Chapter Seventy-Four. Tempests in Tempests in Tempests
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-FOUR
Tempests in Tempests in Tempests
Remember how I talked about the last storm and said that obviously there’d be other storms coming, but they’re so big and all-consuming that calling them storms is meaningless?
But now that I’ve reached that part of the journey—the part where storm becomes too small a word—I realize that it’s a whole different order of problem.
It’s a deep-down problem with words. With the whole idea of words.
The overwhelming majority of human beings have never lived in an atmosphere. Even we hunters haven’t really, because the murderous skies of Jove are kept from us by suits or domes or canopies for, if we’re lucky, fully 100 percent of our voyages.
If that percentage ever drops, it means we’re dead.
But although the overwhelming majority of human beings have never lived in an atmosphere, our language, coming as it does from the dark days of Old Earth, contains the ghosts of a time when we did.
Which means I can talk about wind and storms and clouds and you will on some level at least understand what I’m saying. Or at least, you will understand something. The words will have meaning to you even if that meaning is filtered through layer upon layer of translation and metaphor.
You may have told your doctor that your urine is cloudy.
You may have described a concatenation of trying circumstances as a shitstorm.
You might have heard about winds of change and perhaps even associated them with the air currents that circulate oxygen in whatever dome you happen to live in.
Even though when you really think about it, those are winds of stasis.
Q, of course, has different words for these things.
Nebula. Tempestas. Ventus. But as I’ve come to know her better I’ve realized that translating these words is a kind of false commonality.
When Q speaks of clouds she means things made of water vapor high in an uncovered sky.
Things that drop liquid water rain at unscheduled intervals.
Her storms similarly are more physical but less existential than the ones you might experience in any normal circumstance, and the wind that blows on her in her own home is breathable air.
Air made from 80 percent nitrogen and 18 percent oxygen and 2 percent everything else instead of the low-explosive tri-mix we use day to day.
I know, the idea of just trusting the composition of your atmosphere to luck is strange. Terrans are strange people.
So when I talk about storms in this chapter, well …
obviously, it’s partly a metaphor. You’ve worked out that a lot of this stuff is metaphor, right?
And some of it is jokes. And some of it is just whatever was on my mind at the time.
The neuropsychological division of Psyche Microphysiology, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ausonia Biotechnological Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State, once offered me a free trial of a counseling device which told me my issues with concentration and intrusive thoughts are probably symptomatic of a disorder they could help me manage for a reasonable subscription. I never quite got around to signing up.
Where was I?
Ah, yes. When I talk about storms, I’m using words I stole from our ancestors to describe ideas our ancestors could never comprehend to a reader who—never having lived either on ancient Earth nor modern Jove—can never truly understand either.
Writers are liars and all I’m really doing in this book is trying to fool you.
Trying to make you believe that by reading these words you can feel what I felt and see what I saw and know the people I knew.
You can’t. But I want so badly for you to believe you can.
When I am dead I want you to take these words and read them and say, This woman was real and she mattered, like all the souls she sailed with.
I want you to take these words and read them and imagine that you see your own life reflected in a life you could never have lived.
I want you to take these words and read them and, who knows, perhaps you’ll feel the need to tell your own story to the ones who come after you.
One about a voyage you took a year, or a hundred years, or a thousand years after I am gone.
After I have passed into that shared imagination we pretend is memory.
I hope you will be less afraid than I am.
As we plunged deeper into the Heart, we began moving away from the rich hunting grounds and into the places where even Leviathans feared to fly.
The clouds now were thick and red and opaque, like the cosmos was bleeding into our eyes.
Even our instruments began to fail us, because the air currents created massive friction-induced buildups of static which discharged themselves at random intervals and created the ghosts of spouts on all sides of the vessel.
Most of the crew took to avoiding hull work, busying ourselves with tasks that took us deep inside the ship, into the illusionary safety of our gargantuan steel coffin.
And there we huddled under red emergency lighting, on a ship flying half blind to battle with a monster whose nature we were finding it harder and harder to lie to ourselves about.
On the plus side, the increased sense of doom and foreboding made casual sex way easier to get. It’s incredible how horny people get when they feel like they’re being slowly choked out as a prelude to being sliced open.
Even Locke, normally so proper, or at least so committed to the image of properness, even while they were on top of me, was getting more up for the spicier kind of assignation. In crawl spaces. Up against bulkheads. Two feet from a weapons locker. That kind of thing.
“This,” they said while I re-dressed and went back to pretending to do maintenance, “has gotten very out of my control.”
