Going to the captain’s cabin required me to pass once more through the increasingly raucous crowd.
TALL GANYMEDIAN VOIDER: Hup, now, and play us a reel.
SECOND EUROPAN VOIDER: Play it yourself, you pampered fuckstain.
As I approached the stairwell that led to the door that led to the cabin, I saw Locke watching me. They had suspicion in their eyes, but I wasn’t sure it was suspicion ofmeexactly. If nothing else, the ship’s systems were all bio-locked and so it was pretty hard for anybody to get anywhere they weren’t meant to be.
I scanned my palm at the door, and it slid sideways with only a slight squeak from a decaying servo. Leaving the night’s chaos on the deck, I slipped inside.
The door shut behind me and I was alone in a wide cabin lit by ivory lamps. My expectations of the captain’s sleeping arrangements had been contradictory. On the one hand I had imagined something spartan, something suited to a woman who thought only of the hunt. On the other, though, I had imagined something baroque, bedecked in the bones ofLeviathans and scrimshawed all over like the ravings of a debunked saint.
I was correct, in a way, on both counts.
The main chamber was sparse: a low table set on an inauspicious arrangement of tatami mats was the only furniture, and that table was bare, although from the mirror sheen of it, it looked like an imaging desk. The walls were lightly decorated but what decoration I saw was indeed scrimshaw, finely detailed scenes of the chase engraved on panels of Leviathan ivory. The actual sleeping chamber was set a little to one side, through an archway behind a little silk curtain. It was not, I told myself, a violation to investigate it. I had been sent for a pipe, after all, and that was a personal item so likely to be kept in a personal space.
Were I a more conscientious ship’s hand, I would have gone immediately to that room, retrieved the object I had been sent to retrieve, and returned to the captain for whatever thanks she wanted to give me.
But I’m not conscientious. You might have noticed. I dally. I detour. I go off on tangents and into reveries. Honestly it made me a terrible voider, and I’m not sure it does me many favors as a memoirist either. (In the second case, I’m hoping that if I’m obscurantist enough people will assume I’m deep; if not now then at least after I die.)
So instead of going at once to search the captain’s sleeping chamber I stopped and looked at the windows of her cabin.
They were immense, occupying the whole of the rear wall, and half of the two that joined it. And because the cabin sat flush against the outer hull, they were sloped sharply outwards so that if you stood right next to them you could look down and it was as though there was nothing between you and the endless celestial drop. If Jupiter looked intimidating from the prow, seeing it through a dome designed primarily for looking up, then viewed from the windows of the captain’s cabin it was overwhelming.
Gazing down, I imagined sometimes that I could discernthe bodies of Leviathans moving in the clouds. I couldn’t, any more than the ancient cosmonauts looking up at Earth from Luna could see individual fish in the seas. The Jovian Leviathans are larger, of course, than any of the beasts of Old Earth, but then the planet is larger still. Larger and shrouded in eternal clouds.
It’s a cliché, a terrible cliché, to say that through those windows the planet looked near enough to touch. But sometimes a cliché is reality and sometimes we really are seized with the need to reach out and grasp something even if we know it’s unattainable. Even if we know it’s still a hundred thousand miles away and that touching it would freeze or burn or crush us into pulp and flinders.
Sometimes we want nothing more than to touch oblivion.
I didn’t think I lingered long at that window, watching Jove mocking us from below. But I clearly had, because a voice behind me said, “It was a simple task, shipmate.”
Turning, I saw the captain standing by the door. She was, I am sure to this day, incapable of irreverence; she spoke every word like it was prophecy, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be sarcastic when she wanted to.
“I got distracted,” I explained. Insofar as itwasan explanation. It was more just a restatement of my failure.
“Are you often distracted?”
I comforted myself with the knowledge that whatever I said, I was aboard now and so she couldn’t throw me off the ship for three years. Well, shecouldthrow me off earlier, but only if she was in the mood for actual murder. Still, I thought it safest to say “No.”
It wasn’t safest. “Don’t be a liar as well as a laggard. I know your kind.”
“And what kind is that?” Defiance was a bad choice here, but some remarks touched a deep instinct in me that demanded a reply.
“Tourists.”
It wasn’t what I’d feared, but I had more than one nervethat didn’t like to be touched. “I’m no surfacer,” I insisted. “I’ve made three journeys with the merchant service. Twice with Aphrodite, once with the very state that owns this ship.”
She’d taken advantage of my indignation to close the distance between us. And she moved with such grace and such confidence and such absolute presence that my heart skipped and my mouth went dry. “No surfacer,” she repeated. And she was close enough now to hook two fingers beneath my chin and tilt my face to hers. “More than half by my count. You still smell of solid ground and fresh-mined water. Were we still bodyside I’d call you for a schoolmistress sooner than a huntress. And had I been in the room when those fools Thoreau and Emerson took you on I’d have warned them against it.Pass by that one, I would have said.She’s a dreamer, and there’s no place on the ship for dreamers.”
I don’t know what made me say “Except one,” but I did. And it did not go over well. She glared at me with eyes as dark and as forbidding and as inviting as the sky between the stars.
“And what do you mean by that?”
If I’d been the sort of person who knew when to stop, I might have. “I’m pretty sure you know exactly what I mean.”
One of the things that most draws me to the skies is the strange mix of protection and exposure you have in a voidship. Behind layers of bulkheads and foot-thick alloy walls you’re safer than anywhere else in the system, but on the other side of all that steel and crystal is an annihilating nothing that hates nature as sure as nature hates it. I was getting a very similar feeling now, alone with the captain in her cabin and talking, if I was honest, in a way I knew I shouldn’t be talking. Nothing there could harm me except her.
With an unexpected gentleness that came packaged with an entirely expected certainty, she took me by the shoulders and turned me to the window. And once again I saw the cloud-ribboned face of Jupiter, streaked around with white and red and orange and flashed here and there with lightning. Closer now, I was beginning to make out textures in it, shapes; but with nosurface to see through to it was mists on mists on mists like some grand optical illusion.
