Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (39 page)

Which was a death sentence too, and a slower one than going down the throat of a boojum along with the rest of the trash.

So it was cold desperation that had driven Cynthia here, to the sharp side of this steel desk in a rented station office, staring into the face of a bald old Arkhamer whose jowls quivered with every word he spoke. His skin was so dark she could just about make out the patterns of tattoos against the pigment, black on black-brown.

"Your past doesn't bother me, Doctor Feuerwerker," he said. His sleeves were too short for his arms, so five centimeters of fleshy wrist protruded when he gestured. "I'll be very plain with you. We have need of your skills, and there is no guarantee any of us will be returning from the task we need them for."

Cynthia folded her hands over her knee. She had dropped a few credits on a public shower and a paper suit before the interview, but anybody could look at her haggard face and the bruises on her elbows and tell she'd been sleeping in maintenance corridors.

"You mentioned this was a salvage mission. I understand there may be competition. Pirates. Other dangers."

"No to mention the social danger of taking up with an Arkhamer vessel."

"If I stay here, I face the social danger of an airlock. I am a good doctor, Professor Wandrei. I wasn't stripped of my license for any harm to a patient."

"No-oo," he agreed, drawing it out. She knew he must have her CV in his heads-up display. "But rather, for seeking after forbidden knowledge."

She shrugged and gestured around the rented office. "Galileo and Derleth and Chen sought forbidden knowledge, too. That got us this far." Onto a creaky, leaky, Saturn-orbit station that stank of ammonia despite exterminators working double shifts to keep the toves down. She watched his eyes and decided to take a risk. "An Arkhamer Professor ought to be sympathetic to that."

Wandrei's lips were probably lush once, but years and exposure to the radiation that pierced inadequately shielded steelships had left them lined and dry. Despite that, and the jowls, and the droop of his eyelids, his homely face could still rearrange itself beautifully around a smile.

Cynthia waited long enough to be sure he wouldn't speak before adding, "You know I don't have any equipment."

"We have some supplies. And the vessel we're going to salvage is an ambulance ship, the
Charles Dexter Ward
. You should be able to procure everything you need aboard it. In my position as a senior officer of the
Jarmulowicz Astronomica
, I am prepared to offer you a full share of the realizations from the salvage expedition, as well as first claim on any medical goods or technology."

Suspicion tickled Cynthia's neck. "What else do you expect to find aboard an ambulance, Professor?"

"Data," he said. "Research. The
Jarmulowicz Astronomica
is an archive ship."

Next dicey question: "What happened to your ship's surgeon?"

"Aneurysm," he said. "She was terribly young, but it took her so fast—there was nothing anyone could do. She'd just risen from apprentice, and hadn't yet taken one of her own. We'll get another from a sister ship eventually—but there's not another Arkhamer vessel at Faraday now, or within three days' travel, and we'll lose the salvage if we don't act immediately."

"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 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 creature 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.