Personal life? A joke. Derek's bosses had put him back to work, intending to recoup what he had cost them with his detour. So he had little leisure. Brenna estimated that they had been alone less than five times since that trip down from Space Hospital. Alone? Was a "tryst" in the busy Amazonis Spaceport's cafeteria, for example, being "alone"? Their relationship was as precisely scheduled as a vid drama, and far less satisfying. Today Derek was at Saunder Estates, for an hour or so. Then he had to catch a flight somewhere. As usual.
Everything revolved around Morgan and his slow recuperation. Tiny victories. He had regained his voice early in May. At first he could make only awful strangling sounds, but everyone had celebrated, nevertheless. Morgan had worked like hell with the therapists, learning to control his impaired breathing and reconstructed vocal apparatus—learning to talk for the second time in his life.
He had eyesight again, too, of a sort. That had been less emotionally exciting for the family but probably more so for Morgan. Brenna wasn't sure. Morgan didn't use his new synthetic voice much. Getting a "hello" or a "thank you" out of him was sometimes a major effort. Psychological adjustment problems, Dr. Ives said. They had to give him time, she advised. Indeed! After what he had been through!
Helen Ives had finished her call and was back at the med monitor. "By September, we'll insert an additional vision booster here, on the circuit behind the left ear," she said, touching a spot on the screen. A tiny green blip appeared on the indicated neural map of Morgan's brain. "That will give him more depth perception and better color differentiation."
"He'll like that," Brenna remarked politely. "He's complained that things look flat and fuzzy with his new eyes. I mean, even allowing for the fact that it all resembles a computer diagram."
"Not quite that bad," Helen said, defending her discipline and the fantastic prostheses that could replace human eyesight.
Correction: "Substitute for," not "replace." Morgan could read quite well. The printed word fitted his vision fine. Diagrams were great. But scenes of places he had never been and pictures of people he had never seen registered poorly on the computerized opti-scan prostheses. Morgan couldn't pick up delicate nuances of expression. He had to rely so much on figures, numbers, and other people. That had always been true to some degree for the blind, of course. Before biosynth surgery was perfected, the blind had depended on friends or listened to transcriptions, or read coded writing through their fingertips. That last technique wouldn't work for Morgan. There was too little tactile sensation in his syntha-skin fingertips. The now-outdated Braille system would be virtually useless to him.
"We're working on it," Dr. Ives insisted. "We're going to upgrade his synthetic voice box, too. Intonation refinement, that sort of thing. I understand the implant is closely related to the very same translator-splitter device your father developed from Ward Saunder's patents. We'll match Morgan's pre-accident voice with the implant, and no one will tell the difference."
Brenna gazed at the older woman solemnly. Helen was sincere. She really believed the implant could make Morgan's voice a convincing copy of the original. That would only happen years from now, if at all. The doctors didn't hear the enormous change in voice quality. It wasn't a matter of pitch or timbre or breathiness. Some essential ingredient was gone from that beloved basso, and Brenna didn't believe any medical miracle could bring it back.
"Has Quol-Bez been here yet this morning?" Brenna asked suddenly, changing the subject.
"Why, yes. He and Sao visited Morgan very early. They're over at your father's estate, with Derek. Didn't he tell you?"
Mildly embarrassed, Brenna shook her head. "I haven't seen him. Got back late from the spaceport. Just stopped to see if Morgan was okay and then slept like a rock. Things have been a little jumbled at Breakthrough lately."
"You ought to take some R and R."
"I don't notice you taking any," Brenna shot back, smiling. "Dedication above and beyond the call of duty, huh?"
"If you feel that way, maybe I should put my staff in for raises," Helen said, leading the way toward Morgan's rooms. She was teasing, but Brenna made note of the idea. Dr. Ives and her people had earned every unit of their salaries and more, these past weeks.
