Future Lovecraft

HARMONY AMID THE STARS By Ada Hoffmann

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?”

“’Course.”

“Just bring that to me tomorrow, and I’ll get one out of storage and put them on. Really, it’s easy. It’s fine.”

I wasn’t lying to placate her. I really thought I had a backup. I remember saying goodbye to my family, hugging my sister like a vise and holding my mother more gently, afraid of hurting her. Trying to memorise the smell of the earth, even though it was just asphalt and fuel out there on the launch pad. Walking stiffly onto the ship, praying the photos and letters and music I’d packed onto the thumbtop would be enough. I’m sure I was smart enough to make a backup.

But I’ve trashed my room. Every space-saving drawer. Every pocket. If we were allowed to keep personal files on the ship’s mainframe, I’d have trashed that, too. There was no backup. Finally, I gave up and took out this paper.

I keep glancing out my little window, daring myself to look at the stars. I’ve only realised just now how much I’ve kept on my thumbtop and not in my head. I had a diary from Earth, but I can’t remember any of what I wrote. I had letters from all my friends, all my extended family, even a few ex-lovers. I can remember a few of their faces but only one name. I didn’t know it was possible to lose so much.

I wonder if I’ll remember the percussive beat of a kwaito song, nine years from now. I wonder if I’ll remember Johannesburg. Or the moles on my sister’s face.

I slept with Henri last night to block out the stars’ whispers. To think about something else besides cleaning, blood, and loss. It wasn’t our first time.

I like Henri and I don’t like him. He has nice hands and nice legs. His hair is going prematurely grey. He’s nice to me, in a smarmy sort of way. He’s better than being alone.

I don’t like trying to cuddle on his little cot. We can do it if we try, but once the endorphins wear off, it feels sweaty and squished. So, when we were done, I sat on the floor, wrapped myself in a blanket, stared into space. He ran his fingers through my hair.

“You can take the spare Suardana offered,” he said, when he’d run out of sweet nothings. “You can borrow my music. Borrow everyone’s. Better than doing your oh-so-menial job in silence.”

Henri gets to tease me about that. He’s an organic chemist, so he has one of the only jobs lower on the totem pole than mine: He repairs the composting toilets.

“It’s not the silence. You know what it is.”

“Oui. And the lost files, of course.”

“It’s the sounds.”

I glanced at the window. I’d been hearing it more and more since my thumbtop broke. We were here when you were prokaryotes, said the stars. We will be here when you are dust.

There was a nervous smile in Henri’s voice. “Oui, Moremi, but don’t say it out loud. Ssh.”

I closed my eyes and focused on his fingers in my hair. Normally, I don’t like closing my eyes with Henri. Not in the afterglow, when it’s only his fingers. I always end up realising, with a start, that the hand I’m imagining in my hair is Captain Hao’s.

Henri’s music doesn’t help. It’s all breathy chanteuses and tinkly pop. It doesn’t grab me and move me like kwaito. I keep drifting off and hearing the stars.

We were here when you were dust. We will be here when you are vapour. And you, in the meantime, will serve.

I’m not sure I have all the words right. I try not to get them right.

I keep finding messages in blood. I don’t want to know what they say. I left the second one up for Captain Hao, but after three days, I couldn’t stand it, anymore, and scrubbed it off. She didn’t say anything about it, good or bad, but the stars got louder. The third one, I scrubbed right away. Too much crazy on this ship, already. We don’t need blood.

Last night, I woke up sweating from a nightmare. I couldn’t remember anything. Just the terror. Instead of going back to sleep, I started cleaning early. No one gets up early on this ship. The mess hall should have been empty.

But there was Captain Hao, with a razor blade and a calligraphy brush. One glove pulled off, one hand dripping red, the brush redder. Writing a word on the wall.

She turned her head and looked at me. I’ve never seen emotion in Captain Hao’s face before. Today, her eyes went wide; her lip trembled. I think it was fear.

If she hadn’t looked scared, I might have stormed in, demanded an explanation. But with that look in her eyes, half of me wanted to hug her, kiss her straight black hair, tell her it would be okay. Half of me wanted to run screaming.

I split the difference. I bowed my head and backed out politely. Hours later, when she was gone, I scrubbed the bloody wall until it shone.

I almost didn’t tell anyone. I lay awake, tossing and turning, trying to shut out the stars. Told myself it would make no difference if I did. She’s the Captain. Even if she weren’t, what could we do? Send her home?

We will be here when you are dust, said the stars. You will serve us. She will serve us.

I got up and paced, as much as you can pace in a room the size of a closet, taking one step and turning, step and turn, step and turn. I leaned on the poster I’d smuggled up from Earth, a big view of a herd of kudu in Marakele National Park. I stared at it and wondered if I’d been there before.

I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen kudu. I couldn’t remember if I’d been to a national park, at all. I tried to think of it and only saw blood.

That was the last straw. I had to talk to someone.

