Chapter Sixty-Six. The Chief Engineer
CHAPTER
SIXTY-SIX
The Chief Engineer
The Pequod had over a hundred crew. And if I’m honest with myself, although I like to pretend, sometimes, that I remember each one of their faces, their voices, the touch of the ones who touched me, most of them blur together.
Even the officers I tend to get mixed up in retrospect, because there are a lot of officers on a ship.
After all, an officer is just somebody who fills an office and an office is just something that needs doing.
And so many, many things need doing when you’re deep in unforgiving skies, trying to kill gods.
You might notice, for example, that I’ve barely described the ship’s doctor.
I was never ill on the voyage and while I spoke to her semiregularly because my reconfigurative implants needed some maintenance, we had a distant relationship and I never paid her much mind outside of official interactions.
I thought of her most when Q lay dying and then it was definitely Q I was thinking about, not the doctor, although honestly at the time I tried not to think about either of them.
Have I mentioned lately how selfish and cowardly I am?
I think the other reason I don’t remember the doctor is that I never really made much of an effort to fuck her. I’m just not much into redheads.
The chief engineer, however, was a different matter.
Not that I tried to fuck him either, because he also wasn’t my type.
I’m a bit concerned at this late stage that I might have given the impression that I slept with the entire crew of the ship, and I really didn’t.
Low double digits at best, and most of that was hand stuff.
But while I wasn’t interested in him sexually, the chief engineer did at least stand out to me, partly because towards the end of the voyage (the actual end, not the scheduled end—the scheduled end, after all, included a return trip) the captain sent me to make a request of him.
He also stood out because like the captain, like Dawlish, and like me, his body had been rebuilt by the good people of Aphrodite Pharma State.
Or at least by somebody who bought their supplies under license from somebody who bought their supplies under license from Aphrodite Pharma State.
There are no truly independent biosculptors anymore.
The violent redistribution of a person’s bodily tissues was an occupational hazard of the hunt, and after a long career, Lobscouse—that was his name, or possibly his nickname, I’ve never quite worked it out—had been more redistributed than most. Over a series of unlucky voyages (or lucky voyages, depending on whether you measure luck in flesh lost or wealth gained) the skies had taken both his eyes, both his hands, his lower jaw, and several of his internal organs.
What I found even more interesting was the choices he had made regarding his reconstruction.
The captain’s leg, although clearly prosthetic, was primarily designed as a leg.
Dawlish’s various parts, cheap and prison-issue as they were, were primarily intended as one-for-one replacements.
The parts of my body that I’d had altered, I’d had altered almost entirely because of form rather than function.
Lobscouse had taken a different approach.
When he’d lost his hands, he’d had them replaced with a writhing mass of independently articulated tendrils, each capable of manipulating tiny objects with incredible precision.
When he’d lost his guts, he’d had them replaced with a more efficient system of chemical processors which, since they occupied less space and he didn’t seem especially interested in aesthetics—or perhaps I should say he had his own aesthetic—left him with a torso that narrowed sharply below the rib cage and proceeded cylindrically downwards before flaring out again at the hips, like he was wearing a bizarre tight-laced corset.
When he’d lost his eyes, he’d swapped them out for a photosensitive implant with broad-spectrum analytical capabilities that covered much of his brow and made him look a little like a spider, and a little—especially with his tendril hands—like a Leviathan.
I did once ask him, carefully and giving him every opportunity to tell me to shut up and fuck off, why he’d made those particular choices.
“When man tried to simulate walking,” he’d told me, “he invented the wheel. But a wheel looks nothing like a pair of legs.”
I’d simultaneously known exactly what he meant and had no idea what he was going on about.
What matters now, though, isn’t what he looked like, it’s what he did.
Actually, even that doesn’t matter. What matters is what the captain asked him to do and what it meant to her that she asked him to do it.
Actually, what probably really mattered, what probably mattered to him, is that not long after the events I’m about relate he would die in horrific agony along with almost the entire crew of the Pequod.
And I’m probably doing him, his family, and his memory a disservice by trying to make the whole fucking thing into some kind of metaphor.
But screw it. He’s dead and I’m alive and I’ve started now so I’ll damned well finish. I’m telling this story, and that makes it mine, even though it was other people’s blood that was spilled to make it.
Anyway.
Shortly after we met with the Bachelor—or was it before?—the captain dispatched me from her bed to the engineering bay with a request.
“She wants a harpoon,” I explained to Lobscouse.
“She has a harpoon,” he replied. His voice came from an obsidian-black synthesizer that occupied the bottom half of his face. It sounded almost unnaturally harmonious. “The whole damned ship is full of harpoons. It’s a hunter-barque.”
“She wants a special harpoon.”
Not having eyes, Lobscouse couldn’t roll them, but he achieved much the same effect with his chest and shoulders.
“She asks,” I went on, “that it have a Leviathan-bone haft cored with a high-susceptibility alloy, that the tip have a monomolecular edge and a toggled head in the Temple style. She said you’d know what that meant.”
Lobscouse nodded. “I do. And they’re good specifications. Though it’ll be hard to justify the expense for one lance.”
“She says the expense is no object.”
There was so little flesh on Lobscouse’s face that it should have been hard to read his expression. It wasn’t. “Covering it herself, is she?”
I nodded.
“Call me an old cynic—”
“You’re an old cynic,” I replied automatically.
