“First group, it’s time!” the guard escorting them shouted. He beat his baton against the wall, herding the fifty women assigned to cut sugarcane into a short, wide corridor. There were few enough of them that they could line up inside all orderly. They fixed themselves into five rows of ten, and once all of them were inside, the guard checked his watch and closed the hatch behind them.
Two minutes later, he reopened the hatch, the corridor now empty, the women gone. “Second group, come on!” he barked. Aster hurried with her bunkmates into the corridor. They numbered one hundred in all and could not form neat lines.
The guard shut the hatch behind them, and for one minute they were trapped. Giselle grabbed Aster’s hand hard until the hatch on the opposite end opened. “Quick now, quick,” said their overseer, ushering them into the field from atop his horse. They didn’t need instruction to move hastily. They all but ran out of the portal toward the heat.
“Hut, hut, get on now!” the overseer called. The whiteness of his skin and of his horse’s fur made him easy to spot despite the dark.
The last few women stepped out and everyone held still, the deck shuddering into motion. As it rotated clockwise to make room for the next deck at the entry point, Aster clung tight to the trunk-like stalk of a banana tree. Giselle grabbed Aster’s suspenders for support.
“My stomach,” Giselle groaned.
Aster knew the feeling intimately. It wasn’t the turn of the decks, but the reorienting. Their eyes and minds learned as children, as babies even, to adjust to abrupt shifts in what was up and what was down, but it took their guts a few moments longer. Relative to where they stood on the steps and in the corridor one minute ago, the ground, the sky, their entire surroundings, had shifted thirty or forty degrees down.
Two decks rotated above them, one moving right and the other left, forming a narrow gap. Light spilled through the sliver. Baby Sun still mostly blocked, it wasn’t bright enough to be day yet, but Aster began to make out the individual forms of trees in the banana forest if not the shape of the banana bunches themselves. In half an hour, after the completion of the morning rotation, the sky would be white and the temperature fifty degrees Celsius.
Aster glanced up toward the band of light, newly appreciative of the mechanics of the Field Decks, aptly called the Sphyrum by guards.
“Steady now, steady,” said the overseer to his horse, or maybe to one of the women.
Aster braced herself against the banana plant more firmly as the field turned.
The Field Decks formed a massive sphere. Planks of varying size, each of them a different field, forest, or orchard, came together to form spherical layers, one inside of another inside of another inside of another.
A woman fell and cried out.
“I said steady!” the overseer yelled.
Aster didn’t know how many levels or strata there were, but planks rotated sideways, upward, downward, backward, forward to accommodate diverse plant needs, Baby at the very center. She’d always had a basic idea about the design of the apparatus, but she hadn’t understood it truly until spending time this week with Lune’s renderings, the Sphyrum’s blueprint disguised as an elaborate sigil.
It had never occurred to Aster that when she worked one field, she stood upside down in reference point to a woman working a field on the other side of Baby. Or that when she stared up at the bright sky, Baby Sun a faraway orb of bubbling white, there were layers and layers of decks in front of her. She couldn’t see them because they were rotated out of sight to let Baby’s light through.
Aster bent her knees, widened her stance in preparation for the remainder of the twenty-minute rotation, but the field juddered to a stop. Her hands slipped against the stalk of the banana plant and she lost purchase. Giselle toppled sideways then down, bringing Aster with her. It was another blackout. The electrical outage forced the Field Decks into complete stillness.
Women screamed as they too fell, the force of the sudden stop slinging them about like rag dolls. The overseer’s horse bucked and neighed and threw him to the ground. A loud crack snapped through the field as his body made contact with the earth, but there was no accompanying scream.
Aster yelped. At first she thought it was Giselle’s nails she felt, digging into her shoulder to keep steady, until she looked up to see Giselle’s horrified face now several feet in front of her.
“It flew,” said Giselle.
A hoe had lodged itself deep into Aster’s shoulder blade. Pain spun through her, tears sculpting salt trails down her face. The white streaks would be visible in several hours once the water evaporated, easy to spot against her dark skin. She gasped with each intake of breath.
