Ship Who Searched

by Mercedes Lackey

  Now she cuddled Ted against her cheek, and she could pretend that it was her own arm holding him there.

  With no one there to see, slow, hot tears formed in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She leaned her head to the left a little, so that they would soak into Ted’s soft blue fur and not betray her.

  “It’s not fair,” she whispered to Ted, who seemed to nod with sad agreement as she rubbed her cheek against him. “It’s not fair. . . .”

  I wanted to find the EsKay homeworld. I wanted to go out with Mum and Dad and be the one to find the homeworld. I wanted to write books. I wanted to stand up in front of people and make them laugh and get excited, and see how history and archeology aren’t dead, they’re just asleep. I wanted to do things they make holos out of. I wanted—I wanted—

  I wanted to see things! I wanted to drive grav-sleds and swim in a real lagoon and feel a storm and—

  —and I wanted—

  Some of the scenes from the holos she’d been watching came back with force now, and memories of Pota and Braddon, when they thought she was engrossed in a book or a holo, giggling and cuddling like tweenies. . . .

  I wanted to find out about boys. Boys and kisses and—

  And now nobody’s ever going to look at me and see me. All they’re going to see is this big metal thing. That’s all they see now. . . .

  Even if a boy ever wanted to kiss me, he’d have to get past a half ton of machinery, and it would probably bleep an alarm.

  The tears poured faster now, with the darkness of the room to hide them.

  They wouldn’t have put me in this thing if they thought I was going to get better. I’m never going to get better. I’m only going to get worse. I can’t feel anything, I’m nothing but a head in a machine. And if I get worse, will I go deaf? Blind?

  “Teddy, what’s going to happen to me?” she sobbed. “Am I going to spend the rest of my life in a room?”

  Ted didn’t know, any more than she did.

  “It’s not fair, it’s not fair, I never did anything,” she wept, as Ted watched her tears with round, sad eyes, and soaked them up for her. “It’s not fair. I wasn’t finished. I hadn’t even started yet. . . .”

  Kenny grabbed a tissue with one hand and snapped off the camera-relay with the other. He scrubbed fiercely at his eyes and blew his nose with a combination of anger and grief. Anger, at his own impotence. Grief, for the vulnerable little girl alone in that cold, impersonal hospital room, a little girl who was doing her damnedest to put a brave face on everything.

  In public. He was the only one to watch her in private, like this, when she thought there was no one to see that her whole pose of cheer was nothing more than a facade.

  “I wasn’t finished. I wasn’t even started yet.”

  “Damn it,” he swore, scrubbing at his eyes again and pounding the arm of his chair. “Damn it anyway!” What careless god had caused her to choose the very words he had used, fifteen years ago?

  Fifteen years ago, when a stupid accident had left him paralyzed from the waist down and put an end—he thought—to his dreams for med school?

  Fifteen years ago, when Doctor Harwat Kline-Bes was his doctor and had heard him weeping alone into his pillow?

  He turned his chair and opened the viewport out into the stars, staring at them as they moved past in a panorama of perfect beauty that changed with the rotation of the station. He let the tears dry on his cheeks, let his mind empty.

  Fifteen years ago, another neurologist had heard those stammered, heartbroken words, and had determined that they would not become a truth. He had taken a paraplegic young student, bullied the makers of an experimental Moto-Chair into giving the youngster one—then bullied the dean of the Meyasor State Medical College into admitting the boy. Then he had seen to it that once the boy graduated, he got an internship in this very hospital—a place where a neurologist in a Moto-Chair was no great curiosity, not with the sentients of a hundred worlds coming in as patients and doctors. . . .

  A paraplegic, though. Not a quad. Not a child with a brilliant, flexible mind, trapped in an inert body.

  Brilliant mind. Inert body. Brilliant—

  An idea blinded him, it occurred so suddenly. He was not the only person watching Tia—there was one other. Someone who watched every patient here, every doctor, every nurse. . . . Someone he didn’t consult too often, because Lars wasn’t a medico, or a shrink—

  But in this case, Lars’ opinion was likely to be more accurate than anyone else’s on this station. Including his own.

