In the Mouth of the Whale (6 page)

Maria warned her daughter to stay away from the wranglers. ‘You saw the badge she wore? Those lightning bolts have nothing to do with weather. It’s an old fascist symbol. The wranglers are freelance now, but once they were part of the militia that overthrew the democratically elected government of our country. The fight last night started when a group of the captain’s “comrades” began to sing one of their battle hymns. They are proud of their past, and the townspeople remember some of it too. Weather was used as a weapon, during the wars after the Overturn. Much of the damage to the forest was caused by natural climate change. But not all of it.’

‘But if they use the technology for good—’

‘They were bad people then, and they’re haven’t changed,’ Maria said. She was emptying the bottle of rum into the hopper of the kitchen recycler. Her hair was scraped back from her face and there were dark scoops under her eyes. ‘They didn’t come here to save us. They came here to earn credit. Any good they do is secondary to their main purpose. Can you guess what that is? Think of them as an organism.’

‘They want to survive and reproduce.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But to what purpose? To keep the past alive? There doesn’t seem much point in that.’

‘They think they will be needed again one day,’ Maria said. A light in the recycler’s panel turned from red to green; she dropped the empty bottle into the hopper.

Every day for a week, a flock of small, arrowhead-shaped airships crossed the sky from west to east, circling the distant peaks of the Serra da Bela Adormecida mountains and returning westward high above the river. Meshes of green laser light flickered between them as they sailed back and forth, faint in the hot sunlight; thin fingers of cloud spread in their wake. The townspeople gathered each night on the beach at the edge of the river and banged drums and pots and pans, rang bells and set off fireworks, but little rain fell, and the clouds always evaporated before dawn. At last the weather wranglers’ blimp lumbered into the air and passed low above the town and dwindled into the hot sky, and the sun shone in solitary triumph day after day after day after day.

The R&R Corps and the plantations laid off many workers. Small independent farms failed. The town’s population was swollen by people from outlying villages and settlements; food was rationed; there were outbreaks of malaria and typhus; the army imposed martial law because of increased wildsider activity. Someone tried to shoot down an army plane with a smart missile. The town suffered shortages of food and other supplies because of attacks on road and river traffic, and after several bombs exploded in the solar farm and halved its capacity there were irregular blackouts during the day and no electricity at all between six in the evening and eight in the morning.

We were preparing the Child for the war that lay ahead of her. The Fomalhaut system, which by precedence and natural justice should have been her dominion, had been settled by no less than three upstart clades whose ships had overtaken our slow and badly damaged vessel, and now all three were involved in a war in and around Fomalhaut’s solitary gas giant, and in the big circumstellar dust ring beyond it. We still had much to learn about the cause of the war and the nature of the clades embroiled in it, but we were certain about one thing: it would be a fatal mistake to become involved.

The Child quickly became used to the hardships and restrictions caused by drought and the conflict with the wildsiders. Because the wildsiders had declared that hospital workers and their families were, like schoolteachers, plantation supervisors, workers in the R&R Corps, and anyone else associated with the government, legitimate targets in the struggle for liberation, she could no longer go to the market with Ama Paulinho, she was forbidden to go on collecting expeditions along the river’s edge and into the nearby forest, and her visits to Ama Paulinho’s family were curtailed. But she did not much mind. She had her work in the hospital, and she also had her own work: the life of her own mind, growing in strange directions.

After the boy had drowned in plain sight of almost the entire town, she had realised that death could happen to anyone at any time. Even to her. It was not like the change between maggot and fly. It was not really a change at all, but a loss. The body failed and that failure freed the soul – but what was the soul, and where did it go? Ama Paulinho told her that it flew up to Heaven, where it would live for ever in the grace and glory of God. Her mother told her that the soul was immaterial, made not of matter but of spirit, which could not be measured by any scientific instrument, but this was no help because it simply moved the question behind a veil of mystery.

The Child began to wonder if all this talk about the soul leaving the body like a lifeboat leaving a sinking ship was meant to dodge or obscure the stark fact that death was the end. And she began to understand that the stories her ama told her, of spirits that animated the forest and made the trees grow in their appointed places and maintained the intricate balances of every kind of life, were no more than stories. It was not so very different from the sermons of the priests, who also invoked spirits to explain the mysteries of the world. There was God the saviour, who was everywhere in the world, as invisible and impalpable as the sleet of neutrinos shed by the sun. There was his son Jesus Christ, who had died to redeem the sins of every human being, and would one day return to finish his work. There was the Holy Spirit, who gave access to the salvation that was manifest in Jesus. And there was the handmaiden to the Trinity, Gaia, a version or aspect of the Virgin Mary who contained the entirety of the world’s intricate cycles and epicycles of climate and ecology. According to the Church, it was the holy duty of the human race to help Gaia heal the scars of the Overturn, but the Child thought she knew better. She knew about ecological niches and ecotypes, non-equilibrium dynamics and resilience, the relationship between diversity and energy flows. She knew about survival of the fittest and the lesson of the intricate diversity of Darwin’s tangled hedgerow. She knew about the hard work needed to bring the forest back to life – the plastic tunnels where cloned seedlings were nurtured, the reactors that brewed living soil to replace the alkaline hardpan in dead zones, and so on. The miracle was not that it was a miracle, but that it could be done by ordinary men and women.

There were no miracles, no absolute mysteries, only problems which had not yet been solved. The blooming burgeoning complexity of the world proceeded not from a Word but from the interaction of simple chemicals that in the right conditions could create increasingly complex domains of self-regulating order. Drowned women did not turn into islands; husbands did not run away and become jaguars. There was no bridge between the world of things and the world of spirit because there was only one world. The world in which she lived. The everyday world where death hung like a little dark cloud in a corner of the blue and blameless sky. The trick was not to survive it, but to avoid it.

