“Enough,” said Aster, and used the edge of the wool blanket to snuff out the flame in Giselle’s hand.
“You killed it. It was alive and you killed it.” Giselle walked over to Aster’s medicine bag and helped herself to some burn cream, displacing and orphaning everything else inside, casting jars and vials to the floor and Aster’s mattress. The leather folding case with the scalpels to Pippi’s trunk.
“I’m sorry,” said Aster, folding up the large sheet of graph paper she’d been examining. Across the cabin Mabel and Pippi groaned and then turned. The bed frame strained and creaked under their combined weight.
“You can’t just go killing my babies like that,” said Giselle, massaging the healing paste into her palms.
“I don’t like to watch you hurt yourself. It’s your right to do it, but please, not in front of me.” Aster drew her finger along the lines of text in one of Lune’s lab notebooks. Carefully documented experiments represented how-tos and directions. The one Aster scanned now was a manual on how Baby connected to the grid and distributed power throughout Matilda, all disguised as a detailed drawing of a dissected fish. The heart: Baby. The circulatory system: the grid.
Aster thought the electricity held a clue. The blackouts timed perfectly with the onset of Sovereign Nicolaeus’s illness, and the blackouts twenty-five years ago lined up with Lune’s milder version of the sickness. Unlikely to be a coincidence.
Giselle huffed heavy breaths, arms crossed over her chest.
Aster glanced away again, back at the lab notebook. “Perhaps you think it’s no small thing for you to burn away, but it would mean a great deal to me to lose you. I don’t like to see you chip away at your body, especially when you’re doing so at a rate faster than it can replenish itself. I don’t like watching you die.”
Giselle shook her head, then began to pace the room. “I won’t die. I can’t die.”
Sighing, Aster slammed down Lune’s lab notebook and slid it across the floor. “You said just two minutes ago everything burns away! Are you now so deluded you think you exist outside the category of everything?”
Giselle stilled. Without turning her head to Aster, she spoke in a soft, cool tone: “That was not a kind thing to say.”
Aster didn’t mean it. As much as it frustrated her, she understood the logic of Giselle’s psychosis. Everything dies, so exert control by burning it away yourself. Everything will be born again anyway. There’s no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise.
“You think something’s wrong with me. With my mind,” said Giselle, squeezing her blistered hands into fists. “But I’m the one who understood what your meema was trying to say. I’m the one who gets her.”
Aster stacked Lune’s papers into piles to hide in her trunk. Morning bell would be ringing soon, and guards would then follow for headcount.
“How you think her spirit feels? That her own daughter missed what a complete stranger found so clear?” said Giselle. “You’re the one who’s got something wrong with her.”
All Aster’s life she’d been looking for Lune. She hoped her mother knew that. Forgave her incompetence. Understood Aster’s moments of foolish rejection. “I need to get dressed,” she said, and climbed into her cot as the four o’clock Reveille bell rang.
Aster’s mind wasn’t as cursed by voices and visions as Giselle’s, but she knew madness well. Nightmares that plagued whether asleep or awake. Bouts of mutism. Bouts of the very opposite: raving and raving and endless raving.
She shouldn’t have snapped at Giselle.
Aster sat in her bunk under blankets, brown legs open. She slicked her fingers up with salve then placed them inside and around herself to distribute ointment. Yarrow root, selivine, and coca leaves numbed the thin skin of her vulva.
She’d stolen a jar of mango butter from Ainy ages ago, mortared-and-pestled the verdure into the creamy, sweet-smelling fat. In addition to its anesthetic component, the concoction provided lubrication for what was—in the words of someone who was not Aster—an uncooperative vagina, should a guard overcome her.
There was no system to their violence, but that didn’t stop Aster from trying to devise a formula, a graphical extrapolation based on where she stood in her cycle, pheromones emitted, how well the wheat/amaranth/maize/rice/tea crop fared, the morale of the Guard, and the details of previous abuses: strength, force, duration (all variables affecting the formula). Like any scientific hypothesis in its early stages, there were unexpected outcomes. The discord caused by the blackouts and the rising threat of Lieutenant complicated the calculations further. Best to spread on the salve daily, iron out the formula in the meantime.
