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

restrictions caused by drought and the conflict with the wildsiders. Because the wildsiders had declared that hospital workers and their families were, like schoolteachers, plantation supervisors, workers in the R&R Corps, and anyone else associated with the government, legitimate targets in the struggle for liberation, she could no longer go to the market with Ama Paulinho, she was forbidden to go on collecting expeditions along the river’s edge and into the nearby forest, and her visits to Ama Paulinho’s family were curtailed. But she did not much mind. She had her work in the hospital, and she also had her own work: the life of her own mind, growing in strange directions.
    After the boy had drowned in plain sight of almost the entire town, she had realised that death could happen to anyone at any time. Even to her. It was not like the change between maggot and fly. It was not really a change at all, but a loss. The body failed and that failure freed the soul – but what was the soul, and where did it go? Ama Paulinho told her that it flew up to Heaven, where it would live for ever in the grace and glory of God. Her mother told her that the soul was immaterial, made not of matter but of spirit, which could not be measured by any scientific instrument, but this was no help because it simply moved the question behind a veil of mystery.
    The Child began to wonder if all this talk about the soul leaving the body like a lifeboat leaving a sinking ship was meant to dodge or obscure the stark fact that death was the end. And she began to understand that the stories her ama told her, of spirits that animated the forest and made the trees grow in their appointed places and maintained the intricate balances of every kind of life, were no more than stories. It was not so very different from the sermons of the priests, who also invoked spirits to explain the mysteries of the world. There was God the saviour, who was everywhere in the world, as invisible and impalpable as the sleet of neutrinos shed by the sun. There was his son Jesus Christ, who had died to redeem the sins of every human being, and would one day return to finish his work. There was the Holy Spirit, who gave access to the salvation that was manifest in Jesus. And there was the handmaiden to the Trinity, Gaia, a version or aspect of the Virgin Mary who contained the entirety of the world’s intricate cycles and epicycles of climate and ecology. According to the Church, it was the holy duty of the human race to help Gaia heal the scars of the Overturn, but the Child thought she knew better. She knew about ecological niches and ecotypes, non-equilibrium dynamics and resilience, the relationship between diversity and energy flows. She knew about survival of the fittest and the lesson of the intricate diversity of Darwin’s tangled hedgerow. She knew about the hard work needed to bring the forest back to life – the plastic tunnels where cloned seedlings were nurtured, the reactors that brewed living soil to replace the alkaline hardpan in dead zones, and so on. The miracle was not that it was a miracle, but that it could be done by ordinary men and women.
    There were no miracles, no absolute mysteries, only problems which had not yet been solved. The blooming burgeoning complexity of the world proceeded not from a Word but from the interaction of simple chemicals that in the right conditions could create increasingly complex domains of self-regulating order. Drowned women did not turn into islands; husbands did not run away and become jaguars. There was no bridge between the world of things and the world of spirit because there was only one world. The world in which she lived. The everyday world where death hung like a little dark cloud in a corner of the blue and blameless sky. The trick was not to survive it, but to avoid it.
    By now, she had raced ahead of her teacher’s biology lessons. She was tinkering with the development of flies, using customised splicing