Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  “Let us go one by one,” said Sister Mary Catherine, who everyone knew had not changed her mind and never would. “So we each may be heard.”

  “Go on then.” Sister Faustina floated cross-legged by the door. “Try not to be too hyperbolic.”

  The Revered Mother’s hand jabbed the air—a quick censure—and she fell silent.

  “This is holy house. How would you justify this perversion of its purity?”

  “Were we a convent on a new colony, we would breed livestock for food and labor for our parish. It is the ship’s nature to seek and reproduce. Let the animal do as it will.”

  Sister Mary Catherine huffed, but she had had her turn. Sister Ewostatewos too came down on the side of allowing the ship to do as it would, though she pointed out the ship was hardly a natural animal. Sister Varvara, always one for dramatics, dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the edge of her wimple as she declared that she had prayed hard on this for many sleepless nights and could not condone it. What a sentimentalist, that one. No wonder she had taken the name of a woman who had died singing hymns at the bottom of a pit.

  “What of you, Sister Gemma?” Sister Lucia asked. “We’ve come down split so far.”

  Sister Gemma had hung at the edge of the group, floating above a pew like she longed to sit in it. She rubbed her hands together over and over, though it wasn’t cold.

  “I’m afraid I will have to abstain,” she said.

  “Abstain?” Sister Lucia looked at Sister Faustina, and saw no surprise at all on her face.

  “You see—” Sister Gemma swallowed, and real tears did well up in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t continue to act as one of you. It would be dishonest, and I have been dishonest for so long. I’m leaving.”

  “Leaving?” Sister Varvara started, and smacked her head on the ceiling. “What do you mean, leaving? You’ve taken another posting in another convent?”

  “Leaving the order. I’ve decided this isn’t the life that I am called to anymore.” She curled her arms around herself. “I’m sorry. You have no idea. I never thought—”

  All eyes turned to the Reverend Mother. She only had one question. “Why?”

  Sister Gemma looked away from the Reverend Mother and the front of the room and the crucifix and her face flushed pink. “I’ve fallen in love.”

  The room exploded.

  “Love!” snapped Sister Mary Catherine. The words dripped with ice, as cold as anything on the dark side of any moon. “Romantic love? You swore an oath, my sister, how long have you been breaking it for?”

  “With who?” Sister Ewostatewos asked, brow furrowed. “Who on any earth, out here? Not some shiftless metals-scavenger, oh Gemma, you know that they will tear you apart sure as anything. It isn’t like the romance novels.”

  “You’ve been hiding this too?” Sister Lucia leaned in to Sister Faustina. “Don’t hide it, you must have seen the communications going out. Did you tell the Reverend Mother? Do you think yourself in charge now?”

  “I thought it was Sister Gemma’s right to choose for herself,” Sister Faustina hissed back, their voices lost among the confusion. “I have hidden nothing that you wouldn’t yourself want hidden. Do you think you would want to make a choice like this with all your sisters breathing down your neck?”

  “I will tell you what I think, I think you should not be the only one overseeing communications.”

  “Stop,” the Reverend Mother signed. She floated to Gemma and placed one hand on her head. “If you wish to leave, Sister, then you have my blessing. We are fools to not follow when we are called.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” Sister Gemma said. She wiped away the tears sparkling in the pinks of her eyes and laughed. That laugh softened something in Sister Lucia’s heart. What a strange world they were in, to be on a gravid ship, to have a sister who had fallen in love, to live in this precious precarious time when all was new.

  “I vote we let the ship do as it will,” Sister Lucia said. “I mean, to return to the issue.”

  In the end they all agreed, some more begrudgingly than others. Sister Ewostatewos tracked the ship’s trajectory and discovered that its mate was docked at a small station where they could trade for chemlights and sugar. They could not decide what to do about the babies, if the litter was born healthy. Even Sister Mary Catherine, now that the decision had been made, offered up her opinion that they should return the viable shiplings to Earth to be shaped for convents. It was again a silly idea (such a long journey to Earth for such a small gift) but at least she was participating.

