Heris Serrano

by Elizabeth Moon

  Several days later, Ronnie called again. "I found out what was upsetting them," he said. "And you need to know."

  "What?"

  "Aunt Cecelia left you the yacht in her will."

  "She what? She couldn't have."

  "I thought you didn't know," he said, sounding smug. "They think you did. It was one of the first things she did when she got here, apparently. Went to her attorney and had her will changed."

  "But she shouldn't have—there's no reason—"

  "Well, her attorney argued about it, but she insisted; you know her. And when the doctors said the stroke might have been caused by a drug of some kind, the attorney thought of you, because you would benefit."

  "But she's not dead." That popped out; the rest of her mind snagged on "might have been caused by a drug" and hung there, unable to think further.

  "She could have died. Besides, you know the law—if she's not competent in law for long enough—I forget how long it is—they open her will and distribute her assets under court guardianship."

  "You mean someone can inherit before she's dead?" Heris found she could deal with the lesser curiosity while the greater dread sank deeper into her mind. She had never heard of such a possibility.

  "Yes, but with some controls, so if she's suddenly competent again she can regain control." From Ronnie's tone, this was something most people knew about. Most people as rich as his family, at least.

  "But—I'm not the sole beneficiary, am I?"

  "No, but you're the only one outside family or long-term business associates. She left her forty-seven percent interest in her breeding and training stables to the woman who's owned the other fifty-three percent for the past twenty years, for instance. But that's been expected. The yacht wasn't. And for some reason Mother's really annoyed about it. I think she's still upset with Aunt Cecelia for not liking the decorator she chose. Besides, we don't have a yacht, and Mother's always wanted one."

  "You don't?" Keep him talking. Maybe then she could process that dire possibility, figure out what to do.

  "No . . . my father always said it made more sense to travel on commercial liners, and if you really needed off-schedule travel you could always charter. We've done that. Of course we have shuttles." To Heris, private deep-space ships made more sense than shuttles, and she said so. Ronnie explained. "If you have your own shuttle, you're never stuck onplanet. And no one knows for sure if you're traveling yourself, which they would in a public shuttle. Aunt Cecelia didn't agree; she'd take the public shuttles as often as not, even if my father offered her the use of ours. Now Bunny's family keeps shuttles on several worlds and a yacht. That's the most convenient, but my father says it's far too expensive." Heris gathered her scattered wits and came up with one idea.

  "Ronnie, is his daughter—Brun—back here now? Or could you find out?"

  "Brun? Oh, Bubbles's new name. Yes, she's here . . . why?"

  "Does her father know about Lady Cecelia?"

  "Yes, and Bubbles—Brun—says he's upset. Of course he would be; they've been friends all their lives."

  "Ask her to call me, will you? I'd like to see her, if possible."

  "Of course, but why?"

  Heris herself wasn't sure, but something glimmered at the back of her mind, something that might help Cecelia. "We had a long talk before we left Sirialis. I'd just like to chat with her."

  "Oh." She could tell from his expression that he thought this was a silly side issue, that she should stick to the problem of Cecelia's coma and the irate family. "Well . . . I'll tell her. Do you want her to come up there?"

  "If possible."

  Heris wanted to suggest that Brun take some precautions, but she was afraid Ronnie would waste time asking why. And after all, the girl wanted to be an adventurer—give her a chance to show any native talent.

  Brun called on an open line, direct to the desk at Heris's hostel. She sounded just like the petulant girl Heris had first met. "Captain Serrano!" Her upper-class accent speared through the conversation in the lounge. Heris sensed others listening to the overspill from the speaker. So much for talent. Brun went on. "Have you seen my blue jewel case?"

  "I beg your pardon." It was all Heris could think of, a reflex that meant nothing but bought a few seconds.

  "This is Bubbles, Bunny's daughter," the voice went on. "When we were on Lady Cecelia's yacht, I had my blue jewel case and now I can't find it. It's not at Sirialis, and it's not here—it must be on the yacht. Would you please look in the stateroom I was using, and send it to me?"

  For a moment Heris wondered if Brun had gone mad. Or if she'd given up the change of name and gone back to being a fluffhead. How could she be worrying about a jewel case with Cecelia in the hospital, in a coma? She could hear the annoyance in her own voice when she answered. "I'm sorry—Lady Cecelia's yacht is empty—everything was removed to storage because the yacht was to be redecorated, but now—"

  "But I need it!" Brun's voice whined. "I always wear that necklace at the family reunion, and it's next week, and if I don't wear it, Mother will want to know why, and—"

  "I'm sorry," Heris said. A glimmer of understanding broke through her irritation . . . if Brun was really that devious, she might indeed have talent. "You'd have to get into the storage facility, and I don't know . . ." She let her voice trail away.

  "I'll come up there," Brun said, suddenly decisive. "They'll have to let me in—you can introduce me; it's not like I'm a criminal or anything. I just want my own blue jewel case, and I know just where I must have left it, in the second drawer from the bottom in that bedside chest . . ."

