Sisters of the Vast Black

by Lina Rather

  “Sister Faustina?” She looked down at the straps holding her in her bed and frowned. Her signing was fluid and legible again. “What?”

  Sister Faustina looked at Sister Lucia and stepped back.

  “You had . . . a fit, Mother. You were—very upset.”

  The Reverend Mother’s hands clenched, but when she signed, she said, “I’m only tired—it’s been a long time since we stood under a sun for so many hours. I’ll just sleep.”

  “Mother, you were asking for forgiveness.”

  “All us mortals need forgiveness, child. Let me be, I feel much better now.”

  “But—” Sister Lucia began. “Wouldn’t you rather have me bring my medical bag and have a look at you?” But Sister Faustina took her hand and pulled her away.

  When the hatch had sealed behind them, Sister Faustina rubbed her shoulder and grimaced. Muscle strain, from stopping the Reverend Mother’s fall. Sister Lucia would prescribe some painkillers out of their stores.

  “I don’t understand it,” Sister Lucia said. Her legs worked uselessly. She wished for gravity, so she could pace.

  “Don’t you, though? You’re a doctor.”

  “I don’t get your meaning.” She had never liked Sister Faustina, so curt and sharp-tongued, so willing to dispense with the rules of their order. Did no one else see how she made only the barest motions of performing her obligations?

  “Don’t you? An elderly woman whose mannerisms have changed, who loses her words, who seems to become unstuck from time and place more and more often? You are with her the most of all of us. You are her voice more often than not. Is this really the first time you’ve noticed?”

  Sister Lucia looked away. It was not, of course. The small signs had been building for months.

  “What would you diagnose, if she were any other patient?”

  “Early-stages dementia. Alzheimer’s maybe. I would have to run more tests. She’ll never submit to them.”

  “Of course.” Sister Faustina tapped the soles of her boots together and the little suckers emerged from the bottom. She pressed her feet into the wall to plant herself. “What is the procedure for this?”

  “Now? I’m not sure. We will have to contact the Vatican, surely. She will likely be removed from the ship, if I deem her no longer capable of fulfilling her spiritual duties. There’s a rest home on Earth, and the moon. A few in the second system too.”

  “And then we’ll be assigned a new Mother Superior?”

  “We would elect one, if she died without warning. I think if the Vatican is involved in her retirement they may choose to assign us a tenured sister from another convent. It would be up to them.”

  Sister Faustina hissed through her teeth. “What a perfect opportunity.”

  “What?”

  “Come with me.” Sister Faustina pulled her into the communications room and handed over her headphones. Sister Lucia slipped them over her head, hesitantly, but when she read the cardinal’s message she understood.

  “When did you receive this?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “What did the Mother Superior have to say about it?”

  Sister Faustina was silent.

  “You didn’t tell her.”

  “As you said, today was not the first sign that something is wrong. I haven’t answered it.”

  “It isn’t up to you to decide what to do!”

  “You’re right. It’s up to us, now.”

  She was insane. The woman was patently insane. “If this is the Church’s will, we must follow it. You know that.”

  “Even if it’s regressive? Even if it’s a sly attempt by Central Governance to worm their way back across the four systems?”

  “The Church is not an arm of Central Governance—”

  “Isn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t for a while, but I’ve been digging into our new Pontifex. Orders across the three outlying systems are alarmed, Lucia. The old pope died alone in his gardens and they buried him in a week. The new pope is a cousin of Shen—that Shen. And several other cardinals have had quick and quiet burials in the past years. It would be so easy for them to slip this past us. Everyone is so scattered now. We didn’t even hear about this new pope until the old one was a year dead, we’re so far out. And I assure you there will be orders that don’t hear about these priests they’re sending until one arrives on their doorstep.”

  “We are meant to be obedient, Sister. Even when we don’t understand. It was in those vows you seem to care so little for. And if you wanted a religion where men and women of the religious life had the same level of authority, you should have been a Lutheran.”

