Chapter Sixty-Three. The Lock
CHAPTER
SIXTY-THREE
The Lock
The word Leviathan appears in five different parts of the catechism, and there were at least five different shadows hanging over the Pequod as we flew inexorably towards Hell’s Heart.
Some of these were obvious: the worsening weather, the risk of mutiny, the fact that we were hunting a monster who might not exist and if he did exist had definitely killed a whole mess of people.
The tiny matter of the captain being, in many people’s assessment, out of her goddamned mind. Little things like that.
But the shadow I’ve not mentioned much, not since it was first set up, was the shadow of the lock.
You might remember, before all the philosophizing and fucking and monster-slaying, that when the captain first revealed herself and her plan to the crew, she pledged her entire share of the ship’s take to the first person who called out for the great Beast. And a captain’s share was substantial, especially in a voyage as prosperous as ours was turning out to be.
Even my exceedingly long lay was shaping up to be enough to keep Aphrodite off my back for a good few years.
Ever since that day, it had sat there, the crypto-lock glowing its faint golden light, even after nightfall.
And every so often (we are back, reader, in that nonchronological never-place where events are organized by theme and not by what strictly happened when) one or other of the crew would walk up to the lock and stare at it.
It’d be strange, wouldn’t it, if when they stared they spoke their thoughts aloud.
Even stranger if I managed to overhear each and every one.
And remembered them well enough to write them down years later in my memoir-manifesto-memorial.
“There you stand,” said the captain, examining her handiwork.
“A ring of gold that is formed of light and greed and mathematics. There is meaning in that, perhaps, if there is meaning in anything. For what is realer than wealth and what is wealth but numbers agreed upon? And the mathematicians tell us that it is only their laws that truly exist.”
Her voice was discordant music to me. I knelt in her cabin and felt her hand cold on my throat, her lips warm on my shoulders, where her scrimshawed canes had stung me.
“That,” said Flint later—or earlier—or both—“is a whole lot of fucking money. Of course, I’ll make my own pile from this trip well enough, so it’s not as though I’ll need it.
Then again, who needs money? As long as you’ve your wits and your strength and a gun or two, nothing can touch you and you’ll want for nothing neither. ”
In case you were thinking there’d be a pattern here, I never fucked Flint.
I’m sure he’d be fine, but I only went for officers if they were actually my type, or if I was very drunk, or if I thought it was expected of me.
And Flint did an amazing job of wanting nothing from anybody.
It was the one quality I admired in the man.
Wolfram, of course, did not take his turn standing before the array and staring at the lock until far, far later in the voyage.
Only once Marsh had arranged his release and that of his followers.
Only once he’d set his own plans into motion was he free to stand and stare and muse as so many others had done.
“A lock is it?” he began. “I’ll give the captain this, if she’s mad then she’s fox-mad and no mistake.
The difference between me and the rest of the crew is I admit that greed is all as drives me, while they play coy about it.
And the captain, well, she knows that well enough.
If the crew joins with me and takes the ship, they’ll each of them make far more than they’ve been promised if they stay loyal.
But this”—the lock swirled bright in front of his eyes—“this is more than any fair share, more even than the captain’s share on a freebooter’s vessel.
” He fell silent, considering. “Oh yes, this is a lock all right. And the captain has locked me away from my strongest weapon, for she’s played on the crew’s greed far stronger than I’m able. ”
As the row of watchers passed, the ship sailed on through deepening storms. The clouds were white here, blinding white and opaque about the hull so that we flew by instruments alone, and sometimes saw strange visions and faces beyond the observation dome.
In the mess one evening, Dawlish brought the lock up on a handheld terminal and stared at it. “What do you think?” he asked me.
“What do I think?” I echoed. It wasn’t meant to work this way. “What is there to think?”
“It’s more money than you’d make in six voyages,” Dawlish pointed out. “You must have thought what you’d do with it.”
