Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Page 30
“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 scolded 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 spacetime. 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 him”—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 the medical 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 ove
rheard 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 Dr. 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 blonde 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, Dr. 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.”
“When I was a child, I wanted to jump ship on Leng Station and become a mechanic,” Hester said cheerfully. “I tried a couple of times, but they always brought me back.” She piloted the Caitlín R. Kiernan in a low swooping arc across the Charles Dexter Ward’s forward tentacles, and they could see that Wandrei’s guess had been correct; the Calico had succeeded in prying open one of the Charles Dexter Ward’s airlocks, and the ship was moored partly within the boojum.
Cynthia hoped the Arkhamers had a better way in than that.
§
As it turned out, they didn’t. And Cynthia was unsettled to watch Meredith and Hester strap sidearms on over their pressure suits. Were they really expecting that much trouble from the crew of the Calico? And didn’t salvage law give her first picking? Or would the Arkhamers’ earlier intercept and beacon trump that?
Cynthia had never encountered a dead boojum before, and she had braced herself with the knowledge that there would be any number of things she wasn’t expecting. But no amount of bracing or foreknowledge could ever have been sufficient for the stench of the Charles Dexter Ward—a fetor so intense Cynthia would have sworn she could pick up the scent through her helmet, and before the airlock cycled. What that said about the spaceworthiness of the Caitlín R. Kiernan, Cynthia did not care to consider.
What the cycling outer airlock door revealed was more of a shock than it might have been if she hadn’t already been dragging her tongue across her teeth in a futile effort to scrape the stench of death away. The membranes between the struts were not glossy with health, appearing dull and tacky instead, but the amazing stink that left her lightheaded and pained even within the oxygenated confines of her helmet had led her to expect—well, what course did decay take, on a boojum? Writhing infestations? Deliquescence? Suppurating lesions?
There was none of that.
Just the ridged stretch of intact-seeming corridor disappearing into the curvature of the dead ship, and the reek of putrescence. Don’t throw up in your helmet, Cynthia told herself. That would be one sure way of making things even less pleasant.
The Charles Dexter Ward retained good atmospheric pressure—though Cynthia couldn’t have attested to the air quality—and she didn’t need to tongue on her suit intercom for Wandrei and the others to hear her when she said, “Isn’t anything we salvage from this mess going to be unusable due to contamination?”
Meredith said, “Anything sealed should be fine. And we wouldn’t want unsealed medical supplies anyway.”
“I can smell it through my suit.”
Wandrei looked at her with curious intensity. “Really?” he said, brow wrinkl
ing behind his faceplate. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Maybe your suit has a bad filter,” Meredith said. “We do our best to check them, but, well.” She shrugged—a clumsy gesture, but Cynthia understood. When everything the Arkhamers owned, from their clothes to their ship, was secondhand, salvaged, scavenged, there was only so much they could do.
“That’s probably it,” she said, although she wasn’t sure—and from the look he gave her before he turned away, Wandrei wasn’t sure, either.
“Let’s see if we can’t find the crew of the Calico,” he said.
I am walking in a dead body, Cynthia said periodically to herself, but aside from the eye-blurring stench that no one else could smell, the only sign of death was the darkness. Every boojum Cynthia had ever traveled on had used its bioluminescence to illuminate any space its human crew and passengers were using. But the Charles Dexter Ward stayed dark.
They proceeded cautiously. Cynthia remembered Hester saying the crew of the Charles Dexter Ward might still be alive somewhere in their dead ship, and there was the nagging question of the Calico’s crew—a question that got naggier and naggier the farther they went without finding a single trace of them.
“We know they weren’t on their ship,” Hester muttered. “Corinne hailed them until she was hoarse.”
“And they haven’t been salvaging,” Meredith said. “None of the doors since the airlock has been forced open.”
“My question,” Cynthia said, “is how long they’ve been here. And if they aren’t salvaging, what are they doing?”
That was two questions, and actually she had a third: what did Wandrei know that she and Hester and Meredith didn’t? He didn’t seem worried, and she had noticed after a while that, although he wasn’t in a hurry, he did seem to know where he was going. She didn’t want to be the one to mention it, though. Not a good idea for the politely tolerated outsider.