  He thumbed a control. “Lars,” he said shortly. “Got a minute, buddy?”

  He had to wait for a moment. Lars was a busy guy—though hopefully at this hour there weren’t too many demands on his conversational circuits. “Certainly, Kenny,” Lars replied after a few seconds. “How can I help the neurological wunderkind of Central Worlds MedStation Pride of Albion? Hmm?” The voice was rich and ironic; Lars rather enjoyed teasing everyone onboard. He called it “therapeutic deflation of egos.” He particularly liked deflating Kenny’s—he had said more than once that everyone else was so afraid of being “unkind to the poor cripple” that they danced on eggs to avoid telling him when he was full of it.

  “Can the sarcasm, Lars,” Kenny replied. “I’ve got a serious problem that I want your opinion on.”

  “My opinion?” Lars sounded genuinely surprised. “This must be a personal opinion—I’m certainly not qualified to give you a medical one.”

  “Most definitely, a very personal opinion, one that you are the best suited to give. On Hypatia Cade.”

  “Ah.” Kenny thought that Lars’ tone softened considerably. “The little child in the Neuro unit, with the unchildlike taste in holos. She still thinks I’m the AI. I haven’t dissuaded her.”

  “Good, I want her to be herself around you, for the gods of space know she won’t be herself around the rest of us.” He realized that his tone had gone savage and carefully regained control over himself before he continued. “You’ve got her records and you’ve watched the kid herself. I know she’s old for it—but how would she do in the shell program?”

  A long pause. Longer than Lars needed simply to access and analyze records. “Has her condition stabilized?” he asked, cautiously. “If it hasn’t—if she goes brain-inert halfway into her schooling—it’d not only make problems for anyone else you’d want to bring in late, it’ll traumatize the other shell-kids badly. They don’t handle death well. I wouldn’t be a party to frightening them, however inadvertently.”

  Kenny massaged his temple with the long, clever fingers that had worked so many surgical miracles for others and could do nothing for this little girl. “As far as we can tell anything about this—disease—yes, she’s stable,” he said finally. “Take a look in there and you’ll see I ordered a shotgun approach while we were testing her. She’s had a full course of every anti-viral neurological agent we’ve got a record of. And non-invasive things like a course of ultra—well, you can see it there. I think we killed it, whatever it was.”

  Too late to help her. Damn it.

  “She’s brilliant,” Lars said cautiously. “She’s flexible. She has the ability to multi-thread, to do several things at once. And she’s had good, positive reactions to contact with shellpersons in the past.”

  “So?” Kenny asked, impatiently, as the stars passed by in their courses, indifferent to the fate of one little girl. “Your opinion.”

  “I think she can make the transition,” Lars said, with more emphasis than Kenny had ever heard in his voice before. “I think she’ll not only make the transition, she’ll do well.”

  He let out the breath he’d been holding in a sigh.

  “Physically, she is certainly no worse off than many in the shellperson program, including yours truly,” Lars continued. “Frankly, Kenny, she’s got so much potential it would be a crime to let her rot in a hospital room for the rest of her life.”

  The careful control Lars normally had over
his voice was gone; there was passion in his words that Kenny had never heard him display until this moment. “Got to you, too, did she?” he said dryly.

  “Yes,” Lars said, biting off the word. “And I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t mind telling you that she had me in—well, not tears, but certainly the equivalent.”

  “Good for you.” He rubbed his hands together, warming cold fingers. “Because I’m going to need your connivance again.”

  “Going to pull another fast one, are you?” Lars asked with ironic amusement.

  “Just a few strings. What good does being a stellar intellect do me, if I can’t make use of the position?” he asked rhetorically. He shut the viewport and pivoted his chair to face his desk, keying on his terminal and linking it directly to Lars and a very personal database. One called “Favors.” “All right, my friend, let’s get to work. First, whose strings can you jerk? Then, who on the political side has influence in the program, of that set, who owes me the most, and of that subset, who’s due here the soonest?”

