Jennifer is often considered a Renaissance woman, but she
prefers to be known as a wordslinger and optimist. Read more
about her at www.jenniferbrozek.com or follow her on Twitter:
@JenniferBrozek.
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In our next tale, part of her bestselling, long running Vorkosigan
series, Lois McMaster Bujold writes of young officers sent on
grizzly duty—retrieval and identification of corpses across the
stars. And one officer is disturbed by a young woman’s passion
for her duties—is it the nature of her job or has she lost her
mind?
A F T E R M A T H S
( V o r k o s i g a n S a g a )
By Lois McMaster Bujold
The shattered ship hung in space, a black bulk in the darkness. It
still turned, imperceptibly slowly; one edge eclipsed and
swallowed the bright point of a star. The lights of the salvage
crew arced over the skeleton. Ants, ripping up a dead moth,
Ferrell thought. Scavengers …
He sighed dismay into his forward observation screen,
picturing the ship as it had been, scant weeks before. The
wreckage untwisted in his mind—a cruiser, alive with patterns
of gaudy lights that always made him think of a party seen across
night waters. Responsive as a mirror to the mind under its pilot’s
headset, where man and machine penetrated the interface and
became one. Swift, gleaming, functional … no more. He glanced
to his right, and cleared his throat self-consciously.
Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
“Well, Medtech,” he spoke to the woman who stood beside
his station, staring into the screen as silently and long as he had.
“There’s our starting point. Might as well go ahead and begin the
pattern sweep now, I suppose.
“Yes, please do, Pilot Officer.” She had a gravelly alto voice,
suitable for her age, which Ferrell judged to be about forty-five.
The collection of thin silver five-year service chevrons on her
left sleeve made an impressive glitter against the dark red
uniform of the Escobaran military medical service. Dark hair
shot with gray, cut short for ease of maintenance, not style; a
matronly heaviness to her hips. A veteran, it appeared. Ferrell’s
sleeve had yet to sprout even his first-year stripe, and his hips,
and the rest of his body, still maintained an unfilled adolescent
stringiness.
But she was only a tech, he reminded himself, not even a
physician. He was a full-fledged pilot officer. His neurological
implants and biofeedback training were all complete. He was
certified, licensed, and graduated—just three frustrating days too
late to participate in what was now being dubbed the 120-Day
War. Although in fact it had only been 118 days and part of an
hour between the time the spearhead of the Barrayaran invasion
fleet penetrated Escobaran local space, and the time the last
survivors fled the counterattack, piling through the wormhole
exit for home as though scuttling for a burrow.
“Do you wish to stand by?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Not yet. This inner area has been pretty
well worked over in the last three weeks. I wouldn’t expect to
find anything on the first four turns, although it’s good to be
thorough. I’ve a few things to arrange yet in my work area, and
then I think I’ll get a catnap. My department has been awfully
busy the last few months,” she added apologetically.
“Understaffed, you know. Please call me if you do spot anything,
though—I prefer to handle the tractor myself, whenever
possible.”
“Fine by me.” He swung about in his chair to his comconsole.
“What minimum mass do you want a bleep for? About forty
kilos, say?”
“One kilo is the standard I prefer.”
“One kilo!” He stared. “Are you joking?”
“Joking?” She stared back, then seemed to arrive at
enlightenment. “Oh, I see. You were thinking in terms of
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Decision Points
whole—I can make positive identification with quite small
pieces, you see. I wouldn’t even mind picking up smaller bits
than that, but if you go much under a kilo you spend too much
time on false alarms from micrometeors and other rubbish. One
kilo seems to be the best practical compromise.”
“Bleh.” But he obediently set his probes for a mass of one
kilo, minimum, and finished programming the search sweep.
She gave him a brief nod and withdrew from the closet-sized
Navigation and Control Room. The obsolete courier ship had
been pulled from junkyard orbit and hastily overhauled with
some notion first of converting it into a personnel carrier for
middle brass—top brass in a hurry having a monopoly on the
new ships—but like Ferrell himself, it had graduated too late to
participate. So they both had been rerouted together, he and his
first command, to the dull duties he privately thought on a par
with sanitation engineering, or worse.
He gazed one last moment at the relic of battle in the forward
screen, its structural girdering poking up like bones through
sloughing skin, and shook his head at the waste of it all. Then,
with a little sigh of pleasure, he pulled his headset down into
contact with the silvery circles on his temples and midforehead,
closed his eyes, and slid into control of his own ship.
