The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “How many shares in total?” A full share sounded good — until you found out the salvage rights were divided ten thousand ways.

  “A full share is one percent,” he said.

  No self-discipline in space could have kept Cynthia from rocking back in her chair — and self-discipline had never been her strong point. It was too much. This was a trap.

  Even just one percent of the scrap rights of a ship like that would be enough to live on frugally for the rest of her days. With her pick of drugs and equipment—

  This was a trap.

  And a chance to practice medicine again. A chance to read the medical files of an Arkhamer archive ship.

  She had thirteen hours to find a better offer, by the letter of the law. Then it was the Big Nothing, the breathsucker, and her eyes freezing in their tears. And there wasn’t a better offer, or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

  “I’ll come.”

  Wandrei gave her another of his beatific smiles. He slid a tablet across the rented desk. Cynthia pressed her thumb against it. A prick and a buzz, and her blood and print sealed the contract. “Get your things. You can meet us at Dock Six in thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll come now,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “One more thing—”

  That creak as he stood was the spring of the trap’s jaw slamming shut. Cynthia had heard the like before. She sat and waited, prim and stiff.

  “The Charles Dexter Ward?”

  She nodded.

  “It was a liveship.” He might have interpreted her silence as misunderstanding. “A boojum, I mean.”

  “An ambulance ship and a liveship? We’re all going to die,” Cynthia said.

  Wandrei smiled, standing, light on his feet in the partial gravity. “Everybody dies,” he said. “Better to die in knowledge than in ignorance.”

  The sleek busy tug Veronica Lodge hauled the cumbersome, centuries-accreted monstrosity that was the Jarmulowicz Astronomica out of Saturn’s gravity well. Cynthia stood at one of the Arkhamer ship’s tiny fish-eye observation ports watching the vast misty curve of the pink-gray world beneath, hazy and serene, turning in the shadows of her moons and rings. Another steelship was putting off from Faraday Station simultaneously. She was much smaller and newer and cleaner than the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, which in turn was dwarfed by the boojums who flashed bioluminescent messages at each other around Saturn’s moons. The steelship looked like it was headed in-system, and for a moment, Cynthia wished she were on board, even knowing what would be waiting for her. The Richard Trevithick had not been not her first disaster.

  She could not say, though, that she had been lured on board the Jarmulowicz Astronomica under false pretenses. The ship’s crew of scholars and their families badly needed a doctor. Uncharitably, Cynthia suspected that they needed specifically a non-Arkhamer doctor, who would keep her mind on her patients.

  The lost doctor — Martha Patterson Snead had been her name, for she had come to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica from the Snead Mathematica — might have been a genius, but as the Jarmulowicz Astronomica said goodbye to the Veronica Lodge and started on her stately way toward the Charles Dexter Ward, Cynthia found herself treating a great number of chronic vitamin deficiencies and other things that a non-genius but conscientious doctor should have been able to keep on top of.

  Cynthia’s patients were very polite and very grateful, but she couldn’t help being aware that they would have preferred a genius who let them die of scurvy.

  Other than nutritional deficiencies, the various cancers of space, and prenatal care, the most common reason for Cynthia to see patients were the minor emergencies and industrial accidents inevitably suffered in lives spent aboard a geriatric steelship requiring constant maintenance and repair. She treated smashed fingers, sprained wrists, and quite a few minor decompression injuries. She was splinting the ankle of a steamfitter’s apprentice and undergraduate gas-giant meteorologist — many Arkhamers seemed to have two roles, one relating to ship’s maintenance and one relating to academic research — when the young man frowned at her and said, “You aren’t what I expected.”

  She’d forgotten his name. She glanced at the chart; he was Jaime MacReady Burlingame, traded from the Burlingame Astrophysica Terce. He had about twenty Terran years and a shock of orange hair that would not lie down, nor observe anything resembling a part. “Because I’m not an Arkhamer?” she asked, probing the wrist joint to be sure it really was a sprain and not a cracked bone.

  “Everybody knows you’re not one of us.” He twitched slightly.

  She held him steady, and noted the place. But when she glanced at his face, she realized his distress was over having said something more revealing than he intended. She said, “Some people aren’t pleased about it?”

