But Aster was too busy touching her lips, clicking her teeth together, understanding that the next time someone wanted her to do something she’d rather not, she would say, I do not wish to, and it would be so. Was that what Little Silver did after her visit to the water waifs? Did she visit the king? Did she tell him she wasn’t going to marry him? Did he say, Okay?
These were the questions of a child. Adult Aster would never wonder such foolish things.
xx
Aster took to keeping what free time she had in her botanarium, in the company of plants. There was comfort in their spindly branches. She’d made them. She knew which were dethorned and which were not, which could poison with a single prick or cure cancer with a taste. Ever meticulous, she tried to predict with ever increasing accuracy which seeds would germinate and which would never take to living. In her notebook, she recorded size, shape, color, mothering plants, temperature, soil condition, position in the pot. And though she managed to make 90 percent of her plants turn from seed to seedling, there was always the one or two that lay dead. She dipped her fingers into the soft mud, dug one such seed out, and placed it in a jar which held similar dead-end seeds. It should not make her sad, but it did, ever occasionally.
That was the way of things—to live, and then to have their offspring live, and so on, for all time, as it was in the beginning and would be until the end of days. And everything connected, back to the very first thing that ever was, and to the last thing that ever would be.
She heard someone at the hatch. “Who is it?”
“Your Ainy.”
“I don’t wish to see you. I don’t want to see anyone,” Aster said, returning to her ledger, marking in ink which seed failed to sprout. She wrote hard enough that the nib of her pen poked through the paper, a blob of dark blue where the number 3 should be.
“Aster, open this hatch right now.”
Aster blew air over a cup of tea, even though it was already cool. Her breath made the rose-colored liquid ripple. This was the fourth cup she’d poured herself in the last couple hours, and the fourth she’d let go cold without a single sip. A plate of lukewarm fried eggs sat next to the tea, the runny yolk having solidified now.
“Aster? Baby?”
She poked her fork into her egg, then laid her pen down before opening the hatch.
“You need to come home. There’s still an hour before curfew and you got patients to see,” Ainy said, leaning heavily on her cane as she walked.
Aster sprayed the leaves of the xanthe plant with a solution of water and blood meal. “No. I need to work.” The green leaves of her florae dripped with water, and the smell of it was crisp, sweet, clean.
“Heard about Flick, that little T-decker,” said Ainy.
Everyone had, as Lieutenant wanted. Every newspaper, article announcement, radio broadcast mentioned the execution of an insubordinate lowdeck child named Flick—an act that secured Lieutenant’s reputation as the hard ruler that would get Matilda back in shape. Tough on immorality. Unshakable. Wrathful as God Himself. God’s second. God’s lieutenant. If the Surgeon is our ship’s mother, Lieutenant is its father.
Aster closed the notebook she’d left open on her desk and returned it to the shelves in the section labeled, Ge, for Germination. Finished with that task, she woud start afresh on something else, naming her plants according to the principles of the ancient languages she was studying.
“Aster, talk to me. Your bunkmates are worried. You’ve not spoken to them in days. Giselle is in a state.”
“An interesting euphemism. Giselle is only doing what we all should. Giving up.”
“She needs you.”
“To do what? I can do nothing for her, and even if I did, who’s to say Lieutenant wouldn’t take it all way? Murder her too, in front of a crowd of bewildered cowards?”
“No, to be her doctor, said Aunt Melusine. “That’s what you are, aren’t you, child?”
“Stop calling me that! I’m not a child. I know you mean it affectionately, but all I hear is condescension and disrespect.” Nightmarish visions of Lieutenant’s thin, pursed lips washed through her. In them, he was mouthing the word pigeon. “I am not a child. I cannot be told to mind and be quiet,” Aster said, willfully ignoring the fact that Lieutenant had proved the opposite quite true.
Ainy lifted her cane a few inches, then slammed it back onto the floor with a thud. “I can’t talk to you when you’re in one of your moods.”
