Ship Who Searched (9 page)

In public. He was the only one to watch her in private, like this, when she thought there was no one to see that her whole pose of cheer was nothing more than a facade.

“I wasn’t finished. I wasn’t even started yet.”

“
Damn
it,” he swore, scrubbing at his eyes again and pounding the arm of his chair. “
Damn
it anyway!” What careless god had caused her to choose the very words
he
had used, fifteen years ago?

Fifteen years ago, when a stupid accident had left him paralyzed from the waist down and put an end—he thought—to his dreams for med school?

Fifteen years ago, when Doctor Harwat Kline-Bes was
his
doctor and had heard him weeping alone into his pillow?

He turned his chair and opened the viewport out into the stars, staring at them as they moved past in a panorama of perfect beauty that changed with the rotation of the station. He let the tears dry on his cheeks, let his mind empty.

Fifteen years ago, another neurologist had heard those stammered, heartbroken words, and had determined that they would
not
become a truth. He had taken a paraplegic young student, bullied the makers of an experimental Moto-Chair into giving the youngster one—then bullied the dean of the Meyasor State Medical College into admitting the boy.
Then
he had seen to it that once the boy graduated, he got an internship in this very hospital—a place where a neurologist in a Moto-Chair was no great curiosity, not with the sentients of a hundred worlds coming in as patients
and
doctors. . . .

A paraplegic, though. Not a quad. Not a child with a brilliant, flexible mind, trapped in an inert body.

Brilliant mind. Inert body. Brilliant—

An idea blinded him, it occurred so suddenly. He was
not
the only person watching Tia—there was one other. Someone who watched every patient here, every doctor, every nurse. . . . Someone he didn’t consult too often, because Lars wasn’t a medico, or a shrink—

But in this case, Lars’ opinion was likely to be more accurate than anyone else’s on this station. Including his own.

He thumbed a control. “Lars,” he said shortly. “Got a minute, buddy?”

He had to wait for a moment. Lars was a busy guy—though hopefully at this hour there weren’t too many demands on his conversational circuits. “Certainly, Kenny,” Lars replied after a few seconds. “How can I help the neurological
wunderkind
of Central Worlds MedStation
Pride of Albion
? Hmm?” The voice was rich and ironic; Lars rather enjoyed teasing everyone onboard. He called it “therapeutic deflation of egos.” He particularly liked deflating Kenny’s—he had said more than once that everyone else was so afraid of being “unkind to the poor cripple” that they danced on eggs to avoid telling him when he was full of it.

“Can the sarcasm, Lars,” Kenny replied. “I’ve got a serious problem that I want your opinion on.”

“My opinion?” Lars sounded genuinely surprised. “This must be a personal opinion—I’m certainly not qualified to give you a medical one.”

“Most definitely, a very personal opinion, one that you are the best suited to give. On Hypatia Cade.”

“Ah.” Kenny thought that Lars’ tone softened considerably. “The little child in the Neuro unit, with the unchildlike taste in holos. She still thinks I’m the AI. I haven’t dissuaded her.”

“Good, I want her to be herself around you, for the gods of space know she won’t be herself around the rest of us.” He realized that his tone had gone savage and carefully regained control over himself before he continued. “You’ve got her records and you’ve watched the kid herself. I know she’s old for it—but how would she do in the shell program?”

A long pause. Longer than Lars needed simply to access and analyze records. “Has her condition stabilized?” he asked, cautiously. “If it hasn’t—if she goes brain-inert halfway into her schooling—it’d not only make problems for anyone else you’d want to bring in late, it’ll traumatize the other shell-kids badly. They don’t handle death well. I wouldn’t be a party to frightening them, however inadvertently.”

Kenny massaged his temple with the long, clever fingers that had worked so many surgical miracles for others and could do nothing for this little girl. “As far as we can tell anything about this—disease—yes, she’s stable,” he said finally. “Take a look in there and you’ll see I ordered a shotgun approach while we were testing her. She’s had a full course of every anti-viral neurological agent we’ve got a record of.
And
non-invasive things like a course of ultra—well, you can see it there. I think we killed it, whatever it was.”

Too late to help her. Damn it.

