Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  CHAPTER THREE

  CenCom's softperson operator had a pleasant voice and an equally pleasant habit of not starting a call with a burst of static or an alert-beep. "XH One-Oh-Three-Three, you have an incoming transmission. Canned message beam."

  Tia tore herself away from the latest papers on the Salomon-Kildaire Entities with a purely mental sigh of regret. Oh, she could take in a databurst and scan the papers at the same time, certainly, but she wanted to do more than simply scan the information. She wanted to absorb it, so that she could think about it later in detail. There were nuances to academic papers that simple scanning wouldn't reveal; places where you had to know the personality of the author in order to read between the lines. Places where what wasn't written were as important as what was.

  "Go ahead, CenCom," she replied, wondering who on earth—or off it, for that matter—could be calling her.

  Strange how we've been out of Terran subspace for so long, and yet we still use expressions like "how on earth" . . . there's probably a popular-science paper in that.

  The central screen directly opposite the column she was housed in flickered for a moment, then filled with the image of a thin-faced man in an elaborate Moto-Chair. No—more than a Moto-Chair; this one was kind of a platform for something else. She saw what could only be an APU, and a short-beam broadcast unit of some kind. It looked like his legs and waist were encased in the bottom half of space armor!

  But there was no mistaking who was in the strange exoskeleton. Doctor Kenny.

  "Tia, my darling girl, congratulations on your graduation!" Kenny said, eyes twinkling. "You should—given the vagaries of the CenCom postal system—have gotten your graduation present from Lars and Anna and me. I hope you liked it—them—"

  The graduation present had arrived on time, and Tia had been enthralled. She loved instrumental music, synthcom in particular, but these recordings had special meaning for any shellperson, for they had been composed and played by David Weber-Tcherkasky, a shellperson himself, and they were not meant for the limited ears of softpeople. The composer had made use of every note of the aural spectrum, with super-complexes of overtones and counterpoint that left softpersons squinting in bewilderment. They weren't for everyone—not even for some shellpersons—but Tia didn't think she would ever get tired of listening to them. Every time she played them, she heard something new.

  "—anyway, I remembered you saying in your last transmission how much you liked Lanz Manhem's synthcom recordings, and Lars kept telling me that Tcherkasky's work was to Manhem's what a symphony was to birdsong." Kenny shrugged and grinned. "We figured that it would help to while away the in-transit hours for you, anyway. Anna said the graduation was stellar—I'm sorry I couldn't be there, but you're looking at the reason why."

  He made a face and gestured down at the lower half of his body. "Moto-Prosthetics decided in their infinite wisdom that since I had benefited from their expertise in the past, I owed them. They convinced the hospital Admin Head that I was the only possible person to test this contraption of theirs. This is supposed to be something that will let me stroll around a room—or more importantly, stand in an operating theater for as long as I need to. When it's working, that is." He shook his head. "Buggy as a new software system, let me tell you. Yesterday the fardling thing locked up on me, with one foot in the air. Wasn't I just a charming sight, posing in the middle of the hall like a dancer in a Greek frieze! Think I'm going to rely on my old Chair when I really need to do something, at least for a while."

  Tia chuckled at the mental image of Kenny frozen in place and unable to move.

  He shook his head and laughed. "Well, between this piece of—ah—hardware, and my patients, I had to send Anna as our official deputation. Hope you've forgiven Lars and me, sweetheart—"

  A voice, warm and amused, interrupted Doctor Kenny. "There was just a wee problem with my getting leave, after all," Lars said, over the office speakers, as Kenny grinned. "And they simply wouldn't let me de-orbit the station and take it down to the schools for the graduation ceremony. Very inconsiderate of them, I say."

  Tia had to laugh at that.

  "That just means you'll have to come visit me. Now that you're one of the club, far-traveler, we'll have to exchange softie-jokes. How many softies does it take to change a lightbulb?"