“The mourning of a child’s murder is not one of my moods, so please do not dismiss it thus.” Aint Melusine was as bad as Aster, perhaps worse, at knowing how to talk to people when they were hurting. People’s unhappiness unnerved her. Ainy was empathetic but emotionally incompetent. Aster had learned that well as a child.
“You right. I know,” Ainy said. “I just meant, there’s a lot of us who stop going on at the very moment you do. I ain’t a soft woman, but I’ve witnessed my fair share of unspeakable loss.”
In that moment, Aster realized how little she knew about her Aint Melusine. All she had were her stories, which she mined for scraps of the woman’s past.
Aster sat at her desk and faced away from Melusine. She would go through each drawing in her sketchbook, list its properties, the common name she used for it, and make up a scientific name based on its characteristics and family name.
“I know you feel ganged up on by life at the moment, As—”
“Ganged up on? This is not a game of red rover and I’ve gotten picked last. A child is dead because of me. I was thoughtless. I believed I could fight someone and I couldn’t, and now Flick is dead. Who is next? Naveed? You? Anyone I touch, Lieutenant will come after.”
Aint Melusine staggered to a stool and tried to sit, but it was too high for her, and she ended up leaning awkwardly. “Come back to Quarry. Home will make you feel better. It always does.”
“Quarry is not my home. I am homeless. We are all homeless. We are the very definition of homeless. We are vagrants in Lieutenant’s kingdom.”
“Everyone does a little worse without you there.”
“I don’t care! Let them do worse! Let them die!” Aster threw her pencil to the floor, slammed her sketchbook shut, but it did not make a satisfying sound. She tried to pull herself in, to find the calm that came from her internal world: quiet, rhythms, beats, patterns. She inhaled a breath, then spoke quietly but decisively: “Maybe all the ghosts were doing was telling me to join them.”
Melusine snapped her cane against the counter, so hard Aster heard the wood crack. “Do not pity yourself. We live in the dredges of a stinking ship long abandoned by the Heavens.” She looked up to the silver ceiling, then back down to where she found nothing but the claws of plant stems. “We pray only to Matilda. And ourselves. I’m only myself. I wish I could protect you from everything that’s after you, but where would I even begin? Maybe we all should’ve bornt ourselves in another time, another place. You keep thinking there’s a reason for everything, ’cause you can figure some out. There ain’t. All the bad that’s happened to you, it was never about you. It was about them. You can’t blame yourself. It’s sad, so very sad, and maybe if I were a different woman I’d weep like a little baby. Maybe I want to weep. Maybe if I wept people would feel sorry for me and do nice things for me.”
Aster prepared yet another cup of tea, pouring not-quite-boiling water over loose purple leaves. The blend was supposed to be calming, but she was far past a state tea could remedy. “I don’t believe anything you say. It’s all a fiction you spin like the spider gods.”
Melusine coughed hoarsely, as if to prove her frailty, and said, “Light me my pipe, you ungrateful child.” She removed it from an invisible pocket in her long skirt, held it out.
Aster had the matches right beside her, but she didn’t reach for them. They were not always so easy to come by, and she did not want to waste what few she had so that Ainy could fill her lungs with particles of burned tobacco. “I want to forget everything,” she said.
>
Especially the way Flick called for their great-grandmother with that strange, childish naïveté. One need only call for their meema—she would explain all. After meemas got involved, matters always had a way of working out. It was no different than Aster’s search for Lune. Stupid, so very stupid.
Aster watched the dandelion roots drying on the line, smaller and less complicated than she was, genetically, but possessing the ability to locate and destroy cancerous cells where Aster herself could not. Her skin itched. She wanted it to fall off so she could be just bones—hard, blunt edges.
“What can I do for you, Aster?” asked Melusine, quieter now. Her eyes swirled with rheum, bluish gray, but the tiny pupils pricked like lancets.
“You can get out,” said Aster. This was her only sanctuary.
Ainy gripped her cane, turned, and left.
* * *
Lieutenant continued to lurk the lowdecks in spirit if not in corporeal form, every day another new restriction. Quarry Wingers scarfed lackluster meals, then hurried to their cabins for much-needed sleep—if they could sleep. Guards were posted at every turn, their numbers much greater than usual. Lieutenant had turned the lowdecks into an effective military state.
