In the Mouth of the Whale Read Free

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