Giselle crawled toward her and, before Aster could stop her, ripped the blade of the hoe from her shoulder. Aster felt blood gush.
“Aster? Aster?” someone called. Pippi or Mabel. “You all right?” Aster didn’t think she was. “Let me get you something for the pain,” said Pippi, running through the semidark, presumably toward one of the women who kept poppyserum in their medicine belts. Aster didn’t. Too much risk of confiscation by a guard.
Aster looked around. She wasn’t the only one who’d gotten hit. Someone had left the toolshed door unlatched at the end of yesterday’s shift, and it had fallen open during the hard stop. One rake had made its way into a woman’s ankle, another into a woman’s chest. That wound might be fatal.
The overseer’s mare continued to buck while three women tried to wrangle her. One fashioned a lasso out of tied-together head scarves. Aster crawled to a sitting position, then pulled up against the banana plant stalk with her uninjured side to stand.
“Aster, here,” said Pippi, traipsing through the densely planted trees. “Could only get a little. Heavens, sit down. Your skin looks clammy. Aster?”
Aster scanned the field for the overseer, smiling widely when she didn’t see him.
“She’s in shock,” said Mabel, panting. “Give her the poppyserum.”
“I can’t see nothing. It’s too dark,” Pippi said.
Aster grabbed the dislodged bloody hoe and stumbled forward through the banana trees, using their stalks as support. “Aster!” her bunkmates called after her. She didn’t let herself feel the gaping wound in her back, instead choosing to see this blackout for what it was: a blessing. She stepped over leaves, weeds, and moaning bodies until she made it to the field’s end. A loose net was wrapped around the edge.
Aster used the hoe to cut through the rope to create both an opening and a bridge. She crawled through the hole and tossed the rope forward, hoping someone in the next deck over would grab it. “Catch!” she shouted, not knowing if anyone would hear her over the sounds of crying and yelling. Another deck sat directly on top, leaving the field sheathed in blackness.
Aster felt a pull. “Tie it off!” she yelled, then tugged the rope taut. It felt secure, and she tied her ends off against a piece of uncut net. No time for a prayer, she crawled the fifteen feet across, each hand on the rail formed by the rope.
She was now in the outermost shell of the Sphyrum. Below her was only metal wall. It was too dark to see how long the drop was.
“Are you mad?” said a Quake Wing woman on the next field. Aster ran past her, squinting to see in the dark. If her timing was right, she was in one of Matilda’s rice fields. Her boots squished in the soggy wet soil.
She made it to the short, wide corridor adjoining the Sphyrum to the central stair and ran through it, but the hatch on the other side was closed. Aster banged against it, desperate.
“Who’s there?” a voice called. It was the guard who’d herded the Q deck women today.
Aster kept banging. When the handwheel began to spin, she got in position to sprint. She jolted forward as soon as it opened, knocking the guard over, tripping over the women still awaiting their turn to enter the Field Decks.
“Do you have a match?” Aster asked people she passed, having forgotten her lighter. She didn’t have time for niceties. The
blackouts usually lasted no more than an hour.
“Here, Aster,” someone said.
She startled upon hearing her name. Aster didn’t think anyone could see her in the dark.
“Only you could act such a fool.” Aster thought the voice belonged to a Quince Wing woman who often worked the melon patches. Maybe she was a patient.
The woman pressed a whole book of matches into her hand. “My sincerest gratitude,” Aster said, and continued to run down the steps through the women waiting to board the Sphyrum. At O deck, she left the stairs and dashed into the corridor, took off her button-up. She had an undershirt beneath it.
Guards had abandoned the deck to go who-knows-where. Aster paused and leaned against the wall, letting her eyes adjust further to the lack of light. Once her heart settled, she wrapped her button-up around the blade of the hoe, rubbed salve from her medicine belt onto the fabric. The coconut oil base of the salve would help a torch burn longer.
Aster flicked through four matches before getting one to light. Her shirt caught fire, and the corridor lit up. “You!” called a guard. Aster ran portside away from him as fast as she could, but the gash in her back slowed her down considerably. It was getting harder to deny its existence.
