If Professor Doll bombs the ball she will no doubt destroy all of Matilda, Aster had said.
Good. Matilda is shit. Giselle had rummaged through a shoe box to find a suitable outfit for Professor Doll. She chose a sparkling red dress that left much of the wood on the figurine exposed.
Your Professor Doll does not seem appropriately dressed for the function in question. The guard dolls will notice her attire and realize something is amiss, thwarting your plans, said Aster.
Professor Doll will distract them with her doll tits.
These dolls have no tits, nor any external anatomy in line with the human form, said Aster, running her pointer finger along one of the sexless wood figures. They do not even have mouths.
Professor Doll had set the bomb off, Giselle simulating the explosion by throwing little doll parts everywhere. Aster saw Dr. Doll fly into the air, dead as a thing that never lived could be, and it was fine because Dr. Doll liked space and didn’t mind so much being hurtled forever into the cold, especially if it meant Matilda was gone.
It had been a fun game, one they repeated (though with some variations) several times, most notably when Aster decided to carry out the mock explosion in a guard’s office, with a real bomb she’d made as a test of her knowledge of alchematics.
She had committed several more acts of arson, never caught, stopping only when Giselle begged her to, certain she’d get them both in trouble with the Guard. Had Aster kept going all those years ago, she might very well have blown up all the ship, given the chance.
“My commitment to the destruction of Matilda’s ruling order is well documented,” Aster said, bringing her eyes to Giselle’s unblinking gaze. “Please don’t doubt that if I could get rid of the cold, I would, or that if it was in my power to kill each and every upperdecker, I’d do that as well.”
Giselle smiled quietly, bounced her heels against the cabinet again. She turned her eyes down in a rare show of retreat. “I know. I know you. I’m sick of it, is all. I want to always feel as warm as it feels in here. Warmer than that. I want to be like fire because fire is the only true thing. Or I want to be like one of them cast-iron spider pots you throw into the fire pit—in the morning, the iron remains, shiny like silver serving ware, and all the crust and bad parts is burned out of existence.” Giselle scratched an exposed knobby wrist, picking at an invisible scab. She’d withered to skin and bones this past year. “I want to burn up and be burned and explode.”
“Would you like medicine to calm your thoughts?” Aster asked when she noticed Giselle pressing her hand to her chest, her heart no doubt racing.
Next to Giselle sat a glass spray bottle, the one Aster used to water the more sensitive of her seedlings. Giselle picked it up and threw it across the cabin. “I don’t want your medicine. Your pills or your syrups or your poisons. I don’t want you near me at all. I don’t even know why I came here.”
Aster didn’t startle at the outburst. She was always on edge with Giselle and therefore always adequately braced for contact. “I only offered pills because you’ve requested them in times past. Would you please sweep that up?” She pointed to the broken bottle.
Giselle slid off the counter and walked over to the shattered glass, stepped barefoot over the jagged pieces. She leaned down and used one hand to sweep the shards into the cup of her other hand. “All clean.”
Aster watched as Giselle threw the broken glass into a can, then sat down again on the counter, the bottoms of her feet now bleeding. The blood blended seamlessly into the grate floor, droplets of red indistinguishable from flecks of rust.
“You happy now?” Giselle asked.
Aster didn’t know what response Giselle wanted, needed, expected. Increasingly, their interactions felt like an aptitude test for which she’d not sufficiently prepared.
“No,” said Aster.
“Good!” Giselle shouted. “Neither am I!”
“I fail to see how that’s good.” Aster fetched a pair of tweezers from across the room as well as a stool and the ice chest she left by the door. She sat down on the stool and used the cooler to prop up Giselle’s bloodied foot.
“So disrespectful,” Giselle said.
“What?”
“That’s that child’s foot in there, ain’t it? Using that container like it’s a ottoman, for fuck’s sake. Are you going to bury it in the Field Decks?”