“Oy, Aster! You up there rubbing one out?” her bunkmate Vivian shouted as she dressed. The others tilted their heads over groggily.
Giselle laughed, eyes firm on Aster. She’d declared sides. Aster wished she hadn’t spoken so harshly about her delusions.
“I’m not rubbing one out,” answered Aster to no real end. It would’ve been better to ignore Vivian.
“Don’t be embarrassed. Prudes do it too,” Vivian said.
“I’m not embarrassed because I’m not rubbing one out, and if I were, I’d not be coy about it,” said Aster. She’d have fingered herself right there, in front of everybody, without shame, just to shock them, to prove Flick’s point about should. “If you’re trying to rile me, which I suspect that you are, you’ll have to do better than accusing me of something as banal as self-stimulation.”
Vivian came and lay on Aster’s bunk, rested her forearms on the thin mattress. “It certainly smells like you’re in here doing something as banal as self-stimulation.”
Giselle laughed, much too enthusiastically given the hour, and Aster could tell she was still upset by her actions. Killing her fire. Calling her delusional. The greatest of sins in Giselle’s book.
“What’re you fantasizing about, Aster? Your precious botanarium?” Giselle asked. “Oh! Oh! Pipets! Test tubes! Vials! Selidium hyproxate! Plants!” She devolved into a series of pants and moans, a grand performance for Vivian’s amusement and Aster’s discomfort. “Oh, petri dish, more!”
Not to be outdone by her mentor, Vivian joined in: “Oh, metric scale, right there! So close, just switch from ounces to grams, and, ah, ah, ah!” She threw her head back, closed her eyes.
“If those are the vocalizations you two make while having sex, your partners must be very displeased and highly disturbed,” Aster said, dipping her finger back into the jar of salve.
“Already ready for another go?” asked Vivian. “You’re insatiable.”
“Leave her be,” Mabel said. “It’s always the same two or three jokes with you. You’re dull.” Her voice was rough from coughing fits.
“Dull and crass,” Pippi added, less concerned for Aster’s welfare than she was with the unseemliness of it all.
Aster pulled on boots over three layers of socks, wrapped her medicine belt around her waist. She sat at the edge of her bed in wait of morning cabin check. She had a new routine since learning to read her mother’s journals correctly: headcount, breakfast, study, work shift, study, curfew, study.
After the guard released them following morning cabin check and headcount, she headed to the Quarry Wing kitchen. Pippi nodded at her, then poured yellow cornmeal into a pot of simmering broth, the scent of pork belly, onions, scallions, and gingerroot filling Aster’s nose. Bowls of savory porridge were one of many things that would sustain them throughout the morning, and women hustled to prepare the day’s meals.
Aster’s Aint Melusine stood at the center of it all. She scooped spiced brisket into little circular crusts, orange from turmeric and crushed chili peppers. Once folded over into half-moons, they’d go in the fryer, get packed up with cheese and sections of stone fruit. A late-day supper made the afternoons easier to bear when working twelve-hour shifts in the Field Decks.
“Pippi, the potatoes are done. Safiya, please, child, don’t
overwork the dough.” The air of regal grace about Melusine inspired everyone in proximity to comply. Woman One and Woman Two and Woman Three and so on. Aster’s head was too bloated with new findings to sort faces to names. “You, girl, finish these,” Aint Melusine said, pointing to the meat patties she’d been stuffing. “Aster, I need to speak with you.”
Aster grabbed a jar of buttermilk and a plate of griddle cakes fresh out of the frying grease. The cakes were soft, crispy, and hot as she cut in; they smelled of cornmeal and maple. “Do you mind?” someone asked, bumping into her. “Wait for breakfast time like the rest of us,” she said, then snatched the plate away. A little girl ran past Aster with a pan of something hot, steam coming off of it, and nearly dropped it when a woman snapped at her for running.
