“After six months with nary a spout to be seen, by eye or by scan, the captain decided that we’d be best risking the plunge.”
With a storyteller’s instinct, he paused, letting us hang a moment as no doubt the Essex had hung before its pilots steered it from the ammonia-ice of the upper reaches to the hydrogen-sulfide depths.
“Down we went,” quoth the Old Ionian. “And down anddown to where the winds are so strong they’ll strip the flesh from your bones and the clouds are so dense you can chew on them if you take your helmet off. Well, chew on them for the forty seconds you’d live in that heat and that pressure and—”
“And with the wind so strong it’ll strip your flesh from your bones,” offered the Ganymedian, now openly mocking.
The Old Ionian fixed him with a cold stare. “Fie on ye, thou pamperloin. A fine waste of air-rations you’d be on a hunting voyage.”
“Wouldn’t go near one.” The Ganymedian was giving intense wouldn’t-be-caught-dead energy. “A nice safe merchant run for me.”
A nice, safe merchant run seemed about the Ganymedian’s speed, and probably itwasthe most sensible option (spoilers: given what happened to me and my shipmates it wasdefinitelythe most sensible option). But hearing him say it, in that moment, I felt such a bile of contempt rise up within me that, if I hadn’t been such a giant fucking coward, I’d have called him a prick there and then.
“We had better luck in the deep sky,” the Old Ionian went on, apparently deciding that it was better to just ignore the interruptions. “And we took plenty of sperm on that run. But one day, some sixteen hundred klicks out from resupply station kappa-two, we caught a spout the like of which none of us had seen, the like of which I’ve nary seen since.”
The Ganymedian seemed about to say something, but he got cut off.
“A spout that lit up the array, so strong was its pulse, and when we got into visual, we saw an enormous Leviathan. Twice as long as our barque and pure white—”
“Hang on.” Now it was the Phobosi interrupting. “Pure white? You’re talking about the Möbius Beast.”
The Old Ionian nodded. “That I am, friend. That I am.”
“One”—the Phobosi held out a finger that I couldn’t help noticing was missing a fingertip—“the white Leviathan is a myth, and two”—he held out a second, which was missing thetip and half its length; the pair together looked like they’d been cut through with a single stroke and probably had been—“even if it weren’t, nobody ever said it was the beast that wrecked the Essex.”
“Perhaps,” pitched in the Ganymedian, “they should have hired you as a consultant on the adaptation.”
“Tace,” said Q to the Ganymedian and the Phobosi both. And while none of us spoke her language we got the sense that it meantShut up.
The Old Ionian gave her a grateful nod. “Glad to see there’s some young folk still have manners. But I’ll not waste more of the story on this lot, though it’s true as I’m sitting here.”
At my side, Q stifled a laugh. “Habeoque senectuti magnam gratiam,” she mused to nobody in particular, “quae mihi sermonis aviditatem auxit, potionis et cibi sustulit.” Then, smiling at some private joke, she rose, placed a hand on my shoulder, and added, “I will walk. You will walk with me?”
The Starry Wisdom cultist was already raising her own objections to the hunter’s story, and I couldn’t personally be fucked to join in with the inevitable rounds of pics-or-it-didn’t-happen that would follow. Besides, we had work to look for, so I set my hand over Q’s, stood beside her, and let her lead me out into the streets of Cthonius Linea.
CHAPTER
FIVEThe City
When I’m in a… a walking-out-of-airlocks mood, I think every city looks the same. Tranquility Settlement, Aphrodite Nine, the Experimental Prototype City on Titan. Each one was built by the same small group of conglomerates, working with the same materials to similar budgets and reporting to the same head offices on the core worlds.
On better days, I look closer and realize that not even the infinite reach of the trade-states can fuck everything up the same way every time. Every body in the system is geologically unique and while a dome is a dome is a dome, an ice sheet—even one buried under layers of atmospheric control and composite lagging—will never feel the same as a desert, or a ring of volcanoes.
