In the Mouth of the Whale (55 page)

‘I know I’ve already dealt with one like you,’ I told it. ‘I can do it again.’

‘I’m like nothing you’ve ever seen before!’

The demon was at the perimeter now. In one beat of the viron’s clock, an ornate architecture of briars and thorns reached out and wrapped around it, forming a tightly woven woman-shaped cage.

‘I see it,’ Prem said in my ear.

The cage held for several beats of the clock, its interior a fury of computation that leeched power from the viron around us. Everything lost sharpness and focus; it was as if we were standing in a badly pixilated image composed of just eight shades of grey. And then colour and form began to return and the briars began to shrivel. Loosening their hold on each other. Flaking away into dust that lost its shape to an impalpable wind, blowing away, vanishing.

The demon smiled in my face.

I displaced us at once into a pocket viron of my own design: a replica of the Permanent Floating Market crowded with copies of myself and Prem. But before I could ambush it, the demon whirled through the stalls and walkways, trashing subroutines and algorithms, growing into a toppling tower of debris that stooped down to snatch us up with braided filaments. I displaced us again and again, attempting to gain distance through distraction. The pitted surface of a worldlet naked to black vacuum, where the demon was a coalescence of shadows reaching for us. Bright space above the granulated surface of Fomalhaut, where a white-hot prominence arched towards us like an elongated hand. The blank blue sphere of a water-worldlet, where bubbles whirled up towards us. A flatland, where Prem and I were two triangles suddenly sucked towards a gaping pit. The road before the gate again, in a blowing snowstorm of viruses that flashed into sparks of light when they touched the demon.

‘Enough,’ the demon said

The snowstorm blew sideways and vanished. Prem and I were still inside the perimeter I’d drawn. Cthuga loomed in the night sky, its pale light glimmering on the road and the white wall. The air tasted of smoke; gunfire crackled in the distance. The demon stood just outside the perimeter, arms folded, its expression cool and amused.

I showed it the Klein trap I’d opened while bouncing from pocket viron to pocket viron. Its matrix packed with dizzy perspectives and lush nodes of computational power, opening up like a flower, exploding to dust in my hands.

‘Is that the best you can do? How disappointing,’ the demon said.

I reached up, grasped the barrel of Prem’s rifle, and told her to fire.

The noise of the discharge deafened me. The barrel kicked out of my grip and a star-shaped hole appeared in the demon’s forehead and wept a single black tear. The demon went cross-eyed, as if trying to look inside its skull, and then an intense look of concentration appeared on its face. It coughed and gargled, opened its mouth, showed me the bright bullet resting on its tongue. And closed its mouth and swallowed the bullet and reached towards me, brushing aside the busy algorithms of the perimeter as if they were cobwebs.

Its hand plunged into me and its look of triumph changed to one of consternation. It grabbed at me again, with both hands this time. They swept through me and I didn’t even feel them. Prem asked me what was happening; I told her that I didn’t know.

And now someone else walked out of the gate in the white wall. A girl-child in an antique white dress whose hem brushed her ankles. She walked with a queenly confidence, and I knew that she must be the ship’s passenger. Sri Hong-Owen. She did not pause or waver when the demon in the shape of Bree Sixsmith turned and screamed at her. She walked up and took hold of the demon’s hand and told it to be quiet.

The demon, amazingly, obeyed. Looking off into the distance with a stupid expression, as if distracted by something it wanted but couldn’t understand.

Sri Hong-Owen looked at Prem and me. ‘Thank you for the diversion. It allowed me to run the gift of another visitor. I have full control of my ship now.’

‘Your ship is still owned by the Ghosts,’ Prem said. ‘Surrounded by their ships, the target of heavy weaponry that will blow it apart if it tries to get away. But we can help you escape.’

‘I left home once before, in another life,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘I wanted to find the secret of eternal life, but things didn’t quite work out as I hoped. Change is life, and I have changed a great deal since then. This time around, I think I’ll stay.’

‘Show her,’ Prem said, and I threw up a window that displayed aspects of the Library.

