BAD MATTER

by Alexandra Duncan

Alexandra Duncan lives in North Carolina, where she works as a youth services librarian. Online, she lives and blogs at ashevilledilettante.blogspot.com/. Her first published story appeared in Rosebud magazine. When “Bad Matter” arrived in our offices, it reminded our staff of some of Ursula Le Guin’s fine science fiction stories … so your editor took the liberty of forwarding a copy to Ms. Le Guin. “Hey, I think you’re onto something in that Alexandra Duncan,” replied Ms. Le Guin, who added, “I will certainly look forward to more stories by her.” Should you feel the same way, take comfort in knowing we have another yarn by Ms. Duncan in inventory.

My letter of introduction to the Parastrata crewe came nine months and two days after my father’s death. A pair of silent men in handsewn jumpsuits delivered it to his estate lawyer, leaving behind only the letter and a faint smell of dung and ozone. The executor of his estate had it sent by courier to my office at Baghdad University. He sat silent on the other end of our onscreen feed as I read.

“I don’t understand,” I said, laying the soft square of paper on my desk.

“Yes, miss.” Mr. Roy, the executor, was all courtesy and high, old Mumbai style. I could make out rows of carefully dusted books and a well-behaved ficus behind his shoulder. “The dialect is unusual, naturally. We can engage an interpreter….”

“I’m well able to read it, thank you, Mr. Roy,” I said, raising my hands to adjust a fold in my hijab and trying not to let his archaic predilection for the word miss chafe me. Shouldn’t someone with a doctorate in functional linguistics merit a madam or doctor? Or at least an acknowledgment of competency in her own field? I wondered if my father had mentioned me to his colleagues at all. “What I don’t understand is how these people have anything to do with my father.”

The executor flushed pink as a grapefruit to his crisp, white collar, as if I had mentioned something profoundly personal and unseemly. “Frankly, Miss Saraih, we thought it was a matter only your family could interpret.”

I picked up the paper again. It was strangely heavy, more so than the 20th-century antiquities my students handled in the paleography workshop I gave every spring semester. It was orange-brown and coarse, and had a stale, sweet smell.[1]

[Footnote 1: A selection from Dr. Vikram Hertz’s graduate thesis, On the Cultural Idiosyncrasies of Trans-Celestial Merchant Tribes, Oxford University Press, 2551: In my investigation of the spacefaring crewes, I discovered an inherent mistrust of modern communications technology among their members. Though they use electronic communications devices for arranging rendezvous with business partners and other matters requiring only verbal agreements, personal letters, marriage contracts, and even catalogs of shipping invoices are always manually printed and signed by the party or parties involved. Communications are then hand delivered through a series of trusted intermediaries. As Dr. Helion del Rios notes in his excellent article on the subject, “Counter-intuitive Means of Communication Among the Spacefaring Merchant Class,” (Modern Anthropology, v214, i9: September 2549), crewes value the relative privacy and perceived reliability of this method of communication over the transparency and ease of use offered by more modern methods. This practice has given rise to a resurgence of interest in the ancient art of paper-making among certain crewes. Though some vessels trade for paper, many others employ crewe members in the task of manufacturing their own paper using ready materials, from recycled cloth and plant products, to animal byproducts or waste.]

The letter read:

So brother doctor,

Want you know some virus come on your Ete. This was meet past, and the fix isn’t in it. Mandate say carry copper spooling and opiates your way come next runend, so we come. We listen on how you say these turns, so doctor, but Ete, she lie sleep and talk on you. Think girl must know she meet the Void soon. Right we come. Long promise, so doctor, not forget. Look skyport. We dock til the Decaturn.

—Parastrata Harrah

When I was a child, my father spent nearly two years among the itinerant tribes of spacefaring merchant crewes, completing a field study for his graduate thesis in cultural anthropology. He liked to shock guests at faculty dinner parties with stories of drinking alongside crewe captains and eating fresh-killed meat from the fingers of pale, fire-haired women bearing oxidized metal trays. But he never mentioned a woman named Ete, much less how she might be his.

The executor creaked his chair politely to remind me he was waiting on the other end of the feed.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Roy.” I folded the paper and lowered it to my lap, where he wouldn’t see me worrying its thick crease with my thumbnail.

“No trouble at all.” He executed a perfect smile of uniform white teeth.

“The letter … I’ll need some time to think it over,” I said.

“Perfectly understandable,” he said. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something else, then offered another smile instead. “Well, everything seems in order. Please do call me if you require my services again.”

“As-Salaam Alaikum, Mr. Roy,” I said, inclining my head toward him.