And even without the physical differences—even if every rock in space was just a rock in space and not a cloud of solid ammonia or a ball of metallic hydrogen—there’d have been changes. The system has been settled for centuries now, and a hundred or so years of living builds up history, no matter what the shareholders might prefer. In Cthonius Linea, that history was all to do with the Leviathans. And it was a history in layers.
The first layer was industry. The city was built around its docks, and its docks were built around the trade in the bodies of titans. Where other ports were meant to accommodatesmaller, more agile vessels—messengers and orbit-to-orbit ships, pure rockets and interwell haulers—the landing towers of Cthonius Linea had been built around hunter-barques. An unwieldy but versatile craft, the hunter-ship needed to operate both through the journey in hard vacuum from moon to planet, and also in the violent atmospheric conditions of Jupiter. Which meant they were part winged, part jet, part rotor; elements of the carrier and of the fighter and of the ancient tall ships of Old Earth all factored into their design. This made them, in my opinion, quite the most beautiful vessels ever created, despite the popular perception that they are, for the most part, complete shit.
Atop the industrial layer sits the layer ofproduct. Although spermaceti (if I say it often enough you’ll get used to it) is the main target of the hunt, most parts of the Leviathan are valuable. Or at least, valuable enough that people hang on to them. So the visitor to Cthonius Linea sees that the bones of the great beasts (a biologist would say thatboneis not quite the right word for the creature’s endostructure, but I’m not a biologist so I don’t care) are worked into every part of the city’s architecture. Advertising hoardings are projected onto sheets of white star-ivory. Street vendors hawk their wares from within gargantuan hollowed-out teeth laser-etched with intricate cosmonautical carvings. Half the dress of half the citizens is fashioned from the beasts’ hides—often very processed forms of them, admittedly, because the hides themselves are thick and unsupple.
At last, above the layer of product is the layer of disuse. As the business of hunting moved to other bodies, it became less the province of the individual adventurer and more of the bioindustrial enclaves of the resource-states. The shipyards and refineries and hunters’ inns began to close down, with new businesses blooming like rot on their corpses. So now you’ll see a casino where once there was a refinery, a scrap-metal dealer where once there was a lively trade in beastbones or, as often as not, nothing at all where once there was a tavern alive with hunters’ songs.
I told all this to Q as she walked beside me. She noddedsagely and added, in her heathenish tongue, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” No idea what she meant by it.
We made a strange pair, Q and I, strolling the narrow prefabricated streets of the old quarter and watching out for likely starships. Port cities tended to skew cosmopolitan, but even here it was rare to see a Terran and, being a kind of wandering vagabond from everywhere and nowhere, I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous either. Fortunately, I was accustomed to ignoring catcalls and Q seemed truly not to understand them. To me at least it was the silent stares that were more disturbing, the looks that could’ve been completely in my head or could’ve meant I was two bad steps and a wrong word away from a gutful of flechettes.
Still, we’d managed to walk for some while unshot when we happened upon the door of a little hunters’ chapel. Once the docklands would have been crawling with them. Many of the early hunters had been steeped in the Plutonian faith, offering up their toil to the Father in the hope that he would reward them with his extremely lucrative favor. He never did, as far as I could tell. At least not most people. The Church teaches that those few men who grew wealthy in those early days were definitionally the most holy, and that makes a certain kind of sense. After all, the Father is all-good and all-powerful and he loves us. How fucked up would it be if he let people get rich even if theyweren’tsmarter, harder-working, and more moral than everybody else?
I didn’t know much about Q’s religion, although I assumed it had something to do with the little glass idol she carried. As a result, it was hard for me to explain to her why exactly—despite our having set out in search of a boat and having promised to keep one another company—I felt so compelled to enter the chapel. Honestly, it was hard to explain it to myself. To say that my feelings towards the catechism were complex at that time would be an understatement; there were days when I would swear it was a tissue of lies, there were days when the certainty of its truth gnawed at my chest like rats in my lungs. And there were days—most days, candidly—when I felt bothat once. When passing by a chapel made me feel an uneasy yearning for salvation.
