The Ship Who Won (6 page)

Fanine-who could be?-he had many endearing qualities. He had brought her back to wanting to live, and then

he had neatly caught her up in his own special goal-to

find a species Humanity could freely interact with, make

cultural and scientific exchanges, open sociological vistas.

She was concerned that his short life span, and the even

shorter term of their contract with Central Worlds Exploration, would be insufficient to accomplish the goal they

had set for themselves. She would have to continue it on

her own one day. What if the beings they sought did not,

after all, exist?

Shellpeople had good memories but not infallible ones,

she reminded herself. In three hundred, four hundred

years, would she even be able to remember Keff? Would

she want to, lest the memory be as painful as the anticipation of such loss was now? If I find them after you're . . .

well, I'll make sure they're named after you, she vowed

silently, listening to his quiet breathing. That immortality

at least she could offer him.

So far, in light of that lofty goal, the aliens that the CK

team had encountered were disappointing. Though interesting to the animal behaviorist and xenobiologist, Losels,

Wyvems, Hydrae, and the Rodents of Unusual Size, et cet-era ad nauseam, were all non-sentient.

To date, the CK's one reasonable hope to date of finding

an equal or superior species came five years and four

months before, when they had intercepted a radio transmission from a race of beings who sounded marvelously

civilized and intelligent. As Keff had scrambled to make IT

understand them, he and Carialle became excited, thinking that they had found the species with whom they could

exchange culture and technology. They soon discovered

that the inhabitants of Jove II existed in an atmosphere and

pressure that made it utterly impractical to establish a

physical presence. Pen pals only. Central Worlds would

have to limit any interaction to radio contact with these

Acid Breathers. Not a total loss, but not the real thing. Not

contact.

Maybe this time on this mission into R sector, there

would be something worthwhile, the real gold that didn't

turn to sand when rapped on the anvil. That hope lured

them farther into unexplored space, away from the known

galaxy, and communication with friends and other B&B

ship partnerships. Carialle chose not to admit to Keff that

she was as hooked on First Contact as he was. Not only

was there the intellectual and emotional thrill of being the

first human team to see something totally new, but also the

bogies had less chance of crowding in on her ... if she

looked farther and further ahead.

For a shellperson, with advanced data-retrieval capabilities and superfast recall, every memory existed as if it had

happened only moments before. Forgetting required a

specific effort: the decision to wipe an event out of ones

databanks. In some cases, that fine a memory was a curse,

forcing Carialle to reexamine over and over again the

events leading up to the accident. Again and again she was

tormented as the merciless and inexorable sequence

pushed its way, still crystal clear, to the surface-as it did

once more during this silent running.

Sixteen years ago, on behalf of the Courier Service, she

and her first brawn, Fanine, paid a covert call to a small

space-repair facility on the edge of Central Worlds space.

Spacers who stopped there had complained to CenCom of

being fleeced. Huge, sometimes ruinously expensive

purchases with seemingly faultless electronic documentation were charged against travelers' personal numbers,

often months after they had left SSS-267. Fanine discreetly gathered evidence of a complex system of graft,

payoffs and kickbacks, confirming CenComs suspicions.

She had sent out a message to say they had corroborative

details and were returning with it.

They never expected sabotage, but they should have-Carialle corrected herself: she should have-been paying

closer attention to what the dock hands were doing in the

final check-over they gave her before the CF-963

departed. Carialle could still remember how the fuel felt as

it glugged into her tank: cold, strangely cold, as if it had

been chilled in vacuum. She could have refused that load

of fuel, should have.

As the ship flew back toward the Central Worlds, the

particulate matter diluted in the tanks was kept quiescent

by the real fuel. Gradually, her engines sipped away that

butter, finally reaching the compound in the bottom other

tanks. When there was more aggregate than fuel, the

charge reached critical mass, and ignited.

Her sensors shut down at the moment of explosion but

that moment-10:54:02.351-was etched in her memory.

That was the moment when Fanine s life ended and Carialle was cast out to float in darkness.

She became aware first of the bitter cold. Her internal

temperature should have been a constant 37# Celsius, and

cabin temperature holding at approximately twenty-one.

Carialle sent an impulse to adjust the heat but could not

find it. Motor functions were at a remove, just out of her

reach. She felt as if all her limbs-for a brainship, all the

motor synapses-and most horribly, her vision, had been

removed. She was blind and helpless. Almost all of her

external systems were gone except for a very few sound

and skin sensors. She called out soundlessly for Fanine: for

an answer that would never come.

Shock numbed the terror at first. She was oddly

detached, as if this could not be happening to her. Impas-sively she reviewed what she knew. There had been an

explosion. Hull integrity had been breached. She could not

communicate with Fanine. Probably Fanine was dead.

Carialle had no visual sensing equipment, or no control of

it, if it still remained intact. Not being able to see was the

worst part. If she could see, she could assess the situation

and make an objective judgment. She had sustenance and

air recirculation, so the emergency power supply had survived when ship systems were cut, and she retained her

store of chemical compounds and enzymes.

First priority was to signal for help. Feeling her way

through the damaged net of synapses, she detected the

connection for the rescue beacon. Without knowing

whether it worked or not, Carialle activated it, then settled

in to keep from going mad.

