Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  The screen flickered as Tia found her attention absorbed by the girl. Now she was working out in what were obviously ballet exercises, and doing very well, so far as Tia could tell. Then the screen flickered a third time—

  And the girl was on stage, partnered in some kind of classic ballet piece—and if Tia had not known her left leg was cyborged, she would never have guessed it.

  "Here's a speed-keyer who lost his hand," Kenny continued, but he turned towards the column. "Between my work and Moto-Prosthetics, we've beaten the sensory input problem, Tia," he said proudly. "Lila tells me she's changed the choreography so that she can perform some of the more difficult moves on her left foot instead of her right. The left won't get toe-blisters or broken foot-bones, the tendons won't tear, the knee won't give, and the ankle has no chance of buckling. The only difference that she can see between the cyborged leg and the natural one is that the cyborg is a little heavier—not enough to make any difference to her if she can change the choreography—and it's a lot sturdier."

  A few more of Doctor Kenny's patients came up on the screen, but neither of them were paying attention.

  "There have to be some problems," Tia said, finally. "I mean, nothing is perfect."

  "We don't have full duplication of sensory input. In Lila's case, we have it in the entire foot and the ankle and knee-joints, and we've pretty much ignored the stretches of leg in between. Weight is the other problem. The more sensory nerves we duplicate, the higher the weight. A ten-kilo hand is going to give someone a lot of trouble, for instance." Kenny shifted a little in his chair. "But all of this is coming straight out of what's going on in the Lab Schools, Tia! And most of it is from the brainship program—the same thing that gives you sensory input from the ships' systems are what became the sensory linkups for those artificial limbs."

  "That's wonderful!" Tia said, very pleased for him. "You're quite something, Doctor Kennet!"

  "Oh, there's a lot more to be done," he said modestly. "I haven't heard any of Lila's fellow dancers clamoring to have double-amputations and new legs installed. She has her problems, and there's some pain involved, even after healing is completed. In a way, it's a good thing for us that our first leg-installation was for a dancer, because Lila was used to living with pain—all dancers are. And it's very expensive; she was lucky, because the insurance company involved judged that compensating her for a lost—very lucrative—career was more expensive than an artificial limb. Although—given the life expectancy of you shellpersons, and compare it to those of us still in our designed-by-genetics containers—well, I can foresee a day when we'll all have our brains tucked into minishells when the old envelope starts to decay, and instead of deciding what clothes we want to wear, we have to decide what body to put on."

  "Oh, I don't think it'll come to that, really," Tia said decisively. "For one thing, if it's expensive for one limb, a whole body would be impossible."

  "It is that," Kenny agreed. "But to tell you the truth, right now the problem besides expense isn't technical—we could put the fully-functioning body together—and do it today. It's actually easier to do that than just one limb. Oh, by that, I mean one with full sensory inputs."

  He didn't say anything, but he winked, and grinned wickedly. "And by 'full sensory input,' I mean exactly what you're thinking, you naughty young lady."

  "Me?" she said, with completely feigned indignation. "I have no idea what you're talking about! I am as innocent as—as—"

  "As I am," Kenny said. "You were the one who was asking about me and Anna."

  She remained silent, pretending dignity. He continued to grin, and she knew he wasn't fooled in the least.

  "Well, anyway, the problem is having a life-support system for a naked brain." He shrugged. "Can't quite manage that—putting a whole body into a life-support shell is still the only way to deal with trauma like yours. And we can't fit that into a human-sized body."

  "Oh, you could make us great big bodies and create a whole race of giants," she joked. "That should actually be easier, from what you've told me."

  He cast his eyes upwards, surprising her somewhat with his sudden flare of exasperation. "Believe it or not, there's a fellow who wants to do something like that, for the holos. He wants to create giant full-sensory bodies of—oh, dinosaurs, monsters, whatever—hire a shellperson actor, and use the whole setup in his epics."

  "No!" she exclaimed.

  "I swear," he said, placing his hand over his heart. "True, every word of it. And believe it or not, he has the money. Holostars make more than you do, my love. I think the next time some brain wants to retire from active ship-service, especially one that's bought out his contract, this fellow just might tempt them into the holos."

  "Amazing. Virtual headshaking here." She thought for a moment. "What would the chances be of creating a life-sized body with some kind of brainstem link to the shell?"

  "Like a radio?" he hazarded. "Hmm. Good question. A real problem; there is a lot of information carried by these nerves—you'd need separated channels for everything, but—well, the effective range would be very, very short, otherwise you run the risk of signal breakup. That turned out to be the problem with this rig," he finished, nodding at his armored legs. "It has to stay in the same room with me, otherwise—Greek frieze time."

  She laughed.

  "Anyway, the whole rig would probably cost as much as a brainship, so it's not exactly practical," he concluded. "Not even for me, and they pay me very well."

  Not exactly practical for me, either, she thought, and dismissed the whole idea. Practical, for a brainship, meant buying out her contract. After all, if she wanted to be free to join the Institute as an active researcher and go chasing the EsKays on her own, she was going to have to buy herself out.

  "Well, money—that's the other reason I wanted to talk to you," she said.

