blown away. He wept.… Of course, he was in shock.”
Ferrell dangled the locket on the end of its short chain,
intrigued in spite of himself. It hung with a companion piece, a
curl of hair embedded in a plastic pendant.
“Some sort of holy water, is it?” he inquired.
“Almost. It’s a very common design. It’s called a mother’s
tears charm. Let me see if I can make out—he’s had it a while, it
seems. From the inscription—I think that says ‘ensign,’ and the
date—it must have been given him on the occasion of his
commission.”
“It’s not really his mother’s tears, is it?”
“Oh, yes. That’s what’s supposed to make it work, as a
protection.”
“Doesn’t seem to be very effective.”
“No, well … no.”
Ferrell snorted ironically. “I hate those guys—but I do guess
I feel sort of sorry for his mother.”
Boni retrieved the chain and its pendants, holding the curl in
plastic to the light and reading its inscription. “No, not at all.
She’s a fortunate woman.”
“How so?”
“This is her death lock. She died three years ago, by this.”
“Is that supposed to be lucky, too?”
“No, not necessarily. Just a remembrance, as far as I know.
Kind of a nice one, really. The nastiest charm I ever ran across,
and the most unique, was this little leather bag hung around a
fellow’s neck. It was filled with dirt and leaves, and what I took
at first to be some sort of little frog-like animal skeleton, about
ten centimeters long. But when I looked at it more closely, it
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turned out to be the skeleton of a human fetus. Very strange. I
suppose it was some sort of black magic. Seemed an odd thing
to find on an engineering officer.”
“Doesn’t seem to work for any of them, does it?”
She smiled wryly. “Well, if there are any that work, I
wouldn’t see them, would I?”
She took the processing one step further, by cleaning the
Barrayaran’s clothes and carefully re-dressing him, before
bagging him and returning him to the freeze.
“The Barrayarans are all so army-mad,” she explained. “I
always like to put them back in their uniforms. They mean so
much to them, I’m sure they’re more comfortable with them on.”
Ferrell frowned uneasily. “I still think he ought to be dumped
with the rest of the garbage.”
“Not at all,” said the medtech. “Think of all the work he
represents on somebody’s part. Nine months of pregnancy,
childbirth, two years of diapering, and that’s just the beginning.
Tens of thousands of meals, thousands of bedtime stories, years
of school. Dozens of teachers. And all that military training, too.
A lot of people went into making him.”
She smoothed a strand of the corpse’s hair into place. “That
head held the universe, once. He had a good rank for his age,”
she added, rechecking her monitor. “Thirty-two. Commander
Aristede Vorkalloner. It has a kind of nice ethnic ring. Very
Barrayaranish, that name. Vor, too, one of those warrior-class
fellows.”
“Homicidal-class loonies. Or worse,” Ferrell said
automatically. But his vehemence had lost momentum,
somehow.
Boni shrugged, “Well, he’s joined the great democracy now.
And he had nice pockets.”
Three full days went by with no further alarms but a rare
scattering of mechanical debris. Ferrell began to hope the
Barrayaran was the last pickup they would have to make. They
were nearing the end of their search pattern. Besides, he thought
resentfully, this duty was sabotaging the efficiency of his sleep
cycle. But the medtech made a request.
“If you don’t mind, Falco,” she said, “I’d greatly appreciate
it if we could run the pattern out just a few extra turns. The
original orders are based on this average estimated trajectory
speed, you see, and if someone just happened to get a bit of extra
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Ferrell was less than thrilled, but the prospect of an extra day
of piloting had its attractions, and he gave a grudging consent.
Her reasoning proved itself; before the day was half done, they
turned up another gruesome relic.
“Oh,” muttered Ferrell, when they got a close look. It had
been a female officer. Boni reeled her in with enormous
tenderness. He didn’t really want to go watch, this time, but the
medtech seemed to have come to expect him.
“I—don’t really want to look at a woman blown up,” he tried
to excuse himself.
“Mm,” said Tersa. “Is it fair, though, to reject a person just
because they’re dead? You wouldn’t have minded her body a bit
when she was alive.”
He laughed a little, macabrely. “Equal rights for the dead?”
Her smile twisted. “Why not? Some of my best friends are
corpses.”
He snorted.
She grew more serious. “I’d—sort of like the company, on
this one.” So he took up his usual station by the door.
The medtech laid out the thing that had been a woman upon
her table, undressed, inventoried, washed, and straightened it.
