Chapter Thirty-Four. Bodies
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
Bodies
Guess what! It’s another musing chapter!
By now you should know the drill: skip if you like, more sex and violence later, blah blah blah.
The thing is, though, I really want to talk about the body.
That great, impossible body that chains and arms and machines held tight—or tight-ish—to the underbelly of the Pequod.
Because funnily enough, bodies matter to me.
If we reject the eternal verities of the catechism—and I’ve been trying my whole life to reject the eternal verities of the catechism, with mixed success—they are in a very literal sense all we have.
Which makes it even more of a bummer that these things that should, by all rights, be more truly ours than anything else in the system so often aren’t.
Over the next days and weeks, my crewmates and I were going to take that beautiful, terrible, majestic Leviathan and violate it in every way imaginable.
We were going to take its flesh and its bone and chitin and its ichor and its—drink if you giggle—sperm and carve them up and divvy them out and put them in boxes and barrels.
And then we were going to sell them. Or at least that was the plan.
Perhaps it’s sentimental of me, perhaps it’s even hypocritical, but despite everything we planned to do to the beast—to the thing that at least two of my crewmates half worshiped as an agent of their destroyer-god—I want to speak of it, for a little while at least, as a whole.
Or where I speak of it as parts, to speak of those parts as they belong to the animal, not as they belong to the bottom lines and ledgers of the Olympus Extraction State.
It’s a courtesy I’d want somebody to pay me, in the event that Aphrodite ever catches up to me and decides to take back what they sold.
I’m going to start with the head.
I’ve heard that on the core worlds, there’s still Terran animals.
Things that evolved on Old Earth alongside humans—sorry, that the Father created alongside humans, I was never good in school.
They say that if you look in the eyes of a dog or a cat or even a pig (which I hear some people keep as pets on Mercury and some people eat, but then again some people eat most things), you’ll see something looking back at you that’s recognizably, hauntingly mammalian.
Their eyes work like our eyes; their bones work like our bones.
I’ve heard that everything with an endoskeleton, on some level, is built the same way and on the same pattern.
That even sea animals have hands inside the fleshy mittens of their fins and even snakes have little tiny leglets where our limbs are just as we have little tiny tails poking out just below the bones of our asses.
I’ve heard people say that these patterns amongst Earth animals are evidence that the Father didn’t make shit, because if He did then why didn’t he just make everything, what’d’you call it, bespoke?
Why give humans useless tailbones and snakes useless hips and why do giraffes have the same number of vertebrae as we do?
And I’ve heard them say the opposite. That the sublime echoing of the human form in everything from a mouse to an elephant is proof that the Father made us in his image, and that this image is so sacred that it’s reflected again and again and again in everything we used to share a planet with.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen a hamster or a horse.
I’ve never had a pet and never eaten anything that wasn’t native to the weird, hostile biomes of the outer system.
And if the Father built animals to reflect Himself, like He built humanity to reflect Himself, what the ever-loving fuck is the Leviathan a reflection of?
It is vast. It is alien. It is limbs that grasp and jaws that catch and armor and eyes.
So many, many eyes.
I’ve seen the eyes of the Leviathan from a dozen different perspectives now: soaring past them in the boat, hanging next to them on the butcher line (you’ll hear more about that later, don’t worry), flying towards them or fleeing from them or waking screaming in the night with them haunting my dreams.
The beast’s eyes run in rows down each side of its armored non-face, and there are dozens of them, some as small as my fist, some larger than my entire body when I lie in my bunk curled up and trembling and waiting.
Each one, I am convinced, is different. As different from each other as my eyes are from Q’s eyes are from A’s eyes are from Locke’s eyes are from Truelove’s are from Flint’s.
Without iris or pupil or lid, protected only by a transparent nictitating membrane, the eyes of the Leviathan are cold and dead while it lives, eerily vital after it’s dead.
I don’t know what coreworlders feel when they look in the eyes of their mammalian pets, but I’ve heard that it’s a kind of fellowship.
A feeling that, whether it was the divine hand of the Father or the blind chaos of impersonal cosmic forces, something binds you together.
Some commonality that comes from being part of something larger. Something ordained. Something natural.
I think, perhaps, it’s not so very different from what I feel when I look in the eyes of the Leviathan. Whatever order there is in the universe, whatever plan the Father has for His creation, neither I nor the great many-eyed, many-limbed armored beasts of Jove can be any part of it.
The night after we chained the corpse to the underside of the Pequod, I tried to explain all this to Q. But I couldn’t find the words then. I can barely find them now.
“Lucerna corporis tui est oculus tuus,” she told me. “Si oculus tuus fuerit simplex, totum corpus tuum lucidum erit.”