  Kenny made a rude noise. Although he looked tired, Tia noted that he seemed to be in very good spirits. There was only one thing that combination meant; he'd pulled off another miracle. "I resemble that remark," he said. "Anyway, Lars got your relay number, so you'll be hearing from us—probably more often than you want! We love you, lady! Big Zen hugs from both of us!"

  The screen flickered and went blank; Tia sighed with contentment. Lars had been the one to come up with "Zen hugs"—"the hugs that you would get, if we were there, if we could hug you, but we aren't, and we can't"—and he and Kenny began using them in their weekly transmissions to Tia all through school. Before long her entire class began using the phrase, so pointedly apt for shellpeople, and now it was spreading across known space. Kenny had been amused, especially after one of his recovering patients got the phrase in a transmission from his stay-at-home, techno-phobic wife!

  Well, the transmission put the cap on her day, that was certain. And the perfect climax to the beginning of her new life. Anna and her parents at the graduation ceremony, Professor Brogen handing out the special awards she'd gotten in Xenology, Diplomacy, and First Contact Studies, Moira showing up at the landing field the same day she was installed in her ship, still with Tomas, wonder of wonders. . . .

  Having Moira there to figuratively hold her hand during the nasty process of partial anesthesia while the techs hooked her up in her column had been worth platinum.

  She shuddered at the memory. Oh, they could describe the feelings (or rather, lack of them) to you, they could psych you up for experience, and you thought you were ready, but the moment of truth, when you lost everything but primitive com and the few sensors in the shell itself . . . was horrible. Something out of the worst of nightmares.

  And she still remembered what it had been like to live with only softperson senses. She couldn't imagine what it was like for those who'd been popped into a shell at birth. It had brought back all the fear and feeling of helplessness of her time in the hospital.

  It had been easier with Moira there. But if the transfer had been a journey through sensory-deprivation hell, waking up in the ship had been pure heaven.

  No amount of simulator training conveyed what it really felt like, to have a living, breathing ship wrapped around you.

  It was a moment that had given her back everything she had lost. Never mind that her "skin" was duralloy metal, her "legs" were engines, her "arms" the servos she used to maintain herself inside and out. That her "lungs" and "heart" were the life-support systems that would keep her brawn alive. That all of her senses were ship's sensors linked through brainstem relays. None of that mattered. She had a body again! That was a moment of ecstasy no one plugged into a shell at birth would ever understand. Moira did, though . . . and it had been wonderful to be able to share that moment of elation.

  And Tomas understood, as only a brawn-partner of long-standing could. Tomas had arranged for Theodore Edward Bear to have his own little case built into the wall of the central cabin as his graduation present. "And decom anyone who doesn't understand," he said firmly, putting a newly cleaned Ted behind his plexi panel and closing the door. "A brawn is only a brawn, but a bear is a friend for life!"

  So now the solemn little blue bear in his Courier Service shirt reigned as silent supervisor over the central cabin, and to perdition with whatever the brawns made of him. Well, let them think it was some kind of odd holo-art. Speaking of which, the next set of brawn-candidates was due shortly. We'll see how they react to Ted.

  Tia returned to her papers, keeping a running statistical analysis and cross-tabulations on anything that seemed interesting. And there were things that seemed to be showing
up, actually. Pockets of mineral depletions in the area around the EsKay sites; an astonishing similarity in the periodicity and seasonality of the planets and planetoids. Insofar as a Mars-type world could have seasons, that is. But the periodicity—identical to within an hour. Interesting. Had they been that dependent on natural sunlight? Come to think of it—yes, solar distances were very similar. And they were all Sol-type stars.

