All us ordinary voiders rotated through all our ordinary duties, and on one particular day it was my shift on the array.
The unpredictable ionic conditions of Jupiter’s storms make the eyeball mark one an occasionally useful part of the ship’s sensor suite. An indispensable one when looking for a specific beast. So while another barque would sometimes leave the array unmanned and rely on automated detection, on the Pequod there was always somebody perched at the pinnacle of the vessel, watching the monitors and the atmosphere gauges and the horizon.
I’m not going to tell you about my first experience of the array. The thing about life in the stars is with one or two exceptions (the launch, the battle with the Leviathan, some of the sex, and one or two of the deaths), firsts and lasts and everything in the middle are all part of the same grimy soup.
The voider’s profession is an eternal one. It’s outside time.And it’s never more outside time than when you’re perched at the top of the array, watching for beasts in the clouds.
On my first trip up, and my ninth, and my thirtieth, I began by catching hold of a pair of ascender-bars that ran the length of the aerial. A closed elevator capsule would be safer, but although the ship was huge, launch mass was still at a premium. So every time I started my shift at the watch, I was whisked skywards over a drop of hundreds of feet. Only the strength of my hands and the grip of my boots stood between me and a short, gravitationally normalized fall followed by a messy death splattered across the deck.
As ways to die on a hunter-barque went, it was by far the least romantic, but for the half a dozen seconds of the ascent it still thrilled me every time. The precious moments of nothing but holding and waiting and listening to the wind whip past as I rose. It was like traveling into another life on another world, as apart from the ship as the ship was from the dock or the dock was from any city thatwasn’tperpetually flinging itself into the vacuum.
If you’ve never been on a hunter-barque, it’s hard to describe the view from the array. You’d think it wouldn’t be much different from the deck. After all, there’s nosurfaceanyway, so high up is high up no matter what. But there’s something about the angles, about the way you can look so far down on all sides, until sight starts to play tricks on you and it’s red-and-white nothing above and below and around, and everything in motion as the ship rolls and the clouds roil and the winds sing past the dome. It feels like the long slow walk into heaven we were all promised but so few of us will be able to afford.
I’ll be honest, I was shit at standing watch.
Your job on the array is to pay attention, and I’ve never been great at paying attention. Right back to my schooldays, when the teacher would pull me up for not listening to the day’s readings and the preachers would pull me up for the same exact reason. At the time I couldn’t put into words quite why it pissedme off so much. In hindsight, I think it was the fucked-up cocktail of presumption and irony. Sitting fifth from the end and third from the back in neat, regimented rows and being told to learn by heart the words of people who never sat in a row in their life. People who found lessons in fires and on mountaintops and on roads between cities, who only paid heed to the voices that spoke to them from the empty desert and the open sky.
My teachers would have said the difference is that those men were prophets, and I was just some little shit who didn’t want to study. Maybe they were even right. Maybe calling myself a dreamer or a wanderer or even a voider is just a way of covering up my inadequacies.
On top of the array, though, the difference between a philosopher and an asshole is meaningless. With a hundred yards between me and the rest of the crew and four hundred thousand miles between me and Europa and five hundred million miles between me and the sun, I was a speck in an endless void that was itself just a speck inside an even bigger endless void. Emptiness nested inside emptiness nested inside emptiness. I would feel it echoing inside me and, arrogant and rebellious though it might have been, I couldn’t help imagining that it was how the fathers and founders from Old Earth felt when the Father reached out from the skies and spoke to them.
To me, He spoke mostly about how insignificant I was. In that regard He and my old teachers would have agreed in almost every particular.
Given that we did, in fact, sometimes spot Leviathans, and that they were, in fact, sometimes picked up by a diligent array-watcher rather than an undistractable automated system, I am forced to conclude that I wasuniquelyterrible in this job. Q, I am sure, excelled at it.
“Nihil?” she would ask me, when I returned to her arms at the end of the watch. Which I did often but not always.
