Free In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley Page B

no older than the girl who had been my escort, I had turned from that view and found a woman standing behind me. She held a flaming brand that burned potassium red, sizzling and crackling as snow touched it, and wore a blue silk dress that lifted and displayed her breasts, pinched her waist, and fell in elaborate flounces and folds to her feet. The silvery pelt of a small animal was wrapped around her shoulders, its narrow head resting above the deep cleft between her breasts, the tip of its short, black-furred tail caught between its sharp teeth. Her face was white with powder, the shape of her eyes was exaggerated with black pigment, and her lips were dyed black. The effect was both disturbing and arousing. She answered my stare with a smile and turned – the back of her dress was cut to the beginning of the swell of her buttocks – and stepped to the narrow iron door set in the stone wall, which slid aside with a soft rumble. I followed her across the threshold, and through the rooms beyond. She walked like a dancer, never once looking back to see if I was following, the pale and lovely column of her bare back glimmering in the red flicker of her torch.
    I knew very well that she was only an eidolon, an illusion created by the same machines that maintained the illusion of the memory palace, but I fell in love with her all the same. I never again saw her, but every time I was summoned to talk with the Redactor Svern, I always hoped that I would turn from the stone arch and find her waiting for me. I turned now, and found myself alone in the snowy dark. Alone, I crossed the courtyard, touched the iron door and passed through, and followed the familiar route through the chambers of the memory palace.
    The first was crowded with statues carved from a translucent white stone that reminded me of the complexion of the eidolon (on my second visit I had paused to examine each of them, but although several were a little like her, she was not there). The walls of the next were pierced with arched windows that showed views of other worlds and other times. There was a chamber cluttered with machines: a pile of black cubes set with thousands of red, blinking lights; an ordinary tractor of the type used by my family to travel around the vacuum organism farms; an ancient spacecraft, its white upper half pouched and angled like the head of a monstrous insect, its lower half partly wrapped in golden foil, the whole perched on four silver, spidery legs. A chamber with rough rock walls hung with flags and banners, and every kind of armour ranked beneath them, some pieces twice as tall as me, some less than half my height, with helmets shaped like the heads of animals or globes with gold or silver visors. Most stood motionless, but several turned to watch as I went past. A chamber whose walls were inset with dioramas of animals and birds in various habitats. A chamber crowded with the skeletons of enormous animals, the largest shaped like a spacecraft streamlined for atmospheric entry, and hung from the ceiling. A chamber filled with big glass models of viruses. An empty chamber whose floor was paved with polished limestone flags, each containing the dark, foetal form of a fossil. A chamber of ranked cases that each displayed a single handweapon. A chamber whose walls were crowded with portraits of people in strange and antique dress.
    And so on, and so on. A string of marvels, with other strings leading off left and right from crossways and apses. But I walked straight on, as always, until at last I reached the chamber that usually contained orreries modelling settled systems, their clockwork mechanisms swinging brass and silver and ivory globes and swarms of asteroids and planetoids around golden suns.
    And found instead that it was dark, and filled edge to edge with an immersive simulation of the Fomalhaut system. The vast outer belt of comets and dust clouds, rocks and planetoids and dwarf planets circled the outer edge of the square