I was stillmostlyfocused as I went back to dismembering. But the image-thought of that falling hand stuck with me all the while, and every time I worked on carving up a corpse afterwards. There was something about the job that made the grim reality of our trade in bodies feel very real and very close. I just couldn’t get away from the fact that here with my saw, with Q watching over me like an extremely sexy angel, we were taking a thing that had once been majestic and terrifying, and making parts of it.
The flight-membranes for oil, even if it was a lesser kind than the precious spermaceti.
The carapace for scrimshander.
The tail and the limbs for timbers.
The teeth, yanked from inside its once horrifying mouthparts, would go the largest for building materials, the smallest for jewelry.
The only part of a beast I didn’t know a use for were its eyes. Its hundred beautiful inhuman eyes that have looked out on Jupiter for… for how long?
It may shock you to learn this, but I’m not actually an expert on cetology. I did a fair bit of research when I made the jump from schoolmistress to monster hunter, and I’ve done more since because I’m writing a fucking book about the damned things, but there’s a lot I don’t know. There’s a lotwedon’t know. There are volumes and volumes and volumes on how to refine spermaceti, how to use it and exploit it and make it power cities and starships and civilizations. There’re treatises on Leviathan hide and fashion plates—old ones now, I’ll admit—showingfine corsets and bracers and collar pieces made from the bones and armor of the beasts. One of the mil-states even did a study on whether their tail-spikes could be used as ramming weapons in ship-to-ship combat (the answer was yes in theory, probably no in practice).
But nobody knows how long they live in their natural habitat. We guess at what they eat, but that’s just voiders’ tales and supposition. Only the crews of hunter-barques ever come to Jupiter. Ever sail its skies alongside the monsters.
Only we catch a glimpse of what they see when they look out, through their hundred eyes, on a world of winds and vapors.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIXThe Leviathan as a Dish
There are two schools of thought about whether it’s a good idea to eat bits of the Leviathan.
All the other hunters say it isn’t. Flint says it is.
I’m exaggerating, obviously. I’m sure that somewhere in the tumultuous multitudes of the fishery, there’s more than one person willing to fly in the face of received wisdom, expert advice, the direct experience of everybody else who’s tried it, and common sense. Especially if those people, like Flint, are part of the Church of Liberty.
Of the Big Three Churches, the Libertines are the ones I understand the least, even though I grew up relatively close to their Phobosi heartlands. None of the churchesstrictlyown any territory—that falls exclusively to the trade-states and the short-lived seditionist enclaves that they nobly protect us from. They do have areas where one or the other is stronger. Pluto for Prosperity; Venus for Life; Mars for Liberty; but these are tendencies at best. One of the blessed things about the trade-states of the Exodite Commonwealth as opposed to the clans, kingdoms, and nation-states of Old Earth is that they’re inherently decentralized, meaning the old curse of wars over territory is a relic that humanity has moved far beyond. In our modern, enlightened world we only fight wars over resource rights, trade practices, and of course to repressworkers’ uprisings, all of which are much more sensible things to spill blood over.
Anyway, as far as I can tell the Church of Liberty exhorts its followers to actively reject any authority except the Church itself (which, from what I can gather, sets quite a lot of rules for its followers, especially regarding sexual behavior) and their own impulses. And Flint’s impulse, it seemed, was that he really wanted to eat some Leviathan.
“Eating your kills,” he told the mess hall, “is an ancient and sacred tradition. A man isn’t free if he’s never eaten something he killed with his own hands.”
The Pretty Vestal gave a devastatingly humble smile. “I wonder if the captain intends to eat the Beast, when we catch it.”
“Probably,” replied the Tall Ganymedian. “It seems like the kind of thing she’d do.”
This earned him a rebuke from Dawlish. “Does it? Or are you just saying that to sound clever?” Then without waiting for a reply, he turned to Flint. “Anyway, you didn’t kill it with your own hands. Truelove did.”
Flint scowled. He was usually good-natured to the point of apathy but there were matters he didn’t like to be crossed on. “I shot the first lance, that makes it mine.”
As ever, I wasn’t totally sure how much Q had been following, but she chimed in now. “First lance, the pilot. From the wings. Second lance.” She nodded to Dawlish. “Harpooner.”
“From my boat,” Flint insisted. “On my orders. Which makes it mine.”
“Perhaps”—the imp of the perverse was on me—“we could say it was a group effort?”
No matter which church you came from, this was blasphemy. Even to atheists like the Tall Ganymedian and the Pretty Vestal it was mildly offensive. After all, collective effort was just a short step away from collective action, and that was a dangerous road to go down. It’s a well-known fact that for a society to function, individualism and a strong sense of personal responsibility areabsolute necessities, and suggesting otherwise is sympathizing with terrorists.
Dawlish met my eye. He was, in many ways, a better heretic than me despite being an unbeliever. “We could.”
“My kill,” Flint insisted, “which makes it my meal.”
The Tall Ganymedian regarded him with a look that bordered on the insubordinate. “That’s all well and good, but do you have to cook ithere? You’re making the whole mess smell like an Ionian rendering vat.”
He was, and it did. The ship’s droids are only trained to produce quite a narrow set of dishes, and if you want something else you have to make it yourself. The mess table had a hot plate built in for this purpose, but it was seldom used and when it was used it was hardly ever usedunilaterally. It was more common for a group of us (each, of course, taking personal responsibility for their own contribution) to throw a collection of whatever leftovers or organic scraps we happened to have scrounged up into a pot and make a stew of it. Frying a slice of Leviathan fin, and entirely for one person’s consumption, wasn’t against regulations but it was certainly against common practice.
“Captain’s already barred me from using her cabin,” Flint grumbled, “and did the other officers back me? They did not.”
