An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  “Until now I didn’t know Sovereign Nicolaeus was ill.”

  “I know—believe me, I know—how tempting it is to seek Nicolaeus’s death, but the man slated to succeed him is leagues and leagues worse. Do you think his death accomplishes anything?” Aster had never seen him this disheveled before.

  “I should think his death an end unto itself,” she said, but found herself taking the bait. “Who will succeed him?”

  “I don’t think it’d be wise to tell you.”

  “Then I see no reason why I should help you.” Aster returned the pens she’d left out on her desk to their cases, straightened a stack of lab notes.

  “Please!” he said, rubbing the sides of his fists against his bloodshot eyes. “Trust me. Have I ever once over the course of our acquaintance done anything but aid and protect you?”

  “You have done many things other than aid and protect me over the course of our—acquaintance,” Aster said, stuttering over the word. She didn’t know why it hurt to hear their relationship reduced to something so small.

  “What have I done but keep you safe?” he asked.

  “Do the meals you take keep me safe? Your baths? The books you read?” she countered, more bewildered than enraged. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  The Surgeon’s face softened and he bowed his head. “I didn’t mean literally everything. I should have specified. Let me restate: over the course of our acquaintance, I have done nothing but aid and protect you in matters that involve you, in matters that relate directly to you and your livelihood.”

  Aster pulled her feet up onto the stool she was sitting on so that her whole body was scrunched into a ball. “I see,” she said. She’d thought she’d trained her mind out of its predisposition toward excessive literalism, but there it was, persistent as ever, making a fool of her.

  “It was a ridiculous thing to say,” the Surgeon went on. “Hyperbolic and, even when not taken literally, probably an exaggeration.”

  Aster let her grip on her body slacken, but kept her feet up on the stool. “Tell me who will succeed Sovereign Nicolaeus. I have no reason to help you prevent his death otherwise.”

  The Surgeon wasn’t usually given to fidgeting, but Aster knew no other word to describe the way he dug his hands through pomaded hair, tapped his foot. “Uncle,” he said, exhaling deeply. “It is my uncle.”

  Aster tried to swallow away the sick feeling in her stomach though only managed to relocate the dull cramping from upper digestive tract to lower. “How long have you kept this from me?”

  “I didn’t want to burden you with thoughts of him,” he said, but he should have known by now that she was always burdened with thoughts of that man.

  “That is not an adequate answer, and I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t know,” the Surgeon said in a cracked voice. “I was afraid of what you might do when you found out. Hurt him or hurt—I don’t know. My goal was to cure Nicolaeus so that it would never be an issue, so please trust me. Help me help him, and we’ll never have to give a thought to my uncle again.”

  “How can I help a patient I’m not treating? Who I’ve never really seen?” Aster could tell the Surgeon thought she was being stubborn, yet she meant what she said. Good as Aster was, she couldn’t provide the antidote for a poison unless she knew what that poison was. “Tell me his symptoms, at least.”

  “Cluster headaches. Auditory and visual hallucinations, but no fever. None of that’s anything I haven’t seen before—except the last thing. The last thing is why I’ve come to you. His eyes, Aster. His eyes have changed.”

  The scientist in Aster couldn’t feign disinterest, no matter how much she wanted to. Thoroughly entranced, she urged him to continue: “Changed in what way? What do you mean? Changed color?”

  She’d only seen Nicolaeus once before. The Surgeon had taken her to his chambers to show her how to perform a colectomy. He had plain eyes, and she couldn’t recall the shape or set of them. At the time, they’d held no interest to Aster compared to what hung above the mantel of his fireplace. A rifle, just like Night Empress’s. The only one she’d ever seen in real life, and as far as she knew, the only one on the ship.

  The Surgeon stared over Aster’s head, searching for the words to explain. “His irises have become jagged. Misshapen,” he said, suppressing a shiver. “Like the blade of a serrated knife but more irregular. It’s twisted, polygonal.”

  It sounded like something from one of Aster’s nightmares. She’d never heard of such a thing.

