In the Mouth of the Whale (37 page)

‘No, it’s simpler than that.’

‘Are they aliens, fallen to Earth centuries ago, living in secret all this time?’

She was wondering if Jaguar Boy was an alien, or perhaps descended from people who had been captured and reshaped by aliens. Her ama had often told her about flying saucers and cigar-shaped craft that cruised the skies above the forest, searching for human specimens.

‘Be patient,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘You’ll soon understand everything.’

‘Why can’t you tell me now?’

He shrugged again, said, ‘You still have much to learn.’

The adult River Folk were as large and fat as cows; like cows, their barrel-shaped bodies were bioreactors that fermented and digested the vast amounts of vegetation they ate every day. They had loose black skin that was velvety to the touch, legs shrunken and broadened into flippers, truncated arms with small hands, delicate fingers with pearlescent fingernails. Their faces were broad, with large, mournful brown eyes and wide, mobile mouths.

Their children were much smaller, about the Child’s size, agile and playful. They fed and groomed and generally indulged a little school of infants, maintained the dam and the broad dome of the common lodge with the help of snake-like machines that also gardened the floating fields of lily pads, scared off would-be predators, and collected from the fringes of the forest leaves, rocks, dirt and other materials which they fed into their maker. This was a fat black cube packed with microscopic machines that broke down into atoms the stuff that it was fed, and used them to make more snake-machines, the beads and ribbons which the River Folk children used to decorate their hair (they were covered in a fine pelt that thickened into crest-like stripes on top of their heads), the drug that the adult River Folk used to deepen their meditations, and many other things. It produced shorts, sandals, and a short-sleeved shirt for the Child, any kind of food she requested, and a small coracle as light as a soap bubble and as strong as steel.

The Child slept during the day. At sunset, when the children of the River Folk grew lively and playful, she swam with them, and later, after sunset and her evening meal, she lay on one of the giant lily pads, talking to any who came by. At the beginning of every evening there would be six or seven River Folk children fringing her pad, combing and braiding each other’s crests while they talked and told stories and sang songs (they loved to sing, usually ballads in three-part harmony, chronicling their long and strange history). But they grew distracted as darkness fell, and swam off to play games of tag or experiment with sex, and long before midnight the Child would be left alone, to think about what she had learned. In this fashion, over the days and evenings, she was told fantastic stories of how the River Folk and people like them had come to dominate the human race as it spread out into the Solar System.

It was not uncommon for the moons of the outer planets to possess oceans or inclusions of liquid water beneath their icy shells. Jupiter’s moon Europa had the largest, an ocean a hundred kilometres deep wrapped around a core of silicates that was molten at its centre, heated by tidal friction as the moon was pulled this way and that by the gravity wells of the inner moon Io and the outer moon Ganymede, and it was stretched and kneaded by Jupiter’s gravity. In the deep rifts of its floor, bacterial colonies grew around hydrothermal vents that pumped out superheated water rich in sulphides and iron and other nutrients. The bacteria were the only extraterrestrial life known in the Solar System, but shared the same genetic code as life on Earth, and had most likely arrived on Europa via a rock knocked off the Earth by some massive impact.

When humans had begun to colonise Europa, the ocean had been lightless and lacked oxygen. At first, the Europans had lived in settlements carved into the underside of the moon’s thick icy rind, but at last they had begun to reshape their children, and construct self-replicating bubbles containing rafts of lights and photosynthetic weed that had spread out in great chains across the upper waters. Some of the children were air-breathers like the River Folk, and swam and dived but always returned to their labyrinthine ice cities. Others were truly aquatic, with external gills that trailed in long frills on either side of their smooth bodies.

And as in Europa’s ocean, so in the oceans of other moons in the Solar System – Jupiter’s Ganymede and Callisto, Saturn’s Titan (the subsurface pockets of liquid water that powered tiny Enceladus’ geysers were too small to sustain anything other than bacteria), Uranus’ Umbriel and Ariel, Neptune’s Triton, Pluto’s Charon. Many of these subsurface seas, and the artificial seas created on other icy moons and in the larger of the planetoids in the Kuiper belt, initially melted by guided asteroid strikes and maintained by fusion reactors, were freezing mixes of ammonia and water, but colonising them required only a few simple metabolic adaptations.

