An Unkindness of Ghosts

Aster is preparing for the difficult task of removing the gangrenous foot of a child named Flick. In the vast generation starship called Matilda in which they both live, Aster is in the rare position of being from a different lower-deck region than Flick. Travel between low decks is so rare and closely guarded by the upper deck power structure on Matilda that cultural differences and dialects form. For instance, all the people from Aster’s deck are referred to by the feminine pronoun “she,” while all the people from Flick’s deck are referred to as “they.” Aster holds a special pass provided to her by an organization called Heavens’ Hands Made Flesh that allows her to travel between decks as a medical specialist. Just as happened 25 years ago, Matilda is suffering from power outages, and the lower decks have suffered from a lack of heat.

To forestall the surgery, Flick talks about a variety of subjects. Illumination is provided by chemical lamps called starjars. Flick tries to make a comparative between the chemical reactions within lamps and actual stars. Aster, with a literalness typical of her personality, maintains that the two chemical reactions are different: “You’re arguing that a person is identical to a dog because they both have bones and blood,” she argues (11). With Flick’s great-meema watching, she anesthetizes Flick and carefully removes their foot. She keeps the foot and receives the gift of a cloak from Flick’s relative. The old woman explains, “We got to help each other survive long enough to find out what the spirits have in store. That means not dying of cold” (22).

In an abandoned area of X deck called Xylem Wing, Aster returns to her hidden botanarium, finding her friend Giselle. Giselle is confrontational with Aster, asking why she can heat the botanarium but not the rest of the lower decks, a task she knows would require immense resources. Aster responds, “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 upper-decker, I’d do that as well” (30). Giselle notes that Aster likes to keep records and suggests the reckless burning of them just for the sake of it, a suggestion Aster cannot understand. Among these notes are Aster’s dead mother’s engineering journals.

Theo Smith, known also as Surgeon, visits Aster. Though they have an involved relationship as friends and doctors, Theo’s demeanor is unusually removed. He requests Aster’s help in formulating a cure for a mysterious ailment affecting Theo’s patient Sovereign Nicolaeus, the ship’s acting leader. Aster refuses, to which Theo responds, “I know—believe me, I know—how tempting it is to seek Nicolaeus’s death, but the man slated to succeed him is leagues and leagues worse” (39).

Giselle, who’s been spying on the conversation, later tells Aster that Nicolaeus’s symptoms—partial blindness, confusion, dissociative behavior—sound like those described in Aster’s mother’s notebooks. Giselle points out that what look like ordinary engineering notes are a code, revealing more personal information.

Later that night, a drunken guard, per custom, checks on the bunk where Aster lives with several other girls. He whips a couple of the girls, but Aster stands up to him, exploiting her connections to the powerful Surgeon. He is intimidated and leaves. Giselle and Aster are commanded to go to their regular shift on the field decks; on Matilda, food is grown under the light of an artificial sun called Baby, and it is planted and sown using the slave labor of the lower decks. During her shift, there is a hitch in the complicated field rotation mechanism, and Aster suffers a bad wound. She uses the confusion to escape the field and see Theo, who patches her wound. Aster invokes her relationship to Theo to secure a pass to the engineering deck that monitors Baby. This is where Aster’s mother once worked, and clues in her journal indicate that something about that deck will reveal something new about her death. She discovers that Giselle has run away.

Days after recovering, Aster goes to the engineering room where women monitor Baby, under the pretense of giving the women their radiation screening. Per government propaganda and rumor, Aster assumed that Matilda’s shortages and malfunctions were due to a malfunction in Baby, but she learns that Baby is operating at full functionality. A friendly engineer suggests that a large magnet likely caused the disruption of 25 years ago and of the present day. Additionally, the maps in the engineering room did not correspond to the map drawn by her mother, which shows a secret area, possibly the location of the magnet.