Dawlish was giving me a challenging look. “We still haven’t had your answer.”
I’d have thrown the comment straight back at him, but I knew by this point that he was working an indentured sentence, so any bounty he earned would just go straight to his creditor-jailers. “Nothing special,” I said. “I’d pay down debt. Maybe invest a little if I had any left over.”
The Old Ionian laughed (I never fucked him either, in case you were wondering). “Young folk today, I swear, none of you know how todream. Odds are the money will never be yours. Even if you spot the Beast the captain’s not bound to keep her word. And if the money will never be yours anyway, why are you all being sosensiblewith it?”
“If it will never be ours, why does it matter if we’re sensible or not?” countered the Tall Ganymedian.
And that made the Old Ionian roll his eyes and sigh the way only the old can sigh at the young. “Because it means you’ve forgotten what hope feels like.”
“Now, now.” Dawlish smiled cynically at him. “You can’t forget something you’ve never had.”
“IfIhad that money,” the Old Ionian went on, largely ignoring Dawlish, “I’d buy a castle in the clouds.”
“You mean a hab-platform in the upper atmosphere of Saturn?” I replied.
The Old Ionian’s eyes twinkled, and thinking back on that makes me almost regret never fucking him. “Ah, but tomeit would be a castle in the clouds. And that’s what matters.”
Elsewhere and elsewhen, Locke stared at the spiraling icon on the array.
“On the one hand, it’s a bribe. And that’s good—bribable people are rational people and rational people won’t willingly sail on a doomed ship.” Then they stopped and looked again. “On the other hand, it’s a symbol. And that’s far worse. People have been throwing their lives away for symbols for centuries. Millennia. Even in the dark days of Old Earth. So perhapsthe money was just the bait, a way for the captain to sink her hooks into the crew’s souls. Or perhaps it was a shiny trinket, a distraction like the rattling of keys to keep their minds off her true purpose. If so, she has competition now, for the star cult is growing stronger by the day. And to my shame I do not know which is the greater threat to this vessel.”
We had similar conversations between ourselves, on the rare nights Locke was tired or frustrated enough to take me to bed. Part of the reason I spent less time aboard the Pequod trying to get into Locke’s pants than, say, the captain’s is that they had this infuriating habit of wanting me totalkto them. Which was basically the opposite of what I wanted in a sexual partner.
“I trust her,” I remember saying, when Locke point-blank refused to let me go down on them until I’d given an opinion. “She’s intense and she’s driven and she’s carrying a fuck ton of hurt but she knows what she’s doing.”
Locke had reflected on this at frankly annoying length. “She did, certainly. And she always had a tremendous will. But I worry that her will has come into conflict with her good sense, and that is a fight her good sense cannot win.”
At the array, with rheumy, unblinking eyes, Marsh looked at the captain’s mark. “Money is a good soldier,” he whispered, “and if money were as certain as your waiting, ’twere sure enough. But no, the dreadful trumpet sounds the general doom and we unburthen’d crawl towards death.”
It should go without saying, but I never fucked Marsh, before his incident or after.
Last of all, after I had built her coffin, and she’d rebuilt it to be more to her liking, and after that whole weird affair had been mostly forgotten, Q stood before the array and raised her little black-glass idol to the lock.
What she said I did not hear.
And I will not put words in her mouth.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-FOURThe Last Storm
I’ve not really written about the storms we faced on the Pequod. There hasn’t been time or space for it, and they were so frequent and, in their way, so alike that to talk about one of them is to talk about all of them.
So I’m going to talk about the last.
You might have a question here. You might ask me,Hold on, isn’t the last storm Hell’s Heart itself, that’s a storm by definition.And I suppose in a way you’re right.
Except whatisa storm?
To have a storm, you need an atmosphere. And gas giants areallatmosphere. But that’s exactly the issue. A great poet of Old Earth once said that fish had no word for water, and so we, since we evolved—sorry, I of course mean since we were created to participate in the bounty of prosperity—on a terrestrial world we have no easy word for the great slow phenomena that shape continents.
We have language for it, of course. Language is endlessly flexible. We can talk about tectonic activity and continental drift. But we never look down at our feet and say, “Wow there’s a lot of subduction happening today.”
“But that’s the difference,” you might be saying. “Those kinds of things only happen slowly, whereas the weather changes all the time.”
And I would say I agree.
Which brings me back to my initial question: What’s a storm?
