An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

Aster was always memorizing new ways of being with people.

Twenty thousand lowdeckers and almost half as many different ways of life. That was the nature of a ship divided by metal, language, and armed guards.

It was wasteful, he declared, to recycle the Tarlanders’ defective bodies into Matilda when the steady pulse of an electrical current could reanimate them as perfect, obedient workers.

They argued that every being in the Heavens’ creations deserved the dignity of death.

Tarlanders did not come male and female— everything but.

Their demon forms could not conform to the Holy Order set forth by the Heavens.

Due to a broad range of hormonal disturbances, Tarlander bodies did not always present as clearly male and female as the Guard supposed they ought. This explained Aster’s hairiness and muscular build despite being born without the external organs that produced testosterone.)

Hauser countered with a compromise. Via amputation, he could use body parts rather than the body whole.

“Materials are meaningless without knowledge, which is what you gave us. A cloak for a stove, that’s the trade.”

Baby Sun giving out is how they making a fuss. Tryna tell us it’s time to move, to act. They gave us the same message twenty-five years ago, but we didn’t listen.

We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one.

Guards, mostly. They got a special eye on me. It’s something in my blood they smell.”

“Please don’t doubt that if I could get rid of the cold, I would, or that if it was in my power to kill each and every upperdecker, I’d do that as well.”

Aster didn’t startle at the outburst. She was always on edge with Giselle and therefore always adequately braced for contact.

It’s not impossible to change the course of something’s destiny. To transmutate. Nothing is as it once was. Nothing as it is now will be that way much longer.

Anything Aster had of value had once been his.

In Aster’s telling, there’s no suicide note written in pretty cursive, stashed inside Lune’s radiolabe: Aster, dear. Achingly, sorrowfully, tearfully, regretfully, angrily, I leave you. I am sorry.

“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”

The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.

History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing.

Ghosts is smells, stains, scars. Everything is ruins.

Everything is a clue. It wants you to know its story. Ancestors are everywhere if you are looking.

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.

Best to spread on the salve daily, iron out the formula in the meantime.

That’s what I thought, said Ainy. You never know when a memory’s gonna save your life.

This was where she was meant to be. Not a Q deck fieldworker, but a Y-decker tending to the sun.

The women all had radiolabes, each of them ticking and tocking a steady pulse. Aster’s, of course, remained silent. Broken. Dead as Lune.

She liked to disappear, but the ease and frequency with which she did it made it harder, not easier, to bear.

She’d gone looking for something that didn’t exist and found it.

My sissyness and my sickliness were two sides of the same coin to my father. I was weak and didn’t belong.

He would disown me, and that heartens me. I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.

That is the exact opposite reason why it upsets me when he calls me things that mean boy.

I fascinate and excite him in a way I do not think is entirely wholesome, and it’s been that way since I was very young.

Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse. It is neither here nor there.

I’ve imagined what it would be like to be entwined with Aster, to touch her, to let all my secrets trickle out of me and into her, to take hold of her burdens.

I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline. A hound with no prey drive was no hound at all and should be killed.

Conform or die. That was his motto. I am oddly doing bits of both, each half-assedly.

but healing is not a perfect science.

Like a child, I marvel at the moving parts. A little girl dissecting her first radio.

I’m surprised by how closely my disapproving groan resembles a growl. I’m always surprised by my body. The way it moves and occupies space. Its height. Its presence.

I am not that sort of man. The sort to follow a woman into the brush and do with her whatever pleases him. I don’t think I’m a man at all.

“No, but I will join you to make you happy. I like to make you happy.” She’s never said anything like that before.

and I begin the Evening-Hour Litany, words describing devotion to things I have never seen: oceans, mountains, deserts. I long to see them, though I know I never will.

On Q deck, all children are referred to as girls. All people—all Q-deckers at least—are assumed women unless there’s a statement or obvious sign otherwise,

She had happened upon an erased chalkboard, and though she could see the unsettled dust of calcium carbonate, there was no putting together what had been written there before. Everything left a trace, but sometimes a trace was not enough.

Aster didn’t know what metal in existence behaved that way. Lighter than water. Liquid at room temperature.

Aster thought to call it eidolon, after the wraiths of the ancient world.

She’d found out one of Matilda’s secrets, and if anyone was Matilda’s secret-keeper, was it not the Sovereign himself?

It was hard to imagine the dead having adventures. It was hard to imagine her as a person at all.

There was an excitement coming from Giselle. She was standing on the edge of a new world and so ready to jump. How Lucifer felt upon leaving the Heavens. He didn’t fall. He dove.