An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  This, as a child, had been the part where Aster grew interested. Magical godbeings were par for the course in Ainy’s stories, and didn’t necessarily lead to much excitement, but angry mothers meant bloodshed and trauma. Ainy herself was an angry mother, probably. She had no children by birth, but plenty by spirit. She was surely as disappointed in Aster as the godbearer was with her thirteen sons. That was the state of things, everyone disappointed because they all had too many needs, and no one could ever satisfy them.

  In the story, the sons argue over who will inherit the mother’s land, and instead of writing it out in her will and risking one getting angry, she puts on a fight to the death, the whole world their arena. She referees in the sky, and watches as they tear the planet to pieces, peers down upon them with great sadness. Then she leaves to wander the stars and the Perpetual Night.

  It was not a satisfying ending, but Aster took it to mean: don’t have children.

  That was part of the reason she’d had Theo remove her uterus. It was a rejection of motherhood in general, and tangentially, a rejection of her own mother.

  Aster gathered her tools, nodded a farewell to Naveed and Haneefa, and headed back home. Home. She bowed at the statue in front of the Valley Wing Temple, as was the custom here. Metal arms opened widely, suggesting embrace, but the face showed signs of world-weariness, cautioning passersby not to rely on her too heavily.

  Aster loved that statue, and Quarry Temple had nothing like it. She went there now and saw the burned-out candles and torn books of scripture in languages no one could read. Women came there to pray sometimes, but Melusine had effectively turned it into a sick room for Aster. Q-deckers from many different wings lay on the wooden slats moaning, waiting to be fixed or to die.

  Aint Melusine lay there on a cot now, preferring it to the claustrophobic den of proper quarters. “Excuse my lateness,” said Aster, sitting down on a stool in front of her Ainy.

  “You don’t need to excuse yourself,” said Melusine. “I know you got more important patients to see. I can deal with a little pain. That girl all right? Naveed?”

  Nodding, Aster removed vials of steroid from her medicine bag and needles from her medicine belt. “I’ve found Giselle.”

  Queen of manufactured distance, Aint Melusine did not react at first. She hiked up her skirt so Aster could get at her knees. “She well?”

  “No. She hasn’t eaten since she left during the last blackout. I told her I’d have some food for her in the cabin if she comes back tonight.”

  “She won’t come,” said Ainy, shaking her head. She began to pull down her stockings. “Too afraid of the consequences of coming back. I can’t blame her for not wanting to get beat. She’s not a hardy thing.”

  “I thought if she came in the middle of the night, after cabin check, she could leave before morning curfew. It’s risky, but Giselle has done riskier things,” said Aster, remembering this morning.

  “Where is she?”

  Aster poked the syringe into the vial and filled it. “Do you know what a distortion balloon is?” The answer would likely be no, but Aint Melusine had been around a long time. Perhaps it had come up during the blackouts twenty-five years ago.

  “I don’t,” said Melusine, sounding so serious. She always was. Not stern, just focused, solemn. She had the demeanor of a recluse forced into a town’s mundane social goings-on.

  “Do you know why a ship might draw from an internal power source some of the time, but not most of the time?”

  Aint Melusine thought on that one. “Say there was a ship called Danilda. Say it was floating in the Heavens. Say an object in motion stays in motion because I heard that once. Like a marble on a wood floor will roll damn near forever if it don’t have nothing to get in front of it. But say you want to change its direction. You got to give it a little flick with your finger. It only needs a flick every now and again. Aye?”

  “Aye,” said Aster. “Of course.” Matilda used the magnets when she needed to change direction, drawing on the ship’s internal power to activate them. That was what caused the blackouts. The automatic navigation systems detected another asteroid field, perhaps some planetoids. Aster made a note to look through Lune’s journals to get a sense of what it might have been that caused the ship to change course twenty-five years ago and produce the wave of blackouts.

  “I had a sister named Inertia,” said Melusine. “Died. Ill from the day she was born. Mother thought if she named her that it would keep her alive. Keep her in motion.” Her bare legs shivered, thick hairs doing nothing to insulate her from the cold. “Get on with it then.”

