Something about them caught my eye, an odd mix of commonality and distance. They both wore the bracelets of shell casings that were common amongst Deimosi munitions workers, which was a job I’d done myself when I was much, much younger.
There was also the fact that they were sitting a little aloof from the company, and the part of me that liked to pick scabs and fuck strangers wanted to find out what the hell their deal was.
“Not wanting to be rude,” I said, and I genuinely didn’t. Although not wanting and not doing were different things. “But do you have some kind of problem with the rest of us?”
“We mean no disrespect,” the woman replied, which put us even on disingenuous disclaimers. “Our faith teaches us to avoid the First Devoured where practical.”
I should have left it there, but I had to ask. “And those would be…”
The man next to her—a man I’d soon come to know better, in some ways at least—gave me an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Sister Jermyn is a missionary so she’s a bit… explicit.”
Sister Jermyn turned her head just slightly in her companion’s direction. “Mr. Marsh, condescending to unbelievers is all very well but your speech strays perilously close to secularism.”
“I just meant,” Marsh explained, “that since she doesn’t know what the First Devouredare—”
The Phobosi nudged me. He was a large man with radiation burns up his arms and warsuit interface ports visible at his wrists. Not every Phobosi was a merc, but enough were that it was a safe assumption. “You won’t get sense out of these fuckers,” he said. “They’re Wisdom.”
“They’re what?” There were literally thousands of tiny peculiar sects out there, I could think of at least half a dozen “Wisdom” cults from Deimos alone.
“Church of Starry Wisdom,” he explained. “They think the whole universe was made by a giant space monster and that one day it’ll come back and eat everybody except them.”
Sister Jermyn raised an eyebrow, and I really tried not to find her attractive. I have this idea in my head that very religious people are good in bed on account of all the repression. It’s never been true yet but I can’t quite stop checking. “A common misconception. Our faith holds that the Devouring God will consume everythingincludingus. But we will be last, and we take solace in that.”
Marsh, if I was being honest, didn’t look like he took verymuchsolace in it.
“They also,” the Phobosi added, now sounding actively contemptuous, “think that melanin is a curse from the ancient space monster, which means the whole order-of-getting-eaten thing depends on your skin tone.”
“Thus we maintain the purity of our faith, and the purity of our blood,” Sister Jermyn confirmed, as if that made total sense.
“In order that we may be the last devoured,” Marshconcluded, like an amen. And I recognized a rote quality in his recitation, a quality I’d heard in my own voice so often. One I’d spent half my life hoping nobody else would spot.
“And you really think”—what can I say, I was still in that scab-picking, stranger-fucking mood—“that the fact your skin is a slightly lighter shade of brown than most people’s”—I saw Sister Jermyn stiffen, and I’d later learn that Starry Wisdomershateto be reminded that they aren’t literally a different color from all other humans—“remotely matters to an all-devouring space god from beyond oblivion?”
To my surprise, Marsh looked genuinely hurt. “You know, it’s not polite to mock other people’s religions.”
After that we moved from theology to safer subjects. And as we talked and ate, I became worryingly aware that Sister Jermyn was the only other woman present, which led to the troubling thought that she’d be the one I was sleeping with. And despite my continued belief that hate sex is the best sex, I really didn’t want to share a room with a member of a phenotypically obsessed apocalypse cult if I could possibly avoid it. As subtly as I was able, I beckoned over the landlord. “She isn’t the harpooner, is she?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “Lord, no, the harpooner is”—here he grinned wide—“quite a queer sort, if you catch my meaning.”
His meaning could have been one of a thousand things. “Maybe throw it harder?”
Crouching down, he brought his lips to my ears and whispered two words: “Old Earth.”
It wasn’t what I’d expected. Though I’d traveled widely and met or fought or fucked people from all over the system—Proteans, Cereans, even Erisians—I’d never even seen a Terran. The Great Churches bicker constantly, but they all agree that after the Exodus there was nothing left on Earth but cannibals and criminals.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
The landlord shrugged. “Out.”
I fixate sometimes. On ideas. On unknowns. On hopes orgoals. And whether he knew it or not, the landlord had given me something sharp to fixate on. Who was this Earther I’d agreed to spend the night with? What business was she out on? How much of what the preachers had taught me about Terran ways was true, and how much did it matter?
As the hours slipped by, as the other guests came and went and I saw all the things my new bunkmate wasn’t—the honest local fisherfolk with their eyelashes still frosted, the tourists from the inner worlds who wouldn’t last the week—the more pressing those questions became.
I fought my fatigue as long as I could, but by midnight I was done. I’d crossed half the body that day and my mind was beginning to skip like interwell streaming. So I told the landlord that I was chucking it in.
The room in the Coffin was slightly better than its name suggested, a whole ten feet by five feet with a ceiling high enough that I could just about stand. Between the travel and the time, I was too exhausted to worry about an angry Earther coming back and slitting my throat in the night. I took the opportunity to strip off the environment suit I’d been wearing since Harmonia and then I collapsed into sheets that were cold, grimy, and still more comfortable than anything I’d felt in days.
I don’t know how long I slept, or how well. I only know I woke up with a knife at my throat.
