Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  Oh no. You don't catch me that easy.

  "You're right," she said carefully. "But Mum and Dad trust me to tell you everything that's wrong, so I am."

  "All right then." The "doctor's" face lost that stern look. "So long as you're just being conscientious. Keep taking those vitamin supplements, Tia, and everything will be fine."

  But everything wasn't fine. Within days, the tingling had stopped, to be replaced by numbness. Just like her feet. She began having trouble holding things, and her lessons took twice as long now, since she couldn't touch-type anymore and had to watch where her fingers went.

  She completely gave up on doing anything that required a lot of manual dexterity. Instead, she watched a lot of holos, even boring ones, and played a great deal of holo-chess. She read a lot too, from the screen, so that she could give one-key page-turning commands rather than trying to turn paper pages herself. The numbness stopped at her wrists, and for a few days she was so busy getting used to doing things without feeling her hands, that she didn't notice that the numbness in her legs had spread from her ankles to her knees. . . .

  Now she was afraid to go to the AI "doctor" program, knowing that it would put her in for Counseling. She tried looking things up herself in the database, but knew that she was going to have to be very sneaky to avoid triggering flags in the AI. As the numbness stopped at the knees, then began to spread up her arms, she kept telling herself that it wouldn't, couldn't be much longer now. Soon Mum and Dad would be done, and they would know she wasn't making this up to get attention. Soon she would be able to tell them herself, and they'd make the stupid medic work right. Soon.

  * * *

  She woke up, as usual, to hands and feet that acted like wooden blocks at the ends of her limbs. She got a shower—easy enough, since the controls were pushbutton, then struggled into her clothing by wriggling and using teeth and fingers that didn't really want to move. She didn't bother too much with hair and teeth, it was just too hard. Shoving her feet into slippers, since she hadn't been able to tie her shoes for the past couple of days, she stumped out into the main room of the dome—

  Only to find Pota and Braddon waiting there for her, smiling over their coffee.

  "Surprise!" Pota said cheerfully. "We've done just about everything we can on our own, and we zipped the findings off to the Institute last night. Now things can get back to normal!"

  "Oh Mum!" She couldn't help herself, she was so overwhelmed by relief and joy that she started to run across the room to fling herself into their arms—

  Started to. Halfway there, she tripped, as usual, and went flying through the air, crashing into the table and spilling the hot coffee all over her arms and legs.

  They picked her up, as she babbled apologies about her clumsiness. She didn't even notice what the coffee had done to her, didn't even think about it until her parents' expressions of horror alerted her to the fact that there were burns and blisters already rising on her lower arms.

  "It doesn't hurt," she said, dazedly, without thinking, just saying the first thing that came into her mind. "It's okay, really, I've been kind of numb for a while so it doesn't hurt, honest—"

  Pota and Braddon both froze. Something about their expressions startled her into silence.

  "You don't feel anything?" Pota said, carefully. "No pain, nothing at all?"

  She shook her head. "My hands and feet were tingling for a while, and then they stopped and went numb. I thought if I just waited you could take care of it when you weren't so busy—"

  They wouldn't let her say anything else. Within moments they had established through careful prodding and tests with the end of a sharp probe that the numb area now ended at mid-thigh and mid-shoulder.

  "How long has this been going on?" Braddon asked, while Pota flew to the AI console to call up the medical program the adults used.

  "Oh, a few weeks," she said vaguely. "Socrates said it wasn't anything, that I'd grow out of it. Then he acted like I was making it up, and I didn't want him to get the Psychs on me. So I figured I would. . . ."

  Pota returned at that moment, her mouth set in a grim line. "You are going straight to bed, pumpkin," she said, with what Tia could tell was forced lightness. "Socrates thinks you have pinched nerves; possibly a spinal defect that he can't scan for. So you are going to bed, and we are calling for a courier to come get you. All right?"

