“I have the plug right here, little queen with a small m. What would you tell your followers if I were to pull it? What then would your imprint be like, incomplete, not ready to take shape?”
“You forget I have allies outside of this yellow, cold room. And that sitting, writing all day is an exercise in creation. You forget many things when it comes to women from my part of the world. You forget our power.”
“You talk a lot. The Council has agreed. It is time to say goodbye.”
The planets were in alignment; the three moons rose that day. Outside the tower, red scarves appeared around the necks and mouths of some soldiers. They started to scale the tower, to the only room it housed, on the top floor.
HARMONY AMID THE STARS
By Ada Hoffmann
Ada Hoffmann is a graduate student in computing who commutes to southern Ontario from an obscure globular cluster populated mostly by elves. Her short fiction has appeared in Expanded Horizons, Basement Stories, and One Buck Horror, among others.
THERE’S ONLY SO much paper on this ship. I shouldn’t be wasting it on a diary, even with my thumbtop gone. But I have to write this somewhere, before the songs of the stars drown it out and I forget.
I found blood on the walls today.
I was lugging garbage from the mess hall out to the recycler. Thumbtop in my pocket, piping kwaito music into my ears. Humming along, so I wouldn’t hear the stars at the edge of my mind. I kept my eyes on the white-tiled floors, avoiding the windows. The current song ended and I picked up the rectangular screen of my thumbtop with one hand, using my thumb to scroll through to a song I wasn’t tired of yet. I settled on a homemade audio file: my sister, Onalenna, back Earthside, laughing and singing a song we’d invented as children.
Then I looked up and saw it: the red-brown streaks marring the wall’s white tile, just opposite the window. Angry, dripping Mandarin characters. I dropped my thumbtop with a crash.
I can get by in a Mandarin conversation, but the writing still eludes me. I don’t know what the characters said. Normally, I would have needed to use the detector on my thumbtop even to know what they were. But I’ve got a PhD, same as everyone, and I knew what it would have said if it hadn’t just broken. Organic material. No bacteria. Dissipated proteins. Glucose. Platelets. Erythrocytes.
Blood.
I wanted to pretend I didn’t know why anyone would have done such a thing. But I knew. After all, I’ve been avoiding the stars with all my might since we passed the Oort cloud. They’ve looked different since then. When I’m not talking or listening to music, I hear them whispering, just past the edge of comprehension. Blood is one of their favourite words.
Blood on the walls meant someone else heard them. And someone gave in.
I was halfway done scrubbing the blood off the walls before I realised I might have let them stay as evidence. But there’s already enough crazy on this ship and blood’s unsanitary. Better to clean.
Cleaning used to make me laugh. I’ve got a PhD in microbiology. When we get to Barnard’s Star, nine years from now, I’ll be doing tests too delicate for the antique robots that got there, first. Checking if the local bacteria interact catastrophically with our crops or our bodies. Fixing it if they do. So a plague doesn’t wipe out the real colonists.
But the only bugs on the Harmony I are the ones we brought ourselves. Until we land, “microbiologist” means “cleaning lady”.
I picked up the broken pieces of my thumbtop and tried to hum while I worked, taking up the song where Onalenna’s voice left off. But I was so upset I couldn’t remember how it had gone.
I thought about not telling anyone, but this ship has hierarchies. There are the glorified cleaning ladies and there are the scientists who have important things to do shipboard. And then there is Captain Hao.
Captain Hao likes to say her door is always open. In Johannesburg, when profs said that sort of thing, they meant they liked to chat. I tried chatting with Captain Hao, once or twice. Got a blank stare, like I was singing about cockroach-headed dogs. I thought maybe it was me; maybe my Mandarin was just that awful. But I asked everyone—even Jason Chong, who grew up speaking Mandarin in Singapore—and they all agreed: Captain Hao is like that with everyone.
When Captain Hao says her door is always open, she means she expects verbal reports whenever anything happens. So, when I’d scrubbed the blood off the wall, I made my way to her quarters.
“Captain,” I said, saluting—she likes salutes.
“Dr. Maele.”
She was sketching with a sharp pencil in her quarters, which are bigger than mine—bigger than anyone’s out here—but still barely the size of a college dorm room. No decorations, beyond some charts and calendars: Even her sketches went in a neat pile at the side of her desk, not onto the walls. She was off-duty, but still in her uniform jumpsuit and gloves, with her hair pulled back to the nape of her neck.
She’s beautiful. Her eyes are like licorice candies. She makes me nervous.
“Captain, I found something odd on my cleaning rounds. Somebody’s been writing on the wall. In blood.”
Even her raised eyebrow was tidy. “Have they?”
“Yes.” I took out a slip of notepaper where I’d copied the characters. She frowned at the use of paper, but didn’t comment. “By the recycler. This is what it said. I cleaned it off so no one would panic, but I thought you should know.”
Captain Hao took the paper and studied it. I wanted to ask what the characters meant, but stopped myself. She knows that I have to look at the English side of the manuals, but I don’t like bringing it up. I don’t like looking incompetent to her.
“Good work, Dr. Maele. I’ll look into this. Leave the next one up so I can study it, if there’s a next one. Is that all?”
“Would you like me to do anything? Should I keep on the lookout for blades, bloodstains on pens, suspicious behaviour, anything like…?”
She gave me a flat look, like she didn’t trust me to notice suspicious behaviour in the first place. “No. Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
That’s what I mean by hierarchy. Captain Hao needs to know everything. Cleaning ladies don’t need to know squat.
But I can’t hate her for it. I can’t do anything but wish that I was tidy and important like her, and that she liked me. Call me crazy.
Ni Nyoman Suardana can fix anything. Except, apparently, a shattered thumbtop. She put on her gloves, took the pieces, one by one, from their plastic bag, examined them critically for a few minutes, then turned to me with her dark eyes wide, like she thought I’d be angry. “I can’t do anything, Moremi. I’m sorry. This thing’s wrecked.”
I must have looked disappointed, because she jumped back like I’d startled her. Suardana was like a nervous little bird from day one. I’ve been told she passed her psych eval narrowly, but out here, she keeps getting worse.
“It’s okay,” she said, holding out her hands. “It’s okay. We’ll get you a spare.”
I leaned against the wall and tried to look real casual. If I don’t act casual around Suardana, she just gets worse. “I’m not too worried. Is it easy to get a spare?”
Suardana nodded like she was placating a gunman. “Yes, it’s very easy. Very, very easy. You backed up your files, right?”