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Mar. 12th, 2024 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI have sent my agent the final (touch wood) manuscript of the book I don't really like, which allows me to work on the one I do like. This is a bit of it, that stands alone-ish? This book is low-key SF about a very large orbital spaceship called the Night Service that's basically a small town, run by Chief Administrator Quarren, who is a tired thirty-something woman in a position of institutional power. (I know, right. Such a shock.) In this bit, Quarren's girlfriend Eden has gone away for a while, and Quarren is coping fine. Fine. She's fine.
(The one thing I am proudest of, with Quarren, is that I killed several men for her character development. And, also, that she and a bunch of nuns run an NHS district general hospital in space, because why the hell not.)
If you have read the previous section, though, this one does follow straight on.
Quarren tries to contact Eden on Earth first thing in the morning, but can’t get anything through; there’s been some kind of orbital blackout and no one knows what’s going on with comms. She tries not to take out her annoyance on anyone else, and and her day devolves into shouting anyway. It’s Luna Central, to start with, who have decided to limit the Night Service supply of bedpans, bananas, radio components and pathologists; then it’s a group of tourists’ children, almost shredding themselves on the lift machinery, and then it’s the fire suppression system suppressing things that aren’t fires. And then Quarren goes up to the hospital decks to see Sister Verity and is intercepted by Julia, who shouts, “How could you do this to me?” and bursts into tears.
Everyone going past turns to look, including Sister Verity. Quarren stands there by the intake desk next to the morning bloom of sunflowers and waits for whatever the hell is going to happen to her next. Julia cries into her hands for a minute, then tries again.
“You trashed my evaluation,” she says. “I was supposed to finish up here in a month and go back to Earth. And suddenly they’re telling me that”—a hiccup—“that I failed to live up to expectations! And I know, I know you’ve told me that you, you thought I’d done okay, more than okay even, and you—”
Quarren digs her fingernails in her palms. “You told me you wanted to go home,” she says.
Julia just stares at her. “To the Aster? Yeah, but…”
“I can’t send you there,” Quarren says, more gently. “There are no transfers in and out of medical staff right now, Luna Central have put a stop to it. I can send you home in disgrace. And when you want to come back, we’ll make that evaluation disappear. Someone always owes me a favour.”
“Oh,” Julia says. She’s not crying any more. “You did that for me?”
“Yes,” Quarren says, waiting for Julia to say, then why didn’t you tell me. A reasonable question that Quarren can’t answer. She can’t talk to anyone about anything these days. But Julia just stares at her in shock again and wanders off, muttering the words home and Aster. She’ll need to stay on board the Night Service until her secondment is over and the ship has had sufficient repairs done, but it will be something for her to look forward to. Quarren uncurls her fingernails from her palms and drops in on Sister Verity.
“You don’t get a biscuit, Chief Administrator Quarren,” she says, as Quarren comes in. “You just dropped me in the shit.”
“I did?” Quarren says, after her hand has been slapped away from the malted milk bowl.
“No transfers,” Sister Verity says. She’s wearing the full religious Sister garb today, with scrubs under the orange-red cape and hood. It makes her look like an angry green-orange fruitbat. Quarren, whose mother was one of the Sisters, finds it comforting. “No transfers in and out. You, however, have got rid of one of our qualified doctors another way, which means, after we lost one of our pathologists to an Earth island where there are no dead people—”
“Eden says there are dead people.”
“—you have in fact brought us below the legally-mandated minimum for a hospital of our size and community status.”
“Oh,” Quarren says. “Right.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Sister Verity demands. Quarren can’t actually tell if she’s serious or not. Sister Verity came to sisterhood, womanhood and the practice of medicine reasonably early in life, but her years of bellowing at orbital work crews have never quite left her.
“I’m going to leave it with you,” Quarren says. “I like delegating, when I have the opportunity.”
“Quarren,” Sister Verity starts, but Quarren leaves her to it and goes down to her office. What with John’s arrival and Eden’s departure and the general explosion of everything, she hasn’t had a great deal of time for the nitty gritty of her job. Her enormous list of things to be done, reviewed, noted, ignored and signed off on is only getting more enormous. Quarren sits at her desk, pours some tea and tries to get through it. A traitorous part of her brain wonders if she can skive off in the evening and figure out what to do next in her search for Rob. Traitorous, because Quarren takes her job seriously; she’s well aware she’s responsible for the welfare for over a thousand people who, on Earth or Luna, would have an elected representative. But she isn’t sure if Eden will find anything on Earth, and rather thinks not. She just wants to cover all bases, to look in every nook or cranny, in a way that an old, loving friend and commanding officer would do. She’s aware of the irony, that she should take that commanding officer role so seriously when she’s otherwise tried to reject every aspect of her military past. It is what it is. Quarren has put the photograph of herself, Rob and the other two up on her desk, and wipes a speck of dust off it before she goes back to work.
By early evening, she’s made a dent in it. Quarren is about to shut up shop for the day when she receives one more message. It’s computer-generated, a reminder of a duty shift starting in the next fifteen minutes.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” Quarren says to the ceiling, and heads upstairs in search of Sister Verity. She finds her bustling around in the Freesia Room, putting chairs into rows for a waiting area and checking all the cubicles are clean and equipped.
