A nun was a member of an all-female religious order in one of the superstitious pseudo-faiths of Old Earth. The enlightened churches, of course, don’t gender-segregate their followers. They separate them out by far more sensible criteria, like who has the most money or the largest number of subscribers to their sermon streams.
I said two chapters ago that we didn’t know how the Leviathan reproduces. I also said nobody had ever seen a spawning ground even though that chapter took place inside a spawning ground. I’m not claiming that the Pequod was the first ship ever to encounter such a thing, only that what is seen on the hunter-voyage and what is recorded by posterity, by history, by men and women of science and learning… well. Those are two very different things.
So it is with the reproductive processes of the Leviathan.
No official source I’ve looked at, and I’ve looked at many, from the academic journals of the Venusian pharma-states to the biotheological treatises of the Church of Life, is willing to commit to describing the precise method by which the Jovian monsters reproduce. There’ve been no academic studies, no research-voyages. Most exobiologists have never so much asseen a sample of a dead Leviathan, let alone its whole unmolested body.
Only the hunters have seen that.
Two nuns were walking down the road when a flasher jumped out and exposed himself to them. One was so shocked that she had a stroke. But the other couldn’t reach.
The monstrous, heaving prick of the Leviathan is called the grandissimus in the hunter-fleet. It is enormous. It is superlative. It is endless. Against it, all other cocks look like—actually, I’m trying to come up with a disparaging comparison but let’s face it, penises are pretty crappy-looking all by themselves, so I don’t think similes are helping here.
Aboard ship it’s an object of veneration. Voiders are a superstitious lot, and while the fleet isn’t as male-dominated as it used to be there’s a certain element of destructive machismo that runs through the whole business.
I mean, when you get right down to it, it’s a career built almost entirely of going around ramming spears into things. That kind of symbolism attracts a certain sort.
Would you believe me if I said that the handling of the leviathanic wang was so important that a whole dedicated office on the ship was given over to it? And that this office was called the mincer?
Would you believe me if I said two nuns were once riding their bicycles down a cobbled street, and one said, “I’ve never come this way before” and the other said, “That’ll be the cobblestones”?
On a ship it’s the role of the mincer to take the monstrous member of the leviathan and process it. The celestial mega-schlong is delivered to him by a dozen burly men who carry it slung over their shoulders and then he carefully hollows the meat out of the center with a machine called a boning-spoon. This is processed into a thin broth that the crew drink for good luck and sexual potency. The soft, supple, radiation-resistant skin of the monster-cock is then lovingly fashioned into a kind of a cassock for the most revered and celebrated men on the crew.
How much of that is true?
Well you should never believe a voider’s tale. Voyages grow long and we make shit up to amuse ourselves. And to impress surfacers. And to get laid. Mostly to get laid.
But from this point on you might notice that Marsh wears new robes. Robes in a dark, pliant leather, soft to the touch but warm against the void and hard-wearing in the wind. He even takes to wearing a set over his voidsuit, which speaks of a very particular quality of material.
We voiders make shit up, but we’re deeply uncreative people, so most of our tales have a drop of truth in them.
What’s black and white and red and can’t go through a revolving door?
A nun with a spear in her neck.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHTSoftness
We’re more than fifty chapters in now, so I really hope you’ve got to the point where I can say “sperm” and you won’t find it funny.
Because I’m about to say “sperm” a lot. I’m about to talk about having my hands in sperm, being elbows-deep in sperm. I’m going to talk about squeezing sperm and feeling it run warm and rich and wonderful between my fingers.
Flick back a couple of pages and you can read jokes about dicks and nuns if that’s more your speed.
I’m also going to talk a bit about how good sperm is for your skin, and I do want to stress that this is true only of the psionically active cerebrospinal fluid of the great Leviathan. If you want to let someone jizz on your face go right ahead, there’s worse ways to spend a Saturday. But don’t let them tell you it’ll be good for your pores, because it won’t.
We all on the same page? Great.
Let’s talk sperm.
The volatile and quasimystical energy source that for historical reasons we still callspermacetiis actually a fucking nightmare to work with. If you were paying attention, you’d have noticed that it crystallizes quickly on exposure to air, room temperature, or most surfaces. You might also remember thatits inherent electromagnetic properties make it a pain in the ass to process mechanically unless you’ve got a whole lot of shielding. Which full refining plants bodyside do but which whatever stopgap measures are on a ship don’t.
So instead, to get it piped anywhere you have to make it go liquid again. And that means you have to squeeze it.
When Marsh fell into the head of the first beast we killed—a while ago now but also no time at all because the sky is vast and endless and because I can’t keep my mind on one thought for two seconds together—its sperm spilled all over the chamber floor and blossomed into marvelous crystal patterns like high-explosive snowflakes.
We squeezed a lot of sperm that day.
