Future Lovecraft by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Anthony Boulanger, Paula R. Stiles

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.
    Harmony I: Day 625
    Ni Nyoman Suardana can fix anything. Except, apparently, a shattered thumbtop. She put on her gloves, took the pieces, one