“Good day, miss.” The executor nodded in return.

I killed the feed and sat alone, turning the paper over in my hands. Maybe, I thought, I could unlock its meaning through the smell. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled. Nothing. Only a vague memory of last winter’s visit to a colleague’s farm several hours north of the city. But even after I sealed the letter in a plastic specimen bag and dropped it into the front partition of my filing cabinet, the heady odor lingered on my fingertips.

The ship Parastrata had been docked at Bhutto Sub-Orbital Station for five days when I found it. I sent a call ahead to the ship and bought a ticket to the station. On my way to the shuttle, I stopped to buy a copy of The Word of the Sky[2] at a vintage bookshop in the Dubai spaceport. The store had been retro-fitted in the style of bookshops popular when the spaceport first opened: faux-wood shelves, keypad-driven computer terminals, a hologram of a belled tabby fast asleep on the glass countertop. The young man at the counter even had a pair of antique horn-rimmed spectacles balanced across his nose.

[Footnote 2: The book we know as The Word of the Sky is comprised of the major religious poetry and sacred myths of trans-celestial crewes. Though we commonly reproduce it in written form, oral recitation is the authentic mode of transmission from generation to generation. My hosts were at first curious about the text I brought with me into the field, but were later horrified to discover its contents. Their captain requested I destroy my own copy of the book by burning it in the ship’s aft waste-decomposition chamber, which I did in the interests of maintaining the crewe’s trust and complicity in my research.—Vikram Hertz, On the Cultural Idiosyncrasies of Trans-Celestial Merchant Tribes, p. 42. ]

“Nice glasses,” I said as he scanned my card.

He paused with the scanner in his hand and flashed a confused look.

I tapped the bridge of my nose.

“Oh,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “It’s part of the uniform.”

I settled into a chair in the terminal to wait for boarding and uploaded the text of The Word of the Sky onto my data assistant. I opened a section at random and scanned the page.

But woman, her mettle’s thin,

like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat.

Cover us all, she does,

tame the stars’ fury and channel life.

In the air, she floats;

a perfect, iridescent thing.

But when her feet touch the ground,

bare time til she falls crumpled and tarnished.

Women of the air, stay aloft and be whole!

For earth is hard and corrupt,

and only men will bear its touch.[3]

[Footnote 3: The Word of the Sky, canto 2, verses xix-xxix, ed. Florian Moreno, Turner University Press, 2554]

I closed my eyes and smoothed my hands over the cotton fabric of my traveling clothes—gray business suit and a peacock-blue headscarf. I should turn in my ticket, ride back to my office at the university, have a cup of kombucha, and see if I could finish writing that essay for October’s edition of Terrestrial Linguistics before the next term began, I thought. Bury the letter and whatever connection my father had with this roving cult of technophobes. I wished my mother were still alive, so I could ask her about those days after my father’s return. I wished she and I had not left Mumbai when I was twelve to live with her parents in Iraq. Maybe then my father still would have been alive to receive his letter. Maybe everything would have been different.

I drew in a lungful of the spaceport’s cold conditioned air. Whoever Ete was, my father had strayed from the proper line of scientific inquiry and gotten personally involved with the Parastrata crewe. He must have been their patron in some way. Yes, I remembered him coming home with a tom cat and a queen on my fifth birthday, saying they were not for me. He said he was sending them abroad, and my mother had raised her voice behind the oak doors of their bedroom. The next day, he brought home a gray parrot that nipped my fingers and refused to repeat my name. “A belated present,” he had said. I left it behind with him when we moved.

“Flight 792 to Bhutto Sub-Orbital Station now boarding,” the speaker in the chair’s armrest intoned, smooth as cream in tea.

I hesitated a moment and the speaker prompted me again. “Second call for Flight 792 to Bhutto Sub-Orbital Station.” I stuffed the copy of The Word of the Sky in my bag, straightened my clothes, and took my place in line to board the shuttle.

A current of humid air rolled across the loading dock as the ship Parastrata’s bay doors ground open. The ship’s captain, Parastrata Harrah, stood at the lip of the cargo bay, waiting for me.

“Missus,” said Captain Harrah, hiding any surprise at my arrival behind close-knit eyebrows. His skin reflected the pale glow of the station’s fluorescent tubes, sallow and translucent as rice paper against a yellowing beard. Something was wrong with his left eye. The iris had turned dark and listed outward, so he stared slightly to the left of me as he spoke.

“Captain,” I said. “Thank you for having me on such short notice.”

He grunted in answer, turning back toward the bay. I shouldered my traveling bag and followed him into the ship.

