Chapter Fifty-Five. The Congregation
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FIVE
The Congregation
I tried to make sure, when I was working on this book, that even somebody who knew nothing about Leviathans, or about the hunt, could follow what was going on.
Part of that means making sure you know at least as much about how Leviathans work as I do.
And yes, in hindsight I could probably have worked that information into the text more elegantly instead of just devoting the occasional chapter to long digressions about biology, but, well, I guess that’s just my time as a schoolmistress coming to the fore.
Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; tell ’em; tell ’em what you told ’em.
One of the things I’ve been telling you for a while now is that leviathans are, by and large, pretty solitary creatures.
But as we’ve seen, pretty solitary isn’t the same thing as completely solitary.
Pods are a thing, after all, and it’s hard for any species to be completely solitary unless it reproduces asexually.
An although another thing I’ve told you is that we don’t know much about the reproductive habits of the Jovian beasts, I do think it’s likely that, unlike a lot of polyps, fish, and other sea creatures, they use internal fertilization.
Which is another way of saying that Leviathans fuck.
Nobody has ever actually seen them mating or found a spawning ground. Nobody has ever recorded … anything about them, really. They’re a resource that we kill for parts, not something we document.
But the hunters know. While everybody else just ignores the monsters who keep their lights on, we dig deep inside them, and we understand them. They fuck. They have families. They have nurseries.
And when we find a nursery, we charge into it and start killing indiscriminately.
Q was well around this time, so it must have been either before or after the whole thing with the pirates and the coffin.
I’m putting it after, but I don’t remember the pirates being involved.
I do remember Marsh being deep, deep in whatever the voices were telling him to do, and I think that makes it late in the voyage.
Either way, the themes shake out. And besides, who’s going to prove me wrong? Everybody who could is dead.
By this stage Marsh had taken to holding great sermons from the prow of the ship, which had grown increasingly popular amongst the crew, initially amongst those who fell, phenotypically speaking, into what the Starry Wisdom sect called the Last Devoured, but eventually even some of those who the Devouring God was set to consume first started attending.
“It just makes sense,” explained a young Europan voider who, by Starry Wisdom doctrine, would be very near the top of the Devourer’s menu. “Besides, it probably doesn’t mean me.”
We had passed through the storms into the Southern Tropical Zone with relatively little difficulty, although admittedly that might have been because we were all judging difficulty relative to being boarded by pirates.
Now we were in calmer skies, we could get to work patching up the hull. So when we found the nursery (you see, the biology does matter), I was suspended by a line out of a larboard airlock, fusing a great panel of leviathanic carapace over the breach the raiders had made.
Which meant I had a spectacular view.
Leviathans are impossible. Neither science nor theology accounts for them.
And when gathered in numbers they’re impossibility magnified.
The nursery was a cloud, like a swarm of Wyrms or—if what I’ve heard about the skies of Old Earth and the aviaries of Paestum Vallis is true—a flock of swallows. Except bigger, so much bigger.
The signal to lower was sounded and I finished my spot-weld as quickly as I could before hurrying off to my primary duty of piloting the death boat.
Normally the launch bay was if not a well-oiled machine then at least a decently efficient place-where-people-went-and-got-in-stuff, but this late in the voyage we were tired and uneasy, and, oh yes, a good dozen or so of us had joined an apocalypse cult.
Marsh, Truelove notably walking behind him now, proceeded almost in state to his boat, wielding his coilgun like a staff of office.
His followers trailed behind him, murmuring warnings about the coming annihilation and, when he reached the boat, they lifted him into it on their shoulders, with Truelove climbing up after.
Between that and the captain striding all purposeful and alone to her own boat with its illegal neurally networked copilot, I was beginning to get the sense that things were not going well aboard the Pequod.
“No time now,” said Locke, as if answering my thoughts. “We lower. And bring the narcotic lances.”
The narcotic lances were something the hunt used very rarely and only in target-rich environments. If the hunt did encounter a very large pod of Leviathans, or a whole horde of them like we had here, it would be extremely hard to single one out to kill. So instead of killing them, we drug them.
I say drug: the narcotic in question is a lethal neurotoxin delivered in doses that would kill an entire hab-dome if they got into the air filters.
But to a Leviathan they mostly just make it fly erratically and, more importantly, the lances themselves are tagged with a high-frequency ID marker that flags the Leviathan’s corpse—should it eventually succumb to the poison or to other wounds it suffers in the chase—as the property of the ship.
If it didn’t have this tag on it, and it did die, then like the ambergris corpse it would be considered a loose beast, and free for anybody to haul in and carve up.
By attaching our tags, we marked our Leviathans as fast beasts, and our own property.
The practice might seem odd to those outside the fishery, where property rights are usually a tad more complicated than calling electronic dibs.
But in a lot of ways I liked the purity of the system.
It broke the whole sky into two categories: things that were owned, and things that were waiting to be owned.
It fit well with the world as I understood it.
For example, I, like Dawlish, was very much a fast beast. My body was property of Aphrodite Pharma State and would be until my debt was paid or they came to collect it.
The rest of the crew, as far as I knew, were loose beasts.
Their bodies were the property of whatever power came by and chose to claim them.
What sort of beast you are is left as an exercise for the reader.
Venom spears loaded, we climbed into the boats and, with Marsh’s choir singing hymns of dissolution, we lowered.
From time to time throughout my life, I’ve had moments of disconnection or of dissociation.
Moments when the world has gone distant or fuzzy or shrunk down to two-thirds of its regular size and I’ve felt like somebody else was living through me.
I’ve never had one stronger than I did in that lowering.
Once, on Vesta, I knew a woman with an intricate tattoo the length of her spine.
It was of a great eel winding around a barbed hook to take its own tail in its mouth.
But when you looked carefully you saw that the eel was picked out in tiny legible words—poems, prayers, jokes, blessings and curses—only visible if you got close enough that the picture itself vanished.
Approaching the leviathanic cloud was like that.
From a distance it seemed one thing, pulsing and rippling as if a single will animated it.
It was only as we drew nearer that I began to make out the individual beasts and to get a sense of the absurd, astronomical scale of the whole gathering.
The smallest amongst them—jaws to tail—was a third the length of the Pequod, the largest far longer, and there were thousands in that gathering.
Together they would have represented a treasure trove of sperm (still saying it, how’s it going?) more valuable than the wealth of entire cities, perhaps even entire trade-states.
No hold could carry even half their oil; no ship could catch a tenth of them, a tenth of a tenth.
Though the beasts were densely packed on the scale of gods and gas giants, close to I could see that there was immense space between them. Plenty of room for us to move between the monsters and loose our payloads as needed.
“Range closing.” That was the captain, and I realized how strange it was to hear from her on a hunt. But maybe she thought to find the Mobius Beast amongst the cloud. “Stir them up and strike at will.”
The order to strike at will was immediately taken up by the other boats but Locke gave the command for us to hold, and so we held. “No sense wasting good venom,” they explained. “And no shortage of prey either. But watch it, the skies will be getting rough.”
And they were right. Each time a beast was speared, it shied, and the once-harmonious movements of the swarm got super fucking chaotic super fucking quickly.
Because Locke had kept us back slightly, I had a view from the outside and I could see the panic spreading through the Leviathans like a plague through a prison ship.
Patterns gave way to noise and beasts careened past each other in their hurry to get away from their would-be killers.
This was my first time amongst a mass of Leviathans, and I’d wondered, before lowering, why we used the poison darts here and not in other hunts. This monstrous tumult gave me my answer.