Chapter Fifty-Nine. Wolfram and Marsh
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE
Wolfram and Marsh
After the pirates. Obviously. After Marsh fell. For certain. Otherwise, this could have happened any time. Well, any time before the destruction of the ship and the ignominious death of the entire crew.
I was guarding the captive. The captive that mattered, I mean.
There were others but since they didn’t have honey on their tongues and silver in their eyes, they were less of a concern.
The officers who were still paying attention (maybe two of them?
I was never sure about Flint) liked me to guard him because they thought I was too bound up in my own nonsense to fall for his.
To give them their due, it was a good read.
Anyway, I was guarding the captive when Marsh slunk up to us, wearing his Leviathan-cock robe (what, you thought that part was satire?). He stood outside the cell just staring at the pirate, his hands on the bars and his eyes empty.
“Want something?” asked Wolfram. It was a disingenuous question because the man loved to talk, and I’d been denying him that for a while now.
“You have a purpose,” replied Marsh, more coherent than I’d heard him in months. “The Devouring God has need of you, and you will answer that need.”
I’d expected Wolfram to reply cynically. And in a way I suppose he did. He bowed his head and said, “What purpose may I serve?”
It was an angle. It was obviously an angle. At least, it was obviously an angle to somebody who hadn’t nearly drowned in sperm and had their brain invaded by psychic space monsters they mistook for their god. “You may start the avalanche.”
“From inside a cell?” Definitely, definitely an angle.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
And there he went again, rambling like, well, like his brain had been invaded by a psychic space monster he mistook for his god.
“You do realize,” I told Wolfram, “that he’s completely lost it.”
“No, madam,” replied Marsh, “I do but read madness.” And then he left, a song I didn’t recognize on his lips.
When he was safely out of earshot, I glared at the pirate. “Let me guess, you’re hoping that he and his followers will demand your release and then you and what’s left of your men will, what? Seize the ship?”
A smile flirted with Wolfram’s lips. “Now why would I have a plan like that? I’ve just had my old heart stirred by a man of true and uncommon faith.”
“And if I tell the captain?”
The smile stopped flirting and moved on to a full-on handjob in the toilets. “Well, I’m in no position to know, being as I am a prisoner who hears only what my guards let slip, but I’ve a feeling the captain might be a touch preoccupied.”
“She sees more than you know.”
“Sees too much, if I’m any judge.”
The captain was, by any reckoning, old enough and experienced enough to need no defending from me, but you might have noticed that I’m not a particularly rational woman. “You aren’t.”
“Eloquently put.”
I just glared.
“You should hear what the crew say about her, to a man who can do nothing but listen.”
He wanted me to ask what. I didn’t give him the satisfaction.
“They’re split, of course. But not in a way you’d like. Half say she’s hunting a monster that will kill us all. The other half say she’s wasting time and fuel chasing a myth. As I see it, neither bodes well for her.”
Silence was growing more difficult. Not impossible, but more difficult.
“They talk about you too, you know.”
I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. Okay, who was I kidding? “Who?”
“The crew.”
This didn’t surprise me. Everybody talked about everybody on ship. After all, in a lot of ways we were each other’s entire world. I didn’t want to know what they said. “What do they say?”
“That you think yourself a philosopher but you’re actually full of shit.”
That was pretty fair, if I was honest.
“Also that you’re a giant whore. Although they say that part with respect.”
That checked out as well. Although in my defense most voiders were giant whores. You had to make your own fun in the deep skies and fucking anything that moved was an all-time classic with an extremely low barrier to entry. “And this is supposed to make me abandon my loyalties and join you?”
“This is supposed to pass the time.” He gave me a challenging look.
“Let me guess, we’ve just reached the part where you start musing about how passing the time is all any of us are doing.
Or how we’re all prisoners in our own way.
Or how though some of us are behind bars we’re all connected by the universal brotherhood of man. ”
“I might,” I replied, determined that he wouldn’t make me second-guess myself. “It’d pass the time if nothing else.”
Wolfram sat back in his cell, his hands folded behind his head as a flesh-and-bone pillow. “Go on then.”
“We’re all prisoners in our own way,” I said to him, only slightly sardonically.
“Because of, like, the system, man,” he replied.
I bit my lip. I wasn’t used to being engaged with like this and I wasn’t sure I liked it. “Saying something in a mocking voice doesn’t make it less true. All of us are circumscribed in one way or another.”
He scoffed. “Is that it? That’s all you can say? Who ain’t a slave? Thus the universal thump is passed around? It’s just words and you know it.”
Nevertheless, she persisted. “At least your prison is one you earned. Some of us are born to ours.”
“And some have ours thrust upon us?”
The whole don’t-let-him-get-to-me plan was failing hard. “Now you’re talking like Marsh.”
“Your man Marsh makes a lot of sense.”
“Like shit he does.”
And as though I’d failed some unexplained test, Wolfram gave me a derisive laugh. “That the best you can do?”
“You want me to rebut the arguments of a man who says the Leviathans are speaking to him in his dreams?”
Wolfram’s tone was getting increasingly withering. “Can’t you? It should be easy, shouldn’t it? For somebody with your intellectual pedigree. They say you were once a schoolmistress.”
I was beginning to sense traps everywhere, and the part of me that always wanted to run, or to hide, or to throw myself onto the winds and be spread in droplets over ten thousand square miles was getting a powerful urge to retreat.
“It was a church school. I didn’t need to know much outside the catechism. ”
“Which catechism?” he asked. And then before I could answer went on, “No, let me guess. Liberty, perhaps? You seemed keen to tell me that my imprisonment was my own fault. Except no”—he was smiling now, a hunter’s smile—“because whatever sect you were raised in you don’t sound like you believe it anymore.
If you ever did. Prosperity that was your dogma.
All is worth what it sells for and the rich are holy. ”
I didn’t flinch, but he reacted as if I had.
“Ah yes, there we have it. I should have known. Bad philosophers are one of Pluto’s biggest exports.”
“If you’re insulting me for a reason,” I told him, “just tell me what it is. I’m getting bored with this.”
“I’m hoping you’ll get frustrated enough that you’ll offer to blow me through the bars to shut me up.”
That was a particularly painful observation because I’ll be honest, I’d considered it.
And it made me very uncomfortable to realize how easily this man had worked that out.
How transparent it was that sex and suicide were my two default responses to bad situations.
“If I wanted to shut you up, I’d be putting something in your mouth. ”
“I bite.”
“So do I.”
He fixed me with that penetrating gaze of his. “No, you don’t. You’re too much a coward.”
“Try me.”
He rose then and walked calmly towards the bars. “Shall I tell you another sense I get from you?”
“If I say no, will it make a difference?”
“I’ve a sense you’re the sort who’ll take a cock if there’s nothing else, but it’s not where your heart lies. And I’m afraid I’m vain enough to want to be wanted for my own sake.”
This was going a bunch of places I didn’t like. So I pivoted. “I’m going to tell the officers what you’re planning.”
“Do. No plan worth making relies on secrecy.”
He was probably bluffing. Not that there was anything I could do about it in the moment. So instead I turned my back on him and tried not to listen to any more of his whispering.
It didn’t entirely work, but I made it to the end of my shift without doing anything I regretted, and at that stage of the voyage, I’d been celebrating far smaller victories.