In the Mouth of the Whale (38 page)

Ull was one of the hundreds of dwarf planets that had accreted out of the debris left over from Fomalhaut’s formation and survived the early violent period of the system’s history. A roughly spherical ball of water, methane, and ammonia ices wrapped around a silicate core, marked everywhere with impact craters, and rifts and wrinkle ridges caused by the slow contraction of its outer layers as it cooled. Captured like half a hundred other bodies by the 2:3 orbital resonance with Cthuga, elevated above the plane of the dust ring. Then the Quick seedship had arrived, and Quick machines had diverted chunks of ice and silicates to intersect with Ull’s orbit, glancing impacts that removed most of its volatiles and exposed its core. Some of the hydrogen and helium blown off by those impacts had been collected by the steep gravity well of a superstring placed in orbit, creating a microsun; the small percentage remaining on the surface had been used to synthesise an atmosphere, provide enough water for a hydrological cycle, and synthesise a halflife bubble to keep in the atmosphere and exclude cosmic rays. The machines had dropped a superstring into the centre of the worldlet to give it a pull of around 0.2 g, had sculpted the surface, creating ranges of bare, shaly hills fretted with canyons and arches of rock, and buttes standing up amongst fields of tall crescent dunes, and had added a sparse scattering of life. Tough grasses and cacti, creosote bush and yuccas. Dwarf forests along the tops of the hills, where climate machinery created fogs. One of many garden worlds of every description scattered through the Archipelago, some with gravity and some without, some rocks enclosed in a halflife shell, some hollow shells with free-fall forests or grasslands on their inner surfaces and little suns in their centres.

In this fashion the busy, powerful, tireless machines had transformed several tens of planetoids and dwarf planets. Later, the Quick would abandon most of these early creations, saying that their machines had built and gardened worlds because they had been gifted with the desire and need for creation by those who had sent out the seedship. The machines had the best of intentions, the Quick said, but they had been wrong to try to impose an alien standard of beauty on their new home. Better to embrace the worldlets of Fomalhaut as they were, not use them to create pocket versions of Earth. Better to find new ways of living. So they’d abandoned the garden worldlets, choosing instead lives of solitary or communal contemplation in ships and habitats that were extensively and exotically designed and decorated. Only a few holy or crazy people made their homes on the worldlets, contemplating whatever it was they contemplated. Guardians or gardeners, each plugged into the ecology and climate of their home, recording every detail of its uneventful days.

And then we True had arrived, and had taken possession of everything, including the garden worldlets. And proceeded to wreck most of them through carelessness, ignorance and misplaced confidence in our ability to shape them to suit our needs. One of the first clans had taken a shine to Ull, had manoeuvred it closer to the worldlet where they’d set up their home. It had lost its microsun during the move and everything on it had died and it had grown so cold that the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere had snowed out. The clan had recaptured the microsun and tried to fix up a new ecosystem, planning to turn it into some kind of arena where young bucks could show off their prowess by hunting top predators, but it hadn’t really worked. They had broken an intricate mechanism that they didn’t really understand. Eventually they had given up on trying to rebuild or fix it, and sold the wreckage to Our Thing.

It was a patchwork of private and public hunting grounds now. Prem’s friends had rented a place for us in one of the public estates, a base where we could search for Yakob Singleton and Bree Sixsmith. It was no easy task. Although Ull was just two hundred kilometres in diameter across its major axis, it had a surface area of more than a hundred thousand square kilometres.

When we arrived on the surface, we were met by an antique open-top half-track vehicle driven by one of the Quick housekeepers of the estate’s lodge. It immediately set out across the broad valley where the elevator cable was anchored, and climbed a long switchback that snaked up one of the steep sides, where tree stumps stood amongst loose rock and tongues of rotten ice.

