Chapter Seventy-Two. Four Funerals
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-TWO
Four Funerals
The statistician in me said the fact that the place the Mobius Beast was most likely to be found was also a place where Leviathans of a less mythic flavor gathered was not so very surprising. The Sunday-school kid in me said it was Providence. The atheist in me said it was luck.
The captain’s luck, specifically. Wolfram’s mutiny had stopped before it began but she was no fool.
The crew—most of the crew, the crew she hadn’t made beg and weep on the floor of her cabin—weren’t following her out of loyalty, or even in response to her personal gravity.
They were following her to get rich (or at least, less poor), and like so many other relationships, the one between the captain and her crew would go south very quickly once the sperm went dry.
So it was to her advantage that we slew four beasts within a day of crossing into the Heart proper.
The drills had helped. In the bloodred skies, the stakes were higher all around.
A boat was harder to control; the beasts that flew here were larger and deadlier and more bountiful than those that haunted calmer latitudes.
But it was worth it. At least if you cared about money.
And it is, the Church reminds us, blasphemous not to care about money.
Those early hunts went almost exactly as we’d trained, with the tiny exception that the captain insisted I travel in her boat for the last of them.
On the one hand, that was an honor. She seldom trusted anybody with the helm of her private vessel, and that she’d choose me said …
something, I think? What it said I wasn’t sure.
On the other hand, it did mean I was leaving Q and Locke in the lurch, but I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe I was the only good pilot on the ship, and while Q and I were arguably the best pilot-harpooner team, if I was honest with myself she held up more than her fair share of that partnership.
As it turned out, I didn’t have a great deal to do for most of the hunt.
Since the captain had patched her thinking machine through to her boat, it was able to handle most of the basics of flying for me, which made me feel a bit of a third wheel.
Especially since she also didn’t seem to have brought me along for conversation.
“How close?” she asked. Not to me.
“Reasonably,” replied the machine. “The Beast itself is larger, and it will move differently, but you’re unlikely to get better practice than this.”
“Bring me to its head.” She stared out the window, and I tried not to stare at her staring. Tried not to wonder what thoughts were going through that noble, horrific mind.
Pretending that I was guiding the boat when really it was all the intelligence, I brought us to the head of the beast, and then level with one of its eyes.
The other hunters had already stuck it with several harpoons by this stage and without network assistance I doubt I’d have been able to keep us so steady.
“I see you,” she whispered to the sky. And then she took up the harpoon and commanded, “Canopy.”
The machine obeyed her before I could, so there was nothing left for me except to watch as she sprang out of the boat and launched herself directly at the monster.
Speared and tethered, it was rolling in an effort to shake its tormentors, but that let the captain drop vertically down upon it and drive her lance deep into one of its eyes.
A combination of space constraints and my own ignorance (mostly the latter) have stopped me from including a detailed exploration of leviathanic ophthalmology in these pages.
Superficially, their eyes are very different from ours.
Insect-like, perhaps, or even wholly alien.
Rows upon rows of black spheroids that look with unknowable intelligence on the red storm.
But everything is the same when you cut it open.
I’m sure biologically the fluids that gushed out when the monster’s eye was pierced are extremely different from the aqueous and vitreous humors of a human eyeball, but right there and then, on scarlet winds in a sky crushed by gravity beyond anything primates were designed for, I didn’t really give a shit about the difference.
Basically, I defy any of you to watch any creature get stabbed in a sensitive organ and not at least wince a bit.
Especially when it’s on such a ludicrous scale.
As I—or rather the machine—guided us down to follow the falling monster, its aerosolized life-fluid rushed up to meet us in a cascade.
And the captain rushed up too, setting the line on her harpoon to recall and riding the weapon all the way back to the cockpit. The canopy closed neatly over her and then, to my surprise, she removed her helmet. To my still greater surprise, she reached down and removed mine.
In case I’ve not made it clear, removing your helmet in the boat is incredibly fucking dangerous.
Accidents happen all the damned time and having your suit sealed was very often the difference between a short period of recovery in medbay and an even shorter period of dying from simultaneous heat, cold, pressure, radiation, and windshear.
I considered saying something. But then she ran her gauntleted fingers across my lips and I tasted, for the first and, thankfully, last time in my life, the raw fluid of the Leviathan.
It’s a cop-out to say it was indescribable but, reader, do remember that I’m talking about a creature that lives on Jupiter, flies by an unknown mechanism through skies made of ammonia, eats creatures that shouldn’t exist, and powers the whole of civilization with its brain juice.
What would you expect something like that to taste like?
A little metallic maybe? But not in the way blood is metallic.
Fresh? Probably, but is “fresh” really a flavor?
It stung my tongue and made my lips burn, although looking back that might be because approximately three seconds after I first tasted that Luciferian humor, the captain kissed me.
A lot of weird things had happened since I signed up with the Pequod. This wasn’t the absolute weirdest, but it was probably top four.