“There you are, excellent,” Sister Verity says. “Do that handkerchief properly, it’s falling out.”
Automatically, Quarren pulls the orange silk out of her hair and secures it back in place. “I’m a combat medic, Sister! If you want sawn-off legs and nasty depressurisation accidents, I’m your girl, or I would’ve been half a decade ago. I can’t do community medicine!”
“You’re a doctor and you’re qualified to practise in Luna-controlled space,” Sister Verity says briskly. “Wash your hands, pin up your hair and find your medkit.”
“Sister--”
“Now, Quarren. The clinic starts in five minutes.”
Quarren gives up. She washes her hands properly, puts a stethoscope around her neck and kills a little time by putting a box of kids’ toys into the Freesia Room. Luna Central provides healthcare to all citizens, even in far-flung installations, and this is one of the ways it does it: evening clinics aboard several ships and stations, where people can come in from far afield and be looked at. Quarren approves of it and has always insisted that there be one such clinic aboard the Night Service. She’s starting to regret that excess of public-spiritedness.
People start coming in shortly after that. The other two doctors on-shift are Sister Verity and Teddy Whistall. They each take a paediatric case, while a young woman presents herself to Quarren’s curtained-off consulting space. Quarren consults the information on her tablet, takes a deep breath and says, “How can I help you, Ms Tempest?”
“Just Tempest,” the girl says. She’s wearing jeans and a hoodie, and fingerless gloves. Quarren guesses from her accent that she’s pretty far-flung. “Don’t love having Lulu as my first name, you know? I’m from Triton Astronautics.”
Very far-flung indeed. A satellite-mounted installation in the orbit of Neptune, built entirely for the manufacture of faster-than-light ships. There aren’t so many of those, now there is no more colonisation of planets outside the solar system, but there are still plenty of them being built for long-haul travel. People from so far out in the System tend to be hardy, good-humoured, and Quarren is getting the impression that that holds true here.
“It’s just this,” Tempest says. She’s perched on the edge of the consulting table, hands clasped. “I’m a super-good pilot and I was going to get my System certification? I mean… it’s things like that, that I was gonna do, and wouldn’t be able to do. It’s not that he’s not nice. Like… he washes? And he has a job.”
“I see,” says Quarren, who doesn’t.
“But is that good enough for, you know, forever?” Tempest clasps her hands in pontification. “Like… ever. Forever. That he washes. Him. Me. Us.”
“I, ah, I don’t know,” Quarren says. “Ms Tempest…”
“Just Tempest,” she says earnestly. “I don’t even want it. That’s the thing.”
Quarren stares at her another second before the bell inside her head rings. “You want a termination of pregnancy.”
“Yeah!” the girl says. “That’s it, that’s what you’d call it. Because. You know. Forever.”
“Not forever,” Quarren says, pulling forms off her tablet. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Are you Theta Pyx?”
“No.”
“Fill these out. I’ll be right back.” Quarren hands over the forms, slips through the gap in the curtain and pulls Sister Verity by the arm away from the waiting area. “Sister, I am a combat medic. A combat medic! The one thing I did not do was procreation!”
“Quarren,” Sister Verity says, gently untangling herself from the hold. “In the nicest possible way, get back in there and do your fucking job.”
Quarren shakes her head, but no one will go back to her patient if she doesn’t, so she turns around and heads back behind the curtain. Tempest looks up.
“All done,” she says with an artificial brightness. “You’re all so nice here.”
“We are?” Quarren says, not sure if she’s been anything other than baffled and panicked.
“Nicer than my mom, anyway,” Tempest says. “She’s all, are you sure you want to get rid of it, Lulu, you got him shitfaced once but who’s to say you’ll get a chance again?”
Quarren puts her hands in her mouth so she doesn’t swear like a combat medic. She finds Tempest a timeslot for further treatment and sends her off to have some tea and watch something soothing for the next hour. Her next patient is delayed by a minor kerfuffle in the waiting area. One of the people waiting, an older Theta Pyx woman in a headscarf, is killing time by doing tarot card readings on one of the empty chairs. A well-dressed couple from Luna Central object to it for some reason Quarren can’t identify. “Don’t take scrip for it, ma’am,” she says to the tarot card reader, who smiles up at her and lays out the cards for a curious seven-year-old. The first card is the World, a beautiful rendering of the planet from space, with Earth Orbital shown as a point above. Quarren shakes herself before she can get interested, and goes back to her patient.
They have a respiratory illness, but it doesn’t turn out to be the focus of her attention. The patient’s record shows their age as mid-fifties, but she would have guessed they were older; she suspects they lived in the Luna habitats at a time when the skin-damaging radiation wasn’t so effectively filtered. But the key indicator of their age is around their wrists and forearms: centimetre-thick dark brands, two on each side, that from a distance look like bracelets or tattoos. Quarren qualified too late to see injuries like this when they were newly inflicted, but has seen them later in their owners’ lives, infected and painful even years afterwards.
“When you were very young?” she asks gently, taking hold of both the patient’s hands.
“Yes,” they say. “I treated a girl badly. I’m sure I deserved it.”
