In the Mouth of the Whale (30 page)

Prem stepped forward and seized me in a hug and kissed me hard on the lips and stepped back. For a moment, I felt that gravity had flattened out completely. The hood of her camo gear was thrown back, and she had a fierce and eager expression that made her look lovelier than ever. I confess that I was excited too. Primed, perhaps, by the trip through the gaudy temptations of Glitter Gulch, and the descent through the bloody offerings of the fighting arena. Triggered by the hard kiss that still tingled on my lips and fizzed in my blood.

The Horse was having a hard time hiding his glee. He knew that if he so much as smiled, I would have to beat it out of him, for form’s sake, and after a moment, he turned away and pretended to examine the shadowy vaults overhead.

Prem said, ‘You have your gear and your experience. I have luck, wit, and the help of some good friends. Anything we find helps your clan and the cause of my family equally. Do we have a deal?’

‘We do.’

‘Then let’s move on. We have business here, and little time.’

‘One more thing. Now that we are equal partners, you may remove the tracking device you secreted on my person. That’s how you knew I was coming here, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, that,’ Prem said. ‘You swallowed it during the picnic with my aunt. Your body will get rid of it in the natural way soon enough. Meanwhile, you have to admit it’s been useful.’

‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t express my gratitude.’

‘Don’t be so sniffy, Isak! We’re having fun, aren’t we? I bet even your kholop is enjoying himself, in his way.’

‘This one would not have missed this for anything,’ the Horse said.

A round doorway set in the high, wide wall at the end of the chamber gave on to a lighted room beyond, with glass panels on either side fronting cabinets in which armoured suits the size of Quicks stood. Another door stood open at the far end, leading to a walkway that stretched out across a huge cylindrical pod fitfully illuminated by lamps that floated here and there in the darkness like dim and wandering stars. Shapes shrouded in silvery cloth were stacked and racked in the open space beneath and a ceiling curved overhead: I realised that we had just passed through an airlock into the cargo space of a ship buried in the floor of Glitter Gulch.

Prem Singleton bounded along the walkway; the Horse and I followed with more care, looking all around. Below us, a string of flat-roofed cabins was set in the centre of the maze of shrouded shapes; Prem led us down a steep stair to a platform in front of the entrance to the first cabin, where ten men and women lay prone with their wrists and ankles bound by the kind of smart cord that contracts every time you make a movement. All of them were young, hardly more than children. Two man-sized shapes shimmered towards us. One exchanged a packet with Prem, who told the Horse and me that there’d been several attempts to probe the perimeter, and although her cousins had taken care of them, we should get down to business straight away.

‘The man you were going to meet?’ she said. ‘He’s through here.’

‘And the records of the data miner?’ I said.

‘They’re in the same place.’

Inside the first cabin, an old woman lay dead on a pale carpet amongst antique plastic furniture. Prem barely glanced at her as she stalked past, pushing aside a hanging at the far end and stepping through into the second cabin. Two dead men sprawled close together, one no older than me, the other an old man with halflife flowers braided into his long white hair. Ancient tapestries shrouded the walls, flickering with scenes of the great and glorious long-ago, when Trues had briefly ruled half of Earth. A patch of the white fur that covered the floor had been scorched by the discharge of an energy weapon and a man-sized vase standing in a corner had a fused hole punched through it and the cabin reeked of ozone and char.

I pointed to the old man. ‘Is that him?’

‘His son,’ Prem Singleton said, and led the Horse and me into the next cabin.

It was a long room where creepers and fan palms grew on either side of a tiled pool. At the far end a large shadow floated in the cold blue light of a bubbling aquarium tank. As Prem led us down one side of the pool I saw it was a man: an incredibly ancient man, all leathery skin and prominent bones, netted in wires and tubing. Something crunched under my foot. The shell of a little camera drone. Others lay scattered on the floor.