  Braddon and Pota exchanged one of those looks, the kind Tia couldn't read, and Tia's heart sank. "Okay," she sighed with resignation. "I didn't mean to be such a bother, honest, I didn't—"

  Braddon scooped her up in his arms and carried her off to her room. "Don't even think that you're being a bother," he said fiercely. "We love you, pumpkin. And we're going to see that you get better as quickly as we can."

  He tucked her into bed, with Ted beside her, and called up a holo from the almost-forbidden collection. "Here," he said, kissing her tenderly. "Your Mum is going to be in here in a minute to put something on those burns. Then we're going to spend all our time making you the most disgustingly spoiled little brat in known space! What you have to do is lie there and think really hard about getting better. Is it a deal?"

  "Sure, Dad," she replied, managing to find a grin for him somewhere. "It's a deal."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Because Tia was in no danger of dying—and because there was no craft available to come fetch her capable of Singu-larity Drive—the AI-drone that had been sent to take her to a Central Worlds hospital took two more weeks to arrive. Two more long, interminable weeks, during which the faces of her Mum and Dad grew drawn and frightened—and in which her condition not only did not improve, it deteriorated.

  By the end of that two weeks, she was in much worse shape; she had not only lost all feeling in her limbs, she had lost use of them as well. The clumsiness that had begun when she had trouble with buttons and zippers had turned into paralysis. If she hadn't felt the need to keep her parents' spirits up, she'd have cried. She couldn't even hold Ted anymore.

  She joked about it to her Mum, pretending that she had always wanted to be waited on hand and foot. She had to joke about it; although she was terrified, the look of fear in her parents' eyes drove her own terrors away. She was determined, absolutely determined, not to let them know how frightened she was. They were already scared enough—if she lost her courage, they might panic.

  The time crawled by, as she watched holo after holo and played endless games of chess against Braddon, and kept telling herself that once she got to the hospital everything would be fine. Of course it would be fine. There wasn't anything that a Central Worlds hospital couldn't cure. Everyone knew that! Only congenital defects couldn't be cured. But she had been fine, right up until the day this started. It was probably something stupid.

  "Socrates says it has to be pinched nerves," Pota repeated, for the hundredth time, the day the ship was due. "Once they get you to the hospital, you'll have to be really brave, pumpkin. They're probably going to have to operate on you, and it's probably going to take several months before you're back to normal—"

  She brushed Tia's hair and tied it in back in a neat tail, the way Tia liked it. "I won't be able to do any lessons, then, will I?" she asked, mostly to keep her mother's mind busy with something trivial. Mum doesn't handle reality and real-time very well . . . Dad doesn't either. "They're probably going to have me in a cast or something, and all dopey with pain-pills. I'm going to fall behind, aren't I?"

  "Well," Pota said, with false cheer, "yes, I'm afraid so. But that will probably make the Psychs all very happy, you know, they think that you're too far ahead as it is. But just think—you'll have the whole library at the hospital to dig into any time you want it!"

  That was enough even to divert her for a minute. The entire library at the hospital—magnitudes bigger than any library they could carry with them. All the holos she wanted to watch—and proper reading screens set up, instead of the jury-rig Dad had put together—

  "They're here—" Braddon ca
lled from the outer room. Pota compressed her lips into a line again and lifted Tia out of the bed. And for the first time in weeks, Tia was bundled into her pressure-suit, put inside as if Pota was dressing a giant doll. Braddon came in to help in a moment, as she tried to cooperate as much as she could. She would be going outside again. This time, though, she probably wouldn't be coming back. Not to this dome, anyway.

  "Wait!" she called, just before Pota sealed her in. "Wait, I want my bear!" And at the look of doubt her parents exchanged, she put on the most pleading expression she could manage. "Please?" She couldn't stand the idea that she'd be going off to a strange place with nothing familiar or warm in it. Even if she couldn't hold him, she could still talk to him and feel his fur against her cheek. "Please?"

  "All right, pumpkin," Pota said, relenting. "I think there's just room for him in there with you." Fortunately Ted was very squashable, and Tia herself was slender. There was room for him in the body of the suit, and Tia took comfort in the feel of his warm little bulk against her waist.