“—but I seem to recall that the captain has pledged her whole lay to whoever first sights the great Beast. So by paying for this lance from her own cut all she’s really doing is cheating some poor hand out of their promised reward.”
He was right. He was 100 percent right. I felt a keen need to defend the captain anyway. “Her lay is hers to do with as she pleases. Besides, if she’d made this purchase first and pledged the reward afterwards, the result would be the same and nobody would have had a problem with it.”
The myriad photocells that were Lobscouse’s eyes sparkled. “As an engineer, my girl, I can tell you that order matters. Very few things are commutative outside of pure mathematics.”
“And here I was thinking I was the only faux intellectual on the ship.”
Lobscouse laughed. And through his voice synthesizer it was a remarkable sound, largely unrelated to the actual air coming from his lungs.
It was musical without being music. “No, no, child, you’re in good company where that’s concerned.
Half the crew are philosophers in their off-hours, of one sort or another.
Though mostly it’s another, I’ll grant that much. ”
“But you can make it?” I asked. “The harpoon, as the captain wants it?”
“I can,” he replied. “I’d sooner not, but if she’s giving the order and paying the price then I’ve no choice in the matter.”
Duty—not even duty, really, just the ferromagnetic pull of the captain’s will—said I should leave it there, go back to her, and report success. Even if that success was grudging. But Lobscouse had baited me and like the ice fish of Europa, I bit. “Why would you sooner not?”
“Engine pins.”
I looked blank.
“It’s an old tale from Old Earth, and one I’m surprised you’ve not heard as a Prosperer.
Long ago, there was a man in the old world who made groundcars—or just cars as they would have been called in those days—and one day he commissioned his best engineers to look at every car that went wrong and find out why it went wrong and what part of it had caused the problem. And you know what he found?”
I hated parables. “What?”
“That damned near every part of the car would fail in one way or another, except the engine pins. They’d last and last and last. So you know what he did?”
I did know. Or at least I could guess. Lobscouse had been right, this was exactly the kind of story the Church of Prosperity loved. “He told them to make the engine pins more cheaply.”
“Seems backward,” he said. “And probably not the most pro-consumer move he could have made.”
In the Church, pro-consumer was perilously close to blasphemy, so it took me a moment to process the sentence.
“But there was a kind of wisdom in it. No sense wasting resources making something wonderful when everything else will fail first. Tell the captain that I can make her the finest harpoon was ever darted. But if you’re feeling brave and honest”—I was feeling neither and I was sure he knew it—“tell her that it won’t make a damned bit of difference because there’s a hundred ways a hunt can go wrong and a fancy spear fixes at best one of them. ”
I explained to him how short I was coming up in the bravery and honesty departments.
“You’ll also need to tell her there’s paperwork involved.”
“She’s the captain.”
An unreadable pattern of lights danced across the chief engineer’s eyepiece. “Means less than you’d think. Captain’s a little god until we hit port. Then she’s just another voider and answerable to the stakeholders same as anybody else.”
I relayed this information to the captain when I saw her next. It didn’t go well.
Without telling me to remove a single item of clothing or to kneel anywhere she swept past me on her way to engineering. I trailed behind her, limply protesting that this could all be sorted out if she’d just sign the proper forms.
She wasn’t much of a one for signing forms, A wasn’t.
Down in the engineering bay, Lobscouse was waist-deep in a maintenance hatch fixing one of the perennial things-that-needed-fixing.
“Engineer.” The captain rarely sounded amused, but this time she sounded like she lived in a world where amusement had never existed.
“Captain?” He didn’t look up. Then again, given how his ocular system worked I wasn’t sure he needed to.
“You are to make me a harpoon, according to the specifications I conveyed.”
He still wasn’t looking up, which was beginning to seem less like a quirk of his physiology and more like intentional defiance. “Will do, once the paperwork clears.”
“There will be no paperwork. You will do as I command.”
“Not with ship’s resources I won’t.” And now, at last, the engineer hauled himself out of the hatch, his tendrilous hands latching on to the floor in two dozen places and supporting him as he rose. “Not unless you authorize the payment through the proper channels.”
The proper channels meant Locke, who was pretty much the only person on the ship with a head for figures.
“You understand,” said the captain, “why I need the spear.”
“You’re hunting a monster that’s never been caught and that has killed more folk than I can count—and remember, I’m an engineer so you’d better hope I count well—and who took your leg off you the last time you lowered for him.
You want to chase death, be my guest, but you’ll not do it with ship’s metal unless you pay for it. In full. In advance.”
All this talk of payment was comforting to the part of me that still rested safe in the bosom of the Church of Prosperity. But it was deeply unsettling to the much larger part that was the captain’s creature.
She was looking at the engineer now with the disbelief she always reserved for people who refused to be swept into her wake. “The sky took from you, as it took from me. Why do you remain so sanguine? You should want to see blood spilled in the clouds as much as I.”
The lights on Lobscouse’s eyepiece flicked out, then on. “Why? Because I lost some parts? I got them back again and still made a decent living after deductibles.” He flexed his tendrils. “It’s an improvement in a lot of ways.”
Now the captain’s expression was going from disbelief to contempt. “You made yourself a better tool for your masters and paid for the privilege. Live that way if you will, engineer, but I will not. Make the lance.”
Without giving him time to reply, she turned and swept out. I tried not to find it majestic, but I didn’t try very hard.