Chapter Nineteen. Weaving
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Weaving
By the standards of voidships, the hunter-barque is a small affair, but that’s because voidships are, to use a technical voiders’ term, fucking enormous.
Propelling mass into and out of gravity wells is an expensive business, and since life support and radiation shielding and gravitics and propulsion and processing and all the other hundreds of things you need to make a ship work take up space, and almost as much space on a small ship as on a big ship, the incentive is to build big so that economies of scale can work their miracles.
And what that means, in turn, is that a ship is full of places where hardly anybody ever goes, but where things still sometimes go wrong, and still need hooking up, maintaining, or otherwise patching together.
Void travel is dangerous, and one of the things that makes its flavor of danger so uniquely unpalatable to sensible people is that nine times out of ten the thing that actually kills you is something falling apart deep in inside a place you’ve never even thought about.
Most captains try to avoid that wherever possible, and though her overall goals were different from most captains’, A hadn’t lived as long as she had or stared as far as she had into the cold and the dark without learning to take maintenance seriously.
Which was why on this particular day (early in the voyage, though not so early that it didn’t already feel like the ship had been my whole world forever), Q and I were dangling between decks, foot-thick iron bulkheads either side of us, weaving the world together.
If you’re a surfacer, and you almost certainly are, you’ve probably not seen a sword-weld before.
Hell, even if you’ve spent your whole life on voidships or skystations you probably haven’t.
But you’ve certainly walked over them. Somewhere, buried deep inside whatever machine makes your world run, there will be some giant fucking bits of metal that need to be held together, have room to flex, and not grind horribly.
You don’t think about that, just like all the other things you don’t think about.
All those things you know to be true or believe to be true and which, ironically, need to fit together at the back of your mind, have room to flex, and not grind too horribly in case you start having to notice them.
And while there’s no easy fix for the psychological version, for the physical version we have the sword-weld.
It isn’t the exciting kind of technology, it’s not nanosurgery or a pleasure-drone, but it helps things work for just a little while longer before they surrender to time and friction and mechanical despair.
It’s called a sword-weld because you build it with a sword.
Not the weapon kind of sword, though it’s sharp enough you could still lose a hand to it.
It’s a long, thin piece of metal you use to guide a weft of monofilament wire into place once you’ve shuttled it through a warp of tensile cables, each as thick as your finger.
The work is heavy and delicate at the same time, because the weld needs to run floor to ceiling, sometimes across multiple decks, but also to be woven tightly, neatly, and by hand.
So Q and I were hanging midway between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth levels, the hum of nameless machinery in our ears, each of us playing our part in the tedious, necessary work of sword-welding.
What with our only partly speaking each other’s languages, my relationship with Q was never especially verbal, but when we were working she had a kind of focused silence that …
I mean I could try and say something philosophical here but I’m not proud, I mostly just found it a massive turn-on.
I’d weave the weft into place and the moment my fingers were clear she’d zip up on her line and start pressing the fibers together.
There was a wonderful rhythm to it. A synchronicity that felt a little bit like dancing and a little bit like fucking, although far less fun than at least one of them.
On the whole, I was glad I had the job that didn’t involve working with a razor-edged piece of carbide alloy.
My wandering mind was a liability to the ship when I manned the array.
Down here in the dark and close it would have been a liability to my body and my friend’s, and I had ample incentive to keep both of those intact.
This particular day, my mind was wandering down recriminatory paths.
Self-recriminatory, mostly, because that was how I’d been raised.
Judgment was reserved first for outsiders, then our own failings, and never under any circumstances for our betters.
In a moment of abstraction I almost fell out of rhythm and Q’s sword came down close enough that I was very glad I kept my fingernails short.
“I regret,” she said.
I looked up at her. “My fault. Got distracted.”
“Quid?” she asked.
That was a tricky one. “Just … doesn’t it bother you?”
“Quid?” she asked again.
“Me,” I said. And then added, “All of—everything about me.”
She gazed at me like she had no idea what I meant, and although that should have made me feel better it was massively the opposite.
“I know I’m not exactly … easy. Or particularly faithful.”
“Faithful,” she echoed. And then after a moment she said. “Ah. Fidelis.” She looked deeply confused. “Non es fidelis?”
This was going to some uncomfortable places. “I fuck around like, a lot.”
I suspected that fuck around was going to give her some issues but I had no idea how to explain it to Q.
But it turned out I’d underestimated her.
She laughed. “I do not own you,” she said—it was rare for her to say so many words of Exodite together, but then it was basically a verb, two pronouns, and a negation. “You do not own me.”
“And,” I replied, more hesitantly than I really needed to, “you’re okay with that?”
“I am not—” she seemed to be looking for a word. “—Peregrinus. Exodite.”
It wasn’t quite the reply I’d expected. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
And she looked a little sad then. “To explain. Difficult.” She brought her sword down again to slide the next thread into place. “Too difficult.” But I clearly didn’t find this satisfying so she went with, “At home”—a shrug, so easy and so casual it flat-out sent me—“we share.”
That fit. The difficult thing was that it fit everything I’d been told about the barbaric ways of the Terrans.
It’s axiomatic in the Church of Prosperity that all righteousness, all goodness, and all morality stem from property rights, which is why we teach that sex must be kept strictly within either marriage or employment structures.
It’s probably the Church tenet I’ve broken most often.
The tricky part was that, as stifling as I’d found the culture I was born into, I still couldn’t help thinking of it as a light in the darkness, and couldn’t quite imagine a society where that light didn’t exist at all.
Or at least, I couldn’t imagine anything good about it.
Having, if anything, given myself even more to obsess about, I went back to weaving, while Q went back to her sword-work and I tried to build up the courage to ask her more.
To ask her what she actually believed in, how it was possible to believe in anything if she didn’t start out by believing you could own things.
In the dark days of Old Earth, I remember being taught, there were thousands of different religions fighting for supremacy instead of the objectively better system supported by the Big Three Incorporated Churches.
And they’d teach all sorts of things. Strange things about strange virtues that no sensible person cared about in our enlightened age.
As I watched the sword-weld coming together, I remembered that in some of those bizarre, better-dead faiths they said that time was a tapestry, that fate and chance and freedom wove together to make a pattern that no one of those things could make alone.
Looking up at Q, working away with her sword, I wondered if that was what she believed.
If she saw fate as a skein of thread that she could dance along without constantly berating herself for who she was.
I wondered what it must feel like to believe it.
According to the Catechism of Prosperity we were, ultimately, responsible for our own destinies, and it was a doctrine I’d never really questioned.
The world, the Church told us, was just, for what loving Father would create an unjust world?
Hard work was always rewarded, and if it appeared not to be, well, you must not have been working hard enough.
Then again, the Starry Wisdom preached that the only true power was entropy and our only agency was in choosing the means of our own destruction. And I was pretty sure we couldn’t both be right.
Better, perhaps, to imagine a tapestry.
Whatever ecumenical conclusions I might eventually have drawn in this particular reverie, I was interrupted by an alarm. A single long blast echoing through every deck and crawlspace on the ship so that no hand could possibly avoid it or ignore it. And then Marsh’s voice, crackling over comms.
“A spout”—his tone was urgent, contrary to the nihilistic teachings of his faith—“forty klicks to starboard.”
We were halfway through a line, halfway through the job, but it didn’t matter.
Maintenance was important, but the spout was the sacred calling of the hunter-barque.
It was our rice and our meat, our means of living.
And for me, at least, this first call had a special magic to it—this was what I’d come to the skies for. To see legends. To chase wonders.
To follow a brilliant, terrible woman into the jaws of oblivion.