  “I have lived by my vows every moment of my life since I took them. Do not accuse me of disobedience just because you are a starry-eyed saint-worshipper.”

  “It’s not just about the motions—”

  “This is not an argument about theology!” Sister Faustina was red-faced, sweat collecting damp around the line of her wimple. She’d slammed her hand into the communications console and the moss on it had grown up around her fist, thinking the force for turbulence. “You know something is very wrong. Use your brain, Lucia. This is not right. And if we tell the Vatican about our dear Mother Superior’s failing mind, they will rip her from her home, leave her on some unfamiliar planet, and send a pliant priest to make us missionaries of Central Governance.”

  Sister Lucia did not want to believe it. She held her vows so close in her heart and she had never, ever questioned them. She had followed God to disease-stricken dying colonies, into asteroid belts still spread with mines from the war, and out here to an edge of space with so few people that if they got into trouble, rescue would never come in time. She had not questioned. It was not her place. And yet, she also knew her history. Religion was a useful arm of the state, often enough. What better way to crush resistance than to own the souls of the people? What better way to spread your government than to tie it to the name of God?

  She pressed her hands against her eyes. “What do we do?”

  “We can play dumb about the message—pretend we never received it. That will work until this priest arrives. It will give us a few months, hopefully. We will have to talk to the Mother Superior when she’s in a more stable mood. At the least, we will have to remove her authority to open the airlocks. I don’t want to get blown out into the vacuum if she has an episode. In the long term? I don’t know. This will progress.”

  “We will have to call another quorum. Ask our sisters’ opinions. I’m sure if we approach it with sensitivity, the Reverend Mother will understand we only want to help. She’s just frightened. She has never liked appearing weak, you know.”

  Sister Faustina shook her head. “If we tell Sister Mary Catherine, she won’t understand. She’s planetbound in her soul, I think. And—there is something happening with the Reverend Mother that’s not just the paranoia of her disease. She’s always been afraid of something, and this is making it worse.”

  “I know.” Sister Lucia leaned against the wall, and let the ship’s muscle cushion her. “We can’t ask. It’s not just that she wouldn’t tell us. She abandoned that life when she took her vows and her religious name. Whatever ghosts she carries, it is not our business, and it would be a grave transgression to ask.”

  “I wonder what she wanted forgiveness for.”

  “We’re all sinners.”

  Sister Faustina chuckled. “Not like the Reverend Mother, apparently.” She saw the look on Sister Lucia’s face and stopped. “I mean no disrespect. As you said, it was a different life.”

  “We can tell Sister Gemma.” Yes, that was the solution. She was a practical person. How still her hands were, when she cut into the very ship that bore them all safely through these vast and cruel darknesses, a ship that could expel them all with one breath from its prodigious lungs, like so many meddlesome bacteria! She was a woman of duty, Sister Gemma.

  Sister Faustina had turned away from her and fiddled silently with the arcane dials on the
communications array. Sister Lucia felt the cupful of belief she was holding tightly inside her tremble, and tip, and spill. “Yes. Sister Gemma is a very intelligent woman. I’m sure she will understand our dilemma here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Her voice was flat. “I consider Sister Gemma a great friend.”

  “You do like your secrets.” She spat it, but Sister Faustina did not even turn.

  * * *

  It was easier for Sister Gemma to access some parts of the ship when the gravity was off and she weighed less heavily against its soft insides. She latched the helmet onto the neck ring of her suit and slipped the glass faceplate down until the seal hissed and the air went from tasting fresh to tasting like the inside of a can.

