benzene, liquid camphor, formaldehyde, and a variety of esters and psychotropics, past sex parlours and free-fall emporiums, the blooming, buzzing confusion of their virtual frontages jostling together without plan or pattern, filling the air with vivid hallucinations that offered vices catering to every conceivable human appetite. Reward and encouragement for the part of the brain where primitive emotions and appetites writhe like alligators in a pit, the part that is the seat of every destructive impulse.

We Trues are proud that our brains are as unmodified as every other part of us. The war was a direct result of that aboriginal wiring. And Glitter Gulch was a naked expression of its basest impulses.

There was a saying that had a quarter of the energy and aggression expended in Glitter Gulch and other places like it been harnessed for the war effort, we would have been celebrating victory six hundred megaseconds ago. I could see now that there was some truth to this commonplace observation, although it was hard to know how things could be arranged otherwise. We Trues prize individualism and independence above all things, and so Glitter Gulch was a necessary vent for those qualities in those who would soon be regimented and dragooned into fighting in disciplined order.

Officially, its raw licentiousness was sanctioned because it boosted camaraderie and reduced attempts to mutiny, desert, commit suicide, or go rogue – to turn your weapons on your officers and fellow soldiers. Unofficially, it was a loose collective run by gangs of scions who fought amongst themselves to extract every credit from the accounts of soldiers and sailors, and the men and women who designed and made the ships, machines, weapons, or maintained supply lines. It was a place rife with crime and violence. The habitat of pimps and whores, gamblers and grifters, thieves and trimmers and knockout artists found nowhere else. Throwbacks to a more primitive era.

The Billion Blossoms was one of those gangs, a loose alliance of several minor clans that in the real world had even less power than mine, but down in Glitter Gulch was as powerful as any of the senior clans. Tisin Nemo had given me an introduction to someone in the gang who was willing to help me. The help would not be given freely, of course. I would have to do something in return – I hoped it would be no more than exorcising some minor hell that had fallen into their hands, or verifying that booty liberated from some Ghost rathole wasn’t contaminated.

The Horse and I hurried to our rendezvous still cloaked in our anonymity, but took random turns in the maze until I was as certain as I could be that we were not being followed by the Office of Public Safety, one of Tisin Nemo’s people, or anyone else. All around us civilians and soldiers and sailors bounded along in groups, or ambled arm in arm or stumbled in solo trajectories towards oblivion. Feral tribes of children in uniform roared along one block where smokehouses and bars sold milk laced with psychotropics. I saw a trio of rangers, women permanently arrested in the middle of pregnancy. I saw men and women tweaked in trivial and serious ways. I saw a man riding a Quick modified as a beast of burden, with stout legs and a humped and crooked back fitted with a saddle.

Most people ignored us, but as we crossed a crowded plaza one soldier who was too stupid or too stoned to get out of our way challenged me. I was tall but the man overtopped me by a head or more and his bare arms were as thick as my waist and he had tusks in the corners of his mouth that he exposed in a snarl, asking me what my problem was.

My security threw a nightmare at him, lodging it in the implanted interfaces that allowed him to control his weapons and vacuum suit. He screamed and thrashed, wrestling with horrors only he could see and feel, and bumped into a woman almost as large as he was, with a shaven head and black plastic pegs sticking from her forehead. She laid him out with a blow to his jaw. His companions roared and charged at her, her companions charged at them, the entire plaza dissolved into a battleground, and the Horse and I took to our heels.

Reeling with laughter, we dodged through an archway into a small square courtyard with a dead tree standing in the centre, bare trunk and branches stripped of bark and the smooth wood glowing white as a ghost. Circles of light dropped from floating sparklights overlapped on a floor of scuffed plastic with luminous green spirals sunk in its translucent depths. The walls were tiled with mirrors and chromos of pornography and battle scenes. On one side of the dead tree was a scattering of tables where a few Quick sat; on the other a stage where a Quick guitarist sat on a stool, bent over his woman-shaped instrument and playing trilling riffs to a beat set by his stamping foot, and a Quick singer stepped up beside him and pressed his fists to his throat and began to sing a song of heartbreaking beauty and sorrow.

It was the place that Tisin Nemo had aimed us at. My security had guided me there during our headlong flight.

A man in a quilted ankle-length surcoat ambled over and spoke my name and said that he had been sent to bring us to the meeting place. He smiled when I said that this courtyard was surely the meeting place.

‘You have met me, so in one sense it is,’ he said. ‘But it is not the kind of place where confidences can be exchanged. And in any case, the man you want to talk to never leaves his room these days, and we don’t care to trust people like your friend Tisin Nemo with his whereabouts. In fact, no one outside of his circle knows it. Hence this halfway house. Hence me. I’m nothing in the order of things. Less than even your servant. I’m to guide you if you want the meeting, or to take your regrets to my master if you don’t. It’s all the same to me.’

He wasn’t much taller than the Horse, and had a small head with blond hair sleeked back, the ends curling on the collar of his surcoat. His manner was at once servile and arrogant, as if he was discharging a duty he didn’t much care about. He was also completely transparent to my security. I do not mean that I could see everything he carried. I mean that my security was unable to register more than a sketchy presence; it couldn’t even detect the gross activity of his brain or the clockwork of his heart and lungs. It was as if he was an eidolon, and yet he stood four-square and solid before me.

I told him that Tisin Nemo would alert the Office of Public Safety if we did not return within the next ten thousand seconds. It was a lie, of course, but I felt I needed some kind of safety net.

‘I heard the Office of Public Safety is already looking for you. They aren’t having any luck, as you’ve cloaked yourself, but it is another reason why I was sent. In case you were the bait for some kind of trap. As I said, I’m of no consequence. If I got snapped up,’ he said, with a fine bitterness, ‘no one would care.’

The Horse was sending me tremors of agitation through his security, making it plain that he wasn’t happy. I ignored him.

‘We’re working outside the jurisdiction and without the permission of the Office of Public Safety,’ I said. ‘But when we are done, we’ll have to return to the marshal who interviewed me when I arrived here. We have no other way of leaving T. And if we aren’t finished by the deadline, my friend will tell them where we went.’

‘Ten thousand seconds – that’s three hours? You’ll have much less time than that to make your deal. The man you want to talk to is very busy, and this is a small matter to him. An inconvenience, really, but he is fond of your friend and is willing to grant her this small favour.’

I laughed at this disingenuous attempt to make it seem that I was the supplicant to some important scion. ‘He needs something from me, or he would not have agreed to see me. And I need something from him. I’m sure we can come to a mutual arrangement.’