  * * *

  After the quorum, when the shock had dissipated, Sister Faustina found Gemma in her laboratory, bent over the last slide of the ship’s plasma she might ever draw.

  “I haven’t sent word yet,” she said, when Sister Faustina sat down on the lab bench across from her. “I haven’t any idea where in the system the Cheng I Sao is. I don’t want to be disappointed just yet. It could be months before I disembark, if we don’t cross paths before that.”

  “I see.” Sister Faustina took in the lab, the small marks of Sister Gemma’s time here in her handwriting on every label and the sealed cup of green tea cooling on the desk in the corner, next to a draft of a letter to the university on Venus’s ninth moon about the ship’s egg health. “Are you nervous?”

  Sister Gemma laughed. Sister Faustina hadn’t expected that at all. “I thought I would be. I thought I would spend these last nights lying sleepless in my bed, worrying that I was throwing every good thing away. But I don’t. I’ve been so full of—certainty is the wrong word—peace, I suppose, ever since I decided. It was the same when I chose to take my vows after my novitiate. The other girls in my class spent all night praying, and I slept like a child with a warm glass of real milk.” She looked down at her hands, clad in blue gloves. “I feel ready.”

  Sister Faustina slid her tablet across the workbench.

  Sister Gemma read. It was a manifest, of ships within radius of a station.

  “What’s this?”

  “All of the ships docked at or close to Keda Station, where the ship’s mating partner is. I’ve been contacting ones that have supplies we need and setting up exchanges.” She scrolled down the list and tapped a name there.

  Sister Gemma read the line. She had to put down the slide lest she crack it in her shaking grip. For there in pure white pixels was written the name of the ship of her dearest, beloved correspondent. “How? Did you send a message ahead to them?” That was silly, of course. Even if Sister Faustina had, it would have taken the Cheng I Sao days to arrive here.

  “Happenstance,” Sister Faustina replied, though it felt like so much more than that. The air hung heavy on them both, weighted down with so much meaning. “Perhaps it was fated. A sign you’ve made the right choice.”

  “I never really believed in signs,” Sister Gemma said. And yet her cheeks flushed.

  “Neither do I,” Sister Faustina said. “But this sure seems like one, doesn’t it?” She opened a new message on the tablet and left it there for Sister Gemma, with the address set to the Cheng I Sao’s coordinates.

  * * *

  Keda Station was a little box of nothing in a corner of space full of nothing. No important planets or waystations, no colonies, no moons good for mining or asteroids good for netting. The station itself was a bit of space junk that someone had plucked out of a decaying orbit and set around a moon with lax property laws. Inside the station, the bar served yellowish beer that tasted like an old packet of soy protein. You had to barter for your drink, or pay hard metal. No currencies recognized.

  The sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations pressed up against the portholes looking out over the docked ships. They and the other crew had to wait inside the station for it to begin, for ships’ mating was hardly gentle and it was safer to disembark. The Reverend Mother sat primly in a chair in the quietest corner of the bar. The station’s proprietor, it turned out, was a devout Catholic, and he fussed with c
hildish glee over the first Mother Superior he’d seen since he left his home colony.

  Gemma watched her sisters press up against the glass. She didn’t belong with them anymore. She was wearing clothes that didn’t fit her—the ones she’d given over when she took her vows had long since been converted to carbon and fed to the ship. Sister Faustina had found her a pair of men’s cargo pants and a shirt meant to go under a vacsuit woven with radiation-repelling fibers. She did not feel like herself. Her head itched without its covering, and the skin on her arms prickled with gooseflesh. She still thought of herself as Sister Gemma. She had had another name once, but she had left that behind so long ago and been reborn. And here she was, standing in a strange station in a stranger’s clothes, waiting to be reborn again.

  She turned away.

  Vauca (her Vauca, if she was allowed to imagine that) was waiting for her on the ramp up from the airlock. She was so much like Gemma remembered her. Strong arms, strong jaw. Hands scarred from coolant burns and plague. A smile like a slanted line.

  “Hello,” Vauca said. She had her hands shoved deep in her coverall pockets, but Gemma saw them twisting nervously, and her heart filled with joy for someone to be so needful of her.