Yellow light pulsed dimly against the cargo bay’s alloy walls. My skin turned damp the moment I stepped inside, as if I were visiting the greenhouse containing the replica rainforest at the university. Metal crates and spools of copper wire as wide as hundred-year-old trees lined the walls near the entrance, and in a far corner of the bay, a cluster of goats jostled and bleated behind the gate of a plasticine pen.[4] A sparrow had lodged itself in the rafters and shrieked a warning at us from its nest atop a hanging grid of fluorescent lights. Smells lapped over each other: the tang of metal and offal, ozone burning, and the sharp odors of sweat and new dye mingling with cooking oil and melting wax.

[Footnote 4: Of late, merchant crewes, as they prefer to be called, have begun to specialize in the transfer of particular brands of cargo, rather than accepting any merchandise population centers and outposts wish them to transfer. The Makkaram crewe, for example, has fitted its ship especially for the transfer of volatile gases, and would be ill-equipped to transfer the circuit boards and bolts of silk that are the stock in trade of the Emine crewe. Such specialization reflects the recent increase in the standard of living across the known galaxy, and among the merchant crewes in turn. However, the term “increase” is merely relative. As the trans-celestial crewes’ way of life requires them to remain out of contact with civilization for extended periods of time, they continue to manufacture many of the raw materials terrestrial inhabitants take for granted, such as paper, fabric, dye, and dairy products. Women shoulder a heavy share of the subsistence work among most crewes, eking out a living for their families through heavy labor in dye pits, hydroponic farms, stockyards, and kitchens. Crewes also maintain a brisk trade in livestock among themselves, exchanging such commodities as sheep, goats, cats, canaries, bees, and other relatively small breeds of domesticated animal. A gift of such a work animal would be highly prized, and would be reserved for occasions marking life milestones, such as birth, marriage, or a lasting trade agreement between crewes.—Vikram Hertz, On the Cultural Idiosyncrasies of Trans-Celestial Merchant Tribes, p. 23.]

Parastrata Harrah came to a halt at the end of the cargo bay. Several men, with beards as red-orange as their captain’s must once have been, stood waiting for us in a dense knot. Children peeked out of the wide doorway behind them, whispering to each other and staring openly at my clothes and skin. They ducked out of sight with nervous giggles when they caught sight of me staring back.

The children, even the older girls, wore their heads uncovered, their hair in every bright shade from copper to blood-orange red. Their skin was as pale as Harrah’s. They flashed like fish in the depths of a pond: now hidden, now briefly illuminated in the murky light of the cargo bay. I had no children of my own, no nieces or nephews. I knew they were only doing what children did, but their sudden dartings and pale skin unsettled me. Made me think of ghosts.

Harrah shooed them away and coughed low in his throat. “Missus, so glad you come aboard. Right thinking to speak close. On me and my wives, all say welcome.” [5] He spoke too loudly and looked toward his men, who had folded their arms across their chests. They moved their eyes back and forth between the two of us. One of them leaned his head toward the man at his shoulder and whispered something, all the while cutting his eyes at me.

[Footnote 5: When asked to name a distinguishing feature of merchant crewes, most terrestrial inhabitants note the prevalence of polygamy among the ranks of our spacefaring contemporaries. Although their family structure is key to understanding trans-celestial merchant society at large, the practice is hardly unique in our galaxy, and, as I hope to demonstrate herein, it is neither the sole, nor the most interesting, aspect of their culture. Whether the nature of space travel made polygamy imperative or the pioneering merchants took up such a solitary life to flee persecution for their pre-established social norms is, at present, a matter of some contention in the field of contemporary anthropology.—Vikram Hertz, “The Monogamy Alternative: Marriage and Family Relationships Among Interstellar Crewes,” Modern Thought, v15, i7: January 2553.]

“Soppos, Makam, the goats to lead they own way down some Iota port?” Harrah said, pointing from the group of men to the penned animals behind them. “Less you got no use for pay.”

Without a word, the group unknotted and spread out across the cargo bay to finish whatever tasks they had dropped when they saw me coming.

Harrah turned to me. “You, missus, the so doctor’s smallgirl, true?”

“Yes,” I said. My mouth flicked up into the practiced smile I deployed whenever someone discovered my relationship to that Dr. Vikram Hertz. I lifted a hand to my head to smooth the folds of my hijab and wished I’d dressed in a more sober color that morning. I felt like a silly girl of fifteen wearing such a bright color, calling notice to myself in a crowd of strangers.

“Pain me coming too late to find so doctor Hertz,” Harrah said. “He talked on you, back when.”