“Someone” means Mesfin Biniyam, the ship’s psychiatrist. At Mission Control in Beijing, when they told me psychiatry was one of the most important jobs in space, I laughed. I wrote an eye-rolling letter back home to Onalenna.

Nowadays, I don’t laugh about it.

We each had a weekly session with Mesfin for the first few months. When Henri and I started fighting over whether to call ourselves a couple, Mesfin smoothed it over. When Suardana reported anxiety, he taught her some deep breathing, which helped her keep an even keel—for a while.

But when I first told Mesfin about the stars and their whispers, he got this gazelle-in-the-headlights look. Like, all of a sudden, here was something he hadn’t read in a psychiatric journal. Nowadays, he wanders the ship with nothing to say.

When he stopped holding weekly sessions, I just grumbled and wished he’d help with the cleaning. But today, I needed him.

Mesfin’s office doubles as his cabin and it’s one of the bigger ones. He and I can both sit down and close the door and, if we’re careful, our knees don’t touch. He’s decked out the walls in inspirational posters mixed with traditional Ethiopian art.

I sat down and explained. About Captain Hao. The blood on the walls. The whispers. How I felt like a traitor just talking about it, but worse if I said nothing. How beautiful she was, even writing with the blood from her own wrist. How badly I wanted her to be sane.

He let me h. He asked the usual headshrinker questions. “How does that make you feel?” Then he closed his eyes. “I can’t help with this, Moremi. I’m sorry.”

I pulled away a half-centimeter, which was all I could do without plastering myself against the wall. “What do you mean? You’re the one who deals with the crazy. You’re telling me there’s no entry for this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? No little page of instructions in Mandarin, somewhere in the ship’s handbook? ‘By the way, if the whole crew goes batshit, here’s what you do….’” My voice cracked. That surprised me. I held my hands up to hide my face.

Mesfin’s voice had the kind of calm that you only get by doing a real good job of pretending to be calm when you’re not. “What do you think, Moremi? Do you think there are instructions for this?”

I didn’t want him to see my lip trembling. Like a little kid. “You’re the psychiatrist. Make something up.”

“I hear the voices, too, Moremi. Maybe they’re the stars. Maybe they’re a projection of my unconscious mind. My temporal lobes constructing a presence to block out the emptiness that’s really out there. How can I know? And if I don’t know, how can I give advice? Won’t I simply be repeating what the stars tell me? How can I say anything?”

“People are writing on the walls in blood. How can you not say anything?”

“I can’t say anything.” I expected him to show some emotion, to start waving his hands or trembling. He just sat there. Repeated it over and over. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

I stormed out. I cried in my cabin for a minute or two.

But so what? He showed me what not to be. I refuse to sit there, expressionless, while things fall apart. Even if my memory’s going and the stars are loud in my ears, I have to do something so we survive until Barnard’s Star. I have to, so I can.

I am going to have a talk with Captain Hao.

It will be delicate. I can’t do it when someone else could be watching. And her door isn’t open, anymore. When I come by, she waves pages of Mandarin paperwork in my face. I have to wait for the right moment.

It’s awful, waiting. It drove me to distraction all day. Finally, I gave up and went to Henri.

He smirked the way he always smirked. “Ah, yes, love. I’ll give you something else to think of.” He pulled me close without waiting to see if I liked the idea or not. Half of me hated him for it and half of me wanted to kiss him until speech was not an option. I went with the kissing. Henri’s not all bad. His jaw is a good shape. His skin tastes salty, alive.

I’d kissed halfway down his neck before I realised I wasn’t thinking of those things. And, this time, not about Captain Hao, either. I was thinking of the pulse in his throat. Strong, heady, rhythmic, saltier than skin. The red, the life, hiding inside him. I wanted to touch that. To taste it.

I pulled back abruptly. Henri raised an eyebrow, not moving. He’s learned not to push.

You are ours, said the stars, suddenly loud in my ears. We can use you.

I put my hands over my ears. Henri tilted his head. “Moremi, what…?”

I shoved him away and ran back to my room.

I’m not crazy. Captain Hao’s the crazy one. I’ve always had these little uncomfortable moments. One time, I had a girlfriend back in Johannesburg who—

I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember what she did.

I remember it was awkward, though, and I came home and told Onalenna about it. Once told, it was funny. We laughed and laughed, and Onalenna said—

What did she say?

I can’t picture my sister’s face, anymore. I don’t know what she said. I don’t remember our mother’s name, only the stick of her wrist as she hugged me goodbye. I remember Onalenna’s last words to me: Don’t look back, Moremi. I’ll miss you, but….

But what?

I think I remember her voice. I think I remember it cracking. But I don’t remember my sister.

I don’t remember what I said when I got Captain Hao alone. Just the feeling of blood pounding in my ears. I felt sick, but I had to say it, or be like Mesfin forever.

She stared at me. Not a caught-in-the-act stare. Not a repentant stare. She stared like she’d never believed an African cleaning lady could be so stupid.

“Dr. Maele.” Her voice was ice. “Can’t you read?”

