Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [41]
She only realized that she'd been manipulated when she found herself blurting out her plans for doing some amateur archeological sleuthing on the side, and both the fact that she wanted a bit of archeological glory for herself, and that she expected to eventually come up with something worth a fair number of credits toward her buy-out. She at least kept back the other wish; the one about finding the bug that had bitten her. By now, the three desires were equally strong, for reading of her parents' success had reawakened all the old dreams of following in Pota's footsteps, dealing with Beta had given her more than enough of being someone else's contract servant, and her studies of brainship chronicles had awakened a new fear—plague. And what would happen if the bug that paralyzed her got loose on a planetarywide scale?
As she tried to cover herself, she inadvertently revealed that the plans were a secret held successfully not only from her CenCom supervisors but from everyone she'd ever worked with except Moira.
"It was because I thought that they'd take my determination as something else entirely," she confessed. "I thought they'd take it as a fixation, and a sign of instability."
All through her confession, Alex stayed ominously silent. When she finished, she suddenly realized that she had just put him in a position to blackmail her into taking him. All he had to do was threaten to reveal her fixation, and she'd be decommissioned and put with a Counselor for the next six months.
But instead of saying anything, he began laughing. Howling with laughter, in fact. She waited in confusion for him to settle down and tell her what was going on.
"You didn't look far enough into my records, lovely lady," he said, calming down and wiping his eyes. "Oh, my. Call up my file, why don't you. Not the Academy file; the one with my application for a scholarship in it."
Puzzled, she linked into the CenCom net and accessed Alex's public records. "Look under 'hobbies,'" he suggested.
And there it was. Hobbies and other interests.
Archeology and Xenology.
She looked further, without invitation, to his class records. She soon saw that in lower schools, besides every available history class, he had taken every archeological course he could cram into a school day.
She wished that she had hands so that she could rub her temples; as it was, she had to increase her nutrients a tad, to rid herself of a beginning headache.
"See?" he said. "I wouldn't mind my name on a paper or two myself. Provided, of course, that there aren't any curses attached to our findings! And—well, who couldn't use a pile of credits? I would very much like to retire from the Service with enough credit to buy myself—oh, a small planetoid."
"But—why didn't you apply to the university?" she asked. "Why didn't you go after your degree?"
"Money," he replied succinctly, leaning back in his seat and steepling his fingers over his chest. "Dinero. Cash. Filthy lucre. My family didn't have any—or rather, they had just enough that I didn't qualify for scholarships. Oh, I could have gotten a Bachelor's degree, but those are hardly worth bothering about in archeology. Heck, Hypatia, you know that! You know how long it takes to get one Doctorate, too—four years to a Bachelor's, two to a Master's, and then years and years and years of field work before you have enough material to do an original dissertation. And a working archeologist, one getting to go out on Class One digs or heading Class Two and Three, can't just have one degree, he has to have a double-doc or a quad-doc." He shook his head, sadly. "I've been an armchair hobbyist for as long as I've been a history buff, dear lady, but that was all that I could afford. Books and papers had to suffice for me."
"Then why the Academy?" she asked, sorely puzzled.
"Good question. Has a complicated answer." He licked his lips for a moment, thinking, then continued. "Say I got a Bachelor's in Archeology and History. I could have gotten a bottom-of-the-heap clerking job at the Institute with a Bachelor's—but if I did that, I might