According to Lune’s maps, there was an access tunnel on the other side of the ship that led straight through the shells of the Field Decks to Baby. If she wanted to learn more about her mother, she had to go where she’d worked.
“No time, no time, no time,” she said aloud to herself, her pace slowing from a run to a jog then all the way down to a walk. She would pass out before she made it to the access tunnel. She might pass out right here. Aster visualized her mother’s map. Forty-five minutes to the tunnel, fifty-five maybe. She’d pass so many guards on the way.
Aster shifted course. It wouldn’t take but fifteen minutes to get to the Surgeon’s updeck clinic from where she was if the portside stairs were empty. At this hour, they should be. Her feet had been carrying her there all along.
* * *
Emergency dimmers lit Granite Wing, but what for? Upperdeckers didn’t wake this early.
Aster ditched her torch in the stairwell and struggled up the remaining steps to the Surgeon’s clinic. If he was caring for Sovereign Nicolaeus, he might not be there. She banged the knocker at the top center of the hatch to the rhythm of a lullaby her Aint Melusine sang.
“Aster?” Theo asked, recognizing the unique knocking pattern. She heard him limp to the door and turn the handwheel, but the sounds were muffled. She was beginning to lose her hold on consciousness. As the hatch opened, Aster fell forward into Theo’s arms.
“God,” he said, steadying her.
Aster staggered out of his grasp and supported herself against the wall. Her hand slipped against a placard on the wall before she managed to right herself completely.
“What are you doing here? What’s happened to you?” Theo guided her toward the front office of his clinic and shut the hatch. “Did anyone see you?”
“I need you to write me a pass to Baby,” she said, then slid down the wall to the floor. She knew the liquid sticking her undershirt to her back was blood, not sweat. There wasn’t time to go to Baby now, but if Theo wrote her a pass, she could return to the Field Decks before the end of the blackout and visit Baby after work shift.
“I can’t,” he said. By the look of him, he’d not yet been to bed.
Aster rubbed the back of her neck, the stretch of her arm pulling the wound on her shoulder blade. She winced. “When you came to me last week, you called our relationship an acquaintance. Do you stand by that?” She fought to keep her breath steady as she spoke.
“I—”
“I was too baffled to say anything then, but I’ve had time to process,” she said, aware this was not the ideal moment for such a discussion. Words flowed as freely from her as the blood from her back. Unable to form a coherent thought, she let her animal self take over, mouth moving on instinct. “If we’re acquaintances, then I can’t make you your medicine anymore. It takes days to formulate . . . Did you know that? Too much time to devote to an acquaintance. For a friend, on the other hand? That’s no time at all. For a friend, it’s not work to make it, but a pleasure and an honor . . . Are we friends or are we not? If we are, it should be no trouble to write the pass. If we aren’t, then I’ll leave now.”
She thought of Giselle and Aint Melusine, of Mabel and Pippi. Even Flick and their great-grandmeema. So many people’s well-being weighed on her mind.
“I don’t have time to nurse an acquaintance,” she continued, “especially not one as old as ours. An acquaintance this old that has never bloomed into friendship never will, and it’s hardly worth the upkeep and maintenance required.”
She peered up from where she sat against the wall, Theo tall above her. He was holding out a small card. “I don’t know how well this will work,” he said. “My power doesn’t have the reach it once did.” Aster’s shoulder hurt too much to grab the pass with her right arm, so she switched to using her left. “Did someone—”
“The decks were midrotation when the power cut. It was an accident,” Aster interrupted. She felt too woozy to read the pass, the fine inked lettering nothing more than randomly assorted lines to her mind in its current state. Strange, strange geometry. In minutes she’d pass out, surely she would. The flame in Theo’s oil lantern whipped about its glass confinement. His office had the look of a dollhouse. Everything perfectly placed. A book open on the desk. Steam rose from a mug of chicory coffee.
A prickling sensation spiraled from the gouge in Aster’s back to her chest, stomach, pelvis, thighs. It wove its way up her spine, settled into the fleshy matter of her brain. “Am I your best friend?” she asked. Then her voice went, and she couldn’t even remember the question she’d just posed.
