In the Mouth of the Whale (2 page)

Maria Hong-Owen’s position in the hospital gave her considerable status, but her manner was severe and abrupt, she showed little interest in gossip, and was innocent of tact. Those who believed they mattered in the town thought her a typical barbarian from the Spanish-speaking south. At first, she was invited to parties and formal dinners and introduced to everyone who was anyone, but the wives were jealous of her independence and feared that she would steal their husbands, and the husbands did not know how to deal with a woman whose professional accomplishments gave her the kind of independence they jealously reserved for themselves. It did not help that, quite soon after her arrival in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Maria had a very public row with the supervisor of the sugar-cane plantation. A pipe in the plantation’s mill fractured; pressurised steam scalded three workers; Maria saved their lives and reconstructed their faces and hands with grafts of cultured skin and collagen, and presented a strongly-worded letter of complaint about work practices in the plantation to the members of the town’s council. They rejected it out of hand, of course, being friends and business associates of the plantation’s supervisor, Vidal Rahai Francisca, but Maria’s headstrong action had an effect she couldn’t have anticipated.

Unlike most of its important citizens, Vidal Francisca had been born in the town. His father had been a teacher in its school; Vidal had studied at the agricultural college in Manaus and returned to take charge of the plantation, which was owned, like much of the town, by a minor scion of the Peixoto family. His beautiful young wife had died suddenly of an aneuryism ten years ago and he hadn’t remarried, although it was rumoured that he kept a mistress in an apartment in Manaus. A clever, vain man, he’d taken on the role of ringmaster to the town’s tiny social set. He had organised several famous events – a firework display the size of a minor war, a boat race, a polo match on the futbol field, especially returfed for the occasion, a performance of
Turandot
by a touring opera company – and every Independence Day held a celebrated and much anticipated barbecue at his large house.

After his spat with Doctor Hong-Owen, he had felt insulted at first, and then intrigued. He saw in the woman’s dedication and uncompromising manner something of his younger self, and he sympathised with her plight. Her widowhood and, so he supposed, her loneliness. So he was disappointed when she sent him a polite message declining his invitation to that year’s Independence Day party, excusing herself on the grounds of pressure of work.

Her absence was noted, of course; most people agreed that she was a ball-breaker too proud and snobbish to associate with people she believed to be no better than country bumpkins. Vidal Francisca found himself defending her on more than one occasion. ‘I know how it is, to lose a loved one, and to raise a child alone,’ he said, at a dinner party. ‘It leaves you with little energy for anything else. And if that is not enough, she is a capable woman very dedicated to her work.’

‘If she had any love of her work she should know who pays her salary,’ someone said.

‘Do we pay her to abase herself before us,’ Vidal asked, ‘or to do her work?’

‘Vidal is in love,’ someone else said, to general laughter.

Vidal Francisca managed to change the subject, but more and more he found his thoughts turning to the young doctor and her precocious daughter.

Because her mother was more or less frozen out of the town’s social set, the Child did not mix much with children of her class. She was tutored in mathematics and physics by the teenage son of the hospital director, but that was about it. At first she was too young to know any different, and later she pretended that she did not care.

Imagine the Child growing up in that small and sleepy outpost, blonde and light-skinned like her father, secretive, sunburned, lanky. She learned how to trap birds with sticky sap and poison fish in a pool with a mash of berries, where edible fungi grew and at what season, which trees had kindly spirits and which were possessed by angry spirits that must be acknowledged and pacified, or else they might drop a branch on your head. She learned to read some of the signs with which the Ianomâmis marked their sacred places, and she collected and catalogued beetles and moths, and discussed the pharmaceutical properties of forest plants and mosses with her mother. And so she passed back and forth between two irreconcilable worlds: the numinous world of her mother’s God and of Ama Paulinho’s ancestral beliefs, where spirits animated the forest, men could shrug off human form, and death was not a full stop but a transformation; and the world of her mother’s profession, where logic unpicked mystery and revealed the common principles and laws by which reality could be tamed and manipulated, where disease was driven back by antibiotics and gene therapy, cancers were defeated by tagged antibodies and engineered viruses, and only death remained unconquered.