  Aster hated to do these injections, but the steroids were the only thing that kept Ainy’s arthritis aches something close to manageable.

  “Do it,” said Melusine, her body tense as she awaited the painful injection.

  Aster pressed the needle into her left knee, and Ainy winced. Tears ran down her face, and it was the second time today Aster had to see a woman she loved cry. They were all such weak, soft things. Chalk.

  xiii

  Aster loved the hermit women in her Aint Melusine’s stories. As a child, she fell asleep to the images Ainy’s descriptions conjured. Wooden cottages and herds of goats. Porridge and gnarled walking sticks. These feral witches always had on them a pipe and a cough and a curse.

  Ainy’s stories of the Great Lifehouse made solitude seem attractive, and Aster wanted to be one of those women who could bear lonesomeness well. Ornery as she was, Aster knew much of being by herself, but as she lay in her cot shivering, she couldn’t help but wish for a bed partner. The one she wanted couldn’t or wouldn’t come. There were some rules Theo risked breaking, but Aster doubted sharing a bed with her was one of them.

  She hated her newfound neediness. For years, the only connection she required was to the toys she’d been given, a cigar box of ivory idols wrapped in a browning handkerchief. One stood the size of a middle finger, faceless, in robes, its arms crossed over its chest and its head tipped up. The other was more intricate, a woman aiming her spear into nothingness, a battle-axe on her hip, a bow on her back. It wasn’t until she met Ainy that she was told the proper story.

  Brer Boar gobbled up all the worlds before all the worlds could gobble up him. Then came Huntress. She chased him for millennia, his tusks ripping gaps through time, slipping out of her grasp always. Spent, Huntress decided to make a new world, shaped starfuel into a gas globe full of all manner of creatures. She hovered over it, watchful, until Brer Boar came to gobble it up too. As he charged forward, consumed with hunger from so many years of running, she slung her spear into his temple. She lay him into her lap, overwhelmed with such sadness that she wept, her tears freezing in the great coldness of the cosmos and making a magnificent frost bridge. She walked across it, carrying Brer Boar in her arms, and once at home she sliced his tummy open until all the worlds emerged again. She missed Brer Boar more than she’d missed the worlds.

  Aster had hugged the hard, angry pieces to her chest. Passed around from one hot body to the next, the rigid lines of the statues were a lovingly harsh constant, till at three years old she found herself in Aint Melusine’s arms. Ainy kissed the bone-wrought idols and said, These are symbols of the people who came before us, whose lives were so great they became gods. They exist inside you because we all have a common Ancestor. Understand, babwa? They are far away from us now.

  Aster pulled blankets over her head, used the heat of her breath to warm the self-made tent. “If you can hear me, come. Please,” Aster said into her radio, not expecting Giselle to reply. She felt guilty that she was calling on her to abate loneliness more than anything else, even guiltier that Giselle was not the first person she thought to call on.

  “It’s not safe,” Aster finally heard through the radio, “and you can’t make me come.” Giselle’s voice sounded hoarse, like she’d been screaming. Probably had. Shrieking at the glass dome of the Shuttle Bay in an attempt to crack the glass.

  “Many of the
guards have been stationed to watch the J deck morgue,” said Aster. “The corridors are relatively clear. You need food. You need water.”

  “I’m not hungry. I’m not thirsty. I had some apple today ’fore I came back to the Shuttle Bay this morn’,” she said, but Aster detected the breathy undertone that meant Giselle was fibbing.

  “I saved some supper for you. Made it into sandwiches so you can travel with them easily. Buttermilk plantain biscuits and braised goat curry,” said Aster, trying to make it sound enticing. Earlier, she’d wrapped each one in brown paper, tied them with twine. Giselle would love the pretty packaging. “And some vacuum flasks filled with fresh-squeezed juice. It’ll stay nice and cold how you like it.”

  “Orange?”

  Aster nodded as she spoke. “Mhm.”

  “How do I know it’s not poison?”

