Chapter Thirty-Six. The Leviathan as a Dish
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
The Leviathan as a Dish
There are two schools of thought about whether it’s a good idea to eat bits of the Leviathan.
All the other hunters say it isn’t. Flint says it is.
I’m exaggerating, obviously. I’m sure that somewhere in the tumultuous multitudes of the fishery, there’s more than one person willing to fly in the face of received wisdom, expert advice, the direct experience of everybody else who’s tried it, and common sense.
Especially if those people, like Flint, are part of the Church of Liberty.
Of the Big Three Churches, the Libertines are the ones I understand the least, even though I grew up relatively close to their Phobosi heartlands.
None of the churches strictly own any territory—that falls exclusively to the trade-states and the short-lived seditionist enclaves that they nobly protect us from.
They do have areas where one or the other is stronger.
Pluto for Prosperity; Venus for Life; Mars for Liberty; but these are tendencies at best. One of the blessed things about the trade-states of the Exodite Commonwealth as opposed to the clans, kingdoms, and nation-states of Old Earth is that they’re inherently decentralized, meaning the old curse of wars over territory is a relic that humanity has moved far beyond.
In our modern, enlightened world we only fight wars over resource rights, trade practices, and of course to repress workers’ uprisings, all of which are much more sensible things to spill blood over.
Anyway, as far as I can tell the Church of Liberty exhorts its followers to actively reject any authority except the Church itself (which, from what I can gather, sets quite a lot of rules for its followers, especially regarding sexual behavior) and their own impulses.
And Flint’s impulse, it seemed, was that he really wanted to eat some Leviathan.
“Eating your kills,” he told the mess hall, “is an ancient and sacred tradition. A man isn’t free if he’s never eaten something he killed with his own hands.”
The Pretty Vestal gave a devastatingly humble smile. “I wonder if the captain intends to eat the Beast, when we catch it.”
“Probably,” replied the Tall Ganymedian. “It seems like the kind of thing she’d do.”
This earned him a rebuke from Dawlish. “Does it? Or are you just saying that to sound clever?” Then without waiting for a reply, he turned to Flint. “Anyway, you didn’t kill it with your own hands. Truelove did.”
Flint scowled. He was usually good-natured to the point of apathy but there were matters he didn’t like to be crossed on. “I shot the first lance, that makes it mine.”
As ever, I wasn’t totally sure how much Q had been following, but she chimed in now. “First lance, the pilot. From the wings. Second lance.” She nodded to Dawlish. “Harpooner.”
“From my boat,” Flint insisted. “On my orders. Which makes it mine.”
“Perhaps”—the imp of the perverse was on me—“we could say it was a group effort?”
No matter which church you came from, this was blasphemy.
Even to atheists like the Tall Ganymedian and the Pretty Vestal it was mildly offensive.
After all, collective effort was just a short step away from collective action, and that was a dangerous road to go down.
It’s a well-known fact that for a society to function, individualism and a strong sense of personal responsibility are absolute necessities, and suggesting otherwise is sympathizing with terrorists.
Dawlish met my eye. He was, in many ways, a better heretic than me despite being an unbeliever. “We could.”
“My kill,” Flint insisted, “which makes it my meal.”
The Tall Ganymedian regarded him with a look that bordered on the insubordinate. “That’s all well and good, but do you have to cook it here? You’re making the whole mess smell like an Ionian rendering vat.”
He was, and it did. The ship’s droids are only trained to produce quite a narrow set of dishes, and if you want something else you have to make it yourself.
The mess table had a hot plate built in for this purpose, but it was seldom used and when it was used it was hardly ever used unilaterally.
It was more common for a group of us (each, of course, taking personal responsibility for their own contribution) to throw a collection of whatever leftovers or organic scraps we happened to have scrounged up into a pot and make a stew of it.
Frying a slice of Leviathan fin, and entirely for one person’s consumption, wasn’t against regulations but it was certainly against common practice.
“Captain’s already barred me from using her cabin,” Flint grumbled, “and did the other officers back me? They did not.”
On the hot plate, the fin was beginning to pop and sizzle, its not-exactly-fat turning a yellow-brown that might or might not have meant it was edible.
“Then cook it over a fuel cell in your quarters,” suggested the Second Europan. She’d been part of the group that jumped me over the porn issue, so I didn’t really want to agree with her, but this was one of those moments when the worst person you know was making a great point.
While I’d chosen to stay quiet, Q never could. “Fugit, te inepte,” she shot across the table, but neither I nor the Second Europan actually understood what she meant.
With a look of honestly quite churlish defiance, Flint levered the blackening monster fin off the heat and onto his plate where it sat in a widening pool of psychoreactive grease.
“’Tis a bad omen,” the Old Ionian insisted. “No good ever comes of eating Leviathan.”
While Flint was stuffing god parts defiantly into his mouth, the Pretty Vestal decided to pick an entirely different fight.
“You’re always saying that, old man. You said it about the captain being belowdecks.
You said it about the entertainment system glitching.
They both sorted themselves out, and the voyage is going perfectly well. ”
I’d heard him express the absolute opposite opinion not three days ago, but it was amazing how much difference a kill made.
Suddenly the whole crew was remembering that our main goal was to slay monsters for profit and that no matter how boring things got—and they would get plenty boring—they could also be thrilling and violent and, if they continued to go as well as they just had, they could end in a decent payday for all of us.
Also, he was wrong about the entertainment system sorting itself out.
It had just stopped getting worse. But in my experience people easily confuse not getting worse with getting better, especially if they’ve got something to distract them.
And there was little more distracting than the corpse of a legendary star-beast.
Little. But not nothing.
Because we were about to meet an angel.