Chapter Twenty-Five. Monstrous Pictures of Leviathans
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Monstrous Pictures of Leviathans
Days pass slowly on a hunter-barque. Outside of the gams, we largely have to make our own fun. And yes, often we make that fun with casual sex, or by developing a really intense backgammon habit, but most ships do have some kind of onboard entertainment system.
Streaming services aren’t reliable on the hunt.
There’s no broadcast platforms in the atmosphere of Jupiter itself and interwell transmissions won’t make it through the ionic interference.
Fortunately, recorded media takes up negligible space in the ship’s computers, so any vessel worth traveling on will have a whole audiovisual library available for its crew to rent at a very reasonable fee.
Most of it’s porn. The stuff that isn’t porn is schlock. But hey, you’ve got to give the people what they want.
Usually if you felt like watching something you’d just get it sent into one of the several screens in your bunk, paying a small surcharge if you wanted fewer ads.
But on the fifth of its nine decks the Pequod had an actual theater where a large group of crew members could split the cost of a rental and have it projected on a big screen in an atmospherically dark room.
We mostly used that for porn too. Almost exclusively, in fact, because the need to split the cost meant we had to pick content that a lot of people wanted to see.
And for some reason the most popular choice amongst voidfarers was content that allowed them to jerk off in the dark alongside twenty or thirty coworkers all doing the same.
I tried taking Q exactly once. She didn’t really get it. In her defense, the crew’s tastes ran specific, and watching a slim Vestal get double fisted by two guys in the uniform of Limtoc Kinetic Solutions probably wasn’t the best introduction to Exodite cinematic traditions.
I was just explaining to her, in hushed theater-appropriate tones, what was going on and whether I wanted it done to me at any point, when the image on the screen changed.
What replaced the popular, wholesome pornography was a horrific, leviathanic image of tendrils and mandibles and terrible eyes gazing pitiless into the void.
Another followed it. And another. They were strange, those pictures, distorted almost, as if they weren’t filmed from life but rather conjured by somebody who had seen a thousand descriptions of the beasts but didn’t truly understand what one was.
Either way, the cinema was filled with the sounds of two dozen voiders going off their stroke at once.
“The fuck?” demanded the Second Europan from a row near the front. “We paid for that.”
“It’ll be a corrupt sector in a pile somewhere,” said the First Europan. “It happened all the time when I was on the Grampus.”
The Tall Ganymedian, who had been doing something I was too polite to watch closely with a fresh-faced Enceladean, stood up and readjusted his absurd bottle-green coat. “Well, somebody should do something about it. Who’s in charge of data storage anyway?”
“General maintenance job,” I explained; I’d been dogsbodying on the ship for months by that point and I knew general maintenance jobs very well indeed. “The drones handle most of it and whoever’s on shift covers what they can’t.”
“It’ll be a coolant line,” said a bright-eyed Titanian with an intricate pattern of scarifications on her right cheek. “It’s always a coolant line.”
“Fuck the coolant lines,” replied the Tall Ganymedian. “What I want to know is how we get our money back.”
The First Europan looked at him like he was drunk. Which he may well have been. Then again that might just be me stereotyping Ganymedians again. “We don’t, you pampered sea-dweller. Unless you want to go to the first mate and ask them directly?”
Drawing himself to his full height, which was reasonable on account of his tallness, the Tall Ganymedian puffed out his chest. “Perhaps I shall.”
“Shall you, though?” asked the Bright-Eyed Titanian.
“Yes,” replied the Tall Ganymedian with the unearned confidence of the relatively affluent. “I shall.”
On the screen, the images of beasts were still flickering. If I’d been in a mystical mood, and I am sometimes in an extremely mystical mood, I’d have said that they felt less like a glitch in the system and more like a portent.
Despite the low-key outrage in the theater, we all drifted back to our rooms or our duties.
It became clear that the glitch, or corruption, or omen, or whatever it might have been was not merely confined to the theater but had spread to all the ship’s stored media.
It wasn’t universal, and it never seemed to affect the advertisements that flickered periodically across every screen on the vessel, but otherwise no matter what you tried to watch, flashes of leviathanic imagery crept into it at random.
