The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  Around it, where Cynthia would expect to see the familiar patterns of stars burning in the icy void of the up-and-out, the Big Empty, the sky was shattered. A great mirrored lens, wrenched loose and broken into a thousand glittering shards, cast back crazy reflections of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, the Charles Dexter Ward, and the steelship already moored to the dead boojum, a ship so scarred and dented that all that could be deciphered of its hull markings was the word CALICO. It was a small ship — it couldn’t boast more than a two-or three-man crew — and didn’t worry Cynthia. What did worry her were all those jagged bits of mirror, all those uncalculated angles of reflection. The very things a mirror like that was meant to blind would be drawn to this jostling chaos, and with the boojum dead, neither the Jarmulowicz Astronomica nor her competition had much in the way of defense — unless the stupid stories Cynthia had been hearing all her life were true and the Arkhamers had some sort of occult weaponry that nobody else knew about.

  Unfortunately, she was pretty sure they didn’t.

  “All right,” said the President, loudly enough to cut through the two or three muttered discussions taking place at various points on the bridge. “We have three immediate objectives. One, obviously, is the reason we’re here” — and she nodded at the derelict before them — “the second is salvaging and neutralizing that reflecting lens, and the third is making contact with the Calico over there. We need to see if we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement. Please talk to your departments. By no later than the top of the next shift, I want a roster of volunteers for EVA. I know some departments badly need the practice.” She glanced at an elderly Arkhamer Cynthia did not know; there was clearly a story there by the way the man blushed and stammered, but Cynthia doubted she’d ever hear it.

  “What about the Calico?” a voice said from the doorway. It was Wandrei, and if he was in disgrace, he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Professor Wandrei,” the President said coolly. “Are you volunteering?”

  “Of course,” Wandrei said, smiling at her affably. “And since I imagine they’ve docked at the most useful point of — ah — ingress, may I suggest that you send the planned away team with me?”

  There was a fraught silence. Cynthia stared fixedly at the nearest of the Charles Dexter Ward’s blank, glazed eyes and cursed herself for thirty-nine kinds of fool. Finally, the President said, “Thomas, you’re plotting something.”

  “I pursue knowledge, Madam President,” said Wandrei, “as we all do. Or have you forgotten that I sat on your tenure committee?”

  One of the junior scholars gasped. Cynthia did not look away from the boojum’s dead eye, but she could hear the smile in the President’s voice when she said, “Very well. Take Meredith and Hester and Dr. Feuerwerker, and go find out what the Calico is doing. And remember to report back!”

  The Jarmulowicz Astronomica possessed two landing craft, a lumbering scow called the T.H. White and an incongruously sporty little skimmer called the Caitlin R. Kiernan. The skimmer seated four, if nobody was too fussy about his or her personal space, and Hester knew how to fly it — which meant, Wandrei said, herding his team toward the Caitlin R. Kiernan, that they didn’t need to wait for one of the two people on board who could fly the T.H. White.

  The President was right, Cynthia thought, as she strapped herself in next to Meredith. Wandrei was plotting something. He was almost bouncing with eagerness, and there was a gleam in his eye that she did not like. But she couldn’t think of anything she could do about it from here.

  Hester ran through her pre-flight checks without letting Wandrei hurry her. Meredith — a big blonde Valkyrie whose specialty was what she called boojum mathematics — apologized for crowding Cynthia with her shoulders and said, “Could you see a cause of death, Dr. Feuerwerker?”

  “No,” Cynthia said. “He just looked dead to me. But I don’t know if I’d recognize a fatal wound on a boojum if I saw one.”

  “It probably didn’t leave a visible mark,” Wandrei said from where he was riding shotgun. “So far as our research has discovered, there are only two ways to kill a boojum. One is to cut it literally to pieces — a tactic which backfires disastrously far more often than it succeeds — the other, to deliver a systemic shock powerful enough to disrupt all of the creature’s cardio and/or synaptic nodes at once.”

  “That’s one mother of a shock,” Cynthia said, feeling unease claw its way a little deeper beneath her skin.

