Aetherbound

by E. K. Johnston

  The lift slowed, and then stopped at the bridge level. Pendt felt a swirl of emotions: dread, excitement. She had never been there, but she didn’t know why she had been summoned. Not knowing was a weakness, and no weakness could be tolerated in space. Lodia released her hand and straightened to attention. Pendt copied her without thinking about it. Harlands stood up straight. As much as she could, and in all the ways that she could understand, Pendt tried to be the perfect Harland.

  “Be good, little cat,” Lodia whispered as the door hissed open.

  Her mother’s voice was half admonishment, half desperate prayer. Pendt never misbehaved and didn’t understand why her mother might think she would start now, of all times. Pendt stood up even straighter, and willed herself to look as calm and old and capable as a five-year-old can look. Her back straight, Pendt Harland took her first steps towards the true centre of her small grey world.

  Pictures of the Harland’s bridge didn’t do it justice. The workstations gleamed silver under the lights, and the toggles and buttons and screens seemed to promise adventure. Pendt, used to only as much light as was required, blinked against the brightness of it. Important work must be done here, if the captain needed so much light to do it. Here courses were plotted and schedules were made, long-range communiqués were answered and sent, and all the most important decisions were made.

  And the noises! There was the hushed murmur as two officers—some of her mother’s other remaining cousins—did their work. The steady tone of the navigation system, beaming light back out to the stars. The hum, even now, of the engines.

  And at the centre of it all, the tall, uncompromising figure of Captain Arkady, standing at her terminal and issuing commands.

  “Pendt,” said the captain.

  Out of the corner of her eye, in the fraction of a second before she turned to face her aunt, Pendt saw a screen—no, it wasn’t clear enough for a screen: It was an actual porthole. It was clear steel, as strong as the rest of the hull but transparent and much more expensive.

  And through it, she saw a thousand specks of light.

  2.

  “IT’S BEAUTIFUL, ISN’T IT?” Arkady said, her own gaze slipping from Pendt’s face to the stars.

  “Yes, sir,” Pendt replied.

  The window was why her aunt commanded the Harland. She could tell, with precision and certainty, where the ship was in relation to the stars at each moment. Lodia could do the same thing, but her sense of direction wasn’t as good, so she was only the XO. She could hold a course, but she couldn’t set one. Pendt dragged her eyes away from the stars to her aunt’s face with some effort, and Arkady nodded.

  “You know,” she said, “I can’t play Spark either. Neither can your mother.”

  “I know, sir,” Pendt said. “You two can feel where we are, like the Stavenger sky-mages before magic was purged. That’s why you’re the captain and why Mother is allowed to have so many children.”

  None of Pendt’s cousins had star-sense, and so far, none of Lodia’s children did either. For the first time, Pendt wondered whether her mother might have another baby, even if it went off plan. A ship full of engineers needed a captain, and without a captain, the Harland would be lost in the void.

  “That’s right,” said Arkady. Her voice was calm and level, not commanding. She was almost, almost, an aunt, except that her shoulders were held too high for her to be entirely family. “Some give their hands to the Harland, and some give their minds. Can you give something for our ship?”

  “Of course, sir,” Pendt said. Her chest puffed out. None of her brothers had been asked to do something for the captain yet, and she was the youngest of them.

  “Eat this,” Arkady said, and passed her a four-gram protein cube.

  Extra food was unheard of on the Harland. If Pendt was eating it, that meant someone else was not, and there were only so many calories given to a person every day. As captain, and because her work took so much out of her, Arkady received the largest share. She must always have calories to burn, because she must always use the æther to know where they were and where they were going. Pendt received enough to make sure that she grew, and nothing more. She wanted to eat the protein slowly, to savour the treat, but something in the atmosphere of the bridge told her that this was not the time to dawdle. The older cousins were disciplined, of course, but she could still feel them watching her.

  Pendt put the cube on her tongue and then ground it between her teeth as quickly as she could. She swallowed, and for the first time in her short life, felt the whisper of potential in her mind.

  “Pendt”—Arkady’s voice had changed. Now she was the captain entirely, and this was a command, not a request—“I need you to make your eyes blue.”

  All of her siblings had blue eyes, and most of her cousins did too, except for Tanith, whose eyes were brown. Pendt’s eyes were green. She usually did her best not to think about them. She only saw her reflection briefly every day when she brushed her teeth. On a ship where everyone important had the same utilitarian haircut and variations on the same genetics, green eyes were enough to mark her as an outsider within her own family, and she had never liked that feeling. Still, she couldn’t imagine why the Harland needed her to have blue eyes. She knew she owed the ship already, even if she was only small. If she could help, she would.

  It was like Spark, a bit, only instead of looking at circuits for a match, she was looking at a code, and the code was inside of her. She had never understood the game the way her brothers explained it to her, but this made much more sense than their muddled attempts to include her in their play. She saw the paths of light, the same as they described them. There was even a touch of electricity to it, but there was something else too, something that Pendt knew in her heart even if she couldn’t put a word on her lips.