“She’s brilliant,” Lars said cautiously. “She’s flexible. She has the ability to multi-thread, to do several things at once. And she’s had good, positive reactions to contact with shellpersons in the past.”

“So?” Kenny asked, impatiently, as the stars passed by in their courses, indifferent to the fate of one little girl. “Your opinion.”

“I think she can make the transition,” Lars said, with more emphasis than Kenny had ever heard in his voice before. “I think she’ll not only make the transition, she’ll do
well.
”

He let out the breath he’d been holding in a sigh.

“Physically, she is certainly no worse off than many in the shellperson program, including yours truly,” Lars continued. “Frankly, Kenny, she’s got so much potential it would be a crime to let her rot in a hospital room for the rest of her life.”

The careful control Lars normally had over his voice was gone; there was passion in his words that Kenny had never heard him display until this moment. “Got to you, too, did she?” he said dryly.

“Yes,” Lars said, biting off the word. “And I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t mind telling you that she had me in—well, not tears, but certainly the equivalent.”

“Good for you.” He rubbed his hands together, warming cold fingers. “Because I’m going to need your connivance again.”

“Going to pull another fast one, are you?” Lars asked with ironic amusement.

“Just a few strings. What good does being a stellar intellect do me, if I can’t make use of the position?” he asked rhetorically. He shut the viewport and pivoted his chair to face his desk, keying on his terminal and linking it directly to Lars and a very personal database. One called “Favors.” “All right, my friend, let’s get to work. First, whose strings can you jerk? Then, who on the political side has influence in the program, of that set, who owes me the most, and of that subset, who’s due here the soonest?”

A Sector Secretary-General did not grovel, nor did he gush, but to Kenny’s immense satisfaction, when Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan came aboard the
Pride of Albion
, the very first thing he wanted, after all the official inspections and the like were over, was to meet with the brilliant neurologist whose work had saved his nephew from the same fate as Kenny himself. He already knew most of what there was to know about Kenny and his meteoric career.

And Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan was not the sort to avoid an uncomfortable topic.

“A little ironic, isn’t it?” the Secretary-General said, after the firm handshake, with a glance at Kenny’s Moto-Chair. He stood up and did
not
tug self-consciously at his conservative dark blue tunic.

Kenny did not smile, but he took a deep breath of satisfaction.
Doubly good. No more calls, we have a winner.

“What, that my injury was virtually identical to Peregrine’s?” he replied immediately. “Not ironic at all, sir. The fact that I found myself in this position was what prompted me to go into neurology in the first place. I won’t try to claim that if I
hadn’t
been injured, and
hadn’t
worked so hard to find a remedy for the same injuries, someone else might not have come up with the same answer that I did. Medical research is a matter of building on what has come before, after all.”

“But without your special interest, the solution might well have come too late to do Peregrine any good,” the Secretary-General countered. “And it was not only your technique, it was your skill that pulled him through. There is no duplication of that—not in this sector, anyway. That’s why I arranged for this visit. I wanted to thank you.”

Kenny shrugged deprecatingly. This was the most perfect opening he’d ever seen in his life—and he had no intention of letting it get away from him. Not when he had the answer to Tia’s prayers trapped in his office.

“I can’t win them all, sir,” he said flatly. “I’m not a god. Though there are times I wish most profoundly that I was, and right now is one of them.”

The Great Man’s expression sobered. The Secretary-General was not just a Great Man because he was an excellent administrator; he was one because he had a human side, and that human and humane side could be touched. “I take it you have a case that is troubling you?” Then, conscious of the fact that he Owed Kenny, he said the magic words. “Perhaps I can help?”

Kenny sighed, as if he were reluctant to continue the discussion.
Wouldn’t do to seem too eager.
“Well—would you care to see some tape of the child?”

Child.
Children were one of the Great Man’s weaknesses. He had sponsored more child-oriented programs than any three of his predecessors combined. “Yes. If it would not be violating the child’s privacy.”

“Here—” Kenny flicked a switch, triggering the holo-record he already had keyed up. A record he and Anna had put together. Carefully edited, carefully selected, compiled from days of recordings with Lars’ assistance and the psych-profile of the Great Man to guide them. “I promise I won’t take more than fifteen minutes of your time.”

