“Lignum?” She fished her idol from her pack and spoke into it. Then she tried. “Lignum etiam vitae in medio paradisi, lignumque scientiae boni et mali.”
From the look in her eyes—I had been tryingnotto look in her eyes because when I did it made me feel about six different kinds of wrong—she seemed to think it would mean something to me.
“Boni et mali,” she said again. “Good. And bad.Scientiae.Knowing.”
I’ve never claimed to be the sharpest or the fastest, but I got there. “Knowledge of good and evil?”
“Lignum,” she repeated. “Lignum scientiae boni et mali.”
“The tree of knowledge of good and evil?”
She nodded with delight. “Tree,” she said. “But, many. Many treeae.”
That was the funny thing about faith. I’d heard of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life and that good trees bear good fruit while bad trees bear bad fruit. I’d never really stopped to think what they actuallywere. “What do they look like?”
“Tall,”she said.“Peaceful.”
The way she said it, they sounded wonderful. Then again that might still have been the sex talking. But I took the win where I could. Not that long ago the idea of anything sounding wonderful at all would have felt absurd.
Having scoped out the ship the previous day, I didn’t need to go up to the observation platform again, which I found a little disappointing because I’d have liked to show it to Q. There was something about the city from above, the skyline below and the stars overhead and the cold death of the Europan atmosphere on the other side of the crystal all around, that felt almost magical, that I wanted to share with her. But we were here looking for work, not to sightsee. Also she’d probably already seen it. So we stuck to the ground and picked our way through the docklands towards the launch tower where the owners’ representatives kept their offices.
Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau were based in an atmospherically sealed pod just off the platform where the Pequod—even more majestic close-to, even more remarkable and impossible and right in all the wrong ways—was docked. We weren’t guaranteed to be able to walk in from the elevator and ask for work out of nowhere, but commercial recruiters didn’t usually ask questions. From their perspective, we’d be offering to sign over three years of our lives for no money up front. We’d have needed to lookunbelievablysus for them to think that was a bad deal.
“So,” Emerson said to me. He was watching me over little half-rimmed glasses. “Ye want to go a-hunting, do ye?”
Either he was descended from some of the earliest settlers to land on Europa, or the dialect was an affectation. “That’s right,” I replied.
“And have ye experience in the skies?”
“Three voyages with the merchant service,” I told him. “Once with Aphrodite, once with Olympus, most recently with Caloris. I’ve flown vacuum and atmospheric craft, and—”
“Fie.” Emerson waved a hand dismissively. “Merchant work and a little piloting. Know ye anything of the Leviathan, girl? Have ye ever seen a great beast writhing from the churning skies? Ever flown a boat at a monster’s jaws, canopy down while the wind whips your suit, and you aim your harpoon by eye alone?”
“Can’t say I have,” I admitted. “But I’m young”—not so young as I used to be, admittedly, but younger by far than I feel today—“and willing to learn. And my companion is an experienced harpooner.”
“Yes,” Q confirmed. “Harpoonersum.”
Emerson pulled a face that was halfway between a scowl and a look of pity. “Ye’ve the look of a greenhorn about ye, and she’s the look of a heathen about her. We’d be taking a terrible risk to bring on either of ye, to say nothing of both.”
I couldn’t tell if this was a brilliant negotiating strategy or a terrible one. He seemed to be actively trying to put us off, but perhaps the goal was to make us want the job all the more. Sky-work is paid in lays, a share of the profits of the voyage, and I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that he was trying to get us to accept a longer one. Which is to say, a smaller one. “My friend can speak for herself, Mr. Emerson,” I tried. “But as for me, I’m looking for a job. I know it’s dangerous work, but I mean, look around you. If I walked out that door”—I indicated the entrance to the office—“without waiting for the airlock to clear, I’d be dead in seconds. This whole system is trying to kill all of us, basically all the time. At least on a hunter-barque I might get a story out of it.”
“It’ll be hard labor,” Emerson warned me. “Not glamorous. We’d want to take you on as a hand before the array.”
That was fine. I hadn’t planned to list as an officer. “You won’t regret it,” I told him. And I was right, in a way. They’d have many, many regrets about this voyage, but hiring me wasn’t going to be one of them.
All the while Mr. Emerson had been trying to dissuade me from taking up the position that it was his job to find people to fill, his companion, Mr. Thoreau, had been sitting in one corner of the office reading from a well-thumbed copy of the Testament. This wasn’t itself especially unusual; the Church naturally attracted entrepreneurs. It still unsettled me a little, especially after all I’d shared with Q the night before.About my life story, I mean. Not the fucking. But perhaps also a little bit the fucking.
“Well, Thoreau,” Mr. Emerson said from behind his desk, “what lay shall we offer this young lady?”
I was expecting them to drive a hard bargain, but I was relatively confident in my experience and hoped bringing a harpooner with me would sweeten the deal. If I was lucky, I reckoned I’d swing something around the 250th.
Mr. Thoreau looked up from his reading and seemed very much as if he would rather not have. “Why do you bother me with these things? Can you not see I have other matters on my mind?”
“Other matters!” This wasn’t going down well with Emerson. “What good are your other matters when there’s business to be done? What lay do we offer this girl?”
Thoreau scrutinized me in a way I really didn’t like being scrutinized. “Why should she care?” he asked the room in general. Then to me directly he said, “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”
“The Father,” I replied, perhaps unwisely, “feeds those who feed themselves.”
