An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  Aster wrapped gauze around the sore area on Maud’s bicep, taping the end to hold it secure. “Magnets?”

  “Mmmm,” said Maud. “Don’t get me wrong. Magnets is a good idea except for the part where there aren’t any magnets big enough to do what Jay’s talking about.”

  “I don’t understand what magnets could have to do with it at all,” Aster said, feeling out of her depth again.

  “You need a really strong electrical current to generate some magnetic fields,” said Jay, wiping a crumb from her lip with her thumb. “Something could’ve used Matilda’s current to power their magnet. That’s the only thing I can think of big enough to suck up so much electricity. You understand?”

  Aster recalled the last blackout, the sudden, jerking stop of the deck. She’d attributed the blade flying into her back to that, but—

  The speed required to generate that much force couldn’t have come from decks jolting. The farming tool had broken bone, severed tendons and arteries. A blade affected by a powerful magnet could’ve done that easily.

  She knew that it was true, even without much evidence. Clues from her mother’s journals were coming together. Lune had discovered the cause of the blackouts: a magnet. Aster didn’t know what it meant, but she would. Lune had had this same realization some twenty-six years ago. She hadn’t known what she’d find on the other side of the mystery, but she’d risked everything seeking it out anyway.

  Aster wished Giselle was here. She’d shout, Another clue! Another clue! Giselle would yawn and explain that she’d figured it out ages ago, but she was glad Aster had finally caught on.

  Aster reached for her radio, so tempted to contact Giselle. Three days and not a word. Three days of not knowing if Giselle was alive or dead. She liked to disappear, but the ease and frequency with which she did it made it harder, not easier, to bear.

  Once when Giselle had run off like this, Aster had reached out over the radio right away. Giselle had left hers on while in the custody of a guard, however, and he’d found it in one of the hidden pockets of her linen dress skirts. He’d punished her for the contraband quite forcefully and confiscated the radio. Aster was reluctant to reach out to Giselle in that way ever again, even after finding her a new radio.

  Aster stayed long after she’d drawn the last woman’s blood, the tubes safely tucked in their slots in the cooler, but the time eventually came for her to leave. This pass had a time stamp.

  “Send the Surgeon my regards,” said Jay, that wide grin back on her pale face. Aster prayed the girl would live forever, but of course it couldn’t be so.

  On her way out, she took the chance to admire Baby close-up one last time. It was likely she would never return to the Nexus again. Someone had tacked a large sheet of paper on the glass, obscuring the view from where Aster stood.

  She recognized it immediately as a map of the grid, like the one Lune had in her notes. The fish dissection that wasn’t a fish dissection. Aster walked up closer to it, squinted her eyes. It was hard to make out all the lines with the murkiness of the protective goggles, but she knew their map had something missing.

  Lune’s map showed circuitry pathways nonexistent on this rendering. She’d discovered the impossible magnet, had plotted and charted how it drew power. She’d gone looking for something that didn’t exist and found it.

  Part II

  Metallurgy

  vii

  Surgeon General Theo Smith

  I was always a rather small, trifling thing. My nanny would pick me up and fly me through the air as she called me Bird Bones, which she first abridged to simply Bird, and then later amended to Birdy.

  For that, she got a slap from my father, who thought Birdy too feminine a nickname. I was already prone to an unnatural girlishness, and, Heavens, don’t encourage the boy, Ms. Melusine.

  My sissyness and my sickliness were two sides of the same coin to my father. I was weak and didn’t belong. The feared scandal of my birth—bastard child of a black woman—had already forced his resignation as sovereign. The least I could do was be a good and strapping lad. I suppose he thought he had a chance after all, when I turned out so pale. Though he was unable to impregnate his wife, the Heavens were giving him another chance at a son. Pity for him how it all turned out.

  Sometimes I smile as I imagine his disappointment, and I do so now as I gather up myself to go. What would Father think of my closely shaven face? My peculiar wardrobe? He would disown me, and that heartens me. I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.