Quarren isn’t sure about that. In earlier days of space settlement, the Luna authorities were conscious that their people and habitations were vulnerable to bad actors, that a shot through glass could wipe out a community, and also that they couldn’t imprison anyone, not when there was no space and everyone’s labour was needed. For some crimes, this was their answer: wrist brands, done by electricity not fire. Pain, and a permanent mark. Physical punishment isn’t used anywhere in Luna space any more, but there are always people who talk about slipping standards and the kids these days, and want to bring it back. Retributive justice, Quarren thinks. Sometimes she thinks that’s what she herself escaped.
“Take care of them,” she says, to her patient, checking each brand quickly for any sign of infection. “They’re a risk, your entire life. They were designed that way.”
“Yes, Doctor,” the patient says, looking up at her. “Thanks.”
Quarren nods, and calls the next person in. They have a broken ankle, which is simple to deal with; so is the diabetes check-up that comes after that, and the embarrassed man who stood up too fast beneath his own kitchen cupboards and gave himself a concussion. She doesn’t want to admit it to Sister Verity, but she trained and qualified on Luna, and she’s a ship’s physician’s daughter. She knows all she needs to about community medicine.
She’s dealing with a child with an ear infection when someone beyond the cubicle shouts, “Where is she?”
Quarren steps out of the curtain. The new arrival through the main doors is a middle-aged woman dressed very properly in shirt and trousers, as though for an occasion. She has her hands shoved in her pockets and an expression like Jovian thunder. “I said, where is she!” she shouts again. “Lulu! Get out here!”
Sister Verity is already rushing forward. Quarren ducks back inside, quickly finishes with the ear infection, and steps back through the curtain. Whatever soothing thing Sister Verity is trying to say to the angry woman, it isn’t working. Out of the corner of Quarren’s eye, Tempest steps out of the unoccupied side room where she was killing time before her slot. Her mother—this must be her mother—charges towards her and almost knocks the Theta Pyx woman’s deck of cards to the floor.
“Lulu!” she shouts. “You thought you could just sneak off, you little—”
“Mrs Tempest,” Sister Verity says loudly, over whatever word that was going to be. “If you would just step this way—”
“I’m not stepping anywhere, while that girl throws away the only chance she’ll ever get! And you, all of you, aiding and abetting! Lulu, get over here!”
Over the space of the room, Tempest meets Quarren’s eyes and smiles wryly. That’s what does it: that it’s not a pleading look, but merely one of amused despair, as though this was all she was really expecting. From under a wave of exhausted misery, Quarren says, “Mrs Tempest, either calm yourself, or leave.”
“Excuse me?” Mrs Tempest yells, approaching a stratospheric rage. Mercifully, she’s stomping back over to Quarren’s side of the room, so the entire waiting area doesn’t have to listen to this. The flowers on the wall sway gently in the wake of her passage.
“Who the hell are you?” she yells at Quarren, and Tempest backs off and hides behind her.
“I’m a ship’s doctor for the Night Service,” Quarren says, as calmly as she can. “Your daughter is a Luna citizen in her right mind, and her health is her concern and mine. If you’re not here for some other reason, please leave.”
“Your concern!” Mrs Tempest yells, so the flowers flutter again. “Who cares about your concern!”
She’s stomping forwards; she’s going to haul her daughter away with her by force if no one stops her. Quarren wishes she could be someone who didn’t have to do this.
“Mrs Tempest,” she says. “Stay right where you are and shut the hell up. I’m also chief administrator for the Night Service. That means I run this place, except the operational parts, and my partner wouldn’t like it if I didn’t specify not the operational parts, but all the rest of it. I’m in charge here.”
Mrs Tempest is staring at her in clear disbelief, and Quarren wants to curl up with embarrassment. The Night Service has no uniform requirements and Luna insignia are worn on easily-hidden necklaces. Quarren is not the only one here who finds it hard to serve the same Luna Command that went to war. The problem is, to Mrs Tempest - really, to everyone – Quarren looks like nothing but a tired, shorter-than-average woman in a grey sweater dress.
“And I can determine that someone ought to be removed from the ship, for the sake of public safety,” Quarren continues, wishing she could take a pillowcase from one of the consulting beds and suffocate herself with it. “I think I’m about to do that, unless you prefer to pre-empt me and depart in the usual way.”
Mrs Tempest says, “You’re not really going to…”
“Yes, I am,” Quarren says. “The good Sister and I have a clinic to run. Don’t try me any further.”
She sits down, too unhappy to think. Tempest looks shellshocked. Sister Verity seems to be trying not to laugh, but she holds onto it and calmly takes Tempest away to another room. Her mother looks ready to start shouting again, but Quarren really has had enough. She gets someone from ship’s security to escort her away, and makes sure Lily, Eden’s first mate, is informed for the ship’s day log. It all seems to be quite a messy process. Sister Verity goes to have a quiet word with Tempest and comes back to Quarren, who is still sitting on the edge of her own consulting table and chewing her hair.
“That girl is your new biggest fan,” Sister Verity says. “You could do her procedure.”
“I could, and will not,” Quarren says. “Please can you find me a bad sprain or an easily removable carcinoma.”
