There was something about the doctor that reminded me of Locke. More playful, perhaps because her relationship with her own captain was older and closer. But in dealing with A she was similarly guarded. “I don’t doubt you were both injured, and gravely. But grave injury happens on the hunt. It doesn’t mean that the same beast was responsible for both accidents.”
“Accidents?” Straightening her biomechanical leg, the captain stepped fully onto Statler’s desk, scattering the few personal items he kept there and nearly cracking the screen of his map tablet. “Do you look at this”—she swept her arm in an arc—“and see onlyaccident?”
Much like the Pequod, the captain’s chamber on the Samuel Enderby had great windows overlooking the void, so the captain’s gesture included not only me and Statler and the doctor but also the wreck she was making of the other captain’s personal effects and the raging storms of Jove outside the ship.
It felt like a powerful statement, to me at least. But then I was predisposed to think that on account of desperately wanting to fuck her.
“I see chaos, certainly,” replied Dr. Waldorf. “Rather more of it than there was ten minutes ago. But I don’t mean to offend you, only to point out that you weren’t necessarily injured by the same beast.”
Disgusted past bearing with the skeptical doctor, the captain turned her gimlet stare fully on Captain Statler. “Describe it.”
“Well, I—”
“Describe it.”
Statler straightened his rather overstarched dress uniform. “I was just about to. But I need a moment to marshal my thoughts.”
The captain’s gaze was withering.
“It was… very big,” he tried.
“Go on.”
“And white. Well. Mostly white.”
“Mostly?”
I recognized Captain Statler’s look. People responded to A in one of two ways: either they hated, resented, and feared her (in roughly equal proportions) or else they became determined to please her. I was distinctly in the second camp, and so was Statler. It probably said terrible things about both of us.
“It might be better to say itappearedwhite,” he admitted.
This neither fazed nor impressed the doctor. “All color is appearance.”
“Its carapace was, in places, uncommonly smooth, and so it reflected the ship’s lights and the clouds. And in other places it was—well, yes—I suppose it was pale. Pale and scored with the scars of many battles I’d say.”
The captain was nodding as if this meant something. A tiny, traitorous voice at the back of my mind was telling me it didn’t. That she was only hearing what she wanted to hear.
“And was there a harpoon,” she asked, “lodged in its larboard flight-membrane?”
It was, by any objective standard, an absurd detail to expect a man to remember from an encounter four to six months earlier that had cost him a limb. But being as desperate for the captain’s approval as I was—okay,slightly lessdesperate for the captain’s approval than I was—he gave her the most calculated-to-please answer he could. “It… it may have?”
Springing down from the desk, a captain was an image of triumph. She took Statler by the shoulders and shook him in what I thought was probably gratitude. “There now, that lance you saw was mine, and the beast you saw was the Beast for certain.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I had just enough common sense not to say so.
“Then it seems we are done?” offered Dr. Waldorf rather curtly. “We will of course update our navigational data to reconcile any of these… irregularities that are so concerning you. But as I’m sure you understand, skies shift.”
The captain was ignoring her. As for that matter was her owncaptain. No longer being shaken, he now had his own hands on A’s shoulders and was looking up at her in a way I tried really hard not to identify with. “You’ll stay,” he said, “for the rest of the gam? It would be my honor to host you at my table.”
And Ialsotried not to identify too hard with his disappointment when she turned away from him wordlessly and swept out, leaving me to scurry after her.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-ONEThe Shrine
As disappointed as Captain Statler was by the abrupt withdrawal of A’s attention, the rest of the gam went well. For a day or so, the crew forgot the several shadows that were hanging over our voyage and we indulged ourselves in the usual round of song circles and causal hookups that characterized the meeting of two hunter-ships.
Of course, the fact that our crew was increasingly succumbing to a nihilistic star cult did make things ever so slightly awkward sometimes, but to my (and the other noncultist crew members’) great relief, it turned out that a lot of Marsh’s followers got a whole lot less fanatical once you gave them something to distract them. Plus the Samuel Enderby had a good supply of algal wine, so we all managed to get pleasantly fucked off our heads.
