Chapter Thirty-Seven. The Archangel
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Archangel
The work of hewing up and butchering the Leviathan took days rather than hours, so we were barely halfway done when a hail came through from another barque.
On this occasion, I wasn’t in the captain’s bed when the message came in (I know, I know, it wasn’t for want of trying), so I don’t know how she answered them.
My guess is that she asked if they’d seen the Mobius Beast and they said they had, because we actually changed course to rendezvous with them.
Except it turned out a rendezvous wasn’t on the cards.
At least not the getting together drinking and fucking kind of rendezvous the crew had been waiting for.
Word soon went around that the Jeroboam had two distinct but equally weird things going on.
Firstly, there was a plague on the ship, and although air filtration and decontamination rooms could do a certain amount, the kinds of things people liked to do on gams (see above re: fucking, drinking) were pretty much the opposite of social distancing.
As much of a bummer as that was, because the Pequod was getting cramped and samey after so long in the skies, it paled very slightly into insignificance beside the other weird thing about the Jeroboam, which was that it had the Archangel Gabriel on board.
I was sure they weren’t the actual Archangel Gabriel because the math on that one didn’t begin to check out.
The way I saw it either the Church was onto something, in which case probably some two-fiftieth lay voidhand wasn’t likely to turn out to be an angel at all.
Or else the Church was full of shit, in which case angels probably weren’t real.
There was, I suppose, a middle ground that worked theologically. It was possible that the churches were right in their broad cosmology but wrong on the finer points of doctrine. But believing that felt like it’d be a lot of work, and so I settled for assuming the whole thing was a load of crap.
Since the Jeroboam was keeping itself in isolation, the ships wirelessly linked their internal comms for a kind of remote gam.
This happened sometimes, apparently, and it wound up being what you might call a party line—you could speak to random members of the other crew and use that fleeting moment of human connection to share stories about your past, or catch up with former shipmates, rekindle relationships with old friends. Stuff like that.
Or you could use it for sex. Most people used it for sex.
Unusually, I didn’t. I’d like to say that something about the vast unknowable isolation of the Jovian skies had turned my mind away from the physical and towards higher things, but the truth was I just felt a bit self-conscious about my voice.
Instead, I asked around the crew and tried to work out what the fuck was going on with this whole Archangel Gabriel business.
So I didn’t get an orgasm out of it, but I did get a story.
“He’s Venusian,” Dawlish told me, leaning on the bulwark and watching the Jeroboam from the observation deck. “From the Renouncers.”
It wasn’t a sect I’d heard of. The Great Churches liked to pretend they had a monopoly on faith, but even if you ignored the totally unaffiliated cults like the Starry Wisdom or the various Theonationalist Enclaves, there were little subsects and schismatic branches all over the place. “Renouncers?”
The look on Dawlish’s face was bitter. “Walked away from the Church of Life after the Bull on Cellular Personhood and the Rights of the Coercively Conceived.”
I’d been forced to learn a ton of theology in my time, but it was Prosperity-focused not Life-focused so I just stared at him blankly.
“The Church of Life is big on Venus,” Dawlish explained, his mechanical hand tightening on the gunwale. “The Bull is why I’m here, in a roundabout way.”
I had no idea where this was going.
“I’m a convict,” he explained. “A murderer. A mass murderer, in Venusian law.”
And even though I knew firsthand that Venusian law was probably fucked, I edged just a little bit away from him. “What did you do?”
“According to the Bull on Cellular Personhood, issued by the Church of Life and signed into joint corporate law by Aphrodite Pharma State, Fortuna Entertainment Republic, and the Panagricultural Combines of Ovda Regio, I killed four hundred and seventy-nine human beings. Because according to the Bull on Cellular Personhood, any self-replicating set of cells that’s capable of survival outside of the human body is a human life. ”
My background wasn’t in biology, but I had a feeling this was about to go to some bad places.
“Which means if you get, say, cancer on Venus, you have two choices. You pay a fortune to have Aphrodite or one of its subsidiaries lovingly remove your tumor and transfer it to a laboratory where they can keep it alive and harvest it. Or you go to a backstreet oncologist.” He tapped his chest. “Saved a lot of lives,” he said grimly.
“But not according to Venusian law. The Renouncers looked after me for a while, but it didn’t take. ”
That explained some things about Dawlish.
His cybernetics, for one, which were the cheapest pieces of shit on the market.
Exactly the kind of thing that one of the Corrections Conglomerates would put in their indentured inmates to keep them working and profitable.
I was less sure how much it explained about the guy claiming to be an archangel.
Still, it didn’t seem right to press him for more details, so we chatted a while about our mutual experiences with Aphrodite Pharma State and its enduring commitment to securing its property.
Then I left him to it and went looking for other people who might fill me in on the rest of what was going on.