Sister Verity finds her a broken leg. Its owner is a member of the ship’s pilot corps, who lost his equilibrium playing weightless squash and hit the wall rather harder than intended. “Hey, Administrator Quarren,” he says. “I met this girl at the Moondust Parade, and she’s going back to Earth soon—did I say, she’s from Earth? She’s from Earth—it was a special visit for the parade—and she’s got to go back, she’s from one of their, what are they, polities? Anyway, she’s super nice.”
“I’m sure she is,” Quarren says, amused, using a handheld scanner to check the health of the knitting bone beneath the sealed cast. “You absolutely cannot go to Luna to see her with an immobilised leg.”
“But she’s going back really soon,” he says, pleading. “And there’s a form you’ve got to fill out, if you want visitors here, and it takes ages to get it processed, and did I mention, she’s going back to Earth soon.”
“She must be very pretty,” Quarren remarks to the freesias. “If you promise me you will not even think of going down to Luna—do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Then I’ll sign the form. Go see Sister Verity for your meds, fill it out and come back here.”
His face lights up. “Thank you so much, Administrator Quarren,” he breathes, making Quarren wonder if this is a story that will someday be told at a wedding. He swings himself into his wheelchair and zooms to Sister Verity like a bullet out a gun.
That’s the last of them. Quarren tidies up, puts her medkit back together and goes back through the waiting area. She signs the boy’s form and watches him wheel ecstatically out. On her way to wash up, someone catches her by the arm from one of the plastic chairs. Quarren looks down at the Theta Pyx tarot card reader.
“A glass of water, love?” she says hoarsely, and Quarren goes to fetch one. She brings it back and sits down beside the tarot reader.
“Waiting for test results?” she asks.
The Theta Pyx woman nods. “It’ll be a while, they said. You want your cards read?”
“All right,” Quarren says. Her shift is over now, but she can keep a patient company for a while. She sits down on the next chair and holds out her palms. There’s a specifically Theta Pyx way of doing this, starting with cards laid down directly on the questioner’s hands. Gabriel taught Quarren that, back on those late nights and long nights when they were first getting to know each other.
“Three cards or four?” asks the reader.
“Four,” Quarren says.
The reader nods. It’s quiet in here now, now all the clinic patients have gone, leaving nothing but the ship’s hum and the scent of the freesias. The cards are laid on Quarren’s hands, one by one. The Lovers. Two women intertwined, one of them Theta Pyx. The Moon, with a pencil cross for Luna Central. The Ten of Wands, pinning down the bearer like spikes.
The fourth card is Quarren’s own mind. She gave permission and the reader takes it, looking not at Quarren’s thoughts but at her stasis points, the parts of her mind that make up the walls and roof.
Finally, the reader draws back and pulls the cards into a stack. The other difference about the Theta Pyx way of doing things: the reader sets the terms.
“You’re looking for someone,” she says, after a moment. “A lost woman, like yourself.”
Quarren nods. “Can you tell me where she is?”
“No.” The reader shakes her head. “I can’t tell you anything you couldn’t tell yourself. You know that.”
“Yes, I do.” Quarren does, and she knows what she should have said next. “What do you
want to tell me?”
“You think she’s hiding,” the reader says thoughtfully. “But she’s like you. Where are you hiding?”
Quarren thinks there will be more, but that’s it. The reader smiles, puts the cards back in the deck, shuffles and puts it away. “Go well, friend.”
Teddy is calling the reader’s name. She gets to her feet with the slowness of age and goes to the open consulting room door, leaving Quarren where she is, deep in thought. After a minute, Sister Verity comes to join her, stretching out creaking muscles. “Another day done, save for the paperwork,” she says. “The next shift I have you on is the day after tomorrow, I expect to see you on time.”
“Sister,” Quarren says, but doesn’t have the energy to argue.
“Admit it, Quarren, you enjoyed yourself today,” Sister Verity says, grinning.
“I didn’t, and you are technically my subordinate,” Quarren says, and gives up. “Fine. I’ll be there.”
“Good. Keeps you busy.”
“Sister Verity,” Quarren says, looking up. “Why are you so keen to keep me busy?”
The amusement drains off Sister Verity’s face. “Things seem to weigh on you heavily these days,” she says carefully. “And you worry us all a little.”
Quarren shakes her head. “I’m not sure I deserve such worry.”
“Of course you do,” Sister Verity says, low and gentle. She knows what Quarren is thinking. “You are better than the worst thing you ever did.”
“So people say,” Quarren says, her eyes closed. “The worst thing I ever did is worse than people think it was. They think they know, but they don’t.”
She opens her eyes and sits up in alarm. She didn’t mean to say that; she doesn’t know what made her say it. If Sister Verity asks more questions, she won’t know what to do.
But Sister Verity is just looking at her with the loving compassion the Sacred Infinite allow all souls, even Quarren’s. “You do the same, sweetheart,” she says. “Try and keep yourself busy.”
“Yes,” Quarren says, rattled. “I will.”
“Good,” Sister Verity says. “And may you be always something in the way.”
Quarren bows her head for that blessing, and leaves as quickly as she can.
(The one thing I am proudest of, with Quarren, is that I killed several men for her character development. And, also, that she and a bunch of nuns run an NHS district general hospital in space, because why the hell not.)
If you have read the previous section, though, this one does follow straight on.