Space seemed to spread itself all around him, buoyant as a
sea. He was the ship, he was a fish, he was a merman;
unbreathing, limitless, and without pain. He fired his engines as
though flame leapt from his fingertips, and began the slow rolling
spiral of the search pattern.
*
“Medtech Boni?” He keyed the intercom to her cabin. “I
believe I have something for you here.”
She rubbed sleep from her face, framed in the intercom
screen. “Already? What time—oh. I must have been tireder than
I realized. I’ll be right up, Pilot Officer.”
Ferrell stretched, and began an automatic series of isometrics
in his chair. It had been a long and uneventful watch. He would
have been hungry, but what he contemplated now through the
viewscreens subdued his appetite.
Boni appeared promptly, and slid into the seat beside him.
“Oh, quite right, Pilot Officer.” She unshipped the controls to the
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exterior tractor beam, and flexed her fingers before taking a
delicate hold.
“Yeah, there wasn’t much doubt about that one,” he agreed,
leaning back and watching her work. “Why so tender with the
tractors?” he asked curiously, noting the low power level she was
using.
“Well, they’re frozen right through, you know,” she replied,
not taking her eyes from her readouts. “Brittle. If you play
hotshot and bang them around, they can shatter. Let’s stop that
nasty spin, first,” she added, half to herself. “A slow
spin is all
right. Seemly. But that fast spinning you get sometimes—it must
be very unrestful for them, don’t you think?”
His attention was pulled from the thing in the screen, and he
stared at her. “They’re dead, lady!”
She smiled slowly as the corpse, bloated from
decompression, limbs twisted as though frozen in a strobe-flash
of convulsion, was drawn gently toward the cargo bay. “Well,
that’s not their fault, is it?—one of our fellows, I see by the
uniform.”
“Bleh!” he repeated himself, then gave vent to an
embarrassed laugh. “You act like you enjoy it.”
“Enjoy? No … But I’ve been in Personnel Retrieval and
Identification for nine years, now. I don’t mind. And of course,
vacuum work is always a little nicer than planetary work.”
“Nicer? With that godawful decompression?”
“Yes, but there are the temperature effects to consider. No
decomposition.”
He took a breath, and let it out carefully. “I see. I guess you
would get—pretty hardened, after a while. Is it true you guys call
them corpse-sicles?”
“Some do,” she admitted. “I don’t.”
She maneuvered the twisted thing carefully through the cargo
bay doors and keyed them shut. “Temperature set for a slow thaw
and he’ll be ready to handle in a few hours,” she murmured.
“What do you call them?” he asked as she rose.
She awarded his bewilderment a small smile, like a salute,
and withdrew to the temporary mortuary set up next to the cargo
bay.
*
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On his next scheduled break he went down himself, drawn
by morbid curiosity. He poked his nose around the doorframe.
She was seated at her desk. The table in the center of the room
was yet unoccupied.
“Uh—hello.”
She looked up with her quick smile. “Hello, Pilot Officer.
Come on in.”
“Uh, thank you. You know, you don’t really have to be so
formal. Call me Falco, if you want,” he said, entering.
“Certainly, if you wish. My first name is Tersa.”
“Oh, yeah? I have a cousin named Tersa.”
“It’s a popular name. There were always at least three in my
classes at school.” She rose, and checked a gauge by the door to
the cargo bay. “He should be just about ready to take care of,
now. Pulled to shore, so to speak.”
Ferrell sniffed, and cleared his throat, wondering whether to
stay or excuse himself. “Grotesque sort of fishing.” Excuse
myself, I think.
She picked up the control lead to the float pallet, trailing it
after her into the cargo bay. There were some thumping noises,
and she returned, the pallet drifting behind her. The corpse was
in the dark blue of a deck officer, and covered thickly with frost,
which flaked and dripped upon the floor as the medtech slid it
onto the examining table. Ferrell shivered with disgust.
Definitely excuse myself. But he lingered, leaning against the
doorframe at a safe distance.
She pulled an instrument, trailing its lead to the computers,
from the crowded rack above the table. It was the size of a pencil,
and emitted a thin blue beam of light when aligned with the
corpse’s eyes.
“Retinal identification,” Tersa explained. She pulled down a
pad-like object, similarly connected, and pressed it to each of the
monstrosity’s hands. “And fingerprints,” she went on. “I always
do both, and cross-match. The eyes can get awfully distorted.
Errors in identification can be brutal for the families. Hm. Hm.”
