In the Mouth of the Whale Read Free Page B

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.
    Maui wasn’t much different from the farm rock where I’d spent my early childhood. A dwarf planet about three hundred kilometres across, just large enough to have been pulled into a sphere by its own gravity: a rough ball of water ice accreted around a core of silicate rocks, contaminated with pockets of methane and nitrogen ices, coated in layers of primordial carbonaceous material and spattered with craters, one so big that material excavated by the impact covered half Maui’s surface with a lightly cratered debris shield. Two fragments lofted by that impact still circled Maui’s equator, a pair of moonlets kindled into sullen slow-burning miniature suns by Quick construction machines during the short-lived world-building era immediately after their seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut.
    The Quick machines had extensively gardened the worldlet too, planting vacuum organisms in seemingly random and wildly beautiful patterns utterly unlike the square fields of my foster-family’s farm. Huge tangles of ropes, crustose pavements, clusters of tall spires, fluted columns and smooth domes, forests of wire. Mostly in shades of black but enlivened here and there with splashes and flecks of vivid reds or yellows, sprawled across crater floors, climbing walls and spilling their rims, spreading across intercrater plains, sending pseudohyphae into the icy regolith to mine carbonaceous tars, growing slowly but steadily in the faint light of Fomalhaut and Maui’s two swift-moving mini-suns.
    Once, when the Quick had been the sole inhabitants of the Fomalhaut system, these gardens had covered the entire surface of the worldlet, inhabited by only a few contemplative eremites. Now, they were scarred by tents built to house refugees, the monolithic cubes of fusion generators, landing stages, materiel dumps, missile emplacements, strip mines, refineries, and maker blocks. My transit pod was flying above a region scraped down to clean bright water ice when my security delivered a message. Report to the Redactor Svern when you are finished .
    ‘Report?’ the Horse said. ‘As in talk? As in face to face?’
    The Horse was my kholop. We were crammed thigh to thigh in the pod, dressed in pressure suits, our securities overlapping.
    I said, ‘I don’t know of any other way of talking to him.’
    ‘Then you’re going home. We’re going home.’
    ‘It may not mean anything.’ ‘It may mean your exile is over. That you’ve worked out your penance. That we’re done with minor demons and their petty little hells. We’re done with cleaning up other people’s mistakes—’
    ‘I doubt it.’
    ‘It has to mean something.’
    ‘It probably means that he’s found an assignment so crufty it will make fighting a