Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [26]
Kenny massaged his temple with the long, clever fingers that had worked so many surgical miracles for others and could do nothing for this little girl. "As far as we can tell anything about this—disease—yes, she's stable," he said finally. "Take a look in there and you'll see I ordered a shotgun approach while we were testing her. She's had a full course of every anti-viral neurological agent we've got a record of. And non-invasive things like a course of ultra—well, you can see it there. I think we killed it, whatever it was."
Too late to help her. Damn it.
"She's brilliant," Lars said cautiously. "She's flexible. She has the ability to multi-thread, to do several things at once. And she's had good, positive reactions to contact with shellpersons in the past."
"So?" Kenny asked, impatiently, as the stars passed by in their courses, indifferent to the fate of one little girl. "Your opinion."
"I think she can make the transition," Lars said, with more emphasis than Kenny had ever heard in his voice before. "I think she'll not only make the transition, she'll do well."
He let out the breath he'd been holding in a sigh.
"Physically, she is certainly no worse off than many in the shellperson program, including yours truly," Lars continued. "Frankly, Kenny, she's got so much potential it would be a crime to let her rot in a hospital room for the rest of her life."
The careful control Lars normally had over his voice was gone; there was passion in his words that Kenny had never heard him display until this moment. "Got to you, too, did she?" he said dryly.
"Yes," Lars said, biting off the word. "And I'm not ashamed of it. I don't mind telling you that she had me in—well, not tears, but certainly the equivalent."
"Good for you." He rubbed his hands together, warming cold fingers. "Because I'm going to need your connivance again."
"Going to pull another fast one, are you?" Lars asked with ironic amusement.
"Just a few strings. What good does being a stellar intellect do me, if I can't make use of the position?" he asked rhetorically. He shut the viewport and pivoted his chair to face his desk, keying on his terminal and linking it directly to Lars and a very personal database. One called "Favors." "All right, my friend, let's get to work. First, whose strings can you jerk? Then, who on the political side has influence in the program, of that set, who owes me the most, and of that subset, who's due here the soonest?"
* * *
A Sector Secretary-General did not grovel, nor did he gush, but to Kenny's immense satisfaction, when Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan came aboard the Pride of Albion, the very first thing he wanted, after all the official inspections and the like were over, was to meet with the brilliant neurologist whose work had saved his nephew from the same fate as Kenny himself. He already knew most of what there was to know about Kenny and his meteoric career.
And Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan was not the sort to avoid an uncomfortable topic.
"A little ironic, isn't it?" the Secretary-General said, after the firm handshake, with a glance at Kenny's Moto-Chair. He stood up and did not tug self-consciously at his conservative dark blue tunic.
Kenny did not smile, but he took a deep breath of satisfaction. Doubly good. No more calls, we have a winner.
"What, that my injury was virtually identical to Peregrine's?" he replied immediately. "Not ironic at all, sir. The fact that I found myself in this position was what prompted me to go into neurology in the first place. I won't try to claim that if I hadn't been injured, and hadn't worked so hard to find a remedy for the same injuries, someone else might not have come up with the same answer that I did. Medical research is a matter of building on what has come before, after all."
"But without your special interest, the solution might well have come too late to do Peregrine any good," the Secretary-General countered. "And it was not only your technique, it was your skill that pulled him through. There is no duplication of that—not in this sector, anyway. That's