  She had to wear a breathing mask, for the ship’s natural gases were preserved in these parts for the health of its organs. The methane stink made its way through the filter still. It reminded her of a station they’d visited for refueling that still raised cattle in a herd, for an “artisanal” meat supply, rather than scaffolding layers of protein on cell lattices in laboratories like most stations did. The cattle were half-crazed, banging their heads against padded walls and bellowing at the UV lights that were meant to mimic Old Earth sun but that clearly did not fool the animals’ primitive hind-brain. Cows were stupid, slow, lumbering creatures, but they understood their environment. Colonies that raised cattle had to breed small herds over generations for them to acclimate to the changes in gravity, air pressure, and atmosphere mix. They were only of the world, and so small changes to it disturbed them more. The stationmaster of that ag-station had told the sisters that all cows made that much noise, but in their moaning Sister Gemma had only heard grief. She’d longed for someone to put them out of their misery. Only a month later, they received word that the entire herd had died of an unknown neurological disease. They had frothed at the mouth and bashed themselves against the walls until the terrified bovine vet shot them all lest they stampede and slaughter the population or knock the station from orbit.

  This passage was tighter than it had been when she’d delivered the immunizations. She had to squeeze her hips through taut muscle before she reached the other valve that opened into the central cavity.

  As soon as she was through, she saw why. The ovo-testis was swollen with eggs. They stretched the thin membrane, each the size of a child’s fist and shimmering light orange. There must be hundreds. Sister Gemma checked the ones she could see. All looked well-formed and symmetrical. She didn’t see any half-developed eggs (a sign of a nutrient deficiency) or graying infected ova. It would be a healthy litter if it were allowed to fertilize. She pressed her faceplate against the egg closest to the surface. The nutrient-rich yolk inside shimmered darkly under the harsh light from her helmet. The eggs lit up one by one as her headlamp swung past them, carpeting the inner tract, up along the ship’s central nervous system, down the curve of sinew supporting its guts. Not long now. If they did not allow the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations to fertilize her eggs they would need to coax her to expel them before they expired inside her and left a raging infection.

  Unlike most gastropods, the ships could not self-fertilize. They had been bred that way, so that shipwrights could more easily control their lines. Usually shipwrights would rub one ship with the pheromones of its intended mate to trigger egg production and mating hormones. Out here the distance between ships was usually too vast for them to be attracted naturally. Sister Gemma touched the swollen sac to see if she could check the number of eggs. As soon as she stretched it taut the whole ship shuddered.

  “Sorry, girl,” she said, and rubbed the muscle until it turned a healthy dark green, hot with blood.

  She had intended to check the rest of the inner systems now. Ships were not prone to many diseases—few things could infect them, and they came across others of their kind so rarely—but there were some rare neurological and pulmonary conditions that could develop as they reached maturity. The egg sac was blocking her easy access to those systems. She could cut through the mucus membranes here if she wanted, but that was such trauma for a routine examination. Instead, she tucked herself into a twist of muscle between an artery and the eggs and pulled out her tablet again. She was alone here. She had prepared herself. It was time.

  Again her eyes caught on Dearest and fire bloomed beneath her ribs.

  It had started a year ago, this dangerous, disastrous, delicious dalliance. They had docked at the same station as the Cheng I Sao, listed on the manifests as a deadship with a cargo of chemlights and water treatment tablets. Sister Gemma had been standing at the porthole looking out when they came abreast of her, and she had seen the flesh mixed with metal, the long waving appendages that trickled through the solar winds like their own ship’s frills. At first she had been horrified—what sick twisting of nature was this, what grave mutilation of a living being?—and yet she could not draw herself away.

  The sisters met the crew of the Cheng I Sao in the corridors of the station, next to a stall selling sticky rice paste fried to gloriously brown crisps, where one of the station operators could observe their trade as was custom. Sister Gemma saw the engineer immediately. She was a small, compact woman, clearly born on a planet with punishing gravity. Hexidecimal code tattoos scattered themselves down her arms from shoulder to elbow. That had been a fashion among helium miners. She did not smile, not even when her captain told a long, opaque joke about seaweed nutrient drink and moondust that clearly made sense only to the crew. She was an asteroid in the form of a woman, and Sister Gemma was fascinated.

