At least, that’s what I told myself.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-THREEAmber, Gold and Gray
We slung the corpse—the beast’s corpse, not Q’s hypothetical corpse, we’re back on theotherbody and the other funeral, for the moment at least—beneath the ship far more easily than we’d slung others in the past, partly because we didn’t really give a shit about damaging it on account of it being such a bloated sack of putrescence already, partly because the damned thing floated so holding it up was much less of an issue.
Officially, the blasted Leviathan wasn’t actually a prize of the ship. The captain had made it clear she didn’t give a fuck and bringing it in had largely been a private plan by the second and third mates. Of course, our contracts still held thateverythingwe brought in was to be shared according to the various lays of the crew and the investors, but since it wasn’t a formal kill there was no formal work rotation butchering it.
Instead, Flint and Dawlish and a couple of the other crew members worked on it in their spare time, and rather than a systematic dismemberment like we’d usually get, they went straight for the gut.
I happened to be watching from one of the starboard balconies when they finally breached its abdominal cavity. So I got to see the clouds of off-white bile and electric-blue ichor that spewed out when they cut into it.
People often say that smell is a powerful trigger for memory,and maybe long, long ago in the days of ancient Earth that was true. But not in the skies. The billowing clouds of corruption that flooded out from that carcass must have smelled rank in the truest sense. If they did I was cut off from them by layers of crystal and polymer. Even Flint and Dawlish—the ones who had chosen to plunge deep into the rotting bowels of a destroying god—would be inside fully sealed environment suits, breathing recycled air that smelled a little of ozone and a little of rust, and of hardly anything else.
Perhaps that’s why I’m having such a hard time remembering those days. Grease and metal and atmospheric processors smell the same wherever you are, and so they don’t remind me of the Pequod any more than they remind me of Ganymede or Deimos or Vesta or Titan or Europa.
Spermaceti, of course, has a savor all its own, but you never find it in its raw form outside the hunt, so whatever memories are linked in my mind to that particular scent are buried forever.
The smell of skin I can recapture. The smell of sweat. The smell of somebody else’s body beside mine.
Perhaps that’s why this book is so fucking horny. I didn’t set out for it to be that way. I wanted it to be… actually, I’m not surewhatI wanted it to be. A record, I suppose. The last memorial of a hundred souls who vanished into the void as so many have before them. Of the people I sailed with who deserved better than they got. And the ones who didn’t.
I wanted it to be a testimony to a time and a place. A moment trapped in words like insects in the oldest days of Earth would become trapped in amber.
Whatever amber is.
Like wood and like leaves and like trees, I’ve heard of it but never seen it. Never come within a light-minute of seeing it.
But Ihaveseen the gray amber. The gray gold. The vomit whose price is beyond rubies.
Ihaveseen ambergris.
Smelled it too.
They call it a Madeleine moment, after some long-deadTerran queen I suppose. Or perhaps after the Madeleine of the Testament who made her hair a washcloth and thus demonstrated greater entrepreneurial spirit than the most pious of disciples. Either way, the one time a scent has truly taken me back to the Pequod, it was because of ambergris.
Don’t worry. This story also has fucking in it.
You remember Pandora? The tall, heartbreakingly beautiful Ganymedian I’d told the tale of Ironhands that I’d had from the Town Ho? It’s not a problem if you can’t. Most days I barely remember her myself.
She made me her pet for a while. Even took me home to Ganymede, where for the first time and the last time I got to see the beautiful subsurface seas of that body. And it was with her—or, more precisely, without her because we were neither of us huge fans of fidelity—that I’d had that mythical moment of scent-based transportation that took me from a ballroom over a cryovolcanic vent back to the skies of Jupiter and the halls of the Pequod and the bloated corpse of a Leviathan that just gave up on living.
It was magical in a way. But at the time it was a giant fucking mood killer.
I don’t want to give the impression that Pandora passed me around to her friends like some kind of fungible fucktoy. There was nothing quite so organized as that. But Iwaspretty conscious throughout my time with her that she’d get bored of me if I stopped being entertaining.
Which was why I was pinned to a ballroom window with a stranger’s fingers inside me and her tongue in my mouth when the scent of her perfume hit me like the psychic scream of a dying god and brought me back to the clouds of rot and the airlock of the Pequod and…
“Who’s Flint?” she’d whispered in my ear, and the question confused me because I wasn’t at all clear where I was.
I told her it didn’t matter, but my voice betrayed me. In that moment, it mattered.
Flint swaggered in through the airlock triumphant, theleviathanic bile scoured from him by decontamination, walking in front of six barrel-drones loaded down with glistening gray wax. A glistening gray wax that smelled rich and sweet and alive and beautiful and outside of time.
“Old lover?” the stranger asked, and her too-expensive perfume was rich and sweet and alive and beautiful, like sex and breakfast.
“Old crewmate.”
