Chapter Twenty-Nine. Leviathans in the Stars
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Leviathans in the Stars
A hunter-barque is a machine in so many different ways.
A machine for turning lives—human and Leviathan both—into profit.
To this end it takes in everything it can, ruthlessly devours all it’s able to, and then carelessly jettisons anything that turns out not to be worth the storage space into the Jovian skies.
Because of this, the composition by volume of the ship changes a lot over the voyage.
It starts off, as you might put it, virginal, its hold filled with supplies or with wide-open space (although even that space, in its own way, is storage—an empty hold is full of air and air is more precious than water to a void crew) and every spar and every soul aboard shining and clean.
Or at least as shining and clean as they’re likely to ever get, given that both the spars and the souls will probably have been on half a dozen prior voyages and will have had a fair amount of muck and grime and rust ground irredeemably into their cores.
Then as she sails on she gains some weight and loses some, her hold beginning to fill with spermaceti as her stores begin to empty of food.
If she’s lucky the oxygen saturation of her atmosphere will hold more or less steady as the algae banks go about their photosynthetic churn, and meanwhile her overflow tanks will grow ever more filled with waste.
And waste kills.
Let too much crap build up and you jeopardize the mission, taking up valuable space that could be used for sperm, adding weight that makes the ship burn more fuel which in turn can force it back to port long before its time.
But flush too much too readily and you find that you really, really need the 2 or 3 percent of the junk that you could have salvaged.
Which is why trash picking is one of the ship’s more encouraged extracurricular activities.
The Catechism of Prosperity teaches us that the will of the Father is never more evident than in institutions like hunter-barque trash picking.
It’s effectively a perk of the job: you can go down to the reclamation floors to your heart’s content, dig through the refuse, and anything you can fix you either keep if it’s only useful to you, or sell back to the ship if it’s useful to the voyage.
Nobody takes a salary and yet by the glory of the invisible hand, everybody profits.
Also it gives you something to do when you’re bored. Which you often are on a ship even when the entertainment system hasn’t been co-opted by a rogue thought machine trying to compute the optimal line of attack against an enemy that might not even exist.
Honestly it wasn’t an activity that ever really appealed to me.
I spent long enough wading through crap when I was on duty, I saw no reason to do it on my off-hours too.
But early in the voyage (time is a woolly thing in the sky; it had been months but not yet a year), I noticed that Q would often clock off at the end of her shift and then go immediately to the waste bays to pick through the ship’s refuse.
As a result, the relatively limited storage space we had above and below our bunks was gradually filling up with a vast collection of … stuff.
My church upbringing said that she was doing this for some kind of superstitious or religious reason.
That in all likelihood her little glass idol was telling her that this piece of communicator, or that piece of cabling, or those fragments of psychoconductive Leviathan bone were vitally important for some misguided heathen purpose.
But eventually, after many internal debates with the ghosts of the old men of my childhood, I persuaded myself otherwise.
After an even longer debate, I persuaded myself to just ask her.
So the next time I was sitting in bed, watching her rip the guts out of the emergency backup battery of a long-defunct environment suit, I took a deep breath and said, “What are you actually going to do with all this?”
She looked up at me, quite unguarded, and replied, “Take home.”
“Why?”
From her expression, she found this a very peculiar question. “We need.” She held up a component. “Photocell. Hard to make without”—she waved a hand in frustration—“Silex. Flint. But not.”
“Silicon?” I tried.
Q nodded. “Very little on Earth. Little metal. No fuel.”
That more or less matched what I’d been taught.
When our blessed ancestors had fled that cursed planet, they’d left nothing of value.
It would have been sinful for them to do so.
“How do you”—I hesitated; the question was going to sound crass—“you can’t live on scrounged semiconductors and repurposed copper, surely? ”
I was probably imagining it, but there was a sadness in Q’s eyes then.
A terrible distance. “Can’t live like you,” she said.
“Ships. Cities. Domes.” She shrugged. And then gave up on Exodite and with a touch of frustration in her voice said, “Considerate lilia quomodo crescent non laborant non nent dico autem vobis. Nec Salomon in omni gloria sua vestiebatur sicut unum ex istis.” And then she set her tinkering aside, hauled herself up to my bunk, and kissed me so very, very gently.
“This”—with a single small movement of her head she managed to indicate an all-encompassing everything: the steel walls of the ship, the harsh glare of the strip-lights, the blue-white glow of the screens, which were currently advertising holiday packages to a pleasure complex on Mimas—“is not all there is.”
I was sure that on some unhelpfully literal level she was right.
Despite my upbringing I wasn’t completely incapable of acknowledging that other ways of being probably existed.
Out there. Somewhere. For other people. As a child I’d harbored secret dreams of running away to be a pirate.
Of living by blood and plunder from a hollow asteroid somewhere in the Trojans, or on a rogue atmospheric station in one of the gas giants.
But while I’d made a very, very large number of terrible decisions in my life, I hadn’t quite had the guts to go all in on being a professional murderer.
Sighing in place of speaking, I shuffled sideways so there was just enough room for Q to slide into the bed beside me, and she got the hint. Or at least, she got part of the hint.
Actually that’s not true.
You’ve probably already noticed that I spend a big chunk of this book talking about how horny and self-destructive I am. And don’t get me wrong, that isn’t a completely unfair characterization. But I’m not quite as one-dimensional as I tried to make out the first time I wrote this chapter.
When I said she got “part” of the hint, I was trying to imply that what I really wanted was sex, and that Q made a mistake by not fucking my brains out there and then.
She didn’t. She didn’t at all. It’s just way easier for me to pretend that I wanted to get laid than to admit that I wanted her to hold me. That right in that moment what I needed, more than anything in the world, was to be with somebody. To lie there in the quiet. To be allowed my uncertainties.
The screens were still playing advertisements at us and Q, with an instinct for mercy or a distaste for commercialism that I found equally wonderful, asked the computer to show us something else.
She asked it to show us stars.
I wasn’t sure how much she knew about the way the intelligence was gradually suborning the ship’s noostructure.
I’d told her more than I’d told most people, but I’d been cagey even with her.
Whatever she understood, she’d made an inspired choice.
If there was one thing it definitely wouldn’t have been overwriting it was star maps.
After a few moments’ silence, she traced a finger over the too-low ceiling of my bunk, now covered in an illusory sky, and said, “Cetus.”
It was the first time we’d shared a word.
The first time we’d shared an idea. It wasn’t something I’d ever really thought about despite my travels, but the stars were so impossibly distant that the constellations looked the same no matter where in the system you were.
The Great Bear was the Great Bear from the Temple of Commerce on Pluto.
It was still the great bear from the crystal waterfalls of Mercury. I traced a shape of my own. “Hydra.”
Q moved her finger to a single, bright star. “Polaris.”
That one was foreign to me. “Polaris?”
“North,” she tried. “Always there. Fixed. Unmoving.”
And just like that, she’d lost me again. I’d never been to Earth. Never lived on a world with fixed stars. Never been able to look into the sky and know for certain that one light would always be there.