But the bonhomie was never going to last. We said our farewells to the Samuel Enderby and steered on towards the Heart. And as we did, the old-new tensions crept back, and the crew once more watched each other with suspicious eyes.
And to think we’d been happily squeezing sperm together only a few days earlier.
I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist (and as Wolfram observed, I’m actually kind of a shitty philosopher), so I can’t quite put my finger on what made things get so much darker inthe weeks we sailed the southern tropics. But possibly the fact that Marsh built a giant fuck-off temple out of Leviathan bone and offal might have had something to do with it.
The voyage had, in many ways, been a long and successful one, so the hold—and hunter-barques were mostly hold—was getting less and less full of provisions and more and more full of barrels, each brimming over with precious spermaceti. And under a captain with more of an eye on the voyage and less of an eye on her obsessive crusade of vengeance against the abstract concept of an indifferent cosmos, the remaining space would have been kept rigorously clear so that we could fill it with yetmorespermaceti as we slew yet more monsters.
But we didn’t have a captain like that, we hadourcaptain. And she wasn’t one for details. So when storage bay nineteen was rearranged into a gore-strewn temple to oblivion it went largely unremarked upon.
Well, unremarked upon by her.
“It’s bad enough that she’s brought a machine intelligence aboard,” Locke told Flint. The conversation took place in their office, where I’d been for… unrelated reasons. Unrelated reasons of fucking. “Now she’s letting a death cult set up shop in one of the storage bays.”
“Freedom of religion,” Flint insisted. “I’ll not be part of any action that tells people who they can and can’t pray to.”
Locke gave him a profoundly skeptical look. “Even if their prayer involves smearing the lower decks with waste organic matter?”
Flint eased his everyday-carry pistol from its holster and began turning it over idly in his hands. He did that a lot when he was nervous. Or bored. Or really just whenever. “The way I see it, ain’t none of our business.”
“The storage bay is ship’s property. As, come to that, is the waste matter.”
The Church of Liberty set great store by property rights. But it was a toss-up who they’d assign those rights to. “Come on, picking up waste’s a perk of the hunt. Always has been.” Toillustrate the point, he fished a little scrimshander token from his pocket and flicked it across the desk. “They’ve got a use for the beast gut, let them keep it.”
“And what if it contaminates the sperm? Bay nineteen isn’t empty.”
“You know as well as I do, them barrels is sealed so tight a wasp’s tarse couldn’t get in.”
“They can be opened,” warned Locke. “I’m not sure I trust Marsh around the cargo after his… experience.”
It didn’t take much to make Flint laugh, and this wasn’t much. “What do you think he’s going to do? Drink it?”
“You say that like it’s beyond the realm of possibility.”
Flint leaned forwards, laid his pistol on his lap, and latticed his fingers together. “You know, I’m beginning to think you just don’t like religious people.”
“The Church of Starry Wisdom isn’tlikemost religious people.”
To that, Flint responded with a dismissive shrug. “At least they believe in something.”
I wasn’t sure I cared for that as an answer. For a start, thesomethingthe Starry Wisdomers believed in was literally nothingness given form, and calling thatsomethingwas at least half a paradox.
“They’re a destabilizing influence. And the Father knows we’ve enough of those on board already.”
Flint gave half a smile. “Careful, Locke. That’s dangerous talk.”
“The captain knows my feelings. Reminding the other officers that this obsession of hers is growing ever more troubling to the crew isn’t mutiny. It’s my job.”
“The crew will settle down with a few more kills. And if we bag the Möbius Beast, that’ll settle ’em down for good.”
“Settling us all down for good,” replied Locke gnomically, “isexactlywhat I’m concerned the Beast will do.”
Flint, with typical apathy, shrugged this off entirely.
And while Locke tried in vain to get any other officer togive a shit about the cult in the cargo bay, which (since the captain was locked in her cabin communing with an artificial mind, Flint was religiously mandated to give zero fucks about anything his church hadn’t randomly decided to have a strong opinion on, and Truelove was a fully paid-up apocalypse cultist) didn’t seem likely, I wandered down to bay nineteen to look for myself.
Q came with me, as she often did. Partly out of curiosity, I suspected, and partly for my safety. She had a comfortingly low opinion of my ability to defend myself.
The Temple of the Coming End was, in some ways, a marvelous sight. Notmarvelousin the sense ofgood, you understand, butmarvelousin the sense ofto be marveled at. Marsh and his congregation had rearranged the barrels that, before they moved in, had filled about a quarter of the bay and built them into a reasonable facsimile of devotional architecture. Two great columns of them stood for pillars, and row after row of them took the place of pews. At the back of the chamber, a great stacked block of them, topped with Leviathan bone and strewn with skin and meat and gristle, played the part of the altar.
