Chapter Two. The Coffin Inn
CHAPTER
TWO
The Coffin Inn
It was late by local time when I spilled out onto the streets of Cthonius Linea, so I wandered the docklands looking for somewhere to stay.
In some ways, I wasn’t choosy. Cold, tired, and hungry, I would have taken a blanket in the exhaust port of an ore frigate if the price had been right.
And even the blanket would have been optional.
The price, though, wouldn’t. Prices never are.
That was part of the reason I passed by the Harpoon.
Its intentionally suggestive sign—a supple youth picked out in pink-and-purple neon riding a long, lusty shaft into the night—didn’t especially bother me.
I’ve stayed in similar places before and sometimes the blaring music and the promise of getting railed hard for a small extra fee is exactly what I need.
But the fact that every part of the sign was still lit, that the people inside seemed happy and free and well-sheltered, suggested that it’d be more than I could afford.
Hell, the fact that it had a roof suggested it’d be more than I could afford.
I skipped the Swordfish for similar reasons; the atmosphere was less orgiastic and more refined, but I was still wearing my worn environment suit and had exactly one change of clothes with me. Refinement was not something I was able to offer.
The trick would be to move down. Not physically down, Europa is famously the smoothest body in the system, so there isn’t really an up or down except where miners or fishers have cut into its ball-bearing surface.
I needed to move socially down. To where the buildings were as old as the colony and the walls had been peeled back to the original titanium then repainted with whatever pigments a desperate local could forage or fabricate.
To the kind of place where they don’t tell you what organism your meat is coming from and you know you’re better off not asking.
My feet worked on their own, taking me to the parts of the city that people with choices avoided.
They didn’t always work the way I wanted, mind you.
Years in the Catechism of Prosperity meant they kept trying to guide me into churches, and on that day at least I wasn’t in the mood for religion.
Eventually, though, they brought me somewhere more promising.
It was called the Coffin Inn and I hoped that it might be exactly that—a place that would rent me a six-foot-by-two-foot shelf for the night, just stable enough to sleep lying down and just warm enough that I’d wake up with most of my fingers.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that. It was something older and homier which, if I’d been in a better mood, I might almost have called “quaint.” I made my way inside and found myself in a common room of the old kind, paneled in sheet metal and scattered with human flotsam.
A screen on one wall flicked between pictures slightly too fast to make out any one individually.
Between them, they made an impression that was almost hypnotic—an advertisement for a soda whose name I kept failing to read would flick into a digital portrait of a star-cutter in flight, then one of the old solar ships, then a fog-shrouded beast of unguessable proportions, then another advertisement, this time for a sleek H2-burning groundcar that no customer of the Coffin could possibly afford.
I once asked a man I half knew why they did that, why the trade-states tried to sell things to people who would never be able to buy them.
“Aspiration” had been his only answer. And although I hadn’t liked to admit it, I’d known what he meant. The trade-states didn’t sell products, not really. They sold dreams. They sold hope. And at such reasonable prices.
Tearing my eyes away from the ever-cycling screen, I buttonholed the landlord.
“No room,” he told me at once. “’Less you’re inclined to share.”
Inclined was a strong word. But I was out of options and he knew it. “Depends who with.”
He looked at me in a scrutinizing way that I saw a lot and imagined more. “There’s a lady has half a bed spare. Harpooner, mind.”
That was actually forty times better than I’d expected. In my experience if you’re inclined to share means something on the spectrum from “you can sleep in the pit with my guard-crabs” to “I will definitely be wanting to fuck you.”
“You setting out into the storms?” the proprietor continued conversationally.
I nodded.
“Then you’ll need to get used to close quarters. Not a lot of space on a hunter-barque.”
I nodded again. All star-craft were cramped in one way or another.
It was a kind of cosmic joke, I think, that trapped in a metal box was the freest I ever felt.
As long as it was the right kind of metal box.
The kind that went up instead of down and where if you died it’d be amidst the stars, not deep in a freezing pit or buried under water-ice.
Once I’d agreed to share a bed with a complete stranger and paid up-front for the privilege, the landlord told me to take a seat and wait to be called through for supper.
That I did, and as I sat I found my eyes being drawn back to the screen on the wall and its rotating images of monsters and merchandise.
I would count the seconds before the first ship-picture gave way and the beast in the fog appeared again until I convinced myself that I could predict its arrival down to the eyeblink.
I’d convinced myself wrong. Somehow it still surprised me every time. Or maybe that’s just how it feels now, looking back.
We were called through to the dining hall in little clusters of three or four.
The room was small and would almost have been homey if it hadn’t been for the lack of underfloor insulation.
On a frozen world heat leaves through the soles, and my boots weren’t thick enough or powered enough to keep my feet from going numb.
The food, though, was more than adequate; the polypous meats of Europa’s native sea life grilled and served in a stew alongside dumplings made from some cheap hydroponic grain.
It was warming, filling, and cholesterol-rich enough to fuel my endocrine synthesizers, which had been blinking a warning light on my arm for two days.
My companions were a mixed band: a tall Phobosi who I hoped wouldn’t start trouble; an impractically dressed Ganymedian dandy whose burgundy morning suit looked wonderful in a dome but would offer no protection at all if a seal failed; a slim, pale woman wearing a trapezoid necklace of shining silver wire sat beside a smaller and if anything even paler man sporting the same iconography.