Quarren tries to contact Eden on Earth first thing in the morning, but can’t get anything through; there’s been some kind of orbital blackout and no one knows what’s going on with comms. She tries not to take out her annoyance on anyone else, and and her day devolves into shouting anyway. It’s Luna Central, to start with, who have decided to limit the Night Service supply of bedpans, bananas, radio components and pathologists; then it’s a group of tourists’ children, almost shredding themselves on the lift machinery, and then it’s the fire suppression system suppressing things that aren’t fires. And then Quarren goes up to the hospital decks to see Sister Verity and is intercepted by Julia, who shouts, “How could you do this to me?” and bursts into tears.
Everyone going past turns to look, including Sister Verity. Quarren stands there by the intake desk next to the morning bloom of sunflowers and waits for whatever the hell is going to happen to her next. Julia cries into her hands for a minute, then tries again.
“You trashed my evaluation,” she says. “I was supposed to finish up here in a month and go back to Earth. And suddenly they’re telling me that”—a hiccup—“that I failed to live up to expectations! And I know, I know you’ve told me that you, you thought I’d done okay, more than okay even, and you—”
Quarren digs her fingernails in her palms. “You told me you wanted to go home,” she says.
Julia just stares at her. “To the Aster? Yeah, but…”
“I can’t send you there,” Quarren says, more gently. “There are no transfers in and out of medical staff right now, Luna Central have put a stop to it. I can send you home in disgrace. And when you want to come back, we’ll make that evaluation disappear. Someone always owes me a favour.”
“Oh,” Julia says. She’s not crying any more. “You did that for me?”
“Yes,” Quarren says, waiting for Julia to say, then why didn’t you tell me. A reasonable question that Quarren can’t answer. She can’t talk to anyone about anything these days. But Julia just stares at her in shock again and wanders off, muttering the words home and Aster. She’ll need to stay on board the Night Service until her secondment is over and the ship has had sufficient repairs done, but it will be something for her to look forward to. Quarren uncurls her fingernails from her palms and drops in on Sister Verity.
“You don’t get a biscuit, Chief Administrator Quarren,” she says, as Quarren comes in. “You just dropped me in the shit.”
“I did?” Quarren says, after her hand has been slapped away from the malted milk bowl.
“No transfers,” Sister Verity says. She’s wearing the full religious Sister garb today, with scrubs under the orange-red cape and hood. It makes her look like an angry green-orange fruitbat. Quarren, whose mother was one of the Sisters, finds it comforting. “No transfers in and out. You, however, have got rid of one of our qualified doctors another way, which means, after we lost one of our pathologists to an Earth island where there are no dead people—”
“Eden says there are dead people.”
“—you have in fact brought us below the legally-mandated minimum for a hospital of our size and community status.”
“Oh,” Quarren says. “Right.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Sister Verity demands. Quarren can’t actually tell if she’s serious or not. Sister Verity came to sisterhood, womanhood and the practice of medicine reasonably early in life, but her years of bellowing at orbital work crews have never quite left her.
“I’m going to leave it with you,” Quarren says. “I like delegating, when I have the opportunity.”
“Quarren,” Sister Verity starts, but Quarren leaves her to it and goes down to her office. What with John’s arrival and Eden’s departure and the general explosion of everything, she hasn’t had a great deal of time for the nitty gritty of her job. Her enormous list of things to be done, reviewed, noted, ignored and signed off on is only getting more enormous. Quarren sits at her desk, pours some tea and tries to get through it. A traitorous part of her brain wonders if she can skive off in the evening and figure out what to do next in her search for Rob. Traitorous, because Quarren takes her job seriously; she’s well aware she’s responsible for the welfare for over a thousand people who, on Earth or Luna, would have an elected representative. But she isn’t sure if Eden will find anything on Earth, and rather thinks not. She just wants to cover all bases, to look in every nook or cranny, in a way that an old, loving friend and commanding officer would do. She’s aware of the irony, that she should take that commanding officer role so seriously when she’s otherwise tried to reject every aspect of her military past. It is what it is. Quarren has put the photograph of herself, Rob and the other two up on her desk, and wipes a speck of dust off it before she goes back to work.
By early evening, she’s made a dent in it. Quarren is about to shut up shop for the day when she receives one more message. It’s computer-generated, a reminder of a duty shift starting in the next fifteen minutes.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” Quarren says to the ceiling, and heads upstairs in search of Sister Verity. She finds her bustling around in the Freesia Room, putting chairs into rows for a waiting area and checking all the cubicles are clean and equipped.
“There you are, excellent,” Sister Verity says. “Do that handkerchief properly, it’s falling out.”
Automatically, Quarren pulls the orange silk out of her hair and secures it back in place. “I’m a combat medic, Sister! If you want sawn-off legs and nasty depressurisation accidents, I’m your girl, or I would’ve been half a decade ago. I can’t do community medicine!”
“You’re a doctor and you’re qualified to practise in Luna-controlled space,” Sister Verity says briskly. “Wash your hands, pin up your hair and find your medkit.”
“Sister--”
“Now, Quarren. The clinic starts in five minutes.”
Quarren gives up. She washes her hands properly, puts a stethoscope around her neck and kills a little time by putting a box of kids’ toys into the Freesia Room. Luna Central provides healthcare to all citizens, even in far-flung installations, and this is one of the ways it does it: evening clinics aboard several ships and stations, where people can come in from far afield and be looked at. Quarren approves of it and has always insisted that there be one such clinic aboard the Night Service. She’s starting to regret that excess of public-spiritedness.