Aster kept her head down as she returned to her cabin for curfew. She wanted at least to tend to Giselle’s physical condition. When she reached her turn, she saw one of the guards bark at a little girl Aster believed was called Selah. It was her birthday. She was laughing and playing with her new present, a jump rope, skipping it down the passageway. The guard grabbed her midjump and she fell back. Everyone cleared the corridor.
“Surprised to see you here a whole fifteen minutes before headcount,” said Pippi when Aster slipped through the hatch. She and Mabel lay together in the bunk, listening to the radio. It was nothing but a crackle, but there was always an underground show sometime in the hour before bed. Aster admired their bravery as well as their craftiness. She didn’t know where they hid it that it didn’t get confiscated in the raids. It was a big and bulky thing.
“Your Highness has decided to grace us with her presence,” said Vivian. “Where you been? With your companion, the Surgeon?”
Giselle didn’t join in. She sat in the corner on a rug, fiddling with a doll with black button eyes. She played with her dolls a lot these days, sometimes trying to light them aflame with a match. She rarely spoke.
“Have you been having a go with him? I was certain you was a dyke like that lot over there,” Vivian said, pointing to Mabel and Pippi, “but I suppose you learn something new every day.”
Instead of slinking off, like she probably should have, or like Vivian expected her to, Aster backhanded Vivian so hard she stumbled into the iron wall, her head snapping against the bolt. Then Aster made herself into a hammer, rammed forward, and head-butted Vivian, forehead to nose bones.
“Aster!” Mabel yelled. Pippi sat up helplessly, pressed back against the wall at the sight of the blood. Giselle looked on with eyes shocked open.
Aster hated them all. She wiped off the blood from her forehead. She glanced back at Vivian, with the intention of saying something quite biting, but couldn’t think of anything. So she got into her bed, pulled the covers up over herself, and stared above at the rusty blankness. She touched the metal and it was cold. Maybe Matilda had been a girl once. Maybe she was a giant. Maybe she froze to death in the vacuum of space, and they hollowed her out and put stuff inside her, and that was why she was so cold. A giant empty girl alone in the Heavens with only tiny colonists to keep her company, prattling about stupidly.
* * *
Early the next morning, Aster slid her key card through the lock of Theo’s office hatch, didn’t bother to knock or warn him of her entry. He was in his U deck clinic, one of the few places Aster still had access to. She was now banned from all but a few lowerdecks.
Theo sat behind his desk, his tie loosened about his neck, rubbing his eyes, which were red. Were she not absolutely certain that he was a teetotaler, she’d have thought he’d had a drink. He was not a disheveled man.
“You know I don’t prefer it when you walk in without announcing yourself first. I could’ve been indecent.”
“You’re too godly to ever be indecent,” she said. “You were born clothed. Without urges. A veritable eunuch.” She meant the words harshly but they slipped right past him. Perhaps he was too tired to be offended by her childish attempts at insults. Regretful, she decided to apologize, but he spoke before she could.
“I wasn’t expecting you. Are you allowed to be here?”
“I still have half an hour until I’ve got to be ready for shift,” she said.
“You’re certain? Lieutenant has specific guards watching you.”
“Believe me, I know. How could I not?”
“Of course,” said Theo. “I just . . . I worry. My days and my nights are filled with it. I fear for you. You mean so . . . You should leave here. Right now. If Uncle knows that we’re talking, he will only come down on you harder. I forbid it. I order you, please go. Believe me when I say I have your best interests at heart.”
“I am the only one who gets to decide what is in my best interest. Not you, Theo. The fact that you have been given arbitrary power over me does not mean that you should exert that power when it suits you.”
“Do I have no moral responsibility to protect you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t worry about those kinds of things.”
This was one of those moments where Theo wasn’t Theo, but the Surgeon, obsessed with what was right and what was wrong, what he should do. It was no way to live, constantly on the edge of existential crisis, prostrating himself at the throne of ideological purity.
