Chapter Eighteen. The Array
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
The Array
Atmospheric contact went smoothly, for all Locke’s concerns.
And for a while the ship permitted itself to forget that it had been subsumed into the captain’s private fixation.
The regular duties of a hunter-voyage, which were mostly the same as the regular duties of a merchant-voyage (but with more harpoons) or a mercenary-voyage (but with less bombing) took over.
All us ordinary voiders rotated through all our ordinary duties, and on one particular day it was my shift on the array.
The unpredictable ionic conditions of Jupiter’s storms make the eyeball mark one an occasionally useful part of the ship’s sensor suite.
An indispensable one when looking for a specific beast. So while another barque would sometimes leave the array unmanned and rely on automated detection, on the Pequod there was always somebody perched at the pinnacle of the vessel, watching the monitors and the atmosphere gauges and the horizon.
I’m not going to tell you about my first experience of the array.
The thing about life in the stars is with one or two exceptions (the launch, the battle with the Leviathan, some of the sex, and one or two of the deaths), firsts and lasts and everything in the middle are all part of the same grimy soup.
The voider’s profession is an eternal one. It’s outside time. And it’s never more outside time than when you’re perched at the top of the array, watching for beasts in the clouds.
On my first trip up, and my ninth, and my thirtieth, I began by catching hold of a pair of ascender-bars that ran the length of the aerial.
A closed elevator capsule would be safer, but although the ship was huge, launch mass was still at a premium.
So every time I started my shift at the watch, I was whisked skywards over a drop of hundreds of feet.
Only the strength of my hands and the grip of my boots stood between me and a short, gravitationally normalized fall followed by a messy death splattered across the deck.
As ways to die on a hunter-barque went, it was by far the least romantic, but for the half a dozen seconds of the ascent it still thrilled me every time.
The precious moments of nothing but holding and waiting and listening to the wind whip past as I rose.
It was like traveling into another life on another world, as apart from the ship as the ship was from the dock or the dock was from any city that wasn’t perpetually flinging itself into the vacuum.
If you’ve never been on a hunter-barque, it’s hard to describe the view from the array.
You’d think it wouldn’t be much different from the deck.
After all, there’s no surface anyway, so high up is high up no matter what.
But there’s something about the angles, about the way you can look so far down on all sides, until sight starts to play tricks on you and it’s red-and-white nothing above and below and around, and everything in motion as the ship rolls and the clouds roil and the winds sing past the dome.
It feels like the long slow walk into heaven we were all promised but so few of us will be able to afford.
I’ll be honest, I was shit at standing watch.
Your job on the array is to pay attention, and I’ve never been great at paying attention.
Right back to my schooldays, when the teacher would pull me up for not listening to the day’s readings and the preachers would pull me up for the same exact reason.
At the time I couldn’t put into words quite why it pissed me off so much.
In hindsight, I think it was the fucked-up cocktail of presumption and irony.
Sitting fifth from the end and third from the back in neat, regimented rows and being told to learn by heart the words of people who never sat in a row in their life.
People who found lessons in fires and on mountaintops and on roads between cities, who only paid heed to the voices that spoke to them from the empty desert and the open sky.
My teachers would have said the difference is that those men were prophets, and I was just some little shit who didn’t want to study. Maybe they were even right. Maybe calling myself a dreamer or a wanderer or even a voider is just a way of covering up my inadequacies.
On top of the array, though, the difference between a philosopher and an asshole is meaningless.
With a hundred yards between me and the rest of the crew and four hundred thousand miles between me and Europa and five hundred million miles between me and the sun, I was a speck in an endless void that was itself just a speck inside an even bigger endless void.
Emptiness nested inside emptiness nested inside emptiness.
I would feel it echoing inside me and, arrogant and rebellious though it might have been, I couldn’t help imagining that it was how the fathers and founders from Old Earth felt when the Father reached out from the skies and spoke to them.
To me, He spoke mostly about how insignificant I was. In that regard He and my old teachers would have agreed in almost every particular.
Given that we did, in fact, sometimes spot Leviathans, and that they were, in fact, sometimes picked up by a diligent array-watcher rather than an undistractable automated system, I am forced to conclude that I was uniquely terrible in this job. Q, I am sure, excelled at it.
“Nihil?” she would ask me, when I returned to her arms at the end of the watch. Which I did often but not always.
And I would blink and shake my head because my mind was still full of vapor-thoughts and echoes.
And she would laugh and call me something affectionate but probably insulting in her strange Earther language.
And then she would kiss me, and I would remember things I had forgotten on my watch, and I would feel like a different kind of prophet.
“Si ignoras te, o pulcherrima inter mulieres,” she would whisper, “egredere, et abi post vestigia gregum et pasce haedos tuos juxta tabernacula pastorum.”
The words were familiar yet unfamiliar, and though I didn’t know what they meant, I understood. I knew that they were kind. That they said I was beautiful. That they were, in some strange and elusive way, holy. I tried to let them be enough. Because they should have been. She should have been.
But at the back of my heart, the sky still had its hooks in me. The sky and the things that lived in it.