Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

T he morning before our ship, Parastrata, docks at the skyport, I rise early. I climb over my littlest sister, Lifil, and the other smallgirls curled together like puppies on our bunk. Out in the common room, the rest of the women and girls lie sleeping in the dark, humid simulation of night. As I wind up my hair and bind it with a work rag, I mark how Modrie Reller’s—my stepmother’s—bunk is empty. She must have spent the night in my father’s quarters, even some months gone with child again as she is.

I fasten the clasps of my shift at my shoulders, step first into my light skirts, then my quilted ones, and tie them all at my waist until they hang heavy around my hips. I lean forward to check their length. Only the barest hint of toe peeks out from beneath the hem.

Right so. I smile to myself in the dark. Today will be a good day. Everything balanced, everything raveled right.

I tuck my folding fan into my pocket and make my way to the hatch. Nan and Llell and some of the other grown girls stir on the mattresses cramping the floor as I punch in the pattern code to unlock the door—circle, bar, bar, slant. Only Modrie Reller and I know the pattern. Me, since I’m so girl of our ship, and her, since she’s firstwife to the Parastrata’s captain, at least ever since a fever took my mother to the Void ten turns past. Nan tried to get me to tell the pattern one time, so she could sneak off to her cats in the livestock bay, but I told her no. My father can trust me and Modrie Reller, but it’s hardly safe if all the women and girls know.

I heave the door open on its rollers and creep out into the hallway. The faint, moon-blue light of a biolume bowl washes the walls. I think on going back and hurrying the others along so I won’t be caught alone out in the corridors, but I am the so girl and my father’s eldest daughter, besides. No one would dare say anything to me. And a few minutes by myself is too choice to pass up when I spend near every minute of the day hemmed in by other people. I roll the door partway closed behind me.

I breathe deep. Without the heat and breath of so many women pressed together in one room, the air is less close, almost cool. One of our canaries pipes a question at me from its cage in an alcove along the wall. I bend close and work the tip of my finger between the bars. The canary quirks its head at me, its eyes small, inky spots in the half light.

“Ava,” Llell hisses behind me. She leans out of the hatch, still working the tie of her outer skirt. “Wait on us, huh?”

I pull my finger from the cage, straighten up, and fold my arms in feigned impatience.

Llell squints at me, uncertain.

“Hurry on, then,” I say. Sometimes I forget Llell can’t read my looks. I have to speak aloud if I want her to do what needs doing. Her eyes are bad, like her mother’s and all her brothers’ and sisters’.

Llell nods and ducks back into the sleeping quarters.

There’s doctors on the waystations what can fix bad eyes, but Priority says it’s only for those on Flight and Fixes duty. It’s not worth the cost if you’re only assigned to the kitchens or the nurseries, much less cleaning or the dyeworks. Maybe someday Llell and her mother can share a pair of glasses like my great-grandfather’s widow Hannah has.

Across the corridor, a porthole looks out on the darkness of the Void, speckled bright with stars like a vast, black egg. A distant silver-gray moon hangs against it, and farther out, a blue planet mottled cloud white and brown-green slips into view, a bright halo circling it. Earth, the seat of all our woes.

I step up to the glass. The skyport floats somewhere above the blue planet, still some far to be seen with the naked eye. But come endday, we’ll dock our ship, and we’ll join the other crewes for our first endrun meet in five turns. A nervy, electric thrill trips through my body at the sight of the moon and its world, so impossibly near and far at once. Sometimes I forget the true, endless scope of the Void and coax myself to thinking our ship is all the universe there is. But then we pass a moon or a world, hanging lonely and luminous in the dark, and it comes to me the sheer stretch of the emptiness we live in. I touch my hand to the porthole’s cool, scored surface, and trace the curve of the Earth.

No. I tamp out the thought, tuck my hands under my arms, and look away so I see only our ship. If I’ve taken to gazing out portholes like a silly, Earthstruck girl, I truly must be in need of marrying, as Modrie Reller’s son Jerej teases. All the oldgirls say we younger ones are drawn to the Earth, even though its touch means our ruin. They say even Saeleas, our first patriarch’s wife, fell weeping when our people departed some thousand turns past, and she had seen its desolation with her own eyes. They say ever since, our women have harbored a wanting for the Earth like a soft, rotten spot in our souls.

It is our men who risk to walk it when the need comes, our men who gird themselves and shield us from its pull, who must purify themselves with oil and water after suffering its weight. And in turn, all we need do is remember how our ship is life, the true world, the pure world. I whisper a piece from the Word of the Sky to keep me raveled.

“Clean the dust from our feet,

Our hair, our clothes.

Bring us oil, bring us water,

And in the heavens

We will make a world anew.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Nan says as she finally emerges from the sleeping quarters, followed by Llell.

I stand straight to inspect them. They’ve bound up their red hair in work rags, like mine, and their green skirts brush the floor. Well, Llell’s do. Nan needs to let out the hem of her dress. She’s grown again, and the bare tops of her feet show. If you weren’t looking close, you’d think we were sisters, all dressed alike, except my skin is dull and dark, like my mother’s was, whereas theirs holds a translucent pearl. Lell and all the boys used to tease me on my coloring before I became so girl, but not now. Everything is different now.

I nod my approval and sweep off in the direction of the livestock bay, the other girls in tow.

“Hurry on,” I call over my shoulder. “We want to be done and out of the way for the docking, right so?”

“Right so,” Llell mutters.

“Right so,” Nan chirps, Llell’s blithe echo.

The ship is still observing night, so the solar-fed lights are out. Strips of phosphorous lining the hallway bathe our bare feet in a dim blue glow, and the biolume bowls hanging from the ceiling at every turn keep us from descending into complete darkness. As we reach the bend before the gangway, the daylights buzz to life. Turrut, one of the boys near our age, barrels around the corner with an armful of dioxide canisters for the workrooms clutched to his chest. We shrink against the wall and duck our heads as one, waiting for him to pass. Sometimes Turrut will tease us, try to rouse some words out of us so he can hold it over our heads later, maybe make us do his chores, but today he’s too busy. He flies by without a word.

As he disappears around the bend, Llell hurries forward and falls into step beside me. She keeps her neck bent so our heads are even and speaks down to her feet. “You right know you shouldn’t walk out without us.”

I don’t answer. Llell’s father may head the dyeworks, but her mother is only a fourthwife and a half-blind dyegirl, a nobody.