  “As a result, his vision comes and goes. The pain he’s in, it’s unimaginable. I’ve become intimately familiar with the sounds of his screams.”

  The Surgeon glanced up at her. She supposed he was looking for a reaction. He would find none. Sovereign Nicolaeus’s suffering was of no concern to her.

  “I’ve used electromagnetic imaging to peek into his brain. There are bulges everywhere. I suspect whatever is disrupting the cells in his irises is also weakening the walls of the blood vessels in his brain. It’s a matter of time before an aneurism kills him. I’ve clipped off some of them but I can’t keep up with the rate they form.”

  The symptoms the Surgeon described didn’t speak to any poison Aster knew. Sounded more heavenly than that. Sounded like retribution. Sounded like when Aint Melusine played a record and it got to the good part. Inexplicable, painful death seemed a fitting magnum opus to Sovereign Nicolaeus’s career as Matilda’s head.

  “I can’t help you,” Aster said. The Surgeon closed his eyes. Maybe he was praying. “If you no longer have use for me, you may go. Farewell, Surgeon,” she said, more stern with him than she’d been in years.

  “You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

  She heard the plea in his voice, a hiccup in the steady, deep tones. “Farewell, then, Theo.” Aster supposed the half-centimeter tilt of his chin could be called a grateful nod.

  “I’m sorry I’ve had to be gone from you for so long.”

  “It’s no matter,” said Aster. They were only acquaintances.

  With help from Aster, he stood up and headed to the door. “Uncle’s the one who instituted the lowdeck energy rations, in case you hadn’t already figured that out,” Theo said. She had. “As Sovereign, he will have the power to inflict more suffering than that, and believe me, he wants to. He would have the power to hurt you, to continue his petty and malicious vendetta against you. If you can tell me anything, anything at all that would allow me to heal Nicolaeus, I beg you to tell me. It is only concern for you that makes me ask.”

  If he was so concerned, he might have bothered to ask after her. She knew well the suffering his uncle caused. It was her, not Theo, who’d just cut off a child’s foot.

  “Until next time,” she said, and he finally gave up, beginning to make his way down the corridor. “Theo. Wait.”

  He turned back to her, eyes expectant, hopeful—like she might just lay her forgiveness upon him as easily as one bestows a goodnight kiss upon a child’s cheek.

  “God save the Sovereign,” she called out, then let the hatch door slam shut.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, Theo removed Aster’s uterus. He made her breathe air that wasn’t air. When she awoke, all that remained of her womb was a ghost. This was what she’d prayed to the Ancestors for.

  What Theo did violated the oath he’d made when, as a boy of thirteen, he’d joined the Sovereignty’s Holy Order of the Guard. Doctors had examined Aster’s genitals and reproductive tract and determined she was one of the few females of “this poorly racial stock” capable of carrying offspring. Next to her name in Matilda’s manifest was a stamp that read, Fit to Breed.

  There were less drastic measures of contraception, but Aster liked the decisiveness of a hysterectomy. Cut it out like a cancer.

  When her infertility became apparent, Theo had the doctors who were going to reexamine her expelled from the Guard. He then proceeded to chemically castrate all
the upperdeck men listed in the records of the ship’s reproduction programs. Routine vaccinations, he’d explained.

  The Guard confronted him about his obvious campaign, and though he didn’t confess, he did say he’d received divine providence that the Heavens found Matilda’s breeding programs a disgrace. Until they stopped, the plague of impotency would spread to the rest of Matilda’s upperdeck men. He was, despite everything, quite fearless. The following morning, Sovereign Nicolaeus issued an edict banning “interference with the natural reproductive order.”

  Aster supposed that was what the Surgeon meant when he said that over the course of his and Aster’s relationship, he’d done nothing but aid and protect her. His sudden disregard for her was unlike him.

  “You never told me he knew about this place,” said Giselle, emerging from her hiding spot, damp from auto rain. “Who else knows, Aster?”

