Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  The message was sealed with their cardinal’s encryption. She entered the key. Only two people on the ship knew it, herself and the Mother Superior. They heard from the cardinal so rarely that it took her two tries. Usually these messages were about changes in protocol—the desired length of wimple for their order, a new translation of the liturgies, what station had a shipment of communion wafers available. They had not seen a priest in three years. It was hardly necessary. A century ago the Fourth Vatican Council had allowed sisters of the religious life to perform every sacrament but confession, confirmation, and ordination. There weren’t enough priests out in the black to do it. And anyway, that was how it had been in the beginning.

  Dearest sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, the message began, His Holiness Pius XVI, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God, has decreed that there will be an accounting of the officiants of the Church.

  The last she’d heard, the Pope was Urban X, and he was dead. The announcement of Pius XVI’s appointment must have gotten lost. She did not like the sound of “an accounting,” but then, Sister Faustina was often told she had too great a mistrust of authority.

  A priest will meet you at your next convenient docking. He shall take an accounting of your numbers and activities and send it back to the Holy See. The assigned priest will be overseeing three convents, including yours, and split his time between them accordingly.

  Sister Faustina groped for her tea and swallowed two mouthfuls fast enough to burn the inside of her throat all the way down.

  His Holiness has decreed this as part of the continuing efforts to repair the Church after the Great War, and to minister to as many souls as possible. Further instruction will be sent.—Card. R. Capul.

  “Then why don’t you put the priest on his own ship?” she muttered. The message was dated two months ago. Further instruction had almost certainly already been provided, and was waiting in a relay station somewhere for them to get in range of the signal.

  She resealed the message so no one without the key could read it. No one would. She trusted most of her sisters, and the ones that she didn’t trust were not the kind for subterfuge.

  Some of the other orders would welcome a return to the days of hierarchy. Not many of the shipbound ones. But she could imagine some planetary sisters longing for a past of rules and authority. You didn’t have to be so flexible when you had an atmosphere to hold you close and let you breathe all the air you could ever want.

  The hatch behind her opened. Sister Faustina knew it was the Mother Superior by her creaking bones.

  “Is the colony confirmed?” she signed. “Any other news?”

  Sister Faustina considered the message. There were no secrets in convents, they said. But there were secrets wherever there were humans to have them. “Phoyongsa III checks out. Other than that—just spam.”

  The Mother Superior was staring at Sister Faustina’s screen. Sister Faustina looked back, but she hadn’t forgotten to hide the cardinal’s message.

  “Mother?”

  The older woman squinted at her and then, slowly, nodded. “Very good.”

  “Perhaps you should sleep a bit, before we land.”

  Any of the other sisters, even Mary Catherine, would have had more luck. The Reverend Mother barely managed an indulgent smile for Sister Faustina’s meddling. “Always work to be done, Sister.”

  The Reverend Mother smacked the button next to the hatch, and the contracted muscle relaxed when the electrical current running through it changed. She stepped through and was gone. The current changed back, the muscle contracted, and the hatch sealed back up with a damp pop. Sister Faustina reopened the cardinal’s message and read it again. She would show it to the Reverend Mother. Just not yet. She needed to think over it first. It was an ugly portent to have the Church decide it wanted to be a central dictate again. She had grown up in the ruins of the last war and had no desire to see another. Even if they would have to bring Venus and Mars and the Saturn moon colonies under their iron fist before they reached out for the second and third systems.

  And right after the ascension of a new pope. She didn’t know anything about this new one, but she had kept her ear to the ground. New nuns and priests who had been educated in the first system called Earth His chosen cradle. They spoke about a future under Central Governance like a good thing, with the thoughtless repetition of children who hadn’t yet learned to question what their teachers said. Orders who spent most of their time in the second system, just one jump away from Earth, said new rules were coming faster than they had in a generation. Little things—what cloth was appropriate for women of the religious life, what questions should be asked of a marrying couple before the marriage would be performed, the order of hymns. All starting in the last few years, when the old pope had taken to his sickbed.

  And there were whispers among the new colonists coming here to the third system. Central Governance attempting to collect on old, prewar land claims in the Mars Republic and the Saturn polities. Fresh-eyed young Earthlings arriving on new colonies armed with gifts of expensive agricultural tech and leaflets espousing the glorious benevolence of Central Governance.

  Sister Faustina had listened to all these reports with growing horror. It sounded like Central Governance wanted another war. It sounded like they had forgotten the death, the irradiated lifeless colonies that would lay fallow for generations, the plagues of swallowpox and that beast ringeye leaving towns full of nothing but corpses, the shipfuls of frozen bleeding bodies that still drifted derelict all across the systems.

  Her mothers and father had been soldiers in that war, and after ECG had abandoned them when the supply chains failed, they indentured themselves to a mining moon and died one after the other of redlung, hacking up bits of themselves with every wracking cough. The air on that moon went out so often that Sister Faustina had learned spacesign before she was out of diapers. The stories said that the language only required one hand so that you could cling to a safety rail with the other and save yourself from the vacuum. Secretly she thought it was because so many people lost limbs on the small hardscrabble colonies.

