“If any of them that believe not bid you to a feast,” Thoreau quoted in reply, “and ye be disposed to go; whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake.”
Mr. Emerson drew himself to his full height, or as much of his full height as he could manifest while sitting, and fixed Q with his most businesslike expression. “How much do you understand, heathen?”
“Enough,” Q replied, and half smiled at me in a way I found hard to parse.
“Then what do you say to the ninetieth lay?” Emerson asked, and for some reason this time his companion raised no theological objections.
Q nodded for the final time. “Accipio.”
Thoreau looked at me. “I assume that meansyes?”
It probably did, but I didn’t want to presume, so I shrugged. “Pretty much. Now, can we board?”
“Very keen, aren’t you?” Emerson sounded suspicious, and to be fair to him I would have been too. A lot of people who want to sign aboard ship at short notice are running from something. Any good proprietor or proprietor’s agent would keep an eye out for that sort, not to turn them away, necessarily, but to make sure they were making appropriate recompense.
In any case he’d have been wrong about me and Q. About me at least. There are few things I could say for sure about myself in those days, but I’m certain that I wasn’t running away from anything.
Just the opposite. I was running away from nothing.
CHAPTER
TENCetology
It seems so many years ago now, and at the same time so few. That fateful day that the Pequod launched into Jovian orbital space with a hundred souls aboard. And I’ll tell you all about our journey very soon, but before I do, I need you to understand a little about what we were actually doing.
You might already know. Maybe you, like me, are an outworlder at heart and so you’re more used to thinking about how all this works. What keeps the lights on. What keeps the atmosphere regulators flowing. What stops the separatists burning your house down and, at the same time, why they want to in the first place.
But probably you aren’t. If you can afford a human-written book then you’re probably pretty well off, and that means you probably live somewhere far away from the blood and rust. Maybe you’re on Ishtar Terra, watching an acid storm breaking from your spire balcony, or in the pleasure palaces of Apollodorus having your every desire attended to by somebody nubile and expendable. And if you’re in either of those places, perhaps you’ve never wondered who produces the oils that power the heat pumps that stop the gold melting out of your jewelry. Even if you’re a little less exalted, merely living in the vibrant subterranean seas of Ganymede, perhaps you’ve neverstopped to think how your city, despite being both underwater and underground, is so brightly lit.
The answer, of course, is sperm.
I’ll just pause here while you do your ownthat’s what she saidbits.
Spermacetiderives from an Old Earth word whose etymology I can’t be bothered to look up. It’s the name given to the cerebrospinal fluid of the great Leviathan. Or, more precisely, of a specificspeciesof Leviathan. That’s one of the little details I wanted to clear up in this chapter.
People sometimes useLeviathanas a general term for all the different monstrous entities that live in the turbid, crushing atmosphere of Jupiter. This is all right as far as it goes but there are actually several different types of creature on (or perhaps more accuratelyinsince it has no solid surface) that world, all of which deserve their own correct labels.
If you’re reading this book mostly for the parts in which I fuck strangers, kill gargantuan organisms, or nearly die, sorry, you’ll have to bear with me for a minute or two.
The broad class of beasts that includes the Leviathan, sometimes known as Titans and sometimes Cetaceans, includes four main categories of horror: Behemoths, Krakens, true Leviathans, and Wyrms. Within each of these categories are a whole lot of species and subspecies, most of which I won’t go into on account of how I never saw one and really would lose the Mars-to-Belt audience if I put in long descriptions of things that aren’t even going to show up in the book.
Basically, this chapter is here so you’ll know what the fuck I’m talking about when some great beast with chitinous mandibles and feeder tendrils shows up and I don’t have to explain what it’s called while I’m also explaining how it nearly ate me.
Let’s start with the Behemoths.
They’re not much as Job would have them; for a start, like every other creature native to Jupiter they don’t have any legs. They’re the largest of the planet’s fauna and they live exclusivelyin the hydrogen sea deep in the heart of the world. I’ve seen five in my life (four living, one dead) and perhaps the best way to describe them is that they’re armored maggots a kilometer long which move ponderously through an ocean of ultra-dense liquid star-metal.
They have no mouths, and some scholars speculate that they feed on the massive electrical energies generated by the currents within Jove’s liquid center. I have my own private theory that in this way they serve as the basis for the entire ecosystem. My evidence for this is limited except that the one time I saw such a beast dead, a swarm of Wyrms were feasting on its corpse.
That’s all I know about the Behemoths. It’s also all you need to know. On to Krakens.
These are nearly as big as the Behemoths, but less massive, if you see what I mean. They’re all tentacles and float-sacs, and most of the time they just blow whatever way the winds take them on long parachute arms. Once or twice, however, I’ve seen one expel a great jet of plasma from its rear end. Or its front end. Their body has a lozenge shape, and they’re studded all over with eyes, so the extent to which they can be said to evenhavea front and a rear is debatable.
The mighty Behemoth, big as it might be, is a docile creature. The Kraken, by contrast, will fuck you up all day then come back in the evening and keep fucking you up for fun. Worse, they’re useless. They’re basically giant muscular bags full of gas, and however they turn atmospheric flotsam and any ships they might eat into usable energy, the organs don’t survive gutting.
Wyrms are the final not-Leviathan creature you might be wondering about. And really I’m not sure they’re one thing at all. They’re invariably eel-like, invariably fly in the strange skies of Jove, and there their similarities to one another end. Some are as long as your finger and feed by skimming some unknown element from the surface of the hydrogen sea. Some are twice as long as your entire body and feed by biting chunks out of anything they happen to fly into. Some attachparasitically to Behemoths or Leviathans, some seem to hunt the ones that live parasitically. In a lot of ways it’s beautiful. If your idea of beauty revolves strongly around long thin monsters eating each other.
But what I really want to talk about are thetrueLeviathans. And these are at least slightly uniform. They’re all between some tens and some hundreds of meters in length, always far longer than they are broad and far broader than they are tall. Their flight, which like most Jovian creatures makes a complete mockery of conventional aerodynamics, is an undulating motion supported by rippling side fins which together make up perhaps half their body width. There’s also similarity in their tails, which are always long and taper to points. Finally, they’re always hydrogenically amphibious, able to exist both in the skies and in the hydrogen sea itself, although different species divide their time between those environments differently.
