Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  One of the other colonists rolled up her sleeve. She had a dark-red spot on her upper arm, a cluster of three pinpricks. “Hurt like anything, I’ll tell you.”

  Sister Lucia leaned over her plate to peer at the mark. “That’s a war-issue multi-syringe. It lets you inject a whole batch of immunizations at once, for expediency. Usually more than just the three-or five-set you’d be getting for a new colony. They’re certainly not throwing much money behind this propagandist venture.”

  “The war took its toll.” Terret’s face darkened and Sister Faustina wondered if she was thinking about the famous Phuntsok dynasty, just a memory now, the family scattered across the four systems and scattering further with each baby born under an unfamiliar sky. “Maybe they don’t have the capital.”

  The mood had grown somber. Pressed fiber cutlery scraped against heirloom plates with all the noise of a grasshopper leaping from one stalk of grass to another. The baby slept fitfully, his small hands balled into angry fists. One of the colonists—a young man with a headful of painstaking braids—lifted his fork toward the Mother Superior. “Reverend Mother, you must have seen the war. Tell us, what was it like, to live it? My grandparents would never speak of it, and we were only from the second system.”

  The Reverend Mother was focused on her plate, mixing her curry into her rice carefully and methodically so each grain was covered the same. She ate less these days, Sister Faustina had noticed. One more thing that was none of her business. Let the old woman wither if she wanted. And yet, the way she scooped the rice up and over, over and over, it was unsettling. When the young man spoke, she didn’t put down the spoon, just watched him for a long, quiet moment.

  A quick sign, her left hand. “The war?”

  “Yes, Mother. I just wondered . . .” He fell silent.

  “The war was hell.”

  The colonists looked at each other, then back down at their plates. No one ate.

  “The Reverend Mother does not like to speak much of those times,” Sister Lucia said. She reached out, like she wanted to put a hand on the Reverend Mother’s shoulder, and then remembered how inappropriate that would be. The Reverend Mother held her hand up, flat-palmed, to stop her.

  “I mean biblically,” she signed. “It was hell. The land was turned to churning fire and ash. Sulfur choked a continent dead. I saw California slide into the ocean, I was close enough to watch the line of bombs go off across the fault line one by one, each as visible as a city at night from that distance. You cannot imagine a thing like that, child. Millions dead before they could call for help. A cloud of dust covering a hemisphere.”

  “You were in orbit for the end?” Sister Lucia asked. “I thought . . . I suppose I assumed . . . that you were much farther out in the first system when it all ended.”

  The Reverend Mother’s hands fell into her lap, still and silent. She stared at her food, and for a moment Sister Faustina thought the old woman had gone and fallen asleep there at the table. But no, she lifted her right hand.

  “I was close enough. I’m sorry—this is a very difficult topic. Please excuse me if I do not go on.” Her hand shook. She had never seemed frail before—old, of course, in the way that a towering tree was old—but not frail. Now she did.

  The rest of the dinner party looked at each other over the table.

  “No, excuse me,” the young man said. “I have a little fascination with it, that’s all. This is supposed to be a happy evening. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

  Joseph stood up from the table. “I have just the thing!”

  He ducked into the half-disassembled ship and rattled around in the stack of crates waiting to be unboxed. He returned with a brown bottle wrapped in a cream-colored handwritten label.

  “This is honey wine from my grandmother’s bees, stored in her cellar, given to me by my mother to bless our new home with.” He split the wax from the top and dislodged the cork with a practiced twist. They had only thin plastic cups, but the wine poured golden like the best summer sunset, and around the tables shoulders relaxed again. “Don’t worry—she gave me enough to bless us thrice over. Plenty left to get properly drunk at the weddings.”

