In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley Read Free Book Online

of rotten tree trunks and watched them turn into pupae, watched the shapes of adult beetles appear inside the varnished casings. But mostly she studied fruit flies, which were common, could be easily trapped in bottles baited with morsels of banana, and developed from egg to maggot to pupa to adult in a handful of days.
    Her friend Roberto, the son of the hospital director, was disgusted and amused by her new obsession. As far as he was concerned, biology was barely one step up from woo-woo mysticism. Sure, the principles of Darwinian evolution had an elegant and powerful simplicity, but the patchwork compromises generated by the blind reproductive imperative of genes were ugly, needlessly complex, and, worst of all, indeterminate. When the Child showed him sequences from one of her AI teacher’s files, demonstrating how the body of a fruit-fly maggot liquefied inside the pupal case as all but a few pockets of cells died in a genetically determined sequence of aptosis, how suites of genes were switched on one after the other, controlling growth and development of the body of the adult, Roberto reacted as if it was the most shameful kind of pornography. Saying that it was a slipshod solution to a problem – how to exchange one suit of armour for another – that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
    The Child told him that understanding the ways in which organisms overcame problems of development and survival was the point of biology. It provided a powerful toolkit that gene wizards used to build new kinds of organisms.
    Roberto said, ‘Is that what you want to be? A gene wizard?’
    ‘Or a green saint,’ the Child said, with the unsinkable confidence that only the young and the crazy possess.
    Maria Hong-Owen, pleased by her daughter’s precocious interest in biology, allowed her to use a corner of the hospital’s pathology lab in exchange for help in maintenance of cell cultures. Vidal Francisca, an increasingly unwelcome presence, gave her a microscope for her birthday. The Child was suspicious of the man’s motives, but she loved his gift. It could swing in and out and around every detail of the articulated legs and feathery antennae of insects, the flanges and ridges of their armoured bodies, the hooks and saws of their mouthparts. It could make movies of the swarming animalcules in a drop of pond water, track individual rotifers, paramecia and amoebae. It could zoom into the cytoplasm of living cells and show proteins churning and sliding past each other, reveal the herky-jerky motor at the base of a flagellum, the coiling and uncoiling of DNA in replicating chromosomes.
    Increasingly, the Child worked alone and unsupervised. Her mother was, as usual, preoccupied by her own work; Roberto was amused by her passion but thought it a waste of time; Ama Paulinho couldn’t begin to answer her questions. Only Vidal Francisca pretended to take an interest, but he’d long ago forgotten most of his botanical training, and he was distracted besides by the problems that the drought was causing in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and the surrounding area.
    The river was at its lowest level for a century. Summer thunderstorms brought a little relief, but most of the rain ran off the sun-hardened ground, causing flash-floods that quickly evaporated in the pitiless heat. The work of weather wranglers paid by the town’s council came to nothing, too. They’d arrived in a massive cargo blimp which they tethered in a sorghum field, and every night they rolled through the town, crowding into bars and lanchonetes, causing all kinds of minor mayhem. Maria Hong-Owen was called out in the middle of the night to attend to one of the weather wranglers’ pilots, who’d been stabbed in a brawl with a gang of workers from the tree plantation, and the next evening their captain called at the bungalow with a gift – a bottle of hundred-proof white rum. Dressed in black spidersilk blouson and trousers, a cap with a badge of a fist