The Ship Who Sang (7 page)

‘Now, Carif,' said Onro briskly, stepping into the lift, his son still cradled in his arms, ‘this is what we'll do. How we'll organize. We don't have to take everyone on your very busy planet. The Youth Corps can be called in from Avalon. Just their bag of tricks.'

‘Thank you for believing in me,' Theoda told the nurse.

‘One of the babies was my sister's,' the woman
said softly, with tears in her eyes. ‘She's the only one alive from the entire town.'

The lift had come back up and the ‘brawn' and the nurse took it. Theoda had to pack her gear.

‘The easy part is over, Helva. Now it's all uphill, encouraging, instructing, upholding patience. Even Onro's son has a long, long way to go with therapy before he approaches his pre-plague physical condition.'

‘But at least there is hope.'

‘There is always hope while there is life.'

‘Was it
your
son?' asked Helva.

‘Yes, and my daughter, my husband, my whole family. I was the only immune,' and Theoda's face contorted. ‘With all my training, with all the skill of years of practice, I couldn't save them.'

Theoda's eyes closed against that remembered agony.

Helva blacked out her own vision and with a deep indrawn mental breath as Theoda's words echoed the protest she herself had voiced at her ineffectuality. It still burned in her mind: the searing memory of Jennan, looking toward her as he died.

‘I don't know why one makes a certain emotional adjustment,' Theoda said wearily. ‘I guess it's the survival factor forcing you to go on, preserving sanity and identity by a re-focusing of values. I felt that if I could learn my profession so well that never again would I have to watch someone I loved die because of my
ineffectiveness, then the ignorance that killed my family would be forgiven.'

‘But how could you have turned a space plague?' Helva demanded.

‘Oh, I know I couldn't have, but I still don't forgive myself.'

Helva turned Theoda's words over in her mind, letting their significance sink into her like an anesthetic salve.

‘Thank you, Theoda,' she said finally, looking again at the therapist. ‘What are you crying for?' she asked, astonished to see Theoda, sitting on the edge of the bunk, tears streaming unheeded down her face.

‘You. Because you can't can you? And you lost your Jennan and they never even gave you a chance to rest. They just ordered you up to take me here and . . .'

Helva stared at Theoda, torn with a variety of emotions: incredulous that someone else did understand her grief over Jennan; that Theoda was, at the moment of her own triumph, concerned by Helva's sorrow. She felt the hard knot of grief coming untied and she was suddenly rather astonished that she, Helva, was the object of pity.

‘By the Almighty, Helva, wake up,' shouted Onro at her base. Helva hurriedly sent down the lift for him.

‘What on earth are you crying for? Don't bother to answer,' he rattled on, charging into the cabin and snatching Theoda's kitbag from
her limp hands. He plowed on, into the galley. ‘It's undoubtedly in a good cause. But there's a whole planet waiting for your instructions . . .' He was scooping up all the coffee containers he could find and stuffing them into the kitbag, and his pockets. ‘I promise you can cry all you want once you've given me the therapy routine.' He made a cradle of her hands and piled more coffee cans on. ‘Then I'll lend you my shoulder.'

‘She's got mine any time she wants,' Helva put in, a little unsteadily.

Onro stopped long enough to glance at Helva.

‘You're not making sense either,' he said in an irascible voice. ‘You haven't
got
a shoulder.'

‘She's making perfectly good sense,' Theoda said stoutly as Onro started to push her toward the lock.

‘Come on, Theoda, come on.'

‘Thank you, my friend,' Theoda murmured turning back to Helva. Then she whirled away, allowing Onro to start the lift.

‘No, no, Theoda, I'm the one who's grateful,' Helva called as Theoda's head disappeared past the edge of the lock. Softly, to herself, she added, ‘I needed tears.'

As the landcar zoomed back toward the hospital complex, Helva could see Theoda's arm waving farewell and knew Theoda understood all that hadn't been said. The dust settled down on the road to the hospital as Helva signaled
Regulus Base of the completion of her mission and her estimated return.

