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

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.
    Harmony I: Day 644
    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