In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley Page B

seemed to be genuine fascination with her experiments with fruit flies, and talked about his studies for his degree in agronomy at the University of Manaus. She liked the microscope he gave her for her birthday. She liked the way the rooms of his house swung out from its core and moved to follow the light, and folded at night like the petals of a flower, and she liked its garden, kept green and alive during the drought by an irrigation system that in the evening sprayed water in sweeping arcs that tick-tocked back and forth over flower beds and lawns and stands of trees. She liked wandering there in the warm dusk while Vidal and her mother talked on the terrace. She watched the leathery jostle of the bats that came to feed on the fruit trees. She studied the fireflies dancing over the lawn, identifying three different species by the frequency of their blinking. She checked her beetle traps, picked choice specimens from the weird and monstrous alien life that flocked and clung to the sheet of luminous cloth she’d stretched between two trees.
    She liked Vidal’s horses, too; loved riding the smallest, a chestnut gelding that belonged to Vidal’s daughter, along the riverside path, or through the dry forest, or along trails that crossed the vast monotony of the sugar-cane fields. She learned about the various genetic tweaks engineered into the hybrid cane, the insect pests that attacked it, its fungal, viral and bacterial pathogens. She watched the machine that planted billets in raw red earth, learned that the stands which grew from each billet could be harvested up to ten times before decreasing yields justified new planting. She watched the chopper harvesters at work, ungainly machines exactly as wide as a row of cane, cutting the stalks at their bases and stripping leaves from them: the stalks went into one transporter and the leaves went into another. She was given a tour of the sugar-cane mill by the foreman, who had the biggest and whitest moustache she’d ever seen, and a scar that transected the puckered and empty socket of his right eye. He explained that cane had to be transported to the mill as quickly as possible because its sugar content began to decline as soon as it was cut, showed her how each batch was tested for trash percentage and its brix value – the fraction of sugar in aqueous solution. He showed her how the processing line of the mill washed the stalks and chopped and shredded them with revolving knives, and mixed the pulverised material with water and crushed it between a series of rollers to extract the sucrose-rich juices. The residue went to generators that burned it to generate the electricity that ran the plant; the juices went to bioreactors where the sucrose was broken down to glucose, the glucose was turned into ethanol by a simple fermentation process, and the ethanol was dehydrated and turned into biofuel. The leaves were processed separately, to harvest organic precursors used in another set of bioreactors to produce plastics.
    The mill and the bioreactors and refinery plant were impressive, but very low-tech, using principles that predated the Overturn. And although sugar cane exhibited one of the highest natural photosynthetic efficiencies, and the hybrid strains grown on the plantation had been tweaked, a little less than twelve per cent of the many kilowatts of sunlight energy that fell on the plantation’s fields was captured and turned into biomass. Even the cheap biogel that people painted on their roofs was twice as efficient at converting the sunlight that fell on them to electrical power.
    The Child was becoming very interested in photosynthesis. When Roberto had come back from his first semester at the Federal University of São Paulo, he’d shown her how the logic of quantum mechanics integrated with messy biochemistry at the point where light-harvesting centres transferred solar energy to the reaction centres that transformed it to biological energy. Struck by photons,