In the Mouth of the Whale (45 page)

It was shaped like a trumpet flower, with a circular floor and a seamless wall of slippery ceramic that was three times my height and angled inwards. There was a soft patch of the floor where I slept, another patch that absorbed my wastes, and a third that extruded basic food pellets. I had no connection to the outside world except a view of the sky whose skin was less than a hundred metres above my head, and the cell was open to the vagaries of Thule’s climate conditioning. I was exposed to the naked light and heat of the thistledown city’s minisun, and the freezing fogs of its clouds. Once, it rained so long and so hard that I thought I might drown, because the floor could not absorb the water fast enough: by the time the rain stopped I was up to my knees in it. It rained at other times, too, but never again so fiercely. Apart from the weather and the usual cycle of night and day, there was no variation in the dreary kiloseconds of my isolation except once, when a small bird perched briefly on the rim high above me.

It was an unremarkable dun little creature, hardly bigger than my cupped palm, with a blunt beak the colour of old bone and a short tail cocked above its back and wings barred with black and white, like the rank stripe of a trooper. The kind I had seen a hundred times in the park beyond the Permanent Floating Market and scarcely noticed. Now, intruding on my involuntary solitude, it seemed like a celestial messenger. I hardly dared breathe as it perched above me, unreachable, cocking its head and fixing me for a moment with its unblinking gaze. Then it looked away and its beak opened and it sang a brief song like pure cold water bubbling over silvery pebbles, and with a quick flick of its wings it flew away.

I sang its song to myself, over and again. I cannot explain why, but it gave me the strength to believe that my position was not hopeless, that my proposal had not been rejected outright but was still being considered, that I would not be imprisoned for ever. I remember it still.

Despite my initial bravado, I quickly lost count of how long I had been there. I started to mark the beginning of each diurn by making scratches on my thigh, but I’d been infected with theriacae to treat the various small wounds and injuries I’d acquired during my struggle with the possessed lichen hunter, and they quickly healed the marks I made on my skin, so that I had to remake all the previous scratches at the beginning of each day as well as adding a fresh one. It wasn’t easy, keeping count.

At last, a round hole puckered open in the floor and a voice spoke out of empty air, telling me to climb down into the flitter that waited below. There were no troopers to blindfold or bind me, and the flitter’s canopy was left transparent. I saw the pale trumpet-shapes of my cell and others like it clustered around a black spine that dwindled down through sunlit air. I saw other spines in every direction, angling towards the skin of the sky. I saw, beyond flocks of fluffy white clouds far below, a loose patchwork of square and circular and rectangular platforms that curved away in every direction, the whole pierced by the spines from which individual platforms jutted. A second layer of platforms was visible in some of the gaps between the upper layer, and another layer was visible beyond that. Somewhere far below, near the core where the spines converged, was the platform that supported the Permanent Floating Market and the Library of the Homesun.

For a moment, I hung above the city entire. Then the flitter shot away from the spire in a wild swoop. I yelled with exultation as it cut through the streaming whiteness of a cloud, and the upper platforms of the city rose up and the little craft decelerated with sudden and brutal force that squeezed me into my seat and took away my breath. It hovered in the air for a moment, then dropped straight down towards a platform covered with dark green trees from edge to edge. White pyramids stood here and there amongst the trees; the flitter fell towards the largest and touched down, as gently as a fallen leaf, on the wide lawn of flower-starred turf that surrounded it.

Two troopers and a marshal caparisoned in a glistening white breastplate escorted me into the lowest level of the pyramid. The marshal told me that I was to meet with Yenna Singleton, but would not say why. I did my best to suppress my hope that my offer had been accepted, and asked the marshal how long I had been imprisoned. It had been just one and a quarter megaseconds after the incident at the tower on Avalon. Roughly fifteen diurnal cycles.

I said that I had thought it much longer.

‘All prisoners do,’ the marshal said. ‘You were fed a drug to keep you compliant and to stop you killing yourself. It also affected your sense of time. Don’t worry. The drug was removed from your food yesterday. We need you to be sober and alert.’

I was allowed to shower and shave, and to dress in my own clothes. My security had been shut down and I could not unlock it; I felt naked as the troopers and the marshal took me to a disc that promptly shot up a transparent tube, rising through floor after floor to a windowless atrium whose walls, floor and vaulted ceiling were constructed of seamless, polished black stone, with the badge of the Singleton clan set in silver in the centre of the floor.

The Horse was waiting at the far end of the atrium, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside a tall double door.

After I had stood before the college of Redactors and had been tried for causing the deaths of Arden and Van through culpable negligence and then had been sentenced to exile, after I had been led through the Alexandrian Gate in disgrace and the great double doors had clanged shut behind me, I had seen a small figure standing at the foot of the bridge that arched across the moat. It was the Horse, who had chosen to stand by me. My heart had leaped with gladness then, and it leaped again now, as the marshal marched me across the atrium, her boot heels ringing on stone.

The Horse stood up to meet me and said, ‘I thought I would never see you again.’

‘I had the same thought about you.’

‘It seems we were both misinformed.’

‘Do you know why we have been brought here?’

‘The Redactor Svern sent me here. He didn’t trouble to explain why.’

‘I may have an idea,’ I said, and told the Horse about the deal I had tried to make with the Office of Public Safety. ‘I was given to understand they had no interest in it. Hence my imprisonment. But perhaps they have changed their minds. Or perhaps the Redactor Svern has intervened.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

‘As much as I always do.’

‘Then we’re still in trouble.’

‘As much as we always are.’

‘At least you still have your sense of humour,’ the Horse said.

‘And you still have your cynicism.’

The Horse had no news of Prem Singleton. He was telling me how badly the war was going when at last the marshal commanded the doors to open. They swung apart in ponderous silence, exposing a dark space beyond.