At the main monitoring station, two medic aides were stowing their sterile suits in the clean lockers. Another was watching the bio scans. Two more medics were on standby. In an emergency, they would all be here in moments, since they were housed in the adjacent wing. "He did quite well on the rehab exercises, Dr. Ives," one medic reported. On the screen, they could see waldos wheeling away the treadmill and lifting bars until the next therapy session. The little fetch-and-carry robot which was always in the room with Morgan was adjusting the therma-blankets carefully on the rack that held the fabric free of Morgan's fragile skin. The robot was handy. And it eliminated the need for human attendants to be with Morgan every minute. That would have been unpleasant for the medics; Morgan's room was a large hyperbaric chamber. The high pressure helped his badly hurt lungs, but long exposure to it forced "normal" humans to go through lengthy decompression. Instead, the therapists left as soon as possible after every exercise session. Morgan's only true around-the-clock companion was the little octopus-shaped robot on wheels.
"If he's tired, I could come back later..."
Helen checked the scans. "No, he's okay. His breathing rate's increased almost four percent. Did I tell you he can stand without constant support now? Marvelous! Go on in. We'll let you know if he becomes fatigued."
Brenna walked past the monitoring station and into the alcove off Morgan's room. She peered through the transparent wall. Opposite the alcove another clear wall gave Morgan a view of the canyon. It probably meant little to him now. Morgan used to love the view. That was why he and his father had selected this site for Saunder Estates: Mars. The splendid landscape, and conveniently close to Pavonis City. Morgan had been a teenager when Kevin McKelvey laid out the claim—a teenager with perfect eyesight and a strong physique.
Morgan was lying on his stera-gel chair-bed, listening to a ComLink broadcast. He had graduated from the tank of glop some time ago, but he still required stera-gel to guard against infection and support his syntha skin in Mars' gravity. The chair-bed appeared fairly ordinary, except for the jellylike pink substance serving as "cushions."
Brenna sat down facing the pli-wall dividing the alcove from the hyperbaric chamber. "Hello, Morgan." Audio circuits fed her voice past the wall and into the room. No one could speak to him directly. Too much infection risk.
"Brenna?" Morgan swiveled his head slowly, seeming to stare at her. "Chair—take me to the alcove wall." The chair-bed glided toward Brenna, the little robot rolling out of its path. The chair-bed reshaped itself and propped Morgan's head and upper torso at a forty-five-degree angle to put him at eye level with his visitor. It also formed a spongy pocket under his withered legs, cradling his knees. Brenna pressed her hand against a special section of the wall. The material gave like an invisible glove, shaping itself around her flesh. On the other side, Morgan reached toward her, carefully; he didn't yet trust his control over his myoelectric hands. They were as close to touching each other as was possible, but the thin veil of plasticene still separated their fingers.
Morgan was wearing a loose hospital robe this morning. That was tremendous progress! When he had first arrived on Mars, he couldn't wear any clothing at all, for fear of endangering his delicate syntha skin. Almost his first words when his voice had been restored were to complain that there was no comfortable position for him to lie in—one that wouldn't slough off the stuff. Eventually he had graduated to a glorified loincloth, when the syntha skin seemed likely to bond to his body and stay. Now he could wear a robe. When Brenna had arrived at the alcove, the waldos attached to the chair-bed had neatly folded back the blanket covering his legs, giving Morgan the illusion that he had freedom of movement and the blanket was just to keep his useless feet warm.
There was a long, awkward silence. F
requent visitors here got used to that. Or they gave up. A lot of them had given up. Morgan wasn't hideously scarred. But there were some scars. His skin was too taut, allowing little facial expression. The surgeons had re-created his hair and eyebrows, duplicating the originals as best they could. He still tended to look like an emotionless, vid-drama "android."
"Did you have a good trip?" Morgan asked finally.
"No problems." Brenna was almost accustomed to his new voice now. The hyperbaric chamber further intensified changes in tone quality.
Another silence. Then, "When did you get in? About two?"
"Uh-huh. Yuri reminded us of the time, or I'd still be there, working on that damned oscillator. It's got to be the oscillator that went wrong. But ... we can't stay there twenty-four hours a day. We'll drop."
