Federations

AFTERMATHS by Lois McMaster Bujold

This story, which takes place in her Barrayar milieu, takes a rather grim look at some of the professions that will arise in the wake of interstellar war.

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 the 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 self-consciously cleared his throat.

“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 Hundred and Twenty 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 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 re-routed 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 mid-forehead, 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 said, keying 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, sliding into the seat beside him. “Oh, quite right, Pilot Officer.” She unshipped the controls to the 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 hot-shot 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, then 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.

“People.”

She awarded his bewilderment a small smile, like a salute, and withdrew to the temporary mortuary set up next to the cargo bay.

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 as 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 and trailed 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 door-frame 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.

“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 full of personal things… Take Lieutenant Deleo, here. He must 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. I wonder if it’s the cause of her choice of work, or the effect?

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 remarked, 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, massaging 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 in curiosity.

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 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. That people give them to the soldiers as presents, and 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 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 his irony. “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 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 kick when the ship split, they could well be beyond it by now.”

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 vented a little macabre laugh. “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 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.