by Lina Rather
“If you take samples from that man, you will very well kill him. He’s extremely sick. He’s a good man, he doesn’t deserve to die. And you know what your superiors are planning to do with this.”
“He’s a monster,” he whispered. For the first time, she noticed the hairline crack running up the front of his faceplate, and the misting of blood on the front of his armor. “They are monsters. I saw—they killed my squadron. And you. You rammed your ship into my ship. My friends might be dead up there—”
She had no answer for that. In protecting them, the Reverend Mother had done something terrible to someone else. She had bought their safety with someone else’s pain. It was not just or right but she had to believe it was the lesser evil. She stepped closer to the boy. She had never known how to soothe, so she did not try. “I took a vow of pacifism. I will not hurt you. But I will not let you hurt him, either.”
She would never, for all the rest of her life, be able to explain what happened next. The air in the room changed and grew hot, like they were standing in front of the fire. The once-pale light through the open door filled the room with gold. She was seized, suddenly, by the idea that she could see inside this boy, see all his hopes and dreams and fears, and the small desire beating in his very deepest heart of hearts longing for home home home.
She unstuck her dry tongue from the roof of her mouth. She was filled with a great lightness. She did not understand but the current swept her along. “Please. My son. Don’t you want to go home? There are different lives for you than this.”
The light in the room faded as soon as it had come. The rifle barrel trembled and then he lost his hands and it fell. And he fell to his knees in the dried streaks of Terret’s blood, on the floor of a home that was not his own, in the armor of a government that he knew now had turned him cruel and monstrous and sent him here to die and unleash death. Sister Faustina wrapped her arms around him and she felt hot tears on her own cheeks, for everything lost here.
* * *
In the end, if this had been a battle, they did not win. Of the original score-and-ten colonists, seven lived, including the baby. None of them could remember from their fever-dreams if the soldiers had taken any of their tissues, but it seemed likely, based on the number of bodies with rifle holes in them, that samples of the disease had left with the third ship and were currently jumping across the four system back to Earth where they would be weaponized. They had no soldiers to ask—the only live one left was the boy sobbing into Sister Faustina’s arms, and he had not managed to take anything himself.
By the time the Cheng I Sao reached orbit again, the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations had bled out. Her armor plates were engaged still, the skin trying to heal itself around the navigation bay, loyal to the last. Inside they found the Reverend Mother’s body. She had died with one hand around the emblem of St. Rita, and she had died smiling. The escape pod with Father Giovanni was nowhere to be found, and it was anyone’s guess where he had gone.
Sister Lucia could never be all right with this—not with any of it—but she hoped the old woman had found some measure of peace at the end. When they had wrapped her body in its shroud and let it out into space she had wanted to scream after it all of her questions and her anger. She had not been hurt, but she had lost something. An essential belief. She had felt it crack and slip away as soon as they saw their dead ship and she had known she would never be able to ask the Reverend Mother any of the questions eating their way through her guts.
“You’ve been very quiet,” Gemma said. They’d limped their way to a station near the center of the system over the course of two weeks, dragging the corpse of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. At the station, there was too much work to be done, and none of them had felt like talking. There were supplies to be bought and survivors to care for and arrangements to make. Sister Lucia had not spoken to her old friend in days.
“Have you come to say goodbye?”
Gemma shrugged. “We’re not leaving until tomorrow. I just wanted to talk to you.”
And Sister Lucia had wanted desperately to talk to her, but now that they were together she had both far too much and far too little to say. She longed for those easy days of standing in the laboratory together, when it was just a fun puzzle and lives didn’t hang in the balance. When it seemed their whole small, anonymous lives would be spent traipsing across the system helping earthquake victims and writing hagiographies. But nothing remained of that life or that future.
“I don’t know what to do,” Lucia admitted.
“Well, from what Sister Faustina says, it’s likely you’ll be elected Mother Superior tomorrow.”
“How am I supposed to lead anyone when—” Sister Lucia cut off. “I don’t think I’ll ever be sure of anything again, Gemma.”
“The Reverend Mother was clearly no saint.” Neither of them could bring themselves to call her Mrs. August, and that surely had not been her real name anyway. That was lost to history. “But she tried. And you are my dearest, oldest friend, and I know you have a good heart to guide you. There’s much to be done, now. Especially without the Church’s support.”
They had taken the vote as soon as they docked at the station, and unanimously decided to declare themselves an independent order. Sister Ewostatewos sent the notice to the Church to make it official. Through a system of relays, of course, so it would not arrive until long after they had departed. And Sister Mary Catherine had left them, for she was shaken too deeply in her faith. Sister Lucia had not realized she would miss her, but she did.