None of the people I asked—from my crew or the Jeroboam’s—could explain precisely when their crewmate had started to claim (or as they put it, because every last one of the bastards believed him, to realize) that he was the Archangel Gabriel.
Or for that matter why he’d started to claim it, other than the obvious reasons (those reasons being either “because he’s the Archangel Gabriel” or “because it’s incredibly useful to have a bunch of people thinking you’re the Archangel Gabriel,” depending on your perspective).
They just knew he’d kept it pretty close to his chest when he’d first signed aboard, only revealing his definitely-actually-true-no-really identity as one of the most cosmically important beings in the universe once they were safely within the atmosphere of Jupiter and the captain’s options were reduced to “put up with it” or “space him.”
I got the impression the captain had wanted to go with “space him,” but the crew had rebelled.
The whole idea of a crew of otherwise sensible people deciding that some random from a broken hab-dome on Venus was a powerful servant of the Divine Father was messing with my head. But I kept digging, if only because I wanted to know why any of them believed him for more than ten seconds.
The answers I got were vague and mostly unsatisfying.
One or two did claim that he had directly, personally cured them of the plague, although even then they were unclear on how he’d done it and seemed happy to admit that other people had gotten better perfectly naturally.
Most of the rest just said things like “Well, you have to believe in something” and “Better safe than sorry.”
I didn’t buy either of those. I’ve been seesawing between believing and not believing my whole life and nobody’s ever convinced me believing is better. As for safety—I mean, maybe it’s just the November soul in me, but I’m the sort who’d pick sorrow every time.
Perhaps I’d have learned more about the strange situation on the Jeroboam, but about halfway into the gam, the captain’s voice came crackling into my bunk over the intercom.
“I’ve need of you,” it said. “An angel has just prophesied my death.”
Naturally I went to her at once, and I found her pacing the floor of her cabin, bathed in the holographic blue light of her map table.
“Speculate,” she was demanding of the thinking machine. “From what data we have, was their story true?”
“I’m not supposed to—” the machine replied, only to be cut off with a word and a gesture from the captain.
“It might or might not be,” it continued, which A took as confirmation.
“The sighting places the Beast spinwards in the third southern belt some eighteen months ago. That’s consistent with what we know of its patterns but doesn’t limit its location much. ”
Still pacing, the captain demanded, “And the death of the mate?”
“There’s no reason for the captain to lie to us, but he might have been lying anyway. The angel confirmed it despite confirming very little else, but there might be multiple explanations for that. Ship’s data shows the mate wasn’t aboard the Jeroboam but it could have been tampered with.”
“And the angel himself,” the captain continued, stopping now and glaring at the table. “Is he what he claims to be?”
The light over the mirror-surface shimmered. “I’m not trained to answer questions of theology.”
“You can’t believe,” I interrupted, “that an angel came into the world, only to take the shape of a simple ship’s hand.”
As if recognizing my presence for the first time, the captain turned to face me. “You think might never hid itself behind meanness?”
Unlike the thought engine, answering questions of theology was damned near all I’d been trained to do. That didn’t mean I liked doing it, or did it well. “I think saints,” I replied, “are rarer by far than liars.”
“And if I said”—she stepped towards me and, partly on instinct and partly in play, I backed away, pressing myself against her cabin wall—“that I was of a mind to believe him, would you think me out of my wits?”
She’d taken to asking me that a lot. I never knew what answer she wanted me to give. “Would you care if I did?”
Her face was close to mine now. It sometimes began this way, when she was in a certain kind of mood. When the storm inside her was close to raging itself apart. “Answer me,” she whispered, “or damn you for a coward.”
There was a game to be played here. A game of just enough defiance. “I’ve never pretended to courage.”
“Should I credit him?” she asked me, sounding almost desperate. “The angel?”
Looking back, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to say yes. To tell her what the crew of the Jeroboam had just finished telling me. Better to believe. Better to be safe. Better to take warnings when they’re given.
But while I’ve been many things in my life, I’ve tried to avoid being too much of a hypocrite.
“What did he say?” I asked instead.
“That my fate would be that of the first mate of the Jeroboam,” the captain told me, her eyes fixed on mine and her hands sliding into position on my wrists.
“That the Leviathan would be my death. That it was the Divine Father incarnate. That the will that drives the world is set against my hunt. That in the end the Beast’s great tail would stave my boat and send me spinning down into the abyss whence none return. ”
Her breath was hot on my cheek and her fingernails were beginning to dig into my skin. And I knew then, or thought I knew, the answer she wanted me to give. “Suppose you believed him?” I said. “Suppose you knew, in your heart, that every word he spoke was true. Would you turn aside?”
She smiled then. Terrible and beautiful. And she kissed me with a hunger like the sky.