  "And the bane of the BB program rears its ugly head," he intoned, and grinned. "Oh, they're going to hate you. You're just like all the rest of the really good ones. You want to buy that contract out, don't you?"

  "I don't think there are too many CS ships that don't plan on doing it someday," she countered. "We're people, not AI drones. We like to have a choice of where we go. So, do you have any ideas of how I can start raising my credit balance? Moira has kind of cornered the market on spotting possible new sites from orbit and entry."

  "Gave her the idea, did you?" Kenny shook his finger at her. "Don't you know you should never give ideas away to the competition?"

  "She wasn't competition, then," Tia pointed out.

  "Well, you have a modest bonus from the Zombie Bug run, right?" he said, scratching his eyebrow as he thought. "What about investing it?"

  "In what?" she countered. "I don't know anything about investing money."

  "Operating on my own modest success in putting my own money into Moto-Prosthetics—and not in paper stock, my dear, but in shares in the company itself—if you use your own knowledge to choose where to invest, the results can be substantial." He tapped his fingers on the side of his chair. "It's not insider trading, if you're thinking that. I would consider putting your money where your interest and expertise is."

  "Virtual headshaking," she replied. "I have no idea what you're getting at. What do I know?"

  "Look—" he said, leaning forward, his eyes bright with intensity. "The one thing an archeologist is always cognizant of is the long term—especially long-term patterns. And the one thing that most often trips up the sophonts of any race is that they are not thinking in the long term. Look for what a friend of mine called 'disasters waiting to happen,' and invest in the companies that will be helping to recover from that disaster."

  "Well, that sounds good in theory," she said doubtfully. "But in practice? How am I going to find situations like that? I'm only one person, and I've already got a job."

  "Tia, you have the computing power of an entire brainship at your disposal," Kenny told her firmly. "And you have access to Institute records for every
inhabited planet that also holds ruins. Use both. Look for problems the ancients had, then see if they'll happen again at current colonies."

  Well, nothing sprung immediately to mind, but it would while away some time. And Kenny had a point.

  He glanced at his wrist-chrono. "Well, my shuttle should be hailing you right about—"

  "Now," she finished. "It's about to dock: four slots from me, to your right as you exit the lock. Thanks for coming, Kenny."

  He directed his Chair to the lift. "Thank you for having me, Tia. As always, it's been a pleasure."

  He turned to look back over his shoulder as he reached the lift, and grinned. "By the way, don't bother to check my med records. Anna has never complained about my performance yet."

  If she could have blushed . . .

  * * *

  While Alex spent his time with some of his old classmates—presumably living up to what he had told her was the class motto, "The Party Never Ends"—she dove headlong into Institute records. The Institute gave her free, no-charge access to anything she wanted; perhaps because they counted her as a kind of member-researcher, perhaps because of her part in the Zombie Bug rescue—or perhaps because brainship access was one hole in their access system they'd never plugged because they never thought of it. Normally they charged for every record downloaded from the main archives. It didn't matter to her; there was plenty there to look into.

  But first—her own peculiar quest. She caught up on everything having to do with the old EsKay investigations in fairly short order. There wasn't much of anything new from existing digs, so she checked to see what Pota and Braddon were doing, then went on to postings on brand new EsKay finds.

  It was there that she came across something quite by accident.

  It was actually rather amusing, when it came down to it. It was the report from a Class Two dig, from the group taking over a site that had initially gotten a lot of excitement from the Exploration team. They had reported it as an EsKay site—the first ever to be uncovered on a non-Marslike world. And an EsKay Evaluation team was sent post-haste.

  It turned out to be a case of misidentification; not EsKays at all, but another race entirely, the Megalt Tresepts, one of nowhere near as much interest to the Institute. Virtually everything was known about the Megalts; they had sent out FTL ships in the far distant past, and some of the colonies they had established still existed. Some of their artifacts looked like EsKay work, and if there was no notion that the Megalts had been in the neighborhood, it was fairly easy to make the mistake.

  The world was surprisingly Terran—which would have made an EsKay site all the more valuable if it really had been there.

  Although it was not an EsKay site after all, Tia continued reading the report out of curiosity. Largo Draconis was an odd little planet—with an eccentric orbit that made for one really miserable decade every century or so. Other than that, it was quite habitable; really pleasant, in fact, with two growing seasons in every year. The current settlements were ready for that dismal decade, according to the report—but also according to the report, the Megalts had been, too.

  Yet the Megalt sites had been abandoned, completely. Not typical of the logical, systematic race.

  During the first year of that wretched ten years, every Megalt settlement on the planet (all two of them) had been abandoned. And not because they ran out of food, either, which was her first thought. They had stockpiled more than enough to carry them through, even with no harvests at all.

  No, not because the settlers ran out of food—but because the native rodents did.

  Curious about what had happened, the Evaluation team had found the settlement records, which outlined the entire story, inscribed on the thin metal sheets the Megalts used for their permanent hardcopy storage. The settlements had been abandoned so quickly that no one had bothered to find and take them.