Aint Melusine pointed to the pantry. Aster nodded but snuck the jar of buttermilk with her. Once inside the pantry she removed the lid, took several sips of the thick liquid. Without honey or pureed peaches to sweeten it, the milk was sour, but it filled her belly fine. Ravenous, she gulped up the whole jar, set it empty on a shelf next to a bag of millet.
The lightbulb up above shined brightly, and Aster moved to slide her goggles from her forehead to her eyes.
Melusine tugged the metal pull, and now the only light was what came through the crack under the door. It was just enough to illuminate Ainy’s face. The wrinkles drew her skin into the loveliest, sharpest angles.
“You don’t come swooping in here to peck at whatever grabs your fancy. What’s that matter with you?” Melusine asked, closing the doors of the pantry behind them.
“Apologies,” Aster said. Admittedly, she’d been distracted this last week. She ran her fingers along sacks of food: yucca, oats, black-speckled peas, red onions.
“What’s gotten into you? I heard you stopped seeing patients?” Aint Melusine asked. Aster scratched behind her ear, picking an old scab. “Pippi told me about you and that guard.”
“What guard?”
“You know what guard,” said Ainy.
Aster didn’t know. She checked the time on her pocket watch. It was four thirty. At five thirty they began lining up for shifts. It’d be a waste of time to go to her botanarium this morning, and she’d finish her reading in her cabin today despite the bustle of her bunkmates readying themselves.
“Look at me, child,” Melusine said.
“I’m not a child.”
“You’re a child of the Heavens. You’re my child.”
Aster resisted the impulse to say, I’m not your child, because she didn’t mean it, because it wasn’t worth the hurt, however mild and brief, it would cause.
“Pippi told me you told off a guard the other night. That you struck him. That sounds like a pretty childish thing to do.”
That was days ago. Aster had already cast it from her mind. “He beat Pippi and Mabel,” she said.
“Then he beat them. That’s how it goes. Unless you want to get your ownself hurt ten times that, it’d behoove you to learn it. Pippi said he saw your face.”
Aster let her head drop forward knowing Ainy wouldn’t like her reply. “He did. Saw my face, heard my voice, read my name.”
“Stupid,” said Aint Melusine. “What possessed you to do such a thing?”
“My mother, I think.” Aster recalled how she’d felt that night, her emotions charged.
Ainy’s brow pulled tight and she sat her hands on her hips. “You can’t let this cold get to you. You can’t let these blackouts make you uneasy and go and do something to get yourself kilt. Your life is worth more than the careless mistakes you’re making.”
Someone knocked on the pantry door and Aint Melusine shooed them away.
“You always said to heed what spirits are telling me,” said Aster.
“What spirit told you to get into it with that guard? Certainly not a spirit to be trusted if they didn’t also tell you to finish it.”
“Finish it?” said Aster.
“Finish him. Death ends a issue. A fight makes it fester on and on. I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close.” She’d heard those words from her Aint Melusine before, but in a story. Perhaps a history lesson. She frequently lost track of fable and memory when it came to Ainy’s tellings.
She vaguely recalled a tale that took place decades before Aster came to be Aster, in a decade known as the Wishing Time—a great flood had washed X deck away. Aint Melusine had called it the Baptism, flipped through the tissue-thin pages of her brown scrapbook, and pointed to a photograph. Despite monochromatic coloring—dull grays, whites, and blacks instead of rich browns, vibrant maroons, peachy pinks—the photo revealed the world to a level of detail Aster had never before seen in paper form, light doing what a painter’s brush could not. Six women wearing hooded fur coats kneeled in the snow before an endless stream of water, stretching either way outside the bounds of the photograph. This is a picture of the world that existed before this world, Ainy had said. Like X deck, something came and took it ’way. But we remember. We remember. We must try to remember even that which has been forgotten.
Aster had been seven when Melusine explained X deck and the world of the photograph, her gaunt, charcoal hands twisted by arthritis. Aster sat in a tub of warm water and listened to her caretaker speak. She drew her finger along the surface of the soapy liquid and made designs. Pay attention. Melusine popped Aster’s hand two times hard, and water splashed. This is an obscura, Ainy had said. Fascinated by the little black box Ainy held, Aster had forgotten her stinging fingers.