  She didn't have any time to think of anything else—for at that moment, two strangers dressed in the white pressure-suits of CenCom Medical came in. There was a strange hiss at the back of her air-pack, and the room went away.

  * * *

  She woke again in a strange white room, dressed in a white paper gown. The only spot of color in the whole place was Ted. He was propped beside her, in the crook of her arm, his head peeking out from beneath the white blanket

  She blinked, trying to orient herself, and the cold hand of fear clamped down on her throat. Where was she? A hospital room, probably, but where were Mum and Dad? How did she get here so fast? What had those two strangers done to her?

  And why wasn't she feeling better? Why couldn't she feel anything?

  "She's awake," said a voice she didn't recognize. She turned her head, which was all she could move, to see someone in another white pressure-suit standing beside her, anonymous behind a dark faceplate. The red cross of Medical was on one shoulder, and there was a name-tag over the breast, but she couldn't read it from this angle. She couldn't even tell if the person in the suit was male or female, or even human or humanoid.

  The faceplate bent over her; she would have shrunk away if she could, feeling scared in spite of herself—the plate was so blank, so impersonal. But then she realized that the person in the suit had bent down so that she could see the face inside, past the glare of lights on the plexi surface, and she relaxed a little.

  "Hello, Hypatia," said the person—a lady, actually, a very nice lady from her face. Her voice sounded kind of tinny, coming through the suit speaker; a little like Moira's over the ancient com. The comparison made her feel a little calmer. At least the lady knew her name and pronounced it right.

  "Hello," she said cautiously. "This is the hospital, isn't it? How come I don't remember the ship?"

  "Well, Hypatia—may I call you Tia?" At Tia's nod, the lady continued. "Tia, our first thought was that you might have some kind of plague, even though your parents were all right. The doctor and medic we sent on the ship decided that it was better to be completely safe and keep you and your parents in isolation. The easiest way to do that was to put all three of you in cold sleep and keep you in your suits until we got you here. We didn't want to frighten you, so we asked your parents not to tell you what we were going to do."

  Tia digested that. "All right," she said, trying to be agreeable, since there wasn't anything she could have done about it anyway. "It probably would have gotten really boring on the ship. There probably wasn't much to watch or read, and they would have gotten tired of playing chess with me."

  The lady laughed. "Given that you would have beaten the pants off both of them, quite probably," she agreed, straightening up a little. Now that Tia knew there was a person behind the faceplate, it didn't seem quite so threatening. "Now, we're going to keep you in isolation for a while longer, while we see what it is that bit you. You'll be seeing a lot of me—I'm one of your two doctors. My name is Anna Jorgenson-Kepal, and you can call me Anna, or Doctor Anna if you like, but I don't think we need to be that formal. Your other doctor is Kennet Uhua-Sorg. You won't be seeing much of him until you're out of isolation, because he's a paraplegic and he's in a Moto-Chair. Can't fit one of them into a pressure-suit."

  The holo-screen above the bed flickered into life, and the head and shoulders of a thin, ascetic-looking young man appeared there. "Call me Kenny, Tia," the young man said. "I absolutely refuse to be stuffy with you. I'm sorry I can't meet you in person, but it takes forever to decontam one of these fardling chairs, so Anna gets to be my hands."

  "That's—your chair—it's kind of like a modified shell, isn't it?" she asked curiously, deciding that if they were going to bring the subject up, she wasn't going to be polite and avoid it. "I know a shellperson. Moira, she's a brainship."

  "Dead on!" Kenny said cheerfully. "Medico on the half-shell, that's me! I just had a stupid accident when I was a tweenie, not like you, getting bit by alien bugs!"

  She smiled tentatively. I think I'm going to like him. "Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Amenemhat the Third?"

  His large eyes widened even more. "Well, no—that is definitely a new one. I hope it's a compliment! One of my patients said I looked like Largo Delecron, the synthcom star, but I didn't know she thought Largo looked like a refugee from a slaver camp!"

  "It is," she assured him hastily. "He's one of my favorite Pharaohs."

