Alex studied the two pictures, each of which showed the same bright-eyed, elfin child. An incredibly pretty child, dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a thin, delicate face and a smile that wouldn’t stop. “How did you get into the shellperson program?” he asked. “I thought they didn’t take anyone after the age of one!”
“They didn’t, until me,” she replied. “That was Doctor Kenny’s doing, and Lars, the systems manager for the hospital; they were convinced that I was flexible enough to make the transition—since I was intelligent enough to understand what had happened to me, and what it meant. Which was—” she added, “—complete life-support. No mobility.”
He shuddered. “I can see why you wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone else ever again.”
“Precisely.” She blanked the screens before he had a chance to study the pictures further. “After I turned out so well, Lab Schools started considering older children on a case-by-case basis. They’ve taken three, so far, but none as old as me.”
“Well, my lady—as remarkable as you are now, you must have been just as remarkable a child,” he told her, meaning every word.
“Flatterer,” she said, but she sounded pleased.
“I mean it,” he insisted. “I interviewed with two other ships, you know. None of them had your personality. I was looking for someone like Jon Chernov; they were more like AI drones.”
“You’ve mentioned Jon before—” she replied, puzzled. “Just what does he have to do with us?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” he blurted—then hit himself in the forehead with his hand. “Decom it, I didn’t! Jon’s a shellperson too; he was the supervisor and systems manager on the research station where my parents worked!”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “So that’s why—”
“Why what?”
“Why you treat me like you do—facing my column, asking permission to come aboard, asking me what kind of music I want in the main cabin—”
“Oh, you bet!” he said with a grin. “Jon made darn sure I had good shellsoft manners before he let me go off to the Academy. He’d have verbally blistered my hide if I ever forgot you’re here—and that you’re the part of the team that can’t go off to her own cabin to be alone.”
“Tell me about him,” she urged.
He had to think hard to remember the first time he ever started talking to Jon. “I think I first realized that he was around when I was about three, maybe two. My folks are chemtechs at one of the Lily-Baer research stations—there weren’t a lot of kids around at the time, because it was a new station and most of the personnel were unattached. There weren’t a lot of facilities for kids, and I guess what must have happened was that Jon volunteered to sort of babysit while my parents were at work. Wasn’t that hard—basically all he had to do was make sure that the door to my room stayed locked except when he sent in servos to feed me and so forth. But I guess I kind of fascinated him, and he started talking to me, telling me stories—then directing the servos in playing with me.” He laughed. “For a while my folks thought I was going through the ‘invisible friend’ stage. Then they got worried, because I didn’t grow out of it, and were going to send me to a headshrinker. That was when Jon interrupted while they were trying to make the appointment and told them that he was the invisible friend.”
Tia laughed. “You already knew that Moira and I have known each other for a long time—well, she was the CS ship that always serviced my folks’ digs, that was how I got to know her.”
“Gets you used to having a friend that you can’t see, but can talk to,” he agreed. “Well, once I started preschool, Jon lost interest for a while, until I started learning to play chess. He is quite a player himself; when he saw that I was beating the computer regularly, he remembered who I was and stepped in, right in the middle of a game. I was winning until he took over,” he recalled, still a little aggrieved.
“What can I say?” she asked rhetorically.
“I suppose I shouldn’t complain. He became my best friend. He was the one that encouraged my interest in archeology—and when it became obvious my parents weren’t going to be able to afford all the university courses that would take, he helped get me into the Academy. Did you know that a recommendation from a shellperson counts twice as much as a recommendation from anyone but a PTA and up?”
“No, I didn’t!” She sounded surprised and amused. “Evidently they trust our judgment.”
“Well, you’ve heard his messages. He’s probably as pleased with how things turned out as I am.” He spread his hands wide. “And that’s all there is to know about me.”
“Hardly,” she retorted dryly. “But it does clear up a few mysteries.”