  It was a good thing the Megalts used metal for their records; nothing else would have survived what had happened to the settlement. The rodents had swarmed both colonies; a trickle at first, hardly more than a nuisance. But then, out of nowhere, a swarm, a flood, a torrent of rodents had poured down over the settlement. They overwhelmed the protections in place—electric fences—and literally ate their way into the buildings. Nothing had stopped them. Killing them in hordes had done nothing. They merely ate the bodies and kept moving in.

  The evidence all pointed to a periodic change in the rodents' digestive systems that enabled them to eat anything with a cellulose or petrochemical base, up to and including plastic.

  The report concluded with the Evaluation team's final words on the attitude of the current government of Largo Draconis, in a personal note that had been attached to the report.

  "Fred: I am just glad we are getting out of here. We told the Settlement Governor about all this, and they're ignoring us. They think that just because I'm an archeologist, I have my nose so firmly in the past that I have no grasp on the present. They told me in the governor's office that their ward-off fields should be more than enough to hold off the rats. Not a chance. We're talking about a feeding-frenzy here, furry locusts, and I don't think they're going to give a ward-off field a second thought. I'm telling you, Fred, these people are going to be in trouble in a year. The Megalts threw in the towel, and they weren't anywhere near as backward as the governor thinks they were. Maybe this wonder ward-off field of his will keep the rats off, but I don't think so. And I don't want to find out that he was wrong by waking up under a blanket of rats. They didn't eat the Megalts—but they ate their clothes. I don't fancy piling into a shuttle with my derriere bared to the gentle breezes—which by that time should be, oh, around fifty kilometers per hour, and minus twenty Celsius. So I may even beat this report home. Keep the beer cold and the fireplace warm for me."

  Well. If ever there was something that matched what Doctor Kenny had suggested, this was it.

  Just to be certain, she checked several other sources—not for the veracity of the report, but to see just how prepared the colony was for the "rats" as well as the worsening weather.

  Everything she found bore out what the unknown writer had told "Fred." Ward-off generators were standard issue, not heavy-duty. Warehouses had metal doors—and many had plastic or wooden siding. Homes were made of native stone and well-insulated against the cold, but had plastic or wooden doors. Food had been stockpiled, but what would the colonists do when the "rats" ate through the warehouse sides to get at the stockpiled rations? The colony had been depending on food grown on-planet for the past twenty years. There were no provisions for importing food and no synthesizers of any real size. They had protein farms—but what if the "rats" got into them and ate the yeast-stock along with everything else? What would they do when the stockpiled food was gone? Or if they managed to save the food, what would they do when—as Fred had suggested—the "rats" ate through their doors and made a meal off their clothing, their blankets, their furniture. . . .

  So much for official records. Was there anyone on-planet that could pull these people out of their disaster?

  It took a full day of searching business-directories before she had her answer. An on-planet manufacturer of specialized protection equipment, including heavy-duty ward-off and protection-field generators, could provide protection once the planetary governor admitted there was a problem. Governmental resources might not be able to pay for all the protection the colonists needed—but over eighty percent of the inhabitants carried hazard insurance, and the insurance companies should pay for protection for their clients.

  That was half of the answer. The other half?

  Another firm with multi-planet outlets, and a load of old-fashioned synthesizers in a warehouse within shipping distance. They didn't produce much in the way of variety, but load them up with raw materials, carbon from coal or oil, minerals, protein from yeast and fiber from other vat-grown products, and you had something basic to eat—or wear—or make into furnishings—

  She set her scheme in motion. But no
t through Beta, her supervisor, but through Lars and his.

  Before Alex returned, she had made all the arrangements; and she had included carefully worded letters to the two companies she had chosen—plus all of the publicly available records. She tried to convey a warning without sounding like some kind of crazed hysteric.

  Of course, the fact that she was investing in their firms should at least convey the idea that she was an hysteric with money. . . .

  If they had any sense, they would be able to put the story together for themselves from the records, and they would believe her. Hopefully, they would be ready.

  She transmitted the last of the messages, just as Alex arrived at her airlock.

  "Permission to come aboard, ma'am," he called cheerfully, as she opened the lock for him. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and when he burst into the main cabin, she told herself that fashions would surely change, soon—he was dressed in a chrome yellow tunic with neon-red piping, and neon-red trousers with chrome-yellow piping. Both bright enough to hurt the eyes and dazzle the pickups, and she was grateful she could tune down the intensity of her visual receptors.

  "How was your reunion?" she asked, once his clothes weren't blinding her.

  "There weren't more than a half dozen of them," he told her, continuing through the hall and down to his own cabin. He pitched both his bags on his bed, and returned. "We just missed Chria by a hair. But we had a good time."

  "I'm surprised you didn't come back with a hangover."

  He widened his eyes with surprise. "Not me! I'm the Academy designated driver—or at any rate, I make sure people get on the right shuttles. Never touch the stuff, myself, or almost never. Clogs the synapses."

  Tia felt irrationally pleased to hear that.

  "So, did you miss me? I missed you. Did you have enough to do?" He flung himself down in his chair and put his feet up on the console. "I hope you didn't spend all your time reading Institute papers."