Chapter Thirty-Nine. Scrimshander
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
Scrimshander
A few days after the Jeroboam’s visit, we finished the cutting down, and the great corpse of the Leviathan was drawn into the underbelly of the ship.
It was a slow process, beginning with the evacuation of the entire lower deck so we wouldn’t vent a massive chunk of our oxygen into the Jovian storm.
When that was done, the lower airlock, which ran the whole length of the ship’s keel, creaked open.
And the difference in pressure meant that the mostly-hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter rushed into the gap like a hurricane, carrying sky-Wyrms up with it and—in one of the few examples of the harsh conditions actually helping the ship instead of hindering it—supporting the great mechanical arms which came down to pull the beast up for the next stage of its dismemberment.
The sound of the atmospherically backed rising of the Leviathan was fittingly immense. It set the whole hull of the ship shaking with the grinding of metal and the screaming of the wind, and since I was lying in bed with Q when it happened, it made it really hard to fuck.
So we made our way down to the viewing platform on the bottom deck to watch the next stage of the drawing.
Eventually the screaming, shuddering noise of the pulling-in was over but, as we came closer to the hold, we heard it replaced with a new, perhaps even more disturbing sound.
A beating, drumming sound, like the heaviest rain you ever heard, but coming from below and within instead of outside and above.
Once we reached the viewing platform, with its thick walls and its reinforced portholes, we realized what it was.
The hundreds upon hundreds of Wyrms that had been drawn in alongside the carcass were still feasting but, knowing themselves trapped, they were now as often hurling themselves against the walls and the viewing ports as against the ever-dwindling body of the Leviathan.
And then, as Q and I watched, one final sound began. A low, loud hissing as once more the atmosphere of the hold was evacuated.
The Wyrms don’t fly by any principle known to current science—they’re nothing like aerodynamic enough—but whatever electro- or psychokinetic process holds them up, it requires some kind of atmosphere.
And as the hydrogen around them was pumped once again into the Jovian skies they began to fall to the ground, making the rain sound return one last time.
Monstrous as they are, they can’t live in a vacuum, and so Q and I watched as they flopped and gasped and choked their last.
It was slaughter on a massive scale. Hundreds of lives snuffed out in order that one, vast life could be broken down into its constituent parts.
Of course if we didn’t, then our own lives wouldn’t be worth very much of anything and, universal community of all living beings aside, it was 100 percent better them than me.
“Fui quod es,” mused Q, “eris quod sum.”
From here, much of the remaining butchery was automated.
The walls of the hold were lined with countless claws and jaws and saw blades that would complete the dissolution of the Leviathan with robotic efficiency.
They would pry away the rest of its armor, precisely excise the head and spinal ridge (those being the parts that contained the precious spermaceti), and sort the usable parts into barrels for processing while the rest of the monster would be diced, slurried, and sprayed unceremoniously back into the sky that spawned it.
Of the valuable parts of the corpse, most are reserved for sale back in port, but there are inevitably fragments—especially fragments of bone and carapace—which are too small, too irregular, or too inconvenient to have much commercial value, and it’s from these that the crew make the strange artworks known as scrimshander.
I tried a hand at it myself once, but I didn’t have the dexterity or the artistic touch.
Q—as in most things—was my superior by far.
We sat one evening in her bunk while she etched images in a shard of not-exactly-chitin.
The scent of burning wafting up from her laser cutter was oddly cozy, like cooking over open fire or a solid-fuel heater.
For more than an hour, I watched her from behind the procedurally generated mystery novel I was pretending to read, taking in the lines of her wrists as she worked and the distant, quiet look on her face as she guided the laser.
Eventually, since I have a tendency to get restless—so restless that I at times sell myself onto doomed star-voyages that throw themselves down the gullets of abominations—I stretched and was about to get out of bed, when Q held up a hand and said, “No.”
I froze, hoping I hadn’t broken some strange Terran taboo and especially hoping that this wouldn’t lead to her pulling a knife on me like she had when we’d first met. Well, mostly hoping it. Slightly hoping the opposite, but my issues are for a different time.
She turned the slightly curved panel of beastbone she was working on, and I saw, etched in dark lines across its ivory surface, my own image.
The picture-me was sitting quietly, reading a dataslate, her back against—what, exactly? Something strange and alien that rose up from the ground and spread arms over her like a loving monster.
“What is that?”
“Tree,” she said.
I’d never had a word and an image come together with so much context and so little all at once.
The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba.
So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him.
Because I said to you “I saw you under the fig tree,” do you believe?
Was this what they were? This pattern of knots and whorls and these spots of light and shadow from a sun through an unfiltered sky?
“It’s beautiful,” I told her. Because it was. Because it somehow made me beautiful, which is something I’d never been used to feeling.