When Alex hit his bunk that night, he found he was having a hard time getting to sleep. He’d always thought of Tia as a person—but now he had a face to put with the name.
Jon Chernov had shown him, once, what Jon would have looked like if he could have survived outside the shell. Alex had known that it was going to be hideous, and had managed not to shudder or turn away, but it had taken a major effort of will. After that it had just been easier not to put a face with the voice. There were completely nonhuman races that looked more human than poor Jon.
But Tia had been a captivatingly pretty child. She would have grown up into a stunning adult. Shoot, inside that shell, she probably is a stunning adult. A stunning, lifeless adult. Like a puppet with no strings; a sex-companion android with no hookups.
He had no desire to crack her column; he was not the sort to be attracted by anything lifeless. Feelie-porn had given him the creeps, and his one adolescent try with a sex-droid had sent him away feeling dirty and used.
But it made the tragedy of what had happened to her all the more poignant. Jon’s defects were such that it was a relief for everyone that he was in the shell. Tia, though . . .
But she was happy. She was as happy as any of his classmates in the Academy. So where was the tragedy? Only in his mind.
Only in his mind. . . .
CHAPTER SIX
Alex would have been perfectly happy if the past twelve hours had never happened.
He and Tia returned to Diogenes Base after an uneventful trip expecting to be sent out on another series of message-runs, only to learn that on this run, they would be carrying passengers. Those passengers were on the way from Central and the Institute by way of commercial liner and would not arrive for another couple of days.
That had given him a window of opportunity for a little shore leave, in a base-town that catered to some fairly heavy space-going traffic, and he had taken it.
Now he was sorry he had . . . oh, not for any serious reasons. He hadn’t gotten drunk, or mugged, or into trouble. No, he’d only made a fool out of himself.
Only.
He’d gone out looking for company in the spaceport section, hanging around in the pubs and food-bars. He’d gotten more than one invitation, too, but the one he had followed up on was from a dark-haired, blue-eyed, elfin little creature with an infectious laugh and a nonstop smile. “Bet” was her name, and she was a fourth-generation spacer, following in her family’s footloose tradition.
He hadn’t wondered what had prompted his choice—hadn’t even wondered why he had so deviated from his normal “type” of brown-haired, brown-eyed and athletic. He and the girl—who it turned out was the crew chief of an AI-freighter—had a good time together. They hit a show, had some dinner—and by mutual agreement, wound up in the same hotel room.
He still hadn’t thought about his choice of company; then came the moment of revelation.
When, in the midst of intimacy, he called her “Tia.”
He could have died, right then and there. Fortunately the young lady was understanding; Bet just giggled, called him “Giorgi” back, and they went on from there. And when they parted, she kissed him, and told him that his “Tia” was a lucky wench, and to give her Bet’s regards.
Thank the spirits of space he didn’t have to tell her the trut
h. All she’d seen was the CS uniform and the spacer habits and speech patterns; he could have been anything. She certainly wasn’t thinking “brawn” when she had picked him up, and he hadn’t told her what he did for the Courier Service.
Instead of going straight back to the ship, he dawdled; visited a multi-virtual amusement park, and took five of the wildest adventures it offered. It took all five to wash the embarrassment of his slip out of his recent memory, to put it into perspective.
But nothing would erase the meaning of what he had done. And it was just his good fortune—and Tia’s—that his partner hadn’t known who Tia was. Brawns had undergone Counseling for a lot less. CS had a nasty reputation for dealing with slips like that one. They wouldn’t risk one of their precious shellpersons in the hands of someone who might become so obsessed with her that he would try to get at the physical body.
He returned to the docks in a decidedly mixed state of mind, and with no ideas at all about what—if anything—he could do about it.
Tia greeted her brawn cheerfully as soon as he came aboard, but she left him alone for a little while he got himself organized—or as organized as Alex ever got. “I’ve got the passenger roster,” she said, once he’d stowed his gear. “Want to see them, see what we’re getting for the next couple of weeks?”