  “I tested it for you. I tested it in the botanarium,” said Aster, and she had. Giselle would’ve known she was lying otherwise. “And I tasted it, and here I am, talking to you, not dead, not poisoned.”

  “They make a poison that just targets me. My cells. My DNA.”

  “That’s why I also made sure to look at the food more closely in my lab.” Aster couldn’t test for everything, and she certainly couldn’t test for a type of poison that existed only in Giselle’s head, but she hoped the detection kits she had for arsenic, formaldehyde, cyanide, and heavy metals would suffice.

  “It taste good?” Giselle asked.

  “Ainy made it.”

  “Is there black-eyed peas in the goat curry?”

  “I picked them all out for you. It sounds good, doesn’t it? So why don’t you come? You don’t have to stay very long. I’ve packed it all up in a bag for you.”

  “It’s cold down there,” said Giselle.

  “Then we can lie together under the covers.”

  “All night?”

  “All night.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Giselle, then cut off the transmission.

  Aster waited, her radio on should Giselle reach back out, but it seemed increasingly unlikely she would show. One hour passed, then two, then three. What if she had started to come but was caught on her way?

  Unable to sleep, she distracted herself with one of Lune’s notebooks. She scanned over the passages, searching for hints.

  After using the lavatory, I see the H deck guard in front of me. I stare into his dark pupils, unafraid. I will not run from him, nor will I indulge his protective instincts by seeking to move past him. So what if he apprehends me? Pushes me backward? All he has done is saved me a bit of time on my journey, so I might be returned to my quarters more quickly.

  Aster knew it referred to the obstruction that caused Matilda’s piloting systems to redirect, because H deck was her code word for the Heavens, but she didn’t know what else her mother was talking about. Frustrated, she tossed the notebook to the floor and switched to A Concise Grammar of the Ancient Tongues, focusing so that only Marcus Leavitt’s prose filled her mind.

  Aster scribbled notes onto a slate by candlelight. It was rare she needed to write things so as not to forget, but such was the depth of detail of the Ancient Tongues. Other books required she consult additional books at the end of each paragraph, and then additional books after that, ad infinitum. (“Speakers of the common tongue become most familiar with old tongues through specific stock phrases, ‘carpe diem,’6 ‘ad infinitum,’7 ‘in cognito,’8 . . . et cetera. 9 But these languages are about much more than adding ‘-us’ or ‘-em’ to the end of a word. The Ancient Tongues are orderly, systematic yet vibrant dialects suited for taxonomy and the sciences or poetry and the arts. To know the Old Tongue is to know one of Common’s greatest ancestors, and to know the ancestors is to know yourself [Leavitt iv].”)

  Aster loved the way the pages felt, their heftiness, their texture. The paper hummed. Chalked with charts, diagrams, and tables, the book contained what a person could not—an order, a system, a rubric. Grammar textbooks reduced a language to something graphic and chartable, subject to scrutiny. Aster welcomed these straightforward, detailed explanations after dealing so long with Lune. She craved clarity, transparency, and answers. She was tired of wondering. She wanted to get to the knowing part.

  * * *

  Aster felt water sprinkle onto her face and sprung up in her cot. She’d fallen asleep.

  “Hush,” Giselle said, “or you’ll wake all the others.”

  Aster shuffled backward in bed when she saw Giselle still had the rifle.

  “Don’t worry. There’s no juju in it.”

  Aster couldn’t believe she’d risked carrying it through the corridors when there was always a chance of guards about, especially when it wasn’t even working. “You need to give that here,” she said, grabbing the gun. She needed to find a safe place for it where no one from the Sovereignty could see.

  “Aster!” Giselle rasped, loud enough that the other women began to awake.

  “What’s going on?” Mabel asked, voice strained and whispery. She fumbled around for her glasses and took a long drink of water to soothe her throat.

  “Aster stole something of mine,” said Giselle.

  Pippi rubbed her eyes and straightened her night scarf, pink rollers poking out from underneath. Vivian hopped down from her bunk and went to the sink to splash water on her face. “Is it morning already?” she asked. It nearly was. Giselle had waited almost the whole night to come.