  I glance at my wristwatch and note I’m going to be late for my meeting with Aster, but Uncle has called for me. When he bids, it’s best to come. I should radio Aster, let her know of the change in schedule, but it’s too much of a risk for her. In the fields, an overseer might see.

  “Theo, lad, sit down,” Uncle says when I reach his chambers, greeting me with a firm handshake. He’s smiling and his voice is warm. The Sovereign’s illness has him in good spirits.

  “I hate it when you call me lad,” I say.

  He laughs deeply and gruffly. “I do suppose you’re a man now.”

  No, not quite. Not at all. That is the exact opposite reason why it upsets me when he calls me things that mean boy.

  “I get taken by how youthful you look at times,” he says. “Sometimes it feels you are getting younger, not older.”

  It’s the medication I take, an expected but welcome side effect of the special serum Aster makes me for my postpoliomyelitis syndrome. It’s a testosterone antagonist. I don’t think she knows.

  “There was always a way about you,” says Uncle. “Suffice it to say, you are angelic. There can be no other explanation for the medical miracles you perform and your childish smoothness.”

  Though more forgiving of my sissyness than my father, it comes out sometimes. His—not quite disdain, not quite repulsion . . . would it make sense if I called it attraction? I fascinate and excite him in a way I do not think is entirely wholesome, and it’s been that way since I was very young.

  I don’t know if he’s ever hurt me in that way adults can hurt children. I certainly have no memory of it. But then, I have no memory of most of my childhood. Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse. It is neither here nor there.

  Uncle’s had his maid set up a coffee service in the smoking room, and I sit as far away from him as I can in one of the chairs, purposefully avoiding the sofa. If I sat there, he’d certainly sit next to me, too close.

  “I trust you’re well,” I say, and help myself to coffee. I typically take it black, but adding cream and sugar gives me more to do with my hands.

  “As well as can be expected. I am saddened by the state of Sovereign Nicolaeus’s health, but the Heavens takes us when it does, and as it is its will, it is to be praised. To God we must surrender.”

  “And is it the Heavens’ will that you replace him when his time finally does come?” I ask.

  “You know better than I, Heavens’ Hands Made Flesh,” Uncle says, and he believes it. He’s always believed in me.

  “On this matter, I don’t know what the Heavens would have, but I do know most certainly that you will take Nicolaeus’s place, as that is what the Sovereignty wants.”

  “Does the Sovereignty not follow the Will of the Heavens?”

  “They follow something,” I say.

  Uncle nods. “Indeed. You too believe they’ve lost their way.”

  I believe their way has always been one of godlessness.

  After the requisite small talk, we move on to the matter he really wants to discuss: Aster.

  I do not tell him that I’m on my way to meet her. I doubt it’d go over well. He says that I am too lenient with her and others of her ilk.

  “I know that it’s in your nature to be kind to the downtrodden, but she’s not good for you.
She’s dangerous.”

  He thinks she’s dangerous because she has an influence on me, and anyone influencing me means that he cannot exert perfect control over me. “She’s harmless, Lieutenant.”

  “None of them are harmless, Theo. They are animals, and if it weren’t for us bending them into some kind of shape, they’d live in complete chaos and sin.”

  I wonder what he’d say if I confessed the depth of my feelings for Aster right now. The regard I have for her is not parallel to anything I’ve felt toward another. Heavens forgive me, but despite vows promising the opposite, I’ve imagined what it would be like to be entwined with Aster, to touch her, to let all my secrets trickle out of me and into her, to take hold of her burdens.

  “I’m very tired,” I say.

  “Of course. I don’t mean to keep you.”

  And yet he has. I hope that Aster understands. She’s keen on schedules and keen on people sticking to them. We’re similar in that way.

  I like cycles and repetition. I like a good sense of rigor in my day. It helps me mark the passing of time. It helps me honor each moment. I have no personal sense of time, no real feel for what it means when sand passes through an hourglass. Sometimes it takes an hour. More frequently, it’s an instant, days, universes.

