by Jack Dann
The strange life cycle of the Suvari is not our invention; it is common in fungi and plants like ferns and mosses. We wondered how such a life cycle would affect the culture of sentient beings, and ended up exploring first contact in the context of our shared Catholic upbringing and similar sleep patterns.
— Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch
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NIGHTSHIP
KIM WESTWOOD
KIM WESTWOOD, a graduate of the inaugural Clarion South workshop, won a 2002 Aurealis Award for her first speculative fiction story, ‘The Oracle’, which was published in Redsine 9 and then translated for the Serbian magazine Znak Sagite. Seven more stories have appeared since, in anthologies such as Agog! and Eidolon I, Year’s Bests in Australia and the USA, and on ABC Radio National. She is a recipient of the prestigious Varuna Writer’s Fellowship and has recently sold her first novel to HarperCollins Australia.
Like Sonya Dorman, Kit Reed and Carol Emshwiller, Westwood writes with subtle style and a brilliant intensity. In the wild, gender-bending story that follows, she grants us a glimpse into a dystopian future of ships and slaves, Rajas and Mukhtahs. Listen to the dark and violent poetry of the future…
Here the linen smells of mice and the men of old boots. I lie beneath a slaughter of ferals, cushioned in my guilty comforts and waiting for this black-caulked hulk to sink; but it glides like death along the briny channels of a shrouded city half-submerged — a Grey Zone, neither sea nor shore.
Past my porthole other nightships slice the mist thickening on dank canals. Blunt-nosed, barnacled, they nudge from lock to lock, deals done and deliveries made under cover of a perpetual fog.
Now that I am owned — ship’s boy to a Baron — I have been sewn up to make certain. And if it wasn’t me they’d chosen for those rough, practised hands, it would have been another. Ship’s surgeon Crake, who did the work on me, doubles as a dentist for the crew and, Gods help the bleeders, a midwife. Midshipman Nog went to him for bunions on his toes. The lancing knife took the ends off each in one quick disconnection, Crake shouting as he cut, You’ll fit a smaller shoe and use less leather! A bloody stump Nog has now, and cries at night in his bunk across the bulkhead from me.
I know, since he is not captive, he could jump ship for shore at any time. But for what? For where? Galley Ma would say for Kosciusko, a distant mountain, west, that climbs above our creeping winter into sunlight. But none of us — the bonded, sold — have ever seen it, or will ever go; and the crew, all five of them Barons including Nog, won’t speak of it.
Three years ago, at thirteen, I was bonded to my captain, a metal merchant and fur trader. Some say it’s a sorry pact compared to smelter work, but she is better than most, and amid the business of it I feel a fierce attachment. The Barons, although powerful among the Iron Families, are not the cruellest, and tucked between her threats are rough endearments and promises of protection, safe passage. So when she brings out the knife to tease — threatening to cut my stitches then have them resewn tighter — I listen with a hellish joy, and behind my pleas and protestations there is desire for her hand to snick.
Above deck the ship’s bell sounds EYES PORT! and it’s force of habit that makes me press my face to the rimy glass as we pass below a row of bodies, heads in sacks, suspended from canal-side cranes. Pacifists mainly, and any others — the infidelitous and effete — that threaten the Family system.
From my pelted bower I hear shouts starboard, and tinkly bells, the graunching of a girl barge alongside. The captain and her first lieutenant are off to spend what leisure time they have. Later, when the barge returns, she will fall sated into bed smelling of glitter and oil and a barge girl’s milky seed, but it’s of no matter to me: I am her true companion, kept for an entirely different pleasure.
I close my eyes to the caress of air, a quick filigree touch, then the sharp edge of a fingernail down my cheek — not my captain, but the ghost of ship’s boy Aggi at my bedside.
You like it too much, she says, aglimmer.
I make as if to grab her, but she jinks away. An old game. She was always faster, lighter than me; a mere slip of a boy whose misfortune it was to be too lithe, too handsome at thirteen and in the short years she had beyond that age when fate and Family collude to choose our adult occupations.
