“Everybody knows you’re not one of us.” He twitched slightly.
She held him steady, and noted the place. But when she glanced at his face, she realized his distress was over having said something more revealing than he intended. She said, “Some people aren’t pleased about it?”
He looked away. She reached for the inflatable splint, hands gentle, and did not push. People told doctors things, if the doctors had the sense to keep quiet.
His pale, spotted fingers curled and uncurled. Finally, he answered, “Wandrei got in some trouble with the Faculty Senate, I hear. My advisor says Wandrei was high-handed, and he’s lucky he has tenure.”
Cynthia kept her head down, eyes on her work. Jaime sighed as she fitted the splint and its numbing, cooling agents began to take effect. “That should help bring the inflammation down,” she told him. But as Jaime thanked her and left, she wondered if she ought to be grateful to Wandrei or if she ought to consider him her patron.
But she wasn’t grateful—he had taken advantage of her desperation, which was not a matter for gratitude even if it had saved her life. And the Arkhamers didn’t seem to think in terms of patronage and clients. They talked about apprentices and advisors, and nobody expected Cynthia to be Wandrei’s apprentice.
She also noticed, as the days drew out into weeks, that nobody was approaching her about taking an apprentice of her own. She was just as glad, for she had no illusions about her own abilities as a teacher, and no idea how one person could go about imparting a medical school education from the ground up, but it made her feel acutely isolated—on a ship that was home to several hundred people—and she lay in her hammock during her sleep shift and worried about what would happen to the shy, solemn Arkhamer children when she was no longer on board. At other times, she reminded herself that the Jarmulowicz Astronomica was part of a network of Arkhamer ships, and—as Wandrei had said—they would acquire another doctor. They were probably in the middle of negotiating the swap or the lease or the marriage or whatever it was they did. But when she was supposed to be asleep, she worried.
They knew they were nearing the Charles Dexter Ward for days before he showed up on even the longest of the long-range scanners. The first sign was the cheshires, the tentacled creatures—so common on Arkhamer vessels—which patrolled the steelship’s cabins and corridors, hunting toves and similar trans-dimensional nuisances that might slip through the interstices in reality and cause a potentially deadly infestation. One reason Arkhamer ships were tolerated at stations like Faraday was because the cheshires would hunt station vermin just as heartily. Boojums took care of their own pest control.
Normally, the cheshires—dozens or hundreds of them, Cynthia never did get a good count—slept and hunted seemingly at random. One might spend hours crouched before the angle of two intersecting bulkheads, tendrils all focused intently on one seemingly random point, its soft body slowly cycling through an array of colors that could mean anything or nothing at all . . . only to get up and slink away after a half-day of stalking as if nothing had happened. Cynthia often had to shoo two or three out of her hammock at bunk time, and like station cats they often returned to steal body heat once she was asleep. But as the Jarmulowicz Astronomica began encountering the spacetime distortions that inevitably accompanied the violent death of a boojum, the ship’s cheshires became correspondingly agitated. They traveled in groups, and any time Cynthia encountered two sleeping, there was also one keeping watch . . . if a creature with sixteen eyes and no eyelids could be said to sleep. Cynthia tried not to speculate about their dreams.
The second sign was the knocking. Random, frantic banging, as if something outside the ship wanted to come in. It came at unpredictable intervals, and would sometimes be one jarring boom and sometimes go on for five minutes. It upset the cheshires even more; they couldn’t hear the headache-inducing noise, being deaf, but they could feel the vibrations. Every time Cynthia was woken in her sleep shift by that terrible knocking, she’d find at least one and usually more like three cheshires under her blankets with her, trying to hide their wedge-shaped heads between her arms and her body. She’d learned from her child patients, who lost their shy formality in talking about their playmates, how to pet the cheshires, how to use her voice in ways they could feel, and she would lie there in the dim green glow of the one working safety light and pet the trembling cheshires until she fell asleep again.
