Chapter Nine. Getting Laid
CHAPTER
NINE
Getting Laid
Q woke before me next morning bright, early, and upbeat. While I lay wrapped in the blanket trying to work out if the previous night had changed anything.
Normally it wouldn’t, because normally I wouldn’t have seen her again.
She’d have been moving on, or I’d have been moving on, or at the very least we’d have had a conversation where we made it clear that no, this was just a sex thing, that no, there’d be no repeat performances, and that yes, we were both cool with that.
With Q, though, we barely shared a language, and if we stuck to our deal we’d be living shipboard together for three years.
She didn’t seem the clingy sort, but though I hated to admit it, she wasn’t the one I was worried about.
I hesitate to use the phrase catching feelings because even though I once worked gutting dust-spiders at a factory in Huygens Crater I still have some dignity.
Still, I can sometimes get … invested in people.
Especially people who seem to have things sorted out in ways I don’t or to live in ways I can’t.
Q finished her devotions to the little glass idol, tucked it into her bag, stood, and smiled at me. “Ship,” she said. “Ibimus?”
I nodded. “Ibimus,” I replied. I had no idea what it meant but it felt positive.
As I guided Q through the streets of Cthonius Linea to the Pequod’s docking tower, we talked casually of everything except for the fact that we’d fucked.
I told her instead about the time I’d jumped ship on a remote asteroid and got swept up in a feud between two mining colonies, and she told me what she could of life on Earth.
Here, more than ever, words were against us.
She told me of caelum, which I thought meant sky, but the way she spoke about it was strange, as though it was something you could just see, always, without having to walk out of an airlock or into a viewing dome.
Silva I could not even begin to translate.
“Silva,” she tried again. “Arbores.”
I shook my head.
“Lignum?” She fished her idol from her pack and spoke into it. Then she tried. “Lignum etiam vitae in medio paradisi, lignumque scientiae boni et mali.”
From the look in her eyes—I had been trying not to look in her eyes because when I did it made me feel about six different kinds of wrong—she seemed to think it would mean something to me.
“Boni et mali,” she said again. “Good. And bad. Scientiae. Knowing.”
I’ve never claimed to be the sharpest or the fastest, but I got there. “Knowledge of good and evil?”
“Lignum,” she repeated. “Lignum scientiae boni et mali.”
“The tree of knowledge of good and evil?”
She nodded with delight. “Tree,” she said. “But, many. Many treeae.”
That was the funny thing about faith. I’d heard of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life and that good trees bear good fruit while bad trees bear bad fruit. I’d never really stopped to think what they actually were. “What do they look like?”
“Tall,” she said. “Peaceful.”
The way she said it, they sounded wonderful. Then again that might still have been the sex talking. But I took the win where I could. Not that long ago the idea of anything sounding wonderful at all would have felt absurd.
Having scoped out the ship the previous day, I didn’t need to go up to the observation platform again, which I found a little disappointing because I’d have liked to show it to Q.
There was something about the city from above, the skyline below and the stars overhead and the cold death of the Europan atmosphere on the other side of the crystal all around, that felt almost magical, that I wanted to share with her.
But we were here looking for work, not to sightsee.
Also she’d probably already seen it. So we stuck to the ground and picked our way through the docklands towards the launch tower where the owners’ representatives kept their offices.
Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau were based in an atmospherically sealed pod just off the platform where the Pequod—even more majestic close-to, even more remarkable and impossible and right in all the wrong ways—was docked.
We weren’t guaranteed to be able to walk in from the elevator and ask for work out of nowhere, but commercial recruiters didn’t usually ask questions.
From their perspective, we’d be offering to sign over three years of our lives for no money up front.
We’d have needed to look unbelievably sus for them to think that was a bad deal.
“So,” Emerson said to me. He was watching me over little half-rimmed glasses. “Ye want to go a-hunting, do ye?”
Either he was descended from some of the earliest settlers to land on Europa, or the dialect was an affectation. “That’s right,” I replied.
“And have ye experience in the skies?”
“Three voyages with the merchant service,” I told him. “Once with Aphrodite, once with Olympus, most recently with Caloris. I’ve flown vacuum and atmospheric craft, and—”
“Fie.” Emerson waved a hand dismissively.