“Sure,” Alex replied, perking up visibly. He had looked tired when he came in; Tia reckoned shrewdly that he had been celebrating his shore leave a little too heavily. He wasn’t suffering from a hangover, but it looked to her as if he’d done his two-day pass to the max, squeezing twenty-two hours of fun into every twenty-four hour period. He dropped down into his chair and she brought up her screens for him.
“Here’s our team leader, Doctor Izak Hollister-Aspen.” The Evaluation team leader was an elderly man; a quad-doc, as thin as a grass stem, clean-shaven, silver-haired, and so frail-looking Tia was half-afraid he might break in the first high wind. “He’s got four doctorates, he’s published twelve books and about two hundred papers, and he’s been head of twenty-odd teams already. He also seems to have a pretty good sense of humor. Listen.”
She let the file-fragment run. “I must admit,” Aspen said, in a cracked and quavery voice, “there are any number of my colleagues who would say that I should sit behind my desk and let younger bodies take over this dig. Well,” he continued, cracking a smile. “I am going to do something like that. I’m going to sit behind my desk in my dome, and let the younger bodies of my team members take over the digging. Seems to me that’s close enough to count.”
Alex chuckled. “I like him already. I was afraid this trip was going to be a bore.”
“Not likely, with him around. Well, this is our second-in-command, double-doc Siegfried Haakon-Fritz. And if this lad had been in charge, I think it might have been a truly dismal trip.” She brought up the image of Fritz, who was a square-jawed, steely-eyed, stern-faced monument. He could have been used as the model for any ortho-Communist memorial statue to The Glorious Worker In Service To The State. Or maybe the Self-Righteous In Search Of A Convert. There was nothing like humor anywhere in the man’s expression. It looked to her as if his head might crack in half if he ever smiled. “This is all I have, five minutes of silent watching. He didn’t say a word. But maybe he doesn’t believe in talking when it’s being recorded.”
“Why not?” Alex asked curiously. “Is he paranoid about being recorded or something?”
“He’s a Practical Darwinist,” she told him.
“Oh, brother,” Alex replied with disgust. The Practical Darwinists had their own sort of notoriety, and Tia was frankly surprised to find one in the Institute at all. They were generally concentrated in the soft sciences—when they were in the sciences at all. Personally, Tia did not consider political science to be particularly scientific. . . .
“His political background is kind of dubious,” she continued, “but since there’s nothing anyone can hang on him, it simply says in the file that his politics have not always been those of the Institute. That’s bureaucratic double-talk for someone they would rather not trust, but have no reason to keep them out of positions of authority.”
“Got you.” Alec nodded. “So, we’ll just not mention politics around him, and we’ll make sure it’s one of the forbidden subjects in the main cabin. Who’s next?”
“These are our post-docs; they have their hard science doctorates, and now they’re working on their archeology doctorates.” She split her center screen and installed them both on it at once. “On the right, Les Dimand-Taylor, human; on the right, Treel rish-Yr nal-Leert, Rayanthan. Treel is female. Les has a Bio Doc, and Treel Xenology.”
“Hmm, for Treel wouldn’t Xenology be the study of humans?” Alex pointed out. Les was a very intense fellow, thin, heavily tanned, very fit-looking, but with haunted eyes. Treel’s base-type seemed to be cold-weather mammalian, as she had a pelt of very fine, dense brown fur that extended down onto her cheekbones. Her round, black eyes stared directly into the lens, seeing everything, and giving the viewer the impression that she was cataloging it all.
“No audio on the post-docs, just static file pictures,” she continued. “They’re attached to Aspen.”
“Not to Old Stone Face?” Alex asked. “Never mind. Any grad student or post-doc he’d have would be a clonal copy of himself. I can’t imagine any other type staying with him for long.”
“And here are our grad students.” Again she split the screen. “Still working on the first doctorate. Both male. Aldon Reese-Tambuto, human; and Fred, from Dushayne.”