The weakened insolation of its damaged minisun meant that it was always winter on Ull. Grey and white and black. We crossed a field of dunes capped with frost that gave way to stony scrub and the fretwork skeletons of long-dead tree-sized cacti. Hanging forests of dwarf dragonblood trees had once grown along fretted scarps, but they had died when the worldlet was moved, and most of the birch and pine trees planted amongst their stout smooth-skinned stumps had also died, standing in sere and leafless clumps against the iron sky. By some quirk or mismanagement of the worldlet’s climate control, the fogs that had once sustained them now filled canyons and valleys. Streams ran out of the foggy canyons, smoking in the cold, spilling into marshlands and strings of small lakes. The lakes were fringed with ice and stands of giant rushes. A small population of ‘native’ Quicks hunted fungi and lichens that had psychotropic properties prized by True scions. Jack sheep and deer with bladed antlers and humped shoulders taller than a man grazed the mosses and lichens that grew in the foggy valleys, and jaguars and sabre-toothed mountain lions preyed on sheep and deer and elk, and scions hunted the jaguars and lions and everything else.

Prem Singleton had rifled a dressing chest in the elevator terminus. Wearing a sheepskin jacket with a fur collar, thick black tights and riding boots, she looked the very image of a hunter, and grew animated as we trundled along. She pointed out animal trails, good spots to set up hides, a salt lick where animals would come at night.

‘If this were another time, I could take you on a trek, Isak. Can you ride a horse?’

I told her that I did not know, for I had never tried; for some reason that amused her.

‘They’re small, and very docile and sure-footed. The best way to travel through country like this. There are bikes, too, but they don’t connect you to nature the way a living mount does.’

‘You enjoy getting in touch with your wild side.’

‘All Trues should experience this. Not just scions. One day, when the war is over, it may be possible.’

‘Yes, and we’ll live in a paradise where everyone can rule their own worldlet, and can pluck fruit and tame birds from the trees. Except that whenever we try to establish some kind of utopia we wreck it. As we wrecked this world. That’s how we are, Majistra. We won’t change because if we did we would no longer be Trues.’

‘Some believe that we have already changed. That we have absorbed some of the traits and habits of the Quick,’ Prem said.

(Beside me, the Horse, who was once again pretending to doze, stirred and opened his eyes; I gave him a look and he shrugged and shut them again.)

‘We changed the Quick when we made them our servants,’ Prem said. ‘And by doing so, we changed ourselves. There are hardliners who say that we should let the Quick die out, when the war is over. That we are True, and should make sure that our proud heritage is not contaminated by posthuman decadence. Are you a hardliner, Isak?’

‘I am a servant of the Library,’ I said, and asked her which side she chose.

‘Most in my clan are hardliners,’ she said. ‘Like all the old clans.’

‘I understand they are not monolithic in their beliefs.’

‘They aren’t democracies, either. Scions must respect the beliefs of their elders and betters, and subdue their own beliefs for the greater good. It’s dangerous to have ideas that clash with the ideas of those above your rank. I’m sure it’s the same with your clan.’

‘We all try to do what is best for the Library. But we also like to talk, so there’s often little agreement over what that might be.’

There were two benches in the back of the half-track, hard against either side. Prem was sitting in the middle of one and the Horse and I sat on the other, facing her. Now she turned away, her profile keen in the wintry light as she looked out at the landscape, lost in some reverie. After a while, she said, ‘This is like one of the sagas, isn’t it? We’re on a kind of quest, and we are bound together by ties of blood and betrayal. You by Bree Sixsmith; me by Yakob. I suppose you librarians know all about those old, old stories.’

‘I know that all too many of them were tragedies.’

Prem’s smile was like a starburst in the wintry gloom. It occurred to me that if this really was like one of the old sagas, then she must be the heroine, fierce and beautiful and wild. And more than a little frightening to those who knew how dangerous such heroines were to those around them.

‘We’ll find him,’ she said. ‘I can feel it in my core. The same feeling I get on a hunt. I know it may seem foolish, to pin your hopes on something as abstract and subjective as a feeling. But if you had ever hunted, you’d know that you quickly learn to trust your instincts as much as your reasoning.’

‘I think I understand. After all, I hunt in my own small way,’ I said.

