Ship Who Searched (8 page)

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 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.”

Now she cuddled Ted against her cheek, and she could pretend that it was her own arm holding him there.

With no one there to see, slow, hot tears formed in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She leaned her head to the left a little, so that they would soak into Ted’s soft blue fur and not betray her.

“It’s not fair,” she whispered to Ted, who seemed to nod with sad agreement as she rubbed her cheek against him. “It’s not fair. . . .”

I wanted to find the EsKay homeworld. I wanted to go out with Mum and Dad and be the one to find the homeworld. I wanted to write books. I wanted to stand up in front of people and make them laugh and get excited, and see how history and archeology aren’t dead, they’re just asleep. I wanted to do things they make holos out of. I wanted—I wanted—

I wanted to see things! I wanted to drive grav-sleds and swim in a real lagoon and feel a storm and—

—and I wanted—

Some of the scenes from the holos she’d been watching came back with force now, and memories of Pota and Braddon, when they thought she was engrossed in a book or a holo, giggling and cuddling like tweenies. . . .

I wanted to find out about boys. Boys and kisses and—

And now nobody’s ever going to look at me and see me. All they’re going to see is this big metal thing. That’s all they see now. . . .

Even if a boy ever wanted to kiss me, he’d have to get past a half ton of machinery, and it would probably bleep an alarm.

The tears poured faster now, with the darkness of the room to hide them.

They wouldn’t have put me in this thing if they thought I was going to get better. I’m never going to get better. I’m only going to get worse. I can’t feel anything, I’m nothing but a head in a machine. And if I get worse, will I go deaf? Blind?

“Teddy, what’s going to happen to me?” she sobbed. “Am I going to spend the rest of my life in a room?”

Ted didn’t know, any more than she did.

“It’s not fair, it’s not fair, I never did anything,” she wept, as Ted watched her tears with round, sad eyes, and soaked them up for her. “It’s not fair. I wasn’t finished. I hadn’t even started yet. . . .”

Kenny grabbed a tissue with one hand and snapped off the camera-relay with the other. He scrubbed fiercely at his eyes and blew his nose with a combination of anger and grief. Anger, at his own impotence. Grief, for the vulnerable little girl alone in that cold, impersonal hospital room, a little girl who was doing her damnedest to put a brave face on everything.