Federations

Ferrell was less than thrilled, but the prospect of an extra day of piloting had its attractions, and he gave a grudging consent. Her reasoning proved itself; before the day was half done, they turned up another gruesome relic.

“Oh,” muttered Ferrell, when they got a close look. It had been a female officer. Boni reeled her in with enormous tenderness. He didn’t really want to go watch, this time, but the medtech seemed to have come to expect him.

“I—don’t really want to look at a woman blown up,” he tried to excuse himself.

“Mm,” said Tersa. “Is it fair, though, to reject a person just because they’re dead? You wouldn’t have minded her body a bit when she was alive.”

He vented a little macabre laugh. “Equal rights for the dead?”

Her smile twisted. “Why not? Some of my best friends are corpses.”

He snorted.

She grew more serious. “I’d sort of like the company, on this one.” So he took up his usual station by the door.

The medtech laid out the thing that had been a woman upon her table, undressed, inventoried, washed, and straightened it. When she finished, she kissed the dead lips.

“Oh, God,” cried Ferrell, shocked and nauseated. “You are crazy! You’re a damn, damn necrophiliac! A lesbian necrophiliac, at that!” He turned to go.

“Is that what it looks like, to you?” Her voice was soft, and still unoffended. It stopped him, and he looked over his shoulder. She was looking at him as gently as if he had been one of her precious corpses. “What a strange world you must live in, inside your head.”

She opened a suitcase, and shook out a dress, fine underwear, and a pair of white embroidered slippers. A wedding dress, Ferrell realized. This woman was a bona fide psychopath . . . 

She dressed the corpse and arranged its soft dark hair with great delicacy, before bagging it.

“I believe I shall place her next to that nice tall Barrayaran,” she said. “I think they would have liked each other very well, if they could have met in another place and time. And Lieutenant Deleo was married, after all.”

She completed the label. Ferrell’s battered mind was sending him little subliminal messages; he struggled to overcome his shock and bemusement, and pay attention. It tumbled into the open day of his consciousness with a start.

She had not run an identification check on this one.

Out the door, he told himself, is the way you want to walk. I guarantee it. Instead, timorously, he went over to the corpse and checked its label. Ensign Sylva Boni, it said. Age twenty. His own age . . . 

He was trembling, as if with cold. It was cold, in that room. Tersa Boni finished packing up the suitcase, and turned back with the float pallet.

“Daughter?” he asked. It was all he could ask.

She pursed her lips and nodded.

“It’s—a helluva coincidence.”

“No coincidence at all. I asked for this sector.”

“Oh.” He swallowed, turned away, turned back, face flaming. “I’m sorry I said—”

She smiled her slow sad smile. “Never mind.”

• • •

They found yet one more bit of mechanical debris, so agreed to run another cycle of the search spiral, to be sure that all possible trajectories had been outdistanced. And yes, they found another; a nasty one, spinning fiercely, guts split open from some great blow and hanging out in a frozen cascade.

The acolyte of death did her dirty work without once so much as wrinkling her nose. When it came to the washing, the least technical of the tasks, Ferrell said suddenly, “May I help?”

“Certainly,” said the medtech, moving aside. “An honor is not diminished for being shared.”

And so he did, as shy as an apprentice saint washing his first leper.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.”

Yes, he thought, the good face pain. But the great—they embrace it.

SOMEONE IS STEALING THE GREAT THRONE ROOMS OF THE GALAXY HARRY TURTLEDOVE