"I watched the data feed until you shut up shop at one a.m." Morgan tilted his head slightly toward the vid screen attached to the chair-bed. The thing operated on voice command alone, if need be, so that he wouldn't have to exert his frail body.
ComLink. His lifeline to the world outside this room. His uncle's vast communications network enabled Morgan to cross continents and interplanetary space. Dramas and standard holo-mode images didn't do much for him anymore. But he could hear, and he could read from the text with fewer distractions than most normally sighted people. Thanks to ComLink, he had been watching over Brenna's shoulder while she and the Breakthrough Unlimited team hunted for the probable cause of Prototype II's blowup. He had been a thousand kilometers from the hangar, but distance didn't matter.
"That was an interesting readout you got on number five graviton baffle. The peak stresses obviously hit there first," Morgan said. "The field instability links right up with the hull material flaw. It's all going to tie together."
That was practically an oration for Morgan. Brenna started with pleased surprise. "You think so? I do, too. But you're better at metallurgy analyses. Yuri agrees. George and Hector and the kids are halfway convinced the trouble's in the power plant. Even Tumaini said we could solve everything if we just 'borrowed' Quol-Bez's ship and took her engines..."
"Don't." That came out sharply, straining Morgan's artificial vocal cords. He fell into his staring mode, looking through her. Brenna wanted to ask what had upset him so, but was afraid to. The old wish? "Borrowing" Quol-Bez's ship and examining the Vahnaj version of faster-than-light drive? Why would that recurrent fantasy disturb him? Morgan, too, had played with that scenario during moments of FTL piloting frustration. "It can't be done," Morgan said. His unnatural voice was more solemn now. "Don't you realize Space Fleet would have slipped agents past the cordon to do exactly that, long before now, if it were possible? It isn't."
"They're afraid of diplomatic repercussions. But a civilian outfit..."
"No." Very flat, allowing no argument. "As Derek says, 'Affirmative and underline.' The Vahnaj aren't that stupid. They won't let humans steal it. They made sure we can't."
Brenna stared at him, her curiosity simmering. "How do you know? Did Quol-Bez tell you that?" There was no reply. She waited, a long time. Morgan didn't move and didn't speak. Only the labored rise and fall of his chest showed that he was alive. Those inhuman, computerized gray eyes were unblinking. "You okay?" Brenna asked anxiously.
"It's not the power plant," Morgan replied finally. The non sequitur threw her for a moment. He had dropped what they had been talking about and had gone back to discussing the problems with Prototype II, refusing to answer further questions about the Vahnaj FTL ship. That only heightened her curiosity, rather than shutting it off. "It's the oscillator," he said, with as much emphasis as he could. Was that a former test pilot's gut feeling ... or was he somehow picking up hints from Quol-Bez? The Ambassador was with him so much nowadays. Helen Ives had commented on how well Quol-Bez and Morgan seemed to be communicating. The doctor appreciated the alien's kind interest in her patient. Brenna wondered if there was more to it than that. A growing rapport existed between Morgan and the Vahnaj Ambassador. Other people had noted the subtle changes in the relationship. Echoes of past remarks rattled in Brenna's thoughts. Quol-Bez's saying there were other means of opening doors—seeing and speaking and touching—than most Homo sapiens realized, means Morgan now might discover. Quol-Bez's steadfast loyalty to Morgan, and Morgan's family, ever since the accident. Speculations about Vahnaj extrasensory abilities. Morgan's sensory organs, except for his ears, were radically altered and limited now. That might indeed make a deference in communication. It did, with other humans. Had the injuries worked the opposite effect with Quol-Bez, making it easier for the Vahnaj and Morgan to understand each other?
"Check the oscillator," Morgan insisted.
"Okay. Sure."
"And then what?" Brenna frowned, trying to figure out what Morgan meant. "The franchise runs out in September," he said. "What are you going to do about it?"
"I...I hadn't thought that far ahead yet."
"You'd better. You've got to apply for renewal or lose the option at high ecliptic orbit," Morgan reminded her.