“I’m going to turn you around now. Is that all right, Aster?”
She’d learned that habit from him. Narrating every action you planned to perform on a patient. Always waiting for a clear yes or no before proceeding, no matter how much it slowed the process.
“Careful,” she said as she turned her back away from the wall.
Theo crouched down to her level, slipped a suspender off her shoulder, and removed the scissors from her medicine belt, using them to cut through her undershirt. Aster closed her eyes when she heard his sharp intake of breath. She didn’t need to be reminded of how bad it was.
“I have to repair this now,” said Theo.
Aster supposed that was the real reason she’d come here. Nothing to do with Baby. Nothing to do with a pass. “Is there tendon damage?”
“Yes.”
“Arterial damage?”
“Yes.”
His steadiness calmed her. He rubbed his hand against her uninjured shoulder, touching his thumb over one of her more prominent scars.
Their partnership revolved around sewing up each other’s various wounds. They’d become intimately familiar with each other’s frailties. Theo knew her every brittle bit.
“Have to make it back to the Field Decks before the end of the blackout,” Aster said, using the last threads of her lucidity to communicate.
Theo rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “No. No, you have to stay here. I can’t let you leave.”
“As soon as the power returns, my overseer will know I’m gone,” she said, but she wasn’t sure that was true. More likely, he was dead. She prayed they’d forgotten about her in the chaos of bodies and wounds and darkness.
“You’ve lost several pints of blood,” Theo said, still crouched behind her. She could feel his eyes examining the wound, deciding where he’d need to sew, which tools he’d need to use.
“And Nicolaeus? Don’t you have to see to him?”
“I’ve been instructed to assure his comfort and nothing more.” Theo stood up and went back through the front office to the clinic, returning a moment later with several bottles of blood. He was going to do a transfusion.
“You�
��re operating on me here?” she asked.
“We can’t afford to move you.” Worry creased his eyes. He positioned her onto her stomach and anesthetized her as he had during her hysterectomy, her double mastectomy, various reconstructions after tussles and altercations. “It’s good to see you,” Theo said. “Our last meeting didn’t go as I’d hoped. I haven’t thought of much else but you since.”
Aster grunted, half asleep, lulled by the gentleness of his voice and the pain relief of the anesthetic.
“Why do you need to go to Baby?” asked Theo, but Aster was already well into a dream, images divided between memories of the past day and the world of her mind’s own making.
The overseer’s mare was standing on her hind legs. Lune’s notebooks. Maps made of gospel, seals, devil summons. Mangled memories. Giselle’s curious ravings. The horse trotted off and Aster followed after until she was tracking the ghosts of X deck with her mother’s radiolabe. It ticked and ticked and ticked, but whenever she turned, there was only absence and cold. She hid in a cavern on a moon made of ice in the cloak the old woman gave her, rabbits all around. They were rotting away and Aster had to amputate their feet. Their severed paws made a path in the snow leading out to the horizon. Snow fell, covering them so Aster could not see, but she knew the way forward was straight ahead. It always was.
“I’m chasing my mother’s ghost,” Aster whispered out loud, suddenly conscious. Theo instructed her to count down in her head from one hundred. She made it to ninety-four before fading back into unconsciousness.
* * *
Aster didn’t stir for two and a half days. Upon waking, she would remember why she didn’t like to sleep in long bouts. Memories couldn’t be intimidated into retreat while asleep.
It was Theo’s lips pressed against the skin of her hand that first woke her. She was in the Q deck infirmary. He used a medicine dropper to feed her water. “I’m glad you’re awake,” he said. “There’s much to tell you.”
Giselle had disappeared.
vi
On Q deck, a child’s schooling began in infancy. A mother wore her babies and toddlers on her back or hip as she talked to them through her work preparing soil or harvesting cassava. She counted rows of crops out loud with silly rhymes, recited poems, and by three or four, most children knew their numbers to one hundred, how to do sums and differences, and how to make bearing a load easier with a pulley or lever.
An Unkindness of Ghosts Page 7