Her gauntlets had come off now and she was nimbly undoing the seals on my atmosphere suit, which, if I’m being technical, probably wasn’t any more dangerous than taking the helmet off because if the canopy went down we’d be instantly killed either way.
But it felt more dangerous. I mean, maybe it’s just me, but as I general rule I think most things are more dangerous if you’re also fucking.
“Follow the beast,” the captain told her machine-servant-ally-patron. “I would watch it die.”
Of all the things you don’t want to hear someone say while they’re undressing you, I would watch it die is quite possibly the actual top of the list. And if you do hear it, you should try your absolute level best not to find it a turn-on.
I am bad at life.
But I’m really fucking good at death.
Outside the canopy, the great Leviathan twisted its final agonies while inside the captain’s mouth pressed hot and urgent against my skin.
“What gods did you pray to?” she whispered, not to me, while I clung to the pilot’s seat with ichor still on my lips and tried to only unravel in a way that wouldn’t get us both killed. “And when you saw us approach, did you cry to them for mercy?”
I cried for mercy. The captain, typically, had none.
“Did you wonder”—her tongue ran the length of my throat and then her teeth nipped at my jaw with borderline cruelty—“what it meant in the end? Had you lived, would you have sought me out and said, You blinded me and you will pay?” She placed a hand over my eyes and, liberated from reality, my imagination filled in visions of the dying beast all around us.
Its feeder tendrils reached up to caress us and its legs wrapped around us like an embrace.
Out in the storm, I thought I heard it screaming.
“And when my vengeance comes will it be to make an altar of the skies?”
I made an altar of myself, stretched out across the console with controls sticking in my back in ways that would in any normal circumstances have made it a really fucking hard to get off, but this was the captain, and when she was with me she was all my faith and all my hope.
“Will it be a last act of worship to the only god who has ever touched my soul, or will it taste”—she raked a single fingernail down my neck; her touch was the lightning and the storm—“of ashes and dust and base earth? Is this—”
And then, from some deep, passionate, extraordinarily misguided place in the pit of my physiology, I said, “Please.”
A spell broke.
“No pleading.” She was looking into my eyes now, intense and on fire and walking the garrote wire between sanity and the grave. “No prayers. No bargains. No gods. No masters, no payments, and no debts.”
And from the same wrong, wrong, wrong place, I said, “Stay.”
She recoiled from the word. Or from me. Probably a bit of both.
Never having known what was best for me, I went on. “I know I’m just … this is just…” Sitting up, I hugged my undershirt around me and turned my face from her. Outside, the Leviathan was twitching its last. And though a creature so vast and strange could never look remotely human, it felt personal.
“You know what I am,” the captain said. And she said it to me, not to fate, or the world, or the storm.
“I know who you are,” I corrected her. “I know you brought me here for a reason.”
Her gaze flickered between my body and the body of the beast. Between the marks of her mouth and the marks of her spear. “You distract me. There are times I favor distraction.”
Once again, I was reminded of how fucking dead I’d be if something went wrong with the boat while I was half naked and three-quarters fucked. I began—only slightly regretfully—struggling back into my atmosphere suit. “And in the moment?”
“What moment?”
I was officially over it. “The moment we find the Beast. Will I distract you then?”
For a horrible, tantalizing, tempting third of a second, it almost seemed like I was getting through to her. “I will finish what I began.”
It would have been churlish to point out that she often didn’t. That I was quite regularly left to finish myself because she was off on some tear about flight paths and brit-clouds and storm-currents. So instead, I went, if anything, one step more churlish and said: “Why?”
“Don’t be a child.”
“I’m sitting half naked in a ship full of monster blood asking why you’d rather risk your life than fuck me. If that’s what a child sounds like to you, you shouldn’t be around children.”
“I have come too far to turn aside.”
I wanted to call bullshit.
Etymological note: I don’t really know what bullshit is or why its meaning is distinct from regular shit. My theology tells me that both bull and bullock are beasts of Old Earth but not what they are or whether they ’re different from each other.
“Look me in the eye,” the captain went on, “and tell me that you would want me were I a different kind of woman. If I had two legs and no purpose, rather than one of each.”
I wanted to call bullshit again. Except I couldn’t because she was right.
The part of me that pretended to be a sensible, functional human being with a reasonable life expectancy desperately wanted to say that I’d have still desired her even if she were an accountant working in the head office of a subsidiary branch of Occator Financial Services.
That I’d still want her even if she wore cardigans and had the median number of flesh-and-blood limbs and never did anything that might get anybody killed. Even if she were ordinary.
But that part of me was shit out of luck.
The truth was that I wanted her because she didn’t want me.
Worse, I wanted her because she wanted something so vast and inexplicable that just being close to it made me feel the uneasy peace of my own irrelevance.
And I craved that like I craved a hundred other things I didn’t dare name.
Once it had become abundantly, overwhelmingly clear that I had no answer, she gave me a slate-cold smile and nodded. “We return to the Pequod.”