I do wonder if part of the reason smell gets such a reputation for triggering memories is that you’re basically always smelling things. Whereas most people, in most jobs, aren’t usually having regular tactile experiences.
I’m not most people. And the hunter-fleet isn’t most jobs.
Nothing brings back more memories for me than the feeling of an amorphous semisolid turning to clear fluid in the palm of my hand. And yes, that doesn’t happen that often in civilian life, although I do sometimes get very weird flashbacks from moisturizer dispensers and the one time a wealthy girlfriend fed me honeycomb. But through the years of my journey on the Pequod, that strange, smooth skin sensation runs like a seam of frozen methane through a Europan ice mine.
Q and I did that first cleanup alone. She was being punished for risking the prize in the first place, and I was being punished for standing up for her, and also for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But the joke, it turned out, was on the ship. Because it was no punishment at all. I mean, yeah, I wasn’t wild about spending hours on my knees in a nonsexual context, but the sheer peace of being with Q and doing that simple, honest job was a balm to me. Breaking off the spires of sperm, as delicate asspun sugar (or so I imagine; I’ve dated some rich women but never spun-sugar rich), and warming it between our hands and melting it and pouring it into the casks where it would be stored in a climate-controlled, pressure-tolerant, explosion-resistant cabin until we could finally sell it back on Europa for processing.
There was magic in it.
Every now and then my hands would find hers. It wasn’t the only job where that could happen, but itwasthe only job where my hands wouldn’t also, if I wasn’t careful, sometimes encounter a razor-sharp blade or a whirring buzzsaw that would split my arm up the middle if I didn’t pull back quick enough.
There was an intimacy to it. That might seem strange because from a certain perspective “intertwined with mine while coated in pulped monster brain” probably doesn’t seem like the most intimate place Q’s fingers had been. Like in case I haven’t made it clear or you’re reading the version of this book that’s had the sex scenes edited out to placate the Church of Liberty, we were totally fucking throughout the entire voyage. But—and maybe this is just my religious upbringing coming out, or maybe it has more to do with my profound disconnection from a body I don’t own, or maybe it’s something I should just let myself feel and stop overthinking—I don’t think howintimatesomething is necessarily has much to do with how far into your pants it reaches.
Fuck, I’m about this close to unironically sayingIt’s about how far it reaches into your heart, but if I actually did that I really would have to kill myself. And by the direct airlock-walking method instead of the deeply indirect book-a-passage-on-a-doomed-ship-and-fall-in-love-with-too-many-people method.
But even leaving aside my pathological fear of sincerity, heart metaphors have never really been my thing anyway. Sure, I’m prosperity-church not life-church so I learned a lot more economics than biology in school, but even I know that the heart is just a ball of muscle that pumps blood around a sackof meat and gristle. And sure that sack of meat and gristle can be a whole lot of fun if you do the right things with it, but the meatiness and the gristliness never go away.
Intimacy isn’t about reaching into your pantsorreaching into your heart. It’s about reaching across time. It’s about a touch that you can still feel—really feel, sure as the ice wind on your too-exposed skin—a day or a year or ten years later. It’s waking up in the night and realizing that your hands are empty and your bed is empty and you’re ugly-crying for what might have been.
It’s a silver-white filigree dissolving to nothing between your fingers. It’s hands passing across hands as you kneel in a circle with six or ten of your crewmates and do one of the few jobs that drones still can’t do.
“We’re close now,” the Old Ionian voider was saying on one of those occasions. “If she steers us into the Heart then doom is on us. It’s that machine to blame, I’ve no doubt of it.”
“The Heart is just a storm, old man,” replied the Tall Ganymedian, whose dress had deteriorated since launch. His bottle-green coat was patched with Wyrm leather and half its buttons were replaced with bone. “And everybody knows that storms are where you find the richest pickings.”
A hollow-eyed Europan gazed down into the pit of sperm we were all sharing. “If we’re doomed, we’re doomed. Nothing will change it and all we may do is watch.”
“Fie,” replied the Old Ionian. He was basically the only person I’d ever heard sayfiein cold blood but then he was very, very old. “You’ve spent too long listening to the Deimosi’s sermons.”
“He hears the voice out of the Heart,” said the hollow-eyed Europan. “It warns and it beckons.”
“That’s the same as doing neither,” the Tall Ganymedian pointed out. His hand touched mine beneath the sperm, and neither of us recoiled. For all the talk was growing dire, in this place there was a kind of calm.
A calm you could sink into and lose yourself.
Pandora would anoint her skin with oils, though not so fine as the oils that bathed my skin every day I worked at the sperm vats. The preachers who spoke at me as a child said that they had seen the mind of the Father, but I have touched the mind of a god, felt its thoughts slipping through my fingers and softening the calluses on my palms.
The day Marsh had fallen into the head, the day Q had cut him free, the day we had spent hours on our knees melting fractals into aspersions—that day, we had gone back to our room and fucked with the Leviathan still on our hands, and we had faded into one another like clouds mingling in the skies.
For so long aboard the Pequod I didn’t know where I began and she ended. I still don’t. As faraway and unreachable as she is.
If I was a different sort of person, probably I’d feel the same way about the whole crew. About the whole of humanity even. After all, are we not all traveling in the same metaphorical ship? Stakeholders in the same metaphorical corporation? Do we not all, in a very real sense, have our hands in the same vat of sperm?
I dunno. Maybe I’m just shallow, but I don’t think we do, actually. Locke would sometimes come and squeeze the sperm with us, for the look of the thing, but their masters back on Olympus never would. They wouldn’t dream of it. Dawlish and I both had our bodies remade by surgeons who worked for companies who were owned by companies who worked for investors who were owned by companies that were part of Aphrodite Pharma State, and that experience bound us to one another as cleanly as it cut us off from every other fucker. And not one of those surgeons or investors or voting-stock holders on the incorporate councils has a life that even begins to touch mine.
I have been to the sky. You have not. It’s okay for us to be different.
We aren’t melting together into a vat of undifferentiated sperm, all our dissimilarities revealed as illusions. We’re boundtogether by webs of trust and betrayal and pain and comfort and triumph and humiliation and caring and apathy and life and life and life.
And below the web, the endless void.
And at its heart, monsters.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINEWolfram and Marsh