The Child had an early familiarity with death. She kept a small menagerie of animals collected from the wild places inside the town limits or bought in the market. She had a tank of terrapins, several tanks of river fish. She had an ant farm sandwiched between two plates of glass. She collected several species of stick insect from the forest, and bought a baby sloth from a mestizo boy in the market, but it died because she couldn’t figure out how to wean it. Most of her animals died, sooner or later. One day her fish would be all alive-o in their tanks; the next they’d be floating belly up. The ants deserted their maze. One by one, the stick insects dropped to the bottoms of their wire-mesh cages, as stiff and dry in death as the twigs they had emulated in life. Only the terrapins did not die, no matter how often she forgot to feed them, or how fetid the green soup of their little pond became.

And because she made herself useful around the hospital, working in the lab, running errands for the nurses and doctors, fetching water and food for patients, and so on, the Child was also familiar with the deep and powerful mystery of human death. One day she’d be chatting with an old woman; the next, the woman’s bed would be empty and stripped to its mattress. Late one sultry night, the Child delivered a bite of supper to her mother as she kept watch on a dying patient in a little room off one of the wards. She saw the man start in his solitary bed and try to rise on his elbows, toothless mouth snapping at the air, his eyes wide and fixed on something far beyond the limits of the room, the hospital, the town, the world. She saw her mother ease him down and talk to him soothingly and fold his hands around a rosary, saw him try to take a breath and fail, and try and fail again, and that was that. Her mother called the Child to her side and they said a prayer over the body. Then her mother rose, her shadow wheeling hugely across the wall and ceiling, and flung open the shutters of the window as if setting something free.

Yes, the Child had an early education in death, but to begin with she was only mildly interested in it. Animals died, and it was disappointing because it meant that she had failed in some part of their care. People came to the hospital to get better, but sometimes, especially if they were old, nothing could be done for them, and they died. She did not think that it was something that would ever happen to her until she saw the drowned boy.

She was eleven, that summer. We had at last passed through Fomalhaut’s Oort Cloud and were approaching the bow shock of its heliosphere. After almost one and a half thousand years, we were poised to enter the rarified climate of our destination. And the weather that summer in the little town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira and in the vast Amazonia region all around was unusually hot and dry. The wet season ended a month early, and after that no rain fell for day after day after day. The sun burned in a cloudless sky bleached white as paper. The lawn in the hospital compound withered. The streets were silted with silky dust and dust blew into houses and apartments. The R&R Corps stopped planting out new areas of forest. The artesian well that watered Vidal Francisca’s sugar-cane plantation dried up; he had to run a pump line two kilometres long from the river. And the level of the river dropped steadily, exposing rocks and an old shipwreck unseen for decades.

It was a return of the bad days, Ama Paulinho said, and told the Child tall tales about great droughts in the long-ago. People prayed to Gaia at every Mass, but no rain came. During the day they stayed indoors as much as possible, sheltering from brassy hammerfalls of heat and light; in the evening they gathered along the beach below the Praia Grande, to enjoy the breezes that blew over the cool waters of the river. Families brought food or cooked there, men drank and talked at a couple of bars set up on the sand, and children ran everywhere.

Maria Hong-Owen was too often busy with her duties at the hospital to visit the beach, but the Child went there almost every evening with Ama Paulinho, where they ate with the old woman’s extended family, everyone sitting around a blanket spread with bowls and dishes of salad, rice and beans, fried fish, farofa, hard-boiled eggs, and fruit. Afterwards, the Child liked to walk by herself, watching fat tropical stars bloom in the humid nightblue sky, watching bats dip and skim across the river, watching people moving about. Children chased up and down the beach in little packs, or played the game that was the rage in the town that summer, involving throwing little shells into the air and catching them on the back of the hand while chanting nonsense rhymes, but the Child believed that she had grown beyond those childish things. She was no longer a child nor yet an adult, but something else. A changeling, perhaps, like one of the lonely creatures in her ama’s stories. Living amongst people, disguised as one of them, but watchful and apart.