Then, like a Phoenix rising again from the bitter ashes of her hundred hours' mourning, Helva lifted on the brilliant tail of exploding fuel toward the stars, and healing.

EVERY DIVERTED SYNAPSE
in Helva's shell-encased body vibrated in unconditional revolt against the autocracy of Central Worlds Service.

‘All haste, all haste,' she snarled in impotent revolt to her sister ship, the 822, on the private ship-to-ship band on which not even Cencom could eavesdrop.

The Seld-Ilsa snorted unsympathetically. ‘You're doing something, which is more than I can say in Mediation Service. I've spent weeks and weeks on end waiting for them to make up their minds which planetary crisis is most crucial. By the time we get there, critical mass has been reached and we have a helluva mess to clean up.'

‘You think MedServ doesn't proscrastinate?' Helva retorted sharply. ‘Why Jennan and I . . .' and she stopped, startled to have been able to mention his name.

Ilsa took advantage of the brief pause and grumbled on, oblivious to Helva's stunned silence.

‘You'd think they'd have briefed us better in training. When I think of the situations I've
already encountered that were never even mentioned! Theory, procedure, technique, that's all we handled. Not a single practical suggestion. Just garbage, garbage, trivial garbage. They don't need brain ships, they need computers!' The 822 ranted on. ‘Stupid, senseless, unemotional computers.'

Helva spotted the fallacies in the 822's complaints but remained quiet. She and Ilsa had been classmates and she knew from past experience the voids in the other's personality.

‘I
heard
,' the 822 said confidentially, ‘that your mission has to do with that blue block building in the hospital annex.'

Helva adjusted her right fin scanner but the oblong structure was devoid of any unusual feature that would indicate its contents.

‘Have you
heard
when I'm supposed to hasten away from here again?' she asked Ilsa hopefully.

‘Can't talk now; here comes Seld back. See you around.'

Helva watched as the 822's brawn-half ascended to the airlock and the SI-822 lifted off Regulus Center Base. Seld had partied with Jennan in Helva one time when both ships were down at Leviticus IV. Seld had a passable bass, as she recalled it. Envy briefly touched her. She flicked back to the ambiguous hospital annex, savagely wondering what kind of emergency this would be. And would she remain an X-designate the rest of her service life?

She had set down at the end of the great
Regulus field, the farthest edge from the Service Cemetery. Despite her resignation to Jennan's loss, despite Theoda's healing tears, Helva could not bring herself to grind more salt into her sorrow by proximity to Jennan's grave. Perhaps in a century or so . . . Consequently, waiting around on Regulus was painful. And with the 822 gone, she could no longer divert her pain into anger at the prolonged wait she must endure.

‘KH-834, your “brawn” is on her way with assignment tape,' Cencom alerted her.

Helva acknowledged the message, excitement stirring within her. It was almost a relief to receive a double-initial call, the pleasure overriding her twinge of regret that her ‘brawn' partner was feminine. It was a relief, too, to experience any emotion after the numbing of Jennan's death. The Annigoni experience had broken her apathy.

A ground car zipped out from the direction of the massive Control and Barracks complex, skidding to a stop at her base. Without waiting, Helva lowered the lift and watched as a tiny figure hefted three pieces of baggage onto the platform.

‘K' meant to stay a while, Helva decided. The lift ascended and shortly her new brawn was framed in the open lock, against the brilliant Regulan sky.

‘Kira of Canopus requesting permission to board the XH-834,' said the young woman,
saluting smartly toward Helva's position behind the titanium bulkhead.

‘Permission granted. Welcome aboard, Kira of Canopus.'

The girl kicked the limp lump of a fabric bag unceremoniously aboard. But she carefully carried the other two back to the pilot's cabin. The odd-shaped one Helva identified, after a moment's reflection, as an ancient stringed instrument called a guitar.

‘Naturally they'd send me someone musically oriented,' she thought, not at all sure she was pleased with this infringement on her most cherished memories of Jennan. She ruthlessly suppressed this unworthy thought with the admonition that the majority of service personnel were musically oriented. The infinite possibilities of the art passed traveltime admirably.