When she finished, she kissed the dead lips.
“Oh, God,” cried Ferrell, shocked and nauseated. “You are
crazy! You’re a damn, damn necrophiliac! A lesbian
necrophiliac, at that!” He turned to go.
“Is that what it looks like, to you?” Her voice was soft, and
still unoffended. It stopped him, and he looked over his shoulder.
She was looking at him as gently as if he had been one of her
precious corpses. “What a strange world you must live in, inside
your head.”
She opened a suitcase, and shook out a dress, fine underwear,
and a pair of white embroidered slippers. A wedding dress,
Ferrell realized. This woman was a bona fide psychopath …
She dressed the corpse, and arranged its soft dark hair with
great delicacy, before bagging it.
“I believe I shall place her next to that nice tall Barrayaran,”
she said. “I think they would have liked each other very well, if
they could have met in another place and time. And Lieutenant
Deleo was married, after all.”
She completed the label. Ferrell’s battered mind was sending
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him little subliminal messages; he struggled to overcome his
shock and bemusement, and pay attention. It tumbled into the
open day of his consciousness with a start.
She had not run an identification check on this one.
Out the door, he told himself, is the way you want to walk. I
guarantee it. Instead, timorously, he went over to the corpse and
checked its label.
Ensign Sylva Boni, it said. Age twenty. His own
age …
He was trembling, as if with cold. It was cold, in that room.
Tersa Boni finished packing up the suitcase, and turned back
with the float pallet.
“Daughter?” he asked. It was all he could ask.
She pursed her lips, and nodded.
“It’s—a helluva coincidence.”
“No coincidence at all. I asked for this sector.”
“Oh.” He swallowed, turned away, turned back, face
flaming. “I’m sorry I said—”
She smiled her slow sad smile. “Never mind.”
*
They found yet one more bit of mechanical debris, so agreed
to run another cycle of the search spiral, to be sure that all
possible trajectories had been outdistanced. And yes, they found
another; a nasty one, spinning fiercely, guts split open from some
great blow and hanging out in a frozen cascade.
The acolyte of death did her dirty work without once so much
as wrinkling her nose. When it came to the washing, the least
technical of the tasks, Ferrell said suddenly, “May I help?”
“Certainly,” said the medtech, moving aside. “An honor is
not diminished for being shared.”
And so he did, as shy as an apprentice saint washing his first
leper.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “The dead cannot hurt you. They
give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their
faces. And one can face that, I find.”
Yes, he thought, the good face pain. But the great—they
embrace it.
Lois McMaster Bujold was born in 1949, the daughter of an
engineering professor at Ohio State University, from whom she
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picked up her early interest in science fiction. She now lives in
Minneapolis, and has two grown children. She began writing
with the aim of professional publication in 1982. She wrote three
novels in three years; in October of 1985, all three sold to Baen
Books, launching her career. Bujold went on to write many other
books for Baen, mostly featuring her popular character Miles
Naismith Vorkosigan, his family, friends, and enemies. Her
fantasy from HarperCollins includes the award-winning Chalion
series and the Sharing Knife series.
Ten-times nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, she
has won in that category four times, in addition to garnering
another Hugo for best novella, three Nebula Awards, three
Locus Awards, the Mythopoeic Award, two Sapphire Awards, the
Minnesota Book Award, the Forry Award, and the Skylark
Award. In 2007, she was given the Ohioana Career Award, and
in 2008 was Writer Guest-of-Honor for the 66th World Science
Fiction Convention. A complete list may be found here:
http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bujold. Her works have been translated into over twenty languages.
More information on Bujold and her books is archived at
www.dendarii.com
and
her
blog
at
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16094.Lois_McMaste
r_Bujold/blog
Every teenager dreams of their first car, and Jerry is no different.
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Somehow he stumbles onto the perfect vehicle, too good to be
true. And that’s the problem. What dark secret lurks in the
vehicle’s past and can he ever be free of it? Or is that the price
of …
D R I V I N G A B A R G A I N
By Robert J. Sawyer
Jerry walked to the corner store, a baseball cap and sunglasses
shielding him from the heat beating down from above. He picked
up a copy of the Calgary Sun, walked to the counter, gave the
old man a dollar, got his change, and hurried outside. He didn’t
want to wait until he got home, so he went to the nearest bus stop,
parked himself on the bench there, and opened the paper.
