And the captain, without hesitation, repeated, “Open the brig.”
After all that buildup, I’d half expected the consequences to be explosive. They weren’t. And what, realistically, had I thought would happen? That Wolfram would burst out of the cell and tear the captain’s neck open with his teeth? That he’d yell “Yaharr me hearties, I be in charge now”?
So many of my expectations of the voyage, looking back, were a child’s expectations. The stuff of bedtime stories and pulp novels. The reality was so much stranger and wilder and quieter and louder and more boring and more terrible.
The doors opened, and Wolfram stood, stretched, and walked out into the waiting arms of his new coreligionists, and then they went calmly to the cells of the other redeemed corsairs, and let them out as well.
They made no move that day.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-SIXThe Chief Engineer
The Pequod had over a hundred crew. And if I’m honest with myself, although I like to pretend, sometimes, that I remember each one of their faces, their voices, the touch of the ones who touched me, most of them blur together. Even the officers I tend to get mixed up in retrospect, because there are alotof officers on a ship. After all, an officer is just somebody who fills an office and an office is just something that needs doing. And so many, many things need doing when you’re deep in unforgiving skies, trying to kill gods.
You might notice, for example, that I’ve barely described the ship’s doctor. I was never ill on the voyage and while I spoke to her semiregularly because my reconfigurative implants needed some maintenance, we had a distant relationship and I never paid her much mind outside of official interactions. I thought of her most when Q lay dying and then it was definitely Q I was thinking about, not the doctor, although honestly at the time I tried not to think about either of them.
Have I mentioned lately how selfish and cowardly I am?
I think the other reason I don’t remember the doctor is that I never really made much of an effort to fuck her. I’m just not much into redheads.
The chief engineer, however, was a different matter. Not that I tried to fuck him either, because he also wasn’t my type. I’ma bit concerned at this late stage that I might have given the impression that I slept with the entire crew of the ship, and I really didn’t. Low double digits at best, and most of that was hand stuff. But while I wasn’t interested in him sexually, the chief engineer did at least stand out to me, partly because towards the end of the voyage (the actual end, not the scheduled end—the scheduled end, after all, included a return trip) the captain sent me to make a request of him.
He also stood out because like the captain, like Dawlish, and like me, his body had been rebuilt by the good people of Aphrodite Pharma State. Or at least by somebody who bought their supplies under license from somebody who bought their supplies under license from Aphrodite Pharma State. There are no truly independent biosculptors anymore.
The violent redistribution of a person’s bodily tissues was an occupational hazard of the hunt, and after a long career, Lobscouse—that was his name, or possibly his nickname, I’ve never quite worked it out—had been more redistributed than most. Over a series of unlucky voyages (or lucky voyages, depending on whether you measure luck in flesh lost or wealth gained) the skies had taken both his eyes, both his hands, his lower jaw, and several of his internal organs.
What I found even more interesting was the choices he had made regarding his reconstruction. The captain’s leg, although clearly prosthetic, was primarily designed as a leg. Dawlish’s various parts, cheap and prison-issue as they were, were primarily intended as one-for-one replacements. The parts of my body that I’d had altered, I’d had altered almost entirely because of form rather than function.
Lobscouse had taken a different approach. When he’d lost his hands, he’d had them replaced with a writhing mass of independently articulated tendrils, each capable of manipulating tiny objects with incredible precision. When he’d lost his guts, he’d had them replaced with a more efficient system of chemical processors which, since they occupied less space and he didn’t seem especially interested in aesthetics—or perhapsI should say he had his own aesthetic—left him with a torso that narrowed sharply below the rib cage and proceeded cylindrically downwards before flaring out again at the hips, like he was wearing a bizarre tight-laced corset. When he’d lost his eyes, he’d swapped them out for a photosensitive implant with broad-spectrum analytical capabilities that covered much of his brow and made him look a little like a spider, and a little—especially with his tendril hands—like a Leviathan.
I did once ask him, carefully and giving him every opportunity to tell me to shut up and fuck off, why he’d made those particular choices.
“When man tried to simulate walking,” he’d told me, “he invented the wheel. But a wheel looks nothing like a pair of legs.”
I’d simultaneously known exactly what he meant and had no idea what he was going on about.
What matters now, though, isn’t what he looked like, it’s what he did.
Actually, even that doesn’t matter. What matters is what the captain asked him to do and what it meant to her that she asked him to do it.
Actually, what probablyreallymattered, what probably mattered tohim, is that not long after the events I’m about relate he would die in horrific agony along with almost the entire crew of the Pequod. And I’m probably doing him, his family, and his memory a disservice by trying to make the whole fucking thing into some kind of metaphor.
But screw it. He’s dead and I’m alive and I’ve started now so I’ll damned well finish. I’m telling this story, and that makes it mine, even though it was other people’s blood that was spilled to make it.
Anyway.
Shortly after we met with the Bachelor—or was it before?—the captain dispatched me from her bed to the engineering bay with a request.
“She wants a harpoon,” I explained to Lobscouse.
“She has a harpoon,” he replied. His voice came from an obsidian-black synthesizer that occupied the bottom half of his face. It sounded almost unnaturally harmonious. “The whole damned ship is full of harpoons. It’s a hunter-barque.”
“She wants aspecialharpoon.”
Not having eyes, Lobscouse couldn’t roll them, but he achieved much the same effect with his chest and shoulders.
“She asks,” I went on, “that it have a Leviathan-bone haft cored with a high-susceptibility alloy, that the tip have a monomolecular edge and a toggled head in the Temple style. She said you’d know what that meant.”
