Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  Nancia discovered that she could no longer "remember" the names of the constellations as they appeared in Vega subspace. She had never spent long enough in this subspace to establish the look of the sky in her own human memory; and the navigational maps that she relied on had been erased. So had her tables of Singularity points and decomposition algorithms, her Capellan music recordings. . . .

  "Do you know, I'm sorry I used to laugh at softpersons," she said thoughtfully to Simeon while the techs buzzed about her, removing the melted blobs that had been hyperchips, restoring connections and sensors, building in new blank memory banks to be loaded with whatever information she requested. "I never realized how crippled they are, having to rely on no more skills and information than they can store in an organic brain."

  "It's not nice to laugh at the handicapped," Simeon agreed gravely. "I trust this has been a learning experience for you, young FN. Would you like me to help you prepare a list of data requests for your new memories?"

  "Yes, please," Nancia said, "and"—this she did remember, the frustration of listening to the medical jargon of the techs at Summerlands working on Caleb—"do you think I can afford a classical education? Latin and Greek vocabularies and syntax?"

  "I'll indent for the Loeb Classical Hedron," Simeon said. "That has twenty-six Old Earth languages plus all the major literature."

  "And—" she didn't want to go too far into debt—"a medical set? Pharmacology, Internals, and Surgical?"

  "Should be standard equipment on any ship gets into as much trouble as you do," Simeon agreed.

  "Yes, but can I afford it? I've lost some accounting data; I don't know how my credit stands with Courier Service—"

  Simeon came as near to a laugh as Nancia had ever heard from him. "FN, trust me, the bonus for this last job, plus the hazardous service pay, will cover any frills you want to request and go a long way towards paying off your debt to Lab Schools. Pull off a couple more like this and you'll be a paid-off shell, your own woman. In fact," he added thoughtfully, "there's no reason why you should pay for the classical and medical hedra. I'll just slip those in as part of the replacement list, which is charged to Central—"

  "No," Nancia said firmly. "That's how it starts."

  "How what starts?"

  "You know. Darnell. Polyon. Everything."

  "Oh. Well, I see what you mean, but it is a gray area, you know . . ."

  "Not," Nancia said, "for House Perez y de Gras. I'll buy the extra skills hedra myself, out of my bonus. From the figures you just beamed up, I'll have more than enough to pay honestly for those 'frills' and any other expenses I may incur during this stay,"

  But that was before she discovered the item that would strain her budget to its limits.

  Nancia's repairs were nearly finished when Caleb, now walking without a stick and looking even more muscular than before, landed at Vega Base and requested permission to come aboard. Nancia exclaimed in delight at the bronzed, fit young man she saw stepping out of the airlock.

  "My goodness, Caleb, you look as if you'd never been ill a day in your life."

  "There wasn't much to do at Summerlands," Caleb said dismissively. "It's a sin to waste time; I worked out in the physical therapy rooms most of the time while they were fussing over final tests and declaring me fit for duty again. What's our next assignment?"

  "Our?"

  "You didn't think I'd desert you? You made some errors of judgment while I was away, Nancia, but nothing that can't be repaired. In fact," Caleb added, looking around the gleaming interior from which all traces of OG Shipping's mauve and puce had finally been removed, "it looks as if the repairs are just about finished."

  "They are, but Caleb, I—I'm partnered with Forister now," Nancia said. She felt guilty as she said the words; suppose Caleb felt that she was rejecting him? But it was the simple truth. Her call sign was FN-935 now, not CN.

  "Temporary assignment," Caleb brushed that aside. "Now I've been pronounced fit again, Forister can go back into comfortable retirement. No need for him to continue straining himself in tasks he's really not up to. Take this last debacle. You're not to blame, Nancia, being young and inexperienced, but you must see that it was handled all wrong. If . . ."

  While Caleb blithely explained the mistakes Forister had made and how he, with the benefit of hindsight, could have done so much better, Nancia attempted to control some new and unfamiliar sensations.

