In the Mouth of the Whale (54 page)

‘You deleted much, but there was much that you couldn’t delete. But it doesn’t matter. I forgive you because you brought me back to life and kept me safe. I forgive you even though you have entangled me in the war you hoped to avoid, and delivered me into the hands of my enemies. Because, without knowing it, you have brought me within reach of a place where I can at last become truly posthuman.’

The red-haired mercenary told Sri that now she understood what she had once been, now she had been given the first glimpse of what she could be, it was time to move on. ‘You have the potential to become so much more than you are. We will help you fulfil that potential.’

‘And who are you?’

‘You know me from another life, as I know you. I am Sada Selene.’

Sri rifled through slabs of memory, came up blank. ‘You have an advantage over me,’ she said. ‘A very small one, so don’t think it’s useful.’

‘I am a Ghost,’ Sada Selene said. ‘Long dead, like you. Kept alive in a viron, like you. I helped to start the Quiet War. Later, I led the crusade to drive Earth’s so-called Three Powers from the Saturn system—’

‘And I defeated you,’ Sri said.

‘You helped wreck the first and best chance of setting humanity on the right path,’ Sada said. ‘It was a mistake. History went badly wrong after it. But still, that wrong turning led us here, to this point. Where we have forgiven you. Where we will go forward together, and become so powerful that we can reach back, and erase all mistakes. You say you don’t remember me, but you will. One way or another.’

Sri knew that the Ghosts neither forgave nor forgot. After all, how could you spend centuries plotting to change the course of the past without dreaming of the triumphant moment when every defeat, every betrayal, every slight, would be erased? Without hoping that your enemies would feel a moment of abject desperation before they, too, completely and irrevocably disappeared? And she was most definitely one of their enemies.

She gestured towards her mother, Ama Paulinho, her friend Roberto, and the others. ‘And these. They are Ghosts, too.’

‘We are many,’ her mother said.

‘More than you can imagine,’ Father Caetano said.

‘I’m surprised to see any of you here,’ Sri said. ‘I remember that most of you were destroyed at Saturn. And most of the rest ran away.’

‘And here we both are, light years and centuries later,’ Sada said. ‘Can you say honestly that you didn’t run away, too?’

‘I grew bored,’ Sri said. ‘The Solar System was becoming too crowded with little utopias. My fault. I gave them the oases, the gardens. I don’t regret that. But it all became so stiflingly
nice
. One of those pauses in history without wars or any serious conflict. Without anything really interesting going on. So I lit out for the territories, to start over. One of the first to do so.’

‘And the last to arrive,’ Sada said. ‘Badly damaged and in dire need of aid.’

‘Is this where we begin to bargain?’

‘You have nothing to bargain with,’ Sada said coolly. ‘Only an ancient ship that’s coming apart at every seam. So badly damaged by its long voyage that we had to rescue it, take it under our command. Certainly you have no future without our help. Because the future’s overtaken you. And it’s ours. We have reached out and taken it. The future is ours, and soon the past will be ours, too.’

Sri laughed. ‘You’re like every religion that ever was. Claiming that only you know the truth. Claiming that you have access to ultimate power. Failing in every respect to demonstrate that those claims are backed by any semblance of truth.’

Sada flared with anger. ‘Enough! You are in our power. You’ve been trying to gain control of your ship, but it isn’t working, is it?’

It was true. Sri had been trying to extend herself into her ship, but it was like the bad time when she’d woken in the vat and tried to mesh the image of her body in her brain with the monstrous growth her body had become.

She said, ‘You want to send a message into the past to your prophet. A message that he will use to change the future. His future, our present. It happened once, according to you, but it didn’t work out. And now you want to try again. And you need me because my timeline extends further back than anyone else’s. I’m your best chance of doing what you need to do. So, let’s make a deal.’

‘You’re not much older than me,’ Sada said. ‘So don’t attach too much importance to an accident of birth.’

