Chapter Five. The City
CHAPTER
FIVE
The City
When I’m in a … a walking-out-of-airlocks mood, I think every city looks the same.
Tranquility Settlement, Aphrodite Nine, the Experimental Prototype City on Titan.
Each one was built by the same small group of conglomerates, working with the same materials to similar budgets and reporting to the same head offices on the core worlds.
On better days, I look closer and realize that not even the infinite reach of the trade-states can fuck everything up the same way every time.
Every body in the system is geologically unique and while a dome is a dome is a dome, an ice sheet—even one buried under layers of atmospheric control and composite lagging—will never feel the same as a desert, or a ring of volcanoes.
And even without the physical differences—even if every rock in space was just a rock in space and not a cloud of solid ammonia or a ball of metallic hydrogen—there’d have been changes.
The system has been settled for centuries now, and a hundred or so years of living builds up history, no matter what the shareholders might prefer.
In Cthonius Linea, that history was all to do with the Leviathans. And it was a history in layers.
The first layer was industry. The city was built around its docks, and its docks were built around the trade in the bodies of titans.
Where other ports were meant to accommodate smaller, more agile vessels—messengers and orbit-to-orbit ships, pure rockets and interwell haulers—the landing towers of Cthonius Linea had been built around hunter-barques.
An unwieldy but versatile craft, the hunter-ship needed to operate both through the journey in hard vacuum from moon to planet, and also in the violent atmospheric conditions of Jupiter.
Which meant they were part winged, part jet, part rotor; elements of the carrier and of the fighter and of the ancient tall ships of Old Earth all factored into their design.
This made them, in my opinion, quite the most beautiful vessels ever created, despite the popular perception that they are, for the most part, complete shit.
Atop the industrial layer sits the layer of product.
Although spermaceti (if I say it often enough you’ll get used to it) is the main target of the hunt, most parts of the Leviathan are valuable.
Or at least, valuable enough that people hang on to them.
So the visitor to Cthonius Linea sees that the bones of the great beasts (a biologist would say that bone is not quite the right word for the creature’s endostructure, but I’m not a biologist so I don’t care) are worked into every part of the city’s architecture.
Advertising hoardings are projected onto sheets of white star-ivory.
Street vendors hawk their wares from within gargantuan hollowed-out teeth laser-etched with intricate cosmonautical carvings.
Half the dress of half the citizens is fashioned from the beasts’ hides—often very processed forms of them, admittedly, because the hides themselves are thick and unsupple.
At last, above the layer of product is the layer of disuse.
As the business of hunting moved to other bodies, it became less the province of the individual adventurer and more of the bioindustrial enclaves of the resource-states.
The shipyards and refineries and hunters’ inns began to close down, with new businesses blooming like rot on their corpses.
So now you’ll see a casino where once there was a refinery, a scrap-metal dealer where once there was a lively trade in beastbones or, as often as not, nothing at all where once there was a tavern alive with hunters’ songs.
I told all this to Q as she walked beside me. She nodded sagely and added, in her heathenish tongue, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” No idea what she meant by it.
We made a strange pair, Q and I, strolling the narrow prefabricated streets of the old quarter and watching out for likely starships.
Port cities tended to skew cosmopolitan, but even here it was rare to see a Terran and, being a kind of wandering vagabond from everywhere and nowhere, I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous either.
Fortunately, I was accustomed to ignoring catcalls and Q seemed truly not to understand them.
To me at least it was the silent stares that were more disturbing, the looks that could’ve been completely in my head or could’ve meant I was two bad steps and a wrong word away from a gutful of flechettes.
Still, we’d managed to walk for some while unshot when we happened upon the door of a little hunters’ chapel.
Once the docklands would have been crawling with them.
Many of the early hunters had been steeped in the Plutonian faith, offering up their toil to the Father in the hope that he would reward them with his extremely lucrative favor.
He never did, as far as I could tell. At least not most people.
The Church teaches that those few men who grew wealthy in those early days were definitionally the most holy, and that makes a certain kind of sense.
After all, the Father is all-good and all-powerful and he loves us.
How fucked up would it be if he let people get rich even if they weren’t smarter, harder-working, and more moral than everybody else?
I didn’t know much about Q’s religion, although I assumed it had something to do with the little glass idol she carried.
As a result, it was hard for me to explain to her why exactly—despite our having set out in search of a boat and having promised to keep one another company—I felt so compelled to enter the chapel.
Honestly, it was hard to explain it to myself.
To say that my feelings towards the catechism were complex at that time would be an understatement; there were days when I would swear it was a tissue of lies, there were days when the certainty of its truth gnawed at my chest like rats in my lungs.
And there were days—most days, candidly—when I felt both at once.
When passing by a chapel made me feel an uneasy yearning for salvation.
So I went inside, letting Q follow me and hoping she would indulge my strange outworlder’s ways.
Hunters’ chapels are gloomy, desperate places.
Sky-hunting is dangerous and half the parishioners in any given church will be grieving or waiting to grieve.
In the Plutonian Church, that can be an expensive business.
Many a hunter has come home to find their loved ones spent so much on prayers that half their pay has gone before it was even claimed.
And if you want evidence both for the perils that await the hunter-ship and the lengths a hunter’s kin will go to in their memory, you need look no further than this.
Three of the chapel’s five walls were given over to memorial plaques, all that remained of dead souls lost to the Jovian winds.
Q and I both—despite our radically different contexts—found ourselves drawn to them at once; she holding her idol up before them for reasons I couldn’t understand, me scanning them for names or memories or meanings.
They were all of them small, all of them similar. One, for example, read thus:
SACRED to the MEMORY of JOHN TALBOT. Lost in the eternal storms of JOVE, now with ETERNITY in truth. This memorial is SPONSORED by AXIOM ENERGY DRINK, a product of Coradini Food and Beverages, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State.
Most were shorter still. The Church charges by the character for immortality, and so many more ran along these lines:
S2TM; AO, LB, XH, NN, NN, FR, YK, L, TRC; Others; GBNF
I still wasn’t in a safe mood to dwell on death; although I’d committed to seeking my fate amongst the Leviathans rather than beneath the wheels of a groundcar, I could feel within myself that instability I knew to mistrust. Not quite sure how to tell Q any of this, I placed my hand on her shoulder and whispered to her that I needed to stay, that I needed to do something.
And before she could ask me what, I took up my place at the rear of the congregation and, heart clenching in my throat, waited for the sermon to start.
Like most pulpits in most churches, at least most Plutonian churches, the pulpit in that tiny chapel was an ancient device of steel and light connected to a communications array that would, stellar conditions and planetary alignment permitting, receive broadcasts directly from the Golden City on Pluto.
Since the whole of that city was given over to the glory of the Father and his Favored, there was always a service beginning somewhere and so the faithful throughout the system were certain to be able to hear the divine word as and when their schedules and bank balances permitted it.
A light blinked on in front of me, and I scanned my credit-chip across it.
I was down to my last few pennies, but the Church knew the value of a large number of small donations so, with pious generosity, they offered a sliding scale of payments starting at very, very affordable levels and only requiring you to consent to your data being harvested for legitimate, godly purposes.
The transaction hung a moment, then went through.
Worship music began to fill the air and the pulpit began projecting the image of an immense congregation hall, a little fuzzily coming as it did from something like four and a half light-hours away.
Q leaned over and whispered in my ear. “I vidi satis. Going.”
All over again I was torn. The idolator inside me wanted to leave the chapel with her, to make divinity out of companionship and desire. But the ghost of an old faith kept me behind, made me bid her farewell and turn my eyes back to a sermon I knew in advance would have no answers for me.