Something about them caught my eye, an odd mix of commonality and distance. They both wore the bracelets of shell casings that were common amongst Deimosi munitions workers, which was a job I’d done myself when I was much, much younger.
There was also the fact that they were sitting a little aloof from the company, and the part of me that liked to pick scabs and fuck strangers wanted to find out what the hell their deal was.
“Not wanting to be rude,” I said, and I genuinely didn’t. Although not wanting and not doing were different things. “But do you have some kind of problem with the rest of us?”
“We mean no disrespect,” the woman replied, which put us even on disingenuous disclaimers. “Our faith teaches us to avoid the First Devoured where practical.”
I should have left it there, but I had to ask. “And those would be…”
The man next to her—a man I’d soon come to know better, in some ways at least—gave me an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Sister Jermyn is a missionary so she’s a bit … explicit.”
Sister Jermyn turned her head just slightly in her companion’s direction. “Mr. Marsh, condescending to unbelievers is all very well but your speech strays perilously close to secularism.”
“I just meant,” Marsh explained, “that since she doesn’t know what the First Devoured are—”
The Phobosi nudged me. He was a large man with radiation burns up his arms and warsuit interface ports visible at his wrists. Not every Phobosi was a merc, but enough were that it was a safe assumption. “You won’t get sense out of these fuckers,” he said. “They’re Wisdom.”
“They’re what?” There were literally thousands of tiny peculiar sects out there, I could think of at least half a dozen “Wisdom” cults from Deimos alone.
“Church of Starry Wisdom,” he explained. “They think the whole universe was made by a giant space monster and that one day it’ll come back and eat everybody except them.”
Sister Jermyn raised an eyebrow, and I really tried not to find her attractive.
I have this idea in my head that very religious people are good in bed on account of all the repression.
It’s never been true yet but I can’t quite stop checking.
“A common misconception. Our faith holds that the Devouring God will consume everything including us. But we will be last, and we take solace in that.”
Marsh, if I was being honest, didn’t look like he took very much solace in it.
“They also,” the Phobosi added, now sounding actively contemptuous, “think that melanin is a curse from the ancient space monster, which means the whole order-of-getting-eaten thing depends on your skin tone.”
“Thus we maintain the purity of our faith, and the purity of our blood,” Sister Jermyn confirmed, as if that made total sense.
“In order that we may be the last devoured,” Marsh concluded, like an amen. And I recognized a rote quality in his recitation, a quality I’d heard in my own voice so often. One I’d spent half my life hoping nobody else would spot.
“And you really think”—what can I say, I was still in that scab-picking, stranger-fucking mood—“that the fact your skin is a slightly lighter shade of brown than most people’s”—I saw Sister Jermyn stiffen, and I’d later learn that Starry Wisdomers hate to be reminded that they aren’t literally a different color from all other humans—“remotely matters to an all-devouring space god from beyond oblivion?”
To my surprise, Marsh looked genuinely hurt. “You know, it’s not polite to mock other people’s religions.”
After that we moved from theology to safer subjects.
And as we talked and ate, I became worryingly aware that Sister Jermyn was the only other woman present, which led to the troubling thought that she’d be the one I was sleeping with.
And despite my continued belief that hate sex is the best sex, I really didn’t want to share a room with a member of a phenotypically obsessed apocalypse cult if I could possibly avoid it.
As subtly as I was able, I beckoned over the landlord.
“She isn’t the harpooner, is she?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “Lord, no, the harpooner is”—here he grinned wide—“quite a queer sort, if you catch my meaning.”
His meaning could have been one of a thousand things. “Maybe throw it harder?”
Crouching down, he brought his lips to my ears and whispered two words: “Old Earth.”
It wasn’t what I’d expected. Though I’d traveled widely and met or fought or fucked people from all over the system—Proteans, Cereans, even Erisians—I’d never even seen a Terran.
The Great Churches bicker constantly, but they all agree that after the Exodus there was nothing left on Earth but cannibals and criminals.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
The landlord shrugged. “Out.”
I fixate sometimes. On ideas. On unknowns.
On hopes or goals. And whether he knew it or not, the landlord had given me something sharp to fixate on.
Who was this Earther I’d agreed to spend the night with?
What business was she out on? How much of what the preachers had taught me about Terran ways was true, and how much did it matter?
As the hours slipped by, as the other guests came and went and I saw all the things my new bunkmate wasn’t—the honest local fisherfolk with their eyelashes still frosted, the tourists from the inner worlds who wouldn’t last the week—the more pressing those questions became.
I fought my fatigue as long as I could, but by midnight I was done. I’d crossed half the body that day and my mind was beginning to skip like interwell streaming. So I told the landlord that I was chucking it in.
The room in the Coffin was slightly better than its name suggested, a whole ten feet by five feet with a ceiling high enough that I could just about stand.
Between the travel and the time, I was too exhausted to worry about an angry Earther coming back and slitting my throat in the night.
I took the opportunity to strip off the environment suit I’d been wearing since Harmonia and then I collapsed into sheets that were cold, grimy, and still more comfortable than anything I’d felt in days.
I don’t know how long I slept, or how well. I only know I woke up with a knife at my throat.