In the Mouth of the Whale (7 page)

‘Ask him about his telescope,’ Roberto said.

‘He has a telescope?’

‘A good one. Twenty-centimetre reflector. Ask him to show you the stars and planets. You’ll learn something useful, and it’ll keep him off the topic of G-O-D.’

See the Child and the priest, then, sitting on the parched lawn of the bungalow in the hot summer night, leaning over a slate that displayed the telescope’s images, directing it this way and that. Gazing at double stars and nebulae, at the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda, watching for shooting stars, studying the Moon’s rugged face.

That summer Jupiter was as close to Earth as it ever got: the brightest star in the sky, rising like a lamp in the east. The telescope easily resolved the Galilean moons and Father Caetano told the Child the story of their discovery by the father of astronomy, Galileo Galilei: how that venerable scientist had realised that their shifting patterns meant they were not distant stars that by chance inhabited the same patch of sky as the planet, but were moons orbiting it. That if moons orbited Jupiter, Earth was not, as the Church asserted, the centre of the cosmos. Galileo, headstrong and unskilled in diplomacy, had angered the Church by publishing his ideas after explicit warnings to abandon them; he’d been forced to recant, but had been vindicated after his death, Father Caetano said, and the Church had long ago accommodated itself to his discovery, and to the discoveries of many other scientists.

This was a point he returned to over and again, one the Child had disputed before. The Church invoked absolute truths encoded in texts which could not be questioned because they proceeded from divine revelation, while all scientific theories were provisional and subject to modification and dispute as more data was gathered: absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached. And so Father Caetano’s so-called reconciliation was entirely on the terms of the Church, which cut and adjusted the truth of the world to fit into the frame of its own proclaimed truth.

But the Child was beginning to learn something about diplomacy and strategy, about when it was worth arguing a point and when it was not. So this time she kept her silence, the moment passed, and Father Caetano went on to talk about the properties of the four moons – fiery Io; Europa, with its ocean locked under a thin crust of ice; Ganymede, largest of all the moons in the Solar System, with a smaller ocean beneath a thicker crust of ice and rock; deep-frozen, battered Callisto – and the people who lived on Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and on the moons of Saturn.

They were Outers, descendants of rich and powerful families who had fled to the Moon to escape the ecological and political disaster of the Overturn. When Earth’s three major power blocs had turned their attention towards the Moon, the settlers had moved on, some to Mars, the rest to the moons of Jupiter, and then Saturn. The Martians had been destroyed after they’d declared war on Earth; the Outers living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were more peaceable, and quarantined besides by distance. They’d been living there for more than a century. Now, according to Father Caetano, there was talk of reconciliation.

‘Not because our leaders want to welcome them back to the rest of the human race, from which they exiled themselves in a selfish act of self-preservation. But because they have developed technologies that would be very useful to us in very many ways, and could make a great deal of money for people who already have too much money.’

Father Caetano talked on, explaining that many of the Outers had lost their belief in God, and thought of themselves as gods (‘with a small “g”’) because their antecedents had meddled with their genomes.

‘They claim to be smarter and kinder than we are. To be more moral. I cannot say if it is true. Certainly, they are vainer than us, to think such things of themselves. Such vanity is always a sin and an affront to God.’

‘Even if it’s true?’

Father Caetano and the Child were sitting side by side, faces lit by the slate on the table before them, with its faintly restless telescopic image of Jupiter. A bright quarter-moon was cocked above the shadows of the trees at the far end of the garden.

‘Especially if it’s true,’ Father Caetano said. ‘If you are clever and kind, you would not boast about it to those not as gifted as you. Because it would not be clever, and it certainly wouldn’t be kind. Many people don’t like the Outers for exactly that reason.’

‘But if they
are
cleverer, they could help us,’ the Child said.

‘Cleverness isn’t everything. Without a proper moral compass, without proper restraint, scientific enquiry can too easily lead to the creation of monsters.’

‘Have any of them ever visited Earth?’

It gave the Child a funny feeling to think that people like her were right now walking around on small icy moons in space suits, living in domed cities, tinkering with their biological destiny.

‘If you want to meet one, your best chance is to go to Brasília,’ Father Caetano said. ‘That’s where the ambassadorial missions are. They are tall and mostly pale, I hear. And must wear skeletons of metal and carbon fibre, because they grew up in places where the gravity is very weak. So they are weak too. Unable to move around by themselves. If they are gods, they must be very poor gods, I think.’

Father Caetano enjoyed his conversations with the eager young girl. He believed that her challenging mixture of naivety and sharp and original insights helped him to examine and renew his faith, and he also believed that he was doing good, that he was saving her soul from being indelibly marked by the sin of pride. We, who created him and set him in motion, believed it too. He was our agent, after all.

The Child had been so cooperative during her talks with Father Caetano that her mother decided that she should be rewarded. Once a month, Maria and a nurse from the hospital travelled upriver with Father Caetano, to visit those of his parishioners who had refused to move to São Gabriel da Cachoeira when the trouble with the wildsiders had spread from the mountains to the west. The Child could go with them on the next trip. She would help Father Caetano at the service, assist her mother at the field clinic, and be allowed to do a little botanising amongst the ruins.

Picture the Child, then, sitting in the shade of the canvas awning of a skiff making its way upriver. The nurse in front with two soldiers; Maria at the stern with Father Caetano, who was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt instead of his soutane, his eyes masked with sunglasses, the tiller of the skiff’s outboard motor tucked under his arm.

Trees pressed along both sides of the river, standing above sandbanks and stretches of crazed mud and shoals of rocks exposed by the drought. It was seven in the morning, and already hot. The sun had levered itself above the horizon an hour ago and now it glared at eye level. Unblinking, tireless. And it had only just begun its work for the day.

