Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  * * *

  The Reverend Mother sat on her bed, in her chamber, under the crucifix, praying. She was supposed to be asking for guidance in the matter of the ship and its imprinting on a mate. And what a theological tangle—could a consecrated house be allowed to mate, be fertilized, give birth? Or to seed another? It was a hermaphrodite species—many of its evolutionary cousins did not even require a mate. No matter their decision, scholars back in Rome would debate it for years with increasingly esoteric justifications.

  Not so very long ago she had loved those debates, their citations and countercitations, their appeals to history and linguistics and textual analysis. If she were another person, with another past, she would have tried to stay in the Vatican as a scholar.

  Though if she had another past, she would not have chosen this life at all. Her bones missed the gravity of her youth. Ship gravity was different. She told her sisters she was from an orbital station in the second system, and that she had only done her novitiate on Earth, but that wasn’t true. No matter how often people told her that ships’ gravity was the same as on Earth, she felt the difference. Her body did not connect so surely to the ground beneath her feet.

  The Reverend Mother had not spoken aloud in forty-three years. Even now, with only her creator to hear, she prayed in sign language. In the early years, she had been so afraid of slipping. So afraid of uttering a word and realizing a stranger was within earshot. Now her past was forty years gone, along with most of those who had known her, and she had lived more of her life silent than speaking. It was a strange thing, to realize you were no longer the person you were.

  The trouble was, the past was returning.

  It bubbled up inside her in the strangest of times. Standing with her sisters in the chapel, she sometimes turned to them and saw not Gemma and Lucia and Ewostatewos and Faustina and Mary Catherine and the others, but long-dead friends. The sisters’ names were overwritten with the names of her novitiate class, or those of the sisters who had been on board the Saint Afra’s Tears, her first convent. Some nights, she woke and was sixteen again, a London girl before the Fall, looking out a window on a city of a billion people. It took so long, these days, to come back to herself and realize those were stars out the glass and not millions and millions of lights from all the people living on top of each other. Sometimes it took until breakfast for her to remember herself.

  When she had accepted the posting to the newly consecrated Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, the Reverend Mother had intended to die aboard this ship. She had intended to lead her sisters until her heart gave out aiding some plague-stricken asteroid crew or when a gravity-less hour finally let a stroke into her brain.

  But now she knew—her mind was vanishing.

  “Lord,” she signed. She had the same crucifix in her chamber as they had in the chapel. This one she had carried with her from her novitiate in her small allotment of personal items. The faces on this batch had come out poorly. Jesus barely had a mouth, and not even the suggestion of a nose. She had taken it in like a stray. Back then, she’d had an exile’s affection for misshapen things. “Tell me what to do. I don’t know anymore. I barely know myself anymore, some days.”

  She had hidden her losses so far. So many words took her a moment to dredge up in sign language, and that moment saved her over and over from saying what she shouldn’t. Someone would notice soon. Maybe they would chalk it up to the inevitable decline of age, but if it continued, there would be no denying she was not fit for her post. She wasn’t familiar anymore with where they sent sisters no longer able to carry out their duties. She would not be allowed to stay aboard the ship. Ships had no allowance for dead weight. Even on orbital stations—some of which were so large they were nearly moons—the margins for water and nitrogen recycling were so thin that they would not carry an extraneous old woman.

  When she was on board the Saint Afra’s Tears, a sister had retired because her arthritis had gotten too bad for her hands to work the airlock release in an emergency evacuation. That was thirty years ago, but the only place to go was back to her family, or to the homes run by Rome on Earth. The Reverend Mother had no family. After the war, London was a crater. The moon was split by rebellion. Like so many she had scattered—

  That wasn’t true.

  She was only allowed to tell herself true stories now, she’d decided. She couldn’t allow her mind to twist upon itself any more than it already was.