“Where does that leave me?” he asked. “How do I both protect you and respect your autonomy? What if you are a danger to yourself?”
“Short of suicidal ideation, it is my right to be a danger to myself.” Even if she had thoughts of self-murder, it was still her life.
“How am I supposed to distinguish between your recklessness and your occasional seeming death wish? I spoke to your Ainy and—”
“You spoke to Aint Melusine about me?”
“I was concerned for you after everything that happened. You didn’t speak to me after. I had no idea how you were doing. What would you have me do? Pretend not to care about you? Not think about you? I wish I could. I wish I could not think about you.”
Again, Aster was confused as she was as a child, unable to interpret the people around her. Their bodies, their behaviors, their actions spoke in a tongue with too many tenses, moods, and declensions, all the verbs irregular.
“The next time I am worried after your emotional state, I’ll go visit your dear Uncle Lieutenant. What do you think about that? Would you appreciate it?”
He clasped his fingers together, his thumbs tapping against his desk. “I said go—now go. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“I thought we were—” Aster started, but she didn’t finish. The truth was, she didn’t think friends was a very good word to describe their relationship. The feelings she had for Theo were not the same as the ones she had for Mabel, Pippi, or even Giselle. She sometimes thought Theo’s feelings for her were similarly inclined.
“You thought we were what? What do you delude yourself into thinking you are to me?” The force of his words cracked through the air like a whip.
The laces of her shoes had at some point become untied, and she let the dirty string drag against the floor as she walked out of the room.
xxi
The story of the Raven’s house went two ways, and Aster didn’t know which she liked best. The first, Ainy told like so:
Raven returned home after many years of flying about, only to find that the tree of his boyhood had been cut down. The wood that made up the trunk of the great oak had been transformed into the planks of a cottage.
As Raven flew closer, he saw smoke rising from the chimney of the cottage and smelled what he thought
was stew cooking. He went up to the door and pecked at it with his beak. “Who’s there?” said a voice from inside. “It’s me, Raven.” Then a man opened the door. He saw Raven and began to salivate. His stew needed meat. “Come inside,” he said to Raven. Raven entered. “Aha!” the man said, and he went after the bird with a hatchet. But Raven said, “No, no. That’s a silly way to eat me.” The man dropped his axe. “Oh?” Raven perched on the top of the fireplace and began to speak: “If you kill me and cook me up, I will be tough and stringy, breaking your teeth. You must have me alive, uncooked.”
So the man sprinkled salt, rosemary, lemon pepper, and cayenne onto the Raven and swallowed him up whole in one gulp. Once inside the stomach, Raven began flying about the man’s body, pecking away, chewing up important parts, until the man died in great agony.
Raven flew up the canal of the man’s throat and escaped by way of the mouth. He fixed himself a bowl of stew. He thought about how it was good to be back home. The End.
Aster likened herself to Raven in this story, Lieutenant to the man. If only she could get inside of him. Cannibalize his insides and reclaim her place. It wasn’t a pretty story, not like the other version, which went like so:
When Raven came home, he saw that his woman was inside the house with another man, cooking the good-for-nothing some stew. “That’s my stew,” Raven said. “You only cook me stew.” His woman said, “There, there, Raven. It’s not so important who eats the stew but who’s in it. Because what’s in it will soon be a part of me.” That’s when the good-for-nothing man said, “I want to go in the stew then.” But Raven flew in front of him and dove into the pot of scalding-hot broth, boiling himself alive. To prove he was most important, the good-for-nothing man followed Raven into the stew, boiling himself alive as well. The woman enjoyed her stew and thought how nice it was to be at home.”
In stories, girls were brave and played tricks, and won. Aster wanted to be one of those girls. She wanted to be like Giselle, who’d put a bullet in that guard’s head with no more difficulty than she’d brush a knot out of her hair. She wanted to be like Lune. This sadness ringing through her, resonant and unending like the repeated clang of two cymbals, tired her.
An Unkindness of Ghosts Page 23