Federations

“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.”