  They had stayed in the station a week, pumping unrecyclable waste out of the ship and repairing all the metal parts that were far overdue for their regular maintenance. Her sisters spent that time in prayer or ministry. Sister Gemma, shamefully (so shamefully, her face burned still when she thought of herself slipping away from the ship in the morning like she had no duties at all, no obligations) had spent it with the engineer. Her name was Vauca, a name twisted from the Latin roots of the absent place they lived. She said her parents were strange pagans who worshipped the stars and the dark. She did not know much about them; they had died young of plague.

  She showed Sister Gemma her ship. She had bought a litter of failed shiplings from a shipyard station—the small ones that were usually euthanized, that wouldn’t grow the inner chambers necessary to house humans—and coaxed them into growing into lattices welded to the outside of a deadship.

  “I’ve gotten them to propel us,” she had said. “It’s far more cost-effective than engine fuel. But making jumps is just a dream—we still have to use a hyperspace engine for that. And they keep dying on me. I wish we had someone with your expertise aboard.”

  Sister Gemma had not been in love, not yet. But she was in awe of the project. What a grand experiment! A colony of unformed ships, working together! Purposeless beings given purpose in community! And of course, she was in awe of Vauca, too.

  They had not met again. Twice the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations had arrived at stations where the Cheng I Sao had been docked before them, and small packages were waiting for Sister Gemma. Not gifts, of course. She was not allowed to accept gifts. A vial of one of the shiplings’ hemolymphatic fluid with a note asking for her opinion on a strange genetic marker. A packet of nitrogen supplements specifically formatted for a maturing ship, difficult to find in this system. I remember you were looking for these. Sister Gemma had left things in return at other stations—a medicine to try on a dying shipling, fluid from her own ship for comparison, a small rock worn flat in a river on a gorgeous agricultural moon that she thought Vauca would like.

  And of course, they exchanged letters. Dozens. She was careful to wait a proper time before writing back, or it might have been hundreds. Their correspondence was jumbled, asynchronous, with letters bouncing across hundreds of relay satellites to be received late and out of order and corrupted by distance. She longed to hear Vauca’s words in the o
rder they were intended. She had learned to long for small things in this shipbound life—the crunchy skin of a fresh apple right as it split beneath your teeth, air that tasted like salt and decay smelled from the bank of a stagnant estuary, a dear one’s conversation unbroken.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said to the eggs surrounding her. For she loved this ship too, and the life she had on it, every month spent under a new sky doing as much good as her two hands could do. She loved its strange biology and the revelations it showed her. She imagined that decades ago, when humanity was confined to its single sphere, she would have been a scientist and spent her life pursuing the great creation of beasts like this.

  Here in the central cavity the air was warmer, holding her close and safe. The ship’s heartbeat echoed through her body in great waves, like she was kneeling in an ocean, letting the surf crash over her again and again and again. She rocked with the sound. Time was once, she heard God’s voice in this body. Not in words—she was no saint and did not want to be—but in the mysterious workings of it, its infallibility, the great work they did on board. Somehow, she had started seeing it as only an animal again. Beautiful, yes, and an extraordinary testament to human ingenuity. But she saw God in the faces of Terret and her child, and the pulsing engines of deadships and the stars themselves, just as much as she saw Him here, now. She couldn’t decide if that was because she had stopped looking for Him here, or because He was showing her that she could find Him anywhere she went.

  * * *

  At the second quorum, they chose to leave the gravity off. It made everything feel quieter, even though they all knew that sound waves traveled just as well without gravity’s hold. Sister Lucia let herself drift in the currents of the ship’s exhalations.

  “Today is the last day where we can alter the ship’s course without burning into our fuel reserves,” she said. She had brought her Bible with her, and held it tucked under her arm, like one of the passages might illuminate this strange conflict they found themselves in. “We shall decide by supermajority.”