  He looked away. She reached for the inflatable splint, hands gentle, and did not push. People told doctors things, if the doctors had the sense to keep quiet.

  His pale, spotted fingers curled and uncurled. Finally, he answered, “Wandrei got in some trouble with the Faculty Senate, I hear. My advisor says Wandrei was high-handed, and he’s lucky he has tenure.”

  Cynthia kept her head down, eyes on her work. Jaime sighed as she fitted the splint and its numbing, cooling agents began to take effect. “That should help bring the inflammation down,” she told him. But as Jaime thanked her and left, she wondered if she ought to be grateful to Wandrei or if she ought to consider him her patron.

  But she wasn’t grateful — he had taken advantage of her desperation, which was not a matter for gratitude even if it had saved her life. And the Arkhamers didn’t seem to think in terms of patronage and clients. They talked about apprentices and advisors, and nobody expected Cynthia to be Wandrei’s apprentice.

  She also noticed, as the days drew out into weeks, that nobody was approaching her about taking an apprentice of her own. She was just as glad, for she had no illusions about her own abilities as a teacher, and no idea how one person could go about imparting a medical school education from the ground up, but it made her feel acutely isolated — on a ship that was home to several hundred people — and she lay in her hammock during her sleep shift and worried about what would happen to the shy, solemn Arkhamer children when she was no longer on board. At other times, she reminded herself that the Jarmulowicz Astronomica was part of a network of Arkhamer ships, and — as Wandrei had said — they would acquire another doctor. They were probably in the middle of negotiating the swap or the lease or the marriage or whatever it was they did. But when she was supposed to be asleep, she worried.

  They knew they were nearing the Charles Dexter Ward for days before he showed up on even the longest of the long-range scanners. The first sign was the cheshires, the tentacled creatures — so common on Arkhamer vessels — which patrolled the steelship’s cabins and corridors, hunting toves and similar trans-dimensional nuisances that might slip through the interstices in reality and cause a potentially deadly infestation. One reason Arkhamer ships were tolerated at stations like Faraday was because the cheshires would hunt station vermin just as heartily. Boojums took care of their own pest control.

  Normally, the cheshires — dozens or hundreds of them, Cynthia never did get a good count — slept and hunted seemingly at random. One might spend hours crouched before the angle of two intersecting bulkheads, tendrils all focused intently on one seemingly random point, its soft body slowly cycling through an array of colors that could mean anything or nothing at all . . . only to get up and slink away after a half-day of stalking as if nothing had happened. Cynthia often had to shoo two or three out of her hammock at bunk time, and like station cats they often returned to steal body heat once she was asleep. But as the Jarmulowicz Astronomica began encountering the spacetime distortions that inevitably accompanied the violent death of a boojum, the ship’s cheshires became correspondingly agitated. They traveled in groups, and any time Cynthia encountered two sleeping, there was also one keeping watch . . . if a cre
ature with sixteen eyes and no eyelids could be said to sleep. Cynthia tried not to speculate about their dreams.

  The second sign was the knocking. Random, frantic banging, as if something outside the ship wanted to come in. It came at unpredictable intervals, and would sometimes be one jarring boom and sometimes go on for five minutes. It upset the cheshires even more; they couldn’t hear the headache-inducing noise, being deaf, but they could feel the vibrations. Every time Cynthia was woken in her sleep shift by that terrible knocking, she’d find at least one and usually more like three cheshires under her blankets with her, trying to hide their wedge-shaped heads between her arms and her body. She’d learned from her child patients, who lost their shy formality in talking about their playmates, how to pet the cheshires, how to use her voice in ways they could feel, and she would lie there in the dim green glow of the one working safety light and pet the trembling cheshires until she fell asleep again.

  The knocking was followed by what the Arkhamers called pseudoghosts — one of them explained the phenomenon in excruciating detail while Cynthia cleaned and stitched a six-inch long gash on her forearm: not the spirits of the dead, but microbursts of previous and future time. “Or, rather, future probabilities, since the future has yet to be determined.”

  “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 schooled 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 space-time. 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 her” — 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 Sick 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 sec
ond 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 overheard 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 farther and farther 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.