Chapter Forty-Five. The Fountainhead
CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVE
The Fountainhead
You’ve already seen, many times now, that the Leviathan is tracked in part by eye, in part by instrument, and what the instruments detect is a pulse of electrokinetic activity we call the spout.
It’s vital to the fishery. Nobody would catch a Leviathan without it. But also nobody has a fucking clue what it is. There isn’t even a broad consensus in ignorance, the tacit agreement that well probably it’s this because reasons that’s the basis of so many of our other certainties.
I was standing on the observation deck watching the instruments one evening.
I say evening; a day on Jupiter is ten hours, and so while the ship keeps what voiders call Mean Circadian Time—a rough approximation of the twenty-five-hour day you’d get on Old Earth—the actual day-night cycle, still just about perceptible in the upper atmosphere at least, is almost totally out of sync with it.
Anyway, I was standing on the observation deck watching the instruments and contemplating the nature of the spout.
It’s hard to remember exactly what I was musing about all these years later, but I seem to recall that I was compiling a very illuminating analogy between the fountain-like qualities of the spout and the Leviathan’s role, through the energetic properties of its sperm, as the fountainhead of all life and prosperity in the system.
It was a good metaphor, I thought. Unfortunately, I never got to complete it because I was interrupted by an angry mob.
Okay, not an angry mob. More a peeved gaggle.
Both Europans, a Mimean, a Cerean, and the Bright-Eyed Titanian cornered me—or at least got as close as they could to cornering me in a space with very few corners—and made it very clear that they wanted a word.
I tried not to take too much satisfaction in the fact that they all looked like they’d been in a fight already, and like they’d probably come off worse. Split lips, black eyes, and notable limps were spread unequally amongst them. “I told you,” I began, “she doesn’t listen to me.”
“This isn’t about the captain,” said the First Europan, spitting blood. “This is about that fucking Terran you’re so thick with.”
“Q?” I asked casually. Except I used her actual name—she never hid it from the crew, I’m just hiding it from you. “What about her?”
“New kill’s getting hauled in,” said the Bright-Eyed Titanian, “and we want to be sure she won’t be up to her old tricks.”
The new kill was a small beast that Flint and Truelove had taken down between them a few days earlier.
It hadn’t been anything like as promising as the one Q had saved Marsh from, and voiders being as voiders are, a fair few of the crew had taken that as an indication that our luck had turned and she was responsible.
“She brought a curse on us,” added the Cerean. He and I had barely interacted apart from that one time he kicked me in the head, but I knew he was from Ahuna Mons, which in the Church we used to call Little Pluto. He was, I suspected, a true believer in the catechism.
“Can we maybe deal with one curse at a time?” I tried. “The captain’s a curse, Q is a curse, we’re cursed because we didn’t kill one of the Death’s Heads and hang its skull off our larboard hull. Did it ever occur to you that maybe life is just random and this job is just hard?”
The Bright-Eyed Titanian moved in very close beside me.
She wasn’t armed, but four friends behind you was the best weapon you could have.
“Listen to me, you pissant little tourist. Each and every one of us has mouths to feed and bills to pay and your faux-wisdom bullshit isn’t keeping a single damned one of us from starving.
” She glared, which I won’t pretend I didn’t find hot because, well, I’m not calling her the Bright-Eyed Titanian for nothing.
“Keep your little piece of Terran ass in line, or we’ll do it for you. ”
I did my best to shrug that off. “You’ve got a problem with Q, take it up with…” A realization hit me. “You did, didn’t you? And she beat the crap out of you.”
The Second Europan scowled. “She caught us by surprise.”
“What, all of you?”
“The heathen is full of tricks,” replied the Cerean.
I permitted myself a smile. “So is the believer, in my experience.”
That didn’t sit well with the Cerean. “Beloved,” he began, which threw me until he continued the quotation, “believe not every spirit, because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
And you know what? Fuck that. I stepped forward.
This did put the Titanian behind me, which would have been incredibly bad if it actually came to violence, but at least it let me get right into the face of my sort-of-but-not-but-sort-of coreligionist. “You do you,” I said. “I’ll pick a ravening wolf every time.”
By my very inexact calculation, I was about seventy-six seconds from this little group deciding that talk was getting them nowhere and giving me another kicking to make themselves feel better. Except just as they were squaring up to take swings at me, we heard footsteps across the deck.
Sometimes I swear she’d had speakers put in.
Because the captain’s footsteps echoed in a space that it should have been acoustically impossible to echo in.
It wasn’t that she had a heavy tread, in fact if anything she walked lightly, but she took each step with such confidence that her every footfall was a gunshot.
A shot right to the heart, in my case.
“Crewmates,” she said, aloof and passionless as the stars.
In an effort to avoid some unspoken, unthreatened reprisal, my would-be assaulters fell into line, murmuring various flavors of cap’n under their breaths.
“Mark me,” she said to them, and to the void, and perhaps to me, “I am not insensible of your woes nor ignorant of your disappointments.” This was, I suspected, strictly true.
All she’d claimed, after all, was that she knew of the crew’s woes, not that she gave a crap about them.
“Whether you hunt for glory”—she glanced at the Bright-Eyed Titanian—“or for profit”—the Europans—“or to satisfy a god who tells you honest toil is sacrament and wealth a blessing”—the Cerean and, with more than a trace of irony, me—“you shall be well served by the next stage of our voyage.”
Behind me, the Mimean murmured something about not having been served too well by it so far.
“We fly south,” she went on, addressing the complaint without acknowledging it.
“To richer skies, and there I swear to you, shipmates, our fortunes will be born anew. For we will carve through storm and swell and electric fire to the very heart of this world’s wonders.
To the fountainhead where monsters are birthed and heroes are made and a hunter’s hand can overflow with sperm, ripe for the taking. ”
The fact that the captain could talk about hands overflowing with sperm and everybody took it totally seriously said a lot about her.
“Cleave to me, shipmates,” she said, “and look to your duties. We cross the tropics soon, and any of you sorry sky-dogs caught lagging at your post will be flogged.”
They didn’t cheer. Even A couldn’t quite get people to cheer a threat of flogging. But they went on their way sharply enough. Except for me. I hovered a moment, snagged like a shard of shrapnel in the field of an accelerator coil.
“Thank you,” I stage-whispered. Loud enough that she’d hear me, quiet enough that I could pretend I’d not meant her to.
She looked down at me. And in a tight, strangling moment, I realized she had no idea what I was thanking her for.