‘In hells and other virons. This is the real world, Isak, with real consequences. It’s completely different.’

‘I can assure you that actions in hells all too often have real consequences,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that why we’re here?’

Prem didn’t seem to hear me. ‘We come to places like this to renew our ties with the world in blood and death,’ she said. ‘And not always the death of our quarry. Scions are sometimes killed on hunts.’

‘Then let us hope this is no hunt, but instead our prize will fall into our hands as easily as one of those birds in the fabulous paradises of the future.’

Prem laughed, and pointed past the cabin of the half-track, towards a low cliff that rose against the iron sky. ‘We’ll find out soon enough. There’s the lodge.’

It was a rambling single-storey stone building that clung to the edge of the cliff and bridged a small river that plunged in a short waterfall to a deep pool below. Prem said that she wanted to interrogate and instruct the lodge’s staff, and left the Horse and me in a long, low-ceilinged room. Its curved wall-window gave a view of the river’s course scribbled across a rumpled plain of open scrub towards the close horizon, which had already swallowed Fomalhaut and was now rising towards the crimson spark of the minisun. The room was filled with the minisun’s cold and bloody light.

I was taking in the view and thinking that Lathi Singleton’s tier high in the thistledown city of Thule was the summer aspect of this little worldlet’s winter, and that both were as fake as any viron and far more sentimental, when movement off to one side of the pool directly below caught my eye. A quartet of riders – Prem Singleton and three Quick – on shaggy-pelted ponies, cutting away from the river and vanishing into the deep shadows at the edge of a stand of dark green conifers.

‘I hope that isn’t what it looks like,’ the Horse said.

He had come up behind me. Like Prem, he’d raided the dressing chest of the terminus, exchanging his colourful motley for a plain tunic and leggings worn under a fur coat that reached to his ankles.

‘What does it look like to you?’ I said.

‘Betrayal.’

That was what I had immediately thought, but I didn’t want to believe it. ‘Perhaps she wants some exercise after the rigours of the journey,’ I said.

‘Or perhaps she knows where her cousin is, and has gone to make some kind of bargain with him.’

‘If you believe I have been too trusting, you should say so plainly.’

The Horse shrugged inside his oversized fur coat. ‘She has a deal with you. And she also has a deal with those mysterious friends of hers. I can’t help wondering which she considers more important.’

‘You are welcome to follow her.’

The Horse struck a pose. ‘If you command it, I’ll do my best. Despite my complete – and completely ironic – lack of experience riding my totemic animal. Not to mention my utter ignorance of the territory. But I have another idea. That is, if you are in any way worried about your friend’s fidelity.’

‘You want to talk to the house servants. Exactly what I was about to suggest.’

‘Then I should do it at once,’ the Horse said.

‘Have them bring me something to eat, too,’ I said, as he walked off down the length of the room.

I turned back to the window and studied the stand of trees under which Prem and the Quicks had ridden. It was growing dark. Shadows lengthened and merged as the horizon rose up and obscured the minisun. Shells of light refracted by the worldlet’s halflife bubble slowly died away and stars stood everywhere in the black sky, shining hard and bright above an inky panorama.

More agitated by Prem’s disappearance than I cared to admit even to myself, I prowled the margins of the long room. It was carpeted with red halflife grass, and the few pieces of furniture were handmade, expensive, and shabby, in the fashion of places that are infrequently used and owned by no one in particular. The wall at the rear was of naked olivine, polished to reveal the glittering swirls of shock inclusions. There was an odd, small, square cave in the centre with a stuffed lion head mounted above it, eyes of black and gold glass and skin gone brittle and cracked and moulting. To one side was a rack of antique weaponry. Knives with long and variously shaped blades, crossbows, and rifles with long muzzles and mechanical firing pans. All of them handcrafted, all showing the wear of much use and the polish of much care.

I was examining a knife with a serrated blade as long as my forearm when the Horse returned. Carrying a tray covered with a cloth, he stalked down the length of the room, saying, ‘That was a fool’s errand. There’s no one here.’