Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [123]
And meanwhile, or so he'd told himself, it only made sense to learn as much about Tia as he could. She was unique; the oldest child ever to have been put into a shell. He had to be very careful with someone like that; the normal parameters of a brain-brawn relationship simply would not apply.
So now he knew what she had looked like—and, thanks to computer-projection, what she would have looked like if she had never caught that hideous disease and had grown up normally. Why, she might even have wound up at the Academy, if she hadn't chosen to follow in her famous parents' footsteps. He knew most of the details, not only of her pre-shell life, but of her life at Lab Schools. He knew as much about her as he would have if she had been his own sibling—except that his feelings about her had been anything but brotherly.
But he had told himself that they were brotherly, that he was not falling in love with a kind of ghost, that everything would be fine. He'd believed it, too.
That is, up until he ran into Chria Chance and her gunner.
There was no doubt in his mind from the moment the screen lit up that Chria and Neil were an item. The signs were there for anyone who knew how to read body language, especially for someone who knew Chria as well as Alex did. And his initial reaction to the relationship caught him completely by surprise.
Envy. Sheer, raw, uncomplicated envy. Not jealousy, for he wasn't at all interested in Chria and never had been. In some ways, he was very happy for her; she had been truly the poor little rich girl—High Family with four very proper brothers and sisters who were making the Family even more prestige and money. She alone had been the rebel; she of all of them had wanted something more than a proper position, a place on a board of directors, and a bloodless, loveless, high-status spouse. After she threatened to bring disgrace on all of them, blackmailing them by swearing she would join a shatter-rock synthocom band under her real name, they had permitted her the Academy under an assumed one.
No, he was happy for Chria; she had found exactly the life and partners that she had longed for.
But he wanted what she had—only he wanted it to be Tia sitting back there in the second seat. Or Tia in the front and himself in the back; it didn't much matter who was the one in command, if he could have had her there.
The strength of his feelings had been so unexpected that he had not known what to do with them—so he had attempted, clumsily, to cover them. Fortunately, everyone involved seemed to put his surliness down to a combination of pain from his injuries and wooziness due to the pain-pills he'd gulped.
If only it had been . . .
I'm in love with someone I can't touch, can't hold, can't even tell that I love her, he thought with despair, clenching his hand tightly on the armrest of his chair. I—
"Alex?" Tia whispered, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silence of the ship, for she had turned even the ventilation system down to a minimum. "Alex, I've decoded the storage-mode. It's old-fashioned hard-etched binary storage and I think that it's nav directions that relate to the stellar map on the page. Once I find a reference point I recognize, I'm pretty sure I can decode it all eventually. I got some ideas, though, since I was able to match some place-name glyphs—and we were right—I'm positive that these are directions to all the EsKay bases from the homeworld! So if we could just find a base—"
"And trace it back!" This was what she'd been looking for from the beginning, and excitement for her shoved aside all other feelings for the moment. "What's the deal—why the primitive navcharts? Not that it isn't a break for us, but if they were space-going, why limit yourself to a crawl?"
"Well, the storage medium is pretty hard to damage; you wouldn't believe