  "I'll have to see if I can't cultivate the proper Pharaonic majesty, then," Kenny replied with a grin. "It might do me some good when I have to drum some sense into the heads of some of the Psychs around here! They've been trying to get at you ever since we admitted you."

  If she could have shivered with apprehension, she would have. "I don't have to see them, do I?" she asked in a small voice. "They never stop asking stupid questions!"

  "Absolutely not," Anna said firmly. "I have a double-doctorate; one of them is in headshrinking. I am quite capable of assessing you all by myself."

  Tia's heart sank when Anna mentioned her degree in Psych—but it rose the moment she referred to Psych as "headshrinking." None of the Psychs who had plagued her life until now ever called their profession by something as frivolous as "headshrinking."

  She patted Tia's shoulder. "Don't worry, Tia. It's my opinion that you are a very brave young lady—a little too responsible, but otherwise just fine. They spend too much time analyzing children and not enough time actually seeing them or paying attention to them." She smiled inside her helmet, and a curl of hair escaped down to dangle above her left eyebrow, making her look a lot more human.

  "Listen, Tia, there's a little bit of fur missing from your bear, and a scrap of stuffing," Kenny said. "Anna says you wouldn't notice, but I thought we ought to tell you anyway. We checked him over for alien bugs and neurotoxins, and he's got a clean bill of health. When you come out of Coventry, we'll decontam him again to be sure, but we know he wasn't the problem, in case you were wondering."

  She had wondered. . . . Moira wouldn't have done anything on purpose, of course, but it would have been horrible if her sickness had been due to Ted. Moira would have felt awful, not to mention how Tomas would feel.

  "What's his name?" Anna asked, busying herself with something at the head of the bed. Tia couldn't turn her head far enough to see what it was.

  "Theodore Edward Bear," she replied, surreptitiously rubbing her cheek against his soft fur. "Moira gave him to me, because she used to have a bear named Ivan the Bearable."

  "Excellent name, Theodore. It suits him," Anna said. "You know, I think your Moira and I must be about the same age—there was a kind of fad for bears when I was little. I had a really nice bear in a flying suit called Amelia Bearhart." She chuckled. "I still have her, actually, but she mostly sits on the bureau in my guest room. She's gotten to be a very venerable matriarch in her old age."

  But bears weren't really what she wanted to talk abo
ut. Now that she knew where she was, and that she was in isolation. "How long am I going to be in here?" she asked in a small voice.

  Kenny turned very serious, and Anna stopped fiddling with things. Kenny sucked on his lower lip for a moment before actually replying, and the hum of the machinery in her room seemed very loud. "The Psychs were trying to tell us that we should try and cushion you, but—Tia, we think that you are a very unusual girl. We think you would rather know the complete truth. Is that the case?"

  Would she? Or would she rather pretend—

  But this wasn't like making up stories at a dig. If she pretended, things would only seem worse when they finally told her the truth, if it was bad.

  "Ye-es," she told them both, slowly. "Please."

  "We don't know," Anna told her. "I wish we did. We haven't found anything in your blood, and we're only just now trying to isolate things in your nervous system. But—well, we're assuming it's a bug that got you, a proto-virus, maybe, but we don't know, and that's the truth. Until we know, we won't know if we can fix you again."

  Not when. If.

  The possibility that she might stay like this for the rest of her life chilled her.

  "Your parents are in isolation, too," Kenny said, hastily, "but they are one hundred percent fine. There's nothing wrong with them at all. So that makes things harder."

  "I understand, I think," she said in a small, nervous-sounding voice. She took a deep breath. "Am I getting worse?"

  Anna went very still. Kenny's face darkened, and he bit his lower lip.

  "Well," he said quietly. "Yes. We're having to think about mobility, and maybe even life-support for you. Something considerably more than my chair. I wish I could tell you differently, Tia."

  "That's all right," she said, trying to ease his distress. "I'd rather know."

  Anna leaned down to whisper something through her suit-mike. "Tia, if you're afraid of crying, don't be. If I were in your position, I'd cry. And if you would like to be alone, tell us, all right?"