And I would blink and shake my head because my mind was still full of vapor-thoughts and echoes. And she would laughand call me something affectionate but probably insulting in her strange Earther language. And then she would kiss me, and I would remember things I had forgotten on my watch, and I would feel like a different kind of prophet.
“Si ignoras te, o pulcherrima inter mulieres,” she would whisper, “egredere, et abi post vestigia gregum et pasce haedos tuos juxta tabernacula pastorum.”
The words were familiar yet unfamiliar, and though I didn’t know what they meant, I understood. I knew that they were kind. That they said I was beautiful. That they were, in some strange and elusive way, holy. I tried to let them be enough. Because they should have been. She should have been.
But at the back of my heart, the sky still had its hooks in me. The sky and the things that lived in it.
CHAPTER
NINETEENWeaving
By the standards of voidships, the hunter-barque is a small affair, but that’s because voidships are, to use a technical voiders’ term, fucking enormous. Propelling mass into and out of gravity wells is an expensive business, and since life support and radiation shielding and gravitics and propulsion and processing and all the other hundreds of things you need to make a shipworktake up space, and almost as much space on a small ship as on a big ship, the incentive is to build big so that economies of scale can work their miracles.
And what that means, in turn, is that a ship is full of places where hardly anybody ever goes, but where things still sometimes go wrong, and still need hooking up, maintaining, or otherwise patching together. Void travel is dangerous, and one of the things that makes its flavor of danger so uniquely unpalatable to sensible people is that nine times out of ten the thing that actually kills you is something falling apart deep in inside a place you’ve never even thought about.
Most captains try to avoid that wherever possible, and though her overall goals were different from most captains’, A hadn’t lived as long as she had or stared as far as she had into the cold and the dark without learning to take maintenance seriously.
Which was why on this particular day (early in the voyage, though not so early that it didn’t already feel like the ship had been my whole world forever), Q and I were dangling between decks, foot-thick iron bulkheads either side of us, weaving the world together.
If you’re a surfacer, and you almost certainly are, you’ve probably not seen a sword-weld before. Hell, even if you’ve spent your whole life on voidships or skystations you probably haven’t. But you’ve certainly walked over them. Somewhere, buried deep inside whatever machine makes your world run, there will be some giant fucking bits of metal that need to be held together, have room to flex, and not grind horribly. You don’t think about that, just like all the other things you don’t think about. All those things you know to be true or believe to be true and which, ironically, need to fit together at the back of your mind, have room to flex, and not grind too horribly in case you start having to notice them.
And while there’s no easy fix for the psychological version, for the physical version we have the sword-weld. It isn’t the exciting kind of technology, it’s not nanosurgery or a pleasure-drone, but it helps things work for just a little while longer before they surrender to time and friction and mechanical despair.
It’s called a sword-weld because you build it with a sword. Not the weapon kind of sword, though it’s sharp enough you could still lose a hand to it. It’s a long, thin piece of metal you use to guide a weft of monofilament wire into place once you’ve shuttled it through a warp of tensile cables, each as thick as your finger. The work is heavy and delicate at the same time, because the weld needs to run floor to ceiling, sometimes across multiple decks, but also to be woven tightly, neatly, and by hand.
So Q and I were hanging midway between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth levels, the hum of nameless machinery in our ears, each of us playing our part in the tedious, necessary work of sword-welding.
What with our only partly speaking each other’s languages, my relationship with Q was never especially verbal, but when we were working she had a kind of focused silence that… I mean I could try and say something philosophical here but I’m not proud, I mostly just found it a massive turn-on. I’d weave the weft into place and the moment my fingers were clear she’d zip up on her line and start pressing the fibers together. There was a wonderful rhythm to it. A synchronicity that felt a little bit like dancing and a little bit like fucking, although far less fun than at least one of them.
On the whole, I was glad I had the job thatdidn’tinvolve working with a razor-edged piece of carbide alloy. My wandering mind was a liability to the ship when I manned the array. Down here in the dark and close it would have been a liability to my body and my friend’s, and I had ample incentive to keep both of those intact.
