Chapter Twenty-Eight. Clouds
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Clouds
In the days that followed, the captain’s winter mood kept her confined to her cabin. This left Locke in charge by default, which, from an objective point of view, was absolutely for the best. We changed course and for a while we were on a completely ordinary hunter-voyage.
That was how we continued for a month or so, and when I think back on that time I can almost let myself forget the doom that hung over the journey. I can almost forget the horrors and let myself think only of the wonders, of the beautiful things.
Almost.
We aren’t far into the story yet. Not really.
But I’m already getting muddle headed. Sifting back through memories and dreams and wishes and might-have-beens, it’s sometimes hard for me to sort what actually happened from what I’ve just told myself happened.
Or what should have happened. Or what should never and could never have happened but I wanted so badly that the wanting has become a substitute for recall.
Don’t get me wrong, what I’m telling you is true.
But ask anybody who collects stories for a living, any detective or journalist or executioner-errant: eyewitnesses aren’t worth shit.
We—and by we I mean humans in general but I also mean the specific humans who try to explain things to other humans using words—so often start with a pattern we want to see and fit the facts around it.
Still, I’m sure I remember the brit.
You may not have heard of brit. It’s not a common term outside the hunter-fleet. It’s the general name we give to the smallest Jovian organisms, the myriad sky-plankton that float on the winds and live by thermotrophy or chemotrophy or psychotrophy depending on their nature.
I don’t know how small the smallest brit-organisms are.
Nobody has ever done a full breakdown and any of them that aren’t visible to the naked eye and don’t show up on ship sensors would never be recorded by practical-minded hunters.
Bluesky exobiologists, on the other hand, seldom come as far out as the gas giants.
When they do, it’s usually to study the subterranean seas of Ganymede, which have the advantage of being close to some very good hotels.
What I do know is that the biggest brit-organisms are about the size of a fist, and roughly the same shape.
Little fleshy balls covered in fine spines or whipping flagella or rippling pseudopods.
Most of the time they’re few enough and far enough between that you barely think of them unless their blended remains start gumming up the intake jets of your boat or, worse, the ship itself.
Sometimes, though, they get blown together in clouds the size of continents. And those clouds are one of the most beautiful sights you will see in all the system.
Life is strange. Life-the-phenomenon, I mean, not life-the-experience.
It must be one of the most unevenly distributed things in the cosmos because it’s so rare across so much of it but when it does appear it appears in abundance.
And nowhere is that truer than in a brit-cloud.
The brit itself is already spectacularly diverse in shape and form and color.
Quite a lot of it is bioluminescent, so as the ship flies into it the sky comes alive with rippling displays of light like you’ll see nowhere else.
But life (like, the catechism teaches us, society) also forms hierarchies.
So where the tiniest, weakest creatures gather, the things that feed on them gather too, and the things that feed on the things that feed on them, and the things that feed on those, and—above even the great apex predators—the hunter-ships of humanity and the carrion eaters that swarm alongside us.
The brit-cloud wasn’t where I saw my first Death’s Head Leviathan (that had been a few weeks earlier, you’d get very bored if I told you everything that happened on every day of a three-year voyage), but it was where I first saw them in numbers.
And such numbers. Leviathans are so big that they have to be solitary (well, mostly solitary, bar breeding and raising their young), because two or more sharing the sky for any length of time would harvest all the nourishment out of the winds in days and then they’d both starve.
But in the bountiful environment of the cloud they could gather in twos and threes and tens.
Family groups, I assumed, although I might just have been projecting.
We kept our distance from them. Death’s Heads give no sperm and so there’s little profit in hunting them, but if disturbed they can and will ram a ship with their great bony foreheads. And if they do, who can say what would become of the ship that disturbed them?
Who can say what becomes of any ship, if it doesn’t come home?
That’s the thought that haunts the hunter-barque. If the vessel is lost, if all hands fall into the skies, then there’s nobody to know what happened to you. Nobody to tell what beast or what machine or what act of indifferent nature or merciful divinity sent so many souls to their deaths.
Even amidst the beauty of the brit-cloud, you can’t quite forget that you’re nothing inside nothing inside nothing.
The Death’s Head schools carved paths through the light and color, making the patterns even richer and more complex and allowing, here and there, glimpses of the clear red sky beyond.
In one brief moment in our days amongst the brit, I stood with Q and she laid her head on my shoulder as we watched the Leviathans.
“Ex Iove,” she said, “semper aliquid novi.” And then for my benefit, or perhaps for yours, she added, “Something new. Always.”
We didn’t watch for long. I had couplings to fix.