  She hadn’t scattered, she had run. She had run from all of the things she should have been held responsible for. For decades afterward, her face had been on posters alongside the likes of General Frederick Lee, the Butcher of Mars, and President Shen, the Destroyer. No one she knew from those days would look for her among the religious. The idea of her being religious would have been an absurd joke. They all believed she was dead now. For years she had tried her damnedest to die, taking postings in colonies stricken with ringeye and moons still strewn with unexploded mines. By some cruel intervention, she had not. She had lived through the plagues and the bombings and the little skirmishes that no one called “war” for fear it would reignite the galaxy-spanning horror so freshly ended.

  Overhead, seven bells chimed. She had used up all her time spiraling. Soon it would be breakfast and time to officiate the weddings and baptize the baby, and she would have to act as if she were whole.

  Who could she tell? Lucia? Lucia was so sweet, so kind and dedicated, and she was a doctor. She would do what she was asked and tell no one. She would try to think of a solution. But she was also too kind, too much in love with everything and everyone around her. She would do what was kindest, and not what was needed.

  Faustina would make the hard choices. But while she had pragmatism in spades, her heart lacked the unnamed quality that Lucia had, the ability to be guided by only instinct and love.

  Gemma? In months past, she might have gone to their biologist. But something was wrong with Gemma. She had come to the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations so young, a wide-eyed novice with fingertips stained green from shipyard work and not a thing to hide. Now, the Reverend Mother could feel her closing in on herself, protecting some secret newly blossomed. In the romantic dramas that traveling ships transmitted back and forth to each other, sisters like them were supposed to carry no secrets. They were all supposed to be wide-eyed and innocent, waiting to be swept up by a dashing salvager or chemlight trader. That wasn’t true. Wherever there were people, there were secrets.

  * * *

  This moon had no predators. Birds with long necks sang at dusk and dawn, a sound like a woman whistling through her teeth. It wasn’t attractive, exactly. But it was birdsong unlike any other Sister Gemma had heard. She lay awake in the warm night listening to them swoop low over the pond, cry out, and pluck small fishes from the water. A whistle, a splash, a contented cry. Somewhere in the grasses, their nests lay hidden, and the birds would return to feed their young the meat of the fish they had chewed for them. Life from death, as it always was and always would be.

  In the morning, she helped the three brides dress. This was another duty she doubted would have been done by her foremothers, but they were shorthanded, and the other colonists were needed for the actual work of turning a grassland into homes. One bride had brought an antique dress, bright blue in the style of a century ago, with small silver buttons up her spine that Sister Gemma did up one by one.

  The bride had gathered thin grasses from the edge of the pond. She and her husband would wind them around each other’s wrists. An old custom, to marry them to the land as much as to each other. The grass would be dried and framed above their marriage bed. Sister Gemma had heard there was a pagan rite back on Old Earth that was similar, but she was not enough of a theologist to tell if they were related.

  The bride bent her head down so that Sister Gemma could slip the last lentil-sized button through its loop. She rubbed the grasses between her hands, discarding the small broken ones she found. They were of an age, and as S
ister Gemma did up the buttons, she felt dizzyingly like this was her own body she was dressing. A body from a different life.

  “I never thought this would happen,” the bride said. She finished picking the broken grasses from her bouquet and let them go.

  “Marriage?” Sister Gemma asked. One of the woman’s hairs had loosed from pins and tangled in the top button; Sister Gemma worked it free with fingers practiced from sewing her old habit back together.

  “All of it,” the bride said. “I love all of these people. I would give my life for any of them. I love this world even though I’ve only met it. I want to care for it so it will love me back. I have not had a life like that, Sister. Even three years ago I couldn’t have imagined this.”

  “I understand,” Sister Gemma said. “It’s so hard to contemplate the future. It’s so hard to imagine we can be anything other than what we are.”

  She realized her fingers were shaking against the nape of the woman’s neck, and she tugged on the waistline of the dress instead, to smooth the wrinkles.