  She found the part of the code that made her eyes green, and focused on it. She knew what blue looked like, both in someone’s eye and in the code, even though no one had ever explained it to her, because her blue-eyed cousin was standing close by. She reached for that blue, strengthened by the four grams of protein, and wrote it overtop of her own green code. It felt as natural as breathing to do it, but experiencing the change made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t articulate. How could something so easy feel so wrong? Was she going to be the same person after this? What right had she to do it, and what right had her captain—her aunt—to ask.

  She opened her eyes, and Lodia gasped, a soft sound that might have been a sob, except Harlands didn’t cry. The captain’s face hardened.

  “Pendt, you must listen to me,” she said. Her tone was unmistakable now. Arkady had stopped thinking of her as Family and saw her only as part of the Harland.

  “Yes, sir,” Pendt said.

  She didn’t know what she had done wrong. She had done exactly as Arkady asked. Maybe it was the wrong shade of blue. She couldn’t see her own eyes, of course, but Pendt was sure she’d matched her cousin’s eye colour when she’d changed the code. Maybe she should have gone with Arkady’s shade instead. Maybe her aunt had wanted her to be more creative. Pendt tried reaching for the blue again, and she could see it just as clearly as before, but something inside her knew that if she tried again, without the protein, it would only hurt her in the long run.

  “You must never use your gene-sense again,” Arkady said, giving name to Pendt’s curse. “Do you hear me? Never use the æther, unless I have given you permission.”

  “You mean until I get lessons?” Pendt asked. Surely there was a version of Spark for her to play, now that she knew what she could do. The colours called to her, choice beyond measure, and she couldn’t answer that call. “I’ve been doing my best to instruct myself until—”

  “I mean never,” said the captain, abruptly cutting her off. It wasn’t the colour. It was the fact that she could do it. “Your skills will not be useful to the Harland until you come of age.
Until then, you will do what you are told.”

  Pendt wanted to cry, but some instinct told her that crying wouldn’t help, and she clung to it, even as her Harland-ness seemed to fall away from her. If she was useless, then there was nothing that would help. She would be a blue-eyed burden forever.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Pendt said. Her voice was very small. “I’m sorry I’m not better. For the Harland.”

  “I am sorry too,” Arkady said. She spoke like she’d already forgotten who Pendt was and didn’t look in her direction. She looked at Lodia instead. “You’re dismissed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Pendt remembered nothing about the lift ride back down to Family quarters. Her mind was struggling to absorb everything she had seen: the lights and sounds, the coldness of her aunt’s look, the way her cousins gazed right through her. Lodia didn’t hold her hand.

  “You only have bio-sense, nothing electrical or star-born, or even mathematical,” Lodia said when she and Pendt got back to the Family quarters. “That’s what gene-sense means. Before the æther was purged, the Stavengers called it grain-sense, and mostly used it for farming. We have no need of that here. It’s not worth it to spend the calories on you.”

  Pendt said nothing. The part of her that wondered about the future and dreamed about flying a ship with her siblings was dying, and the part that was growing in its place was a silent, waiting thing.

  “You won’t be useful until you’re eighteen and can work legally under the shipborn rules,” Lodia continued. “Then you can be hired out. Until then, you will be worthless. The captain will decide what you can do to earn oxygen.”

  Pendt understood only that she was useless, and that she didn’t deserve to breathe as a result. She knew that eighteen was far away, more than ten years, and she knew exactly how many calories and how much atmosphere a person consumed in that much time.

  Then her brain fixed on the word hire. They would get her a job on another ship. She’d have to leave everything and everyone she had ever known and go to a place where she wasn’t Family. She would never belong again, and that was the worst fate she could possibly imagine. She wasn’t much of a Harland, to her shame, but in all of her dire imaginings, she had never considered losing her name. She’d rather face the airlock.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, Pendt was taken to the galley instead of the crèche. She would miss the quiet times she’d spent learning about Harland operations, but she wouldn’t miss her brothers. Or the way everything in the room reminded her that she was useless. Or the constant feeling of disapproval from whatever elder cousin was in charge of training. Really, she could read anywhere.

  She was too young to be of good service doing maintenance, and the galley was moderately safer anyway, though Pendt was never sure if that had entered into Arkady’s calculations. The children didn’t get jobs until they were twelve unless they showed remarkable aptitude, and Pendt had no aptitude for anything. It was known immediately by everyone who saw her, family and otherwise, that her position was a mark of some terrible failure on her part.

  The cooks made her stand on a stool to pass them things or carry pots that were too big for her. When she made mistakes, she was reported immediately for punishment. She didn’t hold it against them. They would be punished far worse if they coddled her, and they had no reason to. Even shamed, Pendt was Family and they were not. That meant she was the Family’s to use as they saw fit. Arkady ruled in the galley as much as she ruled everywhere else, and her edict regarding Pendt was wordless, but clear nonetheless. Still, she was small, and she was clumsy, so Pendt made many mistakes.

  “There is nothing in the void,” said Lodia as she locked Pendt into one of the supply closets for having dropped three grams of vege-matter on the galley floor on the fourth afternoon of her new life. It wasn’t her last infraction. She didn’t like the small space or the confining dark, but she was coming to appreciate the solitude. She’d been forced to eat the matter as part of her own rations, of course, so there hadn’t been any waste, but such behaviour couldn’t go unpunished. “You have to be more careful.”