Prem rapped on the tank’s thick glass, close by the head of the mummy-thing. ‘I told you I’d be back,’ she said. ‘And I’ve brought the man who can unlock your little secret.’

I felt as if I had stepped through what I’d thought was an ordinary door, and found myself in a saga. ‘That’s the leader of the Billion Blossoms?’

‘Another of your race’s great achievements,’ the Horse said. ‘An eternal living death.’

‘Oh, he isn’t dead,’ Prem Singleton said.

‘Kill me now,’ a voice said out of the air. It was as flat and flavourless as distilled water and seemed to speak directly in my ear. I looked around as anyone would, but of course there was no one behind me.

Prem Singleton’s camo shimmered and faded. She was dressed in a one-piece form-fitting black garment with armoured plates over her back and breasts, black boots, black fingerless gloves. She studied the mummy-thing, and said, ‘Give it up easily, and I’ll consider your request.’

‘You killed my children. Go to the Ghosts.’

‘They fought and died honourably. Honour their memory.’

The mummy-thing looked so absolutely dead, lips wrinkled back from yellow teeth, eyes blank as stones, that I felt a physical shock when its head turned amongst wires and streaming bubbles, jerking from side to side as if seeking Prem Singleton’s face. I suppose it had watched and acted on the world outside its tank through the drones, but they were gone now, and it was blind and helpless.

‘Swear you will release me,’ it said.

Prem Singleton pressed her right hand against the tank’s glass and said, ‘I swear I’ll do my duty by you if you give me what I want.’

‘Your friend is from the Library of the Homesun.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell him I will let him in.’

‘Thank you,’ Prem Singleton said, and looked over her shoulder at me and told me to do my worst.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Where are the data miner’s records?’

Prem Singleton tapped her fingernails on the tank. They were black, and shaped to sharp points. ‘In his head,’ she said.

Breaking into the mind of the leader of the Billion Blossoms turned out to be no harder than harrowing a minor hell. A neural net had taken over most of his brain’s functions, as a vine in a jungle worldlet will take over the form and function of the dying tree it enfolds. He might not have been alive at all, in the strict sense: the agents of his personality and consciousness appeared to have migrated or to have been copied into the net. He was a simulacrum. A ghost inhabiting the ruined mansion of its own brain.

Access was straightforward, then, but the experience was far stranger than any exorcism. It was as if the Horse and I had been plunged into a cloud of ghosts. They pressed in all around us, needy unravelling constructs of cobwebs and fog hung in an empty null space. Everything flat and insipid and so desperately sad. A few briefly parasitised my sensorium and triggered emotions and memories that were not my own; although I managed to dismiss them, the encounters struck at the very core of my sense of self.

It got to the Horse, too. When we disengaged, after mirroring and studying the package of information that our algorithms had assembled from tagged fragments scattered throughout the ghostly cloud, he looked even paler than before. Saying with affected carelessness, ‘I always wondered what went on inside those unreconstructed brains of yours. Now I know, and I wish I didn’t.’

‘He really does want to die,’ I told Prem Singleton. ‘He’s been like that for a very long time. The old woman and the old man weren’t his daughter and son. They were his great-great-grandchildren. He founded the Billion Blossoms and his family would not let him die.’

‘You have what we came for.’

‘Oh yes. He kept to his side of the bargain.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s worse than I thought. A major breach in the Library’s integrity.’

‘Show me.’

I showed her. It was a map of the hell that Yakob Singleton had discovered, before it had been collapsed: a low-resolution copy of a part of the Library known as the Brutal Quarter. I was discomfited that I’d failed to recognise it, but told myself that the resolution was extremely degraded, and I had not been expecting to find anything resembling any part of the Library because no part of the Library had ever been mirrored in any hell that my clan had ever explored and exorcised. Yet there it was: a citadel of towers clad in mirror-glass that reflected a blue sky in which argosies of fluffy white clouds endlessly sailed from nowhere to nowhere. The towers soared above plazas with formal beds of withered shrubs, dry fountains, and sculptures like metal sails or gigantic replicas of internal organs. Everything on an inhuman scale. No sign of life apart from a solitary bird-thing that endlessly circled the top of the tallest tower.

