An Unkindness of Ghosts Read online

  ii

  On the subject of amputations—

  Seventy years into Matilda’s voyage, days after the disaster that claimed the bulk of the Guard’s high-ranking members, a scientist named Frederick Hauser proposed a solution to the problem of the Tarlands’ declining population.

  It was wasteful, he declared, to recycle the Tarlanders’ defective bodies into Matilda when the steady pulse of an electrical current could reanimate them as perfect, obedient workers. It didn’t matter that the genetic anomaly endemic to their people might lead to their extinction if their spiritless cadavers could hoe fields effectively. No productivity loss.

  The few who’d survived the disaster crinkled their brows at Hauser’s scheme. They argued that every being in the Heavens’ creations deserved the dignity of death.

  According to Hauser, however, Tarlanders were not of the Heavens. Even beasts of the field were made male and female, were they not? So they might multiply and spread the Heavens’ bounty. Tarlanders did not come male and female—

  everything but.

  In his speech to the Guard’s remaining members, preserved forever in a phonograph cylinder, Hauser explained that Tarlanders came from the Realm of Chaos—the world that existed before the Heavens overruled it, replacing nonsense with divine structure. Their demon forms could not conform to the Holy Order set forth by the Heavens.

  (Aster knew he referred to what the Surgeon once called hereditary suprarenal dysregula. Due to a broad range of hormonal disturbances, Tarlander bodies did not always present as clearly male and female as the Guard supposed they ought. This explained Aster’s hairiness and muscular build despite being born without the external organs that produced testosterone.)

  The man who’d taken the role as interim sovereign cleared his throat and, judging by the sound of a clinking glass on the recording, drank from a glass of water. He said that he could not allow the degradation of a creature in the Heavens’ realm, whether that creature came from somewhere else or not.

  Hauser countered with a compromise. Via amputation, he could use body parts rather than the body whole. Electrified arms to pull rakes. Electrified hands for sewing.

  The Interim Sovereign asked Hauser to leave, but the meeting carried on after his departure. They debated the merits of the scientist’s idea. The recent disaster meant Matilda was in turmoil. Such a program might reify the supremacy of the Sovereign and his Holy Order of the Guard.

  Ultimately, however, they decided the plan required too many resources and too much manpower to implement, especially with their depleted ranks. Their meeting moved on to other business before the phonograph recording cut off abruptly.

  Aster had asked the Surgeon if any of the record cylinders explained the event that had weakened them so substantially. He shook his head. Most recordings of the transitional Guard’s meetings had been destroyed.

  Aster carried that knowledge inside her. These men had the means and opportunity to destroy evidence, to protect their legacy, but not one of them thought earnest discussion of reanimating a person’s limbs for the purpose of manual labor warranted deletion from their official record. Forget the horrifying cruelty—the incompetent science of it all.

  * * *

  “Wait, now, yo’wa, not so quick,” said Flick’s great-grandmeema. She tugged Aster’s suspenders and dragged her back through the cabin hatch. “Take this.” She held out a large gray cloak.

  “I should be—” Aster started, but stopped herself when she remembered Flick’s anti-should tirade. “I have to be going.”

  “See if it fits. Won’t take but a second to try it on,” Flick’s great-grandmeema said, reminding Aster of her Aint Melusine. The woman who raised Aster had similar levels of persistence.

  Flick’s great-meema smiled, revealing intermittent metal teeth, sloppily rooted. Whoever had installed the implants neglected to perform a sinus augmentation and gum graft on the decayed gingiva and posterior maxilla.

  Aster set down her medicine bag and took hold of the offering. Curled sheep’s wool lined the inside, off-white and dirt-stamped.

  “It’s been in my family since before Matilda, I reckon,” the old woman said. “I never had much use for it before these energy rations, except for those early-born babies who couldn’t keep their temperature up. I’ve washed out all the spit-up. It’s yours now. You like it?”

  Aster squeezed the soft lining. “It’s too dear.”

  The woman snorted and waved a hand. “I’d say it’s a pretty fair trade for the stove, no? We got quite the bargain.”

