At my university, I studied a speculative anatomical diagram of the beast and I still remember every detail. The wide mouth, the cavernous throat, the many-chambered stomach which bloomed with oxygen-generating gut flora. (How else could Jonah have breathed for so long?) The male, it was said, had a long, barbed tail that it would use to fight for mates while the female—perhaps a third of its size—had a great pouch on its back for carrying its young.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how much we can learn about such a long-vanished creature using only modern science, revealed truth, and logic.
Within the Church of Prosperity, the extinction of the whales of Old Earth is considered an object lesson in stewardship. The whale, so I was taught as a child and so I argued again in one of my better-received second-year essays, was granted to Man alongside all the rest of the bounty of land and sea, to husband wisely and in accordance with the catechism. But some time in the Dark Days, foolish people rebelled against this sacred charge and campaigned to stop the whale from being hunted. This, the Father took as a great insult and He decreed that since humanity no longer wished to take the bounty of the whale that had been granted unto us, He took it back.
And so the whale is no more. Not even Q has ever seen one, for they ceased to be a thousand years before she was born.
Whilewhaleis the more common term in the language of Old Earth, the hunter-fleet, those parts of it that follow the Three Churches at least, take great pride in the fact that the Leviathan is also most definitely called out by name. All three faiths agree that it’s mentioned no less than five times, although, in a strange quirk of theological dynamics, nobody is quite sure what the fifth is.
Many a hunter-barque has inscribed, somewhere about it, the words of the seventy-fourth psalm: “You it was who cracked the skull of the Leviathan and spread its blood like rains upon the desert.” And many is the preacher who has highlighted the prophetic power of this passage, which, though it was written long before the hunt rose as an industry, contains clear references to the life-giving properties of spermaceti and its vital role in sustaining our colonies in the uninhabitable parts of the cosmos.
So you see, it isn’t a surprise that Leviathans figure so deeply in Marsh’s weird little death cult. They’re a powerful, mysterious species. In the great hierarchy of living creatures they are, in a very literal sense, god-tier.
There. The expository aside is over. If you were imagining the pornographic version, assume that whoever was doing me has pulled out a fraction early and sprayed hot jism over my back, and that I have crept back to my bunk hollow and ashamed.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-THREEThe Lock
The wordLeviathanappears in five different parts of the catechism, and there were at least five different shadows hanging over the Pequod as we flew inexorably towards Hell’s Heart. Some of these were obvious: the worsening weather, the risk of mutiny, the fact that we were hunting a monster who might not exist and if he did exist had definitely killed a whole mess of people. The tiny matter of the captain being, in many people’s assessment, out of her goddamned mind. Little things like that.
But the shadow I’ve not mentioned much, not since it was first set up, was the shadow of the lock.
You might remember, before all the philosophizing and fucking and monster-slaying, that when the captain first revealed herself and her plan to the crew, she pledged her entire share of the ship’s take to the first person who called out for the great Beast. And a captain’s share was substantial, especially in a voyage as prosperous as ours was turning out to be. Even my exceedingly long lay was shaping up to be enough to keep Aphrodite off my back for a good few years.
Ever since that day, it had sat there, the crypto-lock glowing its faint golden light, even after nightfall. And every so often (we are back, reader, in that nonchronological never-place where events are organized by theme and not by what strictlyhappened when) one or other of the crew would walk up to the lock and stare at it.
It’d be strange, wouldn’t it, if when they stared they spoke their thoughts aloud.
Even stranger if I managed to overhear each and every one.
And remembered them well enough to write them down years later in my memoir-manifesto-memorial.
“There you stand,” said the captain, examining her handiwork. “A ring of gold that is formed of light and greed and mathematics. There is meaning in that, perhaps, if there is meaning in anything. For what is realer than wealth and what is wealth but numbers agreed upon? And the mathematicians tell us that it is only their laws that truly exist.”
Her voice was discordant music to me. I knelt in her cabin and felt her hand cold on my throat, her lips warm on my shoulders, where her scrimshawed canes had stung me.
“That,” said Flint later—or earlier—or both—“is a whole lot of fucking money. Of course, I’ll make my own pile from this trip well enough, so it’s not as though I’llneedit. Then again, whoneedsmoney? As long as you’ve your wits and your strength and a gun or two, nothing can touch you and you’ll want for nothing neither.”
In case you were thinking there’d be a pattern here, I never fucked Flint. I’m sure he’d be fine, but I only went for officers if they were actually my type, or if I was very drunk, or if I thought it was expected of me. And Flint did an amazing job of wanting nothing from anybody. It was the one quality I admired in the man.
Wolfram, of course, did not take his turn standing before the array and staring at the lock until far, far later in the voyage. Only once Marsh had arranged his release and that of his followers. Only once he’d set his own plans into motion was he free to stand and stare and muse as so many others had done. “A lock is it?” he began. “I’ll give the captain this, if she’s mad then she’s fox-mad and no mistake. The difference between me and the rest of the crew is I admit that greed is all as drives me,while they play coy about it. And the captain, well, she knows that well enough. If the crew joins with me and takes the ship, they’ll each of them make far more than they’ve been promised if they stay loyal. Butthis”—the lock swirled bright in front of his eyes—“this is more than any fair share, more even than the captain’s share on a freebooter’s vessel.” He fell silent, considering. “Oh yes, this is a lock all right. And the captain has locked me away from my strongest weapon, for she’s played on the crew’s greed far stronger than I’m able.”
As the row of watchers passed, the ship sailed on through deepening storms. The clouds were white here, blinding white and opaque about the hull so that we flew by instruments alone, and sometimes saw strange visions and faces beyond the observation dome.
In the mess one evening, Dawlish brought the lock up on a handheld terminal and stared at it. “What do you think?” he asked me.
“What doIthink?” I echoed. It wasn’t meant to work this way. “What is theretothink?”
“It’s more money than you’d make in six voyages,” Dawlish pointed out. “You must have thought what you’d do with it.”
Across the table, the Tall Ganymedian smiled. “What would be the point? The money goes to the one who raises the great Beast, and she’s not raised a single spout yet. She uses her time on the array to nap.”
Just for completeness, I didn’t fuck Dawlish. Or the Tall Ganymedian. I’m usually a sucker for a tall Ganymedian but can only really put up with them in small doses.
“IfIraised the monster,” the Tall Ganymedian went on, “well, I’d probably go home, blow half of it on the longest bath I’ve ever had, and then treat myself to some new gloves.”
It was a materialistic response. But without wishing to overly stereotype, the Ganymedians were a materialistic people. Then again, the Church teaches that materialism is the same as godliness, so in a way it’s not even an insult.
