Chapter Fifty-Three. Amber, Gold and Gray
CHAPTER
FIFTY-THREE
Amber, Gold and Gray
We slung the corpse—the beast’s corpse, not Q’s hypothetical corpse, we’re back on the other body and the other funeral, for the moment at least—beneath the ship far more easily than we’d slung others in the past, partly because we didn’t really give a shit about damaging it on account of it being such a bloated sack of putrescence already, partly because the damned thing floated so holding it up was much less of an issue.
Officially, the blasted Leviathan wasn’t actually a prize of the ship.
The captain had made it clear she didn’t give a fuck and bringing it in had largely been a private plan by the second and third mates.
Of course, our contracts still held that everything we brought in was to be shared according to the various lays of the crew and the investors, but since it wasn’t a formal kill there was no formal work rotation butchering it.
Instead, Flint and Dawlish and a couple of the other crew members worked on it in their spare time, and rather than a systematic dismemberment like we’d usually get, they went straight for the gut.
I happened to be watching from one of the starboard balconies when they finally breached its abdominal cavity. So I got to see the clouds of off-white bile and electric-blue ichor that spewed out when they cut into it.
People often say that smell is a powerful trigger for memory, and maybe long, long ago in the days of ancient Earth that was true.
But not in the skies. The billowing clouds of corruption that flooded out from that carcass must have smelled rank in the truest sense.
If they did I was cut off from them by layers of crystal and polymer.
Even Flint and Dawlish—the ones who had chosen to plunge deep into the rotting bowels of a destroying god—would be inside fully sealed environment suits, breathing recycled air that smelled a little of ozone and a little of rust, and of hardly anything else.
Perhaps that’s why I’m having such a hard time remembering those days. Grease and metal and atmospheric processors smell the same wherever you are, and so they don’t remind me of the Pequod any more than they remind me of Ganymede or Deimos or Vesta or Titan or Europa.
Spermaceti, of course, has a savor all its own, but you never find it in its raw form outside the hunt, so whatever memories are linked in my mind to that particular scent are buried forever.
The smell of skin I can recapture. The smell of sweat. The smell of somebody else’s body beside mine.
Perhaps that’s why this book is so fucking horny.
I didn’t set out for it to be that way. I wanted it to be …
actually, I’m not sure what I wanted it to be.
A record, I suppose. The last memorial of a hundred souls who vanished into the void as so many have before them.
Of the people I sailed with who deserved better than they got. And the ones who didn’t.
I wanted it to be a testimony to a time and a place. A moment trapped in words like insects in the oldest days of Earth would become trapped in amber.
Whatever amber is.
Like wood and like leaves and like trees, I’ve heard of it but never seen it. Never come within a light-minute of seeing it.
But I have seen the gray amber. The gray gold. The vomit whose price is beyond rubies.
I have seen ambergris.
Smelled it too.
They call it a Madeleine moment, after some long-dead Terran queen I suppose.
Or perhaps after the Madeleine of the Testament who made her hair a washcloth and thus demonstrated greater entrepreneurial spirit than the most pious of disciples.
Either way, the one time a scent has truly taken me back to the Pequod, it was because of ambergris.
Don’t worry. This story also has fucking in it.
You remember Pandora? The tall, heartbreakingly beautiful Ganymedian I’d told the tale of Ironhands that I’d had from the Town Ho? It’s not a problem if you can’t. Most days I barely remember her myself.
She made me her pet for a while. Even took me home to Ganymede, where for the first time and the last time I got to see the beautiful subsurface seas of that body.
And it was with her—or, more precisely, without her because we were neither of us huge fans of fidelity—that I’d had that mythical moment of scent-based transportation that took me from a ballroom over a cryovolcanic vent back to the skies of Jupiter and the halls of the Pequod and the bloated corpse of a Leviathan that just gave up on living.
It was magical in a way. But at the time it was a giant fucking mood killer.
I don’t want to give the impression that Pandora passed me around to her friends like some kind of fungible fucktoy. There was nothing quite so organized as that. But I was pretty conscious throughout my time with her that she’d get bored of me if I stopped being entertaining.
Which was why I was pinned to a ballroom window with a stranger’s fingers inside me and her tongue in my mouth when the scent of her perfume hit me like the psychic scream of a dying god and brought me back to the clouds of rot and the airlock of the Pequod and …
“Who’s Flint?” she’d whispered in my ear, and the question confused me because I wasn’t at all clear where I was.
