Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [39]
No, he wasn't perfect. In fact, he wasn't even close.
"XH One-Oh-Three-Three, you have an incoming transmission," CenCom broke in, disturbing her thoughts. "Hold onto your bustle, lady, it's the Wicked Witch of the West, and I think someone just dropped a house on her sister."
Whatever allusions the CenCom operator was making were lost on Tia, but the sharply impatient tone of her supervisor was not. "XH One-Oh-Three-Three, have you selected a brawn yet?" the woman asked, her voice making it sound as if Tia had been taking weeks to settle on a partner, rather than less than a day.
"Not yet, Supervisor," she replied, cautiously. "So far, to be honest, I don't think I've found anyone I can tolerate for truly long stretches of time."
That wasn't exactly the problem, but Beta Gerold y Caspian wouldn't understand the real problem. She might just as well be Vegan. She made very few allowances for the human vagaries of brawns and none at all for shellpersons.
"Hypatia, you're wasting time," Beta said crisply. "You're sitting here on the pad, doing nothing, taking up a launch-cradle, when you could already be out on courier-supply runs."
"I'm doing my best," Tia responded sharply. "But neither you nor I will be particularly happy if I toss my brawn out after the first run!"
"You've rejected six brawns that all our analysis showed were good matches for your personality," Beta countered. "All you'd have to do is compromise a little."
Six of those were matches for me? she thought, aghast. Which ones? The tofu-personalities? The Valkyrie warrior? Spirits of space help me—Garrison? I thought I was nicer and—more interesting than that!
But Beta was continuing, her voice taking on the tones of a cross between a policeman and a professorial lecturer. "You know very well that it takes far too long between visits for these Class One digs. It leaves small parties alone for weeks and months at a time. Even when there's an emergency, our ships are so few and so scattered that it takes them days to reach people in trouble—and sometimes an hour can make all the difference, let alone a day! We needed you out there the moment you were commissioned!"
Tia winced inwardly.
She'd have suspected that Beta went straight for the sore spot deliberately, except that she knew that Beta did not have access to her records. So she didn't know Tia's background. The agency that oversaw the rights of shellpersons saw to that—to make it difficult for supervisors to use personal knowledge to manipulate the shellpersons under their control. In the old days, when supervisors had known everything about their shellpersons, they had sometimes deliberately created emotional dependencies in order to assure "loyalty" and fanatic service. It was far, far too easy to manipulate someone whose only contact to the real world was through sensors that could be disconnected.
Still, Beta was right. If I'd had help earlier, I might not be here right now. I might be in college, getting my double-docs like Mum, thinking about what postgraduate work I wanted to do. . . .
"I'll tell you what," she temporized. "Let me look over the records and the interviews again and sleep on it. One of the things that the schools told us over and over was to never make a choice of brawns feeling rushed or forced." She hardened her voice just a little. "You don't want another Moira, do you?"
"All right," Beta said grudgingly. "But I have to warn you that the supply of brawns is not unlimited. There aren't many more for you to interview in this batch, and if I have to boot you out of here without one, I will. The Institute can't afford to have you sitting on the pad for another six months until the next class graduates."
Go out without a brawn? Alone? The idea had very little appeal. Very little at all. In fact, the idea of six months alone in deep space was frightening. She'd