  Simeon, she tightbeamed to the managing brain, is there a malfunction in my repaired circuits? My sensors show a temperature rise and high conductivity, and I'm picking up a strange buzzing in some of the audio circuits.

  The Vega manager's reply was a few seconds delayed. Fascinating, he beamed back while Caleb continued his speech. Your synoptic connectors are picking up direct emotional signals. What an unusual coupling—that's not supposed to happen. You must have done something to your connections while you were fighting the hyperchip attack.

  What are you talking about? Is it dangerous? Fix it! Nancia demanded.

  Simeon transmitted a chuckle over the audio circuit, stopping Caleb in mid-peroration.

  "What was that? Is Central trying to contact us?"

  "No, just a—a message from one of the repair techs," Nancia improvised. "You were saying?"

  "Well, try not to let it happen again," Caleb said irritably. "We've got to get our future relationship straight, Nancia; surely that's more important than some last-minute twiddling with your repairs? Now listen. I don't want you to feel guilty over what's past."

  "Why should I?" Nancia asked, startled. "Oh, because I didn't report the conversations I heard on my first voyage, and stop those young criminals before they got properly started? Well, I do feel guilty. That was a bad mistake." But one Caleb had encouraged her to make.

  "I don't mean that at all!" Caleb said. "You acted with perfect propriety in keeping those conversations private. I mean the way you've been rocketing around the Nyota system, bearing false witness, pretending to be something you're not, encouraging breaches of PTA regulations on Angalia, getting involved in all sorts of violence and mixing with very questionable people indeed—"

  Simeon, I know I'm overheating. Can't you send a tech out to fix my circuits?

  There's nothing to fix, Nancia, but Lab Schools will want to study just how you achieved it. Briefly, you've created a mind-body feedback loop between your cortex and the ship—one that carries emotional as well as intellectual and motor impulses.

  You mean—?

  You're a little more like a softperson than the rest of us, Nancia—or, you might say, a little more human. You're angry, my dear, and your connections are showing it. Flushed, ears buzzing, breathing faster, higher fuel consumption—yes, I'd say you're in a roaring snit. And not without cause. You've outgrown that righteous little snip, Nancia. When are you going to shut him up and kick him off you?

  "—but you were misled, and I myself bear some of the fault, having allowed you to persuade me against my better judgment into the first false step on the downward path of deception," Caleb finished his sentence without being aware of the split-second exchange between Nancia and Simeon. "Now that you've seen what such things can lead to, I'm sure you'll repent of your errors. And I want you to know that I freely and completely forgive you. We'll never speak of this again—"

  "You're darned right, we won't!" Nancia interrupted. "Go find yourself a ship to match your morals, Caleb!"

  "What do you mean?"

  To calm herself down, Nancia took a moment to convert her entire Vega subspace map to Old Earth linear measurements and back. By multiple precision arithmetic routines. In surface-level code. She was on the verge of hurting Caleb's feelings. And she wasn't quite angry enough to do that. The inexperienced young brainship who'd teamed with Caleb five years ago would have accepted his self-righteous lecture as if he were laying down Courier Service regulations. It wasn't Caleb's fault, or her fault either, that she'd outgrown his narrow black-and-white view of the world. Forist
er had taught her the value of shades of gray and the duty of perceiving them. And if now she felt more truly partnered with that spare, sardonic, aging brawn than with the young man who'd shared her first adventures—well, there was no reason Caleb should suffer unnecessarily on that account.

  Her overheating circuits cooled down and the buzzing in her ears stopped as she calmed herself with tranquil, fixed equations.

  "It wouldn't work, Caleb," she said at last. "You may forgive me, but the past would always be between us. You'd do better to find another brainship, one that has never betrayed your high ideals." Preferably one that hasn't been commissioned for more than ten minutes.

  "For myself—" Nancia sighed, "sadder but wiser," that's true, anyway. "I think it is more appropriate for me to petition Central that my temporary partnership with Forister be made permanent, or to find another brawn if Forister chooses to retire now." Please, please, don't let him do that.

  "Well." At least Caleb's speech-making impulses had been knocked out temporarily. "If you really think . . ."

