“That my fate would be that of the first mate of the Jeroboam,” the captain told me, her eyes fixed on mine and her hands sliding into position on my wrists. “That the Leviathan would be my death. That it was the Divine Father incarnate. That the will that drives the world is set against my hunt. That in the end the Beast’s great tail would stave my boat and send me spinning down into the abyss whence none return.”
Her breath was hot on my cheek and her fingernails were beginning to dig into my skin. And I knew then, or thoughtI knew, the answer she wanted me to give. “Suppose you believed him?” I said. “Suppose you knew, in your heart, that every word he spoke was true. Would you turn aside?”
She smiled then. Terrible and beautiful. And she kissed me with a hunger like the sky.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHTThe Archangel’s Story
I’m going to be honest. At the time I wasn’t much interested in what the Archangel told the captain because, and I want to make this absolutely one hundred thousand million percent clear: he wasn’t a fucking archangel. He was a scammer.
But I’ve rewritten this book three times and each time I go back to it I get the feeling that something is missing, and what I think is missing on this pass is the Beast. The true Beast. The Beast that this whole thing is about.
I pieced this story together later, in fragments from members of the crew who heard it from other members of the crew, or other crews. Some of it I got on the Pequod, some elsewhere. Much of it I had from a man named Ironhands I met in a dive bar on Hygiea, and some I got from sources I’ve long since forgotten.
Here is the tale as I learned it.
“The Archangel Gabriel,” began the Tall Ganymedian, leaning on the bulwark of the Pequod’s main deck with characteristic apathy, “on hearing of the Möbius Beast, decided that it was an incarnation of his god.”
“Which was foolish,” Ironhands continued through the vapor haze of the miners’ bar. “There’s no gods in this world.”
“Save one,” added Marsh in the mess.
“Anyway,” I told a woman with one green eye and one brown,who I loved passionately for about three hours in a dark room in a cheap inn, back on Cthonius Linea, “he forbade the crew from hunting it, which would have been fine except—”
“Except human nature is what it is,” explained Dawlish. “Forbid people to do something and there’s always some fucker who’ll do it just to spite you.”
Even with that—I type onto a barely working tablet at a table in a dark corner of a bar on Titan, knowing full well that this round of edits was due in yesterday—they would have been fine. Our ship hunted the Möbius Beast for three years and only came upon it at the last. Most ships never sight it.
“And when they do,” said the Old Ionian, “it’s too late.”
“But this particular ship, she was unlucky,” Ironhands told me—his hands really were iron, or rather they were steel but then chemically speaking steel has more iron in it than iron does. And actually they were probably mostly low-density composites but you can’t call a man Low-density-composite-hands, that’d be silly. “Because we sighted the Beast, and the first mate, name of Mayhew—”
“Macy,” said Dawlish.
“Miller,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
“Mabunda,” I told the woman with the one green eye.
“—he was all seized with a lust to hunt the Beast down.”
The woman with one green eye smiled at me.Seized with lusthad been a cheap play, but I’m a cheap sort of girl.
“The Archangel,” the Old Ionian went on, “he swore against it. Prophesied against it, said it would bring doom on the first mate, and on all who lowered with him.”
“On him alone,” said the Tall Ganymedian. “Which as you’ll learn later was extremely on the nose.”
Ironhands leaned closer to me. Uncomfortably close, if I’m honest. “But what did he know? After all as far as Mayhew—”
“Miller—”
“Mabunda—”
“Macy—”
“—was concerned the Archangel was naught but a manbefore the array. Whereas a first mate”—Ironhands puffed up his chest in a parody of entitlement—“well, a first mate must be obeyed, must he not?”
“So what happened?” asked the woman with one green eye.