  Sister Faustina swallowed a mouthful and it went down warm and sweet and still cool from inside the crate. The moon was just spinning into springtime, but the wine warmed her straight through from her tongue to her fingertips. She swallowed another mouthful and this time the honey came to the fore, sugar and muskiness coating the inside of her mouth. She had tasted real wine only rarely, and had never understood the words in the old cookbooks and romantic novels that came across the relays. Oakey or dry or soil-tasting. This was sweet, then warm, then bitter in the back of her mouth, gently encouraging her to take another sip for the sweetness.

  Joseph lifted the bottle to the light and there, in the bottom, was a preserved honeybee. A real one, its wings scattering the light through the glass.

  * * *

  That night they slept with the hatch open and the wind whistling through the ship. The moss that covered the walls rippled in its wake, like waves, like the ship reaching out toward atmosphere. They needed no chemlights—the glow of the planet above and the unclouded stars left the night a soft blue, bright enough to see by, or write by. Sister Lucia couldn’t sleep, so she slipped from her chamber to sit in the grass beside the ship with paper and a sharpened pencil.

  For her daily meditation she was working on a biography of Saint Adetayo, who had spent her life growing the first living ship and who had through her devotion allowed humanity to spread across the stars without needing to suck dry the Earth. She had just reached the part where Adetayo, stripped of funding by her university and with only trays of greenless veliger-stage neonates to show for her efforts, was on the verge of losing her faith. There was not much more to go—much of the saint’s later life had been lost to the inevitable ravages of history.

  Once she finished writing the hagiography by hand, Sister Lucia would record it and set the recording into a satellite that they would launch into solar orbit so that the story of Saint Adetayo would broadcast indefinitely to be heard and shared by all who encountered the signal. Sister Lucia knew hubris was a sin, but she swelled with pride when she imagined her words living long beyond her mortal body, the signal traveling farther and farther to alien worlds not yet dreamed of by human imaginations. Someday humanity’s language would be strange, stranger even than the patois spoken in the farthest systems now, but the words would persist.

  She had taken on hagiography because there were long stretches where they were alone with little need for doctoring. Usually it brought her clarity. Today she found herself unable to untangle the threads of the saint’s life. Saint Adetayo had left no journals. None of her private words were extant, lost between the plague at the end of the saint’s century, and the rebellions after, and then the war only a generation ago. Sister Lucia was at the pivotal moment—the loss of faith, the moment when all might have been undone. Some creative interpretation was necessary to evoke the despair, the burning desire for progress that led Saint Adetayo to press on.

  When she was a child, the only teacher on the asteroid had told Sister Lucia she loved too many things too deeply. She loved the rovers that rumbled her lullabies and the little spider-legged bots that rattled overhead repairing microfissures in the glass dome that kept them alive. She loved the roly-poly bugs that aerated the soil in the gardens and the aphids that cleaned the plants. She loved her parents and the other children and that teacher despite his lack of love for anything that wasn’t a person. Later when she took her aptitude tests and began her medical training, she learned to love skin and bone and microbiomes and mitochondria, the miraculous architecture of humanity. What a glorious universe, to have made beings so complicated and fragile! She loved them all, each and every one. When she took her vows, she had seen the great history of them stretching behind her, all of her dead sisters who linked hands and brought her here, to this one moment, which could not have
been any other way.

  She wrote, Alone in her darkened laboratory, Saint Adetayo sat with her trays of failed ships, contemplating their small lives. Each one a failure, a chance for humanity to see the stars realized and then extinguished by the unyielding rules of genetics. She had no one left beside her. This was a fool’s errand, a project for a crackpot scientist who had lost sight of the laws of nature, according to her department chair. Saint Adetayo had only righteousness left, and the knowledge that she had a gift for humanity that would change the entire course of history and take them from their small and dying planet to a great wide universe.

  She took the blunt side of her pencil and drew a dark black line through all of it.

  Certainty? Is that what the saint had felt? Certainty? How could she have felt certainty in anything? How could she have known that she was on the cusp of a miracle and not instead meddling in God’s design?