  In the corridor, a guard shouted orders, and Aster moved to the side where she couldn’t be seen in the cabin. “But you supplied the materials for the stove,” she said.

  “Materials are meaningless without knowledge, which is what you gave us. A cloak for a stove, that’s the trade.”

  Aster slipped her hand into her left trouser pocket to check her watch. If she wanted time in her botanarium before returning home to Q deck, she needed to leave now. “Really, it was nothing. I must go.”

  “How can you call such a gift nothing? If we’d known how to make one of those things two weeks ago, Flick might never got frostbite, certainly not bad enough to turn to gangrene. That stove could’ve saved my little one’s foot,” Flick’s great-meema said, dark face stern. “If we can get our hands on more alcohol—and believe me, we can; we Tide Wing women can get our hands on anything—when we do, we can save another from my great-grandbaby’s fate.” She tightened the loose-knit shawl around her neck before continuing: “You’re a smart one. You know as good as me and as good as Flick that there is no Promised Land. Matilda’s an orphan, a daughter of dead gods. But the Ancestors is real and their spirits are at work. Baby Sun giving out is how they making a fuss. Tryna tell us it’s time to move, to act. They gave us the same message twenty-five years ago, but we didn’t listen. So they had to make their message louder, break Baby Sun even more. You hear me?”

  Aster didn’t know if the woman meant hear literally or as a euphemism for understand. Depending on which it was, Aster’s answer would be different.

  “We got to help each other survive long enough to find out what the spirits have in store. That means not dying of cold. Please, try on the cloak.”

  Aster unstrapped her rucksack from her back and set it down next to the cooler and medicine bag. “Fine,” she said, then slid on the cloak.

  “Magnificent,” Flick’s great-meema observed. “Do you like it?”

  The fabric weighed six or seven pounds, and it pressed down on Aster’s body. “I do. It is warm and pleasingly heavy. My sincerest gratitude, eldwa.”

  The woman tilted her head, squinted her eyes. “You have a harsh accent,” she said. “It’s elwa. Not eldwa. Elwa. See how much better that sounds? Soft like syrup. Though I prefer you not call me that at all. Who wants to be reminded they are old? Call me he’lawa. I am a healer, like you. Well, not quite like you. You’re a little off, aren’t you?” The woman grabbed Aster’s chin, turning her face so they were forced eye to eye. “You’re one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”

  Aster had been called worse: simple, dumb, defective, half-witted dog, get on all fours and spread. Not all there.

  But Aster was all there. She felt herself existing. Perhaps the derogative referred to her motherlessness. A part of each person lay in their past, in their parentage and grandparentage, and if that history was missing, were said people incomplete?

  “I’ll return to examine Flick as soon as I’m able,” Aster said, and bade goodbye once again. She felt thankful that the woman let her go this time.

  Two guards stood at either side of the corridor. Aster had a pass to be away from her home deck but she kept her head down, not wishing to draw attention to herself. Pass or not, they might have a mind to start trouble.r />
  A shaved-headed teenager sold blankets in the middle of the corridor, and patrons lined up to barter. They carried bars of soap, swaths of cotton, ivory combs.

  Subfreezing temperatures weakened what were already not particularly robust immune systems, and people hobbled to their quarters, wrapped in knit scarves that provided little barrier. Aster thought she should give her new cloak to one of them, but it felt too good around her.

  An elderly woman shouted at three children, and they cried. Tears made the charcoal circled about their eyes run down their cheeks in watercolor swirls. They did that here on T deck—smudged black onto their faces in thick, wide circles. Rakkun eyes, they called it, after the scavenging animal; for they descended from a scavenging people.

  So they said. So they told themselves. So their stories went. This far from the past, no one could truly know their history.

  The children were siblings, going by the look of them. All three shared the same murky gray irises, the color near identical to the ashy swells beneath their eyes. She’d seen them before on the Field Decks during one of her shifts. They didn’t work near her, of course, being from different decks, but she’d noticed them in passing.

