Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  “You’re too sentimental,” Sister Faustina said. Ships were closer to octopi or deep-sea monsters than dogs. Though they were cute at this stage. In the way bubble-eyed children’s toys were cute. “It’ll get eaten, you know. If we were a shipyard, we’d throw all the ones that didn’t look promising out into the vacuum to suffocate as soon as they broke their eggshells.”

  “Shush,” Sister Lucia said to the eggs and the wrigglers inside. “Don’t listen to her. We believe in all of you.”

  “They’re invertebrates, Lucia,” Sister Faustina said. One of the eyes inside an egg hanging right by her head blinked at her, as if in reproach. She resisted blinking back at it.

  Sister Lucia was on her hands and knees peering into all the eggs on the top layer. Sister Faustina wondered if she included these yet-brainless hatchlings in her evening prayers. Probably. Such a sweet one. It was a wonder she had the spine to do what they were doing.

  “So—the priest.”

  “I’ve kept him away from the Reverend Mother.” Sister Lucia prodded one of the spheres and watched as the color flushed and then evened again. “He doesn’t know signing. He might get it into his head to learn, though. This is not sustainable.”

  On his first evening on the ship, Father Giovanni had clambered up on one of their dining chairs and taken the old crucifix off the chapel wall. He’d brought out a new one from the plethora of bags that Sister Faustina had dragged on board for him. They’d stood beneath him as he hung it, and then stood in silence when he turned around and showed it off like a proud father showing off a new infant.

  “It’s a bit graphic, isn’t it?” asked Sister Ewostatewos. The crucifix had Jesus’s face twisted in a rictus of pain, his limbs twisting against the nails, the torn flesh dripping red-painted blood down the cross. Compared to their old crucifix, with the smushed-face, cartoonish Son of God on his balsa wood cross, it was disturbing. Sister Faustina had stared into the darkness painted inside Jesus’s open mouth and heard him screaming. “I mean . . . it doesn’t really exemplify an air of peaceful contemplation, does it?”

  “Our Lord suffered for us,” the priest said, from above them on the chair. With his long legs, his head scraped the chapel roof, and the mossy fronds tickled at his hair. He batted them away. “It is only right that we remember that, and seek to be worthy of that pain.”

  It had not endeared him to any of them, aside from Sister Mary Catherine, who was so overjoyed to have an Earth-trained priest on board that she followed him around like a tracking drone. His other changes did not sit well either—the daily logs he kept and transmitted back to Earth, the demand that they hand out gospel tracts on humanitarian missions, or the way he spoke of Earth Central Governance with a reverence that approached that which he had for the Vatican.

  “You could poison him,” Sister Faustina said. Sister Lucia’s head shot up. “I’m kidding, of course.” She would say an extra Hail Mary tonight. She was losing her grip on piety, because of him. She had always had to work at it.

  “She will get worse,” Sister Lucia said. “Her nightmares already are. She’s scared, though she’d never say it. And if she passes, or if he discovers what’s happening and insists she retire back to the first system . . .”

  “His authority will be unchallenged.” So far the priest and the Reverend Mother had kept a kind of truce, only acting if they were unanimous. It was a fragile truce, held together only by the assumption that they held equal power on the ship, that the Reverend Mother could not challenge Father Giovanni’s authority and he could not challenge hers. “He’ll do whatever orders from Earth tell him to.”

  Father Giovanni was an actual Italian from actual Rome, and he believed in every word from the newly ascended pope with the dewy-eyed certainty of someone who had only left the seminary months before. This trip, apparently, was his first time leaving the safe embrace of gravity and he managed to mention this at least once an hour. Most often more. Many of the adjustments to spaceborn life he found primitive, upsetting, and uncomfortable. They had not shut off the gravity since he arrived, not even on holy days, because it upset his stomach. He was very well-meaning, and like most people who were well-meaning and ignorant, he bulldozed through everything in his way with not even a thought.

  “Look at this.” Sister Lucia brought a hymnal out of her bag, one of the new ones that Father Giovanni had brought with him from Earth. So far Sister Faustina hadn’t found so many differences between it and the decades-old ones they had been using. Just a few stylistic grammar changes and some updated instrumentation because no one, out here, was going to be playing a pipe organ. Sister Lucia lifted the book to the light glowing off the eggs and carefully worked her thumbnail under the endpapers so that the thin page came free of the cardboard cover. When she held it close enough, a watermark appeared in the bottom left corner.

  Sister Faustina leaned in to see it. A globe, two hands embracing around it. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Earth Central Governance. They paid for them, apparently. I asked the father about it. He said, and I quote, ‘They have taken quite seriously to acts of holy charity.’ Holy charity. As if it’s charity to indebt one of the largest religions in the four systems to you.”

  “Not only that. Back in the old days, before the war, everyone who wanted land on a habitable planet had to get their charters through ECG, did you know that? They had to list everyone going with them, everyone they were taking, and exactly where they would land. You were obligated to report back once a year what you were producing and how, and if you didn’t, the jackboots might show up to repossess the colony and drag you back to Earth. Once upon a time, Central Governance had a map of everyone in the systems, and every place worth owning or worth destroying. They can’t get that back—it would be impossible—but they can track where these books are going, where we are distributing them, how many more we need to order.”