It seems like a joke—and I’ll freely admit that a lot of things in this book are jokes, because I have a very short attention span and like to kid myself that facetiousness is the same thing as satire—to say that a lack of access to porn was a major morale problem on a ship where we all risked our lives on a frequent if irregular basis.
It’s not.
A shitty truth about life is that it mostly sucks for most people most of the time.
Over millennia of progress we’ve developed more and more efficient ways of distracting ourselves from this, and in their infinite wisdom the trade-states and great Churches of the Commonwealth have found more and more efficient ways to monetize that distraction.
An ancient enemy of humanity once said that every society is three meals from chaos, but in our modern age of plenty basic nutrition is generally accessible if you’re willing to eat enough metaphorical shit to get it.
Entertainment is a whole different thing.
Boredom is a subtle monster that gnaws at the soul of an individual and gnaws still worse at the souls of crowds.
“This is intolerable,” the Tall Ganymedian was telling the Old Ionian in the mess. “I’ve not even been able to read a book.”
“What’s intolerable,” the Second Europan replied—if replied is the right word because she wasn’t really the one being addressed—“is that you keep going on about it.”
The Old Ionian leaned back in his chair and frowned. “You want my thoughts—”
“We seldom do,” interrupted the Tall Ganymedian, to no immediate effect.
“—the ship is haunted. There’ve been ill signs since we left Europa.”
Beside me, Q sighed. “Mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes.”
“Perhaps,” said the First Europan, “but there’s something about this ship that’s not right. We’ve all seen the shadows in the captain’s boat.”
“Holograms,” I insisted. “Not ghosts.”
It took me all of two and a half seconds to regret speaking. The whole mess turned to me and the Second Europan said, quite casually, “Well, I guess you’d know.”
While I was still gathering my thoughts, Q leaned forward. “What do you say?”
“Oh, come on”—this was the First Europan again. I remember that he had an elaborate tattoo over one eye and cybernetics replacing his little finger—“it’s not like it’s a secret she’s fucking the captain.”
We’d firmly established by now that Q could care less who I slept with but she had a protective streak that I really didn’t want anybody to trigger. So, uncharacteristically, I stood up for myself. “What I’m doing and who with is my business.”
“True enough,” agreed the First Europan. Except it was a fake agreement. An agreement that was clearly a trap. “But what the captain’s doing and who with. That’s a whole ’nother thing. That’s all our business.”
A knife was always a useful tool on a ship, which unfortunately meant most of us were armed most of the time. So when I saw Q’s hand inching towards the edge of the table, I covered it gently with mine in the hope we could avoid things kicking off.
“Audi, vide, tace,” she said to the First Europan, “si tu vis vivere in pace.”
The First Europan’s eyes narrowed. “Watch it, Earther.”
“It’s fine,” I told the room. “I’m sure the officers are on it.”
“Like fuck they are,” said the Tall Ganymedian. “What you really mean is that you’re the captain’s pet deckhand and you don’t want to admit how little of a shit she gives.”
“Or what strange and fell things she be up to,” added the Old Ionian.
“She hasn’t done anything strange and fell,” I replied, not really wanting to explain why I was so confident on this point. Especially because a thinking engine was actually considered pretty strange and fell by a lot of people.
“Perhaps not,” conceded the Bright-Eyed Titanian, “but she’s got the whole ship roped in to hunt a monster that doesn’t exist, and half the crew are already fool enough to cheer her for it. That might not be witchcraft but it’s fuckery of some sort.”
“And since you’re fucking the fucker who’s fucking us with her fuckery,” added the Second Europan, “this is on you.”
I didn’t think that followed. But I also didn’t think they were any of them in a mood to take no for an answer.
It’s terrible what interrupting somebody’s masturbation schedule will do.
“Fine,” I said. “If it’ll get you off my back, I’ll …
I don’t know, I’ll mention it next time she asks to see me or something. ”
It was a foolish thing to offer. My relationship with the captain was the opposite of the kind where I got to make requests. But it pacified the crowd, for a while at least. That was all I’d really been planning on.
I mean. I say planning. You might have already worked out that planning isn’t really my bag. Which is probably why this whole thing went as badly as it did.