  A Sector Secretary-General did not grovel, nor did he gush, but to Kenny’s immense satisfaction, when Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan came aboard the Pride of Albion, the very first thing he wanted, after all the official inspections and the like were over, was to meet with the brilliant neurologist whose work had saved his nephew from the same fate as Kenny himself. He already knew most of what there was to know about Kenny and his meteoric career.

  And Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan was not the sort to avoid an uncomfortable topic.

  “A little ironic, isn’t it?” the Secretary-General said, after the firm handshake, with a glance at Kenny’s Moto-Chair. He stood up and did not tug self-consciously at his conservative dark blue tunic.

  Kenny did not smile, but he took a deep breath of satisfaction. Doubly good. No more calls, we have a winner.

  “What, that my injury was virtually identical to Peregrine’s?” he replied immediately. “Not ironic at all, sir. The fact that I found myself in this position was what prompted me to go into neurology in the first place. I won’t try to claim that if I hadn’t been injured, and hadn’t worked so hard to find a remedy for the same injuries, someone else might not have come up with the same answer that I did. Medical research is a matter of building on what has come before, after all.”

  “But without your special interest, the solution might well have come too late to do Peregrine any good,” the Secretary-General countered. “And it was not only your technique, it was your skill that pulled him through. There is no duplication of that—not in this sector, anyway. That’s why I arranged for this visit. I wanted to thank you.”

  Kenny shrugged deprecatingly. This was the most perfect opening he’d ever seen in his life—and he had no intention of letting it get away from him. Not when he had the answer to Tia’s prayers trapped in his office.

  “I can’t win them all, sir,” he said flatly. “I’m not a god. Though there are times I wish most profoundly that I was, and right now is one of them.”

  The Great Man’s expression sobered. The Secretary-General was not just a Great Man because he was an excellent administrator; he was one because he had a human side, and that human and humane side could be touched. “I take it you have a case that is troubling you?” Then, conscious of the fact that he Owed Kenny, he said the magic words. “Perhaps I can help?”

  Kenny sighed, as if he were reluctant to continue the discussion. Wouldn’t do to seem too eager. “Well—would you care to see some tape of the child?”

  Child. Children were one of the Great Man’s weaknesses. He had sponsored more child-oriented programs than any three of his predecessors combined. “Yes. If it would not be violating the child’s privacy.”

  “Here—” Kenny flicked a switch, triggering the holo-record he already had keyed up. A record he and Anna had put together. Carefully edited, carefully selected, compiled from days of recordings with Lars’ assistance and the psych-profile of the Great Man to guide them. “I promise I won’t take more than fifteen minutes of your time.”

  The first seven and a half minutes of this recording were of Tia at her most attractive; being very brave and cheerful for the interns and her parents. “This is Hypatia Cade, the daughter of Pota Andropolous-Cade and Braddon Maartens-Cade,” he explained, over the holo. Quickly he outlined her background and her pathetic little story, stressing her high intelligence, her flexibility, her responsibility. “The prognosis isn’t very cheerful, I’m afraid,” he said, watching his chrono carefully to time his speech with the end of that section of tape. “No matter what we do, she’s doomed to spend the rest of her life in some institution or other. The only way she could be at all mobile would be through direct synaptic connections—well, we don’t do that here—they can only link in that way at Lab Schools, the shellperson project—”

  He stopped, as the holo flickered and darkened. Tia was alone.

  The arm of her chair reached out and grasped the sad little blue bear, hidden until now by the tray table and a pillow. It brought the toy in close to her face, and she gently rubbed her cheek against its soft fur coat. The lightning-bolt of the Courier Service on its shirt stood out clearly in this shot . . . one reason why Kenny had chosen it.

  “They’ve gone, Ted,” she whispered to her bear. “Mum and Dad—they’ve gone back to the Institute. There’s nobody left here but you, now.”

  A single bright tear formed in one corner of her eye and slowly rolled down her cheek, catching what little light there was in the room.