The obscura made pictures like the ones in Aint Melusine’s book. Ainy’s meema gave it to her, and her meema gave it to her, and her meema gave it to her, and so on, all the way back to the Great Lifehouse. One picture per generation, that was the rule, no more, because the device only had so much juju. You got to document. That’s what our work is, as womenfolk, memorating any way we can. Do you count yourself among us?
Aster batted the water in the tub violently, her way of saying yes. That’s what I thought, said Ainy. You never know when a memory’s gonna save your life.
Late to learn to speak, Aster didn’t yet have words, and she had grunted so her Ainy would continue. See, look at X deck, here. Ainy had pointed to another black-and-white photo in her book. It depicted a long, empty corridor, filled with standing water. I took this myself.
Finding this photograph less interesting than the one on the Great Lifehouse, Aster had glanced at it no more than a second before returning to play with the soap bubbles in the tub. Not everything that’s important looks important, child, said Ainy, smacking Aster once more. You got to document.
One day Aster stole the obscura from Melusine’s trunk, examining its cube body, looking through the tiny hole. On accident, she snapped a picture, a photo appearing immediately, nothing at first, then metamorphosing into an image of Aster’s foot. A document of her foot. For symmetry’s sake she took a photo of her other foot, then her knees, Ainy’s jar of cocoa butter, a comb made of bone, a dent in the bedpost. She had taken forty-one pictures until it refused to take any more, the juju gone. Clicking and clicking and clicking, but nothing happening, Aster slammed the obscura into the wall.
When Melusine returned, saw the broken machine and the photos surrounding Aster, she said, Child, you been in my trunk? Aster shook her head no. Little girl, I’ll ask you one more time. You been in my trunk? Again, Aster shook her head, this time more aggressively. Ainy Melusine pointed to her open trunk, the things inside messy and out of place. I mighta not noticed for ages if you’da just closed it. Shut the shit you pry open, girl. She walked away, slammed the hatch, and did not speak or look at Aster for weeks.
“I just want you to be careful. Don’t think they won’t kill you. All that cheek you got, it’s only a matter of time,” said Aint Melusine now, opening then shutting the pantry door behind her.
* * *
Thousands ascended the central stairs in order of wing and deck—two out of five of the Tarland decks as well as
W and O decks. Aster estimated eight thousand workers in total, perhaps fewer. Aint Melusine lived in Q but didn’t work the fields. Too old, too arthritic.
Giselle turned to give Aster a sharp look. “Watch where you’re going,” she said, Aster having stepped on her heel.
Lost in thoughts of her mother, Aster had blanked out the better part of the walk and had missed their arrival to the center gates of the Field Decks. “Pardon me,” she said, yawning. She hadn’t gotten more than two hours of sleep per night the last week. Her free time belonged to Lune now.
“Have you got tiny spikes fixed to the bottom of your boots or something?” asked Giselle, her arms crossed over her chest. “That’s a decent idea, actually.” She bent down in the crowd of Q-deckers to rub her chafed heel.
“Don’t blame Aster. That’s why you supposed to wear shoes,” said Pippi, tucking a loose piece of her white head scarf under a fold. She was perpetually midpreen.
“Shoes is blister machines,” said Giselle. Upon standing, she unfastened the top button of her dress, sweaty despite the cold. The eleven-flight climb to the Field Decks had warmed them near as good as a heater.
“I’ll give you that,” Mabel said, wheezing, lungs still recovering from the journey. When she stayed on oxygen all night, she tolerated her day’s work with little flare-up, but the stairs tested her lungs’ limits.
Aster could tell Pippi wanted to wrap an arm around Mabel’s waist, but they were near the front of the crowd today. The guard up front might see.
“You got to put in for reassignment,” Pippi said.
Mabel shook her head as she caught her breath. “I’m not spending my days away from you,” she said, her whisper-tone unnecessary. Except for a word here and there, guards didn’t know the languages specific to a deck. The recent intrusion of the guard must’ve been fresh in Mabel’s memory.
An Unkindness of Ghosts Page 6