  “Goodbye, Uncle,” I say, and hurry as much as I can, which isn’t much. My leg is always in some kind of pain.

  * * *

  When I reach the Sphyrum, a guard salutes me. He abandons his post to walk me through the corridor adjoining Matilda’s main staircase to the Field Decks. If I’ve timed it right, I can enter the Maple Wood on its way to Baby. It will pass the wheat field where I agreed to meet Aster, and at precisely 18:39 there will be a gantry connecting the two decks.

  I consult my map of the Sphyrum as well as my wristwatch and walk past the guard. “An honor to serve you, Surgeon, sir,” he says.

  There’s a metal-grated portway at the edge of the field that will lock in place with the gantry, and I stand there alone as the deck lurches into motion toward the sun. I almost tip right over.

  There are thoughts of jumping, I admit, but these are not fully realized impulses. Vague what-ifs. Nothing more.

  My father raised blue field spaniels, hardy, spry hunting dogs. I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline. A hound with no prey drive was no hound at all and should be killed. I saw him drown a whole litter once, and I think he meant to drown me too. Conform or die. That was his motto. I am oddly doing bits of both, each half-assedly.

  The deck slows to a stop and docks into place with the gantry, and I have one minute to walk across. As soon as I do, I spot Aster.

  Her shift is over, and except for a few stragglers, the others have left for their home decks. It’s hot, so she’s torn off the sleeves from her shirt, rolled up her trousers to the knee. One of her kneesocks stops midshin and the other ruffles down at her ankle, just an inch of blue fabric peeking out of her black boots.

  It’s been four days since Aster staggered into my clinic bleeding, dazed, split open. I hasten my mind away from images of her torn body that morning, but now, as I watch her, I am reminded of the twenty-two-centimeter gash.

  I reknitted her shattered scapula together with the help of an injectable osseous tissue, sutured the slit in her subclavian artery, and grafted blastema-mimic onto her injured tissue, but healing is not a perfect science.

  “You came,” Aster says when she hears my approach. Eyes closed, she brushes her hand over stalks of wheat, head tilted up to Baby Sun. Its light wanes now that day shift has ended. Decks overhead creak toward each other, ushering in night.

  Like a child, I marvel at the moving parts. A little girl dissecting her first radio.

  It was Aster who informed me that Matilda’s architects designed the Sphyrum as an homage to the Celestial Sphere, a theoretical model of the Great Lifehouse and its surrounding astronomy. I don’t believe there’s a book, brochure, or pamphlet in the Archives that Aster hasn’t read. She picked up the tidbit about the Sphyrum’s design from an old preship newspaper article.

  In the model, the Great Lifehouse rests at the center of an imaginary sphere, stars revolving around it along various axes. If I understand it correctly (and I very well may not; astromatics never much enthralled me), the Celestial Sphere was distinct from the worldview pretelescope scientists held that the universe revolved around a single, insignificantly sized planet. Rather, the Celestial Sphere provided a way of understanding relationships in the horizon, the poles, and the night sky to determine the location of stars relative to one’s location on the Great Lifehouse at a given time.

  In the Sphyrum, the sun is at the center and the land revolves around it. It is, in fact, the very opposite of the Celestial Sphere, but then tributes shouldn’t be perfect imitations.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be able to make it,” she says.

  Her invitation had been quite terse. More of a demand. She’d contacted me on my radio and said to come to the wheat fields for prayers. Not to the banana fields? I’d asked, which was where I thought she’d been assigned. No, she informed me, her sharp tone cutting through the crackle of the radio static. Wheat and banana share no sonic similarities. You should have your hearing checked, she told me. I can’t say for sure whether she meant it in earnest, but given the overannunciation of her remaining instructions, there’s a reasonable chance she did.

  “At any rate, I appreciate you made it at all,” she says, tipping the straw hat she’s got on, seemingly not upset by my tardiness. “I found a larval specimen of Lepidoptera. Look. Isn’t it beautiful?” Aster holds up the yellow-spotted caterpillar resting on her middle finger.