By now, she had raced ahead of her teacher’s biology lessons. She was tinkering with the development of flies, using customised splicing kits. Creating maggots that did not pupate but continued to eat and grow; maggots that pupated but did not undergo aptosis and so were not able to develop further; maggots with metabolic kinks which meant that they processed food inefficiently and grew very slowly, some able to pupate, others not. The giant maggots and developmentally challenged pupae quickly died; only half-starved, slow-growing maggots lived significantly longer than ordinary flies. The Child couldn’t tinker with her own genetic make-up because the various tools she needed – tailored viruses and micro-RNAs, splicing protocols, telomere treatments, and so on – were strictly licensed by the government. And gene wizards and green saints jealously guarded their research, especially the secrets which had extended their lives. Although the Child had sent flattering messages to various gene wizards employed by the Peixoto family, only a few had replied, and those with benign vagueness that recognised the Child’s interest but did nothing to satisfy her thirst for knowledge. So she set about educating herself, soaking up gigabytes of old, unrestricted literature on human longevity, and when her work on maggots confirmed the work of certain early pioneers, she decided that she could take one positive step towards her goal, and began to cut down her food intake.

It wasn’t easy to eat less with her ama clucking over her, but the Child discovered that she could make herself throw up after meals, with a finger down her throat at first, then, when that no longer worked because she’d lost her gag reflex, with soapy water. She didn’t do this every day. She had a strict plan, and the will to discipline herself. To take charge of her body and her destiny. She dosed herself with a complex mix of vitamins, mineral supplements and omega-3 oils spun by the hospital’s maker. She charted changes in her weight. She studied herself in the mirror every day, felt her ribs and the horns of her pelvis. She worked on her maggots and flies. She tried to devise a plan to trick Vidal Francisca into ordering splicing templates for human genes through the sugar-cane plantation’s laboratory, but she couldn’t work out how to get past the fearsome government licensing restrictions.

It was her use of the hospital maker that gave her away. One of the technicians discovered the simple programs she’d written, and told her mother; her mother confronted her, and it all came out. The dieting and the ideas about tinkering with her own genome, her plan to remain a child for ever.

Maria Hong-Owen blamed herself. For being too caught up in her work. For failing to spot her daughter’s obsession, for failing to realise that her skinniness was something more than a phase in her development. She talked with the Child about her experiments and tried to rationalise away her fears, but the Child was stubborn and refused to listen to reason, refused to accept that she was risking her health to no good purpose. They fought each other to unsatisfactory truces, the Child by turns sulky and shrill, Maria tired and headachy after working long hours in the hospital, where she spent more than half her time arguing with the hospital board about emergency measures, or with remote officials about essential supplies that had never been sent or had been lost somewhere in the supply chain, or had been hijacked by wildsiders or bandits. At last, alarmed by her daughter’s flat insistence that she knew better than anyone else about matters that she was far too young to properly understand, Maria said that she would receive some instruction from Father Caetano.

Here is one whose life is not even written in water. One we must create from first principles. A violation of our rules, yes, but necessary if we are to achieve our aims. Besides, there was a church in the little town, and so there must have been a priest or two, and we imagine this one darkly handsome, vigorous and practical, able to navigate the rapids and swift currents of the river and to hike through kilometres of forest and dead zones as he made the rounds of his extended parish.

Like so many priests in the wilderness, Father Stephanos Caetano was a Jesuit, educated in the venerable Colégio Santo Inácio in Rio de Janeiro. His work in São Gabriel da Cachoeira had not given him much opportunity for debating theological niceties, but he tried to do his best by the Child. See them now, sitting in the shaded veranda of his bungalow, talking, sipping iced lemonade made by Father Caetano’s wife, a plump homely woman who worked in the hospital’s administration, while out in the hot bright little walled garden bees and hummingbirds attend flowering bushes sparingly watered from the dwindling river.

‘He pretends to be interested in my experiments,’ the Child told Roberto, the next day. ‘But even though I explained everything three different ways, he doesn’t really understand it.’

‘Well, I don’t really understand it either.’

‘Only because you can’t be bothered to.’

Roberto shrugged. A lanky teenager dressed in a one-piece white tracksuit and running shoes, just returned from his daily run. His wiry hair was matted with sweat; his dark skin shone. He’d always run everywhere as a kid, driven by impatience and an excess of energy that the boundaries and routines of the small town couldn’t contain, and he still ran now, at least ten kilometres a day. Besides an interest in science, he and the Child shared an ambition to escape the town and make their mark on the wider world. Roberto was already on his way. He’d aced the vestibular for the Institute of Physics at the Federal University of São Paulo, won a scholarship. In a few weeks, at the end of summer, he’d be gone, on a trajectory that the Child longed to follow.

He said, ‘Is it so bad, if all you’re doing is boring him with biology?’

‘He keeps bringing God into it.’

‘Priests have a habit of doing that.’

‘I told him about spandrels,’ she said. ‘The old idea that certain properties of organisms are accidental byproducts of function and form, just as the highly decorated spandrels between adjacent arches in cathedrals are accidents of geometry. I told him that our appreciation of beauty in all its forms, our arts, might also be spandrels.’

‘You were trying to stir him up.’

‘I was bored. I wondered if it was possible that religion was a spandrel.
He
said that all forms of art were ways of praising creation. And therefore, of praising the Creator. So how could I be sure, he said, that they were truly accidental?’

‘He isn’t stupid,’ Roberto said.

‘I have to see him again,’ the Child said. ‘Over and over. Until I’m turned into a good little Christian.’

‘That will take some time.’

‘And meanwhile you’ll be in São Paulo, free as a bird.’