  Pendt held her chin up and took it like a Harland.

  Three days and two more stints in the cupboard after that, she overheard her cousins discussing if their mother was going to airlock her.

  “It would be much more economical,” Donalin argued. “Otherwise we’re going to feed her all these years to bring us dinner. Usually, we make people pay us to do that, just for the privilege of being on our ship.”

  “She’s still Family,” Tanith said. She was sixteen, and there was something in her face that made Pendt think she knew a secret that would never even occur to her younger sister or any of the boys. “A Harland is always worth something, even if we have to wait for her for a bit.”

  “The captain has made it clear we’re not to bother with her one way or the other,” Jerrus said. He was the most practical of the lot, the most like his mother, except he couldn’t feel the stars. “So, we won’t, unless we get new orders.”

  “And you’d better set an example for her sibs,” Tanith said. “Not to mention Karderee. They need to understand how fragile our balance is, and what Pendt’s flaws might cost us.”

  That shut everyone up for a while. The Harlands were not afraid of space, but they were respectful towards it, and not a one of them, Pendt included, was going to tempt fate.

  As she cleared plates from the table without being acknowledged by any of her relatives, it occurred to Pendt that she had one thing they didn’t have: She had seen the stars.

  She didn’t see them again for a very long time.

  3.

  JUST BEFORE SHE TURNED eight, Pendt asked if she could work in hydroponics. She told her mother that she knew as much about plants as she did about protein—which was to say, not much—and that she thought she could help the plants grow better.

  “How do you know that?” Lodia asked, and Pendt found herself the sole recipient of her mother’s attention quite suddenly. It was not a reassuring feeling.

  “I just”—Pendt groped for words to explain the feeling—“I just do?”

  It was difficult to elucidate. It was similar to the feeling that Pendt had as she measured out calories onto her siblings’ plates, but wilder and less predictable. She felt it most strongly when she had just eaten, and sometimes it knocked the wind out of her if she chased it for too long.

  Lodia was quiet for a moment, and then she put her hands under Pendt’s chin and forced her to make eye contact.

  “You will always feel that call,” Lodia said. Her voice was pure Officer, but there was a fear in her eyes that Pendt didn’t understand. “I feel a call to the stars and your brothers feel the call of electricity, but you must never answer it, do you understand me?”

  “But I can make the plants grow better,” Pendt protested. “I know I can. I can be better for the Harland.”

  “The Harland has all the plants it needs,” Lodia said. “The machines in hydroponics are sufficient to our needs, and they do not require calories like you would if you did their work.”

  Tears sprang to Pendt’s eyes. She hadn’t learned to control the impulse to cry yet, even though she was always determined to stop herself. She ground them off her cheeks with the palms of her hand and faced her mother.

  “I want to be better for the Harland, sir,” she said. “I’m sorry my idea is a bad one.”

  “It’s all right, Pendt,” Lodia said. “If you knew everything about ship operations at eight, it would be a miracle. It takes a long time to understand the balance of space. Your aunt works hard to maintain it, making sure we have exactly what we need and nothing more. That’s how we survive.”

  Her mother opened the door to their quarters and ushered Pendt out into the hallway. It was past time for both of their shifts to start. Lodia
was nearly due on the bridge to relieve the captain for the afternoon’s inspection, and Pendt was, as always, to report to the galley.

  “Will you leave me at the next colony?” Pendt asked just before her mother stepped into the lift. Her cousins had started whispering things about her being left behind. It was marginally better than when they suggested Arkady might just airlock her and get it over with.

  “No, little cat,” her mother said. The use of the name was not a comfort, less a bargain and more a threat. “When you’re eighteen and can sign a contract on Brannick Station, you’ll be worth so much to us.”

  That vague promise or something like it was all Pendt ever got. She didn’t know why she would suddenly be worth more when she was eighteen, except that she would be able to enter into contracts. Her oldest cousins could do that if they wanted, though they didn’t need one to work on the Harland. Dr. Morunt was under contract, but Pendt’s mother never talked like she was planning to give her daughter medical training. The cook had no gene-sense to speak of, relying on Morunt’s calculations to determine who ate how much. It must have something to do with food, though. Everything always came back to food.

  Pendt continued to wonder about it while she worked in the galley preparing lunch. She was best at measuring out portions, so the job was usually given to her. This required much less heavy lifting, but she could still make mistakes by being imprecise or by dropping things, so her rate of punishment had not decreased.

  Pendt fetched the containers from the galley stowage and arranged the trays being assembled for everyone’s meal. Each tray had a coloured chip on it, indicating who the meal was for, and Pendt’s job was to make sure the calories on the plate matched Dr. Morunt’s recommendations. The food was divided up by type: protein, vegetable, starch. Each package was made of fibres that would be recycled into wires and such. When it was emptied and cleaned, Pendt put it into the compressor. All told, it was tedious work. But it didn’t result in getting burns from the stove and there was no point in complaining, so Pendt did it.