  "I do," said Nancia, "and," she added firmly, "I will pay the penalty fee for requesting a brawn reassignment. It's not fair that you should bear any part of that burden."

  But it was a little disappointing to see how quickly Caleb accepted the offer. . . .

  * * *

  The trial of the Nyota Five, as the gossip byters had dubbed Nancia's first passengers, was still in progress when she landed at Central Base some weeks later.

  The solitary journey back, with no brawn or passengers to distract her, had given Nancia plenty of time to think . . . perhaps too much. She had no way of knowing how the trial was progressing or how the court had reacted to the testimony presented; in deference to High Families sensibilities, newsbeamers were not permitted in the courtroom and the gossipbyters had nothing but speculations to report. She didn't even know if the court would wish her cross-examined on the deposition she'd sent back on datahedron. Well, if they did, she was available now. And there'd be no new assignment until Forister was released from testifying and free to brawn her again. If he still wanted to, once he'd heard what was on her deposition . . . and what wasn't.

  Nancia didn't have much time to brood over that possibility; she had hardly touched down at Base when a visitor was announced.

  "Perez y de Gras requesting permission to board," the Central Base managing brain warned her in advance.

  That was a welcome surprise! The last Nancia had heard from Flix was a bitstream packet from Kailas, mostly consisting of pictures of the seedy cafe where he'd found a synthocomming gig. He must have quit—or been fired. . . . Well, she wouldn't ask him about that. Nancia opened her outer doors and set the wall-sized display screens in the lounge to show the surprise she'd been preparing for him.

  "Flix, how lovely, I didn't know you were . . ." she began joyfully as the airlock slid open. The words died away to a faint hiss from her port speaker as she took in the sight of the trim, gray-haired man who stood in the open airlock, surveying her interior with cool gray eyes. Nancia hastily blanked out the moving displays of her new, holo-enhanced, super-detailed SPACED OUT and replaced them with some quiet, correct images of still life paintings by Old Masters.

  "As far as I know," said Javier Perez y de Gras, "he isn't. Although doubtless, now that I've been reassigned to Central, your little brother will find another squalid position on this planet from which to annoy me with the sight of his failure."

  "Oh." Nancia hadn't previously compared the pattern of Flix's jauntings from gig to gig with her father's diplomatic assignments. Now she made a hasty scan of her restored memory banks and found a surprising number of correspondences. That was something she'd have to ask Flix about. Just now she really didn't feel up to discussing it with Daddy.

  "I don't suppose," she said carefully, "that was what you came to see me about? Flix's career, I mean?"

  Her father sniffed. "I don't consider that a career. You have a career, Nancia my dear, and by all accounts you've done quite well to date—a few errors in judgment, perhaps, but nothing that maturity and experience won't—"

  This time Nancia knew what caused the flush of heat that swamped her upper deck circuits and the red haze that trembled in her visual sensors. For a moment she didn't speak, fearing that she would be unable to control her voice; she could not look at Daddy without seeing Caleb and, shadowy in her imagination, Faul del Parma y Polo. Just another man, seeing in her nothing but a tool to serve his plans, coming to give her a rating on how well or ill she'd done for him. Were all men like that?

  "Exactly what errors of judgment were you thinking of?" she inquired when she had her vocal circuits under control again. Not that she hadn't made plenty of mistakes for Daddy to pick at. . . .

  But what he complained of was the last thing she'd been worried about.

  "At least, fortuitously, some other ship performed the service of transporting them back to Central," Daddy said. "But from what I've heard at the trial, you were quite prepared to perform that service yourself. You shouldn't lower yourself that way, Nancia. A Perez y de Gras shouldn't be used as a prison ship to transport common criminals."

  "In case you've forgotten, Daddy," Nancia replied, "those 'common criminals' are the very same people I transported to the Nyota system on my maiden voyage . . . and didn't you pull a few strings to arrange that assignment for me?"