  “Aint Melusine. Him. You. No one else.”

  “And are you all right?” Giselle asked. “I mean, about the Surgeon’s uncle? Lieutenant? That’s his name, right?”

  “Yes. I am fine.”

  It was a lie she couldn’t sell. Giselle knew as well as Theo how Lieutenant singled Aster out for a startling array of abuses. Not so much in recent years, but as a teen she’d endured daily humiliations. He had given her name to several guards, so though she rarely faced him in person, she frequently experienced his wrath by proxy.

  There was the time she’d developed a bacteriophage to treat an antibiotic-resistant staph infection plaguing Q deck, which a guard confiscated because such a thing must obviously contain contraband. He’d ripped IV needles from Aster’s patients, gleefully informing her that this was ordered by Lieutenant.

  When she’d responded by switching them to a course of medical-grade honey known for its bactericidal properties, he poisoned her remaining beehives. Two of her seven patients died.

  Lieutenant was the one who’d had Aster declared fit to procreate before Theo intervened. For a year, he’d made her wear the lowdeck uniform long since discontinued. Perhaps no single thing was particularly significant, but they were small pains that had reduced her fortitude bit by bit.

  “To me, a sovereign’s a sovereign, but I suppose if I had to pick I’d take Nicolaeus over your Lieutenant any day. The better solution is to kill them both,” said Giselle, treading back and forth between Aster’s desk and the shelves. She balled her fists into her hair and pulled. Aster watched from a distance as she leaned against the hatch. “Has the Surgeon read your meema’s stuff? Her notebooks and things?”

  Aster wrinkled her brow, surprised by the change in topic. Giselle’s thoughts moved in unpredictable patterns. “No,” she replied.

  Giselle nodded sharply twice. “That’s good at least. Wouldn’t want him picking up on the similarities between what’s happening to Nicolaeus and what was happening to your meema—then he’d really think you had a cure,” she said before walking to the shelf holding Aster’s mother’s papers. She pulled out various folders, let the ones she wasn’t looking for fall to the ground. Three she kept. “What she had was more mild then what’s happening to the old boy, but it’s got to be the same poison that caused it, right, Aster?”

  Aster had no answer because she couldn’t suss the question. Her mother’s journals mentioned nothing about being poisoned or being ill. There was certainly no description of specific symptoms.

  “If what was happening to her was going to get as bad as it is for Sovereign Nicolaeus, maybe that’s why she self-murdered. She mercy-killed herself,” Giselle speculated. “Went out with some dignity.” She sat on the floor and began flipping through pages of the notebooks in the folders.

  Aster joined her, wrapped an arm around Giselle’s waist to try to steady her. “I’m not sure you and I are perceiving the same reality,” she said, which is what she always said to Giselle when she seemed in the midst of one of these episodes.

  “This isn’t madness, Aster—look.” She pointed to a passage in one of Lune Grey’s notebooks:

  Maintenance required in various L deck systems. The speakers blare static despite a lack of sonic input. Happens sporadically but still worth further investigation.

  Giselle had pointed to one of the few journal entries that made sense. Lune Grey was a mechanic. Her old bunkmates had verified that much. The radiolabe verified it further. It wasn’t surprising she’d made note of something that needed fixing.

  “And look at this here,” said Giselle, skipping to another passage:

  There are some obvious issues in L deck’s wiring, I suspect severing its connection with the electrical grid. The speaker static continues. Additionally, the light and heat sensors are shot, showing incorrect readings. So far, not a maintenance priority, but to be looked at in more depth.

  “See?” Giselle said. “That’s just the beginning.”

  “I don’t understand how my mother’s discussion of ship maintenance has anything to do with Sovereign Nicolaeus’s poisoning,” said Aster.

