Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [237]
"I'm not a man," Nancia pointed out. "I'm not even a softperson. And my only interest in your body is that I don't want you to get sick before . . ."
"Before my trial," Fassa finished calmly. "It's all right. You needn't be tactful. I'm going to prison for a long time. Maybe forever. As long as they don't put me on Shemali, I don't care."
"What's the matter with Shemali?" Nancia asked.
Fassa clamped her lips together and stared at the cabin wall. Her creamy skin was a little paler than usual, tinged with green shadows. "Nothing. I don't know anything about Shemali. I didn't say anything about Shemali."
Nancia gave up on Fassa for the moment. After all, there were other ways to find out what was up on Shemali. Reports on hyperchip production and sales should soon be coming in over the Net. A few invigorating hours of compiling evidence against Polyon would calm her and leave her better able to cheer up Fassa.
She felt a sneaking sympathy for the girl after reading her records. Growing up in the shadow of Faul del Parma couldn't have been easy. Losing her mother at thirteen, spending the next five years in a boarding school with not a single visit from her father, then sent out to Bahati to prove herself. . . . Nancia thought she understood how Fassa might feel. But I didn't turn criminal to impress my family, she argued with herself.
Your family, she replied, wouldn't have been impressed. Besides, she'd had it better than Fassa. Daddy and Jinevra and Flix had dropped in regularly during the eighteen years Nancia spent at Laboratory Schools. It was only after graduation that Daddy had lost interest in her progress—
Softpersons could cry, and it was said that tears were a natural release of tension. Nancia looked up the biomed reports on the chemical components of tears, adjusted her nutrient tubes to remove those chemicals from her system, and concentrated on the Net records of hyperchip sales and transfer.
There was absolutely nothing there to incriminate Polyon. Two years after his arrival at Shemali, his new metachip design had been approved for production and christened the "hyperchip" in tribute to its improved speed and greater complexity. Since then, production of hyperchips had increased rapidly in each accounting quarter, so rapidly that Nancia couldn't believe Polyon was siphoning off any of the supply for his personal use. The manufactured hyperchips were subjected to especially stringent QA testing, but no more than the expected ratio failed the test . . . and all the failures were accounted for; they were sent off-planet for disposal and destroyed by an independent recycling company that had, so far as Nancia could discover, no links whatsoever with Polyon, the de Gras or Waldheim lines, or any other High Families. The hyperchips that passed QA were installed as fast as they were released, and every sale passed through the rationing board. Nancia knew from personal experience how difficult it was to get them; ever since her lower deck sensors and graphics coprocessors had been enhanced with hyperchips, she'd been pushing without success to get the hyperchips installed in the rest of her system. Micaya Questar-Benn, when questioned, told Nancia that her liver and heart-valve filter and kidneys all ran on hyperchips, installed when the metachip-controlled organs began to fail. But she, too, had been unable to get hyperchips to replace the smart chips in her external prostheses; that wasn't an emergency situation, and the ration board had refused to approve the surgery or the supplies.
Polyon had been nominated twice for the Galactic Service Award for the contributions his hyperchip design had made in areas as diverse as Fleet brainroom control, molecular surgery, and information systems. Even the Net, that ponderous, conservative communications system that linked the galaxy with news and information and records of everything ever done via computer—even the managers of the Net were slowly, conservatively augmenting key communications functions with hyperchip managers that had significantly