  Javier Perez y de Gras sat down heavily in one of the comfortably padded cabin chairs. "I did that," he said. "I thought it would be nice for you to have some young company . . . young people of your own class and background . . . for your first voyage. An easy assignment, I thought."

  "So did I," Nancia said. Some of the sadness she felt crept into her voice; whatever she'd done to her feedback loops, it seemed to work both ways. She could no longer maintain the perfectly controlled, emotionally uninflected vocal tones she had prided herself on producing before the hyperchip disaster. "So did I. But it turned out . . . rather more complicated than that. And I didn't know what to do. Maybe I did make some 'errors in judgment.' I didn't have a lot of advice, if you recall." Just a taped good-luck message from a man too busy and important to come to my graduation.

  "I recall," her father said. "Call that my error, if you like. Once you'd made it through Lab Schools to graduation and commissioning, you seemed to be doing so well, and I was worried about Flix. Still am, for that matter." He sighed. "Anyway, there you were, off to the start of a glorious career, and my other two children had problems aplenty."

  "Not Jinevra!" Nancia exclaimed. "I always thought she was the perfect example of what you wanted us to become."

  "I wanted you to become yourselves," her father said. "Apparently I didn't communicate that to you. Jinevra's a paper-doll cutout of the ideal PTA administrator, and I don't know how to talk to her any more. And as for Flix—well, you know about Flix. I thought he needed attention more than you. Thought a few suggestions, maybe an entry-level position in some branch of Central where he could work himself up and someday amount to something . . . of course he'd have to give up fooling around with the synthcom. . . ." Javier Perez y de Gras sighed. "Flix never has straightened out. I don't know, perhaps he feels neglected on account of all those years when I took every free moment to visit you at Lab Schools. I didn't have that much time for him then. Even the day he was born, I was at Lab Schools, watching you be fitted for your first mobile shell. Seemed he needed me more than you. . . . I thought it was time to redress the balance."

  Nancia absorbed the impact of this speech quietly. For the first time, looking at her father's worn face, she began to comprehend how much time and effort he must have really given to his family over the years. Since their mother had quietly retired to the haven of Blissto addiction in a hush-hush, genteel clinic, he had tried to be both father and mother to three obstreperous, brilliant, demanding High Families brats. Another man might have leaned too hard on his children for emotional comfort; another career diplomat might have shunted
the children into exclusive boarding schools and forgotten about them. But Daddy was no Faul del Parma, to use and abuse and forget his children. He'd done the best he could for them . . . within his limitations . . . snatching moments between meetings, suffering long tiring reroutings between assignments to spend a day or two on their planets, juggling a diplomat's unforgiving schedule to work in graduations and school plays.

  "An error of judgment, perhaps," Javier Perez y de Gras said when the silence had lasted too long, "but never . . . please believe me . . . an error of love. You're my daughter. I only wanted the best for you." And rising from his padded chair, he laid one hand briefly on the titanium column that enclosed and protected Nancia's shell.

  * * *

  "Requesting permission to come aboard!"

  There was no identification this time, but Nancia recognized Forister's voice, even though there was something unfamiliar about the way he drew the words out. She activated her external sensors and saw not only Forister but General Questar-Benn standing on the landing pad.

  "Request permission to come aboard," Forister repeated. He was pronouncing his words very carefully. And Micaya Questar-Benn was standing very properly, stiff as if she were on a parade-ground. A suspicion began to grow in Nancia's mind.

  She slid open the lower doors and waited. A moment later the airlock door opened and Micaya Questar-Benn stepped into the lounge. Very slowly and carefully.

  Forister followed. He was holding an open bottle in one hand.

  "You are drunk," Nancia said severely.

  Forister looked wounded. "Not yet. Wouldn't get drunk before I came back to share the news with you. Just . . . happy. Very happy," he expatiated. "Very, very, very . . . where was I?"

  "Looking at the bottom of a bottle of Sparkling Heorot, I suspect," Nancia told him.

  Forister's wounded expression intensified. "Please! Do you think I'd toast the best brainship on Central in that cheap stuff? It's only fit for, for . . ."