  The elderly woman pointed a bony finger at them, and they ran away, right into Aster. They scurried past her without an apology, patting their pockets to make sure nothing had fallen out during the bump.

  Lowdeckers, Aster included, hoarded. Pockets got new life as homes for various and sundry collectibles—poppyserum, antibiotics, seeds, thread, screws, thimbles. Aster had stolen whole stalks of corn from the fields before. Slid them up her trouser leg.

  “Watch where you’re going,” one of the children called over their shoulder, and she did. After Tide Wing came Tributary Wing. Aster took the staircase downward, leaving T deck for her botanarium. There, at least, there was some kind of quiet.

  iii

  Xylem Wing, like all X deck, smelled of decay. You can’t expect the dead to wear perfume, Aster’s Aint Melusine had said. She’d guided Aster through the abandoned deck as a child. No one but ghosts is here, child. Do what you want with it. What had once been a mess hall was now Aster’s botanarium.

  She returned there now, desperate for the sanctuary of her private garden and laboratory. She spun the handwheel and opened the hatch, eyes closed reverently. Pungent florals scented the air.

  “Finally,” said Giselle, rifling through a pile of papers. “It’s almost curfew. I was starting to think you weren’t gonna come here to—whatever it is you say you got to do every night. Debrief or decompose.”

  Giselle knew very well the word was decompress. Aster dropped her medicine bag on the floor, set the ice chest with Flick’s foot by the hatch. She’d only been away since this morning, but she’d missed the botanarium’s moss-covered walls, the vine-strangled support beams. Rows and rows of her botanical progeny welcomed Aster with their familiar order.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, in no mood to deal with Giselle. After her shift in the Field Decks, she’d had only a brief break for supper before going to tend to Flick. She needed quiet and she needed solitude.

  Aster undid the straps of her rucksack, wiggling her shoulders and arms out of them. As she did, the brass radiolabe clipped to her right trouser pocket slipped out. Tarnished and dented, it didn’t make for particularly fine jewelry, but Aster wore it daily because it had belonged to her mother. It was the tool she’d used to detect radiation levels as one of Baby Sun’s mechanics.

  “Because I like it here,” Giselle finally replied. “Didn’t you say I was always welcome?”

  “I said that you were welcome as long as I was here. I would argue that last bit is a rather important addendum.”

  Giselle shrugged, head bent over Aster’s papers. She’d cut her hair today. The curls poked out from her head unevenly, unsure of their place. “You got no more right to this space than I do. Far as I’m concerned, it’s my botanarium too. It’s warm in here, actually warm. I’m so tired of being cold. I got just as much right to be warm as you.”

  Aster’s radiolabe bounced rhythmically against her as she walked the twelve feet to her desk. She squeezed it hard, hard enough to make a dimple in the soft metal with her finger pads. There was no harm she could do to something already so broken. As a child, she’d done everything she could to get it working, sneaking it to the parts of the ship highest in radiation. She’d even tried it down here on X deck, thought maybe the reason it didn’t work was because she’d been using it wrong. Maybe Aster’s meema hadn’t meant for the device to sense normal types of radiation, the ones from the natural world, but rather the types from the other world. Ghosts. Nine years old and still prone to childish flights of fancy, Aster had traipsed X deck’s supposedly haunted corridors, radiolabe held out in front of her. If there were spirits there like her Aint Melusine said, surely the radiolabe would beep.

  It didn’t. She tried it in all of Matilda’s secret passages because she liked to unearth abandoned things.

  “Are you listening to me at all?” asked Giselle.

  Aster’s thoughts had wandered off but she had the presence of mind not to tell Giselle that. “I am listening,” she said.

  “It feels safe down here.” Giselle looked up from the scattered papers to stare at Aster. “Can’t trust nowhere else on this ship. I swear, even the walls are alive. Every time I think I’ve found a good spot, an abandoned closet, there’s things lurking just round the way. Guards, mostly. They got a special eye on me. It’s something in my blood they smell.”

