Spermaceti built the city of Cthonius Linea. With Old Earth long out of resources and the transuranics available in the rest of the system cutting it less and less over the centuries, energy had become our number-one problem. That’s “our” as in “humanity’s.” Because let’s face it, we’re all stuck in this mess together. Well, most of us. The people on the core worlds seem fine, actually, even though energy-crisis-wise they’re the ones who need the most on account of it being really hard to maintain a garden full of orchids on a world where the temperatures outside cross seven hundred and it rains acid.
All part of the divine plan I suppose.
Where was I? In case you either skipped history in school or this book gets inexplicably popular thirty years after my deathand you’re reading it in a totally different cultural context, a few centuries ago we were, as a species, fucked. So the discovery of the Leviathans, right when we needed them most, must have felt like a miracle. Of course the Plutonian Church says it was exactly that. Proof of a benevolent Father who wishes to guide the Worthy to Prosperity. I think the Venusian Church says it’s proof that a benevolent Father seeks always to safeguard life, for life is all that is holy. Other cults say different. Whoever’s right, a rush of the faithful and the entrepreneurial came to the outer worlds. Merchant-pilgrims in solar ships pushed to the limits of their photoelectric sails.
I sometimes wish I’d been born back then. In the frontier years, before the sky was carved up and tamed. Back when people believed the future would be better than the past instead of worse. The Cthonius I saw when I finally arrived was a shadow of a ruin of what it used to be. In the launch towers of the docklands, water-ships outnumbered hunter-ships by twenty to one. Still, the streets thronged with travelers from across the system—corporates from the inner worlds, indolent Ganymedians, severe scholars from the Golden City on Pluto—and that was enough of a crowd to lose myself in. But I could imagine a time when all those thousands of people, to the last, would have been here for the hunt.
Except those days were gone. Had been since long, long before I got there.
CHAPTER
TWOThe 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 aroofsuggested 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 suchreasonableprices.
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.”
Inclinedwas 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 experienceif you’re inclined to sharemeans 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.
