Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [135]
"XN-935, how soon can you be ready to lift?"
"I completed my test flight patterns yesterday," Nancia replied. She was careful to keep her voice level, monitoring each output band to make sure that no hint of her disappointment showed in the upper frequencies. CenCom could perfectly well have communicated with her directly, via the electronic network that linked Nancia's ship computers with all other computers in this subspace—and via the surgically installed synaptic connectors that linked Nancia's physical body, safe behind its titanium shell, with the ship's computer—but it was a point of etiquette among most of the operators to address brainships just as they would any other human being. It would have been rude to send only electronic instructions, as if the brainships were no more human than the AI-controlled drones carrying the bulk of Central Worlds' regular traffic.
Or so the operators claimed. Nancia privately thought that their insistence on voice-controlled traffic was merely a way to avoid the embarrassing comparison between their sense-limited communication system and a brainship's capabilities of multi-channel communication and instantaneous response.
In any case, it was equally a point of pride among shellpersons to demonstrate the control over their "voices" and all other external comm devices that Helva had shown to be possible, nearly two hundred years ago. Nancia knew herself to lack the fine sense of musical timing and emphasis that had made Helva famous throughout the galaxy as "The Ship Who Sang," but this much, at least, she could do; she could conceal her disappointment at hearing CenCom instead of a direct transmission from Daddy to congratulate her on her commissioning, and she could maintain a perfectly professional facade throughout the ensuing discussion of supplies and loading and singularity points.
"It's a short flight," CenCom told her, and then paused for a moment. "Short for you, that is. By normal FTL drive, Nyota ya Jaha is at the far end of the galaxy. Fortunately, there's a singularity point a week from Central that will flip you into local space."
"I do have full access to my charts of known decomposition spaces," Nancia reminded CenCom, allowing a tinge of impatience to color her voice.
"Yes, and you can read them in simulated 4-D, can't you, you lucky stiff!" CenCom's voice showed only cheerful resignation at the limitations of a body that forced him to page through bulky books of graphs and charts to verify the mapping Nancia had already created as an internal display: a sequence of three-dimensional spaces collapsing and contorting about the singularity point where local subspace could be defined as intersecting with the subspace sector of Nyota ya Jaha. At that point Nancia would be able to create a rapid physical decomposition and restructuring of the local spaces, projecting herself and her passengers from one subspace to the other. Decomposition space theory allowed brainships like Nancia, or a very few expensive AI drones equipped with metachip processors, to condense the major part of a long journey into the few seconds they spent in Singularity. Less fortunate ships, lacking the metachips or dependent upon the slow responses of a human pilot who lacked Nancia's direct synaptic connections to the computer, still had to go through long weeks or even months of conventional FTL travel to cover the same distance; the massive parallel computations required in Singularity were difficult even for a brainship and impossible for most conventional ships.
"Tell me about the passengers," Nancia requested. When they came aboard, presumably one of her passengers would have the datahedron from Central specifying her destination and instructions, but who knew how much longer she would have to wait before the passengers boarded? She hadn't even been invited to choose a brawn yet; that would surely take a day or two. Besides, picking CenCom's brains for information on her assignment was better than waiting in tense expectation of her