The knocking was followed by what the Arkhamers called pseudoghosts—one of them explained the phenomenon in excruciating detail while Cynthia cleaned and stitched a six-inch long gash on her forearm: not the spirits of the dead, but microbursts of previous and future time. “Or, rather, future probabilities, since the future has yet to be determined.”
“Of course,” Cynthia said. The girl’s name was Hester Ayabo Jarmulowicz; she was tall and skinny and iron-black, and she had laid her arm open trying to repair the damage done to an interior bulkhead by the percussive force of the knocking. “So the woman I almost ran into this morning before she vanished in a burst of static—was that Martha Patterson?”
“Probably,” Hester said. “Not very tall, wiry, freckled skin?”
“Yes. Keep your arm still, please.”
“That was Doctor Patterson. Before Doctor Patterson, we had Doctor Belafonte, so you may see him as well.”
“And your future doctors, whoever they may be?”
“Very likely,” Hester said.
Cynthia saw Dr. Patterson several times, and once an old man who had to be Dr. Belafonte, but the only future ghost she saw was herself—her hair longer, grayer, her clothes shabbier—standing beside the exam table with a scowl on her face that could have been used for spot-welding.
What frightened Cynthia most—aside from the nauseating, almost electric shock of walking into the medical bay and seeing herself—was the way that scowl had looked as if it had been carved into her face.
It made no sense. Why would she still be on the Jarmulowicz Astronomica? She didn’t want to stay, and the Arkhamers clearly didn’t want to keep her. But then she thought, in the middle of autoclaving her instruments, Wandrei trapped me once.
That was not a nice thought, and it brought others in its wake, about pitcher plants and the way they started digesting their prey before the unfortunate insects were dead, about the way her future self’s face had looked as if it were eroding around that scowl.
She schooled herself for being morbid and tried to focus on her patients and on her reading in the ship’s archives (Wandrei had at least kept his word about that), but she was very grateful, as well as surprised, when, a few days after their conversation about pseudoghosts, Hester Ayabo marched into the medical bay and announced, “Isolation is bad for human beings. I am going to eat lunch with you.”
Cynthia toggled off the display on the patient file she had been updating. “You are? I mean, thank you, but—”
“You can tell me about your studies,” Hester said, midway between an invitation and a command. She gave Cynthia a bright, uncertain, sidelong look—like a falcon, Cynthia thought, trying to make friends with a plow horse—and Cynthia laughed and got up and said, “Or you can tell me about yours.”
Which Hester was glad to do, volubly and at length. She was an astrobiologist—the same specialty as Wandrei, and Wandrei was in fact a member of her committee, which seemed to be a little like being a parent and a little like being a boss. Hester studied creatures like boojums and cheshires and the dreadful bandersnatches, creatures that had evolved in the cold and airless dark between the stars—or the cold and airless interstices of space-time. She was very excited by the chance to study the Charles Dexter Ward, and on their third lunch, Cynthia found the nerve to ask her, “Do you know how the Charles Dexter Ward died?”
Hester stopped in the middle of bringing a slice of hydroponically cultivated tomato to her mouth. “It is something of a mystery. But I can tell you what we do know.”
It was more than Wandrei had offered; Cynthia
listened avidly.
As Wandrei had told her, the Charles Dexter Ward had been an ambulance ship—or, more accurately, a mobile hospital. He had been in service for more than ten solar, well known throughout the farther and darker reaches of the system. His captain was equally well known for disregarding evidence of pirate status when taking patients on board; though there was no formal recognition of neutrality once you got past the sovereignty of Mars, the Charles Dexter Ward was one boojum that no pirate would attack. “Even the Mi-Go,” Hester said, “although no one knows why.”
Cynthia tried to hide the reflexive curl of her fingers, even though there had been no hint of special meaning in Hester’s tone. “What became of his crew?”
“Probably still aboard,” Hester said. “Possibly some are even alive. Although you can’t eat boojum. It’s not what we’d consider meat.”
“How did the Jarmulowicz Astronomica find out about him?”
