Call me Isma.
VNP-8851
Byㅤ Kothardarastrix
Published on 08 Mar 2025 03:53
by Kothardarastrix, Ethagon, and MasterTman2
VNP-8851
A carving on Ahab's leg that may depict his ship the Pelkot.
Item №: VNP-8851
Specifications: A prosthetic peg leg carved from the ivory of an Astrocetus and tipped with an irrilite ferrule. The leg is decorated with elaborate scrimshaw that includes depictions of various planets, stars, sailing ships, and extraterrestrial life forms, as well as script in Ortothan and an undeciphered variant of the language spoken in the prehistoric Fae Empire. This leg previously belonged to the famous space-whaler Captain Ahab, who disappeared in the early stages of the Yeren-Fae space race. It was recovered from an uninhabited planet, also called Ahab, that orbits a brown dwarf companion of the star Sirius.
Normalization Protocols: If you find this document, send it to Vanguard. In my present, they were an organization focused on letting the public know about things such as these, though they may no longer exist by the time this document reaches you. In that case I humbly ask you, dear reader, to bring this to a place known to you dealing with historical artefacts such as this for all to see.
Addendum
Call me Isma.
You may think it absurd or pretentious to begin my account this way, but if there is anyone who has the right to do it, and if there was ever a time and place for it, it is me, here and now. But I'm getting ahead of myself; let me explain.
Did you know that Moby-Dick is based on a true story? Several true stories, in fact. The idea of a whaling vessel sunk by its own preferred prey, and the horrific ordeal thereof, reached Melville's imagination through a literary account of that exact fate, suffered by a ship called the Essex in 1820. The book's infamous meandering passages on the science of whales and practice of whaling were drawn from various contemporary texts, as well as Melville's own experience aboard a whaling ship. Several of the book's minor characters are quite possibly based on people Melville met on that voyage. Even the titular cetacean is based on a real "person," a ferocious white whale called "Mocha Dick" that terrorized whalers near its namesake island for almost thirty years. But the book's other principal antagonist, the tragic Übermensch Ahab, has no clear real-world inspiration. How could he? One hopes that no one has ever led a life as miserable and monomaniacal as Ahab's doomed quest for terminal vengeance, or that if he has, he at least did not drag down and drown an entire crew of fools in his maelstrom of mad charisma. But alas, any student of history knows that men like Ahab are all too real, and that all too often they bring far more than a single ship and a hated whale along to their own watery graves.
It was as such a student of history that I first became aware of Moby-Dick, and of Ahab. The former came to me in a literature class, a required facet of my well-rounded education at the First University of Mars, but that course held my interest more tightly than any required curriculum did that year. We spent an entire semester on Melville's magnum opus, unpacking archetypes, dissecting metaphors, and following every one of Melville's fleeting allusions back to its root. Between the ten of us, we must have written almost as many essay pages as are in the book itself, and mine were probably the majority. That book affected me, in the unquantifiable way that books sometimes do. It made me long for that bygone eon when the solar system was young and the rust-red dunes of Mars were the beaches of an ocean that teemed with microscopic life. Often, I would stand at the edge of the dome and stare up at the pale blue dot of Earth, where my great-great-grandfather had once been a sailor, or so I had heard. Sometimes I would dream about the wind in my hair and the salt on my skin, the pounding power of the frigid waves, the shriek of seagulls… all things that I never really expected to experience.
There can be no doubt that this fascination with 19th-century seafaring, combined with the unavoidably extraterrestrial nature of my upbringing, is what steered me toward the particular aspect of history that, were there more of it to study, I might fairly call my specialty. Every Martian historian is an expert on space exploration, of course, since our grand cities are still but two generations removed from the first humans to set foot on the Red Planet, but almost all — perhaps even all but me — are limited almost entirely to those same humans. What I study is the era of space exploration that elapsed before our ancestors ever thought to explore the stars: the Yeren-Fae Space Race.
None can dispute the reality of Yeren space exploration, of course; the dozen Dyson trees discovered so far and the sparse but persistent population of feral Astrocetus are living testimonies to it, and I am but one of many astroarchaeologists who helped excavate the first Yeren colony's fossilized remains from Cydonia. Nonetheless, Fae spacefaring — spacefaering, if you will — remains a subject of great debate and skepticism. Many regard it with the same seriousness as tales of extraterrestrial cow theft or dreams of alien visitors.
Though the Church of the Second Hytoth obviously still exists, no indisputable evidence of the Ortothan Sidhe Hypothesis has been found on the moons of Uranus, and while someone clearly once lived on the planets of Alpha Centauri, they have just as clearly moved on to somewhere else entirely. Only "messages in bottles" remain, floating in unguessed numbers at unknown orbits throughout our solar system, and containing information that is satirical or metaphorical as often as it is factual. These scattered sources seem to suggest that the spacefaerers somehow traveled the stars in literal wooden sailing ships, across literal seas, an image so absurd and nonsensical that my belief in its reality has led to my derision by academics (and unwelcome celebration by tabloids) as an "ancient astronaut theorist". But even more so than this, the aspect of my studies that is most ridiculed, and perhaps most understandably so, is my attempt to biographize the real Captain Ahab.