“Merchant work and a little piloting. Know ye anything of the Leviathan, girl? Have ye ever seen a great beast writhing from the churning skies? Ever flown a boat at a monster’s jaws, canopy down while the wind whips your suit, and you aim your harpoon by eye alone? ”
“Can’t say I have,” I admitted. “But I’m young”—not so young as I used to be, admittedly, but younger by far than I feel today—“and willing to learn. And my companion is an experienced harpooner.”
“Yes,” Q confirmed. “Harpooner sum.”
Emerson pulled a face that was halfway between a scowl and a look of pity. “Ye’ve the look of a greenhorn about ye, and she’s the look of a heathen about her. We’d be taking a terrible risk to bring on either of ye, to say nothing of both.”
I couldn’t tell if this was a brilliant negotiating strategy or a terrible one.
He seemed to be actively trying to put us off, but perhaps the goal was to make us want the job all the more.
Sky-work is paid in lays, a share of the profits of the voyage, and I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that he was trying to get us to accept a longer one.
Which is to say, a smaller one. “My friend can speak for herself, Mr. Emerson,” I tried.
“But as for me, I’m looking for a job. I know it’s dangerous work, but I mean, look around you.
If I walked out that door”—I indicated the entrance to the office—“without waiting for the airlock to clear, I’d be dead in seconds.
This whole system is trying to kill all of us, basically all the time.
At least on a hunter-barque I might get a story out of it. ”
“It’ll be hard labor,” Emerson warned me. “Not glamorous. We’d want to take you on as a hand before the array.”
That was fine. I hadn’t planned to list as an officer. “You won’t regret it,” I told him. And I was right, in a way. They’d have many, many regrets about this voyage, but hiring me wasn’t going to be one of them.
All the while Mr. Emerson had been trying to dissuade me from taking up the position that it was his job to find people to fill, his companion, Mr. Thoreau, had been sitting in one corner of the office reading from a well-thumbed copy of the Testament.
This wasn’t itself especially unusual; the Church naturally attracted entrepreneurs.
It still unsettled me a little, especially after all I’d shared with Q the night before.
About my life story, I mean. Not the fucking.
But perhaps also a little bit the fucking.
“Well, Thoreau,” Mr. Emerson said from behind his desk, “what lay shall we offer this young lady?”
I was expecting them to drive a hard bargain, but I was relatively confident in my experience and hoped bringing a harpooner with me would sweeten the deal. If I was lucky, I reckoned I’d swing something around the 250th.
Mr. Thoreau looked up from his reading and seemed very much as if he would rather not have. “Why do you bother me with these things? Can you not see I have other matters on my mind?”
“Other matters!” This wasn’t going down well with Emerson. “What good are your other matters when there’s business to be done? What lay do we offer this girl?”
Thoreau scrutinized me in a way I really didn’t like being scrutinized.
“Why should she care?” he asked the room in general.
Then to me directly he said, “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”
“The Father,” I replied, perhaps unwisely, “feeds those who feed themselves.”
Pleased I had at least some knowledge of doctrine, Thoreau nodded. “And you will be fed and watered well enough on the ship. As for the lay, the Father says that we owe our brother forgiveness to the tune of seventy times seven, so let us make it that.”
My shit mental arithmetic told me three things. That seventy times seven was 490. That 490 was a lot bigger than 250. And that because of how division worked, a 490th of something was much less than a 250th of it.
“There,” Emerson said with worrying finality. “That settles—”
“I don’t think it does,” I interrupted. The ship had called to me, but I wasn’t quite sure it had called to me loudly enough that I’d sign on for barely more than half what I thought I was worth.
“With my experience I’d be expecting something around”—fuck it, swing for the fences—“the two hundredth?”
Thoreau brayed with laughter. “The two hundredth? Mean you to beggar us? ’Twill be the four ninetieth or nothing.”
“Now, now.” Mr. Emerson seemed slightly more willing to negotiate, although I was beginning to feel uncomfortably like this was all part of a well-rehearsed grift. “We can offer her something a touch more generous than that, surely? After all, where her treasure is, there will her heart be also.”