“My advice,” I told them, “is learn to enjoy it.”
Their eyes narrowed. “Not that this. The whole this. The voyage.”
I shrugged. “Our holds are near full. Give the captain her due, she’s an old hand at the hunt and your precious Olympus Extraction State will make a killing out of this trip, and all it’s cost us so far is a couple of deaths and one man’s sanity.”
“So far.” Locke did that thing where you echo somebody as a way of expressing Everything you just said is meaningless because of the one bit of it I’ve just repeated.
Then, rather than primly going back to their many duties like they usually would after giving me a seeing-to, they slumped against the steel wall of maintenance corridor 147-c-(ii)-delta and slid slowly down to the floor, where they sat in a pleasingly disheveled heap. “She never used to be like this.”
It wasn’t the first time they’d told me that. At the time I also assumed it wouldn’t be the last, although I was wrong on that score for catastrophic reasons. “She lost a limb. I see why that would change a person.”
“Honestly”—Locke was staring into the middle distance in a way I sincerely hoped didn’t mean they were coming totally unglued—“I don’t think it was that.”
“No?”
“Losing a limb is a sudden change. With A”—nobody called the captain by her name except Locke.
Well, Locke and me, privately, in my head—“it was more like … like metal fatigue. You use a piece of machinery day in, day out for years or decades and eventually it snaps, but you can’t just blame the last stress cycle.
People talk about the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but that one straw is no different from all the others.
I assume. I suppose it depends what the straws are made of. ”
“And what a camel is,” I added.
“That too. But the point is I’ve known her for years and losing her leg wasn’t a turning point, it was just … just the last shitty thing in a long string of shitty things. This is a shitty industry, after all.”
I’d been banging Locke on and off for months now, and this was the first time they’d admitted anything like this. “Isn’t that heresy?”
They shrugged. “You’re the seminary girl.
Where I’m from we treat religion more practically.
The big churches are all the same; the little ones are all weird as fuck.
” It was odd to hear Locke say weird as fuck, but they’d loosened up in a lot of ways lately.
“Keeping in good with the Father isn’t going to save us and, no matter what the Plutonians say, it isn’t going to put food on the table either. At least it hasn’t for anybody I know.”
It hadn’t for anybody I knew either. But when I’d pointed that out to people back home they’d gotten really angry at me for it.
“I do my job,” Locke went on, “and I do it right and I do it well. When I do it really well nobody gets killed and we all come out just a little bit better off than we were before. When I do it badly…” They shrugged and spread their hands in a gesture that eloquently expressed the sentence You get shitshows like this.
For a moment we lapsed into silence. Except there was never silence on a ship, and now with the perpetual outrage of the wind outside, our every moment of quiet was underscored by the thrumming of the engines in dialogue with the shrieking of the skies.
“I trust her,” I said. And it was true even though it shouldn’t have been.
“Then I envy you.”
“I trust you too.”
That got a gallows laugh. “One day, I—” Locke was also the only person that really said my name on the ship, and that made me feel a bunch of strange things, not all of them comfortable.
“You’ll have to actually commit to something.
You can’t trust the woman who might be sailing us all to our deaths and also trust the person who says she definitely is. ”
In a futile effort to lighten the mood, I smiled and said, “Seminary girl, remember? Accepting contradictory beliefs is my whole thing.”
“Go on then. Unpack the theodicy. How do you trust both of us?”
Having to justify myself sucked. There’s a reason I’ve chosen to tell this story in a way that means you absolutely can’t talk back to me. “I trust that she’ll do the right thing,” I said. “And I trust that you’ll stop her if she doesn’t.”
I couldn’t help noticing Locke’s eyes straying to the weapons locker. “Do you now?”
Fuck it. I got up, punched my code into the locker, pulled out a heavy, snub-nosed flechette pistol, and threw it to them. “Yes. I do.”
“I think you’re getting me mixed up with Flint. He’s the one who thinks shooting bad people solves everything.”
Honestly I didn’t think Flint’s philosophy had even that much nuance to it. “He’s not wrong, though.”
“You don’t think one mutiny per voyage is enough?”
“I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it’s not mutiny when you’re first mate. It’s just necessary checks and balances.”
Locke didn’t argue. And they also didn’t give the gun back. Instead they secreted it—more expertly than I’d have expected for a bean pusher and a pen counter—inside the line of their once-more-immaculate uniform. They nodded an acknowledgment that was something like gratitude.
For a moment, we understood each other. Or I thought we did. For a moment, things were calm.
That much remains true about storms, of any kind, whatever world they happen on.