  Giselle wrapped skinny arms around her middle and hugged herself. “Here I can be practically naked,” she continued, standing, kicking off her boots, pulling down her tights. “It’s so gloriously hot. And safe.” She hopped up onto the counter to sit, thighs spread, her buttocks squashing and crinkling the papers she’d just been reading. “The heat, it’s like—it feels like energy from someone doing conjure.”

  Aster felt it hypocritical to chastise Giselle’s magical thinking when moments ago she’d recalled childhood attempts to spy ghosts with her mother’s radiation detector, but she still felt the need to set Giselle straight. “The warmth here has nothing to do with conjure or magic. It’s heat lamps powered by energy siphoned from Baby Sun. Simple.”

  “If it’s so simple, why don’t you do it to the rest of the lowdecks, huh?” said Giselle.

  “The amount of energy required to heat one large cabin does not compare to that necessary to heat the whole of ten lowdecks. Someone monitoring Matilda’s electrical grid would notice.”

  “And while you’re at it, why don’t you unheat the upperdecks?” Giselle grinned wildly, ignoring Aster’s explanation of unfeasibility. “You can get your precious Surgeon to help. He’ll write you a pass to the Nexus like he writes you a pass to everything, and you can switch off they heat like they switched off ours. And I’m a good person. I’m not even asking you to ice up their modest little bajillion-mile mansions. Heavens forbid! Just the sporting fields and the meadows,” she said, her tone growing more serious, like she thought this an actual option.

  “The average upperdeck estate is 9,300 square feet,” said Aster. “Not a bajillion miles.”

  Giselle rolled her eyes. “The point is . . .” she began, but Aster knew what the point was. Cutting off heat to the lowdecks when there were woods, lakes, beaches, and game fields in the upperdecks didn’t make sense if the actual goal was conserving energy.

  We must protect the wildlife sanctuaries. Like Giselle, Aster had read the newspaper article on the importance of preserving the upperdecks’ nature spaces.

  “If I could switch our fates with theirs, I would,” said Aster. She happily imagined two updeck men navigating the A deck hedge maze one fine Matildan afternoon. They’d feel suddenly underdressed, then downright chill. Lost in the maze, they’d huddle together for warmth before eventually dying of hypothermia. “I’d do it in a second.”

  Giselle stilled her swinging legs fro
m her seat atop the counter. “Would you? Would you really do it? Sometimes I don’t think you’re any different from one of them . . . how you talk. How you strut about this ship like some sort of god—and why? Lots of us is doctors and healers down here, and we managed it without help from the Surgeon. You ain’t special just cause you got all your stupid passes.”

  Aster scraped her nail along the outer thread of her trouser pocket, working the frayed stitches loose. She agreed that she wasn’t special, not in the colloquial sense that implied one’s difference was praiseworthy. Rather, she was plain-old strange. Always had been.

  At nine years old, she used to outfit a tiny wooden doll in a cardigan and navy corduroys. Giselle had sewn the clothes out of fabric stolen from the wardrobes of upperdeckers, using her thumb as a dress form.

  Aster pretended the smartly dressed figurine was a clever, important scientist, and the doll-woman’s bunkmates had seen fit to host a ball in her honor, because they liked her, because they valued her, because they didn’t think her odd or unpleasant to be around.

  Aster had placed the doll in front of a spool of thread, which was to be the doll-woman’s podium. As a result of Dr. Doll’s research and expert mastery of astromatics, the HSS Matilda has found a habitable planet. No longer are we to wander the Heavens homeless, said another doll wearing a plaid skirt, introducing Dr. Doll.

  You’re so stupid, Giselle had said.

  I don’t care if you think I’m stupid. I will continue to do what I want to do without consideration for your opinion, said Aster.

  Giselle had sat down, legs crossed, elbows upon her knees. Fine, I’ll play your boring game . . . Who can I be? She picked up one of the wooden figurines, thumbed its juts and curves. How about I be your rival? Professor Doll believes your Dr. Doll is stupid if she thinks anybody is ever getting off this ship. She plans to set off a bomb at your stupid ball and blow everyone up just like Night Empress did that one time. Giselle scurried away and then returned with a matchbox. Explosives, she explained.