  “Give it back,” said Giselle, and lunged at Aster to pull it away.

  “Ladies, stop it,” called Pippi.

  Aster held the rifle as tight as she could, her grip weaker than she’d like because of her injured shoulder. Bruising pain swept across her back and through to her chest, punching the air straight out of her lungs.

  Then there it was again, the explosive boom Aster had heard for the first time yesterday morning, louder now, this time making her ears whistle sharply. Around the cabin, the other women seemed to be experiencing the same, their palms pressed to their ears.

  The rifle had gone off, the bullet impaling the metal wall. So much for no juju.

  Undeterred, Giselle straddled her arms on either side of Aster’s head. She was so close that her short hair fell into Aster’s mouth, making her cough. At that, Giselle placed her palm over Aster’s lips and pushed down hard, thumb blocking her nose so Aster could not inhale. Giselle’s forearm pressed into Aster’s chest, right over her sternum. “Give it back,” she said. “It’s mine.”

  Aster did not struggle, her body limp but for her arms wrapped around the rifle.

  “Leave her alone,” someone said.

  “Giselle, you’re really hurting her,” said Pippi. She was crying.

  “Mind your business,” Giselle shot back, then increased the pressure on Aster’s jaw, covering her lips and nose.

  Someone began to light candles and oil lanterns, glints of mournful light shooting everywhere.

  Do you know the story of how the lightning bug came to be? Melusine had one day asked. Aster knew the story, yes. An arrogant young god was the ruler of Light, and because Light brought him so much joy, he hoarded it close so that the whole universe was blacker than the blackest black, blacker than asleep, blacker than dead. But some of the Light was rebellious and escaped. God froze them with the might of his words to punish them, and those became the stars. But some Light made itself so small in order that God would not see, and flitted and flew around at will, prodigal luminescence.

  Aster weighed too many pounds to flit away, and so she began to writhe until Giselle loosened her grip. She bit Giselle’s fingers hard, drawing blood. Giselle screamed and jerked back, clutching her hand to her chest. Aster gasped oxygen, dots in her eyes.

  “I hate you. I wish I’d never come,” said Giselle, and dashed out the cabin. The bag of food and necessities Aster had packed her sat by the hatch.

  “You’ve got to go after her,” cried Pippi.

  Aster was already on her way. “Hide th
at for me,” she said, pointing to the rifle, then grabbed the satchel by the door.

  She ran after Giselle, and it didn’t take long to catch up. Giselle was too weak to move very fast. “Leave me be!” she yelled.

  “I will, but promise me you’ll be quiet, that you won’t draw attention to yourself,” said Aster. “And take this.”

  Giselle took the bag and threw it on the ground, the carefully wrapped sandwiches spilling out. “You can’t make me eat your poison.”

  “Please,” said Aster.

  “Oy! You two!”

  Aster glanced behind her to see the guard approaching, Lemuel. She knew his name because he could often be found sneaking about with one of the women from an upperdeck, his fingers tangled in her not-blond-but-but-not-brown-either hair as she pushed him off, laughing, to say something like: Lemuel, it’s filthy down here. Is there nowhere else we can go?

  “We were just going to the bathroom, sir,” Aster said. “We thought it’d be no harm since it’s almost headcount anyway.”

  “Up against the wall, the both of you,” he ordered.

  “This is your fault. This is your fault. This is your fault,” Giselle whimpered under her breath.

  Another guard came from around the corner, this one older, his uniform more decorated. “What’s this?” he asked. Lemuel straightened his posture, but this did nothing to fix his unbuttoned shirt, his ruffled hair, his loose belt buckle.

  “I caught these two trying to sneak out, sergeant,” he said. The sergeant regarded Aster and Giselle boredly and told Lemuel to handcuff them.

  * * *

  They both got the cane, six lashes against the bum, four across the back. “Strip,” Sergeant Warner said.

  Giselle and Aster both cried, the level of discomfort such that tears could not be unwilled to fall. It happened, like breathing, through no say of their own. Aster, sometimes, liked to count the droplets.