“Oh?” I said, trying to keep the question out of my voice. My heart did an odd twist. I didn’t remember it, but my mother said when my father came back from his studies, I shook his hand and asked her in a whisper who he was.

“You see why we tell him come,” Harrah said.

“I’m not sure I do,” I admitted. “I thought you could tell me … in the letter … what relation this girl Ete is to my father.” I waited, trying to keep my face still and my heartbeat in check, the way I did when I visited the doctor for my annual exam.

“He’d not talk on Ete?” Harrah’s voice grated, as if something had gone wrong with its mechanics.

“No,” I started, then saw the look on his face and tried to draw my words back. “Maybe he did. I’m sure he wrote about her. He wrote about all of you.”

Harrah’s lips folded into a taut line. “Come.” He cut me short and began stalking forward into a long, blue-lit corridor running along the spine of the ship. Pale, red-haired people flitted from room to room along the hall, glancing up with curiosity written across their faces as I passed, then shifting their eyes downward again once they saw the captain.

Five minutes through the door and I had made it all go awry. “I want to thank your wives for their hospitality,” I said, doubling my pace to keep up with Harrah. “I hoped your invitation to my father extended to me, and I might stay a few days to see how I could assist you.”

I bit the inside of my bottom lip as we walked and fought the urge to run my hands over my headscarf again. I wished I could have sounded less stiff, but Harrah didn’t even seem to hear me. He was staring down the corridor toward a tall, white-haired woman in a floor-length skirt the hue of new grass. Her thin shirt stopped at the shoulders, revealing long, softly wrinkled arms as pale as stripped birch bark. She moved with tiny, graceful steps, so her long skirt and hidden feet gave her the illusion of floating. The woman came to stop in front of us. She dipped a small bow to Harrah, and then to me, without meeting my eyes.

“Missus, here my firstwife Laral,” Harrah said, his voice ripe with pride. “She care of you well, meantime I work my day.”

Laral made her bow again and stood aside so Harrah could pass by us. He strode back toward the cargo bay without another look at me. Laral gestured for me to follow her and set off down the corridor with quick, tiny steps. Every twenty meters or so, we passed an open, arched doorway leading to a different room.

“What’s here?” I stopped in front of an arch leading to a kitchen noisy with the sounds of metal pots and women’s voices, the air thick with steam and the smell of frying meat.

“Not important, not for you, missus,” Laral said, and hurried me farther down the ship’s gullet. I caught glimpses of other rooms as Laral sped along. The ship’s garden, sunk lower into the floor than other rooms, rich with the smell of wet earth, humming with hydroponic lights and the gentle drone of bees lazing through the air. A dim workshop where men lowered framed screens into a vat of pale brown paste and women raised newly dyed swathes of green and orange cloth, dripping, from metal tubs. Sleeping quarters, dark and empty now in the middle of the work day. And between each room, an arched niche housing a bright yellow canary in a copper wire cage.

“The birds,” I started.

“Them, they watch how the air goes,” Laral explained without breaking step. “When it get some virus, some bad matter, the canaries, they go first to give us know.”

The long corridor ended in a closed door, the only one I had seen so far.[6]

[Footnote 6: Crewe members themselves live in common areas open to all. They reserve closed rooms for outsiders visiting the ship for extended periods of time, whether they be traders from another crewe, terrestrial clients, or the rare passenger. Closed rooms are commonly placed at the point in the ship farthest from the general exit, and therefore from the flow of traffic, making it difficult for the room’s inhabitants to exit the ship. This imposed isolation of strangers may have evolved from the practice of confining prisoners to a ship’s brig. Today, isolation serves the dual purpose of protecting crewe members from what they perceive as the corrupting influence of terrestrials, and the passenger from any harm less enlightened members of the crewe may intend for him.—Vikram Hertz, On the Cultural Idiosyncrasies of Trans-Celestial Merchant Tribes, p. 18.]

“Your father stay on this room when he come, back when, missus,” Laral said. “Good for your father, good for you.” She turned the spoked wheel on the outside of the door and pulled it open. A raised mattress covered with a green embroidered blanket took up most of the room, leaving barely enough space for a small wooden table that could fold cleverly into the wall. A clear bowl of bioluminescent fluid hung from the ceiling, casting the same blue-white light that filled the hall. A small, round porthole cut into the wall above the bed.

“My husband say you to rest, missus,” Laral said. “Come eat later, and after you talk on the so doctor.”

“Thank you, Laral.” I tried to meet her eyes, but they slipped away from me again, like oil on water. She pushed the door closed after her as she left.