  Sister Lucia tried again. Alone in her darkened laboratory, Saint Adetayo sat with her trays of failed ships, each one a life she had created and extinguished. Was this hubris, she wondered? Was she taking on a role humans were never meant to have—creator and destroyer of new life?

  No. That was all wrong. She scribbled over it until the lines were just a black block on the page. The sides of her hands were covered in graphite dust.

  Hagiographies had a structure. There were conventions. Sister Lucia had never considered herself a great artist—her writings would never make a person weep with beauty—but she knew the form. Saints did not wonder if they were committing a great sin in hagiographies. Saints in hagiographies were guided by God’s loving hand. Real life might have been messier, but the point of stories was not their realism.

  Sister Lucia took a deep breath and resettled herself cross-legged on the ground. She reached out for the ship’s flank and felt its warmth, its thick skin that held them safe inside. She lived inside a miracle. How could this ship’s creation be anything but glorious? How could Saint Adetayo have felt anything but love for her creations, even when they seemed a failure?

  She opened her eyes. The paper lay before her. She folded over the top so she wouldn’t have to see her many false starts, but she’d crossed them out so hard that their ghostly impressions taunted her from the other side.

  The problem was, she didn’t understand. She had no idea how Saint Adetayo had decided she knew what God’s will was. She had sat in her lab with her dead specimens and known, somehow, in her heart that this was just a setback and not a sign. Sister Lucia had no such certainty in herself. She and her sisters had a much smaller choice to make, and yet she had no idea what God wanted of them. It seemed such a tiny thing, to let the ship mate and reproduce, but it was tied so deeply to everything they had vowed.

  She picked up her incomplete hagiography and tore the pages to shreds. Before she could regret it, the wind carried them away like so many seeds, out over the tents where the colonists slept and the remains of their ship waiting to be made into something new and, beyond that, the lake and singing insects there. She looked up to the darkened portholes, where her sisters slept. Or should have been sleeping. One light glowed at the end of the ship.

  * * *

  “That’s a good sign.” Sister Gemma held the vial up to the cold white-blue glare of the chemlight. Inside, the blood was the grayish-green of dying algae, too long outside of the ship’s warm body. The dye drifted into the liquid, slow and viscous. She shook it and the vial turned pinkish. The ship was low on iron—she would have to carry unfiltered water from the lake tomorrow to replenish its hard minerals. But its antibodies were strong. “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

  Sister Lucia drew another vial of blood from the exposed muscle beneath the peeled-back membrane. She took a deep breath before she plunged the needle in. A ship’s muscle was like cold gelatin—it felt nothing like drawing blood from a person, Sister Gemma knew. “Aren’t you?”

  “This would be my working shift, were we in flight. I find it easier to keep the schedule.” Just a small lie.

  “I—kept thinking about the ship. I kept thinking about . . . its desires, like it was a person. But that’s not right. And then I thought about it like a tool for us to bend to our will, but that isn’t correct either. I go around and around. I thought I should make myself useful.”

  Sister Gemma understood. The ship felt like another sister. It cared for them; how could they not love it? How could they not want it to be happy, and fulfilled, and to feel as loved as they felt it loved them? You would not be asking these questions of a dairy cow, she reminded herself.

  “I’ve also found myself uncertain.” About so much, these days.

  On the workbench they had lined up a row of tissue culture plates, where Lluviu virus and Reston and the yet-unnamed Martian virus that caused black nosebleeds were replicating. This was their small project together. Liveships had highly adaptable immune systems to shake off diseases before they carried them between atmospheres. No one really knew the mechanism behind it—so much of their anatomy was still a mystery. When she’d first come on board, Sister Lucia had spent hours watching Sister Gemma care for the ship. Months in, she’d suggested that they might use the ship’s immune mechanisms to cure human disease. It was just outlandish enough to be a good hobby, and Sister Gemma had agreed.