  “Yes,” said Wandrei and did not elaborate.

  Hester piloted the Caitlin R. Kiernan with more verve than Cynthia’s stomach found comfortable; she gripped her safety harness and swallowed hard, and Meredith said kindly, “Hester is one of the best young pilots we have.”

  “When I was a child, I wanted to jump ship on Leng Station and become a mechanic,” Hester said cheerfully. “I tried a couple of times, but they always brought me back.” She piloted the Caitlin R. Kiernan in a low swooping arc across the Charles Dexter Ward’s forward tentacles, and they could see that Wandrei’s guess had been correct; the Calico had succeeded in prying open one of the Charles Dexter Ward’s airlocks, and the ship was moored partly within the boojum.

  Cynthia hoped the Arkhamers had a better way in than that.

  As it turned out, they didn’t. And Cynthia was unsettled to watch Meredith and Hester strap sidearms on over their pressure suits. Were they really expecting that much trouble from the crew of the Calico? And didn’t salvage law give her first picking? Or would the Arkhamers’ earlier intercept and beacon trump that?

  Cynthia had never encountered a dead boojum before, and she had braced herself with the knowledge that there would be any number of things she wasn’t expecting. But no amount of bracing or foreknowledge could ever have been sufficient for the stench of the Charles Dexter Ward—a fetor so intense Cynthia would have sworn she could pick up the scent through her helmet, and before the airlock cycled. What that said about the spaceworthiness of the Caitlin R. Kiernan, Cynthia did not care to consider.

  What the cycling outer airlock door revealed was more of a shock than it might have been if she hadn’t already been dragging her tongue across her teeth in a futile effort to scrape the stench of death away. The membranes between the struts were not glossy with health, appearing dull and tacky instead, but the amazing stink that left her lightheaded and pained even within the oxygenated confines of her helmet had led her to expect— well, what course did decay take, on a boojum? Writhing infestations? Deliquescence? Suppurating lesions?

  There was none of that.

  Just the ridged stretch of intact-seeming corridor disappearing into the curvature of the dead ship, and the reek of putrescence. Don’t throw up in your helmet, Cynthia told herself. That would be one sure way of making things even less pleasant.

  The Charles Dexter Ward retained good atmospheric pressure — though Cynthia couldn’t have attested to the air quality — and she didn’t need to tongue on her suit intercom for Wandrei and the others to hear her when she said, “Isn’t anything we salvage from this mess going to be unusable due to contamination?”

  Meredith said, “Anything sealed should be fine. And we wouldn’t want unsealed medical supplies anyway.”

  “I can smell it through my suit.”

  Wandrei looked at her with curious intensity. “Really?” he said, brow wrinkling behind his faceplate. “I don’t smell anything.”

  “Maybe your suit has a bad filter,” Meredith said. “We do our best to check them, but, well.” She shrugged — a clumsy gesture, but Cynthia understood. When everything the Arkhamers owned, from their clothes to their ship, was second-hand, salvaged, scavenged, there was only so much they could do.

  “That’s probably it,” she said, although she wasn’t sure — and from the look he gave her before he turned away, Wandrei wasn’t sure, either.

  “Let’s see if we can’t find the crew of the Calico,” he said.

  I am walking in a dead body, Cynthia said periodically to herself,
but aside from the eye-blurring stench that no one else could smell, the only sign of death was the darkness. Every boojum Cynthia had ever traveled on had used its bioluminescence to illuminate any space its human crew and passengers were using. But the Charles Dexter Ward stayed dark.

  They proceeded cautiously. Cynthia remembered Hester saying the crew of the Charles Dexter Ward might still be alive somewhere in their dead ship, and there was the nagging question of the Calico’s crew — a question that got naggier and naggier the farther they went without finding a single trace of them.

  “We know they weren’t on their ship,” Hester muttered. “Corinne hailed them until she was hoarse.”

  “And they haven’t been salvaging,” Meredith said. “None of the doors since the airlock has been forced open.”

  “My question,” Cynthia said, “is how long they’ve been here. And if they aren’t salvaging, what are they doing?”

