Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [169]
I give him ten minutes after we reach Central to get himself and his bags off me and make room for a brawn with some manners, Nancia vowed to herself as she drove her engines through a harder and faster takeoff than she would normally have imposed on a softperson passenger. No, that's too generous. Five minutes.
She felt slightly regretful when she peeked through Caleb's cabin sensors and saw him struggling to sit up after the takeoff, white and shaken. But she wasn't sorry enough to change her basic position on brawn assignments.
"There's one thing we should have settled before liftoff," she announced without preamble.
"Yes?" Caleb didn't bother turning his head to look at the cabin speaker. Of course, he was an experienced—if incompetent—brawn; he would know that she would be able to pick up his words from any direction. Still, Nancia felt vaguely ruffled—as if she were being ignored even as he replied to her.
"Transporting you back to Central Worlds is my official assignment, and I cannot refuse it. But I do not wish you to construe this as formal acceptance of you as my brawn. I have no intention of waiving my rights to free choice of my own brawn just because this match is convenient for Central."
Now what ailed the man? He had just begun to regain some color after the high-G lift-off; now his face was drained again, still as a mask—or a corpse. Nancia began to wonder if this brawn would live to see Central. If he wasn't fit enough to make the journey, somebody should have warned me.
"Of course," said Caleb in a voice so level and drained of meaning that it could have issued from any housekeeping drone, "no one would expect you to waive that right. Particularly for me." He turned his head and for the first time looked directly at the sensor. "Shut down sensors to this cabin, please, XN. I wish to rest. In privacy," he emphasized. He lay down again with one arm flung over his face. After a moment he rolled over and lay facedown on the bunk, as if he didn't trust Nancia not to peek at him.
* * *
"Simeon? Shellcrack, Simeon, I know you're picking up my beams. TALK TO ME!"
"You're an excessively demanding young thing, XN-935, and you're shouting again."
"Sorry." Nancia was so glad to have got some response from the Vega Base brain that she immediately lowered the intensity of her beam to match Simeon's almost inaudible burst. "Simeon, I need to know about this brawn they've saddled me with."
"So scan the newsbeam files."
"I did. There's nothing in them. Not what I need to know, anyway." The files had been enlightening in their own way, with their lurid stories of a ship and a man almost destroyed by a sudden radiation burst, the brawn's limping, months-long journey homeward in his crippled, brainless ship and the hero's welcome he had received when he arrived at Vega 3.3 with the survey data he'd been sent to gather. The tale of what Caleb had gone through, the months of solitude and deprivation and the lingering effects of radiation poisoning, had done much to reshape Nancia's feelings towards the pallid brawn who'd boarded her on Vega 3.3. She felt a grudging respect for the man she saw spending hours in her exercise facility, working out with gyroweights and spring resistors to restore wasted muscles.
The man who had accepted her initial hostile attitude as no more than his due, who'd shut her out of his mind at once and had not spoken a word to her since. They had traveled in silence through the three days it took to move between the suns of Vega 3 and Vega 4, while Nancia waited impatiently for Simeon to resume communications so that she could ask what she wanted to know. Finally she'd begun battering at the Vega Base brain's frequencies with ever-increasing bursts of communication that must have given him the equivalent of a softperson's "headache."
Nancia condensed the newsbytes she'd read and transmitted them in three short bursts to Simeon, just to convince him she'd done her homework.
"So what else do you want to know?"
"How. Did.