Chapter Sixty-One. The Shrine
CHAPTER
SIXTY-ONE
The Shrine
As disappointed as Captain Statler was by the abrupt withdrawal of A’s attention, the rest of the gam went well.
For a day or so, the crew forgot the several shadows that were hanging over our voyage and we indulged ourselves in the usual round of song circles and causal hookups that characterized the meeting of two hunter-ships.
Of course, the fact that our crew was increasingly succumbing to a nihilistic star cult did make things ever so slightly awkward sometimes, but to my (and the other noncultist crew members’) great relief, it turned out that a lot of Marsh’s followers got a whole lot less fanatical once you gave them something to distract them.
Plus the Samuel Enderby had a good supply of algal wine, so we all managed to get pleasantly fucked off our heads.
But the bonhomie was never going to last. We said our farewells to the Samuel Enderby and steered on towards the Heart. And as we did, the old-new tensions crept back, and the crew once more watched each other with suspicious eyes.
And to think we’d been happily squeezing sperm together only a few days earlier.
I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist (and as Wolfram observed, I’m actually kind of a shitty philosopher), so I can’t quite put my finger on what made things get so much darker in the weeks we sailed the southern tropics.
But possibly the fact that Marsh built a giant fuck-off temple out of Leviathan bone and offal might have had something to do with it.
The voyage had, in many ways, been a long and successful one, so the hold—and hunter-barques were mostly hold—was getting less and less full of provisions and more and more full of barrels, each brimming over with precious spermaceti.
And under a captain with more of an eye on the voyage and less of an eye on her obsessive crusade of vengeance against the abstract concept of an indifferent cosmos, the remaining space would have been kept rigorously clear so that we could fill it with yet more spermaceti as we slew yet more monsters.
But we didn’t have a captain like that, we had our captain. And she wasn’t one for details. So when storage bay nineteen was rearranged into a gore-strewn temple to oblivion it went largely unremarked upon.
Well, unremarked upon by her.
“It’s bad enough that she’s brought a machine intelligence aboard,” Locke told Flint. The conversation took place in their office, where I’d been for … unrelated reasons. Unrelated reasons of fucking. “Now she’s letting a death cult set up shop in one of the storage bays.”
“Freedom of religion,” Flint insisted. “I’ll not be part of any action that tells people who they can and can’t pray to.”
Locke gave him a profoundly skeptical look. “Even if their prayer involves smearing the lower decks with waste organic matter?”
Flint eased his everyday-carry pistol from its holster and began turning it over idly in his hands. He did that a lot when he was nervous. Or bored. Or really just whenever. “The way I see it, ain’t none of our business.”
“The storage bay is ship’s property. As, come to that, is the waste matter.”
The Church of Liberty set great store by property rights.
But it was a toss-up who they’d assign those rights to.
“Come on, picking up waste’s a perk of the hunt.
Always has been.” To illustrate the point, he fished a little scrimshander token from his pocket and flicked it across the desk.
“They’ve got a use for the beast gut, let them keep it. ”
“And what if it contaminates the sperm? Bay nineteen isn’t empty.”
“You know as well as I do, them barrels is sealed so tight a wasp’s tarse couldn’t get in.”
“They can be opened,” warned Locke. “I’m not sure I trust Marsh around the cargo after his … experience.”
It didn’t take much to make Flint laugh, and this wasn’t much. “What do you think he’s going to do? Drink it?”
“You say that like it’s beyond the realm of possibility.”
Flint leaned forwards, laid his pistol on his lap, and latticed his fingers together. “You know, I’m beginning to think you just don’t like religious people.”
“The Church of Starry Wisdom isn’t like most religious people.”
To that, Flint responded with a dismissive shrug. “At least they believe in something.”
I wasn’t sure I cared for that as an answer. For a start, the something the Starry Wisdomers believed in was literally nothingness given form, and calling that something was at least half a paradox.
“They’re a destabilizing influence. And the Father knows we’ve enough of those on board already.”
Flint gave half a smile. “Careful, Locke. That’s dangerous talk.”
“The captain knows my feelings. Reminding the other officers that this obsession of hers is growing ever more troubling to the crew isn’t mutiny. It’s my job.”
“The crew will settle down with a few more kills. And if we bag the Mobius Beast, that’ll settle ’em down for good.”
“Settling us all down for good,” replied Locke gnomically, “is exactly what I’m concerned the Beast will do.”
Flint, with typical apathy, shrugged this off entirely.
