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The screen flickered and went blank; Tia sighed with contentment. Lars had
been the one to come up with 'Zen hugs', 'the hugs that you would get, if we
were there, if we could hug you, but we aren't, and we can't'.
and he and Kenny began using them in their weekly transmissions to Tia all
through school. Before long her entire class began using the phrase, so
pointedly apt for shell-people, and now it was spreading across known space.
Kenny had been amused, especially after one of his recovering patients got the
phrase in a transmission from his stay-at-home, techno-phobic wife!
Well, the transmission put the cap on her day, that was certain. And the
perfect climax to the beginning of her new life. Anna and her parents at the
graduation ceremony, Professor Brogen handing out the special awards she'd
gotten in Xenology, Diplomacy, and First Contact Studies, Moira showing up at
the landing field the same day she was installed in her ship, still with
Tbmas, wonder of wonders.
Having Moira there to figuratively hold her hand during the nasty process of
partial anesthesia while the techs hooked her up in her column had been worth
platinum.
She shuddered at the memory. Oh, they could describe the feelings (or rather,
lack of them) to you, they could psych you up for experience, and you thought
you were ready, but the moment of truth, when you lost everything but
primitive com and the few sensors in the shell itself ... was horrible.
Something out of the worst of nightmares.
And she still remembered what it had been like to live with only softperson
senses. She couldn't imagine what it was like for those who'd been popped into
a shell at birth. It had brought back all the fear and feeling of helplessness
of her time in the hospital.
It had been easier with Moira there. But if the transfer had been a journey
through sensory-deprivation hell, waking up in the ship had been pure heaven.
No amount of simulator training conveyed what it really felt like, to have a
living, breathing ship wrapped around you.
It was a moment that had given her back everything she had lost. Never mind
that her 'skin' was duralloy metal, her 'legs' were engines, her 'arms'
the servos she used to maintain herself inside and out. That her 'lungs' and
'heart' were the life-support systems that would keep her brawn alive. That
all of her senses were ship's sensors linked through brainstem relays. None of
that mattered. She had a body again! That was a moment of ecstasy no one
plugged into a shell at birth would ever understand. Moira did, though ... and
it had been wonderful to be able to share that moment of elation.
And Tomas understood, as only a brawn-partner of long-standing could, Tomas
had arranged for Theodore Edward Bear to have his own little case built into
the wall of the central cabin as his graduation present. "And decom anyone who
doesn't understand," he said firmly, putting a newly cleaned Ted behind his
plexi panel and closing the door. "A brawn is only a brawn, but a bear is a
friend for life!"
So now the solemn little blue bear in his Courier Service shirt reigned as
silent supervisor over the central cabin, and to perdition with whatever the
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
brawns made of him. Well, let them think it was some kind of odd holo-art.
Speaking of which, the next set of brawn-candidates was due shortly. We'll see
how they react to Ted.
Tia returned to her papers, keeping a running statistical analysis and
cross-tabulations on anything that seemed interesting. And there were things
that seemed to be showing up, actually. Pockets of mineral depletions in the
area around the EsKay sites; an astonishing similarity in the periodicity and
seasonality of the planets and planetoids. Insofar as a Mars-type world could
have seasons, that is. But the periodicity, identical to within an hour.
Interesting. Had they been that dependent on natural sunlight? Come to think
of it, yes, solar distances were very similar. And they were all Sol-type
stars.
She turned her attention to her parents' latest papers, letting the
EsKay discoveries stew in the back of her mind. Pota and Braddon were the
Schliemanns of modern archeology, but it wasn't the EsKays that brought them
fame, at least, not directly. After Tia's illness, they couldn't bring
themselves to return to their old dig, or even the EsKay project, and for
once, the Institute committees acted like something other than AIs with chips
instead of hearts. Pota and Braddon were reassigned to a normal atmosphere
water-world of high volcanic activity and thousands of tiny islands with a
good population of nomadic sentients, something as utterly unlike the EsKay
planets as possible. And it had been there that they made their discovery.
Tracing the legends of the natives, of a king who first defied the gods and
then challenged them, they replicated Schliemann's famous discovery of ancient
Troy, uncovering an entire city buried by a volcanic eruption. Perfectly
preserved for all time. For this world and these people, it was the equivalent
of an Atlantis and Pompeii combined, for the city was of Bronze Age technology
while the latter-day sentients were still struggling along with flint,
obsidian, and shell, living in villages of no more than two hundred. While the
natives of the present day were amphibious, leaning towards the aquatic side,
these ancients were almost entirely creatures of dry land.
The discovery made Pota and Braddon's reputation; there was more than enough
there to keep fifty archeologists busy for a hundred years. Ta'hianna became
their life-project, and they rarely left the site anymore. They even
established a permanent residence aboard a kind of glorified houseboat.
Tia enjoyed reading their papers, and the private speculations they had
brought her, with some findings that weren't in the papers yet, but the
Ta'hianna project simply didn't give her the thrill of mystery that the EsKays
did.
And, there was one other thing. Years of analyzing every little nuance of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]