Ship Who Searched

by Mercedes Lackey

  Philip was not inclined to be coaxed and would not give in to bullying. So it was in a decidedly belligerent state of mind that he disembarked from his shuttle onto the docks of the Pride of Albion. Like every hospital station, this one affronted him with its sterile white walls and atmosphere of self-importance.

  There was someone waiting—obviously for him—in the reception area. Someone in a Moto-Chair. A handsome young man with thick dark hair and a thin, ascetic face.

  If they think they can soften me up by assigning me to someone they think I won’t dare be rude to—he thought savagely, as the young man glided the Chair toward him. Conniving beggars—

  “Professor Brogen?” said the ridiculously young, vulnerable-looking man, holding out his hand. “I’m Doctor Sorg.”

  “If you think I’m going to—” Brogen began, not reaching out to take it—then the name registered on him and he did a classic double-take. “Doctor Sorg? Doctor Uhua-Sorg?”

  The young man nodded, just the barest trace of a smile showing on his lips.

  “Doctor Kennet Uhua-Sorg?” Brogen asked, feeling as if he’d been set up, yet knowing he had set up himself for this particular fall.

  “Yes indeed,” the young man replied. “I take it that you weren’t—ah—expecting me to meet you in person.”

  A chance for an out—not a graceful one, but an out—and Brogen took it. “Hardly,” he replied brusquely. “The Chief of Neurosurgery and Neurological Research usually does not meet a simple professor on behalf of an ordinary child.”

  “Tia is far from ordinary, Professor,” Doctor Sorg responded, never once losing that hint of smile. “Any more than you are a ‘simple’ professor. But, if you’ll follow me, you’ll find out about Tia for yourself.”

  Well, he’s right about one thing, Brogen thought grudgingly, after an hour spent in Tia’s company while hordes of interns and specialists pestered, poked and prodded her. She’s not ordinary. Any “ordinary” child would be having a screaming tantrum by now. She was an extraordinarily attractive child as well as a patient one; her dark hair had been cropped short to keep it out of the way, but her thin, pixie-like face and big eyes made her look like the model for a Victorian fairy. A fairy trapped in a fist of metal . . . tormented and teased by a swarm of wasps.

  “How much longer is this going to go on?” he asked Kennet Sorg in an irritated whisper.

  Kennet raised one eyebrow. “That’s for you to say,” he replied. “You are here to evaluate her. If you want more time alone with her, you have only to say the word. This is her second session for the day, by the way,” he added, and Brogen could have sworn there was a hint of—smugness?—in his voice. “She played host to another swarm this morning, between nine and noon.”

  Now Brogen was outraged, but on the child’s behalf. Kennet Sorg must have read that in his expression, for he turned his chair towards the cluster of white-uniformed interns, cleared his throat, and got their instant attention.

  “That will be all for today,” he said quietly. “If you please, ladies and gentlemen, Professor Brogen would like to have some time with Tia alone.”

  There were looks of disappointment and some even of disgust cast Brogen’s way, but he ignored them. The child, at least, looked relieved.

  Before he could say anything to Kennet Sorg, he realized that the doctor had followed the others out the door, which was closing behind his chair, leaving Brogen alone with the child. He cleared his own throat awkwardly.

  The little girl looked at him with a most peculiar expression in her eyes. Not fear, but wariness.

  “You’re not a Psych, are you?” she asked.

  “Well—no,” he said. “Not exactly. I’ll probably ask some of the same questions, though.”

  She sighed, and closed her blue eyes for a moment. “I’m very tired of having my head shrunk,” she replied forthrightly. “Very, very tired. And it isn’t going to make any difference at all in the way I think, anyway. It isn’t fair, but this—” she bobbed her chin at her chair “—isn’t going to go away because it isn’t fair. Right?”

  “Sad, but true, my dear.” He began to relax, and realized why. Kennet Sorg was right. This was no ordinary child; talking with her was not like talking to a child—but it was like talking to one of the kids in the shell program. “So—how about if we chat about something else entirely. Do you know any shellpersons?”

  She gave him an odd look. “They must not have told you very much about me,” she said. “Either that, or you didn’t pay very much attention. One of my very best friends is a brainship—Moira Valentine-Maya. She gave me Theodore.”

  Theodore? Oh—right. The bear—He cast a quick glance over towards the bed—and there was the somber-looking little bear in a Courier Service shirt that he’d been told about.

  “Did you ever think about what being in a shell must be like?” he asked, fishing for a way to explain the program to her without letting her know she was being evaluated.

  “Of course I did!” she said, not bothering to hide her scorn. “I told Moira that I wanted to be just like her when I grew up, and she laughed at me and told me all about what the schools were like and everything—”

  And then, before he could say anything, the unchildlike child proceeded to tell him about his own program. The brainship side, at any rate.

  Pros and cons. From having to be able to multi-task, to the thrill of experiencing a singularity and warp-space firsthand. From being locked forever in a metal skin, to the loneliness of knowing that you were going to outlive all your partners but the last . . .

