Chapter Sixty-Two. A Comparative Theology of Leviathanism
CHAPTER
SIXTY-TWO
A Comparative Theology of Leviathanism
I know, I know, it’s chapter sixty-two and things are just getting good and here she is on another tangent.
If it helps, imagine me narrating this bit while I get railed hard from behind by a drunk space pirate.
So far I’ve mostly restricted these long, unfashionable expository segments to explaining the mechanics of the hunt; you’ve probably never seen a Leviathan yourself, you’ve almost certainly never hunted one, any images you may have seen will have been generated by neural networks trained on badly flawed datasets and even if that weren’t the case you’d still not understand the beasts the way those of us who’ve fought them do.
So I’ve tried in my flawed, erratic, occasionally hyperfixated way to give you some sliver of a part of a fraction of what it’s like to be where I’ve been and to do what I’ve done. What so many people I knew died doing.
But from here on out, we also need to talk about the religious side. Because it’s going to matter.
Marsh and his crowd of the desperate and forgotten aren’t the first to feel a near spiritual awe at the sight of the Leviathan.
Hell, people have been worshiping creatures like this since before they even knew they existed.
Our records of Old Earth are patchy (much was lost in the wars before the Exodus, and much more was purged as heresy or discarded as an inefficient use of resources, which, in my own faith, is the far greater sin) but remnants remain, and echoes.
I’ve seen references to Dagon and to Hydra, to the Kraken—the beast which gave the modern, Jovian creatures their common name—and to Leviathan itself.
The name Leviathan features in the catechism, along with whale, which is a less figurative term and refers to an Earth beast long since extinct.
We know nothing about the whale now, except that it must have been physiologically capable of swallowing a man and his raft, and its digestive processes must have been slow in the extreme.
At my university, I studied a speculative anatomical diagram of the beast and I still remember every detail.
The wide mouth, the cavernous throat, the many-chambered stomach which bloomed with oxygen-generating gut flora.
(How else could Jonah have breathed for so long?) The male, it was said, had a long, barbed tail that it would use to fight for mates while the female—perhaps a third of its size—had a great pouch on its back for carrying its young.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how much we can learn about such a long-vanished creature using only modern science, revealed truth, and logic.
Within the Church of Prosperity, the extinction of the whales of Old Earth is considered an object lesson in stewardship.
The whale, so I was taught as a child and so I argued again in one of my better-received second-year essays, was granted to Man alongside all the rest of the bounty of land and sea, to husband wisely and in accordance with the catechism.
But some time in the Dark Days, foolish people rebelled against this sacred charge and campaigned to stop the whale from being hunted.
This, the Father took as a great insult and He decreed that since humanity no longer wished to take the bounty of the whale that had been granted unto us, He took it back.
And so the whale is no more. Not even Q has ever seen one, for they ceased to be a thousand years before she was born.
While whale is the more common term in the language of Old Earth, the hunter-fleet, those parts of it that follow the Three Churches at least, take great pride in the fact that the Leviathan is also most definitely called out by name.
All three faiths agree that it’s mentioned no less than five times, although, in a strange quirk of theological dynamics, nobody is quite sure what the fifth is.
Many a hunter-barque has inscribed, somewhere about it, the words of the seventy-fourth psalm: “You it was who cracked the skull of the Leviathan and spread its blood like rains upon the desert.” And many is the preacher who has highlighted the prophetic power of this passage, which, though it was written long before the hunt rose as an industry, contains clear references to the life-giving properties of spermaceti and its vital role in sustaining our colonies in the uninhabitable parts of the cosmos.
So you see, it isn’t a surprise that Leviathans figure so deeply in Marsh’s weird little death cult. They’re a powerful, mysterious species. In the great hierarchy of living creatures they are, in a very literal sense, god-tier.
There. The expository aside is over. If you were imagining the pornographic version, assume that whoever was doing me has pulled out a fraction early and sprayed hot jism over my back, and that I have crept back to my bunk hollow and ashamed.