For most of the day, I ignored that little fact. But that evening, as we lay together in my bunk, watching advertisements for soft drinks and opiates flicker past on the screens above, I plucked up the courage to ask her about it. “Were you not,” I tried, “absolutely fucking shitting yourself?”
“Mors certa—”
“Yes yes, mors certa hour uncerta. I know. But still”—I looked at her lying beside me, half smiling, her eyes soft and dark and everything all at once—“aren’t you…”
“Nemo potest non beatissimus esse,” she replied, “qui esttotus aptus ex sese quique in se uno sua ponit omnia.” And then with a wicked grin she added, “But yes. Shitting myself. A bit.”
And then she kissed me, and I wished for the hundred thousandth time that every question had so simple an answer.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOURBodies
Guess what! It’s another musing chapter! By now you should know the drill: skip if you like, more sex and violence later, blah blah blah. The thing is, though, I really want to talk about the body. That great, impossible body that chains and arms and machines held tight—or tight-ish—to the underbelly of the Pequod.
Because funnily enough, bodies matter to me. If we reject the eternal verities of the catechism—and I’ve been trying my whole life to reject the eternal verities of the catechism, with mixed success—they are in a very literal sense all we have. Which makes it even more of a bummer that these things that should, by all rights, be more truly ours than anything else in the system so often aren’t.
Over the next days and weeks, my crewmates and I were going to take that beautiful, terrible, majestic Leviathan and violate it in every way imaginable. We were going to take its flesh and its bone and chitin and its ichor and its—drink if you giggle—sperm and carve them up and divvy them out and put them in boxes and barrels. And then we were going to sell them. Or at least that was the plan.
Perhaps it’s sentimental of me, perhaps it’s even hypocritical, but despite everything we planned to do to the beast—to the thing that at least two of my crewmates half worshipedas an agent of their destroyer-god—I want to speak of it, for a little while at least, as a whole. Or where I speak of it as parts, to speak of those parts as they belong to the animal, not as they belong to the bottom lines and ledgers of the Olympus Extraction State.
It’s a courtesy I’d want somebody to pay me, in the event that Aphrodite ever catches up to me and decides to take back what they sold.
I’m going to start with the head.
I’ve heard that on the core worlds, there’s still Terran animals. Things that evolved on Old Earth alongside humans—sorry, that the Father created alongside humans, I was never good in school. They say that if you look in the eyes of a dog or a cat or even a pig (which I hear some people keep as pets on Mercury and some people eat, but then again some people eat most things), you’ll see something looking back at you that’s recognizably, hauntingly mammalian. Their eyes work like our eyes; their bones work like our bones. I’ve heard that everything with an endoskeleton, on some level, is built the same way and on the same pattern. That even sea animals have hands inside the fleshy mittens of their fins and even snakes have little tiny leglets where our limbs are just as we have little tiny tails poking out just below the bones of our asses.
I’ve heard people say that these patterns amongst Earth animals are evidence that the Father didn’t make shit, because if He did then why didn’t he just make everything, what’d’you call it, bespoke? Why give humans useless tailbones and snakes useless hips and why do giraffes have the same number of vertebrae as we do? And I’ve heard them say the opposite. That the sublime echoing of the human form in everything from a mouse to an elephant is proof that the Father made us in his image, and that this image is so sacred that it’s reflected again and again and again in everything we used to share a planet with.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen a hamster or a horse. I’ve never had a pet and never eaten anything that wasn’t native to the weird, hostile biomes of the outer system. And if theFather built animals to reflect Himself, like He built humanity to reflect Himself, what the ever-loving fuck is the Leviathan a reflection of?
It is vast. It is alien. It is limbs that grasp and jaws that catch and armor and eyes.
So many, many eyes.
I’ve seen the eyes of the Leviathan from a dozen different perspectives now: soaring past them in the boat, hanging next to them on the butcher line (you’ll hear more about that later, don’t worry), flying towards them or fleeing from them or waking screaming in the night with them haunting my dreams.
The beast’s eyes run in rows down each side of its armored non-face, and there are dozens of them, some as small as my fist, some larger than my entire body when I lie in my bunk curled up and trembling and waiting. Each one, I am convinced, is different. As different from each other as my eyes are from Q’s eyes are from A’s eyes are from Locke’s eyes are from Truelove’s are from Flint’s. Without iris or pupil or lid, protected only by a transparent nictitating membrane, the eyes of the Leviathan are cold and dead while it lives, eerily vital after it’s dead.
I don’t know what coreworlders feel when they look in the eyes of their mammalian pets, but I’ve heard that it’s a kind of fellowship. A feeling that, whether it was the divine hand of the Father or the blind chaos of impersonal cosmic forces,somethingbinds you together. Some commonality that comes from being part of something larger. Something ordained. Something natural.
I think, perhaps, it’s not so very different from what I feel when I look in the eyes of the Leviathan. Whatever order there is in the universe, whatever plan the Father has for His creation, neither I nor the great many-eyed, many-limbed armored beasts of Jove can be any part of it.
The night after we chained the corpse to the underside of the Pequod, I tried to explain all this to Q. But I couldn’t find the words then. I can barely find them now.
“Lucerna corporis tui est oculus tuus,” she told me. “Si oculus tuus fuerit simplex, totum corpus tuum lucidum erit.”
And when I didn’t understand she said, “Your eyes. Beautiful.”
She kissed me then, and I tried not to imagine that my body was the body of the beast, my lips the tendrils that curled from the monster’s mouthparts, my jaw its mandibles and my eyes its eyes, dead and alive and belonging to a world that no human had any right to walk upon. I tried not to think of my hands and fingers as they clung to her as being the same species of jointed, segmented, grasping appendage that belonged to the dead Leviathan.
It was no good. I was feeling out of sorts and out of place and out of myself and out of my body. I pulled away from Q as gently as I could manage and shook my head. I told her I was sorry, that I needed air—or as close to it as an artificial atmosphere could come.
On deck I let my limbs guide me wearily aft of the array. My mind was full of horrors and wonders and clouds and eyes. Uncountable, terrible eyes.
It was at times like this I went to the captain, if she would have me. The times when I wanted to be destroyed, to let myself be broken and silenced and devoured. The times I wanted to be seenthroughrather than seen. To look into eyes that were a void, not a galaxy. That promised nothingness instead of a mortifying everything that I would never understand.
I didn’t have it in me, on that night, or the nights like it, or the nights that echoed it and called out to it, to be beautiful. I had it in me only to be subordinate.