She checked her readout screen. “Lieutenant Marco Deleo. Age
twenty-nine. Well, Lieutenant,” she went on chattily, “let’s see
what I can do for you.”
She applied an instrument to its joints, which loosened them,
and began removing its clothes.
“Do you often talk to—them?” inquired Ferrell, unnerved.
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“Always. It’s a courtesy, you see. Some of the things I have
to do for them are rather undignified, but they can still be done
with courtesy.”
Ferrell shook his head. “I think it’s obscene, myself.”
“Obscene?”
“All this horsing around with dead bodies. All the trouble and
expense we go to collecting them. I mean, what do they care?
Fifty or a hundred kilos of rotting meat. It’d be cleaner to leave
them in space.”
She shrugged, unoffended, undiverted from her task. She
folded the clothes and inventoried the pockets, laying out their
contents in a row.
“I rather like going through the pockets,” she remarked. “It
reminds me of when I was a little girl, visiting in someone else’s
home. When I went upstairs by myself, to go to the bathroom or
whatever, it was always a kind of pleasure to peek into the other
rooms, and see what kind of things they had, and how they kept
them. If they were very neat, I was always very impressed—I’ve
never been able to keep my own things neat. If it was a mess, I
felt I’d found a secret kindred spirit. A person’s things can be a
kind of exterior morphology of their mind—like a snail’s shell,
or something. I like to imagine what kind of person they were,
from what’s in the pockets. Neat, or messy. Very regulation, or
have been very conscientious. Everything regulation, except this
little vid disc from home. From his wife, I’d imagine. I think he
must have been a very nice person to know.”
She placed the collection of objects carefully into its labeled
bag. “Aren’t you going to listen to it?” asked Ferrell.
“Oh, no. That would be prying.”
He barked a laugh. “I fail to see the distinction.”
“Ah.” She completed the medical examination, readied the
plastic body bag, and began to wash the corpse. When she
worked her way down to the careful cleaning around the genital
area, necessary because of sphincter relaxation, Ferrell fled at
last.
That woman is nuts, he thought. I wonder if it’s the cause of
her choice of work, or the effect?
*
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It was another full day before they hooked their next fish.
Ferrell had a dream, during his sleep cycle, about being on a
deep-sea boat, and hauling up nets full of corpses to be dumped,
wet and shining as though with iridescent scales, in a huge pile
in the hold. He awoke from it sweating, but with very cold feet.
It was with profound relief that he returned to the pilot’s station
and slid into the skin of his ship. The ship was clean, mechanical
and pure, immortal as a god; one could forget one had ever
owned a sphincter muscle.
“Odd trajectory,” he remar
ked, as the medtech again took her
place at the tractor controls.
“Yes … Oh, I see. He’s a Barrayaran. He’s a long way from
home.”
“Oh, bleh. Throw him back.”
“Oh, no. We have identification files for all their missing.
Part of the peace settlement, you know, along with prisoner
exchange.”
“Considering what they did to our people as prisoners, I don’t
think we owe them a thing.”
She shrugged.
*
The Barrayaran officer had been a tall, broad-shouldered
man, a commander by the rank on his collar tabs. The medtech
treated him with the same care she had expended on Lieutenant
Deleo, and more. She went to considerable trouble to smooth and
straighten him, and massage the mottled face back into some
semblance of manhood with her fingertips, a process Ferrell
watched with a rising gorge.
“I wish his lips wouldn’t curl back quite so much,” she
remarked, while at this task. “Gives him what I imagine to be an
uncharacteristically snarly look. I think he must have been rather
handsome.”
One of the objects in his pockets was a little locket. It held a
tiny glass bubble filled with a clear liquid. The inside of its gold
cover was densely engraved with the elaborate curlicues of the
Barrayaran alphabet.
“What is it?” asked Ferrell curiously.
She held it pensively to the light. “It’s a sort of charm, or
memento. I’ve learned a lot about the Barrayarans in the last
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three months. Turn ten of them upside down and you’ll find some
kind of good luck charm or amulet or medallion or something in
the pockets of nine of them. The high-ranking officers are just as
bad as the enlisted people.”
“Silly superstition.”
“I’m not sure if it’s superstition or just custom. We treated
an injured prisoner once—he claimed it was just custom. People
gave them to the soldiers as presents, and that nobody really
believes in them. But when we took his away from him, when
we were undressing him for surgery, he tried to fight us for it. It
took three of us to hold him down for the anesthetic. I thought it
a rather remarkable performance for a man whose legs had been