He wasn't the first to do so. Yuri had hinted around the subject. Tumaini and Hector and the junior pilots were bringing it up with embarrassing frequency, too. It wasn't their initiative. They were fellow pilots, but not co-owners. It was Brenna's responsibility, and they were very much aware she had made no moves to do anything about it. Without a franchise on a test area in space, Breakthrough Unlimited would be in even more serious trouble than it was now, its entire future program in doubt.
Question: Was Breakthrough Unlimited going to continue?
Morgan was looking at her, that hard, unnerving stare that prickled the hair on her nape. The eyes were the same color they had always been, not artificial-looking at all. But the expressiveness was gone. The ingenious microcomputers filling the sockets didn't know how to duplicate subconscious human byplays, that silent language that added so much. Warmth, humor, smothered rage—missing. Not a blank stare, quite. Brenna felt she was under two inquisitors' cameras.
"Are you going to Earth?" Morgan asked. "You could combine Uncle Todd's trip to the P.O.E. awards ceremony with the franchise grants meeting at Terran Worlds Council. Quol-Bez told me Councilman Ames is chairing the meeting this year. He's pro-FTL, and he's an old buddy of Uncle Todd's. He'd be favorable to renewing the franchise."
Brenna shrugged uneasily.
"I want you to answer something."
Without hesitation, Brenna said, "Of course."
Morgan's mouth pulled back in a tiny grimace that was supposed to be a smile. The effect was grotesque. Brenna forced herself to show no reaction. "Don't agree so fast. Your dad taught you to read the fine print, just as mine did."
"Okay. If I can answer, I will. How's that?"
"Much better. Straight: Am I still your partner?" Morgan asked softly.
For a second, Brenna was speechless. Then she blurted, "That's the stupidest damned dumb question I've ever heard!"
"Is it? Do I still have full voting rights?"
Brenna was hurt. "I won't even dignify that with a reply."
"I wasn't sure. I needed to know. I ... I feel locked out. I want to be back on the line. I want to take part." His voice didn't register the poignancy in the words. His syntha skin couldn't paint his inner anguish. But Brenna touched the man behind the medical miracles, her heart twisting in a knot.
Some of the monitoring equipment was winking. Alarms. Elevated pulse rate. Stressed breathing. Brenna half expected Dr. Ives and her aides to burst in and pull the plug on the conversation.
Morgan wasn't ready for that and wouldn't accept it. His intense stare shifted toward the ubiquitous cameras and bio scanners. He spoke to the unseen doctor. "Helen, if you interrupt, I'll give you a fight. Turn off those spy eyes. I'm not a museum display! Brenna and I want privacy. We have business to discuss."
Dr. Ives's voice issued from the vid screen. "If the bio scans get worse, all bets are off."
"Bargain."
The came
ras' on lights died. It was the first time since the accident that Brenna could recall this situation. She and Morgan, alone. No medics. No co-workers. No other members of the family or friends. No eavesdroppers anywhere. "What about it?" Morgan was making an effort to control his crippled body. Bio scans showed the graphs steadying out—not in the safe range, but better. A fine tracery of newly developed blue veins throbbed visibly within his syntha skin.
Brenna took a deep breath. "As far as I'm concerned, nothing's really changed."
He grimaced again. "It's changed. But if the partnership hasn't..."
"You can tap into all the corporation data any time..."
"I already have. That's how I know you haven't made an appointment at T.W.C.'s franchise meeting. Were you waiting on my vote before proceeding?" His question gave her an out, if she wanted it. An excuse for indecision.
"I ... I've had my uncertain days," Brenna confessed. "After what happened..."
"It happened," Morgan said imperturbably, the stiff mannequin's face revealing nothing. "That's the past. Are you quitting? Do the others want to quit?"
"They're gung-ho." Brenna bit her lip, considering how to express her feelings. "I'm ... I'm experiencing a bad case of guilt, I suppose."
"You weren't flying her. I was. She blew. We'll find out why. The decision to go with the test was mutual. There's no guilt," Morgan said, the cold voice chilling her.
Outward Bound Page 21