  They’d set themselves a high bar—they wanted to make an antiviral for ringeye. It was a disease from the last days of the war. A hemorrhagic, neurological fever. Victims became first aggressive, their bodies turning to tight coils of rage. In the early days, before word of the disease traveled, more people were killed by ringeye victims than by the virus. Then they began to bleed, their gums and cuts and the small veins in their lungs leaking blood until they drowned or exsanguinated. And from the pupil out, their eyes filled with concentric circles of orange and pink and black, like the rings of the planet where it had first appeared.

  Whole worlds had died bleeding. Even now, when everyone knew not to go within a hundred thousand meters of an outbreak, there were stories of whole colonies going dark only to be found in puddles of their own unclotted blood. The worst part was the little children. The disease took their parents and older siblings, and left them to starve helpless and alone among the bodies.

  She and Sister Lucia had had several minor successes with related diseases, though of course they did not dare seek out a sample of ringeye to bring on board. What had begun as a hobby had turned into a real hope. And they worked so well together—Sister Gemma had always considered herself an immensely practical person, while Sister Lucia was given to incredible insights and leaps of faith.

  Her tablet chimed. A new message icon. She could not open it here. Sister Lucia would never pry but surely her face would give her away. She could barely school her features into a semblance of calm as it was.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Sister Lucia was bent over her test tube, carefully portioning drops of a reacting agent into each one. Her tongue jutted out from between her teeth. She was so engrossed, she didn’t even nod. Sister Gemma took her tablet and went to the lavatory, where she could have some privacy without arousing suspicion. She perched on the edge of the sink and cradled the tablet in her lap. She didn’t dare drop it. Such delicate instrumentation was likely beyond even Sister Faustina’s ability to repair without the resources of a large station. And her hands were slick with sweat.

  My dearest Gemma, the letter began. Sister Gemma closed her eyes. Such informality. Such intimacy, in just three words. She trembled before it. It shook her right down to the atoms of her soul.

  Already her mind was betraying her by crafting a response. Dearest. So many doors were opened by a word like dearest. So many tantalizing possibilities. Sweetest, if she were braver. Fondest, perhaps. Fondest was a good word. The roots of it were in words like infatuated and foolish. How appropriate. That’s what she was—an infatuated fool.

  She made herself open her eyes. I know
your vocation, the message read, And I apologize if I am too forward in this letter. My mother used to tell me I’d have more of a mind if I didn’t speak it quite so often. But I never did listen well. If you do not want to hear from me after this, I will respect that. My dearest, I have come to care for you—

  —more than care for you— Her heart skipped in her chest.

  —over the course of our correspondence.

  She hugged the tablet against herself and the heat from the battery warmed her through, like another person’s head resting against her shoulder. There was more, three more paragraphs, but she couldn’t stand them. She needed just a moment. If she tried to continue she would burst out of her skin.

  Someone rang the bell on the door. She jumped and closed the message. “Occupied!”

  “I’m sorry for interrupting.” Sister Lucia.

  Sister Gemma shoved down a flash of irritation. There was no reason for that. She was the one doing wrong. She pressed her face against her shirt and hoped she was merely blotchy. She ran the faucet for too long and pressed wet hands against her eyes until she saw sparks. Then she closed the message on her tablet and hid it away in a warren of descending file names about the ship’s hormone levels and salt intake, where no one would ever look. She would read the rest later, alone, when she was supposed to be sleeping.

  “Are you all right?” Sister Lucia asked. She held one of the cell cultures. “You look peaked.”

  The smile on Sister Gemma’s face threatened to snap. Her teeth clicked against each other. “I have a bit of a headache. It’s nothing to worry over.”

  “This might make you feel better.” Sister Lucia lifted the tray. Inside, a tangle of lab-grown human veins sat pink and healthy and clotting. “It cured the Reston!”

  Sister Gemma’s breath stopped. She stared at the ventricles, the wash of fluid in the bottom of the dish. How could she think about leaving, when there was so much here to do?