“Medtech Boni?” he said, keying the intercom to her cabin. “I believe I have something for you here.”
She rubbed sleep from her face, framed in the intercom screen. “Already? What time—oh. I must have been tireder than I realized. I’ll be right up, Pilot Officer.”
Ferrell stretched, and began an automatic series of isometrics in his chair. It had been a long and uneventful watch. He would have been hungry, but what he contemplated now through the viewscreens subdued his appetite.
Boni appeared promptly, sliding into the seat beside him. “Oh, quite right, Pilot Officer.” She unshipped the controls to the exterior tractor beam, and flexed her fingers before taking a delicate hold.
“Yeah, there wasn’t much doubt about that one,” he agreed, leaning back and watching her work. “Why so tender with the tractors?” he asked curiously, noting the low power level she was using.
“Well, they’re frozen right through, you know,” she replied, not taking her eyes from her readouts. “Brittle. If you play hot-shot and bang them around, they can shatter. Let’s stop that nasty spin, first,” she added, half to herself. “A slow spin is all right. Seemly. But that fast spinning you get sometimes—it must be very unrestful for them, don’t you think?”
His attention was pulled from the thing in the screen, and he stared at her. “They’re dead, lady!”
She smiled slowly as the corpse, bloated from decompression, limbs twisted as though frozen in a strobe-flash of convulsion, was drawn gently toward the cargo bay. “Well, that’s not their fault, is it?—one of our fellows, I see by the uniform.”
“Bleh!” he repeated himself, then gave vent to an embarrassed laugh. “You act like you enjoy it.”
“Enjoy? No… But I’ve been in Personnel Retrieval and Identification for nine years, now. I don’t mind. And of course, vacuum work is always a little nicer than planetary work.”
“Nicer? With that godawful decompression?”
“Yes, but there are the temperature effects to consider. No decomposition.”
He took a breath, then let it out carefully. “I see. I guess you would get—pretty hardened, after a while. Is it true you guys call them corpse-sicles?”
“Some do,” she admitted. “I don’t.”
She maneuvered the twisted thing carefully through the cargo bay doors and keyed them shut. “Temperature set for a slow thaw, and he’ll be ready to handle in a few hours,” she murmured.
“What do you call them?” he asked as she rose.
“People.”
She awarded his bewilderment a small smile, like a salute, and withdrew to the temporary mortuary set up next to the cargo bay.
On his next scheduled break he went down himself, drawn by morbid curiosity. He poked his nose around the doorframe. She was seated at her desk. The table in the center of the room was as yet unoccupied.
“Uh—hello.”
She looked up with her quick smile. “Hello, Pilot Officer. Come on in.”
“Uh, thank you. You know, you don’t really have to be so formal. Call me Falco, if you want,” he said, entering.
“Certainly, if you wish. My first name is Tersa.”
“Oh, yeah? I have a cousin named Tersa.”
“It’s a popular name. There were always at least three in my classes at school.” She rose and checked a gauge by the door to the cargo bay. “He should be just about ready to take care of, now. Pulled to shore, so to speak.”
Ferrell sniffed and cleared his throat, wondering whether to stay or excuse himself. “Grotesque sort of fishing.” Excuse myself, I think.
She picked up the control lead to the float pallet and trailed it after her into the cargo bay. There were some thumping noises, and she returned, the pallet drifting behind her. The corpse was in the dark blue of a deck officer, and covered thickly with frost, which flaked and dripped upon the floor as the medtech slid it onto the examining table. Ferrell shivered with disgust.
Definitely excuse myself. But he lingered, leaning against the door-frame at a safe distance.
She pulled an instrument, trailing its lead to the computers, from the crowded rack above the table. It was the size of a pencil, and emitted a thin blue beam of light when aligned with the corpse’s eyes.
“Retinal identification,” Tersa explained. She pulled down a pad-like object, similarly connected, and pressed it to each of the monstrosity’s hands. “And fingerprints,” she went on. “I always do both, and cross-match. The eyes can get awfully distorted. Errors in identification can be brutal for the families. Hm. Hm.” She checked her readout screen. “Lieutenant Marco Deleo. Age twenty-nine. Well, Lieutenant,” she went on chattily, “let’s see what I can do for you.”
She applied an instrument to its joints, which loosened them, and began removing its clothes.
“Do you often talk to—them?” inquired Ferrell, unnerved.
“Always. It’s a courtesy, you see. Some of the things I have to do for them are rather undignified, but they can still be done with courtesy.”
Ferrell shook his head. “I think it’s obscene, myself.”
“Obscene?”
“All this horsing around with dead bodies. All the trouble and expense we go to, collecting them. I mean, what do they care? Fifty or a hundred kilos of rotting meat. It’d be cleaner to leave them in space.”
She shrugged, unoffended, undiverted from her task. She folded the clothes and inventoried the pockets, laying out their contents in a row.
“I rather like going through the pockets,” she remarked. “It reminds me of when I was a little girl, visiting in someone else’s home. When I went upstairs by myself, to go to the bathroom or whatever, it was always a kind of pleasure to peek into the other rooms and see what kind of things they had, and how they kept them. If they were very neat, I was always very impressed—I’ve never been able to keep my own things neat. If it was a mess, I felt I’d found a secret kindred spirit. A person’s things can be a kind of exterior morphology of their mind—like a snail’s shell, or something. I like to imagine what kind of person they were, from what’s in the pockets. Neat, or messy. Very regulation, or full of personal things… Take Lieutenant Deleo, here. He must have been very conscientious. Everything regulation, except this little vid disc from home. From his wife, I’d imagine. I think he must have been a very nice person to know.”
She placed the collection of objects carefully into its labeled bag.
“Aren’t you going to listen to it?” asked Ferrell.
“Oh, no. That would be prying.”
He barked a laugh. “I fail to see the distinction.”
“Ah.” She completed the medical examination, readied the plastic body bag, and began to wash the corpse. When she worked her way down to the careful cleaning around the genital area, necessary because of sphincter relaxation, Ferrell fled at last.
That woman is nuts. I wonder if it’s the cause of her choice of work, or the effect?
It was another full day before they hooked their next fish. Ferrell had a dream, during his sleep cycle, about being on a deep-sea boat and hauling up nets full of corpses to be dumped, wet and shining as though with iridescent scales, in a huge pile in the hold. He awoke from it sweating, but with very cold feet. It was with profound relief that he returned to the pilot’s station and slid into the skin of his ship. The ship was clean, mechanical and pure, immortal as a god; one could forget one had ever owned a sphincter muscle.
“Odd trajectory,” he remarked, as the medtech again took her place at the tractor controls.