  "But I'm not sure," Heris said, shaking her head for the benefit of the listeners in the hostel lounge. "I don't think they'll let anyone but Lady Cecelia's agent—"

  "But you are her agent," Brun said. "You can do it—I know you can. I'll be up there in—let's see—late tonight. I'll call." She broke the connection. Heris looked around and sighed dramatically.

  "The rich are different from you and me," said the clerk, with sympathy. Heris shrugged.

  "They think they are. Can you believe? She thinks she left something aboard Lady Cecelia's yacht months ago, and expected me to retrieve it. Of course everything's in sealed storage. Of course they aren't going to let her into it."

  "Who is she?" the man asked.

  "Lord Thornbuckle's youngest daughter. They call her Bubbles."

  "Ah—I've heard of her. They will let her in, bet you they do. Likely her father owns the company that owns the company that owns them. Might as well cooperate with that kind."

  * * *

  In person, Brun had indeed reverted to the fluffhead Bubbles. Her blonde hair, brushed into a wild aureole, had been tinted pink at the ends. She wore an outfit of pink and lime green which Heris assumed was an extreme of fashion; bright clattering bracelets covered both arms to the elbow.

  "Captain Serrano!" Her greeting almost went too far; Heris recognized the tension around the eyes that didn't fit the wide smile. "I'm simply devastated . . . I have to have that necklace."

  "Nice to see you again, miss." Heris couldn't bring herself to call the girl Bubbles, but "Brun" would break the fluffhead cover. "I've checked with the storage company; they will meet with you Mainshift tomorrow. Perhaps you could give me a few more details? They thought the chests in that stateroom had all been empty."

  "Oh, of course. Let's go eat somewhere—I'm starved. I'm sure the food's better at my hotel." And Brun turned away, clearly someone who expected flunkies to do as they were told. Heris saw the amused glances of the others in the lounge, and gave them a wry grin as she followed Brun out into the concourse.

  Chapter Seven

  Cecelia's first sensory impression was smell: not a pleasant scent, but a sharp, penetrating stink she associated with fear and pain. After a timeless rummage through the back shelves of memory, her mind decided it was medicinal, and that probably meant she was in a doctor's office. Gradually, over time she could not guess, she became aware of p
ressure. She lay on her back; she could feel the contact between a firm surface and her shoulders and her buttocks. She was less sure of her arms and legs . . . and in trying to feel their position realized in one stab of panic that she could not move.

  She did feel the leap her heart gave then, and she heard, as if from a great distance, the voices that chattered above her. Her mind rattled around the vast dark space it sensed, and reminded her of other unpleasant wakenings. The eighteenth fence at Wherrin, that bad drop that she'd misjudged in the mud. The time a new prospect had gone completely berserk under a roofed jump, and nearly killed her. She wondered what it had been this time . . . she couldn't quite remember. An event? Training? Foxhunting? Oddly, she couldn't even remember the horse—even any horse she'd worked recently.

  The voices above gave her no clue. No one asked her name or what had happened; no one spoke to her at all. A bad sign, that: she knew it from times she'd sat waiting outside for a hurt friend. A few of the technical terms sounded familiar, BP and cardiac function and perfusion. If she didn't know what they meant, she knew they meant something. But others . . . her mind tried to grasp the unfamiliar syllables, but they slipped away. Demyel-something and something about selective pathways and neuromuscular dis-something. The drug names she didn't expect to know, but she knew the voices discussed things to be put in this line or that. A harder pressure against her arm—at least she knew now that her arm was up there, not down here—might be an injection.

  It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt, and that scared her. If you didn't hurt, something really big was wrong. The longer it didn't hurt, the worse it was. If it was really bad—her mind shied away from the idea of spinal cord injury, brain injury—you would never hurt again, but that was worst. Sometimes even regeneration tanks wouldn't work on central nervous system injuries.

  If she could move something . . . she struggled, first to decide what to move, and then to move. An eyelid. She felt no movement, and the darkness did not lift.

  "A bit of excess activity there," someone said. Had she managed a movement she did not feel? She tried again. "Another tenth cc of motor inhibition," she heard. "And increase the primary decoupler one cc an hour." Inhibition? Decoupler? Just as the additional drugs pushed her beneath the surface of thought again, her mind made all the connections and nearly exploded in panic. No accident at all . . . someone had done this to her. On purpose. And she had no way to summon help. Damn, she thought. I was stupid. Heris was right. Hope she figures it out . . .

  She woke again, to the same medical-ward smells, the same darkness, the same inability to move or speak.

  "Hopeless, I'm afraid," she heard. She didn't recognize the voice. "There's been no change at all, nothing in the brain scans . . . look, here's the first. Massive intracranial bleed, typical cerebral accident. Probably all those years of riding, with repeated small concussions, caused significant weakening in the vascular attachments here and here—"

  Someone else was here, not a medical person. Someone who wanted to know if she was going to get well. Someone who cared. If she could only make a sound, a small movement, anything.

  "You can see the monitors yourself," the voice said, nearer now. "If we use a strong aversive stimulus—" Acrid fumes stung her nose; her brain screamed danger/poison/run. "—you see a very slight reaction in the brainstem, there. The fourth line. But she doesn't move. I can open an eye—" She felt the pressure on her eyelid, felt the movement across the eye itself, but saw nothing. "No change in pupil size, no response here. Cortical blindness. There's no evidence of auditory response, no indication of higher cortical functions."