“I’ve not yet decided what do with it. Would it be proper to bury it? The Surgeon usually burns them, and so that’s the practice I’ve taken.” She lifted Giselle’s foot onto her knee, preparing to pluck out each piece of glass embedded in her skin. “None of these fragments have slid in particularly deep, but there will still be pain.”
“I don’t mind it. I like it,” Giselle said. “Makes me walk faster. Keeps me alert.”
Aster removed the splinters quickly and efficiently. When she was done, she instructed Giselle to rinse off her feet in soapy warm water so she could bandage them. Giselle, for once, obeyed. Aster used the time to update her notebook. She flipped to the page where today’s to-do list was and crossed out the items she’d successfully completed:
eat breakfast
clean body (use soap and the scrub brush today)
clean teeth
find out where the Surgeon has been
reread nineteenth chapter of clinical pharmacology
check old woman on S deck for recurrence
amputate Flick’s foot
Giselle snatched the notebook from Aster’s hand, ink smearing as Aster crossed out the last item. “I can’t believe you got to make a list to remind yourself to wash your ass,” she said, squinting as she read. Aster’s handwriting resembled something a particularly adept two-year-old might muster. Giselle was the only person who could read any of it at all.
“I like to have a written record of all that I do,” said Aster. Documenting, her Aint Melusine called it. Recordkeeping. Memorating.
Giselle tore the page from the pad, scrunched it into a ball. “Do you have a lighter?”
“No.”
“Are you lying?”
Aster did not reply.
“Has it got juju?”
Again, Aster did not reply.
“Show it to me,” Giselle said, hands on her hips. Aster reached into her pocket and removed the lighter.
“Whatever you are planning, I am sure it is a waste,” said Aster. It would cost her several grams of poppyserum to buy more butane, but her poppies were not yet in bloom.
“It’s not a waste. Let me burn it. It’ll feel good.”
“I don’t understand how burning something I find valuable will feel good,” said Aster.
“It’ll all go to dust one day anyway. The sooner you know that, the better. Whether it’s today, tomorrow, a million years from now. Why do you want so bad to be remembered? And by who? They won’t ever know you. Not as good as I know you.”
“I have a system,” said Aster. “When an item on the list does not get crossed out, it goes on tomorrow’s list. If an item has been on the list for fourteen consecutive days, I examine why I have been neglecting the task, then devote that day to completing it.”
Giselle tossed the crumpled to-do list into a pot of soil. But instead of leaving the matter alone—which was not in Giselle’s nature—she limped over to the shelf and grabbed another of Aster’s notebooks and began flipping through it. “I don’t think I’ve read this one yet,” she said. “Or this one.” She fumbled through the documents in a folder, loose papers, tanned with age, kiting to the floor. Remnants of Aster’s mother. Her journals, notes, sketches.
Aster caught a glimpse of the handwritten formulas, diagrams, and equations in dark-blue ink, the penmanship precise and evenly blocked, nothing like her own. Giselle had stumbled onto a folder detailing one of Lune Grey’s more eccentric ramblings. Aster knew the journal entry by heart.
A colleague of mine by the name of Zachary West asked me today—why a rat? Of all creatures, why would I wish to change
into that lowly beast? I gave him some smart answer, like, “Why not a rat?” But the real reason is because I aspire to be as they are. I like the idea of squeezing through cracks, traveling everywhere as they do, even the places Matilda doesn’t want me to go, no one ever able to catch me. Portside, stern, fifty steps that way, down and down more, portward. It’s not impossible to change the course of something’s destiny. To transmutate. Nothing is as it once was. Nothing as it is now will be that way much longer.
Aster didn’t understand her mother’s ravings, no single entry related to another. The handwriting in the journals all came from one person but otherwise could’ve been written by a hundred different people. She seemed to have suffered some form of early-onset dementia.
“No need to get possessive. I was organizing them is all,” said Giselle, perhaps the only person to know the materials as well as Aster, certainly the only other Q-decker to know the language used in the journals.