I thought of going after her, asking her to show me more of the ship, but in the sudden quiet, the weight of travel came down on me. I slipped my feet from my shoes, unwound my hijab, and knelt on the bed. Bhutto Station had rotated to give me an almost full view of Earth beyond the cross-hatch of girders jutting out from the station’s arms. I put my hand to the glass and traced my finger over the swath of land in the southern hemisphere where my father was buried. North and west, a whorl of dust clouds covered Baghdad, but the air was clear over the caliphates of Russia and the mottled green and white coast of the arctic territories.

I felt a pinch at my heart. For some reason, the view made me think of wandering my father’s house—my old home—the week after he died. The Japanese maple in the garden was bigger than I remembered, flourishing to spite the climate. His desk was scratched and not so broad as I had thought. Everything was off, disproportionate, like an antique map of the world.

I covered my head and tried to pray, but my heart wasn’t in it. The last curve of Earth’s glow slipped past my window, and I lay back on the soft, green blanket to sleep.

I woke to the sound of stifled laughter. I didn’t know the hour, but the Earth was out of view and the window looked out on a field of black rich with stars. The smell of hot oil and frying spices hung in the air. I slid my eyes toward the noise and looked out from beneath my eyelashes. Two boys, one ginger-haired, the other stove coil-red, had unwound the door and were peeking through the gap. I lay still, trying to keep my breathing steady and quiet.

“That one look some like the Ava girl,” the taller one with ginger hair said. “Look on that hair. Some black, that’s what.”

“Maybe she come snatch that smallone ‘way,” the shorter boy said. “Like Shock-Headed Peter with the some long fingers.”

“Oh, so! Come, how we say at her.” The tall one laughed. The boys pushed the door closed, and the murmur of voices and cooking smells dissolved.

I sat up and gripped the bunk. The scarf had slipped from my head while I slept. The idea of complete strangers, even little boys, catching me vulnerable, with uncovered hair, made my lungs start to constrict. I forced myself to breathe in and out for a full minute before I got up and changed from my traveling clothes to a tailored, blue, high-collared shirt and dress slacks. I chose a black hijab embroidered with clusters of flowers picked out in black thread I usually reserved for faculty meetings and encounters with government officials.

In the hallway, children darted from room to room, and the adults I had seen working earlier stood about, talking in the arched doorways. A teenage girl openly nursing an infant stared at me as I passed, and she and another girl who might have been her sister began whispering furiously at my back. They both wore their shoulders bare and their hair loose down their backs, but their skirts were so long their toes barely peeked out from below the hem. The girl children and the grown women dressed in the same fashion. A pregnant woman sauntered past with her breasts bare, in the manner of a Minoan statue. I kept my eyes down and worked my way through the crowd, looking for Captain Harrah or Laral.

The dinner hour was beginning. A line of women and small children ringed the communal dining room, waiting for the cooks to serve a rowdy group of men and older boys. I stood against the wall with the women. Some of them stared at me, and I wondered if I should stride forward to stand with the men since, like them, I was strong enough to bear the Earth’s touch. Or was my sex the important thing?

“Ah, so missus, here we find you!” Laral appeared out of the crowd, flanked by two younger versions of herself. A faint hint of blush lit the skin around her cheeks, and her eyes flicked up toward mine, then darted away again. “We come looking on the room, but you go.”

“Laral,” I said, my throat unknotting. “Sorry, I….”

“You come eat, not wander,” Laral said, her voice firm. “Captain wanting you to speak.”

Laral led me to a quiet, dim room, lush with pillows and tapestries shot with copper thread. The captain’s private quarters. The captain sat across from me as we ate a dinner of fried tofu and greens, served by his youngest wife. The woman stayed mute as she carried mugs and bowls to and from the table. The captain followed her with his good eye. When we had finished, she retired to a corner of the room with a small hand loom in her lap.

“My Iri,” Harrah said, waving toward the woman. “Clever fingers, she. Long time she work in the dyeing room before I marry her. So pretty fingers not to turn dark with dye, no.” Iri glanced up at the mention of her name, then dropped her eyes again and pulled the yarn taut on its frame, trying to look as if she hadn’t overheard.

“Captain,” I said. I meant to press him about his message, the girl, my father, but my voice caught in my throat.

Harrah stopped talking and stared at me. He gestured with an open palm, as if he were pushing a bowl toward me.

I looked down and felt blood creep into my face. I rubbed the hem of my shirt between my thumb and forefinger as the seconds stretched out. “Forgive me,” I said finally. “Go on.”

The captain stayed silent, and when I looked up, his polite smile had unraveled. He was staring hard at me. “You want me to talk on Ete,” he said.

I nodded.

