Chapter Fifty-One. The Rose Bud
CHAPTER
FIFTY-ONE
The Rose Bud
You’ve probably cottoned on by now to the fact that this book isn’t strictly in chronological order.
I tried to keep it straight at the start, but memories aren’t like watching a play and a life isn’t one story with a beginning and a middle and an end, it’s a hundred stories that cut each other off and jump between each other and end wrong and start bad and blend together like blood on the wind.
I’ve done my best. Obviously I got on the ship at the start and we’ll finally meet the Beast at the end, but everything in the middle is a jumble of things I’m desperate to remember and things I’d rather forget and forgotten hopes and old regrets and one or two bits of shit I might have just made up.
The gams, I’m about 90 percent sure, happened in the order I’m recounting them.
They’re such a break from the routine of life in the sky that they stand out, and although I may have gotten one or two of the details wrong I’d more or less swear to the general picture.
And hell, if you’ve a mind you can run down those ships and their manifests, speak to their captains, and ask them yourselves.
Which means I’m also fairly certain that we met the Rose Bud while Q was still in medbay, though I can’t remember if it was before or after I started work on the coffin.
It was definitely after Marsh fell into the head and after we’d captured Wolfram and his fellow pirates, because I remember them being involved.
We were still deep in the storms, and tensions amongst the crew were running high.
And so when we found the corpse, we were in a bad place to react rationally.
“It’s a sign,” said the Old Ionian voider, when he saw the beast from the prow.
I’ve talked a lot about the Old Ionian, I think.
So in some ways I’m kind of ashamed of the fact that I’ve forgotten his name.
Hell, if I’m being totally honest, I may even be conflating two different people.
“And no good will come from approaching.”
The thing he had seen was vast and white and distended. A bloated carcass that had once been a Leviathan.
Sometimes they sink. Sometimes they rise. As far as I can tell there’s no pattern to it.
Now the sight had been called, the crew were gathering forward to stare at it and speculate.
“Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,” Marsh whispered, “hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”
I’d noticed a shift in the dynamic between Truelove and Marsh in the last couple of weeks.
While the harpooner wandered the ship declaiming nonsense, the second mate had taken to following him and listening—really listening—as if he truly believed that a brief soaking in spermaceti had given Marsh a spiritual link to their fucked-up entropy god.
While the crew were gathering on the foredeck to stare at the blasted carcass, the officers and captain came by to make their own assessments.
“Worthless,” announced Locke to the crowd. “There’ll be no oil worth having in something so old and rotted.”
Truelove, who had been listening to Marsh intently throughout the encounter, turned to Locke with what you might call respectful defiance. “There’s more to wealth than oil, and my harpooner says the corpse is a blessing, for all its outward decay.”
I could see the look of contempt in Locke’s eyes. Like me, they’d been raised in the Church, but unlike me, they’d rejected its spiritual teachings entirely and nailed their colors firmly to the mast of pragmatism. “We’re a hunter-voyage, not a prayer group.”
Openly sneering, Truelove turned to A. “What say you, Captain?”
But the captain wasn’t listening. She was staring out at the great white mass of the corpse. “To have come so far,” she was saying entirely to herself, “to be cheated so late, and like this.”
“Captain,” repeated Truelove, “what say you?”
“I’ll not believe it.” She was answering her own question, not Truelove’s. “Not until I have looked in its eyes.”
“Captain?”
“Make ready the boats.”
Lowering for a dead beast was a different experience from lowering for a live one. Different but not necessarily better. In a strange way it felt more dangerous, even though it was less so in every single way possible.
When you went out against a live monster, there were half a dozen ways it could kill you, but you were so aware of that and so ready for it that the adrenaline made you feel at least two-thirds immortal.
When the monster was dead already the whole mood was more somber and the grave felt so much closer that it was harder to forget where you were.
That you sat in a pressurized cabin above a fall longer than worlds and your job was to butcher gods to sell their blood to pay the price of another day of living.
Or maybe that was just me. Remember, Q was still in medbay at this point, so I was probably getting a bit morbid.
The winds in this part of the sky were intense, and so the floating body of the Leviathan naturally moved as we drew closer to it.
But when we were about halfway there, it started to move much less naturally.
This kind of corpse normally bobs freely, going this way and that as the unpredictable eddies of the Jovian atmosphere dictate, but this one suddenly started drifting with purpose, directly away from us.
“Fuck”—Flint’s voice crackled across comms—“some other bastard is out here.”
Sure enough, as we broke the next cloud bank we saw a small squadron of hunter-boats and, behind them, a great barque decorated in Ganymedian fashion—its hull sleek and its deck picked out in colored lights that seemed incongruously jolly given its grim business.
This ship’s boats had harpooned the dead Leviathan from the other side and were now rapidly towing it back to their barque.
Where a few minutes earlier, the crew of the Pequod had been at best indifferent about what looked like an extremely low-value prize, the sudden appearance of competition spurred us on and we opened our throttles to catch up with the other fleet.
“Unidentified ship”—that was the captain—“this is the Pequod. Identify yourselves.”
“This is the Rose Bud.” The voice that came back had a distinct Ganymedian accent. “And we claim this as a loose beast.”
I’ll explain the loose beast thing later. Maybe. Basically it meant anybody could grab it. And they were in the right on this one. They’d gotten to the corpse before we had and speared it fair and square.
Out the larboard side of our cockpit, I saw a single boat break free of our little flotilla. I didn’t quite know who it was, but my money—if I’d had any but as I think I explained right back in chapter one, I was broke when I started this trip—would have been on it being the captain.