  When she was sixteen, burying her father, she realized she was too poor for the customary pyres, too poor for passage away, too poor to buy herself any life but the dust-choked one that had killed her parents. And so she had gone to the only church on the moon and claimed that her heart was full of God and begged the priest to sponsor her as a novice.

  She was religious enough, yes—in the way that everyone who stepped foot outside of gravity’s embrace was religious. They all prayed in the dark, be it to the Christian God or the Islamic one or the Hindu many-faced pantheon or the cruel, calculating, exacting god of Science.

  The Reverend Mother knew the truth, of course. They had an understanding. She had accepted Sister Faustina in her novitiate, and on the eve of her vows, called her to a private audience.

  “Why did you choose this path?” the Reverend Mother had signed.

  Sister Faustina looked into the Mother Superior’s eyes and knew there was no point in lying. “I want to be of service. And I want to see this universe that I am but a speck in.”

  “You do not feel called to glorify Him and His works?”

  “I want to do good.” It was true. Even in her short novitiate she had seen enough dying men brought peace by the ritual of a sacrament to believe that this was a good life to lead. “I do not think I am filled with His light as others are. I see this as—a match for my talents.”

  “You will not have a family of your own body. You cannot break your vows for the pleasures of the flesh. I will have you expelled if you do.”

  “I have never felt drawn to such pleasures, Mother.”

  “You will not marry anyone, or officiate funerals, or baptize. Th
ose are sacred duties and I will not have them cheapened.”

  “Words are not my talent anyway.” She knew machines and their intricacies, and she knew logistics and careful planning. Her tongue had always been clumsy and graceless.

  “Very well,” the Reverend Mother had said. This was space and to survive, the old ways must be bent. They had never spoken of her shaky faith again.

  For sixteen years, Sister Faustina had served aboard the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. She had held cool cloths to the foreheads of plague victims and she had learned the basics of surgery. She had gathered up orphaned children and heard the last words of the dying. She cared for the communications array, and the machinery in the hydroponics bay, and all the other metal appendages grafted onto the beast that ferried them through the stars. More times than she could count she had put on a suit and stickboots and clambered outside to reposition antennae or rewrap wiring into the folds of the ship’s skin (like rubber, it was, like the soles of good strong work boots that would keep a man in a hard job alive). She rarely prayed outside of collective worship, but out there, when she was separated from the heavens by only a few millimeters of alloy and glass, she felt God blazing from every planet and star.

  She would give her life for this ship. She would do whatever it took to protect this small life she had built. And that was why she did not tell the Reverend Mother about the message.

  There were other matters to attend to anyway—the communications log recorded three outgoing messages. One was from Sister Lucia to the university on Taurus IX, asking for yet another article to be sent. Two were from Sister Gemma. The first was an accounting of their current predicament with the ship’s desire to mate and a long report on its physiology, sent to a shipwright in the second system. The second she had tried to cover with a boring subject line, but Sister Faustina recognized the recipient. She had been following Sister Gemma’s correspondence.

  Yet another secret she was keeping that the Reverend Mother should have known about. But she believed in letting people make their decisions in private. And more than that: she did not like how the Reverend Mother was changing this past year.

  * * *

  After twelve bells of quiet travel, they arrived at Phoyongsa III in what was morning on that moon. The whole ship shivered when they broke the atmosphere. Outside, it was unfurling its tough outer skin to reveal the soft, darker-green flesh underneath and absorb the filtered sunlight. It would expand its cilia to drink in the moisture from the clouds and all of the nutrients—helium, mostly, on this little ball of rock—that it could not take in when it was compacted against the pressures of space. The sisters pressed their faces against the portholes to feel real sunlight, even though the radiation didn’t penetrate the glass. This sun was a swollen old giant hanging red-orange and huge over the horizon. Below, orange tarps marked where soon there would be houses and a communal kitchen and a mine shaft or a trade post or whatever these ones had decided to take on for their industry.

  When they set down, Sister Faustina helped Sister Varvara heave the gangplank down from the wall. Once they’d set it down on the lip of one of the ship’s calloused plates, she shaded her eyes to look out over the colony.

  The earth was red here, iron-rich, good for crops like sweet potatoes and radishes. The colonists were already working on the sweet potatoes. The thin green stems had been carefully planted in rows of moist brown mounds on the eastern side of the settlement. Rabbits sat fattening in a pen, chickens in another. From the gangplank, the rabbits looked like Mars variants. Very fine hair, very pale. Someday, if this colony lasted long enough and did not add to the gene pool too often, there would be a Phoyongsa III subspecies. Or maybe the colony would not last, but the rabbits would survive, and they would grow and mate and feed alone for generations, until they were no longer a subspecies at all.

  The sisters crowded the open hatch. After months in the ship and orbital stations, the sunlight tingled. The air smelled of so many layered things—flowers, dung, livestock, and cool breeze off water. Sister Lucia helped the Reverend Mother down from the gangplank first.