Natural seas under the surfaces of icy moons and planetoids were very common, more than twenty for every rocky exoplanet occupying the habitable zone of its star. As humanity spread out through the systems of the near stars River Folk, deep swimmers, and clades of other aquatic posthumans began to outnumber every other kind of human and posthuman. Some, like the River Folk, returned to Earth’s oceans and rivers, and there were several aquatic clades that had taken to living in spaceships or orbital habitats containing tiny seas of oxygen-bearing fluorosilicone fluids, free-fall nymphs that were smaller than the Child and pursued long trading orbits between moons and planetoids. But most lived under the frozen surfaces of icy moons. And so the human race shaped itself to inhabit seas like those from which its distant lungfish ancestors had crawled, and to which the ancestors of whales and dolphins and manatees had already returned.

‘Life is change,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘Change is life. The human race diverged from its ancestral hominin form in less than a million years, driven only by Darwinian selection. Divergence of clades from the base form was much faster than that, driven by genetic engineering that can shape a new clade in only a few generations.’

The Child said that this must surely be a fairy story. She knew that the Outers had settled several of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but the tweaks they’d made to their genomes were no more than minor adaptations to life in microgravity; basically, they weren’t much different from people on Earth.

‘In your time they are still more or less base-line human. But we are talking about the time after your time. The human race as you know it still exists, but in small and stubborn pockets of barbarism. Perhaps they will rise again, after the clades have gone. And if they do, it is likely that the cycle will repeat itself. The human species is characterised by nonspecialist intelligence. Which will shape its future as surely as it shaped its past.’

‘Who are you? Are you from this future?’

‘I hope I am a friend.’

They were talking while sharing supper. One of the few long conversations that the Child had with Jaguar Boy during her stay with the River Folk. He spent most of his time asleep, stretched out on the broad branch of a tree close to the dam. Once, she’d tried to sneak away, and he’d been there, standing in a shaft of sunlight with a halo of butterflies orbiting his head, smiling his fearsome smile. He was her guide, and he was also her guardian; she was both pupil and prisoner.

‘I mean, are you like them? From a clade?’

‘I am what you wanted me to be. You wanted freedom. I am here to help you explore it.’

‘I don’t think you’re real.’

‘I’m as real as you are. As the River Folk are.’

‘That’s what I mean. They’re a story told by my ama. She told me a story about you, too, once upon a time. I’m dreaming about you, and I’m dreaming about them, and I’ll wake up . . .’

The Child lost track of the time she spent with the River Folk, but at last Jaguar Boy said it was time to leave. They had other people to visit, much more to learn. And so, early one evening, all of the River Folk, young and old, gathered by the dam and sang a long song that stayed with the Child and Jaguar Boy as they walked through the forest. When they could hear it no more they set up camp between two prop roots of a massive tree, and slept like two lost innocents.

5

We left Avalon, Prem Singleton, the Horse, and I, in a bucket rocket that was little more than a big motor with a few lifepods bolted to it, each just big enough for a crash couch and a single passenger. I spent most of the trip crushed by over one g of acceleration or deceleration – more than five times steeper than Thule’s gravity – with only a little relief when the rocket swung around at the midpoint. It was a crude and brutal way of travelling, but much faster than the freighters I was used to riding, which generally followed long, minimum-energy orbits amongst the worldlets of the Archipelago. Speed was of the essence now. We’d spent far too long, almost half a megasecond, waiting in Avalon’s port while Prem’s mysterious friends tracked down Yakob Singleton.

He and his companion had travelled under false identities created with tools and skills acquired during his work for the Department for Repression of Wreckers, and their route had not been a direct one. They’d returned to Thule and immediately caught a freighter bound for an industrial worldlet, Wayland’s Smithy, and there they’d changed identities again before hopping to Ull, a garden worldlet made over into a hunting ground for scions. Where they had disappeared into the wilderness and where they were still, unless they had adopted new identities that Prem’s friends had been unable to uncover.