“Another Arkhamer ship picked up a distress buoy. They couldn’t stop for her”—and Hester’s sly look told Cynthia that, friends or not (were they friends?) Hester would never tell an outsider why—“but they sent us a coded burst as closest relative. We may not beat other salvage attempts, even so. The beacon just said that the ship was moribund—no reason given. Possibly, the captain didn’t know, or if something happened to him, it might have been junior crew who sent the probe. And nobody tells us students much anyway.”
Cynthia nodded. She put her hand on her desk, about to lever herself to her feet, as Hester sucked down a length of tofu. “Huh,” Cynthia said. “Do boojums die of natural causes?”
Lips shining with broth, Hester cocked her head at her. “They have to die of something, I suppose. But our records don’t mention any that have.”
By the time they were within a hundred kilometers of the dead boojum, the banging and the manifestations were close to constant. Cynthia dodged her own shadow in Sick Bay almost reflexively, as she might a surgical nurse with whom she had established a practiced partnership. It was a waste of mental and physical energy—I could just walk through myself—but she couldn’t bring herself to stop.
Hester brought her cookies, dropping the plate between Cynthia and the work screen on which she was studying what schematics she could find of the Charles Dexter Ward—spotty—and his sister ships—wildly varying in architecture. Or growth patterns. Or whatever you called a boojum’s internal design.
“We’ll be there next watch,” Hester said. “You ought to rest.”
“It’s my work watch,” Cynthia said. The cookies were pale, crisp-soft, and fragrant with lemons and lavender. It was everything she could do to nibble one delicately, with evident pleasure, and save the others for later. Hester did not take one, though Cynthia offered.
She said, “I’ve another dozen in my locker. I like to bake on my rec watch. And you should rest: the President and the Faculty Senate have sent around a memo saying that everybody who is not on watch should be getting as much sleep as possible.”
Cynthia glanced guiltily at her wristpiece. She had a bad habit of forgetting she’d turned notifications off. Something like a giant’s fist thumped against the hull; she barely noticed. “I should be cramming boojum anatomy, is what I should be doing.”
Hester smiled at her, but did not laugh. “You’ve been studying it since we left Faraday. You have something to prove?”
“You know what I have to prove.” But she took a second cookie anyway, stared at it, and said, “Hester. If you only see one ghost . . . does that mean that there’s only one future?”
“An interesting question,” Hester said. “Temporal metadynamics aren’t really my field. It may mean there are futures in which there are no people in that place. It may mean that that one particular future is locked in, I guess.”
“Unavoidable?”
“Inescapable!” She grinned, plush lips a contrast to the wiry narrowness of her face and body. “I’m going to go take my mandated nap. If you have any sense you will too. You’re on the away team, you know.”
Cynthia’s startle broke the cookie in half. “Read the memo,” Hester advised, not unkindly. “And get some sleep while you can. There’s unlikely to be much time to rest once we reach the Charles Dexter Ward.”
Part Two
The corpse of the Charles Dexter Ward hung ten degrees off the plane of the ecliptic, in a crevice of spacetime where it was very unlikely that anyone would just stumble across it. Cynthia had been called to the bridge for the first time in her tenure as ship’s surgeon aboard the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. She stood behind the President’s chair, wishing Professor Wandrei were somewhere in sight. She’d been too nervous to ask after his current whereabouts, but an overheard comment suggested he was at his instruments below. She, on the other hand, was watching the approach to the ruined liveship with her own eyes, on screens and through the biggest expanse of transparent crystal anywhere on the ship.
She rather wished she wasn’t.
The boojum was a streamlined shape tumbling gently in the midst of its own web of tentacles. Inertia twisted them in corkscrews as the boojum rotated grandly around its center of mass, drifting further and further from the solar system’s common plane. It was dark, no bioluminescence revealing the details of its lines. Only the sun’s rays gently cupping the curve of the hull gave it form and mass.
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 Doctor 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 Caitlín 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 Caitlín 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 blond 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, Doctor. 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 Caitlín 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.”
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 28