For you see, unknown reader, while Herman Melville may not have known it, his iconic captain was just as real as Mocha Dick, though they lived billions of miles and hundreds of millennia apart. He was not a human man of Nantucket, searching Earth's oceans for a mundane whale on which to vent his vengeance; he was a legend, a god amongst men, the mightiest hunter and spacefaerer to ever sail the starry skies, and the last great champion of the Empire of the Mab… or so the old stories go.
There is, at most, a single primary source for Ahab's existence, and neither it nor the few secondary sources that exist have much to say; he was powerful, he was loved by the Fae, he despised the Yeren and (naturally) their space whales, and eventually, he disappeared without a trace. It is commonly supposed that he met mutual ends with an equally storied white whale-ship, though if any scholar has an opinion on that matter, it is unfailingly based less on the scant available facts than their supposition of whether a historical clash between a real Ahab and white whale is made more or less plausible by the seemingly independent existence of the same motif in fiction.
Any scholar, that is, except for me. I know for a fact that Ahab was real, and now you do as well, because it is his ivory leg, cut from a tooth of the white whale, that accompanies this message. The cost of this proof was immense, so I beseech you once more, unknown reader, to take the utmost care with it, and to ensure that it finds the eyes of those who will fully appreciate it. In pursuit of this pod's contents, I exhausted the archives of my college, combed the depths of Vanguard's database, waited years for observing time on the Galileo Deep Space Observatory, consulted with fringe Ortothan scholars, made forays to the Wanderers' Library, used strange and dangerous Fae magic to relive moments of the ancient past, and mounted multiple archaeological expeditions to Uranus and beyond, only the last of which yielded that which I sought, and that which I have now bequeathed to you along with the other fruits of my labor, bitter though they may be.
Melville, my stillborn star. Picture taken from the shadow of the planet, facing away from Sirius.
Forgive me; I undersell the extent, gravity, and peril of my adventure by calling it an "archeological expedition," when it would be much more appropriately described as a quest. I have gone far beyond the reasonable bounds of a science mission, cast common sense and self-preservation to the solar wind, and greatly exceeded the limited funding that Vanguard was willing to support my endeavors with. Perhaps they will consider this leg as equal repayment for the grant money I misappropriated to Phoenix Technologies along with the entirety of my own net worth and a terrifyingly large loan, in exchange for a very fast spacecraft and the cryogenic stasis pod that you found this message within. Part of me wishes that I had not been forced by the limitations of my bank account, the unprofitability of space exploration, and the tyrannical speed of light to make this journey myself, in lieu of an unmanned probe; but it is only a small part, for I truly would rather have died than not been the one to complete this great and fateful circle.
Ironic, isn't it?
According to the on-board clock — though I am hesitant to trust it, under the circumstances — my trip across the eight light-years to Sirius took approximately 100 years of subjective time, though special relativity will have made that time longer in your reference frame. I had half-hoped to be outpaced on my way to this system by a faster-than-light craft invented after my departure, but if such a technology does now exist, it is clear that the people of your time still see just as little value in exploring the Sirius system as they did in mine. What good is an inhospitable rock like the one I write this from, when Sol and Centauri already overflow with closer, larger, and more economically useful rocks than it? It is certainly of no use to me — nor, it seems, was it to Captain Ahab, of whom this leg is all that remains.
Sadly, I cannot be scientifically certain of what happened on this planet. But the agnostics I consumed and the Fae magic I performed before embarking on my journey, and perhaps my route's hermeneutic resonance with Ahab's ancient path, filled my long cryosleep with dreams of Ahab and monstrous pictures of whales, visions that I have now set down in two volumes and sent to the stars along with this message. If I truly dreamed these things the way they once occurred, then Ahab, the White Whale, and everyone else drawn into their colliding orbits were vaporized in this planet's toxic atmosphere two hundred thousand years ago, leaving this leg as the sole physical evidence of either's existence.
Planet Ahab, lit by Sirius to the left and Melville to the right.
I hope you can appreciate the gravity of this fact. When my ship arrived at Sirius and awoke me from cryosleep, I already had a vague idea of my destination, having previously discovered Sirius's brown dwarf companion with the GDSO. Now guided by the visions I received in stasis, I flew toward my stillborn star and eventually discovered — or, rather, _re_discovered — the planet Ahab. It looked exactly as it had in my dreams, though this fact was equal parts vindicating and disappointing, for it is but a lifeless, dusty rock akin to Luna or Mercury, wrapped in a thin orange atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. With the few instruments I had aboard, I briefly detected a hint of EVE, so faint that it could have been interference from my own life force, like a distant lighthouse glimpsed once through thick fog. Like the windborne cry of a man overboard, in the seconds before he plunges forever beneath the waves.