A Y deck woman, Lune was as much an enigma for her foreignness as she was for her unexplained suicide. She had Y deck customs and Y deck manners, Y deck notions about life and death and the Heavens. She had a Y deck sense of humor, a Y deck palate, and most relevant to Aster, a Y deck way of talking. Lune wrote in a tongue Aster had never seen or heard before when she’d tried reading her meema’s journals for the first time at ten years old.
Aster learned her mother’s language the same way she learned the language of the upperdeckers: through disparate reading material and tutors. Aint Melusine had nannied an E deck child who’d had a playmate whose nanny was a W-decker, who had a distant relative on Y, a Ms. Beeker.
Ms. Beeker thought it a shame that the Guard placed Aster on Q when her mother had been a Y-decker, and believed it her duty to teach Aster how to speak and read her true ancestral tongue. Aster didn’t particularly want the lessons, and she argued with Aint Melusine over it, said Q was as much her true ancestral tongue as Y.
She’d grown up there, so it was the language her body would always go to first—and wasn’t ancestry all about what lived in the body? Further, the reason the Guard had placed her there was because they believed, given the peculiarities of Aster’s physiology, that her other parent was a Tarlander.
Aint Melusine made her take the lessons regardless, friended-up the right guards so she could smuggle Aster down to Y deck after curfew. Aster pouted about it, but there were some good things: she could use her radiolabe there, thinking it might finally work now that she was where her mother had been. While traipsing through random corridors, she found a secret wall and the secret shaft that went up, up, up forever, higher than she could possibly climb. As a child, she had believed it a chute to the Heavens, but even in that hallowed passageway, her radiolabe didn’t beep. She remembered Giselle batting it out of her hands as it fell down the shaft. Stop obsessing over that stupid thing. It don’t work.
Though the radiolabe remained unusable, Aster did learn to read and speak her mother’s tongue, and by twelve years old she could read Lune’s notes proficiently. Giselle learned Y’s language later but faster than Aster, using Lune’s journals as her reading material.
Aster now walked to the shelf with her mother’s volumes and touched her fingers to the spines of the accordion folders, binders, and envelopes. She stopped at the last folder, the thin cardstock the same shade as the tan of her own fingernails, which were bitten to nubs. She turned from the shelf to Giselle, wiped her hand across her mouth. As she did so, she smelled her palm, still thick with the scent of latex from the gloves she’d worn when amputating Flick.
“Sometimes I think the answer to why your meema offed herself is in here somewhere, and I’m gonna find it. Reading her journals is like reading a good detective novel, but better because it’s real.” Giselle turned brusquely toward the hatch and her whole manner changed from excitedly curious to terrified. “I hear footsteps,” she explained, then slid off the counter and bolted across the botanarium, fox-quick, hiding behind a row of greenery.
Aster remained calm; she knew who it was. Though there was no reason to expect him, only one person besides Giselle and Aint Melusine knew of Aster’s botanarium.
She went to the hatch and let the Surgeon in.
He looked haggard and worn down. Though he carried himself with the same grace he always did, Aster could see the effort behind the impeccable posture. His seams had come undone, and she recognized his poise for what it was: manufactured. Extreme self-consciousness.
“Surgeon,” Aster said, immediately sorry for using his official address when she saw how he chafed at it.
“Aster,” he replied, his face a mess of briefly flashing microexpressions. He looked paler than usual, and she wondered if this was somehow intentional, his self-protective instincts finally taking the lead. The blackouts had thrust the ship into upheaval, which the Guard could not tolerate. After upheaval came uproar, and after uproar came uprising. They’d doubled down, and if ever there was a time for rigid conformity . . .
The Surgeon didn’t have white skin—whitish, but not white. It was close enough that plausible deniability had allowed him to keep his status when his true ancestry came to prominence during puberty. An upperdeck father, a lowdeck mother. Such children belonged, as Aster had heard a C deck woman once say, downstairs. Light tan darkened into true brown when the Surgeon spent more than an hour in the Field Decks, and his jet-black hair had a definite wave. His nose and lips were wider than Aster’s.