People start coming in shortly after that. The other two doctors on-shift are Sister Verity and Teddy Whistall. They each take a paediatric case, while a young woman presents herself to Quarren’s curtained-off consulting space. Quarren consults the information on her tablet, takes a deep breath and says, “How can I help you, Ms Tempest?”
“Just Tempest,” the girl says. She’s wearing jeans and a hoodie, and fingerless gloves. Quarren guesses from her accent that she’s pretty far-flung. “Don’t love having Lulu as my first name, you know? I’m from Triton Astronautics.”
Very far-flung indeed. A satellite-mounted installation in the orbit of Neptune, built entirely for the manufacture of faster-than-light ships. There aren’t so many of those, now there is no more colonisation of planets outside the solar system, but there are still plenty of them being built for long-haul travel. People from so far out in the System tend to be hardy, good-humoured, and Quarren is getting the impression that that holds true here.
“It’s just this,” Tempest says. She’s perched on the edge of the consulting table, hands clasped. “I’m a super-good pilot and I was going to get my System certification? I mean… it’s things like that, that I was gonna do, and wouldn’t be able to do. It’s not that he’s not nice. Like… he washes? And he has a job.”
“I see,” says Quarren, who doesn’t.
“But is that good enough for, you know, forever?” Tempest clasps her hands in pontification. “Like… ever. Forever. That he washes. Him. Me. Us.”
“I, ah, I don’t know,” Quarren says. “Ms Tempest…”
“Just Tempest,” she says earnestly. “I don’t even want it. That’s the thing.”
Quarren stares at her another second before the bell inside her head rings. “You want a termination of pregnancy.”
“Yeah!” the girl says. “That’s it, that’s what you’d call it. Because. You know. Forever.”
“Not forever,” Quarren says, pulling forms off her tablet. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Are you Theta Pyx?”
“No.”
“Fill these out. I’ll be right back.” Quarren hands over the forms, slips through the gap in the curtain and pulls Sister Verity by the arm away from the waiting area. “Sister, I am a combat medic. A combat medic! The one thing I did not do was procreation!”
“Quarren,” Sister Verity says, gently untangling herself from the hold. “In the nicest possible way, get back in there and do your fucking job.”
Quarren shakes her head, but no one will go back to her patient if she doesn’t, so she turns around and heads back behind the curtain. Tempest looks up.
“All done,” she says with an artificial brightness. “You’re all so nice here.”
“We are?” Quarren says, not sure if she’s been anything other than baffled and panicked.
“Nicer than my mom, anyway,” Tempest says. “She’s all, are you sure you want to get rid of it, Lulu, you got him shitfaced once but who’s to say you’ll get a chance again?”
Quarren puts her hands in her mouth so she doesn’t swear like a combat medic. She finds Tempest a timeslot for further treatment and sends her off to have some tea and watch something soothing for the next hour. Her next patient is delayed by a minor kerfuffle in the waiting area. One of the people waiting, an older Theta Pyx woman in a headscarf, is killing time by doing tarot card readings on one of the empty chairs. A well-dressed couple from Luna Central object to it for some reason Quarren can’t identify. “Don’t take scrip for it, ma’am,” she says to the tarot card reader, who smiles up at her and lays out the cards for a curious seven-year-old. The first card is the World, a beautiful rendering of the planet from space, with Earth Orbital shown as a point above. Quarren shakes herself before she can get interested, and goes back to her patient.
They have a respiratory illness, but it doesn’t turn out to be the focus of her attention. The patient’s record shows their age as mid-fifties, but she would have guessed they were older; she suspects they lived in the Luna habitats at a time when the skin-damaging radiation wasn’t so effectively filtered. But the key indicator of their age is around their wrists and forearms: centimetre-thick dark brands, two on each side, that from a distance look like bracelets or tattoos. Quarren qualified too late to see injuries like this when they were newly inflicted, but has seen them later in their owners’ lives, infected and painful even years afterwards.
“When you were very young?” she asks gently, taking hold of both the patient’s hands.
“Yes,” they say. “I treated a girl badly. I’m sure I deserved it.”
Quarren isn’t sure about that. In earlier days of space settlement, the Luna authorities were conscious that their people and habitations were vulnerable to bad actors, that a shot through glass could wipe out a community, and also that they couldn’t imprison anyone, not when there was no space and everyone’s labour was needed. For some crimes, this was their answer: wrist brands, done by electricity not fire. Pain, and a permanent mark. Physical punishment isn’t used anywhere in Luna space any more, but there are always people who talk about slipping standards and the kids these days, and want to bring it back. Retributive justice, Quarren thinks. Sometimes she thinks that’s what she herself escaped.
“Take care of them,” she says, to her patient, checking each brand quickly for any sign of infection. “They’re a risk, your entire life. They were designed that way.”
“Yes, Doctor,” the patient says, looking up at her. “Thanks.”
