In the Mouth of the Whale (39 page)

‘No one at all?’

The Horse set the tray on a side table. ‘They must have left with your friend.’

‘A place like this must have more than three servants.’

‘Then three left with your friend, and the rest fled. Or they’re incarcerated in some place I can’t find. Or murdered. That’s a big knife. I hope you aren’t considering self-harm.’

‘I was marvelling at the inlay,’ I said, displaying the haft to the Horse. ‘It’s bone, carved so cleverly that it induces a strange and very fine emotion when you pass your fingers over it. A mingling of regret and happiness a little like nostalgia, if one can be nostalgic for something one has never experienced. The fakes sold in the Permanent Floating Market are as crude a kick as raw sugar compared to this exquisite confection. Try it.’

But the Horse flinched back when I attempted to hand the knife to him. ‘It isn’t for me,’ he said.

‘It was made by a master craftsman from your glorious past. Carved, I believe, from bone grown in a culture of his own oocytes.’

‘That’s why it isn’t for me,’ the Horse said. ‘Your nervous system and mine, they are tuned differently. You feel only a small portion of what I would experience.’

‘Your loss,’ I said, and sheathed the knife in the rack.

‘Yes, it is.’ The Horse had a strange look that almost exactly mirrored the sensation I’d felt when I’d passed my thumb across the delicate ridges of the ancient sliver of bone. Then he shook his head and forced a smile and with a flourish whipped the cloth from the tray, revealing a plate of bread and cheese, pickles and curls of dried fish, and a bowl of white tea that steamed in the cold air. Saying, ‘I failed to find the servants, but I did manage to loot some provisions. In a crisis, it’s always good to eat when you can.’

‘This isn’t a crisis. Is it?’

‘I suppose that depends on whether or not she comes back.’

I warmed my hands on the bowl of tea. ‘She’ll come back. She needs my skills. But I admit that the manner of her departure is . . . odd.’

‘You’re wondering why she didn’t explain that she had an errand. Why she didn’t take us. Seeing as she needs our skills, and so on.’

‘I am wondering if some of her friends might be close by. After all, they arranged our travel, our disguises, and these accommodations.’

‘I’ve been wondering about them too,’ the Horse said. ‘And I’ve been wondering about a question she asked you on the ride here. About whether you side with the hardliners who believe that we Quick should be allowed to die out once the war has been won.’

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve been wondering if she left because she wasn’t satisfied by your answer.’

I sipped my tea. ‘I told her that I served the Library.’

‘I know. But you didn’t tell her that you weren’t a hardliner.’

‘That goes without saying, surely.’

‘Only if you are familiar with the customs and history of your clan. You assume that everyone you meet knows about them, even though most people don’t have the first idea about the way the Library works.’

‘Why should what I believe concern her?’

‘Because of what
she
believes.’

‘And what is that?’

‘This one is not sure that he should presume to hazard a guess at what a True might think.’

‘I’ll allow you an opinion about it. You have enough opinions about everything else.’

The Horse smiled. ‘Will you allow me two opinions?’

‘If I must.’

‘The first is about you. You have many admirable qualities, and there’s no doubting your skill in harrowing hells and dispatching demons. Which allied with my own small talents makes us such a formidable team.’

‘Is this about you or me?’

‘This one is your kholop. He is nothing without you.’

‘Spare me.’

‘The Library is your world. Perhaps that is why you do not realise that few people in the wider world know or care about it. Perhaps that is why you know much less about the wider world than you think.’

‘I know that I know enough, and no more.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I hope this has something to do with Prem’s disappearance.’

‘She asked you whether or not you were a hardliner.’

‘And I gave an unsatisfactory answer, according to you.’

‘You gave an answer that was clear to you and to anyone in the Library, and obscure to almost everyone else. I don’t think she realised that it was the answer she had been hoping for.’

‘Of course we are not hardliners. After all, the Library is based on Quick knowledge.’

‘And this worldlet was shaped by Quick machines. But look at it now: a half-ruined wilderness where yahoos hunt animals and various kinds of Quick cut into animal form.’

‘Yet we are remaking the Library, not destroying or perverting it.’

‘My point is that a familiarity or even a dependence on Quick technology does not always imply a sympathy with its creators. Librarians are different from most scions, yes, but most scions don’t know that.’

‘Prem may be smarter than you think.’

‘Let’s hope so, for I believe that you and she have much in common. Like librarians, some scions not only respect Quick culture, they also respect Quicks.’

‘You think Prem is one such.’

‘I told you I had two opinions to share with you. This is the second.’

‘And how do you know this?’

‘She has no servants. She was upset when that brute of a prefect massacred the workers in the hatchery. And most of all, she has at all times treated me with a touching courtesy and respect. You may think that isn’t much, but it means a lot to me. In short, she’s the very opposite of a hardliner,’ the Horse said, and explained exactly what he meant.

We talked about it a long time. At last, when it became clear that Prem might not soon return, I asked the lights in the room to dim and settled on a low couch covered in a worn and much-patched tapestry that depicted the exodus of our seedship from our last redoubt in the Solar System’s asteroid belt amidst a hectic and fanciful battle between ships and droids and drones, and slept. And woke when someone shook my shoulder, and turned over and saw Prem silhouetted against the flat pinkish light of dawn.

‘I know where he went,’ she said.