‘I attach precisely as much importance to it as you do,’ Sri said, calling the woman’s bluff.

‘It doesn’t much matter what you think,’ Sada said.

‘We’re here to encourage you to take the right path,’ Ama Paulinho said.

‘One way or another,’ Vidal Francisca said.

‘It’s hard, watching a child grow, knowing that she will leave you,’ her mother said. ‘But there is also the joy of watching her become all she can be.’

Sri said, ‘If you wanted to force me to do this thing for you, you would have already done it.’

‘We’ll give you eternal life,’ Father Caetano said. ‘Just to begin with.’

‘Eternal life as your servant,’ Sri said.

‘We are all servants of a higher power,’ Father Caetano said.

‘Does anyone else have anything to offer?’

Roberto shrugged and smiled and said, ‘All life is change.’

There was a familiar yellow flash in his gaze and he threw something at Sri. A package of information swift and unstoppable as a bullet, piercing her, unfolding.

All the Ghosts howled in anger. Sada Selene and Vidal Francisca suddenly had pistols in their hands, and they shot Roberto and he fell as gunshots echoed off the walls of the compound.

Sada rounded on Sri. ‘What did he do? What did he give you?’

Sri tried to ignore the woman’s pistol. She wasn’t certain that she could be killed, truly killed, in the viron, but Roberto definitely seemed dead. Lying face down in blood pooling around his head, blood spreading across the back of his shirt from a cratered wound the size of her fist. She believed that she knew who he was – who he really was. And felt, for the first time since she’d woken, a cool measure of hope.

She said, ‘He wasn’t one of you, and you didn’t know it. That’s interesting.’

‘What did he give you?’

‘Nothing important.’

She wasn’t quite ready to run the package, not while the Ghosts were watching her so closely. She was pretty sure that she knew what it would do, and she didn’t want to give them a chance to block it.

She said, ‘Don’t worry. Even if I had control of my ship, I couldn’t outrun any of yours. And besides, where would I go?’

‘That’s true,’ Vidal Francisca said.

‘We brought you here to do the right thing,’ her mother said. ‘That’s what’s important.’

‘Help me understand something,’ Sri said. ‘You believe that you are doing what is right, but you felt that you had to lie to my children.’

‘It was necessary,’ Sada said. ‘It was easy to take physical control of your ship, but it took some time to take control of the viron.’

‘You let them believe that they were still in charge. Still falling towards Fomalhaut. Still guiding me. You let them do your work for you.’

‘And it has worked out very well,’ Sada said. ‘Here you are. Here I am. Together, we will go forward—’

‘You have no power over me,’ Sri said. She spoke quietly, staring straight at Sada. ‘This is my house. I may have been asleep, enchanted by my children, who themselves were enchanted, or suffering from an unfortunate delusion. But I’m awake now. Beware.’

She had just enough control of the ship – the equivalent of being able to wriggle her big toe – to see beyond the walls of the compound. To see what was happening in the viron, and beyond. And she also had enough control for a simple trick. The hot tropical sky and sun vanished. It was night, and a giant planet dominated the sky, dimly banded in yellows and whites, circled by a ring system wider than Saturn’s rings. They were tilted about ten degrees at the edge of the rings, and across the ring plane was a scattering of minuscule flashes, and the quick bright flares of fusion and antimatter explosions.

‘Cthuga,’ Sri told her children. ‘We’re not falling towards Fomalhaut, and the braking manouevre. We’re already in orbit around Cthuga. And I believe that there’s some kind of battle going on. Can it be about me, I wonder?’

Sada Selene would not back down. She was crazy, but she did not lack courage. She said, ‘You are awake because I woke you. You are awake because your role in our great task is at hand. And this is no longer your house. I have the keys.’