“I want none to say on her.” Harrah leaned back from the table. “She some bad matter, that one.”

“What do you want me here for, then?” I asked, fumbling my practiced courtesy in confusion.

The captain sighed. “Ete draw all some bad luck on her, even now she gone to the Void.” He frowned. “Was so doctor bring some bad luck on her, on us all. Want you should take it.”

“The bad luck?”

“Ete, her body,” Harrah said.

“Her body,” I repeated. In my hurry to meet the ship, I hadn’t thought the virus Harrah wrote of would have broken down her immune system so quickly. “You mean she’s dead?”

“You read the so doctor’s letter. She go to the Void some centiturns back,” Harrah said.

Of course. A hand-delivered letter must have taken weeks, maybe months, to reach my father, and more time again to reach me. I silently cursed the crewes for their ridiculous epistolary customs, and then myself for failing to remember them.

“And you want me to take her body from the ship?” I said, praying I had misunderstood.

“Right so.” Harrah nodded. “All crewes say, when she gone, we come trade again, give brides and animals. But now, no. Now she some bad ghost on us.”

My heart was a small animal trapped in my breast. “You haven’t buried her or … or….” I faltered, trying to remember from my father’s writings what the crewes did with their dead.[7] I knew there was no special magic in what happened to a person’s body after she died, but the inside of me felt shaken at the idea of her lying somewhere aboard the ship, rotting. No wonder Parastrata Harrah felt ghosts pressing in on him.

[Footnote 7: Most Islamic and Judeo-Christian denominations recognize burial ad astra as an acceptable final rite for those who die aboard interstellar vessels. Therefore, both military and civilian ships have accepted this expedient form of burial as a matter of course.—Margaret Niasaki, “Expressions of Faith in the Interstellar Age,” Epistemology Today, v32, i24: January 2579.]

“Not having her out on the lanes with us, less she follow our wake,” the captain said. “Needs put her underground, where she come be dust.”

I glanced past Parastrata Harrah and saw Iri sitting still as carved wood. Her eyes were on her handwork, but something in the way she held her head told me she was listening.

“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you need. I’ll make the arrangements.”

“Right so.” Harrah’s cheeks creased into a smile. I looked past him again to Iri, and at that moment, she lifted her eyes. Her glare held a terrible charge.

Harrah snapped his fingers without turning to look at his wife. She broke her gaze and stood to serve a plate of honeyed figs, her face once again blank and placid.

In the half-light of the ship’s night, the wheel to my door turned. I sat up in bed, pulling a scarf over my hair in a quick twist and holding it fast with my hand.

“Missus?” a woman’s voice called in a hushed whisper.

I breathed out. “Iri?”

“So, missus,” Iri said. Her skin glowed specter-white in the simulated moonlight.

My heart beat hard. “What is it?”

She knelt beside the bed. “You, missus, come some long way to talk on the girl,” she said. “You wanting to see her?”

I had shared a bowl of goat’s milk with the captain at dinner, but my throat felt dry, as if the soft tissue of my esophagus had bonded to itself. “Yes,” I said, the word tearing my throat open.

“Come,” Iri said. She rose and slipped through the door, soft as air.

We passed the dyeing rooms, the herbarium, the kitchen, the dining hall, and the canaries asleep in their niches. Iri didn’t slow as she strode into the darkened cargo bay.

“Isn’t she on the ship?” I asked, hurrying after her.

Iri didn’t answer. She turned her body sideways and disappeared into a close passageway formed by two rows of copper spooling, stacked high as three men. I hesitated at the periphery, then realized I had lost sight of her and hurried forward into the gloom.

I caught up with her at a sealed hatchway, the twin to my own door. A thin skein of ice covered the seal, but Iri turned the wheel and pushed the door open with a crack like teeth on glass. The hairs on my arms stood on end as a rush of cold air swallowed us.

“Where are we?” I asked, but the question fell away as my eyes adjusted to the dark. A muted glow of blue light bled down from the incandescent bowls hanging from the ceiling, and by it I could make out the shape of a body laid across a raised wooden pallet. A thin crust of ice had turned it white, like the replica effigies of British royalty at the Mumbai Museum of History. I exhaled white smoke and drew my hijab down further over my face, wishing the cloth were thicker.

Iri had gone ahead and stood with her back to me, next to the figure. I walked to her side, barely breathing, and looked down on the body.

It was a woman, younger than I expected, maybe in her thirties or forties, her eyes closed and black lashes sealed in a layer of brine. She was naked from the waist up, except for a small, iridescent green oval held close to her throat by a tendril-thin metal chain. Lengths of thin copper wire had been twined around her long, black braids, which lay heavy over her bare breasts.[8] Even in the dark, I could make out the tinge of discoloration on the tips of her fingers. A dye-worker.

