The Story
Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches which are all that remains of what we once called society. Having long exhausted any conventional sources of energy, life in the solar system is now sustained by a volatile, hallucinogenic substance called spermaceti, which is harvested from the brains of vast cetacean like Leviathans that swim the atmospheric currents of Jupiter.
Finding herself with no money and little to occupy her groundside, the narrator (āIā) takes a commission aboard the hunter-barqueĀ PequodĀ as it sets out in pursuit of precious spermaceti. Once aboard, however, she finds herself pulled inexorably into the orbit of the barqueās captain, a charismatic but fanatically driven woman who the narrator names only as āAā. As theĀ PequodĀ plunges ever deeper into the turbulent, monster haunted atmosphere of the gas giant, the narrator begins to lose herself in the eerie word of Leviathan hunting and the captainās increasingly insistent delusions; the only thing that might keep her grounded is the bond she develops with Q, a woman from the wreck of Old Earth whose skin is marked with holographic light and who remembers things otherwise lost.
Description
Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches which are all that remains of what we once called society. Having long exhausted any conventional sources of energy, life in the solar system is now sustained by a volatile, hallucinogenic substance called spermaceti, which is harvested from the brains of vast cetacean like Leviathans that swim the atmospheric currents of Jupiter.
Finding herself with no money and little to occupy her groundside, the narrator (āIā) takes a commission aboard the hunter-barqueĀ PequodĀ as it sets out in pursuit of precious spermaceti. Once aboard, however, she finds herself pulled inexorably into the orbit of the barqueās captain, a charismatic but fanatically driven woman who the narrator names only as āAā. As theĀ PequodĀ plunges ever deeper into the turbulent, monster haunted atmosphere of the gas giant, the narrator begins to lose herself in the eerie word of Leviathan hunting and the captainās increasingly insistent delusions; the only thing that might keep her grounded is the bond she develops with Q, a woman from the wreck of Old Earth whose skin is marked with holographic light and who remembers things otherwise lost.