“We can do small goods, but we can’t take on Earth. Not alone, and certainly not without abandoning our vows,” Sister Lucia said. “I just keep thinking—is that enough?”
Gemma smiled and nodded across the station. “It was enough for them.”
Sister Lucia looked across. Joseph and Terret and baby Keret sat in the mess hall, eating. Terret’s cane leaned against her side. She had spent a long time without enough oxygen, and while her mind was intact, her right leg would not obey her. There would not be another chance at a new world for her. They would have to go somewhere with infrastructure to till the fields and build the homes for them. And they would have to change their names, all of them, because they would be hunted now. They would not be safe. But when Sister Lucia saw Terret lean down and press her nose into Keret’s hair, she knew they would find it worth it.
“You’re sure you’re going to leave?” she asked.
Gemma nodded. “I think this life really is over for me. If anything would have changed my feelings—well. But I got you a new ship, didn’t I?”
In the corpse of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, Gemma had found three larvae still clinging to life, developed enough to withstand the vacuum and warmed by the last heat from their dying siblings. The sisters had sealed the ship’s flesh around them and hand-fed them protein slurry on the journey, and against all odds, they had survived. One shipling they had sold for their lodging and board and Gemma had taken the second, underdeveloped one for her menagerie. The third—Sister Lucia leaned against the porthole to see it. It had outgrown the lattice in the station’s cargo bay and the shipwright on board had moved it out into space. It was growing nicely. Enough room, the shipwright had said, for a dozen women easy. It was glowing lightly green now, having received its first injection of symbiotic chloroplasts. Another month or two and it would be matured enough for them to christen it.
Vauca arrived with the supplies that Sister Lucia had asked her to beg, borrow, or steal for—growth medium and slides, vials and several strains of exotic antibiotics, testing strips. Everything she would need to perfect their treatment and hopefully, find a vaccine. Gemma leaned down to kiss Vauca, and they lingered on each other for just long enough that Sister Lucia knew she would never convince Gemma to return. She gathered the supplies up instead.
“Don’t be a stranger.”
“Of course not. It’s not that big a system.”
T
hey both smiled, but they both knew it was the end of a great and glorious and innocent time. They knew what they could not forget; they had done what they could not undo. For now they could take a breath but very soon Central Governance would come calling, and the universe would change once more. There would be blood spilled again, across worlds and worlds, there might be war, or plague. And the universe would need them to do what small good things they could, even in the face of that which they could not stop. If all they could be were small rocks to break the current, it would have to be enough.
“Goodbye,” Sister Lucia said, not just to Gemma but to that time when she had believed unquestioningly and loved so foolishly and freely. It hurt like a wound being stitched together, a necessary hurt, a hurt that would leave scar tissue but leave her healed. “Goodbye.”
Outside, the stars glittered cold and uncaring, for they had endured long before humanity and would endure long after. She took comfort in them, and their light, as it reached to her through time. Some of those stars were gone, and they would not know for years; others had swelled to gas giants or collapsed to brown dwarfs, and yet the light that reached here was young and hale. She was one small part of an infinity, and there was much to be done.
Acknowledgments
No book (even a very short one) is possible alone. I owe all the thanks to the following: Jenna and Jesse Barnes, for their endless patience with my science questions; Cait Kostuck, for her cheerleading and kicks-in-the-pants in equal measure; Lexi Campell, Katie Jimenez-Gray, Matt McAloon, Matt Weaver, and Wes Wootten, for being very understanding about having a coworker who wanders around muttering about slugs; Aimee Ogden, for beta-reading the first version of this story and her smart critique; Dan Stout and Stephanie Lorée, for listening to my description of an oddball, too-long short story and saying “Maybe it’s a novella?”; Mary Catherine Moeller, Michael Fealey, and Jaya Minhas, for being all-around good friends; and the SFF and writing communities who have been so kind and welcoming to a new writer. This book also would not have happened without the work of the Tor.com Publishing team, including Ruoxi Chen, Caroline Perny, Mordicai Knode, Amanda Melfi, Christine Foltzer, Drive Communications, and of course, editor extraordinaire Christie Yant. Thank you all for this weird and wonderful journey.
About the Author
Courtesy of the author
Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan, now living in Washington, D.C. Her stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook, go hiking, and collect terrible ’90s comic books.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
I.: Orate Fratres
II.: Sententia probabilis
III.: Sic transit gloria mundi
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SISTERS OF THE VAST BLACK
Copyright © 2019 by Lina Rather
All rights reserved.
Cover art and design by Drive Communications
Edited by Christie Yant
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of
Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-26026-0 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-26025-3 (trade paperback)
First Edition: October 2019
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