'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 doorframe 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 corpses 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 land 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, he thought. 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, 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?'
'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?'
