Speculative fiction: Aster lives in the slums of a space vessel with harsh moral restrictions

A ster removed two scalpels from her med-kit to soak in a solution of disinfectant. Her fingers trembled from the cold, and the tools slipped from her grasp, plopping ungracefully into the sanitiser. In ten minutes’ time, she’d be amputating a child’s gangrenous foot. This shaking and carrying on would not do.

Was this winter?

Dim light – chemiluminescent reactions of peroxide, orange dye, and ester – suffused the makeshift operating room. Starjars, the T-deckers called their improvised lanterns. Aster wondered where they’d gotten the peroxide to work them, let alone the phenyl oxalate ester.

“All you got to do is give one of them a shake and the stuff inside gets all mixed up,” said Flick, rotted foot propped atop two stacked trunks. “Look! You looking?”

Of course Aster was looking. Couldn’t Flick see her eyes?

A pile of faded comics lay next to the child on a flipped-over wicker basket, The Reign of Night Empress #19 on top. Its cover depicted a woman named Mariam Santi in a beige trench coat carrying a cylindrical device made of metal and wood. When she pulled its tiny lever with her index finger, a silver ball shot out of the tube, wounding her enemy.

“Rifle,” Aster whispered, her lips splitting at the corners where the cold had pasted them shut. As a child, she’d called them ripples for the way they had of changing everything in a story. And because she’d misread the word the first time around, finding that f’s and p’s looked similar to her untrained eyes.

Issue 19 of Night Empress had been one of Aster’s favourites when she was a girl, and she’d read it along with every other Mariam Santi adventure available aboard Matilda. Old comics circulated wing to wing, deck to deck.

“Look how it blows up inside when I jostle it! Boom! Boom! Boom!” said Flick as she – he – no, they – shook the starjar. Aster regretted the error. She was used to the style of her own deck where all children were referred to with feminine pronouns. Here, it was they. She’d do well to remember. “Explode! Explode!” Flick continued, tossing the starjar into the air before catching it. “Except not really. If it was an explosion there’d be fire, and if there was fire it’d be hot.” They spoke in that matter-of-fact tone native to children who believed they knew everything. “My great-grandmeema say there was blackouts before too, but they was just passing through. After one week they stopped, and lowdeckers never even had to have no energy rations to stop them. No cold,” said Flick, dark-brown skin lit bronze under the meek glow of the starjars.

If there was a chance he’d respond – and there wasn’t – Aster would radio the Surgeon. He’d write her a pass to transport Flick up to his clinic on G deck or somewhere else warm. He’d sign it in his looping cursive and stamp it with his fancy gold seal. Aster didn’t know every guard on Matilda, but the ones she did wouldn’t dare deny a pass issued by Heavens’ Hands Made Flesh.

As it was, the Surgeon hadn’t spoken to Aster in three and a half weeks, not since the start of the blackouts. No Surgeon, no access to Matilda’s upperdecks. No upperdeck access, no heat.

“It’s like a star, see?” Flick said, shaking another lantern, setting off its chemical show.

Aster looked at the lantern, then at Flick, then at the lantern again. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“A star’s a bunch of little things coming together to make light, yeah? Chemicals and all that. And our little special jars here are a bunch of little things coming together to make light too. Also chemicals. Agree or disagree?”

“Agree,” said Aster, familiar with the basic chemistry from studies in astromatics.

“So, they the same. Chemicals plus more chemicals makes magic,” Flick said, tongue sticking out.

Aster admired the child’s sureness if not their utter wrongness. “Your model lacks specificity and is therefore useless,” she said, speaking more harshly than intended. This close to the end of the day, she lost the ability to modulate her naturally abrupt manner for the comfort of others. “According to such a theory, a suitcase would be no different than a bomb.

Sugars and synthase react to make the cotton of the luggage. Oxygen oxidizes gunpowder to make an explosion. Chemicals plus more chemicals makes magic describes both scenarios rather well, but, of course, we know a suitcase is nothing like a bomb.”

Flick blinked obstinately, and Aster searched for a child-appropriate explanation.

“You’re arguing that a person is identical to a dog because they’ve both got bones and blood.”

“Guards be calling Tarlanders dogs all the time,” Flick said, hand on hip.

Aster twitched at the sound of the familiar word; she hadn’t heard it in ages, but it still stirred a sense of belonging. Tarlanders were the inhabitants of P, Q, R, S, and T decks, and it was as close to a nation as anything on Matilda.

“The guards are hardly a compass by which to measure right and wrong,” said Aster.

Flick’s eyes flashed open in what was presumably mock shock. “You gonna get struck down for saying that, woman. Don’t you know that Sovereign Nicolaeus is the Heavens’ chosen ruler? And that the guards are Nicolaeus’s soldiers and, by extension, soldiers of the Heavens? A spurn to them is a spurn to the Heavens direct,” Flick said in a high-pitched voice.

“Well, let’s hope the Heavens exact vengeance after I’ve amputated your foot. I wouldn’t want you – righteous defender of the moral order that you are – negatively affected by my sacrilege.” Without meaning to, Aster smiled.

Excerpted with permission from An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon, IF/Westland.