Until then we are considered children, and ungendered. At that deciding time we are given titles — man, woman, girl or boy — according to our station. All those in the Iron Families, irrespective of their physiology, are named as men, while those of us born out of Family who pass through puberty and never bleed are sewn up and called boys. We become deck and kitchen hands on the ships — and sometimes, with mixed fortune, captains’ companions; others go to work in the shipyard smelters, or eke a living scavenging for scrap uranium in the waste pits. The last brings better pay, but a shorter life.
Those at menarche — bleeders (and there are far fewer of them than us) — are the only ones announced as women. Exchanged by their own families for a generous stipend, they are sent to the birthing farms for procreative duty, the Iron Families being mostly barren. And only when they are fully spent do they rejoin the populations in the Grey Zone, living out their broken spinsterhood cared for by those of their siblings not sold at auction.
But the girl barges are another thing. Decked with swathes of coloured cloth and strings of bells, they are a floating misery, a tinselled gaol for those youths born out of Family and whose seed has been deemed unworthy of another generation. Most of these ‘ill-affected’ are drowned before they reach thirteen, but the rest the Iron Families visit for distraction.
Aggi used to say she could hear the crying long before a barge appeared.
And now? I ask.
She looks as if she might not answer. I hear it all the time.
When the barge has pushed into the mist and the decks above are silent, I seek out Nog and we sit midship, wedged under the dinghy tarps out of a sleeting headwind.
His foot is bound with filthy strips of rag, and festering. I want him to see Galley Ma, who’s dressed my wounds many times and has kinder hands and better medicines than Crake; but as far as Nog is down the Family’s pecking order he is still one of them, and spits Pacifist!
I don’t argue: she’s told me the story. I peer up at the soot flurries from a floating immolation bier, and change the subject.
Nog, can you tell where one city ends and the next begins!
They are all one now, the towns and cities laced together, he replies. But the old names have been given to the locks.
How far do the canals extend?
As far as there is land north and south, I’ve heard. But I’ve only sailed the central stretch, old New South Wales, between the steel ports. Those Families that ply the most northerly and southerly reaches — the Sardars, Presidents and Muftis — I’ve never seen.
I wonder what he knows of Kosciusko. And west?
Nothing. An indefinite mist.
He shifts position, lifting his bandaged foot with both hands as a foul smell wafts, and taps the dinghy at his back. My escape, he says, if ever I should want it. His rheumy eyes look past the cargo crane and fo’c’sle winches to the Gatling gun niched at the bow, then fix on me. This whole ship is radioactive. We are radioactive.
What’s that mean? I ask, although the answer makes no difference.
He considers. Soon we’ll be deader than dodos.
I don’t ask him about dodos. Those of us born into the Grey Zone know we are living a madness. That our world is dying, and the Families are getting from it what they can.
From somewhere aft there comes an angry shout, the landing thwack of leather, a shrill scream: ship’s boy Moth — forever picked on by the crew — being punished for some petty misdemeanour.
I think of Aggi. Don’t you ever wish … she used to say, arms crossed about a body lean like a sapling as she stared into the mist. I would follow her gaze to where ships’ lights floated in fuzzy strings and shore beacons blin
ked. No, I’d reply. And it was true. I had no spirit for adventure, no fire for any challenge other than my owner, whose dangerous changeability — the beckonings and dismissals — kept me hooked. But in truth there was no one more precious to me than Aggi, and I was often afraid for her. Wishing, I warned, will only bring you trouble. And trouble came, in the form of a Shogun who took a liking to her features and tried to spirit her off the ship. In the fight that ensued the Shogun was killed, and so was Aggi, caught between blades.
The feud between the two Families has lasted a full year, and each night since poor Aggi was tipped dead into the canal I have dreamt a ship of ghosts with her leaning from the prow, hair flying, and I its frail, deluded helmsman led by min-min lights across the marshlands to the snowy sides of Kosciusko.