I told her it didn’t matter, but my voice betrayed me. In that moment, it mattered.
Flint swaggered in through the airlock triumphant, the leviathanic bile scoured from him by decontamination, walking in front of six barrel-drones loaded down with glistening gray wax. A glistening gray wax that smelled rich and sweet and alive and beautiful and outside of time.
“Old lover?” the stranger asked, and her too-expensive perfume was rich and sweet and alive and beautiful, like sex and breakfast.
“Old crewmate.”
Flint, with typical showmanship, had paraded his haul along the deck, to the applause of the crew. Even the tiny fraction of its value that we’d each be entitled to was something to celebrate.
Pandora’s friend—let’s call her Cora—gave me a quizzical smile. “Do I remind you of her?”
“Him.”
That didn’t go down well. She scowled and stopped doing interesting things with her hands.
“We dance tonight, mates,” Flint was saying, as the base, animal scent of the ambergris began to flood the deck. “There’s more scratch in these barrels than in a half a bay full of sperm.”
“It’s your perfume,” I explained.
Cora pulled away from me and I reached out after her reflexively. I hadn’t actually liked her much, but rejection still made me want to vomit and kill myself.
“Ambergris,” I said. It made no difference.
“Ambergris,” I said to Q, who was watching the celebration with confusion—or I think she was, except we hadn’t reconciled yet, she was still in medbay hooked to machines and dying—still I remember the moment so clearly it can’t not be true. “They make perfumes from it.”
At least I was giving Cora a show. She stopped recoiling, which made me feel better than it had any right to, and stepped towards me again. I could still smell her perfume like a breeze across the void, spanning space and time and death and forgetting. “Perfumes?”
“Long ago,” I told her, “I sailed aboard a hunter-barque.”
That soothed her. It played into the rough-trade fantasy she was looking for. “That must have been perilous.”
She didn’t know how perilous, and in truth she didn’t want to know, not really. And I wasn’t much inclined to tell her. “I had my share of adventures. Heard my share of stories. I learned a thing or two about the world. It’s why I know the smell of ambergris.”
“It’s strange,” I told Q as I sat by her bedside later that night. “For something so prized and so beautiful to come from something so rotten.”
Q looked up at me with a smile. “De comendente exivit cibus, et de forti egressa est dulcedo.”
“What does that mean?” asked Cora.
“What does what mean?”
“De whatever whatever et de whatever whatever.”
I didn’t know, I’d never known. “Just something a friend said to me once.”
“This Flint?”
I shook my head. “No. Somebody else.”
In the medbay, Q kissed me. She was stronger than she had been, but at that time, with half a coffin built and half the tubes still in her, I still feared losing her.
“Was that one an old lover?” asked Cora, her smile wicked and possessive.
“In a way.”
“How many ways are there?”
That, at least, I knew how to answer. “Play your cards right and I’ll show you.”
We were back on track. At least, as far as Cora was concerned we were back on track. She drew me away from the window where, out in the lightless depths, a thousand bioluminescent creatures danced to their own music, and took me somewhere quiet and alone.
She laid me down on a low sofa in an alcove in what might have been a library but what with the mood lighting I couldn’t really see clearly enough.
“Tell me a story,” she said as she began to undress me. “From those days.”
“What kind of story?”
“Tell me what happened to Flint, and to the some-ways-lover. Where are they now?”
I froze. There were stories I would tell and stories I most certainly wouldn’t, and that story—which canny readers might also realize is this story—I wasn’t ready to share. Not then and perhaps not now.
So I said, “I don’t know.”
It was half the truth. After all, who truly knows where anybody is? Are the dead floating forever on the winds of Jupiter; are they swimming like superconductive merfolk through the hydrogen sea? Are they with us all for always?
So instead I told her about ambergris. About how we’d found it in a bloated carcass in the deep sky, and how dram for dram it was one of the most precious substances in the system.
And then I told her, because it was what she wanted to hear but also because it was a cold and brutal truth that I couldn’t look away from, that it became still more precious when it was processed and bottled and used, at last, to adorn her beautiful body.
I don’t remember, now, the color of the light in that place that might or might not have been a library. But in my imagination it was red. And when Cora stood before me, all she wore was a perfume made from the vomit of a Leviathan, and her skin gleamed as if it were painted with blood.
And it was, in a way.