Epilogue
So I survived. Obviously. Like, I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t survive.
Most days I’m okay with that. The days I’m not … actually, those are the days I get the most writing done.
You probably want to know how I made it out, but honestly—and I hope you don’t just think I’m blowing smoke up your ass—I kind of assume you’ve figured it out already.
It was the coffin.
I know, I know. It’s so fucking symbolic. Ooh, do you see, it’s a coffin, which is, like, a death thing, but it actually saved her life. Ooh, she must think she’s so fucking clever.
If it helps, it is in fact true. Or at least it’s mostly true.
I might have embellished some of the details, but the heart of it is real.
The heart of it is what matters. The heart of it is that I was on a ship that went down, and I made it out even though I didn’t deserve to, and now I’m here and I’ve told you what it was like, and you can do what you want with it.
I hope it was worth it for you. I hope it was worth it for me.
Sometimes, it feels like sincerity isn’t something we value anymore.
And I’ll admit that in at least two of my previous rewrites I started this epilogue with Well, that just happened.
Because it’s safer, in so many ways. To treat it all like a joke.
Or like an adventure story. Or like an abstract exercise in philosophy.
It wasn’t. The Old Ionian had sailed twenty voyages. He will never sail another. And if his children or his grandchildren could afford to place a memorial for him in a hunters’ chapel I wouldn’t recognize it because I’ve forgotten his name.
Sorry, this is getting self-indulgent. You probably want some details.
The thing is, I should have died on the Pequod. I would have died. And not just when the fucking thing blew up. I should have died a hundred times falling between decks, getting mangled by machines, crashing boats, and getting scythed in half by Leviathans.
But Q saved me.
She saved me every time. In a way she carries on saving me every day.
I don’t know why she did. She might have just really enjoyed the sex.
Looking back, though, I’m sure she knew the voyage was fucked from the start.
I think the coffin thing was legit. Like I think she actually believed she was dying and wanted to at least give me something to do and maybe to make sure that she had a hope of a decent burial, or its sky-bound equivalent.
But once she realized she’d recover I think she saw an opportunity.
Life pods on a hunter-barque are unreliable; they’re usually poorly maintained; we don’t normally drill for them because nobody wants to encourage the crew to abandon the ship; and frankly, given how A went towards the end, I suspect Q didn’t trust that she wouldn’t jettison them.
When she took my hand and pulled me back to myself she led me straight to the coffin.
I’d thought it was some kind of fucked-up sex-and-death thing at first, but she eventually managed to explain to me that no, it had life support, it had foils, and it had a beacon, and we were only a few days away from where we’d met the Rachel, which we already knew was in the area looking for survivors.
Still, those hours clinging to her in the dark, sealed away from the horror outside and wondering every moment if all we’d done was trade a fast death for a slow one, were some of the worst of my life.
Or they would have been, if she hadn’t been with me.
The Rachel picked us up, which meant we were briefly reunited with Wolfram, but fortunately his experience on the Pequod had put him off mutinies for a while.
At least it put him off for long enough for the Rachel to take us to an orbital resupply station and for us to get passage offworld from there.
Passage all the way back, by a long and weird route, to Earth.
If you’ve worked out that I must have survived because I’m telling the story, you’ve probably also worked out that if I’d gone to Earth with a woman who saved my life, was fantastic in bed, and was also clearly into me, that raises a whole bunch of other questions about things I’ve said or implied about my life since.
Because it’s pretty clear I’m not there now.
I don’t really want to talk about it.
But I will. A bit. For Q’s sake.
Firstly, I’m not telling you how we got there. The Terrans don’t have regular interwell transport; they don’t even go to Luna very often, not that there’d be much there if they did.
I do want to tell you, though, that the things you’ve been told by whichever church or trade-state or sect or subsidiary raised you are completely true. There is nothing of value on Earth. It was all mined out and burned down and choked off a thousand years ago.
They’re not completely without technology.
The black oblong idol Q carried turned out to be some kind of rudimentary communicator, which became obvious the moment we landed on Terra and she started talking to people on it.
But they still use solar power like people did in the bad old days, which means they’ve got the energy and mineral resources to support a few million people in small communities that stay in touch with wired communications and old-fashioned ground or sea vehicles.
People like Q sometimes head out into the wider system to see what the hell the rest of us are up to, and to scavenge for any resources they might be short on.
They share everything on Earth. Probably because they don’t really have that much worth owning.
They don’t buy or sell even; there’s just sort of an expectation that if you’re nice to somebody they’ll be nice to you back, or even if they aren’t that somebody else will be, at some point.
In a funny way it reminded me of the ship.
Well, the parts of the ship that weren’t controlled by Olympus Extraction State.
North of the equator, there’s the star that never changes. Q showed it to me the first night we were there.
And she showed me trees.
After so long reading about them, hearing about them in the catechism and in metaphors, I saw trees.
I saw a sky that wasn’t steel or crystal and I felt wind that wouldn’t kill you even though it didn’t come from atmospheric filters.
There’s a bar on Ganymede that makes a cocktail called sex on the beach. It never occurred to me that it was also a thing you could actually do. But we did. By waves of liquid water that nobody bothered to reprocess even though it was undrinkably salty.
Q felt right there. It was her place. Where she was from. Where she made sense.
But I … I didn’t.
I really want to tell you that the reason I left was that Aphrodite Pharma State is still on my tail and if the flesh-bailiffs tracked me to Earth they’d kill all Q’s people and organ-harvest them.
But that’s not true. I’m basically fucking nobody, and I was last seen boarding a ship lost with all hands.
If I hadn’t written this memoir I’d probably have been able to get away with defaulting on my body-loans for the rest of my life (keeping my name secret wasn’t just a style thing; I’m hoping it’ll make it harder for them to find me).
I stayed on Earth for a bit less than a year, and in so many ways it was beautiful. But deep inside I had that nagging, gnawing feeling I always had in church. That sense that everybody else was part of something that I just wasn’t and could never be.
I’d lie in Q’s arms at night weeping, and I couldn’t tell her why.
Because what would I say? That an open sky gives me vertigo?
That the sound of the sea makes me long for the buzz of a generator?
That because of where I’m from and who I am and how I was raised and taught my whole life to think, I straight-up don’t know how to live in a world that nobody owns?
In the end, I just told her I was broken. She’d always known that anyway.
And I left.
I like to think I learned a little from her, at least. If nothing else, I picked up some of her language.
Amo. Amas. Amat. Amamus. Amatis. Amant.
I love. You love. She loves.
Et evasi ego solus ut nuntiarem tibi.
And only I am returned. Alone.