[Footnote 8: The only time a crewewoman is free from labor falls on her wedding day. The other women of the crewe wash the bride. They braid a thin skein of copper through her hair and weave the metal around her wrists and ankles. On her head, they place a headdress of cloth in patches of orange, brown, green, and white, embroidered with copper wire and inlaid with coins. These, and the data disk she wears like a pendant around her neck, are her dowry. The disc is small, the size of an infant’s fingernail. It contains a record of the genetic makeup of the bride’s crewe, full genealogical records dating back multiple generations, call codes and signifying marks on their ships. At the end of her life, she will be buried in her bridal vestments, and the data disc passed on to any living descendants.—Vikram Hertz, On the Cultural Idiosyncrasies of Trans-Celestial Merchant Tribes, p. 28.]

“Iri,” I said, my voice cracking the air. “Was Ete … was she my father’s lover or, or his wife?”

Iri frowned and shook her head as if she’d tasted something bitter. “No.” She shook her head. “Never, no.”

“I thought….” I closed my eyes and started over. “Who is she, then?”

“Our Ete, she the girl of Maram, what gone to the Void some time past,” Iri said, staring down at the cold girl on the pallet. She reached out and rested a thin hand on the corpse’s icy hair. “Maram, she one ‘mong the captain’s smallgirls.” Iri paused. “You know these names?”

“No,” I said, guilt filling up my chest again. “I’m sorry, no.”

Iri waved my response away, as if she had hoped for a different answer, but didn’t expect one. “Maram, when the so doctor come, she ask to weave for him. You understand?” she continued.

I shook my head.

“Laral and me, we them what weave for the captain now,” Iri said.

I stared dumbly at Iri, then her words passed through me like a shockwave, and I remembered a clutch of verse from The Word of the Sky:

Woman, she take up the loom

For a man, one man alone,

Come all the fibers and bind together.

Thread over thread,

Life over life,

To make one life.[9]

[Footnote 9: The Word of the Sky, canto 3, verses ivc-ci, ed. Florian Moreno, Turner University Press, 2554]

“Maram? My father?” I asked.

“Yes,” Iri said. “And them, they make a smallgirl, our Ete. But Maram go to the Void on the making of her. When the virus come on Ete, we try to send word by the so doctor, but word go so slow. Too late, Ete. Too late, so doctor.”

“But you knew about me?” I said.

“We know he have a smallgirl and firstwife groundways. When small Ete come, we say so doctor come back, but his duty fall nearer the firstwife,” Iri said. “And Harrah say the smallgirl Ete can no way touch the ground, so she stay.”

My vision had darkened on the edges. I rested my forehead on my hands. “My father abandoned her?” My voice sounded far away, as if I were in another room.

“No, no, from the so doctor come gifts, letters.” Iri hurried to correct me. “He send animals, medicine, these things. He care for his Ete, but the other smallgirl need him groundways, so he say.”

“And now….” I hesitated. I stared down at the body between us, catching the shadow of my father’s profile in the slope of Ete’s nose, the hue of my own dark curls in this stranger’s locks. I looked up. “She’s my sister.”

“Yes,” Iri agreed.

“How long since she died?”

“Some centiturns, now,” Iri said.

“How old was she?” I asked.

“Coming on three and some hectaturns,” Iri said.

Ete would have been born around the time I was five, then, the same year my father came back to Mumbai. Something thin and painful snapped inside my chest. I felt the bands holding my lungs and heart in check begin to dissolve. I breathed out.

“Crewe say bad luck, have one child only,” Iri said, still stroking Ete’s hair. “Say so doctor bring it to fall on our Maram, his Ete, when both go on the Void so young.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice coming out low and gravely. I thought of my own mother in her hospital bed, her flesh sunk and drawn over her bones. Of myself bent over a textbook program on the small table by the hospital bed, studying while she dozed under a narcotic drip. My vision blurred, and I tilted my face up toward the ceiling to keep tears from slipping out of my eyes.

“You got no smallchild, right so?” Iri asked. “Maybe he bring that bad luck fall on you, too, even come you never know it.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched Iri tending to Ete’s body in the half-light. Her face and arms reflected the bioluminescence from the lamps above, making her skin look as if something iridescent were trapped beneath its surface. I looked down at my hands to see if I glowed too, but my fingers were like thin shadows against the light. My face must have been a dark mask to her.