Quarren nods, and calls the next person in. They have a broken ankle, which is simple to deal with; so is the diabetes check-up that comes after that, and the embarrassed man who stood up too fast beneath his own kitchen cupboards and gave himself a concussion. She doesn’t want to admit it to Sister Verity, but she trained and qualified on Luna, and she’s a ship’s physician’s daughter. She knows all she needs to about community medicine.
She’s dealing with a child with an ear infection when someone beyond the cubicle shouts, “Where is she?”
Quarren steps out of the curtain. The new arrival through the main doors is a middle-aged woman dressed very properly in shirt and trousers, as though for an occasion. She has her hands shoved in her pockets and an expression like Jovian thunder. “I said, where is she!” she shouts again. “Lulu! Get out here!”
Sister Verity is already rushing forward. Quarren ducks back inside, quickly finishes with the ear infection, and steps back through the curtain. Whatever soothing thing Sister Verity is trying to say to the angry woman, it isn’t working. Out of the corner of Quarren’s eye, Tempest steps out of the unoccupied side room where she was killing time before her slot. Her mother—this must be her mother—charges towards her and almost knocks the Theta Pyx woman’s deck of cards to the floor.
“Lulu!” she shouts. “You thought you could just sneak off, you little—”
“Mrs Tempest,” Sister Verity says loudly, over whatever word that was going to be. “If you would just step this way—”
“I’m not stepping anywhere, while that girl throws away the only chance she’ll ever get! And you, all of you, aiding and abetting! Lulu, get over here!”
Over the space of the room, Tempest meets Quarren’s eyes and smiles wryly. That’s what does it: that it’s not a pleading look, but merely one of amused despair, as though this was all she was really expecting. From under a wave of exhausted misery, Quarren says, “Mrs Tempest, either calm yourself, or leave.”
“Excuse me?” Mrs Tempest yells, approaching a stratospheric rage. Mercifully, she’s stomping back over to Quarren’s side of the room, so the entire waiting area doesn’t have to listen to this. The flowers on the wall sway gently in the wake of her passage.
“Who the hell are you?” she yells at Quarren, and Tempest backs off and hides behind her.
“I’m a ship’s doctor for the Night Service,” Quarren says, as calmly as she can. “Your daughter is a Luna citizen in her right mind, and her health is her concern and mine. If you’re not here for some other reason, please leave.”
“Your concern!” Mrs Tempest yells, so the flowers flutter again. “Who cares about your concern!”
She’s stomping forwards; she’s going to haul her daughter away with her by force if no one stops her. Quarren wishes she could be someone who didn’t have to do this.
“Mrs Tempest,” she says. “Stay right where you are and shut the hell up. I’m also chief administrator for the Night Service. That means I run this place, except the operational parts, and my partner wouldn’t like it if I didn’t specify not the operational parts, but all the rest of it. I’m in charge here.”
Mrs Tempest is staring at her in clear disbelief, and Quarren wants to curl up with embarrassment. The Night Service has no uniform requirements and Luna insignia are worn on easily-hidden necklaces. Quarren is not the only one here who finds it hard to serve the same Luna Command that went to war. The problem is, to Mrs Tempest - really, to everyone – Quarren looks like nothing but a tired, shorter-than-average woman in a grey sweater dress.
“And I can determine that someone ought to be removed from the ship, for the sake of public safety,” Quarren continues, wishing she could take a pillowcase from one of the consulting beds and suffocate herself with it. “I think I’m about to do that, unless you prefer to pre-empt me and depart in the usual way.”
Mrs Tempest says, “You’re not really going to…”
“Yes, I am,” Quarren says. “The good Sister and I have a clinic to run. Don’t try me any further.”
She sits down, too unhappy to think. Tempest looks shellshocked. Sister Verity seems to be trying not to laugh, but she holds onto it and calmly takes Tempest away to another room. Her mother looks ready to start shouting again, but Quarren really has had enough. She gets someone from ship’s security to escort her away, and makes sure Lily, Eden’s first mate, is informed for the ship’s day log. It all seems to be quite a messy process. Sister Verity goes to have a quiet word with Tempest and comes back to Quarren, who is still sitting on the edge of her own consulting table and chewing her hair.
“That girl is your new biggest fan,” Sister Verity says. “You could do her procedure.”
“I could, and will not,” Quarren says. “Please can you find me a bad sprain or an easily removable carcinoma.”
Sister Verity finds her a broken leg. Its owner is a member of the ship’s pilot corps, who lost his equilibrium playing weightless squash and hit the wall rather harder than intended. “Hey, Administrator Quarren,” he says. “I met this girl at the Moondust Parade, and she’s going back to Earth soon—did I say, she’s from Earth? She’s from Earth—it was a special visit for the parade—and she’s got to go back, she’s from one of their, what are they, polities? Anyway, she’s super nice.”
“I’m sure she is,” Quarren says, amused, using a handheld scanner to check the health of the knitting bone beneath the sealed cast. “You absolutely cannot go to Luna to see her with an immobilised leg.”
“But she’s going back really soon,” he says, pleading. “And there’s a form you’ve got to fill out, if you want visitors here, and it takes ages to get it processed, and did I mention, she’s going back to Earth soon.”
“She must be very pretty,” Quarren remarks to the freesias. “If you promise me you will not even think of going down to Luna—do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Then I’ll sign the form. Go see Sister Verity for your meds, fill it out and come back here.”
