I stayed perfectly still, my breathing as steady as I could make it, my lips just faintly parted.
“In a minute, brain damage would be permanent. In five you would be dead.” She shifted her fingers just slightly, and almostimmediately my vision began to swim and my heart began to quicken.
All I wanted then was for her to kiss me.
For fragile, beautiful seconds I hovered on the edge of nothingness, and then a voice crackled over comms. Locke, I thought. “Hail coming through, Captain.”
She released her grip at once. “Transfer.”
“—to Pequod,” the hail was saying. “This is the Albatross.”
“Albatross,” the captain replied. “This is Pequod. Receiving.”
The forms here were always the same. “Requesting gam. Beginning log updates. Rendezvous at your—”
“Hast seen the Möbius Beast?” demanded the captain.
The air went dead for a moment. “No,” replied the Albatross uncertainly. “We’re three years out from Europa, mostly hunting the belt-routes, and—”
The transmission dropped. Atmospheric conditions on Jupiter meant that happened sometimes, and it was usually the work of a moment to reestablish them. But the captain didn’t even try; she just brought the chart back up and began entering the new data. With the blood flowing slowly back to my brain, I remained kneeling beside her awhile and, once I realized that she had shut me once again out of her world, I slunk back to her sleeping chamber, retrieved my clothes, and left.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOURGams
If you’ve never shipped in a hunter-fleet, you might not know what a gam is. Even I didn’t really know when I first heard the word, because it’s not something you get in the merchant service. But hunter-missions are different. You take long voyages, and on those voyages you crisscross Jupiter so many different ways and in so many different directions that you’re bound to pick up another ship eventually. The planet is enormous, of course, but so are the ranges of your sensors, and ships are easier to detect than Leviathans.
In a way it’s a bit of an odd sweet spot. If the voyage was lonelier you’d never meet another ship so the whole tradition would never have evolved, and if it was more crowded, if fellow hunters were met more often or there were ports to visit in between as there are on other journeys, gams would be unnecessary.
As it is, a hunter-barque can expect to meet another hunter-barque once every few months; regularly enough to be an anticipated event, rare enough that it’s worth anticipating. And that’s what gives us the gam: an informal social meeting between hunter-ships where the captains exchange data, the crews exchange stories, and we all take advantage of the chance to fuck somebody we haven’t been living with for way too long.
While the captain hadn’t made the most of our firstopportunity to link up with another vessel, we had a second not long after, and while she’d been willing to let an opportunity pass if circumstances went that way, she wouldn’t turn one down flat. She was no fool and, just as she knew the crew wouldn’t stay with her for long if she denied them the opportunity for profit, she knew also that they’d get jumpy if she kept passing up opportunities for recreation.
So the next time we were hailed, by a ship called the Town Ho, she arranged an intercept and let us travel to each other’s decks, and we spent a pleasant evening doing all the things that lonely people did when they met other lonely people in a cloudy sky a million miles from any other human life.
The captain, of course, cared only for news of the Beast, but the rest of us had more eclectic interests. Dawlish picked up a tale from one of the Town Ho’s engineers that he passed around to the other harpooners and from there it spread to the pilots and the lancers and all the hands. For about a week it was the only thing we could talk about. Although honestly that might have said more about how repetitive life on a ship can be than anything else.
The version I’m going to tell you now is the version I told to a woman named Pandora who took me to bed one long hot evening on the shores of Ligeia Mare. She was a tall, exquisitely beautiful Ganymedian, and I mean that even by Ganymedian standards, which—since they can usually afford to eat well in childhood and to have their aesthetic imperfections biomechanically corrected in adolescence—is a very high standard indeed. I caught her eye one evening while she was slumming it in the docklands and for a while we let ourselves be each other’s worlds.
“You must have seen a lot,” she said. It was half a question.
I had, of course, but at the time I wasn’t ready to talk about the things I’d seen personally. The things I’m telling you about now. “Some,” I said instead, and she knew it was an evasion. “But nothing like what I’ve heard from other people.”
And she stroked my hair and kissed me and I wept fromlooking at her because sometimes beauty is too much to bear, and she asked me to tell her a story.
So I told her about Ironhands.
“I first heard this from a man,” I told her, “who heard it from a man who lived it. Which makes it truer than most voiders’ tales.”
She laughed like a songbird and pressed her lips to my throat.
“Many years ago, a ship called the Town Ho had a first mate called Rannick. He was—no offense, but he was Ganymedian and—”
She propped herself over me on her elbows and looked down smiling in mock-outrage. “And he was the kind of person who would sweep up a pretty dockhand and carry her off to his penthouse on the methane sea?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh that sort is theworst. Believe me, I have no illusions that I would be an asset to a hunter-barque. I see myself strictly as a patroness.”
