In the Mouth of the Whale (10 page)

A flower floated in the Horse’s bowl of tea. He plucked it out between finger and thumb and nibbled at it, saying, ‘Did it occur to you that she might have told you you’d fail to goad you into volunteering us for a task that would most likely lead to further disgrace?’

‘I lack your twisted logic.’

‘Also my common sense. If you fail, the Redactor Svern’s influence will be diminished, and you will still be damned. If you succeed, it will benefit the Library, and the Redactor Miriam will do everything she can to make sure that you are not rewarded. She believes that she will win however this plays out.’

‘The Redactor Svern thinks that Yakob Singleton found something important. Something that could change the course of the war. And win me absolution, too.’

The Horse smiled. There was a petal caught between his teeth. ‘But he would not or could not tell you what it is, or how he knows it is so important.’

‘He also thinks that there may be a link between the Mind in Cthuga and the demon that killed our friends and comrades. And he wonders if there’s a link between that demon and the hell that Yakob Singleton discovered.’

‘And that’s why he chose you. You’re caught between his obsession and the Redactor Miriam’s politicking.’

Anyone else would have beaten him for that. I gave him a hard look and said, ‘As far as we’re concerned, all that matters is the hell. After I’ve spoken to Yakob Singleton’s mother, we’ll crack it open, deal with whatever’s inside, and move on from there.’

‘I’d better unpack and test every one of our algorithms, then. It’s been a while since we’ve used the full array.’

‘I’ll take care of the gear. I want you to do what you do best – talk to your friends and acquaintances, and anyone who might know anything useful about Yakob Singleton.’

‘So you do have doubts about what your old master told you.’

‘No. I have doubts about what Yakob Singleton’s mother told him.’

6

They came for Ori two days after the quake. She was working with her crew out on the skin of the Whale, repairing damage to the marshalling yards, when the connection to her bot shut down and she found two Quick in the scarlet halters and black shorts of the public service crew standing either side of her immersion chair.

‘You’re wanted for interview,’ one said.

‘Upstairs,’ the other said. ‘Right now.’

Ori stood. There was no point asking why she was wanted. She knew. She’d been expecting it. All around in the dimly lit room her crewmates reclined in chairs, hands and feet cased in feedback mittens, luminescent strings and streamers flowing over their faces, their attention projected elsewhere. As she followed her escorts out of the room Ori glanced over at Inas, felt a cold needle of regret pierce her heart, looked away. No point asking if she could say goodbye, either.

They rode an express elevator a long way, two kilometres to the decks where Quick administrators and Trues lived. The two PSCs standing behind Ori, saying nothing. At the end of the ride, she was taken down a service corridor and left alone in a cold, brightly lit room. Standing because she had not been told that she could sit. Trying not to shiver. Trying not to think. Trying to ignore the faint but insistent pressure of the presence at the back of her head.

At last a Quick came in, a drab clerk not much older than Ori. She opened a window that displayed a montage of images and video clips culled from the viewpoints of Ori’s bot and the bots of her crew during the confusion and wreckage after the quake had struck, stopped the flow of the montage when the flatbed rail car and probe dropped away, with Ori’s bot riding it.

‘You have to explain everything that happened,’ she told Ori. ‘Starting with why you were on the flatbed rail car.’

‘I already filed a report.’

‘It isn’t my idea,’ the clerk said.

‘Right.’

The clerk listened to Ori’s story about the long fall, letting her tell it in her own words without comment or question, and closed the window.

‘What now?’ Ori said.

‘I hope it works out for you,’ the clerk said, without meeting Ori’s gaze, and left.

Ori waited even longer, this time. She was squatting with her back against one of the walls when a True came in. A man in army uniform, caged in an exoskeleton. A fat pistol holstered at his hip, a captain’s silver starburst on his left breast. He told Ori to stand in the centre of the room and circled around and around her, the little motors in his exoskeleton ticking and whining.

‘We think you may be a wrecker,’ he said at last. ‘We know you used the confusion of the accident to destroy that probe.’

‘No, sir.’

Ori’s head was pounding and adrenalin was pumping through her body.

‘“No, sir.” That’s all you have to say?’

‘The probe this one and her crew were working on broke free, sir,’ Ori said. The True had stopped in front of her, but she didn’t dare look at him. ‘This one and her crewmates did everything they could to lock it down—’

‘Your crewmates did everything they could to lock it down. And when it broke free you just happened to be riding it. Why? For fun? Because you wanted a cheap thrill?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You had a reason. Tell me.’

Ori told the truth, feeling a cold flush of shame. ‘Just before the quake hit, this one climbed on to the flatbed rail car. It would have been better to fasten the bot to the platform, as the others did. But this one wanted to see what happened. Out of ego. Out of wrongfulness. The truck was struck by debris from a chain of freight cars higher up. It fell. This one fell with it.’

‘Why did you launch the probe?’

‘This one believed it might strike the cable and cause serious damage if its payload was breached.’

Ori spoke as humbly as she could. She knew that she had done the right thing, and also knew that she should not expect praise or reward. She had done it without first asking permission. She had acted on her own. She had behaved as if she was a True. She had been crazy.

‘You claim to have had some kind of close encounter.’

‘There was a sprite,’ Ori said reluctantly.

‘And you claim it did something to you.’

‘This one feels it left something of itself behind.’

The True studied her, then opened two windows. One showing the beginning of the montage of stills and clips that the clerk had played, the other a section through someone’s skull that exposed the lobes of the brain, with little puddles of green and yellow and blue caught in a web of red threads.