  “I told her that I guessed I didn’t want to go in when I figured out that you could never touch anybody again,” she concluded, wearily. “I know you’ve got sensors to the skin and everything, but that was what I didn’t like. Kind of funny, huh?”

  “Why?” he asked without thinking.

  “Because now—I can’t touch anybody. And I won’t ever again. So it’s kind of funny. I can’t touch anyone anymore, but I can’t be a brainship either.” The tired resignation in her voice galvanized him.

  “I don’t know why you couldn’t,” he said, aware that he had already made up his mind, and both aghast and amused at himself. “There’s room in this year’s class for another couple of new candidates; there’s even room in the brainship category for one or two pupils.”

  She blinked at him, then blurted, “But they told me I was too old!”

  He laughed. “My dear, you wouldn’t be too old if you were your mother’s age. You would have been a good shell-program candidate well past puberty.” He still couldn’t believe this child; responsible, articulate, flexible. . . . Lars and Kennet Sorg had been right. It made him wonder how many other children had been rejected out of hand, simply because of age—how many had been lost to a sterile existence in an institution, just because they had no one as persistent and as influential as Kennet Sorg to plead their cases.

  Well, one thing at a time. Grab this one now. Put something in place to take care of the others later. “I’m going to have to go through the motions and file the paperwork—but Tia, if you want, you can consider yourself recruited this very instant.”

  “Yes!” she burst out. “Oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes! Oh, please, thank you, thank you so much—” Her cheeks were wet with tears, but the joy on her face was so intense that it was blinding. Professor Brogen blinked and swallowed a lump in his throat.

  “The advantage of recruiting someone your age,” he said, ignoring her tears and his tickling eyes, “is that you can make your career path decision right away. Shellpersons don’t all go into brainships—for instance, you could opt for a career with the Institute; they’ve been asking to hire a shellperson to head their home-base research section for the last twenty years. You could do original research on the findings of others—even your parents’ discoveries. You could become a Spaceport Administrator, or a Station Administrator. You could go into law, or virtually any branch of science. Even medicine. With the synaptic
links we have, there is no career you cannot consider.”

  “But I want to be a brainship,” she said firmly.

  Brogen took a deep breath. While he agreed with her emotionally—well, there were some serious drawbacks. “Tia, a lot of what a brainship does is—well, being a truck driver or a cabby. Ferrying people or things from one place to another. It isn’t very glamorous work. It is quite dangerous, both physically and psychologically. You would be very valuable, and yet totally unarmed, unless you went into the military branch, which I don’t think you’re suited for, frankly. You would be a target for thieves and malcontents. And there is one other thing; the ship is very expensive. In my not-so-humble opinion, brainship service is just one short step from indentured slavery. You are literally paying for the use and upkeep of that ship by mortgaging yourself. There is very little chance of buying your contract out in any reasonable length of time unless you do something truly spectacular or take on very dangerous duties. The former isn’t likely to happen in ordinary service—and you won’t be able to exchange boring service for whatever your fancy is.”

  Tia looked stubborn for a moment, then thoughtful. “All of that is true,” she said, finally. “But—Professor, Dad always said I had his astrogator genes, and I was already getting into tensor physics, so I have the head for starflight. And it’s what I want.”

  Brogen turned up his hands. “I can’t argue with that. There’s no arguing with preferences, is there?” In a way, he was rather pleased. As self-possessed as Tia was, she would do very well in brainship service. And as stable as she seemed to be, there was very little chance of her having psychological problems, unless something completely unforeseen came up.

  She smiled shyly. “Besides, I talked this over with Moira—you know, giving her ideas on how she could get some extra credits to help with all her fines for bouncing her brawns? Since she was with Archeology and Exploration as a courier, there were lots of chances for her to see things that the surveyors might not, and I kind of told her what to look for. I kind of figured that with my background, it wouldn’t be too hard to get assigned to A and E myself, and I could do the same things, only better. I could get a lot of credits that way. And once I owned my ship—well, I could do whatever I wanted.”

  Brogen couldn’t help himself; he started to laugh. “You are quite the young schemer, did you know that?”

  She grinned, looking truly happy for the first time since he had seen her. Now that he had seen the real thing, he recognized all her earlier “smiles” for the shams that they had been.

  Leaving her here would have been a crime. A sin.

  “Well, you can consider yourself recruited,” he said comfortably. “I’ll fill out the paperwork tonight, databurst it to the schools as soon as I finish, and there should be a confirmation waiting for us when we wake up. Think you can be ready to ship out in the morning?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said happily.

  He rose and started to leave—then paused for a moment.

  “You know,” he said, “you were right. I really didn’t pay too much attention to the file they gave me on you, since I was so certain that—well, never mind. But I am terribly curious about your name. Why on earth did your parents call you ‘Hypatia’?”

  Tia laughed out loud, a peal of infectious joy.

  “I think, Professor Brogen,” she said, “that you’d better sit back down!”

  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.