She started by keeping track of the hours by counting

seconds. Without a clock, she had no way of knowing how

accurate her timekeeping was, but it occupied part of her

mind with numbing lines of numbers. She went too

quickly through her supply of endorphins and serotonin.

Within a few hours she was forced to fall back on stress-management techniques taught to an unwilling Carialle

when she was much younger and thought she was immortal by patient instructors who knew better. She sang every

song and instrumental musical composition she knew,

recited poems from the Middle Ages of Earth forward,

translated works of literature from one language into

another, cast them in verse, set them to music, meditated,

and shouted inside her own skull.

That was because most other wanted to curl up in a ball

in the darkest comer of her mind and whimper. She knew

all the stories of brains who suffered sensory deprivation.

Tales of hysteria and insanity were the horror stories young

shellchildren told one another at night in primary education creches. Like the progression of a fatal disease, they

recounted the symptoms. First came fear, then disbelief,

then despair. Hallucinations would begin as the brain synapses, desperate for stimulation, fired off random neural

patterns that the conscious mind would struggle to translate as rational, and finally, the brain would fall into

irrevocable madness. Carialle shuddered as she remembered how the children whispered to each other in

supersonic voices that only the computer monitors could

pick up that after a while, you'd begin to hear things, and

imagine things, and feel things that weren't there.

To her horror, she realized that it was happening to her.

Deprived of sight, other than the unchanging starscape,

sound, and tactile sensation, memory drive systems failing,

freezing in the darkness, she was beginning to feel hammering at her shell, to hear vibrations through her very

body. Something was touching her.

Suddenly she knew that it wasn't her imagination.

Somebody had responded to her beacon after who-knew-how-long, and was coming to get her. Galvanized, Carialle

sent out the command along her comlinks on every frequency, cried out on local audio pickups, hoping she was

being heard and understood.

"I am here! I am alive!" she shouted, on every frequency. "Help me!"

But the beings on her shell paid no attention. Their

movements didn't pause at all. The busy scratching continued.

Her mind, previously drifting perilously toward madness, focused on this single fact, tried to think of ways to

alert the beings on the other side of the barrier to her presence. She felt pieces being torn away from her skin, sensor

links severed, leaving nerve endings shrieking agony as

they died. At first she thought that her "rescuers" were cutting through a burned, blasted hull to get to her, but the

tapping and scraping went on too long. The strangers were

performing salvage on her shell, with her still alive within

it! This was the ultimate violation; the equivalent of mutilation for transplants. She screamed and twitched and tried

to call their attention to her, but they didn't listen, didn't

hear, didn't stop.

Who were they? Any spacefarer from Central Worlds

knew the emblem of a brainship. Even land dwellers had

at least seen tri-dee images of the protective titanium pillar

in which a shellperson was encased. Not to know, to be

attempting to open her shell without care for the person

inside meant that they must not be from the Central

Worlds or any system connected to it. Aliens? Could her

attackers be from an extra-central system?

When she was convinced that the salvagers were just

about to sever her connections to her food and air recy-cling system, the scratching stopped. As suddenly as the

intrusion had begun, Carialle was alone again. Realizing

that she was now on the thin edge of sanity, she forced herself to count, thinking of the shape of each number, tasting

it, pretending to feel it and push it onward as she thought,

tasted, and pretended to feel the next number, and the

next, and the next. She hadn't realized how different numbers were, individuals in their own right, varying in many

ways each from the other, one after the other.

Three million, six hundred twenty-four thousand, five

hundred and eighty three seconds later, an alert military

transport pilot recognized the beacon signal. He took her

shell into the hold of his craft. He did what he could in the

matter of first aid to a shellperson-restored her vision.

When he brought her to the nearest space station and

technicians were rushed to her aid, she was awash in her

own wastes and she couldn't convince anyone that what

she was sure had happened -the salvage other damaged

hull by aliens-was a true version of her experiences.

There was no evidence that anything had touched her ship

after the accident. None of the damage could even be reasonably attributable to anything but the explosion and the

impacts made by hurtling space junk. They showed her the

twisted shard of metal that was all that had been left other

life-support system. What had saved her was that the open

end had been seared shut in the heat of the explosion.

Otherwise she would have been exposed directly to vacuum. But the end was smooth, and showed no signs of

interference. Because of the accretion of waste they

thought that her strange experience must be hallucinatory.

Carialle alone knew she hadn't imagined it. There had

been someone out there. There had!

The children's tales, thankfully, had not turned out to be

true. She had made it to the other side of her ordeal with

her mind intact, though a price had to be extracted from

her before she was whole again. For a long time, Carialle

was terrified of the dark, and she begged not to be left

alone. Dr. Dray Perez-Como, her primary care physician,

assigned a roster of volunteers to stay with her at all times,

and made sure she could see light from whichever of her

optical pickups she turned on. She had nightmares all the

time about the salvage operation, listening to the sounds of

her body being torn apart while she screamed helplessly in

the dark. She fought depression with every means of her

powerful mind and will, but without a diversion, something that would absorb her waking mind, she seemed to

have "dreams" of some sort whenever her concentration

was not focused.

One of her therapists suggested to Carialle that she

could recreate the "sights" that tormented her by painting

the images that tried to take control of her mind. Learning