“Pequod,” the Ganymedian captain’s voice came through again, “we have claimed this as a loose beast. Withdraw.”
The captain didn’t withdraw. Of course she didn’t withdraw. Instead she asked, as she always asked, “Hast seen the Mobius Beast?”
“Pequod, please repeat.” The Ganymedian captain clearly had no idea what she was talking about.
“Hast seen a beast, long as your ship and white as Europan ice?”
There was a pause and then the Ganymedian’s voice came back. “We’re towing one?”
Comms were dead but I could hear the captain’s disbelief in the dead air.
If this was truly the Mobius Beast, passed from natural causes and towed off by a dilettante captain who had never even heard of it, the realization might actually break her.
And that thought, for a moment, ruined me.
I wasn’t quite far enough gone that I didn’t realize the captain’s obsession with the Mobius Beast was all kinds of fucked up, but sometimes life took you to a place where fucked up was all you had and if you lost it you became a healthy, well-adjusted void that collapsed in on itself with a scream so loud that nobody could hear it.
I didn’t want that for her.
“Pequod”—the Ganymedian seemed to be losing patience—“move away from our prize.”
He was, by the law of the sky, totally right to be pissed. But the captain didn’t care, and as the rest of our boats began circling while we waited for orders, Truelove decided that now would be a really good time to get all theological.
“This is not your prize,” he said, and I got a sense of that true-believer calm in his voice, the same as I was used to hearing from the captain.
It was way less sexy coming from him. “This is a gift from the Devouring God and an echo of his coming. So I am told and so I believe and so it is finished.”
The silence on comms felt more awkward than it had a right to be, given that it was just a ship not broadcasting. It got rather more awkward when the reply came in. “Last message unclear, please repeat.”
“This”—Truelove began—“is a gift from the Devour—”
“It is not the Beast.” That was the captain, whose channel had priority for reasons of rank. “We are done. You may take the carcass if you are so fool as to wish it.”
This time awkward didn’t even begin to describe it. “Understood, Pequod,” said the Ganymedian captain, in tones that were about as icy as I’d have expected given that he’d been subjected to a religious tirade and then called a fool to his face.
“What my captain means”—this was Flint, ever merry, ever working the angles—“is that while we’ve no doubt you know your business … You’re a man of business I’m thinking, for certain you sound like one?”
There was a suspicious pause and then the captain of Rose Bud replied, “I have a range of interests, yes. I began as a perfumier.”
“Ah then no doubt you’ve your own reasons for wanting this old and plaguey corpse.”
“It is a gift,” Truelove repeated, and though my many careers had never included con artist, I did wonder just a little if they were working a two-man grift. “From the Devouring God.”
“As you can see,” continued Flint, still all cheer and goodwill, “amongst my own crew we’ve different priorities, but as a businessman I assume you see some value in this carcass beyond the few drams of oil you’ll be able to wring from its dried bones.”
“You sound,” replied the captain of the Rose Bud, his voice all suspicion as well it might be, “like you want it for yourself.”
He was in a different boat a good hundred meters or so from mine, but I could see the look of innocence on Flint’s face as he spoke.
“Me, sir? No, I’m of a mind with my captain—leastways of a mind with her conclusion if not her reasoning.
This Leviathan’s nothing to me but a disease-ridden hulk that’ll see half my crew down with fever as like as not. ”
“Foul and pestilential,” agreed a new voice over comms; Marsh, I thought.
“But some amongst my company are by way of following the Great Chaos”—this was one of the many, many names for the Starry Wisdom sect—“and, well, they do be having their peculiarities.”
“If it is the Crawling God’s will,” intoned Truelove in support, “that we be struck down, we shall be struck down, and I shall rejoice in the sight of the perishing of the unworthy before mine own flesh succumbs.”
“See what I’m dealing with?”
It seemed that A had checked out of this whole conversation, which meant that strictly speaking Locke was the ranking officer in this exchange, and they’d been curiously silent.
“Orders?” I asked over internal speakers.
Locke’s hand came to rest on the back of my pilot’s chair.
Honestly, I wasn’t super clear where things stood with me and Locke at that point.
They were the definition of hot and cold at the best of times, and at work they were all business.
“Let it play out. Flint and I have our differences, but I trust the man.”
A little below us, Truelove’s boat had moved into dart-range of the stricken Leviathan, and while I might have been imagining things, I thought the Rose Bud’s boats were slowing.
At last, the Ganymedian’s voice came back across the void.
“And what will you do with this thing you tell me has no value?”
“Me?” Flint managed to shrug audibly. “I’d let it drift. My crewmates on the other hand…”
“What will be will be.” By now I was more than 90 percent sure Truelove was playing his role up. “But our faith demands that we stare into its deliquescing body and take what we find there as we will.”
Possibly it was the word deliquescing that pushed him over the edge, or maybe some more experienced sky-dog had explained to the captain that yes, there really wasn’t much to be had from this kind of Leviathan and yes, they really did run a risk of making your whole ship come down with a horrific pestilence.
Either way, the Rose Bud’s boats unshackled themselves and let the corpse float free on the winds, leaving us to tow it away at our leisure.
“What the fuck was that about?” I asked the internal comms, not really expecting an answer.
The Old Ionian voider leaned over to me. “Ambergris, girl. Ambergris. Strange thing the other captain being a perfumier by trade and not knowing of it.”
And that was strange.
Strange enough that, had I not lived the story, I’d have doubted the truth of it.