  She turned her attention to her parents' latest papers, letting the EsKay discoveries stew in the back of her mind. Pota and Braddon were the Schliemanns of modern archeology, but it wasn't the EsKays that brought them fame, at least, not directly. After Tia's illness, they couldn't bring themselves to return to their old dig, or even the EsKay project—and for once, the Institute committees acted like something other than AIs with chips instead of hearts. Pota and Braddon were reassigned to a normal atmosphere water-world of high volcanic activity and thousands of tiny islands with a good population of nomadic sentients, something as utterly unlike the EsKay planets as possible. And it had been there that they made their discovery. Tracing the legends of the natives, of a king who first defied the gods and then challenged them, they replicated Schliemann's famous discovery of ancient Troy, uncovering an entire city buried by a volcanic eruption. Perfectly preserved for all time. For this world and these people, it was the equivalent of an Atlantis and Pompeii combined, for the city was of Bronze Age technology while the latter-day sentients were still struggling along with flint, obsidian, and shell, living in villages of no more than two hundred. While the natives of the present day were amphibious, leaning towards the aquatic side, these ancients were almost entirely creatures of dry land. . . .

  The discovery made Pota and Braddon's reputation; there was more than enough there to keep fifty archeologists busy for a hundred years. Ta'hianna became their life-project, and they rarely left the site anymore. They even established a permanent residence aboard a kind of glorified houseboat.

  Tia enjoyed reading their papers—and the private speculations they had brought her, with some findings that weren't in the papers yet—but the Ta'hianna project simply didn't give her the thrill of mystery that the EsKays did.

  And—there was one other thing. Years of analyzing every little nuance of those dreadful weeks had made her decide that what had happened to her could just as easily happen to some other unwitting archeologist. Or even—another child.

  Only finding the homeworld of the EsKays would give the Institute and Central World's Medical the information they needed to prevent another tragedy like Tia's.

  If Tia had anything at all to say about it, that would never happen again. The next person infected might not be so lucky. The next person, if an adult, or even a child unfortunate enough to be less flexible and less intelligent than she had been, would likely have no choice but to spend the remainder of a fairly miserable life in a Moto-Chair and a room. . . .

  "XH One-Oh-Three-Three, your next set of brawn-candidates is ready," CenCom said, interrupting her brooding thoughts. "You are going to pick one of these, aren't you?" the operator added wearily.

  "I don't know yet," she replied, levelly. "I haven't interviewed them." She had rejected the first set of six entirely. CenCom obviously thought she was being a prima donna. She simply thought she was being appropriately careful. After all, since she was officially assigned to A and E with special assignment to the Institute, she had gotten precisely what she expected—a ship without Singularity Drive. Those were top-of-the-line, expensive, and not the sort of thing that the Institute could afford to hire. So, like Moira, she would be spending a lot of time in transit. Unlike Moira, she did not intend to find herself bouncing brawns so often that her buy-out had doubled because of the fines.

  Spending a lot of time in transit meant a lot of time with only her brawn for company. She wanted someone who was bright, first of all. At least as bright as Tomas and Charlie. She wanted someone who would be willing to add her little crusade to the standard agenda and give it equal weight with what they had officially been assigned. She rather thought she would like to have a male, although she hadn't rejected any of the brawns just because they were female.

  Most of all, she wanted someone who would like her; someone who would be a real partner in every sense. Someone who would willingly spend time with her when he could be doing other things; a friend, like Kenny and Anna, Moira and Lars.

  And someone with some personality. Two of the last batch—both females—had exhibited all the personality of a cube of tofu.

  That might do for another ship, another brain that didn't want to be bothered with softpersons outside of duty, but she wanted someone she could talk to! After all, she had been a softperson once.

  "Who's first?" she asked CenCom, lowering her lift so that he—or she—could come aboard without having to climb the stairs.

  "That'll be Donning Chang y Narhan," CenCom replied after a moment. "Really high marks in the Academy."

  She scanned the databurst as Donning crossed the tarmac to the launch pad; he'd gotten high marks all right, though not stellar. Much like her; in the top tenth of the class, but not the top one percent. Very handsome, if the holo was to be believed; wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, sculptured face with holo-star looks—sculptured body, too. But Tia was wary of good looks by now. Two of the first lot had been gorgeous; one had been one of the blocks of tofu, with nothing between the ears but what the Academy had put there, and the other had only wanted to talk about himself.