And while Locke tried in vain to get any other officer to give a shit about the cult in the cargo bay, which (since the captain was locked in her cabin communing with an artificial mind, Flint was religiously mandated to give zero fucks about anything his church hadn’t randomly decided to have a strong opinion on, and Truelove was a fully paid-up apocalypse cultist) didn’t seem likely, I wandered down to bay nineteen to look for myself.
Q came with me, as she often did. Partly out of curiosity, I suspected, and partly for my safety. She had a comfortingly low opinion of my ability to defend myself.
The Temple of the Coming End was, in some ways, a marvelous sight.
Not marvelous in the sense of good, you understand, but marvelous in the sense of to be marveled at.
Marsh and his congregation had rearranged the barrels that, before they moved in, had filled about a quarter of the bay and built them into a reasonable facsimile of devotional architecture.
Two great columns of them stood for pillars, and row after row of them took the place of pews.
At the back of the chamber, a great stacked block of them, topped with Leviathan bone and strewn with skin and meat and gristle, played the part of the altar.
In a lot of ways, it reminded me of home.
From the ceiling, high above us, a whole Leviathan skull hung from thick cables.
I wasn’t quite sure how Marsh’s lot had gotten hold of it—it wasn’t worth much by itself but skulls usually got broken down for scrimshander plates—and could only imagine how long it must have taken to haul the thing up here, because there was no elevator that ran the full way.
“Et venerunt in locum qui dictur Golgotha,” whispered Q beside me, “quod est Calvariae locus.”
Something about the whole place felt wrong.
I mean, I say something. Something other than the bones and viscera all over the place.
Like there was a whispering at the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite block out.
Voiders sometimes said that the sperm sang to them when it was gathered in large quantities and I’ve never believed it, partly because I could never quite stop laughing long enough to work out if it might be true.
But here in Marsh’s shrine of guts, I could almost hear the song myself.
And I was keen to get out of there as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, Marsh and Truelove had other ideas.
“I didn’t think to find you here, sister,” said Truelove, who I could have sworn wasn’t behind me when I walked in but was now.
“A sister driven into desperate terms,” Marsh added, looking past me into the darkness.
“Just seeing what you were about,” I offered, but it sounded weak even to me.
Truelove looked down at me with a fearful benediction. “We would welcome you, if you chose to come to us. As we would welcome all, even the lowliest.”
“Lowliest?” I asked—he could have meant several things, none of them good.
“I have petitioned the captain to release the pirate and his followers,” Truelove clarified. Because of course he had. Because that was going to end so well. “Even now our people bring him to the chapel for his anointing.”
“Anointed,” Marsh echoed, “crowned, planted many years…”
And that, that was something I couldn’t not see.
So I waited in a converted storage bay full of rotting not-exactly-meat while a group of deckhands led a pirate to kneel before a man whose only qualification to lead was that he’d fallen into a bucket of alien brain goo that made him talk weird.
Honestly, it was no stranger than any other religious ceremony I’ve been to.
Wolfram swore on his life and his name and everything he held dear—which I privately suspected wasn’t very much—to keep a bunch of promises that he certainly didn’t intend to keep, and that his erstwhile crewmates would do the same.
Then he had his shirt manhandled off by two of Marsh’s acolytes, to be replaced with a Leviathan-skin robe (was it cock skin?
Maybe. Or maybe that was just a joke, you’ll need to join the hunt yourself to know for sure) and then to have his head marked with a thick slurry of the Leviathan’s intestinal juices.
Q watched the proceedings with polite confusion.
I wondered if she assumed all Exodites behaved like this.
I suppose in many ways she wouldn’t have been wrong.
Sometimes, when I watch a ceremony like the one that was then playing out in bay nineteen (okay not literally like that, but any ceremony from a faith I wasn’t raised in), I remind myself that as unusual as it appears to me it probably makes complete sense to the people inside it.
Except, honestly, that’s not been my experience.
I’m not saying my experience is universal, or even typical, but as alienating as other people’s customs have always felt, my own have felt worse.
And sure, these were recent converts, so probably they were at least somewhat convinced of the theology.
But I couldn’t imagine none of them had doubts.
That none of them felt even a twinge of the uncertainty I always had.
The hollow ache that says Why doesn’t this feel more right?
Then again, it was a nihilistic apocalypse cult. Maybe hollowness was the point. Maybe it was the appeal.
Maybe in another world I’d have joined them. Except I’d already picked my destroyer-god, and she was in her cabin poring over her charts.
The ceremony complete, the celebrants dispersed and Wolfram, to my mild surprise, allowed himself to be escorted back to his cell.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. He wasn’t planning to stay there long.