Chapter Twenty-Three. The Guide
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The Guide
I’d been called back to the captain’s cabin a few times in those first weeks.
When the fire inside her burned too hot and threatened to swallow her and take the ship with it.
And sometimes after she was done with me, I would lie in her bed, letting the sting fade from my back and the marks fade from my skin before returning to my duties.
It wasn’t quite an arrangement. It was nothing so formal. It was more a—it was a thing. A thing that happened sometimes.
On the wall above her bed, an array of slender ivory canes hung. Each one of them was beautiful, scrimshawed with images of the hunt and the skies and the stars and the beasts that lurk in the heavens. I’d been kissed by each one, and knew them all, and had given them names I’m not going to share.
While I rested, the captain would go about her business. Much of the time, it was unremarkable, the day-to-day minutiae of ship-work you’d get on any vessel in the service. But sometimes, as I lay with my eyes half closed and dreamed of monsters, I would hear her hard at work on some private plan.
Her ultimate goal, of course, was no secret. She’d told us all before we even made atmospheric contact what she sought. What she bent all her distorted genius towards. But the details of it. The horror was in the detail.
Kneeling on the tatami mats before her low glass table, she would work for hours at a time on a holographic chart.
In the dark days of Old Earth, enterprising men had mapped the seas and continents of that blessed-and-cursed world.
Repeating the feat on Jupiter was a whole ’nother thing.
There were no fixed points on that planet, only variously stable atmospheric phenomena and the ever-shifting patterns of currents.
It hadn’t stopped the hunter-fleets. Storms and airstreams had been given names as if they were islands and rivers.
The feeding grounds of Leviathans and the swarming grounds of Wyrms and the great slow paths of Behemoths had been tracked and collated and algorithmically correlated into a living map that shifted even as you tried to read it.
It would take a special kind of obsession to try to actually learn a map like that. And that was exactly what the captain had set out to do.
Her own version of the chart was yet more complex. Even looking back, knowing more than I did then, it was remarkable in its density. Over the top of the climate grids and migration maps she’d overlaid an image displaying every sighting, every rumor, every whisper of the Mobius Beast.
I stood, curtain drawn a little aside, in the door to her sleeping chamber and watched.
Aside from the sheet I’d taken from her bed I was naked, but I could have discarded the sheet entirely, or been fully clothed, or been flayed raw, or completely invisible, and it would have made no difference.
When she was at the chart, she was at the chart.
“Assume minimal deviation,” she told the machine, “and extrapolate. Where is it? Where will it be?”
When the chart spoke back its voice was soft and almost servile. “I don’t have enough information.”
“Speculate.”
“I’m not supposed to speculate.”
Thinking machines, true thinking machines, were rare.
The churches were all suspicious of them for one reason or another and the trade-states monopolized their use for—we were told—our own safety.
I had no idea how the captain had got hold of one.
Honestly I didn’t even know if that was what I was looking at.
Neural mathematics and discourse algorithms weren’t the kind of things they taught in a Prosperity school.
We were just taught that better people than us knew what they were doing.
The captain’s voice dropped low and menacing. “Indulge me.”
“I speculate that this will kill you.”
“Not what I asked.”
A network of points on the chart glowed just a little brighter. “These are your best chances in the next eighteen months. After that”—the highlight moved to the great red storm that hunters’ tales said had raged for a thousand years—“you’ll want to be in Hell’s Heart in the Season of the Line.”
The captain nodded. My guess was that the machine hadn’t told her anything she wasn’t already thinking. Even the part about dying.
“That will do,” she said. “For now.” With a wave of her hand she shut down the map and the machine both.
Then she continued speaking, as far as I could tell, to herself.
“And perhaps it’s for the best that we must wait.
The crew gave little resistance when I told them of the hunt, but voiders are fickle people and they will want a kill before long, else they will grow restless.
And Locke will prove more biddable if they feel Olympus is getting its due.
And so inch by inch and wind by wind I draw closer to—”
At last she noticed me. I’d come a fair way forward as she was speaking, although whether it was her tyrant magnetism or more basic urges that drew me out, I couldn’t say. I wasn’t particularly sure there was a difference.
She fixed me with her stare. Not fixed. Pinned, because she looked at me and through me at once. “Do you think me mad?” she asked.
It wasn’t language I’d ever use. I’d been called so many things in my time, told I was wrong in so many ways. And I knew what it was to run for no reason except that standing still felt impossible. Which meant the only truthful answer was “No.”
The captain let out a single harsh breath that was almost a laugh. “Then you are alone on this ship. Locke believes I am out of my mind; Flint and Truelove believe the same although they care less for their different reasons. Even the machine doubts me.”
“Nobody doubts you,” I replied. And it was true. She wasn’t wrong that every officer and half the crew were convinced she was insane. It’s just that thinking somebody was off her head and thinking she was a bad captain were two different things.
For a long, long moment she gazed at me, lingering on the marks her teeth and fingernails had left on my shoulders. “Why do you come here? To me?”
“You ask it. And you’re the captain.”
“It isn’t a captain’s order. You know you could disobey, and I would have no redress.”
“Then just because you ask it.”
And just for a moment, she looked away. “As simple as that?”
I nodded.
“And you cannot tell me what it is you see? What compels you to such obedience?”
I shook my head.
“Kneel.”
And I knelt without hesitation, and she stood at the same time so I was naked at her feet and gazing up at her with awe that should have been terror.
With that same at-me-past-me-through-me look in her eyes she put her hand gently against my throat. I could feel my pulse fluttering beneath her thumb and her forefinger. “With a little pressure,” she told me, “I could cut off blood to your brain. In thirty seconds, you would lose consciousness.”
I stayed perfectly still, my breathing as steady as I could make it, my lips just faintly parted.
“In a minute, brain damage would be permanent. In five you would be dead.” She shifted her fingers just slightly, and almost immediately my vision began to swim and my heart began to quicken.
All I wanted then was for her to kiss me.
For fragile, beautiful seconds I hovered on the edge of nothingness, and then a voice crackled over comms. Locke, I thought. “Hail coming through, Captain.”
She released her grip at once. “Transfer.”
“—to Pequod,” the hail was saying. “This is the Albatross.”
“Albatross,” the captain replied. “This is Pequod. Receiving.”
The forms here were always the same. “Requesting gam. Beginning log updates. Rendezvous at your—”
“Hast seen the Mobius Beast?” demanded the captain.
The air went dead for a moment. “No,” replied the Albatross uncertainly. “We’re three years out from Europa, mostly hunting the belt-routes, and—”
The transmission dropped. Atmospheric conditions on Jupiter meant that happened sometimes, and it was usually the work of a moment to reestablish them.
But the captain didn’t even try; she just brought the chart back up and began entering the new data.
With the blood flowing slowly back to my brain, I remained kneeling beside her awhile and, once I realized that she had shut me once again out of her world, I slunk back to her sleeping chamber, retrieved my clothes, and left.