Nog eases painfully out into the sleet and stumps off to prepare for docking. Left alone, I bring the razor blade from my boot across my forearm and feel the satisfaction as it beads a bright living red. Many things the captain will command and I will bear the marks of, but this I do entirely for myself.
The scars and being captain’s companion sets me apart. Aggi never cared, and the privilege of the latter made me fast friends with Nog; but from the ship’s boys there has always been a reticence, as if those two things laid between us have made an uncrossable divide.
My captain has me on the long chain so I can reach all parts of the cabin as I wish. Her back to me, she is taking inventory with her second in command: a new deal struck with the Rajas, a ship’s boy maimed in a recent act of carelessness. I wonder that she can’t see their third, seraphim-bright and leaning both elbows on the table.
Aggi winks.
The lieutenant tells the hard news to his commander last. The Viscounts have begun a new campaign of mutilation against the Mukhtahs, he says, and her shoulders lift for a breath then drop.
I thought that ended long ago, she responds low-tone, and both are silent a moment, remembering.
Before the Eastern Industry Alliance was forged, the Families — Dukes and Barons, Earls and Emirs, Viscounts, Rajas and Mukhtahs just some — were forever at war among themselves, and developed a taste for it. When they began to mutilate each others’ children in an effort to champion their own line, most were left barren.
My thoughts are on the captain. She had never let me see her unclothed, and instinctively, I had always known why.
Her second takes his leave and she stares awhile unseeing at the door, then leans down to the shackle on the chair leg and begins to haul me in.
Late afternoon we moor at South Head for a stoning. A bleeder has betrayed her Family and aborted their child. I doubt she meant to, but that’s immaterial.
The captain and I climb the path to a high, solitary place clotted with mist and strewn with rocks. The Emirs are gathered in a wide circle, their accused crouched before them in her burial shroud. We take our places at the back of the crowd, being invited guests and this not our Family’s trouble. As a signal comes from one, a scythe of arms is raised and the first volley flies. The woman screams once, twice, then on and on, a lacerating wail above the sick thudding of stones.
I wipe my sleeve across my eyes as if some dirt has lodged there. I can’t be seen to sympathise. I sneak a look at my Baron beside me, nothing to betray her thoughts — except, perhaps, the up-down-up of her Adam’s apple and the white press of her lips.
The woman topples to one side, silent now, a foot released from the bloody huddle in the pooling stain from cloth to dirt. For her at last it’s over, but in my belly something forlorn and wild is rising: a serrated ache that tears from my stitching to my heart. I want to turn my head and puke, but for my captain I must contain myself or be punished for shaming her Family. The broken body is picked off the ground and carried to a pit at the side of the field. There she is dropped — so small, no more than rags — and a little dirt kicked in.
The captain goes to thank the Emirs for being included on their guest list, and to say she will be sure to return the favour when the Barons next have a hanging. Then we leave along the well-trod track back to our ship moored with others in the lock below.
Ma says the Barons dress like last century’s South Sea pirates; the other Families have quite different styles. We, their bonded, are generally attired in the cast-offs, and can tell on sight to which Family each belongs. And so it is with their punishments, which have become signature: stoning is popular with the Emirs and Mukhtahs, while the Barons favour hanging or decapitation, which at least is quick. The Rajas go for immolation, and the Viscounts and Dukes prefer public floggings where the agony is drawn out for hours. I often wonder how they find so many to punish. Are the canal cities still so chock-full of dissenters? Or is it that the Iron Families have found — like me — a cathartic pleasure in the ministry of pain?
Mornings I am sent to help Galley Ma. Of Torres Strait stock (home swept away long ago) she is large-boned and reassuring, queen of her kitchen. This morning she is both hands in the soy dough, squeezing it with soothing repetition. The progeny of pacifists, like her, used to have their left hand — the hand of darkness — sliced off; but Ma has two.