One night, she was walking along the water’s edge when she noticed a flurry of activity a little way ahead. A small group of children shouting and pointing at something in the river; two men running towards them, splashing into the shallows. The Child walked towards them over sugary sand still warm from the day’s sun. More adults were coming down the beach. Then a woman screamed and ran towards the two men, stooping between them and lifting up the wet and naked body of a little boy. She staggered out of the water and sat down hard, pressing the body to herself, shaking it, kissing its face, looking around at people who would not meet her gaze, asking the dear Lord Jesus Christ the same question over and again. Why? Why had this happened? Why why why?

The Child knew the boy from the market, where he helped his father sell watermelons, but she did not know his name until the woman began to say it, calling to him over and again in a cracked and sobbing incantation, rocking his body, stroking wet hair back from his face. Two small girls were crying, hugging each other, convulsed by huge shivers. One man said that the boy had got out of his depth in the river. Other people talked in low voices. No one dared disturb the terrible eloquence of the woman’s grief. The Child stood amongst the crowd, watching everything.

At last, one of the priests, Father Caetano, came along the twilight beach in his black soutane. Two paramedics from the hospital followed him, hauling their gear. They prised the drowned boy from his mother and worked on him for some time; at last they looked at each other across his body and one of them shook his head. The boy’s mother shrieked, pushed away a woman who tried to comfort her, was caught and held tight by another. Father Caetano knelt, recited the Prayer for the Dead, and took out a small vial of oil and with his thumb drew a cross on the boy’s forehead. Then the paramedics lifted the body on to their stretcher and covered it with a blanket and put their equipment on its chest and carried it up the beach, followed by Father Caetano and the boy’s mother and a ragged tail of onlookers.

The Child lingered at the river’s edge after everyone else had gone. Watching the dark water slide past, head cocked as if listening for something.

Late that night, Maria returned from the hospital and looked in on her daughter and found the bed empty. She checked the other rooms in the bungalow and went outside and woke Ama Paulinho. The two women went to the shed where the Child kept her menagerie, and then they searched the rest of the compound. The private gate was locked; the watchman at the public gate at the front of the hospital apologised and said that he had not seen the doctor’s daughter. With the help of two night nurses, Maria and Ama Paulinho searched the wards and surgical rooms, the kitchens and storerooms, the offices and the pathology lab, the pharmacy and the out-patient clinic. They found the Child at last in the mortuary, asleep on a chair near the rack of refrigerated drawers where those who had died in the hospital or in accidental or suspicious circumstances were stored before being autopsied.

The Child said that she’d wanted to keep the dead boy company, and despite close questioning by her mother would say nothing else. She never told anyone the real reason why she’d kept watch over the body: that she had believed the boy might have been seduced by the River Folk, that his death by drowning had been the first stage in his transformation. In her mind’s eye, she’d seen him waking in the cold dark of the mortuary drawer, had seen herself freeing him, helping him back to the river, earning the gratitude of the River Folk. A fantasy that seemed foolish the next morning, but left her with one unassailable conviction. Green saints and gene wizards could extend their lives by a century or more, and people cheated death time and again in her ama’s stories. She was certain that she would find a way to cheat it too.

2

I was on my way to harrow a hell when everything changed. This was on Maui, a no-account worldlet at the trailing edge of the Archipelago. The Trehajo clan had turned it into a resettlement centre for refugees who had fled the last big push by the Ghosts, some hundred megaseconds ago. A family of ice refiners had stumbled upon an active fragment of the old Library, and before informing the resettlement authority they’d taken a peek inside, no doubt hoping to uncover a tasty chunk of data that they could sell on the grey market. They’d woken a minor demon instead, and it had turned them. Luckily, the resettlement authority had realised what was happening, and had moved on the family’s tent habitat before things got out of hand. I’d been tasked with the final clean-up.