Ori felt the presence at the back of her head stir and move forward. The sprite, or a fragment of it. Her passenger. Inas still refused to believe that it was real. And for most of the time, as far as Ori was concerned, it was little more than an itch inside her skull, a hum like the faint but continuous mingled roar of the Whale, a word unuttered, a thought or memory she couldn’t quite grasp. But then it would come to stand behind her eyes, and she knew. She knew that it was real. That it really was inside her head, a bundle of unknown and unguessable thoughts and intentions, separate from her own thoughts, her own intentions.

When she’d been very small, one of her first jobs had been to load cartridges of goo into a sleeve pump attached to one of the tanks that collected the floor-washings of the machine shops. The pump injected the goo into the big tank with a percussive thump, and for a moment a long finger of white goo stood inside the dirty water. And then it began to disperse as the nanobots suspended in it chased down precious flecks and atoms of metal. Whenever the passenger moved forward, Ori thought of that finger of goo. Was frightened that the passenger would disperse inside her brain, chase down and consume every scrap of thought and memory . . .

The True was talking, telling her that she was going to tell him the whole story all over again. He told her that the window showed her brain activity, pointed out the areas that would light up when she lied. ‘When they do, you’re mine,’ he said.

Ori had been through struggle sessions before, confessing faults to her crewmates and accepting their criticisms, but this was something else. The True was cool and precise, asking the same questions over and over, taking her story apart sentence by sentence, jumping on every contradiction and uncertainty, asking her to explain and justify every move she’d made.

She answered as truthfully as she could. Humble and submissive. Hunched into herself, flinching away from the True’s gaze, trying not to look at the flickering patterns of her own brain activity. She felt as if she was being crowded into a smaller and smaller space, caught between fear of the True’s cold disdain and fear of the presence inside her head. Towards the end, she was so worn down that she was about ready to confess to anything and everything, yet an irreducible sliver of stubbornness remained; she continued to insist as politely as possible that the sprite had appeared in front of her and she had felt its intimate scrutiny, and felt some part of it still.

‘You showed initiative,’ the True said. ‘Taking command of the probe like that. A lot of people think that’s dangerous. They don’t like the idea of Quicks thinking for themselves.’

Ori hung her head, waiting for her punishment.

‘Why you’re not going to take the long drop right now, someone is interested in you. Because of your close encounter. You’re going to be tested. If you fail, you fall. And even if you pass, you’ll probably fall anyway. Because the man who thinks he has a use for you, he’s crazy,’ the True said, and walked out, stiff as a pair of scissors in the embrace of his exoskeleton.

The light went out as the door shut on his back and Ori was left alone in the dark. An hour. Two hours. Her bladder ached and sent a hot wire to her groin, and she was exhausted and still horribly afraid, and tired of being afraid. Convinced that she was going to die here because she’d done the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing. But she wasn’t alone. Something was standing at her back. When she twisted around to look at it there wasn’t anything there, of course. Only darkness. But she could feel it.

At last the light came back on, sudden and stark in the white room, and the door slid back and the two PSCs stepped in and told Ori to come with them.

They rode down in a big, slow elevator, the kind used to move machines around. Ori wondered if she was being taken to the end cap. Wondered if the True had lied to her; wondered if she was going to be given the long drop. The elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal a hangar space and a small crowd of Quicks inside a rectangle marked with yellow paint on the floor. The PSCs marched Ori across the space, shoved her across the yellow line, told her to find a spot and wait her turn.

All of the Quicks waiting there had been touched by sprites during the quake. Ori told her story, heard the stories of others. One had been riding a bot that had fallen from the Whale’s skin during the quake – had fallen a long, long way with a sprite wrapped around it. Two others had been confronted by sprites while riding machines in a garage. Two more had been visited while they rode bots hunkered down in a vacuum-organism farm. And so on, and so on. All retained to some degree or other the impression that the sprites they’d encountered were with them still. All were haunted by ghosts in their heads.

One by one they were taken away for medical examination. Most returned; a few didn’t. It wasn’t clear if those who had returned had passed or failed the tests. It took a long time to process everyone. PSC guards tossed food packs and water bottles into the rectangle every six hours. Everyone had to share two portable shitteries. There was nowhere to sit or sleep but the floor. Not one dared to step across the yellow lines that enclosed them. It was unthinkable to leave without permission.

At last, Ori was called forward and escorted to the examination area, a space at the far end behind portable screens. She was told to take off her clothes and she was prodded and scanned from scalp to toes by a small team of medics, passed from one to the next like a piece of meat. When the last was finished with her, she was allowed to dress, and escorted back to the rectangle.

She was one of the last to be examined. The medics packed up and left; the lights dimmed, and most of the Quicks inside the rectangle tried to get some sleep. Ori sat cross-legged, eyes closed, trying to communicate with the presence inside her head. Asking it what it was, what it wanted. Trying to move the centre of her attention to the warm dark at the back of her head where it lived. She jerked awake when the lights in the hangar snapped on. The guards were shouting, telling everyone to wake up.

‘Stand up and get into formation! Five lines, right now!’

‘Face forward, backs straight!’

‘Get ready to meet the commissar!’

‘Commissar Doctor Pentangel on deck!’

Ori stood amongst the others, standing in the middle of the second rank, her heart beating quickly and lightly. The guards snapped to attention as troopers moved across the open space ahead of the tallest True that Ori had ever seen. Very tall and very pale, with a shock of black hair and a beard like an inverted triangle. He wore a long white coat that hung open at the front, showing glimpses of the girdle and arm- and leg-clamps of his exoskeleton as he tick-tocked towards the Quicks standing in orderly rows inside the yellow rectangle painted on the floor.