It was by Aditi’s grace, she says, that I was found to have a certain talent in the kitchen, and so kept both my hands.
Her forebears were among those who tried to keep the Iron Families from their trajectory to power. I ask again how she escaped the Kyoto Uprising, when all the rest were killed. She taps her nose, mysterious about her past. But once I overheard that she and the captain had agreements that went further back than my short life. And although she gladly takes the role of standin for our own mothers, she seems perpetually ungendered: neither man nor woman, but something unnamed in-between.
As boys filter in from around the ship, she motions us closer. Those most recently bonded and still with keepsakes thumb failing palm screens that flicker with the likeness of their parents’ faces. I’d had one too, once; but it was tossed by Grake into the canal soon after I arrived onboard.
When we are settled — nine of us — around her workbench and fixed on her expectantly, she waves her arm towards the black socket of a porthole, and begins.
Today, let’s think of this as Venice, and us as gondoliers.
She describes that city of art built above canals, its floating white beauty trellised in light and eventually swallowed by the sea, and I peer out trying to imagine it as a barge girl floats past, his pale face illumined by the starboard navigation lights.
I gasp, and the other boys rush to look.
Veils drift, gossamer, about him; sequins dot his skin like tiny stars. I am reminded of the jellyfish that slop against the hull and levee walls at turn of tide.
Ma’s conversation takes a different tack.
It was the weathermen, she says, who envisaged this, our fogbound world, back when the skies still turned their daily blue and the sun kept us warm — so, of course, no one listened. The skies began to darken, bit by bit; but did any of us take special note the last day the red disc of the sun burnt unobscured above? Did we sear that hot image on our retinas so that afterward our memories could fill the lacuna in the sky?
She pauses a moment, a reservoir of sadness, then looks carefully around as if to record the geometry and colour of each of us. The inspection ends at Moth, fresh welts congealing above the collar of her shirt.
Ma slaps the dough aside to start on another piece. The day the landscape of our lives was set for change there should have been a warning sound: a siren, or a thunderclap. Instead the machinery of old divisions ratcheted soundlessly together as the Iron Families were united under one dominion. They have always paid heed to an angry and intolerant God, and so Kyoto was quelled by slaughter; but by far the worst of it was saved for the pacifists, who were an anathema to the Families’ way of doing business.
We boys sit hushed above the resting hum of the ship’s reactor and the faint clicking of the ion exchangers inching us along. The images of beauty — Venice, the sun reflecting
off shiny cities edged with blue — chased away and we bereft, our minds turn to what else we’d lost.
Galley Ma takes pity on us and brings out her picture books. She lays them on her workbench and slowly turns the pages as we pore, goggle-eyed, over faded illustration plates.
Once, she says, you could dig in the soil and find a myriad creatures, or look to the sky and see the shapes of birds; but we lost them all — except the ferals — their frail perfection barely a memory now. We are left with fog and the structures of our own making: the canals and enough industry to build a hundred ships. But for what? What kind of future, here? Or perhaps the Families think to conquer other countries cleaner and more sane than ours.
Her tone carries a warning, but our thoughts are stuck on something else, another beauty.
Show us the thing, we implore, and then she brings out her most precious of all, a blue-green globe, and sets it spinning slowly on its stand.
Never forget, she tells us, one eye to the door, that the world is bigger than this fogbound stretch we sail, and although the Iron Families hold sway here, they may not elsewhere.
This is more than she has ever said, and we hold our breaths at the blasphemy of it as she stops the globe, her finger pressed to a fat familiar shape set amid the blue: Terra Obscura. Then she traces a floury line to a peaked contour near its eastern edge and whispers, Kosciusko.
The ship stinks, a slew of ferals being skinned on the aft deck. Their innards will go to Galley Ma; the rest is destined for the tannery at our next stop.
I am primly at the rail in my ship’s boy’s best, waiting for the captain. She is off to a Thirteen sale, and I am to go with her.
Watch your back, says Nog, sluicing the bloody deck with canal water.