The first seven and a half minutes of this recording were of Tia at her most attractive; being very brave and cheerful for the interns and her parents. “This is Hypatia Cade, the daughter of Pota Andropolous-Cade and Braddon Maartens-Cade,” he explained, over the holo. Quickly he outlined her background and her pathetic little story, stressing her high intelligence, her flexibility, her responsibility. “The prognosis isn’t very cheerful, I’m afraid,” he said, watching his chrono carefully to time his speech with the end of that section of tape. “No matter what we do, she’s doomed to spend the rest of her life in some institution or other. The only way she could be at all mobile would be through direct synaptic connections—well, we don’t do that here—they can only link in that way at Lab Schools, the shellperson project—”

He stopped, as the holo flickered and darkened. Tia was alone.

The arm of her chair reached out and grasped the sad little blue bear, hidden until now by the tray table and a pillow. It brought the toy in close to her face, and she gently rubbed her cheek against its soft fur coat. The lightning-bolt of the Courier Service on its shirt stood out clearly in this shot . . . one reason why Kenny had chosen it.

“They’ve gone, Ted,” she whispered to her bear. “Mum and Dad—they’ve gone back to the Institute. There’s nobody left here but you, now.”

A single bright tear formed in one corner of her eye and slowly rolled down her cheek, catching what little light there was in the room.

“What? Oh, no, it’s not their fault, Ted—they had to. The Institute said so, I saw the dispatch. It said—it said since I w-w-wasn’t going to get any b-b-b-better there was no p-p-p-point in—in—wasting v-v-valuable t-t-time—”

She sobbed once, and buried her face in the teddy bear’s fur.

After a moment, her voice came again, muffled. “Anyway, it hurts them so m-much. And it’s s-s-so hard to be b-brave for them. But if I cried, th-they’d only feel w-worse. I think m-maybe it’s b-better this way, don’t you? Easier. F-for every-b-b-b-body. . . .”

The holo flickered again; same time, nearly the same position, but a different day. This time she was crying openly, tears coursing down her cheeks as she sobbed into the bear’s little shirt. “We’ve given her the complete run of the library and the holo collection,” Kenny said, very softly. “Normally, they keep her relatively amused and stimulated—but just before we filmed this, she picked out an episode of
The Stellar Explorers
—and—well—her parents said she had planned to be a pilot, you see—”

She continued to cry, sobbing helplessly, the only understandable words being “—Teddy—I wanted—to go—I wanted to see the
stars—”

The holo flickered out, as Kenny turned the lights in his office back up. He reached for a tissue and wiped his eyes without shame. “I’m afraid she affects me rather profoundly,” he said, and smiled weakly. “So much for my professional detachment.”

The Great Man blinked rapidly to clear his own eyes. “Why isn’t something being done for that child?” he demanded, his voice hoarse.

“We’ve done all we can—here,” Kenny said. “The only possibility of giving that poor child any kind of a life is to get her into the shellperson program. But the Psychs at the Laboratory Schools seem to think she’s too old. They wouldn’t even send someone to come evaluate her, even though the parents petitioned them and we added our own recommendations. . . .”

He let the sentence trail off significantly. The Secretary-General gave him a sharp look. “And you don’t agree with them, I take it?”

Kenny shrugged. “It isn’t just my opinion,” he said smoothly. “It’s the opinion of the staff Psych assigned to her, the shellperson running this station, and a brainship friend of hers in the Courier Service. The one,” he added delicately, “who gave her that little bear.”

Mentioning the bear sold the deal; Kenny could see it in the Great Man’s expression. “We’ll just see about that,” the Secretary-General said. “The people you talked to don’t have all the answers—and they
certainly
don’t have the final say.” He stood up and offered Kenny his hand again. “I won’t promise anything—but don’t be surprised if there’s someone from the Laboratory Schools here to see her in the next few days. How soon can you have her ready for transfer, if they take her?”

“Within twelve hours, sir,” Kenny replied, secretly congratulating himself for getting her parents to sign a writ-of-consent before they left. Of course, they thought it was for experimental procedures.