Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [267]
The Vega manager's reply was a few seconds delayed. Fascinating, he beamed back while Caleb continued his speech. Your synoptic connectors are picking up direct emotional signals. What an unusual coupling—that's not supposed to happen. You must have done something to your connections while you were fighting the hyperchip attack.
What are you talking about? Is it dangerous? Fix it! Nancia demanded.
Simeon transmitted a chuckle over the audio circuit, stopping Caleb in mid-peroration.
"What was that? Is Central trying to contact us?"
"No, just a—a message from one of the repair techs," Nancia improvised. "You were saying?"
"Well, try not to let it happen again," Caleb said irritably. "We've got to get our future relationship straight, Nancia; surely that's more important than some last-minute twiddling with your repairs? Now listen. I don't want you to feel guilty over what's past."
"Why should I?" Nancia asked, startled. "Oh, because I didn't report the conversations I heard on my first voyage, and stop those young criminals before they got properly started? Well, I do feel guilty. That was a bad mistake." But one Caleb had encouraged her to make.
"I don't mean that at all!" Caleb said. "You acted with perfect propriety in keeping those conversations private. I mean the way you've been rocketing around the Nyota system, bearing false witness, pretending to be something you're not, encouraging breaches of PTA regulations on Angalia, getting involved in all sorts of violence and mixing with very questionable people indeed—"
Simeon, I know I'm overheating. Can't you send a tech out to fix my circuits?
There's nothing to fix, Nancia, but Lab Schools will want to study just how you achieved it. Briefly, you've created a mind-body feedback loop between your cortex and the ship—one that carries emotional as well as intellectual and motor impulses.
You mean—?
You're a little more like a softperson than the rest of us, Nancia—or, you might say, a little more human. You're angry, my dear, and your connections are showing it. Flushed, ears buzzing, breathing faster, higher fuel consumption—yes, I'd say you're in a roaring snit. And not without cause. You've outgrown that righteous little snip, Nancia. When are you going to shut him up and kick him off you?
"—but you were misled, and I myself bear some of the fault, having allowed you to persuade me against my better judgment into the first false step on the downward path of deception," Caleb finished his sentence without being aware of the split-second exchange between Nancia and Simeon. "Now that you've seen what such things can lead to, I'm sure you'll repent of your errors. And I want you to know that I freely and completely forgive you. We'll never speak of this again—"
"You're darned right, we won't!" Nancia interrupted. "Go find yourself a ship to match your morals, Caleb!"
"What do you mean?"
To calm herself down, Nancia took a moment to convert her entire Vega subspace map to Old Earth linear measurements and back. By multiple precision arithmetic routines. In surface-level code. She was on the verge of hurting Caleb's feelings. And she wasn't quite angry enough to do that. The inexperienced young brainship who'd teamed with Caleb five years ago would have accepted his self-righteous lecture as if he were laying down Courier Service regulations. It wasn't Caleb's fault, or her fault either, that she'd outgrown his narrow black-and-white view of the world. Forister had taught her the value of shades of gray and the duty of perceiving them. And if now she felt more truly partnered with that spare, sardonic, aging brawn than with the young man who'd shared her first adventures—well, there was no reason Caleb should suffer unnecessarily on that account.
Her overheating circuits cooled down and the buzzing in her ears stopped as she calmed herself with tranquil, fixed equations.