Viewed from that height, the inhabitants of the original of the Brutal Quarter must have seemed like ants as they had scurried about their business. And like ants they had once been part of a super-organism, an ancient corporation knitted from interlinked machines and people that had survived for some fifty gigaseconds on Earth, growing and changing and adapting. In the end, the only true business of the corporation had been its own survival, and at last it had grown so cumbersome that various parts of it had gone to war against each other, and it had fragmented and fallen apart. Yet part of it survived in the Library: exabytes of ancient records of transactions and commercial skirmishes, accountancy systems and contracts, all of little historical interest and no extrinsic worth, and a simulacrum of its ancient, primal core.

I took Prem Singleton to the location of the gateway whose trace I’d discovered in the collapsed hell, showed her that it led to the original of the Brutal Quarter in the Library, told her that Yakob had gone through alone, and had not told the data miner what he had found there.

Prem said, ‘Can we go through?’

‘Unfortunately not. This is only a copy,’ I said, and displaced our avatars to the edge of the flat roof of the tallest building. There, looking out past the citadel of towers to repetitive grids of information-poor suburbs stretched under a gunmetal sky, I tried to explain the significance of what I’d found. That a back door into the Library of the Homesun was unique in the experience and lore of my clan. And if there was one undiscovered back door, it followed that there must be others hidden in the ruins of Quick machines scattered across the Archipelago. Unregulated and uncontrolled access points through which anything might intrude.

‘Your treasury is open to any data miner who happens to stumble across one,’ Prem said, after I had explained this. ‘No wonder you’re upset.’

‘Worse than that, they could be used by Ghosts and demons,’ I said.

I was thinking of the demon I had encountered, of course. The demon that had destroyed Arden and Van. The demon that had been the direct cause of my disgrace and downfall.

Prem said, ‘If Yakob found one back door, he would have gone on to look for others. Perhaps he found something on the other side of the gateway that pointed towards them.’

‘I don’t know what he found, but I do know that he left a message,’ I said, and pointed to the bird-thing that all this while had been circling high above us.

‘It’s written on the bird?’

‘On a minute package of information lodged like a flea in the generic construct of the bird-thing. All it contains is the name of a worldlet. The worldlet, no doubt, where another back door is located.’

‘Which one is it? We’ll go there at once.’

‘There’s something else. The packet was addressed to you.’

‘To me? Really?’

‘Were you and Yakob working together?’

‘If we were working together, why would I need your help to find him?’

‘You needed someone to open this the copy of the hell. And you knew where it was hidden.’

‘I knew that because the Billion Blossoms tried to blackmail my clan. I’m Yakob’s cousin, Isak. And his friend. He would have guessed that Lathi would ask me to look for him if something went wrong.’

It made sense, but it seemed too pat. As if she’d had the explanation prepared long before I’d asked the question.

She said, ‘Either we share everything, or we can’t be partners.’

‘Avalon,’ I said. ‘That’s where your cousin went. It’s a small and insignificant worldlet under military control.’

‘Then it shouldn’t be hard to find out what he did there.’

‘I agree,’ I said, and shut down the gate.

As Prem and I stepped from the translation frame, the mummy-thing’s voice creaked in the air around us.

‘Kill me now.’

Prem looked at me, a hard look that meant she had not finished talking about the clue her cousin had left. Then she turned to the tank and told the mummy-thing, ‘I said I’d do my duty by you and I will. Families are important. They’re what stop us descending into anarchy. I am here to help someone in my family; someone you tried to blackmail. And now I’ve had my satisfaction, I can’t allow you to renege on your responsibilities. I will let you live, and take charge of what’s left of your family.’