Across the table, the Tall Ganymedian smiled. “What would be the point? The money goes to the one who raises the great Beast, and she’s not raised a single spout yet. She uses her time on the array to nap.”
Just for completeness, I didn’t fuck Dawlish. Or the Tall Ganymedian. I’m usually a sucker for a tall Ganymedian but can only really put up with them in small doses.
“If I raised the monster,” the Tall Ganymedian went on, “well, I’d probably go home, blow half of it on the longest bath I’ve ever had, and then treat myself to some new gloves.”
It was a materialistic response. But without wishing to overly stereotype, the Ganymedians were a materialistic people. Then again, the Church teaches that materialism is the same as godliness, so in a way it’s not even an insult.
Dawlish was giving me a challenging look. “We still haven’t had your answer.”
I’d have thrown the comment straight back at him, but I knew by this point that he was working an indentured sentence, so any bounty he earned would just go straight to his creditor-jailers. “Nothing special,” I said. “I’d pay down debt. Maybe invest a little if I had any left over.”
The Old Ionian laughed (I never fucked him either, in case you were wondering).
“Young folk today, I swear, none of you know how to dream. Odds are the money will never be yours. Even if you spot the Beast the captain’s not bound to keep her word.
And if the money will never be yours anyway, why are you all being so sensible with it? ”
“If it will never be ours, why does it matter if we’re sensible or not?” countered the Tall Ganymedian.
And that made the Old Ionian roll his eyes and sigh the way only the old can sigh at the young. “Because it means you’ve forgotten what hope feels like.”
“Now, now.” Dawlish smiled cynically at him. “You can’t forget something you’ve never had.”
“If I had that money,” the Old Ionian went on, largely ignoring Dawlish, “I’d buy a castle in the clouds.”
“You mean a hab-platform in the upper atmosphere of Saturn?” I replied.
The Old Ionian’s eyes twinkled, and thinking back on that makes me almost regret never fucking him. “Ah, but to me it would be a castle in the clouds. And that’s what matters.”
Elsewhere and elsewhen, Locke stared at the spiraling icon on the array.
“On the one hand, it’s a bribe. And that’s good—bribable people are rational people and rational people won’t willingly sail on a doomed ship.
” Then they stopped and looked again. “On the other hand, it’s a symbol.
And that’s far worse. People have been throwing their lives away for symbols for centuries.
Millennia. Even in the dark days of Old Earth.
So perhaps the money was just the bait, a way for the captain to sink her hooks into the crew’s souls.
Or perhaps it was a shiny trinket, a distraction like the rattling of keys to keep their minds off her true purpose.
If so, she has competition now, for the star cult is growing stronger by the day.
And to my shame I do not know which is the greater threat to this vessel. ”
We had similar conversations between ourselves, on the rare nights Locke was tired or frustrated enough to take me to bed.
Part of the reason I spent less time aboard the Pequod trying to get into Locke’s pants than, say, the captain’s is that they had this infuriating habit of wanting me to talk to them.
Which was basically the opposite of what I wanted in a sexual partner.
“I trust her,” I remember saying, when Locke point-blank refused to let me go down on them until I’d given an opinion. “She’s intense and she’s driven and she’s carrying a fuck ton of hurt but she knows what she’s doing.”
Locke had reflected on this at frankly annoying length. “She did, certainly. And she always had a tremendous will. But I worry that her will has come into conflict with her good sense, and that is a fight her good sense cannot win.”
At the array, with rheumy, unblinking eyes, Marsh looked at the captain’s mark. “Money is a good soldier,” he whispered, “and if money were as certain as your waiting, ’twere sure enough. But no, the dreadful trumpet sounds the general doom and we unburthen’d crawl towards death.”
It should go without saying, but I never fucked Marsh, before his incident or after.
Last of all, after I had built her coffin, and she’d rebuilt it to be more to her liking, and after that whole weird affair had been mostly forgotten, Q stood before the array and raised her little black-glass idol to the lock.
What she said I did not hear.
And I will not put words in her mouth.