The Wyrms don’t fly by any principle known to current science—they’re nothing like aerodynamic enough—but whateverelectro- orpsychokinetic process holds them up, it requires some kind of atmosphere. And as the hydrogen around them was pumped once again into the Jovian skies they began to fall to the ground, making the rain sound return one last time. Monstrous as they are, they can’t live in a vacuum, and so Q and I watched as they flopped and gasped and choked their last.
It was slaughter on a massive scale. Hundreds of lives snuffed out in order that one, vast life could be broken down into its constituent parts. Of course if we didn’t, then our own lives wouldn’t be worth very much of anything and, universal community of all living beings aside, it was 100 percent better them than me.
“Fui quod es,” mused Q, “eris quod sum.”
From here, much of the remaining butchery was automated. The walls of the hold were lined with countless claws and jaws and saw blades that would complete the dissolution of the Leviathan with robotic efficiency. They would pry away the rest of its armor, precisely excise the head and spinal ridge (those being the parts that contained the precious spermaceti), and sort the usable parts into barrels for processing while the rest ofthe monster would be diced, slurried, and sprayed unceremoniously back into the sky that spawned it.
Of the valuable parts of the corpse, most are reserved for sale back in port, but there are inevitably fragments—especially fragments of bone and carapace—which are too small, too irregular, or too inconvenient to have much commercial value, and it’s from these that the crew make the strange artworks known as scrimshander.
I tried a hand at it myself once, but I didn’t have the dexterity or the artistic touch. Q—as in most things—was my superior by far. We sat one evening in her bunk while she etched images in a shard of not-exactly-chitin. The scent of burning wafting up from her laser cutter was oddly cozy, like cooking over open fire or a solid-fuel heater. For more than an hour, I watched her from behind the procedurally generated mystery novel I was pretending to read, taking in the lines of her wrists as she worked and the distant, quiet look on her face as she guided the laser.
Eventually, since I have a tendency to get restless—so restless that I at times sell myself onto doomed star-voyages that throw themselves down the gullets of abominations—I stretched and was about to get out of bed, when Q held up a hand and said, “No.”
I froze, hoping I hadn’t broken some strange Terran taboo and especially hoping that this wouldn’t lead to her pulling a knife on me like she had when we’d first met. Well, mostly hoping it. Slightly hoping the opposite, but my issues are for a different time.
She turned the slightly curved panel of beastbone she was working on, and I saw, etched in dark lines across its ivory surface, my own image.
The picture-me was sitting quietly, reading a dataslate, her back against—what, exactly? Something strange and alien that rose up from the ground and spread arms over her like a loving monster.
“What is that?”
“Tree,” she said.
I’d never had a word and an image come together with so much context and so little all at once.The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba. So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him. Because I said to you “I saw you under the fig tree,” do you believe?
Was this what they were? This pattern of knots and whorls and these spots of light and shadow from a sun through an unfiltered sky?
“It’s beautiful,” I told her. Because it was. Because it somehow mademebeautiful, which is something I’d never been used to feeling.
And then, because I wasn’t sure how to process that, because I wasn’t sure how to thank her in a way that didn’t involve sex on some level, I slipped very quietly out of bed, said, “Really,” and then walked very quickly away.
I made my way to the mess, where I found Marsh also busy scrimshawing, although he was using a more traditional blade, rather than laser-engraving. Doing my best to ignore him, I went to the food vendor and ordered up a bowl of Wyrm meat. That was the other advantage of asphyxiating a bunch of sky-serpents alongside the corpse of a star-cetacean. There was at least moderately good eating on them, and since they counted as bounty of the voyage they weren’t taken out of our lays.
Seasoning would be, of course, so the actual meal I got was a thin consommé of unsalted flesh sitting in water recycled from urine or the heating systems or, most likely, both. Still, the bits of scale and bone made something approximating a broth and it was, by and large, better than a lot of things I’d eaten on Europa.
At least it was free range.
Since it seemed the entire crew except for me had a real and enviable talent for sculpture, I watched Marsh’s figurine take shape with a mix of fascination and horror. It seemed to depicta human being, half forced to their knees while some kind of terrible beast raked claws and fangs across their eyes.
“What thefuckis that?” I asked him as politely as I could manage.
“Religious icon,” he explained.
I looked again. It was definitely a person being devoured head first by something lithe and powerful and merciless. “Religious icon?”
“The great star god,” he explained, “in His aspect as the leopard who eats the faces of the unworthy.”
“Just the faces?” I was really trying not to judge, but sometimes other people’s religions sounded even weirder than mine.
He shifted a little in his seat. “I think it might be mostly a metaphor. I don’t think anybody expects Him to come in the form of a literal leopard.”
“Or to eat literal faces?”
“He will take many forms,” explained Marsh. I recognized his expression. Recognized it almost fatally. It was the comfort of a half believer retreating to the safety of dogma from the danger of thought. “A collapsed dome. A bankrupted subsidiary that starves an asteroid. A plague or a ventilation malfunction. All these are manifestations of the Devouring God.”
“And He always eats the… impure first?”
Marsh nodded. “Always.”
