Read Online In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Paul McAuley
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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
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
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