The captain of the Rachel couldn’t help but nod.
And the captain of the Pequod couldn’t help but laugh. Not alonglaugh, not even acruellaugh. If I had to pick an adjective, I’d go withnihilistic. “Then th’art a fool. Either the boat will find its way back on instruments, or it is lost. You must have sailed these skies near as long as I and so I think youknowthis. So why come to me with your tale?”
“You could help us search.” She wasn’t quite begging, but she was making it clear that begging would be an option. And to give the woman her due, the captain didliketo hear begging. Just not in this context. “Between us we still might save them.”
With her typical flair for theatrics, the captain turned to her assembled officers. “First Mate Locke,” she said. “Shall I do as this woman asks? Shall I take my ship from her appointed duties, forsaking myfiduciary responsibilityto all her stakeholders, and spend a week scouring the skies for a boat whose crew, if I am to be honest, are like as not already dead?”
I could see tension in Locke’s jaw. They knew, of course, that they could only answer one way. Or at least, they could only answer one way that wasn’tYou’re a giant fucking hypocrite for pretending you give the tiniest shit about your fiduciary responsibilities.“You should not, Captain,” they said dutifully. And then added, “Although there may be other ways we can help her.”
But the captain entirely blanked the second half of Locke’s reply and solicited opinions from Truelove and Flint. Since Flint was compelled by his faith to expect people to solve their own problems and Truelove was compelled by his to want the universe to be devoured by space monsters, neither of them were much help.
“Voiders are lost to the skies every day,” the captain concluded. “Why should I care more about these than any of theothers?” A sly twitch troubled the side of her mouth. “For that matter, why do you?”
Seeing no option but the truth, the captain of the Rachel told it. “My son is on that boat.”
“Somebody’s son is on every boat,” replied A. “Or daughter, or child. And a captain should put no member of their crew above any other.”
“Not even herself,” added Locke pointedly.
The captain of the Rachel was still keeping eye contact with A. “I was a mother before I was a captain and will be after.”
“Noble,” conceded A, “but not my concern, or the concern of this vessel.”
And once again I got the sense that the captain of the Rachel was trying something desperate. “I know of you,” she said. “And your ship. They say you’ve a child of your own back on Europa.”
The captain half shrugged. “What of it?”
“If he—”
“She.”
“If she were lost in the skies, would you not give anything to find her?”
I knew the captain well enough to know that this was the wrong question. Because it was going to get the expected answer for all the wrong reasons. “If the sky took from me,” A replied, “I would tear it apart. If my daughter had gone to an airy grave towed behind a Leviathan, I would hunt that Leviathan and put its eyes out with my lance and split its corpse in my rending bays and tell the gods themselves that they were next.”
“Then—” began the captain of the Rachel fruitlessly.
“But I would be a fool to hope that I would see her alive again. Gone is gone and dead is dead and the storm swallows us all in the end and what is left to us is fury and defiance and the breaking of worlds.”
“You would not even look for her?” The captain of the Rachel sounded uncomprehending, unbelieving, and increasingly uncomfortable.
“I would not. Hope is a monster more foul than anything we hunt in the skies. It kills and it betrays and it brings good people to death and weeping. Would that the old Grecian had kept her box shut and her eyes closed.”
She’d even lost me at this point, and I was very, very accustomed to her rambling.
“If you were wise,” she told the other captain, “you would join me in my hunt and take your solace from your share in the corpse.” She shook her head in what read to me as genuine sorrow. “But you won’t. I see that we are of different temperaments, and that is either my tragedy or yours. Time and fate will tell us whose.”
That much, at least was prophetic.
As, perhaps, was the fact that when the captain of the Rachel departed, Wolfram hijacked an escape pod and followed her.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-FOURTempests 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 themstormsis meaningless? But now that I’ve reached that part of the journey—the part wherestormbecomes 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.