  "Couldn't you have operated on the bleed?" The voice was male, used to authority, but Cecelia didn't recognize it. Certainly it wasn't her brother-in-law. "With all your facilities—"

  "Too diffuse, I'm sorry. We think branches of both cerebral arteries failed at once. As if she'd been repeatedly bludgeoned, but of course that wasn't the cause. I still think the years of riding had something to do with it, but I can't prove it. I've sent for her scans after the previous accidents."

  "Could it have been . . . a result of poisoning?" YES! Cecelia thought. Good man. Smart man. Of course it was poisoning.

  "I doubt it," the other voice said. "There are neurotoxins, of course, that mimic natural strokes. But the evidence from her scans is clear: this is bleeding." She heard a finger tap on something—a display, perhaps.

  "I didn't mean that it wasn't bleeding," the skeptical voice said. "I wondered if someone had induced the bleeding with a poison, perhaps a blood thinner or something of that sort."

  "Ah." The professional voice sounded more relaxed now. Of course it would. "According to her records, she wasn't taking any medication of that sort . . . and I don't know if they analyzed her blood for that in the hospital that first night. They should have, of course; I just presumed that if it were a drug it would be in the records when she was transferred here."

  So she had been somewhere else and was now who knew where? She wondered where she'd been when she first woke up. Was that the original hospital? Had it been the big downtown one, or the upper-class clinic near her sister's house?

  "The thing is," the skeptical voice said, "the family are concerned that she might have been under . . . er . . . undue influence, as it were, of someone. Until the formal proceedings, we cannot be sure, but the date of her last testamentary revision suggests that something happened recently. If there should be an unforeseen bequest, and if that individual had exerted undue influence, then there would have been . . . er . . ."

  "Motivation to cause her harm. I see, precisely."

  Damn. The fool. The utter, incompetent fool. Now whoever had done this would have a chance to blame it on the one person it couldn't be, and this stupid lawyer—she was sure it was a lawyer—had given them all they needed.

  "But that's another problem, and what we really need from you, doctor, is your assessment of prognosis. Is Lady Cecelia going to recover competency, or not? And if so, when? We have petitions of incompetency . . ."

  "As I said originally, we cannot hold out much hope of recovery. I would hate to be hasty, but . . . my professional opinion is that irreversible brain damage has occurred, and I would be willing to present the evidence to a court. Although I see no reason for haste—"

  "The statutes prescribe the waiting periods, doctor. It has been thirty days—" Thirty days. Thirty days. She had to scream, but she couldn't; she forced rage and panic down and listened. "—and petitions may be presented, although of course no final action will be taken just yet." A pause, during which she felt someone's gaze across her face, painful in its lack of caring. "It is curious, isn't it, that with so much damage she requires no life support?"

  "Unusual, but quite easily explained," said the doctor. She wanted to know his name, wanted to have some name to curse in the darkness. "See here—on this shot—the bleeds stopped short of areas regulating breathing, for instance. It's quite likely that she will live out her normal span."

  "Without rejuvenation treatments."

  "Oh, certainly. We couldn't recommend rejuvenation for someone in her condition. No, indeed."

  Normal span. Her mind calculated . . . at least another ten years, maybe twenty. If she didn't get pneumonia, if she didn't catch a virus. If whoever had done this didn't simply kill her.

  And why hadn't they killed her? Why this? Did someone know she was still alive, aware, inside, and was that person gloating over her suffering? If Heris's wicked admiral had been alive, she could have believed that of him.

  "I thought I saw a movement, a tremor," said the skeptical voice.

  "It's nothing," the doctor said. "Random discharges in peripheral nerves—she's due to be turned again, to prevent pressure sores. Even in these special beds . . . and they do have tremors sometimes. Breakdown products, perhaps, of the damage."

  "I see." She heard the footsteps, fading away, and the sigh and thud of a door opening, shutting again.

  She had heard a
nd understood. If their damned scans were any good, they'd know she could hear and understand. Had they bothered to look lately? Or were they lying, and displaying fake scans for anyone who visited? Thirty days . . . she'd been here for thirty days? Where was Heris? What had happened to the prince?

  Time had no meaning. She slept, she supposed, and woke again; it seemed like a moment of inattention rather than normal sleep. Sometimes she heard voices around her, and sometimes they talked about her; more often they talked of other things. She came to know one woman's voice, and built from her gossipy chatter a picture of someone with bright, avid eyes and a pursed mouth. Then another, who never added to the gossip, but had a satisfied chuckle, as if she were glad to hear bad things about others. The doctor who had talked to the lawyer came infrequently, but she always knew him.

  Scents merged with sounds, with pressures. She knew the smell of her own body and its output; she hated the wet warmth that turned cold too often before someone came to change her. She hated the hands that turned and moved her as if she were a slab of meat . . . she came to hate with special fervor a flowery perfume one pair of hands wore, hands colder and less deft than the others, belonging to a sharp, whining voice that complained of her incontinence.