  “They can start mapping the systems again, based on distribution. We’ll be helping them track everyone we meet. You only need a map—”

  “—if you want to own a place.”

  Sister Faustina did not suggest again out loud that it might be better if they just killed the priest and feigned ignorance, but she would have to say another set of prayers in penance tonight.

  * * *

  The Reverend Mother knew exactly what was happening. Faustina and Lucia, she knew, had come to think of her as a doddering old woman, barely able to hold the unraveling tapestry of her thoughts in her head. The priest thought she was a spaceborn nobody, a provincial Mother Superior so happy to bend to her Earthly betters who were much closer to the mouth of the Church. They were both right. At this point she had lived more of her life on a ship than on soil, and she was happy to let men far away study the finer details of theology for her. And she was losing her mind. As she tried to gather up the threads of her thoughts they only snarled and tangled in her hands. She was not what she had been. Reality escaped her more often than not, images from the past dancing across the visions of today. She woke from her dreams convinced the bombs were falling again, convinced again it was her fault.

  And it had been her fault, in part. She had been in the room where they chose the end of the world-that-was. She had not dropped the bombs but she had asked those young, idealistic men and women drafted straight out of the schools to drop them. It had started so innocently. Her husband was an army scientist, a politician, a rising star in Earth Central Governance. The other colonies and the far-flung asteroid belts were growing restless. Entertainment was hard to get in those days. It was hard to transmit anything across channels not owned by ECG, and ECG didn’t want to waste their precious bandwidth on TV shows and dramas. She had come up with the idea for Radio Terra, and then she had become its voice. It was just small broadcasts at first—the news from the biggest outposts, little stories submitted by lower-level government officials with morals that subtly encouraged cooperation with central authorities.

  She had always been told she h
ad a beautiful voice, a voice like honey and milk and hot smoky whiskey, a voice to bring men and women to their knees. With Earth Central Governance’s relays at her disposal, her voice was the clearest sound in the cosmos, the only recording that came through to ships in the third system and sad, desolate little mining colonies that couldn’t afford entertainment subscriptions. Her voice tumbled through the stars, automatically downloading into any comms array that ran off ECG technology, whispering Earth is the mother of all of humanity and she loves you. Whispering No one will ever care for you like Earth does and you will die horribly in the vacuum without her charity. Whispering, Any man among you who speaks of independence is a traitor.

  Interspersed with the outright propaganda were audio dramas with better production value than anything else on the radio waves. That was the real draw. Everyone tuned in for the dramas. They ran day and night from Earth and didn’t have to be listened to in chronological order so anyone, anywhere, could listen. Some episodes Radio Terra broadcast only for a short time, so that ships would have to trade each other the recordings. Some of those limited-run casts were more valuable than refined chromium.

  Wars were fought in hearts and minds as much as they were fought in blood and bullets. She had turned what might have been one quick war into three solar systems of civil wars, each asteroid and planet and moon turning against itself before it finally turned against Earth.

  She hadn’t even realized a war had started for so long. It began with a whisper, not a bang. A nothing colony on an iridium-mining asteroid stormed an ECG inspection ship that tried to land, hauled out the inspectors and the soldiers, and pulled their helmets off so they burned in the unfiltered radiation from the sun and suffocated. Earth retaliated by blowing the asteroid up underneath the miners, so that those who survived the depressurization were forced to scatter. The news didn’t even filter back to Earth for a month, and it seemed like so much nothing—how many times had these small rebellions risen up, how many times had they crushed them like ants under a boot? Then Mars seeded their orbit with mines. Then the ECG troops on the Moon declared martial law to keep control of their closest colony. Then they started receiving messages from ships—their last messages, the dying cries of Central Governance marine carriers locked in battles with mining transports and rickety little orbital stations that should never have stood a chance. They didn’t when they were alone, of course. But they finally hated ECG enough to overcome their differences.

  She had gone on the radio that night and pleaded with all the red-blooded, good-hearted children of Earth to put an end to this foolishness. She said they could not survive without Earth. They would not be human without Earth. And god help her, so many of them believed her. It was so very, very bloody, what happened next.

  She saw their ghosts now, in the ship. She’d never been on a living ship before taking her vows. There should be no ghosts here. But they haunted the pale shadows between bioluminescent lamps and the softly curving corners of halls made from muscle and moss. When she knelt in prayer she heard a mother scream as her son turned on her with a rifle. She saw battle lines drawn in the sand of desert worlds, the great glass spheres of atmosphere on airless moons cracking.

  Sister Lucia, bless her, was sequencing her DNA to explain what was going wrong inside her head. Gene therapy had come so far, the girl said. Many types of dementia were completely curable, she said. She had such determination. The Reverend Mother knew better. This was not just an accident of genetics, a decaying strand of DNA that had twisted her memories against her. This was holy judgment.

  “You’re awfully quiet, Mother,” said Father Giovanni. She had, frankly, forgotten he was sitting next to her. He took her look for offense and jumped. “I mean . . . lost in thought. Not quiet, of course.”