And when I didn’t understand she said, “Your eyes. Beautiful.”
She kissed me then, and I tried not to imagine that my body was the body of the beast, my lips the tendrils that curled from the monster’s mouthparts, my jaw its mandibles and my eyes its eyes, dead and alive and belonging to a world that no human had any right to walk upon.
I tried not to think of my hands and fingers as they clung to her as being the same species of jointed, segmented, grasping appendage that belonged to the dead Leviathan.
It was no good. I was feeling out of sorts and out of place and out of myself and out of my body. I pulled away from Q as gently as I could manage and shook my head. I told her I was sorry, that I needed air—or as close to it as an artificial atmosphere could come.
On deck I let my limbs guide me wearily aft of the array. My mind was full of horrors and wonders and clouds and eyes. Uncountable, terrible eyes.
It was at times like this I went to the captain, if she would have me.
The times when I wanted to be destroyed, to let myself be broken and silenced and devoured.
The times I wanted to be seen through rather than seen.
To look into eyes that were a void, not a galaxy.
That promised nothingness instead of a mortifying everything that I would never understand.
I didn’t have it in me, on that night, or the nights like it, or the nights that echoed it and called out to it, to be beautiful. I had it in me only to be subordinate.
The day we chained the corpse, the captain had no use for me. Too busy with her charts and her calculations and the machine intelligence that echoed her thoughts back to her. Off rotation, I had no further duties, but in that nihilistic mood I had no further comforts either.
I descended through the ship to the keel balconies.
The primary watch post on a hunter-barque is the array, where the instruments scan the horizon for the telltale signs of Leviathans. But a ship is a flying thing, and it exists in a three-dimensional space, so there’s room for lookouts below as well as above. Below was right for me then.
The keel balconies on the Pequod, like all its outer surfaces, were strangely bedecked with the bones of her prey.
While the viewing window itself, as on every hunter-barque, was a hemispherical blister of transparent crystal bulging almost obscenely from the lower hull of the ship, the walkway that led out to it was pure and white and osseous.
Who had built it that way or why, I couldn’t say. But in that moment I found it fitting.
I stood on the bones of a murdered god looking down at the body of a murdered god, shackled beneath the ship in chains my lover had risked her life to fix in place.
The carapace of the great corpse stretched out beneath me, and it was almost like it was of one piece with the monster-bone platform I stood upon. Some trick of Jovian space and the methane clouds made it hard to see where the creature ended and the ship began and where I stood and who I was.
Hard for me. Hard also for the Wyrms.
There were hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps, all feeding on the body.
A Leviathan’s back is segmented and while its carapace is impenetrable to Wyrm teeth when it lives, in death nothing stops them from flying into the soft, intimate cracks between its great armored plates and wrenching at it with their vicious scavengers’ teeth.
Nor was there, ultimately, anything stopping them pitching themselves at the sides of the ship, believing it perhaps to be just another kind of Leviathan, one stubbornly unwilling to show them its tender, fleshier parts.
I pressed my hands against the crystal viewing window and stared at the Wyrms. And they, in their hunger, stared back.
They battered against the glass, their jaws inches from my fingertips, voracious and primal and a strange kind of comforting.
If I’d been able to, I think I would have opened the window then, let them swarm in and consume me, let them swim-fly all through the ship and take the crew apart one by one.
I’m sorry. This wasn’t what I meant this chapter to be about.
I was trying to talk about anatomy. About the Leviathan.
About how its head is some sixty to a hundred feet in length and protected above by thick chitin and then beneath that by a denser, harder substance that isn’t quite bone.
How its mandibles have on each side a dozen parts that move independently of each other and grind its food to a slurry of undifferentiated biomass.
How set deep inside its jaw it does, in fact, have a tongue.
A thick, muscular tongue whose movements nobody has ever seen and lived.
But much as I pretend sometimes, I’m no scholar. I’m not even much of an autobiographer. I’m not a writer of adventure stories or of tales of forbidden passion. I’m not a philosopher or a believer; I’m too cowardly to be an apostate and too uncreative to be a heretic.
The crystal glass was cool under my fingers, tremoring just slightly when the Wyrms struck it.
I could feel myself willing it to crack.
To let the sky pour in and to make it all be over in one blissful moment of bloody simplicity.
And then, unbidden, a different thought began to sneak up on me.
The thought that if I’d made a different choice that evening I could be in my bunk getting fucked senseless by my closest friend instead of being where I was and as I was and doing what I was doing.
Standing on bone. My mouth dry and my skin still crawling for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Watching sky-serpents writhe through the flesh of a slaughtered Titan, I wept.