  The Reverend Mother led the ceremony, of course, with Sister Lucia translating. Lucia would be a Mother Superior herself someday, Sister Gemma thought. She was full of conviction. It gave her every step gravity. You could see it, in the way her voice did not waver when she read the marriage vows for each couple to repeat and in how she smiled at each of them like they were precious and blessed. Not a cloud crossed the sky the whole morning, and the sun and fields looked like they rolled on ’til the edge of the universe.

  After the ceremony, all the colonists stripped down to their underclothes and threw themselves into the pond in a laughing, shrieking, screaming tangle of limbs and grins. Even the baby came, strapped against Joseph’s back, squalling when his toes hit the cold water.

  “Oh my,” Sister Mary Catherine said.

  “Oh, hush.” Sister Gemma watched from far enough back to call it a respectful distance. “Don’t look if you don’t want. We’re all made in His image, you know. There are some sects in the fourth system that conduct services in the nude, because they believe that is how He intended us to live.”

  “Life is a rich tapestry,” Sister Mary Catherine said and turned, primly, back to stirring the pot of chickpea-flour stew they would be feasting on in a few hours. Sister Faustina was setting up tents for the newlywed couples, scraped together from their ship’s emergency evac kit and the colonists’ extra sheets. After tonight, they would share tents again until the houses were built, but they deserved privacy on their first wedded night. Sister Lucia, so expert with a scalpel, had butchered the lizards and was roasting them skin-on over a fire built from real wood for the smoke. Their fat dripped down their golden meat and hissed in the embers. What a feast it would be, what a night it was.

  * * *

  All lovely things had to end of course, like the most beautiful of sunsets harkening a night cold enough to slice through flesh right into bone. The sisters reboarded the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations come morning, sent off with a sack of barley flour as a donation. As they lifted off, the fields and colonists shrank to the size of aphids, then the moon became a distant green speck, and then vanished entirely. The ship was impatient with the delay. It would not stay to the speed that Sister Ewostatewos asked of it and it pulled at the reins, edging them into the top-speed range, where the walls shuddered with its effort. You could feel it heaving, if you leaned against the softest places in the deepest rooms of it, the thudding great heart working to pump hemolymphatic fluid through a body as great as the grand beasts of Old Earth myth, those long-dead whales and elephants and apatosauruses.

  Before they began their gravity-fast, the sisters held chapel. Sister Lucia read the gospels and Sister Mary Catherine led them in song. They had new music to play, which had come from a relay system near the last moon and claimed to be an organ recital from before humanity took to the stars. Their liturgical calendar was eleven years old. Perhaps, Sister Faustina thought, as her voice rose with the second chorus of “Lord of the Dance,” this new priest the Church was sending to bring them to heel would have one. They still varied the liturgical seasons based on the turns of the Earth. Every few years another debate began about simply making a standardized, static calendar for use across the four systems. But those debates were as likely to succeed as the idea of heliocentrism in the age of Galileo.

  The Reverend Mother passed communion wafers among them and Sister Lucia gave her the Bible to read the next passage from. Sister Faustina watched the Reverend Mother closely, but she seemed herself again. For now. Last night, when Sister Faustina was awake at the communications array, she’d heard the old woman thrashing in her sleep.

  At the end of service, they turned off the gravity. The books were strapped down or put into cabinets. Sister Ewostatewos rubbed her hands across the moss on the walls of the chapel to seal the crucifix and the Stations of the Cross tightly to the wall once more. One by one they dispersed, pulling themselves along the handholds grown into the walls and floor and ceiling.

  Sister Faustina did not strap herself down when the gravity went off. She preferred the feel of it—on the world where she was born, the gravity was two-thirds of Earth Standard. The company that owned them had given all the children vitamin and hormone injections to grow the bones and muscles of Earthers, so they would be better miners. But Earth Standard Gravity still weighed heavy on her shoulders, like she was dragging an anchor. Two years ago was the last time the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations had docked at a moon with a similar gravity to that of her childhood, and when the rest of the sisters were sleeping in their chambers she had left the ship in her vacsuit skin instead of her habit and sprinted across the plains until the night air burned in her lungs, each leap taking her yards away.