The Child soon grew tired of watching the black water for any sign of the River Folk. A few small birds picking along the water margin. Once a flock of parrots rose up, disturbed by the noise of the motor, flying away through green shadows like a shower of red and gold. Caymans lying on a sandbar like logs clad in armour. Otherwise, only the river and the trees and the hot sky.

At last, the river narrowed and cliffs rose up on either side, casting everything into deep shadow, and the skiff was thrusting up a ladder of muscular currents pouring between big wet rocks. Pausing in pools of water stilled by backwash as if to gather itself, pushing on. The Child held on to her bench as the little craft juddered and bounced and slewed; the nurse, a woman barely twice the Child’s age, squeaked and flung her arms around one of the soldiers. At last the skiff breasted the last of the rapids and unzipped a creamy wake along the middle of the river. The cliffs fell back and the skiff rounded a wide bend and the ruins of Santo João do Rio Negro spread across the far shore.

The town had been built two hundred years ago, funded by a Chinese corporation that had planted huge tracts of genetically modified hardwood trees. Felled trees had been rafted downriver to the town’s sawmills, and timber had been transported east along a broad highway driven straight through the forest. All that had ended in the great upheaval of the Overturn. The R&R Corps had demolished the sawmills and warehouse sheds along the waterfront, but had left the rest of the town alone. Much of it had long since returned to nature. Avenues and squares and parks choked with scrub and weeds. Apartment blocks and houses empty shells, every window broken, roofs collapsed, concrete crumbling from rusting rebar. Most had fallen into mounds of rubble overgrown by bushes and vines and pioneer trees, lumpy tracts of secondary growth burned by the drought, but a few blocks behind the waterfront had been colonised and partly rebuilt by indigenous people who had never left the area, or who had returned after the Overturn, helped by government initiatives of the past century. Not to repopulate the Amazon basin as before, but to establish small, ecologically sustainable communities that would help the R&R Corps to rewild the ecosystem, turn dead zones into grassland, and grassland into rainforest.

Mass was held in the open air, in a space cleared from scrub. A block of stone shaped and carved by the townspeople served as an altar; the congregation, mostly old men and women, sat on the hard red earth. The Child rang the bell that told the congregation when to stand and when to sit, held the little tray under the chin of each communicant so that not a crumb of the Host would fall on the ground; then, while Father Caetano heard confessions, she helped her mother and the nurse at their clinic.

When the last patient had been dealt with, Maria told her daughter that they had an hour before the skiff left – they could look for specimens in the ruins. The Child knew that this was a ploy to flatter and placate her, but the chance to explore was too good to refuse.

See Maria and the Child walking away from the river, down a path beaten through tall dry grasses towards a cluster of ruined apartment buildings. It was late in the afternoon, and very hot. The sky white with dust. The sun blazing down. The tinny surf of cicadas all around. One of the soldiers followed them, his carbine slung upside down over his shoulder, his camo gear blending with the brittle browns and yellows of the grass.

Vines curtained the ruins; bushes and small trees gripped the tops of walls. Everything dead and dry, seared by the sun. Little lizards flicked away over tumbled blocks of concrete, no different from the lizards in the hospital compound. A perfectly ordinary buzzard circled overhead.

The Child discovered a mosaic mural behind a curtain of withered vines and used a handful of dry grass to brush away dirt, revealing a stylised whale spouting amongst blue waves. Underneath it, picked out in white tesserae, was a date:
Agosto 2032.
More than a century and a half ago. She tried to imagine herself standing on that very same spot in a hundred and fifty years. It wasn’t impossible. Many gene wizards and green saints were older than that now. Then she tried to imagine returning in a thousand and a half years . . .

The young soldier cleared his throat, said that it was time to go back. The Child’s protests were half-hearted. She would have liked to have reached the line of green trees that ran in a straight line a few blocks away, but she was hot and tired, and felt oppressed by the deep sense of time locked in the ruins, of the dead past all around her. Everything we have comes from the dead. We take so much from them, and never thank them, and they sink into obscurity, nameless, numberless, forgotten. She was beginning to understand that to refuse that fate was no easy task.

‘We’ll explore some more next time,’ her mother said. ‘Who knows what else you’ll find?’

5

Once upon a time, in the long, golden afternoon of the Quick, the Library of the Homesun had been distributed and mirrored amongst the machines of the cities and settlements of the Archipelago and the minds of the ships that cruised between them. A vast store house open to all. But even then, most of the stuff accumulated in its vast matrices had been as much use as a cup of salt water to a thirsty man. Raw unmediated and uncatalogued spew transmitted from the Homesun to every colony system by an offshoot of an ancient project dedicated to the search for evidence of other intelligent life in the galaxy. Entertainments, sagas, immersions, and all kinds of art works that, stripped of their original context, were bafflingly opaque. News and gossip about people and institutions and movements long dead. Ware and gear that had no obvious practical applications, or required a technological base that the Quick’s isolated and decadent civilisation couldn’t support. And then there was all the stuff uploaded by the Quick themselves: all kinds of cultural junk; so-called living journals that recorded every transient thought and sense impression of citizens; the results of subjective and introspective investigations procured by processes more like meditation than experimentation, in which acquisition of knowledge was secondary to the emotional and intellectual states achieved during the search. The theosophical quicksand in which so many Quick had disappeared.

The transmissions from the Solar System had fallen silent long before we arrived at Fomalhaut, rescued the Quick from their long decline, and restarted history. We Trues had brought our own databases and archives; the Library of the Homesun had fallen into disuse, haunted only by eccentrics, renegade philosophers and would-be illuminati searching for nuggets of esoteric knowledge amongst the dross. Then the Ghost seedship had arrived, and everything had changed.