6

The battle for Cthuga was far from over. Ori and the rest of the surviving crew of
The Eye of the Righteous
had made no contact with the enemy since the falling star had struck their ship, but they had seen signs and wonders in the sky by day and by night. High contrails crossing and curling around each other. Sheets of lightning that flickered and danced across significant segments of the immense horizon. Deep pulsing heartbeats from far below. Screams and squawks, wails and unsettling, near-human cries in the radio spectrum. Rippling curtains of auroras. There were disturbances in the usually placid equatorial weather, too. Hazy streaks of cloud laid across thousands of kilometres high in the stratosphere. Little archipelagos of oval storms whirling around spikes of infrared energy rooted far below the upper cloud decks; thunderheads as big as continents boiling up, so tall that the station was forced to make long detours to avoid vast hailstorms and displays of thunder and lightning like the birth of something new and terrible in the world. Once, the ranging crew spotted something bright moving with great speed at approximately their level in the atmosphere, but whether it was a friendly or hostile craft was impossible to determine.

Perhaps
The Eye of the Righteous
was lost to enemy sight in the immensities of the planet. Or perhaps the enemy believed that it had been fully converted; or perhaps they had more important targets to deal with first. In any case, the ship sailed on unharmed, creeping slowly and uncertainly above the cloud deck, its crew always watchful, always fearful. Their ship a small world entire in itself, riding the winds ever westward, finding its way home through the signs and portents and detritus of vast battles.

There were seventeen of the crew left alive and, as was the way of Quicks, no clear leader had emerged. They preferred to talk everything through, several overlapping conversations that gradually merged into a single voice, as if coalescing around a strange attractor. It was soothing to reach that point where everyone, more or less, was thinking like everyone else, and it helped to bind them together.

Ori politely deflected suggestions that she should take control. She felt that the surviving Quick should not emulate the True now that they were, for the moment, free, masters of their own fate. No, they should revert to the old ways as much as possible, and because the old ways were known to them only by rumour and myth, they were in truth forging a new way of living. A democracy in which agreement was not won by appealing to logic or emotion or self-interest, but by a kind of mutual meditation. And besides, she did not want the responsibility of leadership. She did not ever again want to stand out from the crowd, to become the target of someone else’s enmity. She was content to be no more important than anyone else, and to abide by whatever was decided by consensus.

Hereata pointed out the inconvenient truth that Ori wasn’t like everyone else because she alone could refuse to take command. Hira, or anyone else who dissented from the majority, would have to seize control by main force, but it was Ori’s to take if she wanted. All she had to do was reach out, and it would be placed in the palm of her hand.

‘You took charge in the moment of crisis,’ Hereata said. ‘Only you knew what to do to save the station. After that, the station was yours. The station, and everyone on it.’

‘Except Hira and Lani,’ Ori said.

‘They have no power over you,’ Hereata said. ‘Everyone knows that they made the wrong choice.’

‘I didn’t know that what I did was right until I did it,’ Ori said.

‘Of course you did,’ Hereata said. ‘You were right to forgive them, too.’

‘What else could I do? If I was a True I suppose I would have had them whipped and beaten, or given the long drop. But we are not Trues, and we should not behave like them. And besides, we have to fix up this poor old wreck before the enemy finds it again, and we need all the help we can get.’

For the moment, Ori and Hira had settled on frosty politeness and exaggerated observation of every small courtesy, and as in all things Lani followed her bunky’s example. But Ori knew that this truce could not last for ever. Hira was a danger to everyone because she refused to accept the reality of their situation. At every meeting, she argued that they should chase down and engage with the enemy because that had been Commander Tenkiller’s last order, and that they should also attempt to make contact with other stations where Trues would be able to tell them what to do; their debates on how to survive from day to day were, according to her, tantamount to mutiny. Ori tolerated this nonsense as best she could, but privately believed that Hira should have remained in custody so that she couldn’t poison the consensual process with her dangerous ideas. Sooner or later, the woman would attempt to assert herself again, and Ori would have to intervene.

But as far as day-to-day survival was concerned, Hira was the least of their problems. A crew led by Ulua cut down the wrecked hangar and sealed the gaping hole with foam, but discarding so much mass at the leading edge of
The Eye of the Righteous
had altered its trim, and because of the damage its crew couldn’t alter its configuration to correct for the imbalance, so it flew with an eccentric corkscrewing list that limited its speed and at every moment threatened to become uncontrollably chaotic. They were short of water because more than half the ship’s supply had been lost when the impact of the falling star had ruptured tanks and pipework; one of the air-recycling plants had been lost, too, so the surviving plant had to be run at maximum capacity and watched carefully; food was rationed; and because almost every system had to be rerouted around the damage caused by the falling star and the growth of the seed it had carried, nothing worked as well as it should.

In short, they would have been in deep trouble even if they weren’t caught in the middle of a planet-wide battle. So when the ranging crew reported that a steady blip that appeared on the long-range radar was definitely a pelagic station, it took a long time to decide what to do. They couldn’t inspect the intruder remotely because most of the drones had been destroyed by the enemy, and the rest had been garaged in the forward hangar and lost with everything else. A sizeable minority of the crew wanted to avoid the intruder by tacking south, but for once Ori and Hira were in agreement: they both hoped that the station and its crew had survived or avoided contact with the enemy. Ori and her supporters hoped that it would be a useful ally, and might even have news of the progress of the battle for control of Cthuga; even if it was damaged or deserted, it might have supplies of water and food and air, and equipment that they could salvage. Hira hoped that Trues were aboard, that they would take charge and eradicate all uncertainties. So after several hours the crew voted to turn towards the blip, and within a day it was finally in optical range.

It hung in silhouette against the sunrise that banded the broad horizon, a few degrees north of the bright point of Fomalhaut. A stack of circular platforms each about three hundred metres across, set around a central shaft and hung beneath a cluster of tall balloons: one of the chain of resupply stations that girdled the planet, with hydroponic farms on the upper decks that supplied fresh food, and manufactories below. It should have been much deeper down, trawling the depths for carbon and other essential elements, but here it was in the upper air.