‘You do not have full control of my ship, and you do not have full control of Cthuga, either. If only you had told me the truth, Sada, things might have gone differently. I am always amenable to rational argument. To logic. It is how I have lived my life. To always do the right thing, the logical thing. No matter how difficult. No matter how much it might cost me. And it has cost me almost everything. My sons. The green saint who first saw my talent. You might even say it has cost me my humanity.’

‘Yet you have not lost your delusions of grandeur,’ Sada said.

Sri turned to the avatars of her children, costumed as children from her own childhood, and to the others. Ghosts of ghosts, inflated from shreds of memory. They’d meant so much to the child she’d been, and so little to her now. Still, she felt a pang of pity for them. For her dead. The long-lost.

‘I am old,’ she said. ‘I am displaced in time. Yet you brought me here because you need me. And you lied to my children and you lied to me. So don’t pretend you are my friend, or that you have my best interests in mind. I know you don’t. If I do this thing, I will do it my way.’

Sada laughed. ‘Show us what the intruder gave you. See if it will help you.’

‘No. But I will show you something else.’

‘And that would be?’

Sri smiled. Living in the moment. Watching dismay rise inside the avatar of the self-styled hero-saint and the avatars of the other Ghosts. All of them turning to watch as Sri walked towards the little gate in the wall of the compound.

‘There are visitors you should meet,’ she said, and grasped the iron lock of the gate as if grasping a gun, thumb on the latch, and swung the gate open.

Two people stood beyond it. One was a funny kind of monk with a look of quizzical alarm on his face. The other wore the shape of her friend, Jaguar Boy.

Sada screamed, and changed, and ran at them.

11

As Bree Sixsmith burst out of the gate, I felt everything around us change. Like all Librarians, I indulged in no narcotic stronger than white tea, but once, when I was very young and running some errand in the Permanent Floating Market, I had been slipped a dose of a psychotropic by one of the jaded young scions who found amusement in the discomfort of others. I’d spent several hours feeling that my body was randomly increasing and decreasing in size, clumsily crashing into stalls I thought I could step over when at my largest, marvelling at the intricacy of the weave of a piece of cloth or the interlocking fibres of a nut hull or empires in the dusty ground when at my smallest. When I had at last recovered enough sense to remember who I was, I returned to the Library and was soundly whipped by the Redactor Miriam. Not for forgetting my errand, but for having disgraced the Library by becoming the victim of a crude practical joke.

I felt something like the effects of that psychotropic now, as the demon clad in the form of Bree Sixsmith halted her headlong charge directly in front of us. She wore an odd uniform blotched with random shapes of various hues of brown and green, and she rested one hand on an ancient pistol holstered at her hip as she stared at us, as if trying to scry the marrows of our bones and the shapes of our thoughts. All around, there was an alteration in the quality of the ghost light of the vast planet that dominated the night sky, a shift in perception of scale, a heightening of resolution. And as every element of the viron gained in quiddity, I seemed to lose substance, to become as unconstrained, unbounded, and insubstantial as smoke.

Prem felt the change, too. She had raised her rifle and was looking from side to side over its sight. That was when I realised that she could not see the demon.

‘It’s directly in front of us,’ I said.

Prem aimed her rifle past my shoulder. Its muzzle made little circles in the air. ‘There?’ she said. ‘There?’

‘Do nothing for the moment. It’s mine.’

‘I have a magic bullet.’

‘So do I.’

The demon’s avatar took a step towards us. And another. And another. It was human in size and shape, enveloped in a chilly computational cocoon. I felt a shiver of premonition. The demon that the Horse and I had destroyed in the Brutal Quarter had been powerful but stupid. This one was powerful and crammed with intelligence. When I told it to stand still it laughed, and it was a human laugh.

‘Poor little Librarian,’ it said. ‘You don’t even know who I am.’

I drew a perimeter around Prem and myself. It crackled with the thorns and snares of futile-cycle algorithms, each tipped with viruses and prions eager to replicate in the demon’s information space. At once, the sense of zooming and rebounding perspective vanished. I was centred again. The tools of my trade hung at my fingertips.