  “Welcome.” The captain greeted them first. Her name was Terret, a Venusian name, taken from the bright blue birds that flourished on the floating habitats there. She carried a baby with the big, dark eyes of the man beside her. The other colonists huddled behind them, maybe thirty in all. They had already set a long table down the middle of their only road. Sister Faustina picked out the engaged couples by the way they held each other’s hands so gingerly, as if the sisters might actually deny them a ceremony. “Please come and share a meal with us. It’s not much, I’m afraid, but . . .”

  “I’m sure it’s lovely,” Sister Faustina replied.

  Terret nodded and hurried to the table. They were all so nervous. Even the ones of other religions—and Faustina picked out a couple of Hindus and a Buddhist on first sweep. So much could go wrong in a new colony. Ecosystems were so fragile, and humans were such a strain. One wrong step and they could turn their paradise into a desolate rock.

  This was part of why their order still wore the old style black robes, wimples, and habits. For a long, long time, they had done away with such vestments. It made sense when they were confined to Earth. Here, out where there had never been a government truly (and there certainly wasn’t one anymore) the vestments made them stand out. They were a passport through war zones and onto stations whose docking charges they would not have otherwise been able to afford. And in situations like this, a new colony fresh off the ship, they were a bit of a good luck charm.

  This colony was so fresh that their deadship was only half broken-down. One thruster lay against the poly-clad exterior of the back of the ship, and a pile of titanium doors lay stacked on the ground. Soon enough the colonists would have those broken down to component pieces or put through a recycler for the raw metal, and then they would go to building houses or tillers or furnaces.

  There was no church here, but they didn’t need one. A bowl of water would do for the baby, a few tall grasses lashed together in the half-shell of a house would be enough of an arch for the marriages. Sister Ewostatewos had the communion wafers and the licenses that they would transmit to the authorities who mattered in this system. Another copy would be attached to the colony-grant. Sister Gemma had taken the crucifix down from the chapel and was already clambering up on top of crates of rice and seeds to put it up on the wall of a roofless house.

  “Please,” Terret said. They had spread two tables in the middle of the town, already laden with rice and stewed beef tack. “I’m starving. Everything I eat the little one takes, I swear.”

  “Babies will do that,” Sister Varvara said. “May I hold him?” And with that, the tension broke and they all sat down to eat.

  The food was simple. Mostly leftover rations. Dried beef stewed with tomato paste and spices and water into a mouth-tingling curry. Rice cooked with dried lime leaves. A salad made from a flat moss that grew here that was crunchy like butter lettuce with the flavor of leeks, dressed in vinegar and mustard. For dessert, brown sugar cooked in powdered milk and agar agar until it became a caramel pudding. The fresh meat—on this moon, that consisted of lizards long as a forearm, six of them sitting in a pen—would wait for the wedding. It was delicious, all of it.

  Sister Faustina scraped up rice with the side of her spoon along with a long trail of curry that had collected in the rim of her plate. The plates were Martian china—she could tell by the pattern, a mountain-range design that had been popular before the war—and heavy. It would have cost a lot to bring them here in fuel and lost cargo space. “These are lovely.”

  “Thank you,” Terret said. She pointed to her husband, a tall and quiet man. “They are from Joseph’s family. They were a wedding present, an heirloom. We were living off gov-issue fiber-pulp plates before.”

  Another man scooped more rice into another pot set over a burning fuel canister. The canvas bag was marked with the nine-planet stylization o
f the first system and CENTRAL GOVERNANCE ISSUED over the date stamp.

  “Did you spend time on Earth?” Sister Faustina asked. A polite way around to her real questions.

  Terret shook her head. “They have stations around the first system where you can go and get your vaccines and supplies. They’ve got a whole charitable arm for small colony-shares like us—the New Worlds Foundation. I wouldn’t have done it if not for the price—my parents still hate Central Governance, even though the old government’s nothing but a memory and a couple of blast sites back on Earth now. But it was so cheap. The whole package—standard ration pack, vaccines and med kits, chemlights and fuel canisters—was half of what we’d have paid on an independent station. All we had to do was sit through a presentation and take some pamphlets, and we recycled the pamphlets as soon as we left orbit. They made us promise to send them statistical data, but it wasn’t anything we wouldn’t be broadcasting anyhow.”

  Joseph sighed into his plate.

  “You didn’t like the deal?” Sister Faustina asked. Sister Lucia frowned at her from across the table. This was supposed to be a happy day, and she was spoiling it with questions. Oh, well. She would stop before she ruined any matrimonial harmony.

  “Not so long ago they were bombing us,” Joseph said. “And now, we take their propaganda.”

  “We didn’t listen to it,” Terret argued. “What’s the harm in wasting their paper?”

  “I think they forget their defeat too quickly,” Joseph said, and picked his spoon back up to put an end to the matter.

  “It’s a good thing we didn’t have Keret yet.” Terret hugged the boy close to her. She must be very capable, to juggle being a captain and the leader of a colony and a mother. Any one of those was a full-time job. “He would have hated the vaccines. We gave him the after-birth ones and he wailed like he was being born again.”