‘Walk through,’ the marshal said. ‘Majistra Yenna is waiting for you.’

She did not follow us, and it immediately became apparent why. As in the ruined tower on Ull, the door was a translation frame. In a single step, the Horse and I were transported to a place I hadn’t dared to believe I would ever see again – the chamber in the Redactor Svern’s memory palace where he received visitors.

I knew then that I had won the attention of the right people, but instead of triumph a cold shrinking feeling washed through me. Dread. The realisation that I was at the threshold of something truly important, something life-changing. The fear of failing to measure up to the test I had set myself. It was deeper than the nervousness I’d felt at my final examination before I’d passed from novice to practitioner. Then, the course of the rest of my life had been at hazard; now, everything I had ever done or ever would do was in the balance, and I was scared that it had already been judged, and found wanting. If so, I thought, there was nothing I could do except meet my fate with dignity, so I straightened my back and told the Horse to keep quiet unless spoken to, and walked forward.

As before, an immersive simulation of the Fomalhaut system filled the chamber edge to edge, with the bright point of Fomalhaut in its centre and the broad but paper-thin dust ring circling the walls. A thick thread of blue punched through the diffuse red oval of the Ghosts’ territory, and Ghost forces were retreating from it. Abandoning long-established positions, moving towards the edge of the dust ring in the direction of Cthuga. The thready pathways I’d seen before had thickened and joined in a kind of pseudopod or tentacle that angled across the dust ring; its tip had engulfed the gas giant, and the mass of the main body was beginning to flow along it.

The Horse was looking all around with avid curiosity. When I told him to pay attention, he said that someone was coming, and pointed across the chamber, a little to the left of Fomalhaut’s spark.

An old woman walked through the simulation of the dust ring, hip deep in dust clouds and comets and planetoids. Her white hair was done up in a helmet of little plaits and she wore the black one-piece uniform of an army trierarch, with a silver starburst on her right breast. I supposed that she must be Yenna Singleton, the matriarch of the clan, dead for more than two centuries. The Redactor Svern materialised from the shadows behind her, the hem of his black duster trailing behind him as he followed her across the chamber.

‘It’s good to see you again, Isak,’ he said. ‘Even if the circumstances are unfortunate.’

I told him that I was sorry that I had failed him, and he dismissed my apology with a flick of his hand.

‘I have a small confession to make,’ he said. ‘An apology of my own. You see, I knew when I gave you the task that it was almost inevitable that you would fail. Not because you lacked skill or courage, but because it was the kind of problem that no one could solve. And that’s why I chose you, Isak. You had already fallen so far that neither our clan nor you would be hurt if you fell a little further.’

‘You sacrificed me for the greater good.’

‘And I could not tell you at the time, because you might have refused. I am sorry.’

‘I am sorry you doubted my loyalty.’

‘I do not blame you for being angry. But everything has worked out. You have done better than I believed possible, and you have returned.’

‘I survived, yes. And returned as a prisoner.’

The old woman, Yenna Singleton, said, ‘Because you were associated with the traitors Lathi and Prem. Because you were a threat to the security and safety of my clan.’

‘And that has been resolved,’ the Redactor Svern said.

‘Lathi tried to gain power over the senior members of my clan. For that crime she has been arrested and tried and executed,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘Prem is still at large, but we will capture her soon enough.’

‘And I have forged an agreement with the Singleton clan, and you have been returned to us as part of that agreement,’ the Redactor Svern said.

‘Forgive me, Majister, if I don’t share your happiness. For I fear that I still have some way to fall.’

‘We may yet all fall,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘The Ghosts have changed their tactics and thrown everything they have at Cthuga. We are retaking positions they took from us out in the ring, but Cthuga has been overwhelmed. Its defences have been destroyed or compromised. Most of its pelagic stations are lost, and its communications net has fallen over, so little is known about the survivors. We have twice tried and failed to punch a hole through the Ghosts’ forces and we are readying a third wave, but we do so with little hope.’

The Redactor Svern said, ‘It’s always been my belief that we have been fighting the war for the wrong reason. We have been defending our territory, but the enemy don’t care about us and our worldlets, except that we stand between them and Cthuga’s Mind. They call themselves Ghosts because they believe that their reality will not be validated until they reach back in time and change history to ensure that they become the only posthuman species. If they do that, we will become no more than ghosts. Haunting rare timelines separated from each other by the many in which the enemy has been victorious.’

Yenna Singleton said, ‘We have always suspected that they wanted to win the help of Cthuga’s Mind. They tried and failed to make contact with their probes. Now they have flung every resource at the planet. And, at the same time, a starship that departed from the Solar System some fifteen centuries ago is approaching Fomalhaut.’

The Redactor Svern said, ‘And that is why you are here, Isak. Because what you have discovered may have some bearing on the matter of this starship.’

‘With respect,’ I said, ‘I believe I’m here because you failed to find what you were looking for in my security.’

‘You wanted to bargain with my clan, for the good of your clan,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘But as you can see, the two are united.’

‘There’s no more need for subterfuge,’ the Redactor Svern said.

‘There is only a small chance that we may be able to retake Cthuga,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘But we have a much better chance of capturing the starship.’

‘It is our last chance to foil the enemy’s plan,’ the Redactor Svern said. ‘And you can play an important part in it, Isak.’

A window opened in front of me, showing a bright lumpy shape composed of no more than a dozen pixels.

‘We got that from the deep-space array that’s usually pointed at beta Hydri,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘It took a great deal of persuasion to convince Our Thing to look for it, and it took some time, too. It’s very small, not much bigger than an ordinary lighter, and it has deviated from the optimal course between the Homesun and Fomalhaut.’