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 called 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 aga
inst 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 about. 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?”
“Okay,” she replied, faintly. “Uh, can I be alone for a while, please?”
“Sure.” She stopped pretending to fuss with equipment and nodded shortly at the holo-screen. Kenny brought up one hand to wave at her, and the screen blinked out. Anna left through what Tia now realized was a decontam-airlock a moment later. Leaving her alone with the hissing, humming equipment, and Ted.
She swallowed a lump in her throat and thought very hard about what they’d told her.
She wasn’t getting any better, she was getting worse. They didn’t know what was wrong. That was on the negative side. On the plus side, there was nothing wrong with Mum and Dad, and they hadn’t said to give up all hope.
Therefore, she should continue to assume that they would find a cure.
She cleared her throat. “Hello?” she said.
As she had thought, there was an AI monitoring the room.
“Hello,” it replied, in the curiously accentless voice only an AI could produce. “What is your need?”
“I’d like to watch a holo. History,” she said, after a moment of thought. “There’s a holo about Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt. It’s called Phoenix of Ra, I think. Have you got that?”
That had been on the forbidden list at home; Tia knew why. There had been some pretty steamy scenes with the Pharaoh and her architect in there. Tia was fascinated by the only female to declare herself Pharaoh, however, and had been decidedly annoyed when a little sex kept her from viewing this one.
“Yes, I have access to that,” the AI said after a moment. “Would you like to view it now?”
So they hadn’t put any restrictions on her viewing privileges! “Yes,” she replied; then, eager to strike while she had the chance, “And after that, I’d like to see the Aten trilogy, about Ahnkenaten and the heretics—that’s Aten Rising, Aten at Zenith, and Aten Descending.”
Those had more than a few steamy scenes; she’d overheard her mother saying that some of the theories that had been dramatized fairly explicitly in the trilogy, while they made comprehensible some otherwise inexplicable findings, would get the holos banned in some cultures. And Braddon had chuckled and replied that the costumes alone—or lack of them—while completely accurate, would do the same. Still—Tia figured she could handle it. And if it was that bad, it would certainly help keep her mind off her own troubles!
“Very well,” the AI said agreeably. “Shall I begin?”
“Yes,” she told it, with another caress of her cheek on Ted’s soft fur. “Please.”
Pota and Braddon watched their daughter with frozen faces, faces that Tia was convinced covered a complete welter of emotions that they didn’t want her to see. She took a deep breath, enunciated “Chair forward, five feet,” and her Moto-Chair glided forward and stopped before it touched them.
“Well, now I can get around at least,” she said, with what she hoped sounded like cheer. “I was getting awfully tired of the same four walls!”
Whatever it was that she had—and now she heard the words “proto-virus” and “dystrophic sclerosis” bandied about more often than not—the medics had decided it wasn’t contagious. They’d let Pota and Braddon out of isolation, and they’d moved Tia to another room, one that had a door right onto the corridor. Not that it made much difference, except that Anna didn’t have to use a decontam airlock and pressure-suit anymore. And now Kenny came to see her in person. But four white walls were still four white walls, and there wasn’t much variation in rooms.
Still—she was afraid to ask for things to personalize the room. Afraid that if she made it more her own—she’d be stuck in it. Forever.
Her numbness and paralysis extended to most of her body now, except for her facial muscles. And there it stopped. Just as inexplicably as it had begun.
They’d put her in the quadriplegic version of the Moto-Chair; just like Kenny’s except that she controlled hers with a few commands and series of tongue-switches and eye movements. A command sent it forward, and the direction she looked would tell it where to go. And hers had mechanical “arms” that followed set patterns programmed in to respond to more commands. Any command had to be prefaced by “chair” or “arm.” A clumsy system, but it was the best they could do without direct synaptic connections from the brainstem, like those of a shellperson.
Her brainstem was still intact, anyway. Whatever it was had gotten her spine, but not that.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, she thought with bitter irony, how was the play?
“What do you think, pumpkin?” Braddon asked, his voice quivering only a little.
“Hey, this is stellar, Dad,” she replied cheerfully. “It’s just like piloting a ship! I think I’ll challenge Doctor Kenny to a race!”
Pota swallowed very hard and managed a tremulous smile. “It won’t be for too long,” she said without conviction. “As soon as they find out what’s set up housekeeping in there, they’ll have you better in no time.”
She bit her lip to keep from snapping back and dug up a fatuous grin from somewhere. The likelihood of finding a cure diminished more with every day, and she knew it. Neither Anna nor Kenny made any attempt to hide that from her.
But there was no point in making her parents unhappy. They already felt bad enough.
She tried out all the points of the chair for them, until not even they could stand it anymore. They left
, making excuses and promising to come back—and they were succeeded immediately by a stream of interns and neurological specialists, each of whom had more variations on the same basic questions she had answered a thousand times, each of whom had his own pet theory about what was wrong.
“First my toes felt like they were asleep when I woke up one morning, but it wore off. Then it didn’t wear off. Then instead of waking up with tingles, I woke up numb. No, sir, it never actually hurt. No, ma’am, it only went as far as my heel at first. Yes, sir, then after two days my fingers started. No ma’am, just the fingers not the whole hand. . . .”
Hours of it. But she knew that they weren’t being nasty, they were trying to help her, and being able to help her depended on how cooperative she was.
But their questions didn’t stop the questions of her own. So far it was just sensory nerves and voluntary muscles and nerves. What if it went to the involuntary ones, and she woke up unable to breathe? What then? What if she lost control of her facial muscles? Every little tingle made her break out in a sweat of panic, thinking it was going to happen. . . .
Nobody had answers for any questions. Not hers, and not theirs.
Finally, just before dinner, they went away. After about a half an hour, she mastered control of the arms enough to feed herself, saving herself the humiliation of having to call a nurse to do it. And the chair’s own plumbing solved the humiliation of the natural result of eating and drinking. . . .
After supper, when the tray was taken away, she was left in the growing darkness of the room, quite alone. She would have slumped, if she could have. It was just as well that Pota and Braddon hadn’t returned; having them there was a strain. It was harder to be brave in front of them than it was in front of strangers.
“Chair, turn seventy degrees right,” she ordered. “Left arm, pick up bear.”
With a soft whir, the chair obeyed her.
“Left arm, put bear—cancel. Left arm, bring bear to left of face.” The arm moved a little. “Closer. Closer. Hold.”
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