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

clutching two lightning bolts and a shiny black bill that shaded her eyes, she looked impossibly romantic to the Child, an avatar that had stepped from one of Ama Paulinho’s sagas. Maria did not invite her in, so she stood on the doorstep and in fractured Portuguese thanked the doctor for saving her comrade’s life, handed over the bottle of rum, winked at the Child, and marched off, slim, straightbacked, imperiously tall.
    Maria warned her daughter to stay away from the wranglers. ‘You saw the badge she wore? Those lightning bolts have nothing to do with weather. It’s an old fascist symbol. The wranglers are freelance now, but once they were part of the militia that overthrew the democratically elected government of our country. The fight last night started when a group of the captain’s “comrades” began to sing one of their battle hymns. They are proud of their past, and the townspeople remember some of it too. Weather was used as a weapon, during the wars after the Overturn. Much of the damage to the forest was caused by natural climate change. But not all of it.’
    ‘But if they use the technology for good—’
    ‘They were bad people then, and they’re haven’t changed,’ Maria said. She was emptying the bottle of rum into the hopper of the kitchen recycler. Her hair was scraped back from her face and there were dark scoops under her eyes. ‘They didn’t come here to save us. They came here to earn credit. Any good they do is secondary to their main purpose. Can you guess what that is? Think of them as an organism.’
    ‘They want to survive and reproduce.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘But to what purpose? To keep the past alive? There doesn’t seem much point in that.’
    ‘They think they will be needed again one day,’ Maria said. A light in the recycler’s panel turned from red to green; she dropped the empty bottle into the hopper.
    Every day for a week, a flock of small, arrowhead-shaped airships crossed the sky from west to east, circling the distant peaks of the Serra da Bela Adormecida mountains and returning westward high above the river. Meshes of green laser light flickered between them as they sailed back and forth, faint in the hot sunlight; thin fingers of cloud spread in their wake. The townspeople gathered each night on the beach at the edge of the river and banged drums and pots and pans, rang bells and set off fireworks, but little rain fell, and the clouds always evaporated before dawn. At last the weather wranglers’ blimp lumbered into the air and passed low above the town and dwindled into the hot sky, and the sun shone in solitary triumph day after day after day after day.
    The R&R Corps and the plantations laid off many workers. Small independent farms failed. The town’s population was swollen by people from outlying villages and settlements; food was rationed; there were outbreaks of malaria and typhus; the army imposed martial law because of increased wildsider activity. Someone tried to shoot down an army plane with a smart missile. The town suffered shortages of food and other supplies because of attacks on road and river traffic, and after several bombs exploded in the solar farm and halved its capacity there were irregular blackouts during the day and no electricity at all between six in the evening and eight in the morning.
    We were preparing the Child for the war that lay ahead of her. The Fomalhaut system, which by precedence and natural justice should have been her dominion, had been settled by no less than three upstart clades whose ships had overtaken our slow and badly damaged vessel, and now all three were involved in a war in and around Fomalhaut’s solitary gas giant, and in the big circumstellar dust ring beyond it. We still had much to learn about the cause of the war and the nature of the clades embroiled in it, but we were certain about one thing: it would be a fatal mistake to become involved.
    The Child quickly became used to the hardships and