  That was two questions, and actually she had a third: what did Wandrei know that she and Hester and Meredith didn’t? He didn’t seem worried, and she had noticed after a while that, although he wasn’t in a hurry, he did seem to know where he was going. She didn’t want to be the one to mention it, though. Not a good idea for the politely tolerated outsider.

  “What else can you do on a dead boojum?” Hester demanded.

  “Maybe,” Cynthia said after a moment. “Maybe they weren’t here for salvage in the first place. Maybe they needed a hospital. Not all doctors are as laissez-faire as Captain Diemschuller.”

  “The Calico’s too small for piracy,” Meredith said, “but I agree with your general principle. If they aren’t here for salvage — how do we find the operating theaters?”

  Her question went unanswered as they came to a corridor junction and caught sight of another human being.

  He was in shirtsleeves rather than a pressure suit, wearing the uniform of the Interplanetary Ambulance Corps, dark blue with red piping and CDW embroidered on his sleeve. Across his chest were blazoned a row of symbols including a caduceus, a red crescent, and the Chinese ideogram for “heart.” Despite being distracted by the medical symbols, Cynthia knew there was something wrong with him several seconds before she was able to identify why she thought so. And the man — youngish and tall, his skin fishbelly pale in their floodlights — stood and stared at them, his face so perfectly blank that Cynthia finally realized that was the problem. No relief, no anger, no fear — not even curiosity.

  “Hello!” she said, starting forward and forcing brightness into her voice as if she could compensate for his nullity. “I’m Dr. Feuerwerker with the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. Is your captain —” And then she was close enough to see him clearly, close enough to see that the shadow at his midsection was not a shadow but a hole, jagged-edged and gaping, where his stomach used to be, close enough to see the greenish tinge to his pale skin.

  Her voice was thin and screechy in her own ears when she said, “He’s dead.”

  “What?” said Hester

  “He’s dead. He’s been dead for weeks.”

  “But he’s standing up. A dead body couldn’t . . .” Hester’s voice dried up with a faint click as the dead man turned, giving them a good view of his disemboweled torso, and started walking down the hall away from them. His locomotion wasn’t perfect, but it was damn good for someone who’d probably been dead for three months.

  Hester started to blaspheme, and Meredith ungently hushed her. This was not the place to be attracting that kind of attention.

  “It might be a parasite,” Cynthia said, having run frantically through her knowledge of what could animate a corpse. “Something that got through a gap in spacetime when the Charles Dexter Ward died. We have to tell the Jarmulowicz Astronomica” — surprised, Cynthia realized her concern was not for herself, stuck here in the belly of a dead boojum, but for Jaime and the shy children and the cheshires Cynthia couldn’t count — “can we call them from here? How far back —”

  “Calm yourself, Dr. Feuerwerker,” said Wandrei. “What you see is not the work of a parasite. It is the pursuit of knowledge.”

  That brought her up short. She looked at him, calm and sweating behind the faceplate of his pressure suit, and swallowed against a curl of bright nausea. “You knew about this?”

  The twitch at the corner of his lips was more disturbing than the dead man striding away from them. Hastily, Cynthia turned her attention forward again. There were medical-school stories of the horrors Arkhamer doctors got up to. Cynthia had never credited them, considering them part of the general anti-Arkhamer bigotry that permeated so many institutions of higher learning — and so many spacedock taverns.

  Now she wondered if she had been too willing — in her conscientious open-mindedness — to assume there was no truth behind the slander. Ooh, ethics now, Dr. Feuerwerker? That’s a new look on you.

  She stepped forward, following the dead man. Wandrei and the other women jogged to catch up, their pressure suits rustling with the sudden movement. As Wandrei fell back into stride beside Cynthia, she said, “So when did the Charles Dexter Ward sign on an Arkhamer doctor?” Wandrei remained silent, though she waited after each sentence before adding the next. “That’s what got the ship killed, isn’t it? That’s the real motive behind coming here.”

  “Reanimation isn’t a topic we commonly pursue,” Wandrei said. “But if . . . if someone has made it work — think of the advance to human understanding. To medicine.”