‘There’s plenty of room in it,’ I said. ‘For you and your ship, and your crew.’

Sri Hong-Owen studied the window for a moment, head cocked, eyes shining with secret amusement. ‘It
is
very large. And there are some interesting things in it. But it’s also very old, and it needs a lot of work. And, forgive me for saying so, but it’s seriously lacking in possibility. In the capacity for change.’

‘Perhaps you could help us,’ I said.

‘All you have to do is walk across the bridge with us,’ Prem said.

‘You’ll find it’s badly damaged,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘Your friends fought well, but some of the Ghost avatars almost broke through.’

I called up an image of the bridge, and felt a cold dismay. I was only a copy of a copy, had known from the start that there was little chance of surviving my mission, but now that I was confronted with the hard truth of my imminent death I wanted so very much to live.

‘You can’t stay here,’ Prem said. ‘If we go right now there’s a good chance that we can get you across.’

‘Even if the bridge was whole, I couldn’t cross it in my present form. I’m too vast. I’m part of everything now.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Prem said, and raised her rifle. ‘Let’s put that to the test.’

‘Are you trying to threaten me? In my viron? In my ship?’ For a moment, Sri Hong-Owen towered above us, a dark storm cloud that eclipsed Cthuga’s swollen globe. And then she stood before us again, a young girl in a white dress. Saying, ‘If you’re worried that I will form an alliance with the Ghosts, I promise to be no kind of friend to them. And as you can see, they’ve lost whatever power they had over me. I’m free. Free at last.’

‘You are still their prisoner.’

‘They can destroy me, but they can’t control me. And they won’t destroy me as long as I control the avatar of their champion, because she’ll tell anyone who asks that she’s in control. I’m taking my ship out of orbit right now. Stay or try to leave, it’s your choice.’

Prem looked as if she wanted to argue the point. I took her hand and said, ‘We must try to go back. Our people need to know what we learned.’

Sri Hong-Owen said to Prem, ‘If you ever meet an old friend of mine – the one whose form you’ve borrowed? Tell him that I’m grateful for the time I spent with him. Tell him that I hope to repay him and his people one day.’

She turned in a neat quick pirouette that made her white skirt flare out, and walked back towards the gate in the wall. The avatar of the demon followed her like a house pet. Prem and I looked at each other, and then we ran.

The little town was crumbling all around us. Burning buildings fell to ashes and less than ashes. Roofs and walls shivered into billions of discrete bits that sketched ghostly outlines for a moment before evaporating, as the information that had given them order turned into random noise. Prem and I ran full tilt down a narrowing road through this great vanishing, hand in hand, breathless. We passed through a stretch of forest that fell away to blank barrens on either side, and there was the bridge, arched across the river, and the lights of the Library heaped on the far side.

The island and its cathedral and crowded ranks of houses were crumbling and a long section of the bridge had fallen away at the point where it met the island’s prow. Prem and I walked to the edge of the broken roadway, looking out across the churning flow of the river’s repetitive cycles, saw two figures run out along the other side of the broken bridge, shouting and waving to us across the gap.

‘This is a very bad metaphor,’ Prem said.

‘It’s too late to construct another,’ I said, and threw a packet of information to my twin. It turned into a bird and flew across the river as swift as thought and my twin caught it deftly in one hand and held up the other, palm out, in salute and benediction.

The remnants of the island subsided in a dust storm of shattered information that rolled out across the river. And now the bridge on which Prem and I stood began to dissolve.

‘I think—’ Prem said.

‘I know,’ I said.

We clasped each other in each other’s arms. A moment later, everything fell away.

12

When Ori walked her bot out of its garage, she discovered that the sky all around the Whale was threaded with hectic motion. Sleek raptors – so fine to see! – stooped down from zenith, twisting and turning as they chased Ghost craft that jittered in erratic orbits near and far. Drones flared from the raptors’ truncated wings, spiralling away towards their targets. Beam and particle weapons burned sooty threads through the methane-rich air. The percussive flares of explosions, bright blinks vanishing inside black clouds of vapour that were ripped to shreds by wind shear.

