Unlike the captain’s cabin, Locke’s office had no windows. Deep inside the ship, far from the rush of the wind on the hull or the endless Jovian skyscape, there was something that felt strangelyrightabout that small ambition. And I found myself saying, “No children of your own?”
And there again was that half a smile, that twitch of an eyebrow. “Is that your way of asking if I’m married?” they asked. “And is that, in turn, your way of asking if I’m in the market for an illicit shipboard hookup?”
“I’d also be okay with alicitshipboard hookup.”
Locke pursed their frustratingly perfect lips. “I don’t fraternize with hands before the array.”
“Are you sure? You’re missing out.”
“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you—” And here they said my name, or the one I was using then, at least. And it felt weird. Like the more complicated kind of intimacy. The kind I wasn’t looking for because it brought me back instead of taking me away, whenawaywas where I’d wanted to be so badly for so long.
And I couldn’t hack that. So I said, “It’s your loss.” And then I ran.
Not literally ran. I had some pride, for all I’d been taught it was a sin. But I made my way back to my bunk. And there, I lay down and sorted myself out. Honestly, I have a bit of a history of fucked-up sexual fantasies and by my standards an uptight corporate watchdog with a strong sense of hierarchy was pretty vanilla.
For example, I’ve always had a thing for Jonah.
Not Jonah himself, obviously. There were pictures of the guy in some of the versions of the catechism I studied as a child and they never bothered to make him look hot. But thestory. Something about the story really worked for me in a way that I didn’t really understand at the time.
In case any of the Faithful of the Catechism do read this (and it’s possible, it’s not like we were never allowed books, and some parents were more careful than others), I should say I’m not… I’m not literally suggesting that Jonah was fucking the whale. The great apologists teach us that much of the catechism is figurative. So I guess in a way I’m saying that Jonah wasmetaphoricallyfucking the whale.
Not even that, really. Even after all these years I don’t quite have the appetite for blasphemy. But my first sense of what sex and love and passion are and should be—for whatever reason, by whatever twisted path—wound up getting tangled up in my head with the devouring maw of the beast.
This is still sounding fucked up, isn’t it?
Again, it’s not that I wanted anybody to literally eat me. But that whole sequence of experiences. The fear and the flight and the storm and the sudden crash into cold water and then being so utterly and completelyconsumed. Then to be held safe but penitent until at last I’m spat out onto warm sand and I see the Father.
Some part of me, for as long as I can remember, has always wanted that. Looked for it in women who hold knives to my throat, or who fuck me against windows over endless, cavernouspits into oblivion. I’ve looked for it kneeling and bowing my head in a parody of prayer. I’ve lived my life searching for that moment when I come out the other side, disgorged onto the shores of Nineveh and it all makes sense, and it never has. So again and again I’ve launched myself back into the jaws of the beast, in one way or another.
There is, I will admit, a very slim chance that I have issues.
CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVEThe Fountainhead
You’ve already seen, many times now, that the Leviathan is tracked in part by eye, in part by instrument, and what the instruments detect is a pulse of electrokinetic activity we call thespout.
It’s vital to the fishery. Nobody would catch a Leviathan without it. But also nobody has a fucking clue what it is. There isn’t even a broad consensus in ignorance, the tacit agreement thatwell probably it’s this because reasonsthat’s the basis of so many of our other certainties.
I was standing on the observation deck watching the instruments one evening. I say evening; a day on Jupiter is ten hours, and so while the ship keeps what voiders call Mean Circadian Time—a rough approximation of the twenty-five-hour day you’d get on Old Earth—the actual day-night cycle, still just about perceptible in the upper atmosphere at least, is almost totally out of sync with it.
Anyway, I was standing on the observation deck watching the instruments and contemplating the nature of the spout. It’s hard to remember exactly what I was musing about all these years later, but I seem to recall that I was compiling a very illuminating analogy between the fountain-like qualities of the spout and the Leviathan’s role, through the energeticproperties of its sperm, as the fountainhead of all life and prosperity in the system.
It was a good metaphor, I thought. Unfortunately, I never got to complete it because I was interrupted by an angry mob.
Okay, not an angry mob. More a peeved gaggle.
Both Europans, a Mimean, a Cerean, and the Bright-Eyed Titanian cornered me—or at least got as close as they could to cornering me in a space with very few corners—and made it very clear that they wanted a word.
I tried not to take too much satisfaction in the fact that they all looked like they’d been in a fight already, and like they’d probably come off worse. Split lips, black eyes, and notable limps were spread unequally amongst them. “I told you,” I began, “she doesn’t listen to me.”
“This isn’t about the captain,” said the First Europan, spitting blood. “This is about that fucking Terran you’re so thick with.”
“Q?” I asked casually. Except I used her actual name—she never hid it from the crew, I’m just hiding it from you. “What about her?”
“New kill’s getting hauled in,” said the Bright-Eyed Titanian, “and we want to be sure she won’t be up to her old tricks.”
The new kill was a small beast that Flint and Truelove had taken down between them a few days earlier. It hadn’t been anything like as promising as the one Q had saved Marsh from, and voiders being as voiders are, a fair few of the crew had taken that as an indication that our luck had turned and she was responsible.