  “To shipping,” Meredith said.

  “There are a number of applications,” Hester was beginning, when Cynthia almost-shouted, “Are you fucking nuts? Every scare story I’ve ever heard about raising the dead says that either dying or coming back drives people mad. Are you really suggesting—”

  “Are you a scientist, Dr. Feuerwerker?” Wandrei asked. “Then I suggest you wait for the data.”

  The walking cadaver did not move particularly fast. When she caught up to him, he turned to her, jaw moving. If he was trying to say something, the lack of lungs and diaphragm impeded the process. Upon closer inspection, he was a Major and a registered nurse. The name on his shirt pocket read Ngao. His eyes, dull and concave where the ship’s environment had begun dehydrating them, fastened on Cynthia’s face through the helmet.

  His jaw worked again.

  Was he conscious? she wondered, the chill running up her back so real that her head wrenched to one side. Did he know he was dead? Eviscerated? Did he ever try to touch his stomach and have his fingers brush his spine? She wanted to apologize, even though Major Ngao’s fate was none of her doing. But she, too, had sought after forbidden knowledge — not reanimation, at least the irony wasn’t that cruel. She’d muttered those same words about science and the pursuit of knowledge and told herself that Chen and Derleth would be pleased. That Galileo would be pleased.

  Had it been a lie? She didn’t know. Chen and Derleth and Galileo had been dead for centuries. She couldn’t ask them — and even this lunatic on the Charles Dexter Ward couldn’t bring them back. She remembered her burning certainty that the truth was there, attainable and valuable beyond any price — and she remembered Captain Nwapa’s expression, too, that one flicker of horror before the captain got her game-face back. It took a lot to rattle a boojum captain, and Cynthia was not proud of the achievement.

  Wandrei said crisply, “Take us to Dr. Fiorenzo,” before Cynthia could find any words that weren’t trite and false — and probably pointless, really, Dr. Feuerwerker, the man’s missing nine-tenths of his vital organs, do you think he has any attention to spare for you? And if nothing else, Cynthia thought grimly, now at least she had a name to hang the nightmare on.

  The corridors of the Charles Dexter Ward were dark and silent as Cynthia followed the Arkhamers following the dead man. From time spent on the Richard Trevithick and other boojums, she knew a little about their internal architecture, and she’d done her best to stay oriented, so she was fairly sure that they were heading away from the rending plates
and tearing diamond teeth of the Charles Dexter Ward’s mouth (and she couldn’t help wondering if his crew had called him Charlie, the same way the Richard Trevithick’s crew always referred to their boojum as Ricky — it was a stupid thought and wouldn’t be banished). The anatomy of boojums adhered to no principle that Terran mammals abided by, including bilateral symmetry, but if you were headed away from the mouth, you were probably headed toward the cloaca. And most ships’ systems were stuck as deep in the bulk of the boojum as the bioengineers could get them.

  The Charles Dexter Ward being a hospital ship, there was not one specific area that Cynthia would have identified as the sickbay. Rather, she and the others had passed corridor after corridor of clinical chambers and wards, rooms that Cynthia was sure would have reeked of disinfectant and that eternal powdery medicinal smell were it not for the eye-watering putrescence overwhelming everything. They found the operating theaters, which looked as if they’d been the scenes of intense guerilla fighting, and Cynthia’s pace slowed automatically, trying to reconstruct what had happen, where the defenders had been, how the line of attack had run, whether that was all human blood in horrible sticky pools, or if some of it was other colors.

  “Dr. Feuerwerker,” Meredith said, pointing, and she saw that farther down the corridor, in the direction that Major Ngao was plodding, uninterested in what might have been the site of his own death, there was, for the first time in hours, a gleam of light that they hadn’t brought with them from the Caitlin R. Kiernan.

  And as they followed the dead man — he dripped, occasionally, an irregular trail of brownish fluid on the corridor floor — around the bend in the dead boojum’s corridor, Cynthia saw an open pressure hatch, a slice of light spilled across the floor, and a glimpse of one of the medical labs.

  Within it, she could just make out some white-coated movement.