This particular day, my mind was wandering down recriminatory paths. Self-recriminatory, mostly, because that was how I’d been raised. Judgment was reserved first for outsiders, then our own failings, and never under any circumstances for our betters. In a moment of abstraction I almost fell out of rhythm and Q’s sword came down close enough that I was very glad I kept my fingernails short.
“I regret,” she said.
I looked up at her. “My fault. Got distracted.”
“Quid?” she asked.
That was a tricky one. “Just… doesn’t it bother you?”
“Quid?” she asked again.
“Me,” I said. And then added, “All of—everything about me.”
She gazed at me like she had no idea what I meant, and although that should have made me feel better it was massively the opposite.
“I know I’m not exactly… easy. Or particularly faithful.”
“Faithful,” she echoed. And then after a moment she said. “Ah.Fidelis.” She looked deeply confused. “Non es fidelis?”
This was going to some uncomfortable places. “I fuck around like,a lot.”
I suspected thatfuck aroundwas going to give her some issues but I had no idea how to explain it to Q. But it turned out I’d underestimated her. She laughed. “I do not own you,” she said—it was rare for her to say so many words of Exodite together, but then it was basically a verb, two pronouns, and a negation. “You do not own me.”
“And,” I replied, more hesitantly than I really needed to, “you’re okay with that?”
“I am not—” she seemed to be looking for a word. “—Peregrinus.Exodite.”
It wasn’t quite the reply I’d expected. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
And she looked a little sad then. “To explain. Difficult.” She brought her sword down again to slide the next thread into place. “Too difficult.” But I clearly didn’t find this satisfying so she went with, “At home”—a shrug, so easy and so casual it flat-out sent me—“we share.”
That fit. The difficult thing was that it fit everything I’d been told about the barbaric ways of the Terrans. It’s axiomatic in the Church of Prosperity that all righteousness, all goodness, and all morality stem from property rights, which is why we teach that sex must be kept strictly within either marriage or employment structures. It’s probably the Church tenet I’ve broken most often. The tricky part was that, as stifling as I’d found the culture I was born into, I still couldn’t help thinking of it as a light in the darkness, and couldn’t quite imagine a society where that light didn’t exist at all. Or at least, I couldn’t imagine anything good about it.
Having, if anything, given myself even more to obsess about, I went back to weaving, while Q went back to her sword-work and I tried to build up the courage to ask her more. To ask her what she actually believed in, how it was possible to believe inanythingif she didn’t start out by believing you could own things. In the dark days of Old Earth, I remember beingtaught, there were thousands of different religions fighting for supremacy instead of the objectively better system supported by the Big Three Incorporated Churches. And they’d teach all sorts of things. Strange things about strange virtues that no sensible person cared about in our enlightened age. As I watched the sword-weld coming together, I remembered that in some of those bizarre, better-dead faiths they said that time was a tapestry, that fate and chance and freedom wove together to make a pattern that no one of those things could make alone.
Looking up at Q, working away with her sword, I wondered if that was what she believed. If she saw fate as a skein of thread that she could dance along without constantly berating herself for who she was. I wondered what it must feel like to believe it. According to the Catechism of Prosperity we were, ultimately, responsible for our own destinies, and it was a doctrine I’d never really questioned. The world, the Church told us, was just, for what loving Father would create an unjust world? Hard work was always rewarded, and if it appeared not to be, well, you must not have been working hard enough.
Then again, the Starry Wisdom preached that the only true power was entropy and our only agency was in choosing the means of our own destruction. And I was pretty sure we couldn’t both be right.
Better, perhaps, to imagine a tapestry.
Whatever ecumenical conclusions I might eventually have drawn in this particular reverie, I was interrupted by an alarm. A single long blast echoing through every deck and crawlspace on the ship so that no hand could possibly avoid it or ignore it. And then Marsh’s voice, crackling over comms.
“A spout”—his tone was urgent, contrary to the nihilistic teachings of his faith—“forty klicks to starboard.”
We were halfway through a line, halfway through the job, but it didn’t matter. Maintenance was important, but the spout was the sacred calling of the hunter-barque. It was our rice andour meat, our means of living. And for me, at least, this first call had a special magic to it—thiswas what I’d come to the skies for. To see legends. To chase wonders.
To follow a brilliant, terrible woman into the jaws of oblivion.
CHAPTER
TWENTYBoats
Just as a mercenary will get pissy at you if you saygunwhen you meanrifle,pistol, orantipersonnel neurotoxin diffuser, voiders get extremely upset at you if you sayboatwhen you meanshipor for that matter if you sayjetor worst of allfighterwhen you meanboat.
We’re going to the boats now. In a moment you’re about to see the great Leviathan hunt in all its glory. Well, some of its glory. It would be fucking awful pacing if I put the most exciting hunting scene in chapter twenty-one, after all.
But before we get to the action, I’m going to talk to you at length about technical details. Think of it as a stern parent telling you to eat all your dinner so that you’ll appreciate your dessert. Or if you don’t buy that, assume I just really enjoy edging my readers.
