Chapter Thirty-Eight. The Archangel’s Story
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Archangel’s Story
I’m going to be honest. At the time I wasn’t much interested in what the Archangel told the captain because, and I want to make this absolutely one hundred thousand million percent clear: he wasn’t a fucking archangel. He was a scammer.
But I’ve rewritten this book three times and each time I go back to it I get the feeling that something is missing, and what I think is missing on this pass is the Beast. The true Beast. The Beast that this whole thing is about.
I pieced this story together later, in fragments from members of the crew who heard it from other members of the crew, or other crews.
Some of it I got on the Pequod, some elsewhere.
Much of it I had from a man named Ironhands I met in a dive bar on Hygiea, and some I got from sources I’ve long since forgotten.
Here is the tale as I learned it.
“The Archangel Gabriel,” began the Tall Ganymedian, leaning on the bulwark of the Pequod’s main deck with characteristic apathy, “on hearing of the Mobius Beast, decided that it was an incarnation of his god.”
“Which was foolish,” Ironhands continued through the vapor haze of the miners’ bar. “There’s no gods in this world.”
“Save one,” added Marsh in the mess.
“Anyway,” I told a woman with one green eye and one brown, who I loved passionately for about three hours in a dark room in a cheap inn, back on Cthonius Linea, “he forbade the crew from hunting it, which would have been fine except—”
“Except human nature is what it is,” explained Dawlish. “Forbid people to do something and there’s always some fucker who’ll do it just to spite you.”
Even with that—I type onto a barely working tablet at a table in a dark corner of a bar on Titan, knowing full well that this round of edits was due in yesterday—they would have been fine. Our ship hunted the Mobius Beast for three years and only came upon it at the last. Most ships never sight it.
“And when they do,” said the Old Ionian, “it’s too late.”
“But this particular ship, she was unlucky,” Ironhands told me—his hands really were iron, or rather they were steel but then chemically speaking steel has more iron in it than iron does.
And actually they were probably mostly low-density composites but you can’t call a man Low-density-composite-hands, that’d be silly.
“Because we sighted the Beast, and the first mate, name of Mayhew—”
“Macy,” said Dawlish.
“Miller,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
“Mabunda,” I told the woman with the one green eye.
“—he was all seized with a lust to hunt the Beast down.”
The woman with one green eye smiled at me. Seized with lust had been a cheap play, but I’m a cheap sort of girl.
“The Archangel,” the Old Ionian went on, “he swore against it. Prophesied against it, said it would bring doom on the first mate, and on all who lowered with him.”
“On him alone,” said the Tall Ganymedian. “Which as you’ll learn later was extremely on the nose.”
Ironhands leaned closer to me. Uncomfortably close, if I’m honest. “But what did he know? After all as far as Mayhew—”
“Miller—”
“Mabunda—”
“Macy—”
“—was concerned the Archangel was naught but a man before the array. Whereas a first mate”—Ironhands puffed up his chest in a parody of entitlement—“well, a first mate must be obeyed, must he not?”
“So what happened?” asked the woman with one green eye.
I took her hand in mine, ran my thumb across the pattern of scars that formed intricate concentric designs on the back of it. “First mates are arrogant”—I thought back to Locke—“well, most of them. And so when the spout was sighted, he gave the order to lower.”
I described the sequence of lowering to her. And now that I was working from experience instead of fragments I’d stolen from other people I could be clearer, more precise, more alive in the moment. And I think she noticed.
“The boats slipped into the wake of the great Beast,” I told her. “You’d think that a bigger Leviathan would be slower than a small one, but that’s not how it works. Something about the way they move.” I was sensing she didn’t care about the details. “They shot off their wing darts—”
“But it was for naught,” said the Old Ionian. “Clattered off the monster’s carapace like—”
“—piss off tin,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
“And so,” said Ironhands, “they lowered the canopy so the harpooners could do their work. But no sooner was the cover down and the crew exposed than the Beast’s great tail cracked”—he brought his low-density-composite hand down hard on the bar.
“—like a whip,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
“—like thunder and lightning both,” said the Old Ionian.
“—fit to tear the sky,” said the Bright-Eyed Titanian.
“—cross the path of the first mate’s boat,” said Ironhands, “and the very tip of it slashed across the cockpit, and though most of the crew had drilled well and knew to duck…” He gave a smile that was half a sneer. “Officers. Am I right?”
“Not a soul was harmed,” said the Old Ionian.
“Not one hair on one head out of place,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
Dawlish gave me a look that said he only half believed what he was saying. “’Cept for the mate. Who was swiped out the boat and plunged to a meaningless death in the skies.”
After a moment’s silence, the woman with one green eye looked at me skeptically. “That seems unlikely.”
“It’s more common than you’d think,” I told her. “Close calls happen all the time, and if one person is a bit out of position, they can get hit way worse than anybody else.”
I don’t think she liked that explanation. It felt as if I’d denounced a miracle.
Which I suppose I had, in a way.
“So,” the Old Ionian went on, “it all fell out as the Archangel proclaimed.”
“Reckless man does reckless thing,” said the Tall Ganymedian. “Dies. No magic there and no mystery.”
“A beast doesn’t have to be a god,” Dawlish concluded, “to be well worth staying away from.”
That much, at least, was true. And by the same token a man didn’t have to be an angel to speak prophecy.
He just had to open his eyes.