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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
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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, 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 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 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?"
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"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
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