Iri kept her eyes on Ete’s body and furrowed her brow. “Has a question needs wondering,” she said finally, without looking up from the corpse.

“Ask me,” I said. My voice came out rough.

Iri looked at me from beneath her pale eyebrows. “What you say on burying Ete groundways, making her come out dust, you talking true?”

“Of course,” I said. “I don’t want her lying here in the ice forever. She ought to have a proper burial.”

Iri’s eyes flashed sharp as they had in the captain’s chambers. “Not proper,” Iri said.

“To bury her?” I asked, wondering where my words had gone wrong.

“Putting her ‘neath the ground,” Iri corrected. “Captain say Ete body come out dust, but he don’t talk on how her soul come out dust, too.”

“But Captain Harrah said she was bad luck,” I said.

“That my husband thinking, him and some new-thinking men,” Iri said. “Not the old way. Not some right way. Not proper, like you say.”

“What should we do?” I said. “Tell me what’s right and I’ll do it.”

Iri put her chilled hand over mine. “Send our Ete out proper. Send her meet the sky.”

Iri and I carried Ete’s body from the ice room and laid it on a wooden transom in the center of the cargo bay. We sealed the door and hurried back to the body, but as we bent to lift it, I froze. A thin white figure moved from the far doorway into the darkened bay. I grabbed Iri’s wrist. She froze alongside me, her breathing as low and fast as my heartbeat. I lifted the corner of my hijab to cover my nose and mouth, thinking the dark fabric might hide me in the shadowed room, but the figure moved steadily toward us. Of course, I thought. Iri can’t hide, shining like a beacon moon as she is.

I gripped Iri’s hand. The pale body moved toward us in the dark until I could make out the hush-hush of skirts and the soft patting of bare feet on the metal floor. Iri squeezed back. The figure formed itself into a woman as she closed the distance between us, and then, through the dark, we could make out the face of Laral.

I tried to speak, but my throat made a choking sound.

Laral looked calmly from Iri to me, me to the cold body, as if she were evaluating the quality of a piece of cloth. Her eyes came back to Iri. “And?” she said.

“Yes,” Iri said.

“Right so.” Laral nodded and stooped to the floor. She raised the front end of the transom, her thin birch arms straining under the weight of Ete’s body.

“Come, missus,” Iri said. “We send her now.”

I let myself shiver and breathe. My heart regained its rhythm and I followed the women’s silent footsteps into the central corridor. We passed the dozing canaries and still workrooms, the unlit dormitories full of the sounds of breath, then wound through a warren of hallways tucked behind the kitchen.

We stopped outside a thick bulkhead door with a key reader mounted to the wall at its side. A round porthole of reinforced, shatterproof glass looked in on a sterile room with a beaten metal hatch incised into the far wall. Laral produced a thin key card from the folds of fabric gathered around her waist, slid it through the latch reader, and typed a sequence of numbers into the keypad. The door hissed and unlatched with an echoing pop. Laral and Iri grinned at each other like madwomen loosed.

The two women carried Ete’s body into the room and laid it gently on the floor. The warm air of the ship was beginning to melt the ice on Ete’s skin and hair. She looked as if she’d been draped in a net of dew. Each woman bent and pressed her lips to my sister’s icy forehead. Laral laid her hands on the sides of Ete’s head and whispered low in a wavering voice,

Come the last breath of stars,

Their dust fall

And make us all.

Come the last breath of man,

And dust give back again.[10]

[Footnote 10: The Word of the Sky, hymn for the creation of the universe, canto 1, verses iv-viii, ed. Florian Moreno, Turner University Press, 2554]

“Missus, come.” Iri held out her hand.

I knelt between the two women, Ete’s kin, my kin through her; I was only beginning to see. Laral unhooked the metal chain and sliver of green from around Ete’s throat. She circled her arms around me and fastened the clasp behind my neck.

I put my hand over the pendant, where it rested on my breastbone. I knew this feeling of crumbling and letting go from watching my mother die all those years before. My face was wet, though I didn’t remember beginning to cry or trying not to. I reached up with trembling fingers and pulled the hijab back from my head. The cloth unwound in soft, black folds, nearly as long as I was tall. I spread it wide and laid it over my sister’s body. I kissed her head through the cloth, as the other women had done. Then I stood and walked with Iri and Laral to the other side of the bulkhead door.

Iri resealed the door behind us. Laral keyed in a different code, then threw a safety catch. She took my hand and placed it on a small, red button below the keypad. I pressed down. There was no sound on the other side of the door as the outer hatch swung open onto the black sky. We stood with our faces against the glass and watched as the void pulled my sister forward into the waiting net of stars.