His face lights up. “Thank you so much, Administrator Quarren,” he breathes, making Quarren wonder if this is a story that will someday be told at a wedding. He swings himself into his wheelchair and zooms to Sister Verity like a bullet out a gun.
That’s the last of them. Quarren tidies up, puts her medkit back together and goes back through the waiting area. She signs the boy’s form and watches him wheel ecstatically out. On her way to wash up, someone catches her by the arm from one of the plastic chairs. Quarren looks down at the Theta Pyx tarot card reader.
“A glass of water, love?” she says hoarsely, and Quarren goes to fetch one. She brings it back and sits down beside the tarot reader.
“Waiting for test results?” she asks.
The Theta Pyx woman nods. “It’ll be a while, they said. You want your cards read?”
“All right,” Quarren says. Her shift is over now, but she can keep a patient company for a while. She sits down on the next chair and holds out her palms. There’s a specifically Theta Pyx way of doing this, starting with cards laid down directly on the questioner’s hands. Gabriel taught Quarren that, back on those late nights and long nights when they were first getting to know each other.
“Three cards or four?” asks the reader.
“Four,” Quarren says.
The reader nods. It’s quiet in here now, now all the clinic patients have gone, leaving nothing but the ship’s hum and the scent of the freesias. The cards are laid on Quarren’s hands, one by one. The Lovers. Two women intertwined, one of them Theta Pyx. The Moon, with a pencil cross for Luna Central. The Ten of Wands, pinning down the bearer like spikes.
The fourth card is Quarren’s own mind. She gave permission and the reader takes it, looking not at Quarren’s thoughts but at her stasis points, the parts of her mind that make up the walls and roof.
Finally, the reader draws back and pulls the cards into a stack. The other difference about the Theta Pyx way of doing things: the reader sets the terms.
“You’re looking for someone,” she says, after a moment. “A lost woman, like yourself.”
Quarren nods. “Can you tell me where she is?”
“No.” The reader shakes her head. “I can’t tell you anything you couldn’t tell yourself. You know that.”
“Yes, I do.” Quarren does, and she knows what she should have said next. “What do you
want to tell me?”
“You think she’s hiding,” the reader says thoughtfully. “But she’s like you. Where are you hiding?”
Quarren thinks there will be more, but that’s it. The reader smiles, puts the cards back in the deck, shuffles and puts it away. “Go well, friend.”
Teddy is calling the reader’s name. She gets to her feet with the slowness of age and goes to the open consulting room door, leaving Quarren where she is, deep in thought. After a minute, Sister Verity comes to join her, stretching out creaking muscles. “Another day done, save for the paperwork,” she says. “The next shift I have you on is the day after tomorrow, I expect to see you on time.”
“Sister,” Quarren says, but doesn’t have the energy to argue.
“Admit it, Quarren, you enjoyed yourself today,” Sister Verity says, grinning.
“I didn’t, and you are technically my subordinate,” Quarren says, and gives up. “Fine. I’ll be there.”
“Good. Keeps you busy.”
“Sister Verity,” Quarren says, looking up. “Why are you so keen to keep me busy?”
The amusement drains off Sister Verity’s face. “Things seem to weigh on you heavily these days,” she says carefully. “And you worry us all a little.”
Quarren shakes her head. “I’m not sure I deserve such worry.”
“Of course you do,” Sister Verity says, low and gentle. She knows what Quarren is thinking. “You are better than the worst thing you ever did.”
“So people say,” Quarren says, her eyes closed. “The worst thing I ever did is worse than people think it was. They think they know, but they don’t.”
She opens her eyes and sits up in alarm. She didn’t mean to say that; she doesn’t know what made her say it. If Sister Verity asks more questions, she won’t know what to do.
But Sister Verity is just looking at her with the loving compassion the Sacred Infinite allow all souls, even Quarren’s. “You do the same, sweetheart,” she says. “Try and keep yourself busy.”
“Yes,” Quarren says, rattled. “I will.”
“Good,” Sister Verity says. “And may you be always something in the way.”
Quarren bows her head for that blessing, and leaves as quickly as she can.
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on 2024-03-12 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-14 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-12 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-14 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-12 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-14 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-13 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-14 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-13 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-14 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-14 04:32 am (UTC)I copied out a few bits that made me smile especially:
“I’m going to leave it with you,” Quarren says. “I like delegating, when I have the opportunity.” --I think I laughed out loud. And I loved that in short order it was followed by sister Verity turning it back into Quarren's problem, or at least her assignment, and then this:
“Quarren,” Sister Verity says, gently untangling herself from the hold. “In the nicest possible way, get back in there and do your fucking job.” --I can just see what the gently untangling would look like.
Quarren continues, wishing she could take a pillowcase from one of the consulting beds and suffocate herself with it. --The image is just too funny, and the desperation so real.
And the various patients reveal so much about the world you've created. I liked the tarot reader's remark, too: where are you hiding.
Super good!
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on 2024-03-14 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-15 11:50 pm (UTC)This is such a you way of putting it that I could pick it out of a line-up. 😊💜
Congrats on handing off a MS and I am ready to give all the money for this new one. *is poised*
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on 2024-03-17 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 2024-03-17 06:41 am (UTC)