Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [122]
Shellcrack. This was getting her nowhere.
She couldn't pace, she couldn't bite her nails, she couldn't even read to distract herself. Finally she activated a single servo and sent it discretely into his cabin to clean it. It hadn't been cleaned since they'd left the base; mostly Alex had just shoved things into drawers and closets and locked the doors down. She couldn't clean his clothing now—but as soon as they shook the hounds off their trail—
If they shook the hounds off their trail—if the second avalanche and the blizzard hadn't piled too much snow on top of them to clear away. There were eight meters of snow up there now, not four. Much more, and she might not be able to blast free.
Stop that. We'll get out of this.
Carefully she cleaned each drawer and closet, replacing what wasn't dirty and having the servo kidnap what was. Carefully, because there were lots of loose objects shoved in with the clothing.
But she never expected the one she found tumbled in among the bedcoverings.
A holocube—of her.
She turned the cube over and over in the servo's pinchers, changing the pictures, finding all of them familiar. Scenes of her from before her illness; the birthday party, posing with Theodore Bear—
Standing in her brand new pressure-suit in front of a fragment of wall covered with EsKay glyphs—that was a funny one; Mum had teased Dad about it because he'd focused on the glyphs out of habit. She'd come out half out of the picture, but the glyphs had been nice and sharp.
It hit her like a jolt of current. The glyphs. That was where she had seen them before! Oh, these were carved rather than inscribed, and time and sandstorms had worn them down to mere suggestions. They were formed in a kind of cursive style, where the ones on the book were angular—but—
She ran a quick comparison and got another jolt, this time of elation. "Alex!" she whispered excitedly. "Look!"
She popped the glyphs from the old holo up on her screen as he looked up, took the graphic of the third page of the book, and superimposed the one over the other. Aside from the differences in style, they were a perfect match.
"EsKays," he murmured, his tone awestruck. "Spirits of space—this book was made by the EsKays!"
"I think these caches and buildings must have been made by some race that knew the EsKays," she replied. "But even if they weren't—Alex, how much will you wager that this little set of charts shows the EsKay homeworld, once you figure out how to decipher it?"
"It would make sense," he said, after a moment. "Look at this smooth area on every page—always in the same place along the edge. I bet this is some kind of recording medium, like a datahedron—maybe optical—"
"Let me look at it," she demanded. "Put it in the lab." Now she had something to keep her attention. And something to keep her mind off him.
* * *
Alex had nothing more to do but read and brood. While Tia bent all the resources at her disposal on the artifact, he was left staring at screens and hoping the pirates didn't think to scan for large masses of metal under the snow.
Reading palled after too long; music was out because it could be detected, even if he were wearing headphones, and he hated headphones. He'd never been much of a one for entertainment holos, and they made at least as much noise as music.
That left him alone in the dark with his thoughts, which kept turning back towards Tia. He knew her childhood very well now—accessing the data available publicly and then doing the unthinkable, at least for anyone in the BB program: contacting Doctor Kennet and Doctor Anna and pumping them for information. Not with any great subtlety, he feared, but they hadn't taken it amiss. Of course, if anyone in CS found out what he'd been doing, he would be in major trouble. There was an ugly name for his feeling about Tia.
Fixation.
After that single attempt at finding a temporary