  II.: Sententia probabilis

  SISTER LUCIA FOLLOWED THE Reverend Mother back from services. Her eyes were full of grit. She had slept little while they had been moored on the colony-moon. As she got older, she found that atmospheres and horizons disquieted her. Now, back on the ship, the tiredness crashed over her in one unbreaking wave.

  The Reverend Mother paused, gripping the handhold, her feet in their stickboots trailing out behind her. The hall was wide enough to pass, but Sister Lucia waited for her. Perhaps she had had an epiphany about the ship. They were getting so close to the point when they would have to shift its trajectory. Ships like these weren’t like deadships—at speed they could only make subtle turns, and they couldn’t afford to burn so much fuel on stopping to make a sharp turn.

  The Reverend Mother looked behind her, at Lucia. Her mouth was half-open, tempting speech. Her hand slipped on the bar until she was holding on to it with only her fingertips.

  “Mother?” Sister Lucia asked. “Did you forget something?” Perhaps she needed water. Sister Lucia’s own grandmother, in her dotage, had been stricken with sudden and desperate thirsts. Such were the indignities of age.

  The Reverend Mother licked her lips, and her tongue moved like she was trying to form a word. A chill struck Sister Lucia right in the coils of her guts and ran icily up her back. She did not know why the Mother Superior had taken a vow of silence. None of them did. She had heard that the Reverend Mother had been silent even on the first day of her novitiate. Whatever the cause, it was not a vow meant to be broken.

  “Mother,” she said, and let go of her own handhold to reach for her.

  The Mother Superior recoiled. Her hand flashed a sign—what was that? It was clumsy, the gestures blurring into each other and distorted by her shaking.

  “I don’t understand,” Lucia said. “I’m sorry, please tell me again. Are you all right?”

  “Please,” the Reverend Mother signed. “I understood too late. Please. You must forgive me.”

  Sister Lucia paused. Something told her she should not go closer just yet. She pressed her hand against the wall and the moss grew to hold her in place. “Forgive what?”

  The Reverend Mother shrank back against the
wall. The moss reacted as it was supposed to in zero-gravity, licking at her feet to try to hold her still. The Reverend Mother jumped and banged against the ceiling, trying to get away from its reaching fingers. “You must forgive me.”

  “You just had a moment of confusion, Mother . . . perhaps we should get you a cup of tea? It’s been a tiring few days.”

  “You must forgive me. You must forgive me. You must forgive me . . .” The words blended into each other, her fingers losing their dexterity. Sister Lucia caught only fragments—I was a fool and I did not know how cruel they were and like a chorus, please please please.

  “Mother!” Sister Lucia grabbed her arm. She had to make her stop, something was very wrong, she would hurt herself like this—

  The Reverend Mother reared back and sent herself spiraling down the hall, clawing against the walls. She wasn’t turning herself the right way to stall her momentum in the lack of gravity. Sister Lucia shouted, despite herself, and panic flared in the Reverend Mother’s eyes. A hatch opened—Sister Faustina, flying out from the communications chamber. She saw the Reverend Mother and caught her around the middle, her other arm twisted through the handle on the hatch. She grunted when her arm snapped back with the force of the Reverend Mother’s inertia.

  “Lucia!” Sister Faustina snapped, forgetting the honorific. Sister Lucia bristled, but there was no time for their animosity. “What on all the earths—?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Sister Faustina looked at the Reverend Mother, shivering like a wet cat against her. The old woman’s hands were still and silent, and in her eyes . . . they were lacking something, some essential light.

  “Come, Mother,” Sister Faustina said, softly, like she was talking to a feverish child. She pushed herself off from the wall, floated lightly past Sister Lucia, and opened the hatch of the Reverend Mother’s chamber. She was not a gentle woman by nature, but she was careful as she worked the straps to hold the Reverend Mother in her bed. The light was flowing back into the Mother’s eyes. She blinked like she was freshly waking.