Chapter Ten. Cetology
CHAPTER
TEN
Cetology
It seems so many years ago now, and at the same time so few. That fateful day that the Pequod launched into Jovian orbital space with a hundred souls aboard. And I’ll tell you all about our journey very soon, but before I do, I need you to understand a little about what we were actually doing.
You might already know. Maybe you, like me, are an outworlder at heart and so you’re more used to thinking about how all this works.
What keeps the lights on. What keeps the atmosphere regulators flowing.
What stops the separatists burning your house down and, at the same time, why they want to in the first place.
But probably you aren’t. If you can afford a human-written book then you’re probably pretty well off, and that means you probably live somewhere far away from the blood and rust. Maybe you’re on Ishtar Terra, watching an acid storm breaking from your spire balcony, or in the pleasure palaces of Apollodorus having your every desire attended to by somebody nubile and expendable.
And if you’re in either of those places, perhaps you’ve never wondered who produces the oils that power the heat pumps that stop the gold melting out of your jewelry.
Even if you’re a little less exalted, merely living in the vibrant subterranean seas of Ganymede, perhaps you’ve never stopped to think how your city, despite being both underwater and underground, is so brightly lit.
The answer, of course, is sperm.
I’ll just pause here while you do your own that’s what she said bits.
Spermaceti derives from an Old Earth word whose etymology I can’t be bothered to look up. It’s the name given to the cerebrospinal fluid of the great Leviathan. Or, more precisely, of a specific species of Leviathan. That’s one of the little details I wanted to clear up in this chapter.
People sometimes use Leviathan as a general term for all the different monstrous entities that live in the turbid, crushing atmosphere of Jupiter.
This is all right as far as it goes but there are actually several different types of creature on (or perhaps more accurately in since it has no solid surface) that world, all of which deserve their own correct labels.
If you’re reading this book mostly for the parts in which I fuck strangers, kill gargantuan organisms, or nearly die, sorry, you’ll have to bear with me for a minute or two.
The broad class of beasts that includes the Leviathan, sometimes known as Titans and sometimes Cetaceans, includes four main categories of horror: Behemoths, Krakens, true Leviathans, and Wyrms. Within each of these categories are a whole lot of species and subspecies, most of which I won’t go into on account of how I never saw one and really would lose the Mars-to-Belt audience if I put in long descriptions of things that aren’t even going to show up in the book.
Basically, this chapter is here so you’ll know what the fuck I’m talking about when some great beast with chitinous mandibles and feeder tendrils shows up and I don’t have to explain what it’s called while I’m also explaining how it nearly ate me.
Let’s start with the Behemoths.
They’re not much as Job would have them; for a start, like every other creature native to Jupiter they don’t have any legs.
They’re the largest of the planet’s fauna and they live exclusively in the hydrogen sea deep in the heart of the world.
I’ve seen five in my life (four living, one dead) and perhaps the best way to describe them is that they’re armored maggots a kilometer long which move ponderously through an ocean of ultra-dense liquid star-metal.
They have no mouths, and some scholars speculate that they feed on the massive electrical energies generated by the currents within Jove’s liquid center.
I have my own private theory that in this way they serve as the basis for the entire ecosystem.
My evidence for this is limited except that the one time I saw such a beast dead, a swarm of Wyrms were feasting on its corpse.
That’s all I know about the Behemoths. It’s also all you need to know. On to Krakens.
These are nearly as big as the Behemoths, but less massive, if you see what I mean.
They’re all tentacles and float-sacs, and most of the time they just blow whatever way the winds take them on long parachute arms. Once or twice, however, I’ve seen one expel a great jet of plasma from its rear end.
Or its front end. Their body has a lozenge shape, and they’re studded all over with eyes, so the extent to which they can be said to even have a front and a rear is debatable.
The mighty Behemoth, big as it might be, is a docile creature.
The Kraken, by contrast, will fuck you up all day then come back in the evening and keep fucking you up for fun.
Worse, they’re useless. They’re basically giant muscular bags full of gas, and however they turn atmospheric flotsam and any ships they might eat into usable energy, the organs don’t survive gutting.
Wyrms are the final not-Leviathan creature you might be wondering about.
And really I’m not sure they’re one thing at all.
They’re invariably eel-like, invariably fly in the strange skies of Jove, and there their similarities to one another end.
Some are as long as your finger and feed by skimming some unknown element from the surface of the hydrogen sea.
Some are twice as long as your entire body and feed by biting chunks out of anything they happen to fly into.
Some attach parasitically to Behemoths or Leviathans, some seem to hunt the ones that live parasitically.
In a lot of ways it’s beautiful. If your idea of beauty revolves strongly around long thin monsters eating each other.
But what I really want to talk about are the true Leviathans.
And these are at least slightly uniform.
They’re all between some tens and some hundreds of meters in length, always far longer than they are broad and far broader than they are tall.
Their flight, which like most Jovian creatures makes a complete mockery of conventional aerodynamics, is an undulating motion supported by rippling side fins which together make up perhaps half their body width.
There’s also similarity in their tails, which are always long and taper to points.
Finally, they’re always hydrogenically amphibious, able to exist both in the skies and in the hydrogen sea itself, although different species divide their time between those environments differently.
In most other respects, however, they exhibit enormous diversity. I’ll list a few here for your information:
The Barnard’s or Slack-Jawed Leviathan is the largest of the true Leviathans.
It’s seldom hunted because it’s seldom seen, but some titanologists speculate that their bodily oils might prove more potent even than spermaceti.
They speculate this because the Slack-Jawed Leviathan spends all its life skimming the surface of the hydrogen sea, jaws open, funneling frigid, conductive liquids into its mouth.
In theory this should give it access to an incredible supply of ultra-dense energy, but what it uses that energy for nobody knows.
When threatened, the Slack-Jawed Leviathan always dives towards the planet’s core where it’s impossible for regular boats to pursue.
The ominously monikered Death’s Head Leviathan is named for the skull-like armor plates that cover most of its head (all Leviathans are armored, the Death’s Head just front-loads it).
Although its jaws are dangerous, its primary means of attack against large enemies seems to be ramming.
This makes it a huge threat to hunter-barques, but since it feeds exclusively on the lesser Jovian creatures, smaller even than the Wyrms, scholarly consensus is that the head armor evolved for mating duels, rather than for hunting.
The Ridgeback or—remember, if you laugh you lose—Sperm Leviathan is the species most barques hunt, and the species that this memoir is (at least ostensibly, I might also be doing shit with themes) about.
It takes its name (both of its names, really) from the long, broad ridge that runs the length of its spine.
This ridge is filled with long bundles of nerve fibers, and those fibers themselves are bathed in the unique substance we call spermaceti.
The creature’s brain is also marinated in the stuff.
At least two scholars have suggested that this close neural connection to such a powerful fuel should grant the creature psychokinetic abilities, and one of those adds that this might help to explain how it (and by extension all Jovian creatures) can actually fly.
You’ll get a chance to see many of these creatures close at hand, and I will go into far greater detail on their anatomy as and when their various parts become interesting, profitable, or dangerous.
The Harris’s or Killer Leviathan is one of the smaller species. It has a quatripartate jaw, two sets of teeth closing perpendicular to one another. It feeds exclusively on larger beasts and attacks both them and ships with wild fury.
The Laser-Eyed Leviathan is almost certainly a myth.
I could carry on listing more species. The Split-Fin, the Hemingway, the Screaming Galliard, and so on. At some point it just becomes a string of names with no meaning.
Then again, you could say that of all names.