  “What? Oh, no, it’s not their fault, Ted—they had to. The Institute said so, I saw the dispatch. It said—it said since I w-w-wasn’t going to get any b-b-b-better there was no p-p-p-point in—in—wasting v-v-valuable t-t-time—”

  She sobbed once, and buried her face in the teddy bear’s fur.

  After a moment, her voice came again, muffled. “Anyway, it hurts them so m-much. And it’s s-s-so hard to be b-brave for them. But if I cried, th-they’d only feel w-worse. I think m-maybe it’s b-better this way, don’t you? Easier. F-for every-b-b-b-body. . . .”

  The holo flickered again; same time, nearly the same position, but a different day. This time she was crying openly, tears coursing down her cheeks as she sobbed into the bear’s little shirt. “We’ve given her the complete run of the library and the holo collection,” Kenny said, very softly. “Normally, they keep her relatively amused and stimulated—but just before we filmed this, she picked out an episode of The Stellar Explorers—and—well—her parents said she had planned to be a pilot, you see—”

  She continued to cry, sobbing helplessly, the only understandable words being “—Teddy—I wanted—to go—I wanted to see the stars—”

  The holo flickered out, as Kenny turned the lights in his office back up. He reached for a tissue and wiped his eyes without shame. “I’m afraid she affects me rather profoundly,” he said, and smiled weakly. “So much for my professional detachment.”

  The Great Man blinked rapidly to clear his own eyes. “Why isn’t something being done for that child?” he demanded, his voice hoarse.

  “We’ve done all we can—here,” Kenny said. “The only possibility of giving that poor child any kind of a life is to get her into the shellperson program. But the Psychs at the Laboratory Schools seem to think she’s too old. They wouldn’t even send someone to come evaluate her, even though the parents petitioned them and we added our own recommendations. . . .”

  He let the sentence trail off significantly. The Secretary-General gave him a sharp look. “And you don’t agree with them, I take it?”

  Kenny shrugged. “It isn’t just my opinion,” he said smoothly. “It’s the opinion of the staff Psych assigned to her, the shellperson running this station, and a brainship friend of hers in the Courier Service. The one,” he added delicately, “who gave her that little bear.”

  Mentioning the bear sold the deal; Kenny could see it in the Great Man’s expression. “We’ll just see about that,
” the Secretary-General said. “The people you talked to don’t have all the answers—and they certainly don’t have the final say.” He stood up and offered Kenny his hand again. “I won’t promise anything—but don’t be surprised if there’s someone from the Laboratory Schools here to see her in the next few days. How soon can you have her ready for transfer, if they take her?”

  “Within twelve hours, sir,” Kenny replied, secretly congratulating himself for getting her parents to sign a writ-of-consent before they left. Of course, they thought it was for experimental procedures.

  Then again, Pota and Braddon had been the ones who’d broached the idea of the shellperson program to the people at the Laboratory Schools and been turned down because of Tia’s age.

  “Twelve hours?” The Great Man raised an eyebrow. Kenny returned him look for look.

  “Her parents are under contract to the Archeological Institute,” he explained. “The Institute called them back out into the field, because their parental emergency leave was up. They weren’t happy, but it was obey or be fired. Hard to find another job in that field that isn’t with the Institute.” He coughed. “Well, they trusted my work, and made me Tia’s full guardian before they left.”

  “So you have right-of-disposition and guardianship. Very tidy.” The Secretary-General’s wry smile showed that he knew he had been maneuvered into this—and that he was not annoyed. “All right. There’ll be someone from the schools here within the week. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me about the girl, he should finish his evaluation in two days. At the end of those two days . . .” One eyebrow raised significantly. “Well, it would be very convenient if he could take the new recruit back with him, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kenny said happily. “It would indeed, sir.”

  If it hadn’t been for Doctor Uhua-Sorg’s reputation and the pleas of his former pupil, Lars Mendoza, Philip Gryphon bint Brogen would have been only too happy to tell the committee where to stick the Secretary-General’s request. And what to do with it after they put it there. One did not pull strings to get an unsuitable candidate into the shell program! Maybe the Secretary-General thought he could get away with that kind of politicking with Academy admissions, but he was going to find out differently here.