  When they were close enough to touch Vauca reached out and cupped Gemma’s cheek. The brush of her fingertips sent frisson down Gemma’s spine and she shivered. She smelled like burnt wiring and anise, engine oil and peppermint. Gemma wanted to close her eyes and breathe her in.

  “Can I kiss you?”

  Gemma swallowed. It had been years. More than years. A lifetime ago, an oath ago, a name ago. It was so hard to imagine. Her heart was pounding in her chest already. She took Vauca’s hands and let her palms warm her. “I’d like to,” she said. “I—maybe not yet?”

  Vauca laughed and squeezed her hands. It was only a matter of inches for Gemma to lean her head on her shoulder where it fit so naturally. “Of course.”

  They stood that way for a while, two quiet bodies among the press of people and the noise of haggling and mineral trading and the docked ships outside grating against the armatures keeping them attached to the station. Gemma thought she could stay here forever, let the dust come and turn them to statues and she would still be content.

  Then a hush swept across the station, and Vauca’s fine fingers gripped her hair. “Oh! Look!”

  She opened her eyes. The Our Lady of Impossible Constellations circled the other ship, lights spiraling down the whole of its cerulean body. Its fronds waved in the airless dark, and little ice crystals followed in its wake as it exhaled excess oxygen and nitrogen. The other ship was smaller, a darker green, the color of the dried kelp that Sister Varvara bought from water-world traders to make dashi. They circled each other, closer and closer, synchronized like they were capable of speech and higher thought. The Our Lady of Impossible Constellations curled its head and touched the end of the other ship, which curled in to meet her equally. Mating secretions slicked their bodies and then froze and crackled away. Their bodies pulsed and shimmered, pinprick wormholes opening and closing around them with red sparking pops. It was impossible to tell one from the other now. Both their hides mottled with every green hue and their gelatinous muscles obscured where one body ended and the other began.

  Gemma saw Sister Lucia wipe glittering tears from her eyes, and Sister Faustina lean forward. Even the Reverend Mother watched from her spot in the bar and Gemma thought she saw a smile. It was only right that this be so beautiful. The bodies outside glowed greener, bioluminescent trails running from fronds to head and back. The armor plates that kept them safe from meteors and dust and radiation opened like gills against the force of their great breaths, revealing the softer green and gray underneath like the bottom of a pond on a sunny day.

  And just as soon as it had begun, it was over. The two ships disentangled themselves. The smaller ship slid back into its docking port with one wave of its frills, where its crew was waiting to check its nutrient levels and ply it with saline-sweet water and sucrose tablets. The Our Lady of Impossible Constellations stayed out beyond the tug of the station for a long few minutes, facing toward this planet’s orange sun and the nebula beyond. The ships did not exhale in space, not the way humans conceived of exhaling, but Gemma thought she saw it swell and relax, like this was the first moment of peace it had had in a long time. Then it too turned and slid softly into the dock where Gemma had left its homing beacon.

  * * *

  Sister Faustina watched the ship settle back into its dock. Its calloused outer skin rippled and the plates locked back into their places. It would be a few hours before they could return. The ship would be skittish and sensitive until the last of the pheromones scattered across the solar winds. She liked this fine. She intended to find a trader from the first system, who had promised her a bottle of real, dark molasses. That was the sweetness she’d grown up with. The other sisters preferred white sugar for their refined sucrose. It had been a long time since she had tasted molasses dark like the bottom of the deepest, coldest mine shaft. But now she had been put in charge of procuring their supplies, so ha! The others would just have to live with molasses until they ran low again.

  Gemma, habitless, looked taller than she had seemed before. She leaned against that engineer of hers, their arms tangled. Such youth. Let her be happy, Sister Faustina thought, to whatever god really watched over them. Hard choices should have rewards.