  Laughing, Giselle picked up another of the notebooks. “Are you having a bit of fun at my expense?” she asked, then turned serious. Aster didn’t know what she was talking about. “You mean, after all this time you never realized your mother’s notes was in code?”

  iv

  If Aster told a story it’d go like this:

  Once upon a time, a mama had a baby, a dark-brown squirming thing, unwieldy and small. The mama named the baby Aster for the genus of florae, and for the ancient word meaning star, and for the way you had to reach to the back of your throat to form that soft A sound. Not a name to be trifled with. Not a name for someone immaterial. Not a name you gave a baby you planned to leave in a closet to die.

  In Aster’s telling, there’s no suicide note written in pretty cursive, stashed inside Lune’s radiolabe: Aster, dear. Achingly, sorrowfully, tearfully, regretfully, angrily, I leave you. I am sorry. And the mama doesn’t take a knife to her throat.

  Yes, if Aster told a story, it’d go like that—but she wouldn’t tell a story.

  The precisionist in her hated oral history and memory and that flimsy, haphazard way people spoke about the past.

  Back then.

  A long time ago.

  In that land before this great ship Matilda.

  Aster eschewed these ambiguous prefixal and suffixal phrases because they were an affront to the investigative process. They offered summary and conclusion where there were none, by grouping data that should not necessarily be grouped. That was the year everything changed, someone might say—to which Aster asked, Changed how? What precise unfolding of events? Was it really that year, or the year before? Or one event then, and another event several years later, with 1,018 tiny indications in the in-between?

  That had been one of her early lessons from the Surgeon: Do not assign meaning where there is none. In their first year working together, when Aster was fifteen and still so fresh that the thought of incising a skull to remove meningioma made her nauseous, he took her to see a little blond upperdeck girl whose nose would not cease bleeding for days and days. That, and she had bruises everywhere.

  “Hemophilia,” Aster had said. She knew this story; she was an expert at patterns. A mild allergic reaction irritated and inflamed the vessels in her nose, but the blood was unable to clot. The bruises were the logical result of the life of play and pleasure allowed upperdeck children. What would be a minor case of internal hemorrhage in someone without the disease, invisible and never forming contusions, was drastic in the hemophiliac. Every bit of contact leaving a bath of blood beneath the skin.

  “You are wrong, of course,” Theo had said. He spoke with the authority of someone who’d lived many lifetimes, but he was only five years her senior.

  “Of course she got it wrong. She’s one of them,” said the little blond-headed girl, a handkerchief pressed to her reddened nostrils. “She smells.”

  “She doesn’t,” the Surgeon had responded in such a tone that the little girl offere
d no protest. Aster thought to break the girl’s nasal bones, give her a real reason to bleed, but the Surgeon treated the child with detached kindness, the way he treated everyone, the way he treated Aster. He placed two tablets beneath the child’s tongue and let them dissolve, and in seconds she became woozy.

  It had not been necessary, in Aster’s opinion, to sedate the girl before cauterizing her blood vessels with silver nitrate. A painful procedure, perhaps, but Aster had endured worse. She was beginning to see how he coddled his patients.

  Later, back in his study, the Surgeon explained the girl’s condition: “You guessed hemophilia because you assumed the bruises and bleed are connected. They are not. The nosebleed is the result of hereditary disease and the bruises are the result of abuse.”

  Aster nodded as she digested this new information, wondering if she should allocate some sympathy to that little child, ultimately deciding against it. “Had you given me more details, I would have come to your same conclusion.”

  “The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”

  With history, with memory, with retellings, people often settled for the obvious answer. Aster wondered if that was what she’d done with her mother’s journals: written Lune off as mad instead of investigating obvious clues.

  Or maybe she had been right all along about her meema, and it was Giselle being silly. She’d fallen into the trap of inserting narrative where there wasn’t any. Any random assortment of dots could be connected into a picture, whether there was an actual picture there or not.

  Aster turned with a start at the sound of banging. “Cabin search,” a guard announced, his voice muffled through the metal. Though she knew it was unlikely, she wondered if it was one of Lieutenant’s men.

  The hatch did not yield when the guard tried to push inside, and Giselle squeaked a laugh at his failed entry. Vivian, who was in the bunk above her, did the same.