“You don’t look well,” Aster said, noting the redness in his eyes. She’d been so worried when he’d disappeared. It now appeared as if she’d had reason to be. “Go, sit,” she said, pointing to one of the botanarium’s more comfortable chairs. It had been his once. Anything Aster had of value had once been his.
“May I?” he asked, and reached out an arm to wrap around Aster’s shoulder. She nodded acceptance, helping to support his weight as they walked to the chair. He collapsed into it and the bottoms of his trousers rode up. She could see an inch of his mechatronic prosthetic. Connected seamlessly at the knee, it had the shape of a shin and calf, an ankle, a foot. The only difference between this and the good leg was that it was made of metal and not skin, muscle, and bone. It was nothing like the prosthetic Flick would get.
Aster went to one of the cabinets to get him the opianus he’d presumably come here for. It had the pain-suppressing effects of poppyserum but remained in the body longer, had no associated euphoria, and worked particularly well on the deep pain that afflicted the Surgeon in his lower limbs and joints. Only Aster had it because she synthesized it herself.
“Coat off,” Aster said.
Instead, the Surgeon pushed up his sleeve. Aster flushed the IV embedded in his wrist, then injected the opianus.
“Would you like the injections for the weakness?” she asked.
“Please.”
“You’re getting worse,” she said, retrieving the shots. She didn’t know why he hadn’t come to her when he’d run out of his previous dosage, and he obviously had no interest in telling her. Today the Surgeon was all business. “The next time you go so long without seeing me, it’d be in your best interest to take the conventional steroids available to you updeck.” Postpolio syndrome didn’t have to be as hard on his body as he made it.
“As I’ve told you numerous times before—no.” The Surgeon refused any steroids but the ones Aster made especially for him. Unlike those more widely available, the cocktail of drugs she gave him allowed the testosterone derivative to only target the affected muscles.
“Here,” she said, knowing he liked to administer the shots himself in private. “If this was all you wanted, I would’ve been happy to have this delivered to you. You can rest here the night so you don’t have to make the upward journey,” she offered, “but I must leave soon. Curfew. I can come back for you tomorrow. We can have breakfast.”
“I can’t stay,” he said, and Aster turned her face from him so he couldn’t see signs of her disappointment. “The real r
eason I’ve come here is because I need your help. Sovereign Nicolaeus is gravely ill, and I’ve been entrusted with his care.” He clasped his fingers neatly together. Aster could see the brands on the backs of his hands, pink and puckered. They were sigils sealing him to God. “His condition worsens hourly. Without intervention, he will die in days. A fortnight at the very most. That’s why I’ve come to you.”
Aster peered across the botanarium to where Giselle was hiding. Soon, the automated rain-simulator would turn on and she’d get sprayed with a light mist. “I don’t remember inquiring after Sovereign Nicolaeus’s health,” Aster said, all her softness for Theo suddenly nowhere to be found. She’d thought the Surgeon had been the one who was ill or that he’d finally been imprisoned for one of his many transgressions against the Guard. Yet all this time he’d been tending to a tyrant.
“You need to help me heal him,” he said, the rims of his eyes swollen. “If there’s an antidote, I know you’re the one who’s got it.”
Mention of an antidote did, admittedly, win her attention. “Sovereign Nicolaeus was poisoned?” Aster asked, walking to her desk. She wanted to hide her face from his once again, uncertain of what her expression might reveal. “If you inform me who is responsible, I will pass along to them my accolades.”
The Surgeon’s high cheekbones gave him a beauteous sternness, and he looked at her gravely, skin drawn tightly over his jaw. “Now isn’t a time for jest.”
“I didn’t mean it in jest,” Aster responded, though she had. She was taking a cue from Flick: jest whenever the mood struck, regardless of appropriateness.
“Then do you know what ails him?” the Surgeon asked. He seemed on the verge of coming closer to her, touching her in that soft way he sometimes did. Like he was afraid he might hurt her. Everyone else touched her as though they were afraid she might hurt them.
An Unkindness of Ghosts Page 3