I’d pictured her screaming, attacking me in a blood-writing homicidal haze. This was worse.

“Not Mandarin,” I said helplessly, my eyes frozen to hers. “Not very much of it. I can speak Mandarin and read English and, for a non-Chinese citizen, that was enough for—”

“I know the personnel requirements of my own ship, Moremi. Fine. Since you’re so concerned, let me educate you. The words I’ve been writing on the walls? They say, Keep out.”

I stared.

Captain Hao clasped her gloved hands and spoke the way you’d talk to a brain-damaged 12-year-old. “The stars speak to me most of all, as is fitting. They wish to use me, and my ship, for their own ends. I will not let them. They understand blood more than anything else. So, I use blood to let them know they are unwelcome. Haven’t you noticed that, when I do this, the voices lessen, if only for a while? Or does the University of Johannesburg give doctorates to those who don’t understand covariation?”

I was frozen down to my belly. She was right, and I hadn’t noticed.

We will use you, said the stars. We will use her. Soon, you will see.

“Captain?” I said. “What do the stars say to you?”

She pointed. “Out.”

Call me a coward, but I left.

I stewed all evening and all morning, all through my cleaning time. I couldn’t calm down. When the Harmony I was spotless, I collapsed into Henri’s bed.

He didn’t seem surprised. “Your little panic attack is over, then?” I was past caring. With him, at least, I could stop thinking for a minute.

The voices slithered into my ears. I kissed him and kissed him. He pinned me against the cabin wall. His skin grew hot with surface blood. The voices sang. I didn’t care.

Kisses. Blood. The stars. Captain Hao. Blood. I was past thinking. I still saw them.

Henri was already inside me when the voices coalesced into words. Too loud to ignore, not even there and then. So loud they drowned out Henri’s moans.

He is ours. His blood, his life, they are ours. You will give him to us.

For a split second, I could see it: His limbs splayed, his eyes glassy, red everywhere. The stars laughing.

My stomach turned to ice. The vision, and the voices, went away. He was alive and moving, kissing me, cursing in French. Should I have told him to stop? Should I have pushed him off of me?

He took a few minutes of afterglow before he realised I still wasn’t moving. “Love? Are you all right?”

I managed to make my mouth work. “I think so.”

“Come here.”

I sat on the cot beside him and he wrapped me in his arms. They were not comforting.

“It’s the voices, oui?”

“Ee,” I agreed. He knew as many words of Tswana, by now, as I did of French.

“Poor thing. They speak to me, too, you know.”

It was the sort of inane thing Henri would say. Did he think there was anyone who didn’t hear them? But, out of some perverse impulse, I asked, “What do they say?”

“They say that I am not worthy of them. That I must die and my blood will consecrate the ship.” His fingers tightened in my hair. “But it is foolishness. I have never been suicidal, even out here, and I find them easy to ignore. If they want me to kill myself, they will have to try harder, hmm? So, what do they tell you?”

I was silent.

“Poor little Moremi. Don’t think of the stars. Think of home. Old lovers, drinking companions, colleagues, that sister you love so much. Remember we are doing this for them.”

I thought of them. Or I tried to.

I could not think of anything. At first, I thought I was still paralysed from the vision. But I could think of Henri, Captain Hao, Mesfin, Suardana, all the rest of them.

I could not think of my sister. Nor my parents. Nor anyone on Earth I had ever known. I could not remember my alma mater, my hometown, my religion—if I had one. I could not remember veldts or rivers or cities. And I had not even noticed them go.

“Did I have a sister?”

“Of course you did. You always used to talk about her. Her name was…Oh, let me see…It’s coming to me….”

He trailed off and went very pale. We looked in each other’s eyes for a moment. Then he put a hand to his forehead and began murmuring to himself in French, too low and too fast for me to make anything out.

I was in no shape to comfort him. I made an excuse and went back to my room. I read the scant lines in this notebook, over and over again. ‘Onalenna’—that was her name. But I only know it because it is written here. It does not ring a bell.

I think we are all going to die out here. I hope we will die.

How long has it been since I wrote in this notebook? A day? Five years?

It must have been a long time. Everything is in disarray. Wails and screams echo through the metal halls.

I remember nothing. I am not even completely sure that I am Moremi Maele. My only memory—recent? Or old?—is this:

I held a human heart in my hands.

Blood covered my fingers and stained my jumpsuit. I knelt and held the heart up to a woman, speaking words I no longer remember. She was cold and indescribably beautiful.

I remember a split second of revulsion on her face. And then a change, a sort of crumbling. In that moment, as I knelt before her, she gave in. She began to laugh. The stars laughed around us. I felt an odd, surging joy. We were theirs, now. Together, we had crossed the point of no return.

That is all I remember. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it is a real memory or a false vision. I don’t know for sure whose heart it was, though I think I know. Call me cowardly. I can’t bring myself to go look in his cabin. Instead, I sit with this notebook. Waiting, though I can’t say for what.

Is Henri dead?

Is Moremi Maele, in any sense, still alive?