And then, because I wasn’t sure how to process that, because I wasn’t sure how to thank her in a way that didn’t involve sex on some level, I slipped very quietly out of bed, said, “Really,” and then walked very quickly away.
I made my way to the mess, where I found Marsh also busy scrimshawing, although he was using a more traditional blade, rather than laser-engraving.
Doing my best to ignore him, I went to the food vendor and ordered up a bowl of Wyrm meat.
That was the other advantage of asphyxiating a bunch of sky-serpents alongside the corpse of a star-cetacean.
There was at least moderately good eating on them, and since they counted as bounty of the voyage they weren’t taken out of our lays.
Seasoning would be, of course, so the actual meal I got was a thin consommé of unsalted flesh sitting in water recycled from urine or the heating systems or, most likely, both.
Still, the bits of scale and bone made something approximating a broth and it was, by and large, better than a lot of things I’d eaten on Europa.
At least it was free range.
Since it seemed the entire crew except for me had a real and enviable talent for sculpture, I watched Marsh’s figurine take shape with a mix of fascination and horror.
It seemed to depict a human being, half forced to their knees while some kind of terrible beast raked claws and fangs across their eyes.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked him as politely as I could manage.
“Religious icon,” he explained.
I looked again. It was definitely a person being devoured head first by something lithe and powerful and merciless. “Religious icon?”
“The great star god,” he explained, “in His aspect as the leopard who eats the faces of the unworthy.”
“Just the faces?” I was really trying not to judge, but sometimes other people’s religions sounded even weirder than mine.
He shifted a little in his seat. “I think it might be mostly a metaphor. I don’t think anybody expects Him to come in the form of a literal leopard.”
“Or to eat literal faces?”
“He will take many forms,” explained Marsh.
I recognized his expression. Recognized it almost fatally.
It was the comfort of a half believer retreating to the safety of dogma from the danger of thought.
“A collapsed dome. A bankrupted subsidiary that starves an asteroid. A plague or a ventilation malfunction. All these are manifestations of the Devouring God.”
“And He always eats the … impure first?”
Marsh nodded. “Always.”
By any standard, this was objectively nonsense. More than that, it would almost certainly have been directly contradicted by the evidence of Marsh’s own experiences.
Still, a tiny pointless part of me wanted to at least try. Giving up my Wyrm stew as a bad job, I drew my chair closer to him, and he flinched slightly. “Impure, meaning everybody who isn’t like you?”
He had the good grace to flash the tiniest expression of guilt. “So Master Truelove teaches. So the Church teaches.”
If I could have granted myself one wish then, it would have been to be able to call bullshit on my own faith as easily as I could call bullshit on Marsh’s.
Which as wishes went was probably pretty selfish.
I reached out and took his hand, threading our fingers together so that their meaninglessly distinct shades of brown overlapped.
And I took the tiniest bit of hope from the fact that he didn’t pull away.
“And you think a slaughterer-god is going to pick its victims based on”—it was so foreign to my way of thinking I could barely express it—“pigmentation?”
“So I was taught,” repeated Marsh. And I’d have called it a bad answer but I knew the strength of it.
“And the Beast—the great Beast the captain hunts? You think that will leave you for last too?”
Marsh blinked. “So I was taught.”
I looked down at our hands and tried, really tried, to see where he was coming from. “Okay, so let’s say you’re right. Are you really saying your entire religion is just … just based on wanting the monsters to eat me before they eat you?”
Marsh nodded. “Yes.”
“Isn’t that … extremely depressing?”
He snatched his hand back. “It’s a depressing world,” he told me. “And if all I have to look forward to is watching the god between the stars consume you in the moments before it consumes me, then”—he looked down and drew in a deep, ragged breath—“then that’s a lot more than I’d have otherwise.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. If I’d been more pious I’d have explained to him about the Father’s love and how it could be his at very reasonable rates. If I’d been a better blasphemer, I’d have shown him how to build a pyre out of dogma and warm himself beside it.
But I was just me. A lost, confused half a heretic. Fuck, even the hand I’d reached out to him hadn’t been mine. It had been rebuilt by Aphrodite Pharma State along with most of the rest of me, phalangeal reduction and osseous narrowing. I didn’t own my body any more than Marsh owned his soul.
Still a tiny, hypocritical part of me resented him for it.
For not realizing that he’d been lied to his whole life.
For not having the guts to at least come and join me in the horrible halfway place between believing and unbelieving, where you yearned for the certainties of childhood even though you knew they were bullshit and felt like a failure every time you found another one of the hooks the old doctrine left in your heart.
An even tinier part of me thought that maybe he’d change one day. That maybe there was hope for him.
There wasn’t. Fate—if fate is real—or blind chance had other plans for Marsh.
And when the monsters did finally come, they took him the same way they took everybody else.