The brit-cloud wasn’t where I saw my first Death’s Head Leviathan (that had been a few weeks earlier, you’d get very bored if I told you everything that happened on every day of a three-year voyage), but it was where I first saw them innumbers.
And such numbers. Leviathans are so big that they have to be solitary (well, mostly solitary, bar breeding and raising their young), because two or more sharing the sky for any length of time would harvest all the nourishment out of the winds in days and then they’d both starve. But in the bountiful environment of the cloud they could gather in twos and threes and tens. Family groups, I assumed, although I might just have been projecting.
We kept our distance from them. Death’s Heads give no sperm and so there’s little profit in hunting them, but if disturbed they can and will ram a ship with their great bony foreheads. And if they do, who can say what would become of the ship that disturbed them?
Who can say what becomes of any ship, if it doesn’t come home?
That’s the thought that haunts the hunter-barque. If the vessel is lost, if all hands fall into the skies, then there’s nobody to know what happened to you. Nobody to tell what beast or what machine or what act of indifferent nature or merciful divinity sent so many souls to their deaths.
Even amidst the beauty of the brit-cloud, you can’t quite forget that you’re nothing inside nothing inside nothing.
The Death’s Head schools carved paths through the light and color, making the patterns even richer and more complex and allowing, here and there, glimpses of the clear red sky beyond.
In one brief moment in our days amongst the brit, I stoodwith Q and she laid her head on my shoulder as we watched the Leviathans.
“Ex Iove,” she said, “semper aliquid novi.” And then for my benefit, or perhaps for yours, she added, “Something new. Always.”
We didn’t watch for long. I had couplings to fix.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINELeviathans in the Stars
A hunter-barque is a machine in so many different ways. A machine for turning lives—human and Leviathan both—into profit. To this end it takes in everything it can, ruthlessly devours all it’s able to, and then carelessly jettisons anything that turns out not to be worth the storage space into the Jovian skies.
Because of this, the composition by volume of the ship changes a lot over the voyage. It starts off, as you might put it, virginal, its hold filled with supplies or with wide-open space (although even that space, in its own way, is storage—an empty hold is full of air and air is more precious than water to a void crew) and every spar and every soul aboard shining and clean. Or at least as shining and clean as they’re likely to ever get, given that both the spars and the souls will probably have been on half a dozen prior voyages and will have had a fair amount of muck and grime and rust ground irredeemably into their cores.
Then as she sails on she gains some weight and loses some, her hold beginning to fill with spermaceti as her stores begin to empty of food. If she’s lucky the oxygen saturation of her atmosphere will hold more or less steady as the algae banks go about their photosynthetic churn, and meanwhile her overflow tanks will grow ever more filled with waste.
And waste kills.
Let too much crap build up and you jeopardize the mission,taking up valuable space that could be used for sperm, adding weight that makes the ship burn more fuel which in turn can force it back to port long before its time. But flush too much too readily and you find that you really, really need the 2 or 3 percent of the junk that you could have salvaged.
Which is why trash picking is one of the ship’s more encouraged extracurricular activities.
The Catechism of Prosperity teaches us that the will of the Father is never more evident than in institutions like hunter-barque trash picking. It’s effectively a perk of the job: you can go down to the reclamation floors to your heart’s content, dig through the refuse, and anything you can fix you either keep if it’s only useful to you, or sell back to the ship if it’s useful to the voyage. Nobody takes a salary and yet by the glory of the invisible hand, everybody profits.
Also it gives you something to do when you’re bored. Which you often are on a ship even when the entertainment systemhasn’tbeen co-opted by a rogue thought machine trying to compute the optimal line of attack against an enemy that might not even exist.
Honestly it wasn’t an activity that ever really appealed to me. I spent long enough wading through crap when I was on duty, I saw no reason to do it on my off-hours too. But early in the voyage (time is a woolly thing in the sky; it had been months but not yet a year), I noticed that Q would often clock off at the end of her shift and then go immediately to the waste bays to pick through the ship’s refuse. As a result, the relatively limited storage space we had above and below our bunks was gradually filling up with a vast collection of… stuff.
My church upbringing said that she was doing this for some kind of superstitious or religious reason. That in all likelihood her little glass idol was telling her that this piece of communicator, or that piece of cabling, or those fragments of psychoconductive Leviathan bone were vitally important for some misguided heathen purpose. But eventually, after many internaldebates with the ghosts of the old men of my childhood, I persuaded myself otherwise.
After an even longer debate, I persuaded myself to justaskher.
So the next time I was sitting in bed, watching her rip the guts out of the emergency backup battery of a long-defunct environment suit, I took a deep breath and said, “What are you actually going to do with all this?”
She looked up at me, quite unguarded, and replied, “Take home.”
“Why?”
From her expression, she found this a very peculiar question. “We need.” She held up a component. “Photocell. Hard to make without”—she waved a hand in frustration—“Silex.Flint. But not.”
“Silicon?” I tried.
Q nodded. “Very little on Earth. Little metal. No fuel.”
That more or less matched what I’d been taught. When our blessed ancestors had fled that cursed planet, they’d left nothing of value. It would have been sinful for them to do so. “How do you”—I hesitated; the question was going to sound crass—“you can’t live on scrounged semiconductors and repurposed copper, surely?”