  She watched Sister Lucia drift back toward the Reverend Mother and settle next to her in the bar. Good. Without speaking of it, they began taking shifts to watch over her, but so far it had never gotten as bad as that night. The stationmaster served the two cups of lemon barley water, and Sister Lucia smiled at him. Small kindnesses should always be rewarded. The Reverend Mother lifted her glass up to the light from the lantern hanging from the ceiling and shook it so the small barley particles swirled. Where was she really from, Sister Faustina wondered. Barley water was a childhood drink in this system, the cool sweet thing your mother gave you after a hard day in the mines or a long, sweating summer afternoon. Just enough sugar and calories to make your blood run a little hotter, just enough water to quench your thirst, and barley grew everywhere.

  “Excuse me,” someone said.

  She turned and was met with a very young man. He barely looked old enough to shave. He was as tall as someone born in zero-g, and all legs, but his bones were strong, so he must just be a tall planet-born. He was carrying a small traveling bag, and he was dressed in all black. Around his neck he wore a priest’s collar.

  “Hello,” he said, and extended his hand. “Are you, by chance, the sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations? Of the Order of Saint Rita?”

  She was so startled that she could not bring herself to shake his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and then tried again in very slow and clumsy outer-system patois. “Do you not speak English?”

  “I speak English,” she snapped, and he looked genuinely crestfallen. “Who are you?” She knew already, of course. She had to hear it from the ass’s mouth.

  “Oh yes, communication is so spotty out here, isn’t it! I am your new priest.” He held out his hand again and this time, regrettably, she had no choice but to shake it. “What luck I found you! I feel as if I’ve been chasing your tail for ages. I had to pay the captain of the trawler I was on quite a bit of money to have him drop me here when I saw you were docked.”

  “What luck,” Sister Faustina repeated hollowly, and caught Sister Lucia’s eye over the priest’s shoulder. “Do you have luggage, Father? Perhaps you could help me gather our supplies, and then we can take it aboard after the ship has settled.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, oblivious to how she was chewing the inside of her cheek to shreds. “I have several bags. It’s been a long time since we’ve brought this system up to date with current Church practices, you know.”

  * * *

  Sister Faustina and Sister Lucia stood above the clutch of eggs.
After three weeks, most were now showing signs of development. Sister Faustina had never seen a tadpole, but Sister Mary Catherine had assured her the wriggling inside looked just like them. Big black eyes stared balefully at them from within the orange spheres. Amorphous tails writhed inside their nutrient baths. Some of the eggs had not been fertilized, and lay squished and dark and graying in between their lively might-have-been siblings. Soon those would be reabsorbed into the ship’s body as it made space for its clutch to grow and mature. The gestation of this species was not long; in a week or two the eggs would be too large to stay safe here inside the ship. There was a shipyard in orbit around a gas giant that was two weeks away at thruster speed. Another few planets scattered closer in the system had the low-gravity/high-sunlight combination the larval shiplings would crave.

  Sister Lucia knelt beside the egg sac, feeling under the membrane for the thick nerve bundle that lay beneath. “Hand me the scalpel, please.”

  Sister Faustina passed it. Sister Lucia carefully split the mucus seal from the muscle beneath, sweating as she squinted at it to avoid rupturing the egg sac. The eggs were far enough along now that it would not be disastrous, but they had nowhere to nurse the clutch. The sac peeled up and Sister Lucia pressed a thermometer underneath, and then a gas spectrometer.

  “Everything seems to be in order,” she said. “What I wouldn’t give for Gemma right now. Though I don’t think she was an expert on this bit, either.”

  “Shipwrights guard their secrets close. And how many ships are allowed to imprint on a wild mate?”

  Sister Lucia shook her head, and wiped a smear of gelatinous fluid off her face mask and onto her pant leg. The two of them had come to an understanding. The fragile alliance they had formed that terrible night in the Reverend Mother’s quarters had deepened these past several weeks. They were not friends, but they were comrades, and co-conspirators, and currently the two people keeping this ship running as it should. Sister Lucia knelt close to the eggs again and the big, half-developed eyes nearest her fluttered. One of them was smaller than the others, more yellow than orange. She laid her hand over it through the membrane. “Look at that one—so small. What a tiny baby. Who knew they had runts in these litters?”