Of course, it very nearly was.
Dotted around the observation platform were information terminals, and I used one to cross-reference the berth, to find the name and number and ownership of the fine unconquerable lady I’d set my sights on.
Her name was Pequod. She was owned by a collection of private investors with the largest single stake held by the biofuels division of Olympus Extraction State. Their interests and those of the other, smaller backers were overseen by two gentlemen named Emerson and Thoreau, and her captain was a woman named—
And here we are again. Some things are precious. Some things are just mine.
The captain was a woman who, as far as this book is concerned, is simply calledA.
CHAPTER
EIGHTSharing
We’ll come back to the captain later. She’s important, obviously. Incredibly important. Changed-my-life important. Hell, she nearly changed my life the most a life can possiblybechanged.
But that’s all to come. We wouldn’t meet for days yet, and though looking back I remember that first sight of her name like it was this huge turning point for me, it wasn’t really. It was just a name. Could have been anything. Asa. Asha. Abigail. Names mean less than people think they do. Or more. I’m still trying to work that one out.
I wasn’t quite confident enough to sign aboard an unknown ship with an unknown captain about to set forth on an unknown voyage without at leastconsultingwith the woman I’d just agreed to go shipboard with. So I looped back to the Coffin in the hopes that Q would already be there. I found her sitting in the common room. She had one leg stretched out on a scrimshawed bench and was reading a book without acknowledging me. I say reading; she was flipping through pages, about fifty at a time, holding each of those fifty pages briefly up to her little glass idol before moving on to the next set.
For a while I just sat and watched her. Which—yes, now that I say it, comes across as a bit creepy. But she seemed busy with what she was doing and I didn’t want to interrupt her.And she was fascinating to watch. Although there is thetiniestchance that byfascinatingI mostly just meanhot.
There’s sort of a morbid joke I’ll sometimes make that the way to my heart is through my ribs with a knife. Since Q had woken me up last night with a blade at my throat I’d begun to think that might be literally true. Over the space of less than twenty-four hours I’d gone from being terrifyingly aware of all the awful things she might do to me to being terrifyingly aware of all the awful things Iwantedher to do to me.
I might, as a result, have gotten ever so slightly lost in reverie so when she finished the book and started talking to me I almost blanked her.
“Ship,” she said for what I hoped was only the second time. “Habes?”
“Yes.” I gave an exaggerated nod, which made me feel incredibly silly. I knew she understoodyesandno. “But I’ve not signed anything, so if you don’t like it you can back out.”
Q shrugged. “Confido.I trust.”
That was… honestly probably more than I deserved. “And sorry,” I added, “for ditching you earlier. I just… it’s complicated.”
“Complicated?” Q repeated. “That building.Ecclesia?Church?”
I nodded. “More a chapel, but yes. I was raised Plutonian.”
She frowned. Then she held the little idol up to her face and said to it, “Plutonian. Church.”
Symbols skittered across its surface and her eyes darted left and right across them, as though reading extremely quickly. I felt my mouth go a little dry as I watched her.
“Et iterum dico,” she said, and seemed to be quoting, “vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum.”
I looked down, ashamed at how little I understood. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
“Rich man,” she tried. “Camel?”
With a slightly embarrassing sigh of relief, I realized what she meant. “Oh, yes.It is as easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle.”
She looked confused. Which was fair enough. It was a confusing verse. Not least because nobody had seen a camel since before the founding of the Commonwealth.
“Historically,” I explained, “the eye of the needle was the main road into one of the Holy Cities of Old Earth and a camel was some kind of riding animal that went up that road all the time. So although it seems like it’s saying it’s hard for rich people to get into heaven, it’s actually saying the opposite.”
For a while she stared at me, half smiling, almost like she was expecting me to say that it was a joke. Then she just said, “Non intellego.”
That one I’d also worked out. “Neither do most people, I think. Where I’m from we call them mysteries of the faith.”
It wasn’t until after I’d said it that I realized how melancholy I sounded. Ifmelancholyis the right word. Perhapsruefulwould be better. And that left a bitter taste in my mouth that wouldn’t shift no matter how hard I tried to spit it out, and which filled me with an almost nauseous need to purge myself of… something.