Both Prem and I were by now convinced that Yakob’s companion was Bree Sixsmith, but we were unable to agree whether he had been turned by her, or whether he was playing some elaborate game of doublethink. I favoured the former theory; Prem the latter. She believed that her cousin was pretending to help the traitor so that he could uncover others who’d been turned by demons or had for whatever reason allied themselves with the enemy. She thought that he could be redeemed, and I did not try to disabuse her because I quickly realised that it was more a matter of faith than of logic.

I blacked out when acceleration peaked during the trip to Ull, and the rest of the journey was scarcely more comfortable, with the iron toad of gravity squatting on my chest and blood swimming in my eyes. It was hard to imagine how the ancestors of human beings could have developed the ability to walk upright in that gravity; hard to imagine how the first amphibious fish could have chosen to leave the support of the sea to crawl about on land.

There was no time to recover from the rigours of the journey. Upon arrival at Ull’s orbital station, we immediately transferred to an elevator the size of a small freighter. Riding inside a hollow cable with a transparent diamond sheath, it took some eight thousand seconds to fall from the station to the surface of the worldlet. We were masquerading as two scions of a minor family come to hunt with their trusted bodyservant – disguises constructed by Prem’s friends. As we fell towards the glistening bubble of the worldlet’s halflife shell, I tried again to find out who those friends were, and grew angry when Prem told me that now wasn’t the time to discuss such matters.

‘If you knew who they are, it could put you in danger,’ she said.

‘I seem to have been co-opted by a conspiracy with questionable methods and unclear and possibly seditious aims.’

‘You are working towards clearing your name by helping me find my cousin. Everything else is my concern, not yours.’

Prem seemed calm, but she couldn’t stand still for long. Sitting in the couch before the big window of the compartment, jumping up and pacing around, studying the trencher’s menu, turning back to the window. She stepped close to me now, took hold of my hand, and said that she envied me and the rest of the Sixsmith clan.

The Horse, perched on a low stool in one corner of the capsule, pretending to be asleep, half-opened one eye and smiled his sly smile.

‘You have certain advantages,’ Prem said. ‘Not just because you’re clever, although you are. Most of my people may not be as clever as most of you, but they are cunning and ruthless, they have a wealth of experience to draw on, and they are schooled to make the best use of any talents they possess. Those without power think powerful people are stupid and complacent because they have everything they want and are insulated from the troubles that ordinary people must face every day. But it isn’t true. We have learned hard lessons about surviving in a world where everyone else wants what we have, and are prepared to do anything to get it. No, the troubles of ordinary people are nothing to ours. In their world, a mistake can cost you a meal, or a job. In my world, it costs you everything. So we must be clever and cunning simply to survive. But your people, Isak, can move unnoticed through every layer of society. You have power, and custody of a great treasure, but no one wants to or dares to try to take it from you because only you know how to make proper use of it. I envy the freedom that gives you.’

I thought that most of what she said was wrong, but it wasn’t the place or time to start an argument about power and privilege. Instead, I asked her what would happen if she failed to find her cousin.

‘Thanks to that malicious fool on Avalon, we’ve begun to attract the attention of the wrong people. They don’t know what Yakob is chasing, not yet. But if they do . . . Well, let’s say that most outcomes are bad.’

‘Which is why, Majistra, I would like to know what is at stake here.’

‘Victory. Freedom. Everything Our Thing claims we’re fighting for.’ Prem let go of my hand and stepped up to the window and looked out at the half-globe of the worldlet below, white and dun inside the shell of its halflife bubble, which glistered with bloody highlights in the glare of its damaged microsun. ‘It’s down there, Isak,’ she said. ‘The secret of the starship and its passenger. The thing Yakob has been chasing. The thing we need. The end of the war, or the beginning of something far worse.’