“Fred?” Alex spluttered. Understandably. The Dushaynese could not possibly have looked less human; he had a square, flat head—literally. Flat on top, flat face, flattened sides. He was bright green and had no mouth, just a tiny hole below his nostril slits. Dushaynese were vegetarian to an extreme; on their homeworld they lived on tree sap and fruit juice. Out in the larger galaxy they did very well on sucrose-water and other liquids. They had, as a whole, very good senses of humor.
“Fred?” Alex repeated.
“Fred,” she said firmly. “Very few humans would be able to reproduce his real name. His vocal organ is a vibrating membrane in the top of his head. He does human speech just fine, but we can’t manage his.” She blanked her screens. “I’ll spare you their speeches; they are very eager, very typical young grad students and this will be their first dig.”
“Save me—” Alex moaned.
“Be nice,” she said firmly. “Don’t disillusion them. Let the next two years take care of that.”
He waved his hands vigorously. “Far be it from me to let them know what gruesome fate awaits them. What was the chance of death on a dig? Twenty percent? And there’s six of them?”
“The chance of catching something non-fatal is a lot higher,” she pointed out. “Actually, the honor of being the fatality usually goes to the post-docs or the second-in-command; they’re the ones doing the major explorations when a dig hits something like a tomb. The grad students usually are put to sifting sand and cataloging pottery shards.”
Alex didn’t get a chance to respond to that, for the first members of the team arrived at the lock at that moment, and he went down the lift to welcome them aboard, while Tia directed the servos in storing most of their baggage in the one remaining empty hold. As they came up the lift, both the young “men” were chattering away at high speed, with Alex in the middle, nodding sagely from time to time and clearly not catching more than half of what they said. Tia decided to rescue him.
“Welcome aboard, Fred, Aldon,” she said, cutting through the chatter with her own, higher-pitched voice.
Silence, as both the grad students looked around for the speaker.
Fred caught on first, and while his face remained completely without expression, he had already learned the knack of displaying human-type emotions with his voice. “My word!” he exclaimed with delight, “you are a brainship, are you not, dear lady?”
As a final incongruity, he had
adopted a clipped British accent to go along with his voice.
“Precisely, sir,” she replied. “AH One-Oh-Three-Three at your service, so to speak.”
“Wow,” Aldon responded, clearly awestruck. “We get to ride in a brainship? They’ve actually put us on a brainship? Wow, PTAs don’t even get rides from brainships! I’ve never even seen a brainship before—Uh, hi, what’s your real name?” He turned slowly, trying to figure out which way to face.
“Hypatia, Tia for short,” she replied, tickled by the young beings’ responses. “Don’t worry about where to look, just assume I’m the whole ship. I am, you know. I even have eyes in your quarters—” she chuckled at Aldon’s flush of embarrassment “—but don’t worry, I won’t use them. Your complete privacy is important to us.”
“I can show you the cabins, and you can pick the ones you want,” Alex offered. “They’re all the same; I’m just reserving the one nearest the main cabin for Doctor Hollister-Aspen.”
“Stellar!” Aldon enthused. “Wow, this is better than the liner coming in! I had to share a cabin with Fred and two other guys.”
“Quite correct,” Fred seconded. “I enjoyed Aldon’s company, but the other two were—dare I say—spoiled young reprobates? High Family affectations without the style, the connections, or the Family. Deadly bores, I assure you, and a spot of privacy will be welcome. Shall we, then?”
The two grad students were unpacking their carry-on baggage when the two post-docs arrived, this time singly. Treel arrived first, accepted the greetings with the calm, intense demeanor of a Zen Master, and took the first cabin she was offered.
Les Dimand-Taylor was another case altogether. It was obvious to Tia the moment he came aboard—without the automatic salute he made to her column—that he was ex-military. He confirmed her assumption as soon as Alex offered him a cabin.
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