Ori’s passenger moved out of the darkness at the back of her skull. You watch this, she told it, and wondered if it could feel the exhilaration and hope that surged through her and lifted her heart. Watch and learn.

Other raptors shot past the tangled contrails and explosions of the dogfights, aiming their weapons at the cable that hung from the Whale. A boxy Ghost machine jerked across the path of one of them and they met and vanished in a shatter of tumbling fragments. Then the wave of raptors had passed, and the survivors were pulling out in hard turns far below, specks fleeing out across the dirty white cloud deck.

Ori watched them go. So few of them left, and flocks of Ghost craft still circled in every quarter of the sky. But now a second wave of raptors drove down amongst a flicker of hard white stars and raking fans of black threads as Ghosts fired off countermeasures. Many of the raptors were destroyed before they reached the Whale; most of the rest were destroyed in brief fierce dogfights; the few survivors chased away after the survivors of the first wave. Behind them, clouds of tiny drones spread out, some shooting towards Ghost craft, the rest falling in long arcs towards the cable, flaring in chains of tiny explosions along its length.

High above, a bright star was descending.

Ori watched as it went past, about twenty kilometres out. A teardrop of dark, raddled water ice riding a tongue of fusion flame. The old, old starship. Ghost craft of every shape and size made way for it, and far below a carnival of tiny lights rose up to meet it. Sprites. A host of sprites dancing around it, enveloping it, following it as it fell.

The Ghosts’ prize had come to Cthuga.

Ori turned her bot to look straight down the length of the Whale as the starship dwindled away, falling parallel with the cable, vanishing into the cloud deck. Her passenger watched too, pressing against the back of her eyeballs. You should go with the ship, Ori told it. Fly away. Fly away. Get ready for the big moment when everything changes.

But, as always, there was no reply.

She remembered now why she had come out here in the first place and put out a call to Inas, waited out a long, long silence, called again. Nothing. Not even the ping of acknowledgement. Perhaps the comms were jammed because of the attack; perhaps they were about some business of their True master. Ori hoped it was the former rather than the latter. She hoped that Inas and the rest of her former crewmates weren’t enacting some stupid and no doubt suicidal plan of their True master.

She disengaged from the bot, levered herself off the immersion couch, set out towards the commons of jockey crew #87. She’d have to confront them face to face, tell them she’d killed the commissar. And wondered why she hadn’t thought of that before. Thought to lie. Maybe it was because she didn’t know how; because it was a last desperate chance to get close to the True. She’d have to find some way of brazening it out, of pretending that she’d done what had been asked of her. And if Inas and the others fell for it, they’d take her to the True, and she’d tell him about the descent of the Ghosts’ champion, and find some way of convincing him of its importance, of what had to be done.

And if he didn’t believe her . . . But that was unthinkable.

She was no longer afraid. She knew that death was just around the corner but she was no longer afraid. In that moment, she was free. Fully awake, fully aware. Every sense sharp. Feeling a weird exultation, in this hour of her death. Her passenger still rode behind her eyes. A funny kind of pressure, like a word she couldn’t say or an image she couldn’t see, that was beginning to turn into a headache. She wondered if it understood what she wanted to do. She wondered if it would be freed when she died, or if it would die with her.

It should have been a straight run to the commons. Back to the elevator ring, up three floors, and out towards the rim. Ten minutes at the most. But when Ori reached the concourse in front of the elevators she discovered that it was crowded with knots of Ghosts that swept back and forth. After a moment, she realised that they were fighting. Slashing and bludgeoning each other in furious silence. One wielded a cutting tool, waving its spike back and forth, scorching lines of black char across the faces and chests of his attackers. Another swung a whip of monofilament wire, clearing a wide space in front of her. Two gangs ran at each other, merged in a wild flurry of fists and feet. The wounded and dying and dead curled up as if asleep, sprawled in spreading pools of blood.