Of course, the first thing he checked out was the bikini-clad
Sunshine Girl—what sixteen-year-old boy wouldn’t turn to that
first? Today’s girl was old—23, it said—but she certainly was
pretty, with lots of long blonde hair.
That ritual completed, Jerry turned to the real reason he’d
bought the paper: the classified ads. He found the used-car
listings, and started poring over them, hoping, as he always did,
for a bargain.
Jerry had worked hard all summer on a loading dock. It had
been rough work, but, for the first time in his life, he had real
muscles. And, even more important, he had some real money.
Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
His parents had promised to pay the insurance if Jerry kept
up straight A’s all through grade ten, and Jerry had. They weren’t
going to pay for a car itself, but Jerry had two grand in his bank
account—he liked the sound of that: two grand. Now if he could
just find something halfway decent for that price, he’d be driving
to school when grade eleven started next week.
Jerry was a realist. He wanted a girlfriend—God, how he
wanted one—but he knew his little wispy beard wasn’t what was
going to impress … well, he’d been thinking about Ashley
Brown all summer. Ashley who, in his eyes at least, put that
Sunshine Girl to shame.
But, no, it wasn’t the beard he’d managed to grow since June
that would impress her. Nor was it his newfound biceps. It would
be having his own set of wheels. How sweet that would be!
Jerry continued scanning the ads, skipping over all the makes
he knew he could never afford: the Volvos, the Lexuses, the
Mercedes, the BMWs.
He read the lines describing a ’94 Honda Civic, a ’97 Dodge
Neon, even a ’91 Pontiac Grand Prix. But the prices were out of
his reach.
Jerry really didn’t care what make of car he got; he’d even
take a Hyundai. After all, when hardly anyone else his age had a
car, any car would be a fabulous ticket to freedom, to making
out. To use one of his dad’s favorite expressions—an expression
that he’d never really understood until just now—“In the land of
the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
Jerry was going to be royalty.
If, that is, he could find something he could afford. He kept
looking, getting more and more depressed. Maybe he’d just—
Jerry felt his eyes go wide. A 1997 Toyota, only twenty
thousand miles on it. The asking price: “$3,000, OBO.”
Just three thousand! That was awfully cheap for such a car …
And OBO! Or Best Offer. It couldn’t hurt to try two thousand
dollars. The worst the seller could do was say no. Jerry felt in his
pocket for the change he got from buying the paper. There was a
phone booth just up the street. He hurried over to it, and called.
“Hello?” said a sad-sounding man’s voice at the other end.
Jerry tried to make his own voice sound as deep as he could.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m calling about the Toyota.” He swallowed.
“Has it sold yet?”
“No,” said the man. “Would you like to come see it?”
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Jerry got the man’s address—only about two miles away. He
glanced up the street, saw the bus coming, and ran back to the
stop, grinning to himself. If all went well, this would be the last
time he’d have to take the bus anywhere.
*
Jerry walked up to the house. It looked like the kind of place
he lived in himself: basketball hoop above the garage; garage
door dented from endless games of ball hockey.
Jerry rang the doorbell, and was greeted by a man who
looked about the same age as Jerry’s father … a sad-looking man
with a face like a basset hound.
“Yes?” said the man.
“I called earlier,” said Jerry. “I’ve come about the car.”
The man’s eyebrows went up. “How old are you, son?”
“Sixteen.”
“Tell me about yourself,” said the man.
Jerry couldn’t see what difference that would make. But he
did want to soften the old guy up so that he’d take the lower price.
And so: “My name’s Jerry Sloane,” he said. “I’m a student at
Eastern High, just going into grade eleven. I’ve got my license,
and I’ve been working all summer long on the loading dock
down at Macabee’s.”
The bassett hound’s eyebrows went up. “Have you, now?”
“Yes,” said Jerry.
“You a good student?”
Jerry was embarrassed to answer; it seemed so nerdy to say
it, but … “Straight A’s.”
The bassett hound nodded. “Good for you! Good for you!”
He paused. “Are you a churchgoer, son?”
Jerry was surprised by the question, but he answered
truthfully. “Most weeks, with my family. Calgary United.”
The man nodded again. “All right, would you like to take the
car for a test drive?”
“Sure!”
Jerry got into the driver’s seat, and the man got into the
passenger seat. Not that it should have mattered to whether the
deal got made, but Jerry did the absolute best job he could of
backing out of the driveway and turning onto the street. When
they arrived at the corner, he came to a proper full stop at the
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stop sign, making sure the front of his car lifted up a bit before