  “These are a danger to the wheat crop, no?” I ask.

  She helps the caterpillar onto my hand. Her fingers are calloused and dry, and when they scrape against mine, they’re coarse enough that I briefly confuse the contact for static shock.

  “This strain of wheat produces a toxin that the larvae find malodorous, so it’s not of particular concern. Mostly they eat the nasturtium.”

  Then she kisses the caterpillar as it sits in my palm. She does that. Kisses bugs. Leaves of plants. Microscopes. Paper. The muzzles of the draft horses.

  “Here, I would like it back now,” she says, and plucks it from my hand, bending down to set it onto the petals of a red flower. Then she lies down on her back. It is clear that this is where she’s most at home, even more so than in her botanarium.

  “You’re moving stiffly,” I say.

  “It was, as my Ainy would say, a very long day.”

  I’m surprised by how closely my disapproving groan resembles a growl. I’m always surprised by my body. The way it moves and occupies space. Its height. Its presence. “You’re supposed to be in recovery,” I say.

  She shrugs.

  “And your shoulder? How’s it doing?”

  She shrugs again. “Hopefully I’ll get some rest tonight. The cold and the pain have made sound sleep quite impossible the last several nights, but I have work to do in the fields,” she says, stretching her shoulder. “I might get permission from the overseer to stay the night. The heat should help soften the joints. I am surprised more women have not had similar ideas, but I speculate they prefer the relative safety of their quarters to the openness of the Field Decks.”

  Relative safety. That’s the most any of them can hope for. Aster’s sickle sits next to her on the ground; it’s the one she’s been using to harvest grasses of wheat despite the severity of her injury. I don’t know what it is that keeps me from picking it up and slicing it through—everyone. My uncle. The overseer I see in the distance. The guards. Sovereign Nicolaeus.

  “Come with me. I have something to show you,” says Aster, standing up slowly.

  An overseer watches me follow after her, smiling. I cringe because I know what he’s thinking. I know what he’s got on his mind about what we’re about to do.

  I am not that sort of man. The sort
to follow a woman into the brush and do with her whatever pleases him. I don’t think I’m a man at all.

  When I make eye contact with the overseer, I do not smile. I stare at his face hard and do not blink, though the pollens in the air make my eyes want to twitch. His gaze runs from mine, and this is good. People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don’t want to be scrutable.

  Aster brings me to Moon. She’s the she-dog, half wolf, that lives in the barn where the wheat grinder is. The structure is made of wood, the white paint chipped. Though I have never been “outside,” of course, it is here that I can begin to imagine what it’s like.

  Moon is huge. A beast, truly, but sweet as a pup. She doesn’t like to leave the barn, and she survives on the scraps people bring her. Aster pats the dog on the head, rubs her cheek against her jowls so they’re nuzzling.

  I let Moon smell my fingers. She licks them, then settles onto her rug to have her belly petted. “Later, Moon,” says Aster, and heads to the back of the barn. She’s almost limping, and I think to invite her to my cabin where there is a bath with running hot water. No pass I could write would allow her that high, and it would be bad-mannered to invite a young woman into my home, but I wish it could be so.

  “Look,” she says, and she smiles at me, something she doesn’t do frequently. She points to a little nook in the back corner of the barn. There’s a wood bench, and on top of it is a jar filled with water, candles, and an idol of the Mother, she who carried God in her womb and birthed him, the universe itself, the Heavens. “Do you like it?”

  “It is an altar,” I say. There is a pillow in front of the bench for kneeling. Photographs, grayed, of people no one knows, are tacked up against the wood of the barn wall. “What for?”

  “For you. To let you know that I appreciate what you do for me. To cement our . . .” she pauses for a single second, “to cement our friendship. I regret how harsh I was with you. This is an apology for my severity and a thank you for fixing my shoulder. I know you like to pray in the Field Decks. I thought you might like to have a special place. It is not the same as being out there, I know, but—”