  Movement outside alerted her to Donning's arrival; to her annoyance, he operated the lift manually instead of letting her handle it.

  To her further annoyance, he treated her like some kind of superior AI; he was obviously annoyed with having to go through an interview in the first place and wanted to be elsewhere.

  "Donning Chang y Narhan, reporting," he said in a bored tone of voice. "As ordered." He proceeded to rattle off everything that had been in the short file, as if she couldn't access it herself. He did not sit down. He paid no attention to Ted.

  "Have you any questions?" he asked, making it sound as if questions would only mean that she had not been paying attention.

  "Only a few," she replied. "What is your favorite composer? Do you play chess?"

  He answered her questions curtly, as if they were so completely irrelevant that he couldn't believe she was asking them.

  She obliged him by suggesting that he could leave after only a handful of questions; he took it with bad grace and left in a hurry, an aroma of scorched ego in his wake.

  "Garrison Lebrel," CenCom said, as Donning vacated the lift.

  Well, Garrison was possible. Good academic marks, not as high as Donning's but not bad. Interest in archeology . . . she perked up when she saw what he was interested in. Nonhumans, especially presumed extinct space-going races, including the EsKays!

  Garrison let her bring him in and proved to be talkative, if not precisely congenial. He was very intense.

  "We'll be spending a lot of time in transit," he said. "I wasn't able to keep up with the current literature in archeology while I was in the Academy, and I planned to be doing a lot of reading."

  Not exactly sociable. "Do you play chess?" she asked hopefully. He shook his head. "But I do play sennet. That's an ancient Egyptian game—I have a very interesting software version I could install; I doubt it would take you long to learn it, though it takes a lifetime to master."

  The last was said a bit smugly. And there had been no offer from him to learn her game. Still, she did have access to far more computing power than he did; it wouldn't take her more than an hour to learn the game, if that.

  "I see that your special interest is in extinct spacegoing races," she ventured. "I have a very strong background in the Salomon-Kildaire Entities."

  He looked skeptical. "I think Doctor Russell Gaines-Barklen has probably dealt with them as fully as they need to be, although we'll probably have some chances to catch things survey teams miss. That's the benefit of
being trained to look for specifics."

  She finally sent him back with mixed feelings. He was arrogant, no doubt about it. But he was also competent. He shared her interests, but his pet theories differed wildly from hers. He was possible, if there were no other choices, but he wasn't what she was looking for.

  "Chria Chance is up next," CenCom said when she reported she was ready for the next. "But you won't like her."

  "Why, because she's got a name that's obviously assumed?" Neither CenCom nor the Academy cared what you called yourself, provided they knew the identity you had been born with and the record that went with it. Every so often someone wanted to adopt a pseudonym. Often it was to cover a famous High Family name—either because the bearer was a black sheep, or because (rarely) he or she didn't want special treatment. But sometimes a youngster got a notion into his or her head to take on a holostar-type name.

  "No," CenCom replied, not bothering to hide his amusement. "You won't like her because—well, you'll see."

  Chria's records were good, about like Garrison's—with one odd note in the personality profile. Nonconformist, it said.

  Well, there was nothing wrong with that. Pota and Braddon were certainly not conformists in any sense.

  But the moment that Chria stepped into the central room, Tia knew that CenCom was right.

  She wore her Academy uniform, all right—but it was a specially tailored one. Made entirely of leather; real leather, not synthetic. And she wore it entirely too well for Tia to feel comfortable around her. For the rest, she was rapier-thin, with a face like a clever fox and hair cut aggressively short. Tia already felt intimidated, and she hadn't even said anything yet!

  Within a few minutes worth of questions, Chria shook her head. "You're a nice person, Tia," she said forthrightly, "and you and I would never partner well. I'd run right over you, and you'd sit there in your column, fuming and resentful, and you'd never say a word." She grinned with feral cheer. "I'm a carnivore, a hunter. I need someone who'll fight back! I enjoy a good fight!"