  They were plotting a new course for the ship together. He had determined that there was a sector of this system that had never been given the Good Word, and he was intent on having the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations be the first to bring it to them. The Reverend Mother considered proselytizing to be the least interesting of their duties. Sister Faustina had picked up a request for medical assistance coming from a distant ringed planet, and though it was farther, she would rather have them attend to the needy.

  The priest huffed through his nose when she wrote this to him. “You’ve read our new directives. His Holiness has decreed that spreading the Good Word of the Lord is the highest duty of women in the religious life. And I have all those Bibles that we should give out to those in need of them! Surely it would be better, as a practical consideration, to reduce the weight on the ship?”

  Peach fuzz smoothed the lines of his upper lip. She simply did not have the energy to debate theology with him. She wrote, I will consider it. If you will excuse me, Sister Faustina asked I meet her in the communications room.

  A lie, but the communications room was quiet and small, and she was hearing the rattling phantom of automatic fire tatt-tatt-tatt-tatt echoing far away in her hearing. It was hard to concentrate on his insipid, nattering voice when she could hear men dying all around. He let her go, with a smile that said he had won.

  Sister Faustina jumped from her chair when the Reverend Mother entered the communications room. “Please, have a seat.”

  The Reverend Mother shook her head. She was not so fragile yet that she couldn’t keep her feet. Soon, she knew, that would not be true. She looked at the screen, where Sister Faustina was filtering out incoming transmissions, peeling the worthless chatter away. She saw, overlaid on it, the WANTED poster with her husband’s face and President Shen’s and the dark silhouette that was supposed to be her. Her husband was long dead, she knew. She had seen him in the early stages of ringeye, though she’d stopped loving him by then. She had seen the rebels who’d stormed Paris execute Shen, but in the smoke and rubble afterward his body was lost, and so rumors still swirled that he had pulled a last great escape. He never would have lain low, though. She was the last of them left alive. She tried to concentrate through the poster.

  Sister Faustina laughed uncomfortably, like she’d been caught listening to a risqué romantic audiodrama. “Silly, isn’t it? I’m shocked they still send these things around. I’m not even sure who we would turn in a fugitive to. Though I’ve heard that Earth is still using the Radio Terra recordings. They come through the array sometimes.”

  The Reverend Mother gripped the back of the chair and let the shudder roll through her, skin to flesh to bone, and stopped it before it showed.

  “Mother,” Sister Faustina said, and her voice was gentle in a way that Faustina so rarely was. This was love, wasn’t it? For a woman who was so fundamentally uncomfortable with gentleness to try and be gentle with you? What a life she had built here, and she had never deserved it. “What is it? Are you here with us?”

  “I have come to make a request of you,” she signed. She had not realized she was going to ask this until this moment.

  “Of course.” Again Faustina gestured to the seat, and the Reverend Mother shook her head.

  “Before I lose myself completely, I want to make confession. To you.”

  Sister Faustina did not flinch, just as the Reverend Mother had known she would not.

  She could have objected. She could have pointed out that confession was one of those duties held so sacred that only priests could truly perform it. She could have said that it was too great a burden, and the Reverend Mother had no right to ask her to take on the weight of her own heavy heart. And she would have been right.

  Instead, Sister Faustina met her eyes steadily. She closed the messages open on the comms screen so that there was nothing distracting them from this conversation.

  “Why me?” she asked. “Why not Lucia?”

  “Lucia believes so much in me,” the Reverend Mother signed.

  “And I’ve already got enough secrets, I can carry yours too? Is that it?”

  She shrugged.

  Sister Faustina tipped her head back, looking up at
the ceiling like this was a chapel and she was asking for the Lord’s help, like she was a Mars-drama interpretation of a religious sister, always looking at the sky like God was actually a bearded man sitting in the clouds. Her nostrils flared when she breathed out. “You’ve done something really bad, haven’t you.”

  “Yes,” the Reverend Mother signed. “But it isn’t time to tell you yet.”

  A muscle in the corner of Sister Faustina’s mouth twitched like there was something she wanted to say to that. But then a bell on the communications array started ringing, and Sister Faustina started forward to hook her headphones back over her ears. The Reverend Mother jumped too. She hadn’t heard that bell for years. Someone was sending a distress signal straight to them. Not out into general space, like a beacon would. Straight to their array.

  Sister Faustina leaned over the array, one hand pressing the speaker to her ear, the other gripping a knob on the control panel, adjusting the audio for the distortion of space. Her knuckles were white, the nailbeds pink where she gripped the controls.

  The Reverend Mother grabbed her shoulder and Sister Faustina tore her attention away like she had forgotten she was there.

  “The colony,” she said. “Terret’s moon.” She let go of the audio controls and pressed the back of her hand over her mouth, which scared the Reverend Mother more than any alarm bell could. Sister Faustina did not scare and never shocked.

  Sister Lucia crept around and picked up the second headset and held it to her ear. No one but the ship breathed. “They’re infected with ringeye.”

  III.: Sic transit gloria mundi