I landed as close to the detection as I could, but it still took many hours of canvassing the barren surface with nothing but a dowsing wand and a spacesuit to properly locate it. I could not convey to you the triumph, the elation, the relief I felt upon first cresting the rim of that crater and seeing Ahab's leg still standing at its center. Those moments were a higher peak of happiness than I had ever experienced before or ever will again, not in the least because they followed my life's deepest — well, now second-deepest — trough of despair. Had that leg not at last presented itself, I might have finally been persuaded by its absence that I was, in fact, the hack fraud that my critics have called me. It took all my willpower not to leap from the crater rim and seize the leg, or bow to it, or fall sobbing over it, but I did not let my elation overcome my training. Thoroughly photographing the artifact at every step of the process, I carefully removed from it the dust of two hundred millennia, painstakingly revealing each beautiful detail of Ahab's masterful scrimshaw. I now realize that I need not have been so delicate, for the same magic that preserved this leg through its fall from orbit protects it still, but nothing could have crushed my soul more than inadvertently destroying the object of my search in my enthusiasm to reach it… however thematically appropriate such an ill turn of luck might have been, where Ahab is concerned.
As cruel and lifeless as its namesake.
He deserved better. Better than a leg as his only legacy. Had just any of the crew survived the chase and made it home, the conflict could have gone a different direction. Without Ahab's invention of crossing the seas, it was a foregone conclusion for the Yeren to eventually outpace the Fae. Now he is relegated to be no more than a figure of the first decades of his own Race. Missing its period of genuine war followed by a peace born of exploration dis- and economic interest. The Yeren either left entirely or intermingled with the Ortothans depending on who you believe. None of it matters now. None of it mattered to Ahab in his end.
Nor will it matter much in mine. As you have certainly noticed, I am not within the cryo-pod or the ship that delivered it. In fact, I — or, by now, my bones — remain on the planet Ahab, curled at the base of a sun-bleached flag once planted here by a first mate named Stalu. I would have liked to send you that as well, but removing this marker would be a grave disrespect to the men who sacrificed everything to plant it here.
I suppose I should have known better than to trust an "affordable" and "experimental" spacecraft, or my own ability to operate it correctly, but I would not have done so had I been afforded any other option. I knew the risks of this journey as surely as Ahab did, and it is only fair that I, too, should succumb to them. I only wish that my downfall had been more heroic, or at least dramatic, than an undetected cryo-fluid leak. Perhaps I should have packed myself into this pod anyway and let suffocation or old age take me on the long road back to Mars, but — if you'll forgive the self-indulgence — I deserve better than that, for my efforts. My life will end in the same place I spent it searching for. It's only fair.
No, it's more than that.
It's fate.
Lest you think that I have gone as mad as my captain — and Ahab is my captain, for I have followed him to the end and, belatedly, gone down with his ship — I ask you to read again my transcribed visions of the Pelkot's final voyage and battle. Only Ahab's name is exactly the same between iterations, but he is not the only of Melville's characters to be proven real after all. Who is the loyal and caring first mate Starbuck, if not antlered and compassionate Stalu? Who is Pip the mad cabin-boy, if not young Pile and his gris-blasted brain? What is Fedallah, Ahab's strange and malevolent shadow, if not the curious Voruteut bound to his blood with the name Fetateuthis? Stubb and Flask are Struck and Flack, and even the huge, horned harpooners seem echoed by Tashtego, Daggoo, and dear Queequeg. It seems that every named crewman of the Pequod — itself named for a tribe near Nantucket, but no less a clear echo of the Name Pelkot — was in fact a Fae who lived and died two hundred thousand years ago. All, that is, but one.
Ishmael.
In retrospect, it is painfully obvious, isn't it? My own name — or, perhaps, my Name — was a sign, and a warning. No wonder I so loved Moby-Dick, for I am, and shall now always be, its bumbling, rambling, naive, doomed narrator. I know not why I was born a human in our space age instead of a Fae in theirs, or why only my Name echoed backwards through time instead of forwards like those of the ones who should have been my companions, but since that thought first entered my frozen, dreaming brain, it has tormented me. It would have been better, I think, to live and die beside them, consumed by the fire of Ahab, than to smother alone in his ashes. I wish that Queequeg was here, to hold me in the tattooed arms that haunted the confused dreams of my youth, or to smile at me with the gleaming tusks I glimpsed only twice in a hundred years of icy nightmares. I don't want to die alone. I don't want to die cold.
Forgive me, dear reader. I should not haunt you with my own torments, earned or otherwise. What's done is done, and by the time you've read this, even the traitorous gut bacteria who consumed my mummified corpse are likely extinct. Already, my breath is growing short and my vision dark; if my last testimony grows any longer or more meandering, I may drop dead before I can send it. Curse Herman Melville, for writing me with such verbosity! But bless him too, for granting me this fate. Though it is painful at the end, it is also glorious. I have no regrets.
Thank you, reader, for the time you afforded this auto-elegy, and for preserving these last vestiges of Ahab's legacy in my stead. As I launch my unmanned ship back to you, a message in a bottle like those of the old Ortothans, know that I send with it my heart. But not my soul… no, my soul rests here. At Sirius. At sea.
Goodbye.
The Heaviest Matter of the Universe