Kira flipped open the other compact case and Helva, surreptitiously peeking, noticed it was full of vials and other medical equipment. Kira inspected the contents with quick fingers and, closing the case, strapped it with care against the rigors of acceleration on the shelves behind the bed.

Kira was, in form and nature as well as sex, the antithesis of Jennan. Since she was in a carping mood, Helva wondered how much of that was intentional. But that would mean Cencom had more sensitivity than Helva decided, privately, they were computationally blessed with.

Kira of Canopus couldn't weigh more than 40
kilos fully suited. Her narrow face with slanted cheekbones had a delicacy which appeared ill-suited to bear the designation brawn. Her hair, dark brown, was braided tightly in many loops around her long, oval skull. Her eyes, wide set and almond shaped, were of a clear, cool, deep green, thickly lashed. Her fingers, slim and tapering, were as dainty as her narrow feet, oddly graceful in heavy shipboots. Her movements, swift and sure, were quicksilver, full of restless energy, dartingly inquisitive.

Kira reentered the main cabin. Helva, used to Theoda's lethargic movements, had to adjust quickly.

Kira inserted the order tape, locking it into its niche in the pilot's board. As the code ran through, a startled exclamation was wrung from Helva.

‘Three hundred thousand babies?'

Kira's laugh was a staccato arpeggio of mirth.

‘Assignment Stork, by the holies!'

‘You're only temporary?' questioned Helva, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. There was a magnetism about Kira that appealed to Helva.

Kira smiled wryly. ‘This assignment will take some time. Only 30,000 are collected already. Even in this day and age, it takes times to make babies.'

‘I haven't got facilities . . .' Helva began, aghast at the thought of becoming a nursery. She broke
off as the tape elaborated on the condition of the proposed cargo. ‘Babies in ribbons?'

Kira, who had had previous briefing on their mission, laughed at Helva's outraged reaction.

The tape continued remorselessly and Helva understood the significance of the miles of plastic tubing and tanks of fluid that had been placed in her not-overgenerous cargo spaces.

In the system of the star Nekkar, an unexpected radiation flare had sterilized the entire population of its newly colonized planet. A freak power failure had resulted in the total loss of the planet's embryo banks. The KH-834's mission was to rush embryos to Nekkar from planets that had answered the emergency call.

In the very early days of space travel, when man had still not walked on Mars, or Jupiter's satellites, a tremendous advance had been made in genetics. A human fetus in its early stages was transferred from one womb to another, the host mother bringing the child to term and giving it birth without having relationship to it. A second enormous stride forward in propagating the race of man occurred when a male sperm was scientifically united with female ova. Fertilization was successful and the resultant fetus was brought to term, the child growing to normal, well-balanced maturity.

It became a requirement of those in hazardous professions, or those with highly desirable dominant characteristics of intelligence or physical perfection, to donate sperm and ova to
what became known as the Race Conservation Agency.

As civilization expanded on to newer, rawly dangerous worlds, the custom was for the young men and women to leave their seed with the RCA on reaching their majority. It was good sense to have such a viable concentration of genetically catalogued seed available. Thus, given a lack, say, in a generation of a particularly desirable ethnic group, sufficient additional embryos could be released to restore the ecological balance.

On an individual basis, the young wife, untimely widowed, might bear her husband's children from his seed on file at the RCA. Or a man, wishing a son of certain pronounced genetic characteristics to perpetuate a family name or business, would apply to the bank. There were, of course, ridiculous uses made of the RCA facilities: women in the thrall of a hysteria over a noted spaceranger or artist would apply to the RCA for his seed if the male in question was agreeable. But naturally conceived children were the rule rather than the exception. Helva herself had been the naturally inseminated child of her parents.

Generally, the RCA served Central Worlds as a repository in case of just such an emergency as had arisen at Nekkar: the inability of individuals to propagate the race. An appeal had reached the Main RCA on Earth to locate and deliver 300,000 fertilized ova of genetic type similar to
the Nekkarese. RCA had 30,000 on hand and had forwarded the call to all major RCA banks throughout the Central Worlds asking for contributions, which the KH-834 would pick up and deliver to Nekkar.