Unfair. Unfair. But nothing is ever fair, I thought. Or else if there is justice in the universe it exists only on levels we can’t perceive, in some chilly macrocosmic place where everything is evened out in the long run but the sin is not necessarily atoned by the sinner. I pushed her into the slot down next to Fazio and slammed the sled shut. And went to the dropdock’s wall console and keyed in the departure signal, and watched as the sled went sliding down the track toward the exit hatch on its one-way journey to Betelgeuse. The red light of the activated repellers glared for a moment, and then the blue-green returned. I turned away, wondering if the symbiont had managed to get a piece of itself into me, too, at the last moment. I waited to feel that tickle in the mind. But I didn’t. I guess there hadn’t been time for it to get us both.
And then, finally, I dropped down on the launching track and let myself cry. And went out of there, after a while, silent, numb, purged clean, thinking of nothing at all. At the inquest six weeks later I told them I didn’t have the slightest notion why Elisandra had chosen to get aboard that ship with Fazio. Was it a suicide pact, the inquest panel asked me? I shrugged. I don’t know, I said. I don’t have any goddamned idea what was going on in their minds that day, I said. Silent, numb, purged clean, thinking of nothing at all.
So Fazio rests at last in the blazing heart of Betelgeuse. My Elisandra is in there also. And I go on, day after day, still working the turnaround wheel here at the Station, reeling in the stargoing ships that come cruising past the fringes of the giant red sun. I still feel haunted, too. But it isn’t Fazio’s ghost that visits me now, or even Elisandra’s—not now, not after all this time. I think the ghost that haunts me is my own.
THE SHIP WHO RETURNED
by Anne McCaffrey
Anne McCaffrey is a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Award, a SFWA Grand Master, and an inductee into the SF Hall of Fame. Her work is beloved by generations of readers. She is best known for authoring the Dragonriders of Pern series, but she has also written dozens of other novels. She was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1926 and currently makes her home in Ireland, in a home named Dragonhold-Underhill.
“The Ship Who Returned,” which first appeared in the anthology Far Horizons, is a sequel to The Ship Who Sang, part of McCaffrey’s Brain and Brawn Ship series. This story follows Helva, a sentient spaceship with the mind of a human girl, as she deals with the death of her human partner and an emergency return to the planet she had saved years before.
Helva had been prowling through her extensive music files, trying to find something really special to listen to, when her exterior sensors attracted her attention. She focused on the alert. Dead ahead of her were the ion trails of a large group of small, medium and heavy vessels. They had passed several days ago but she could still “smell” the stink of the dirty emissions. She could certainly analyze their signatures. Instantly setting her range to maximum, she caught only the merest blips to the port side, almost beyond sensor range.
“Bit off regular shipping routes,” she murmured.
“So they are,” replied Niall.
She smiled fondly. The holograph program had really improved since that last tweaking she’d done. There was Niall Parollan in the pilot’s chair, one compact hand spread beside the pressure plate, the left dangling from his wrist on the armrest. He was dressed in the black shipsuit he preferred to wear, vain man that he’d been: “because black’s better now that my hair’s turned.” He would brush back the thick shock of silvery hair and preen slightly in her direction.
“Where exactly are we, Niall? I haven’t been paying much attention.”
“Ha! Off in cloud-cuckoo land again…”
“Wherever that is,” she replied amiably. It was such a comfort to hear his voice.
“I do believe…” and there was a pause as the program accessed her present coordinates, “we are in the Cepheus Three region.”
“Why, so we are. Why would a large flotilla be out here? This is a fairly empty volume of space.”
“I’ll bring up the atlas,” Niall replied, responding as programmed.
It was bizarre of her to have a hologram of a man dead two months but it was a lot better—psychologically—for her to have the comfort of such a reanimation. The “company” would dam up her grief until she could return her dead brawn to Regulus Base. And discover if there were any new “brawns” she could tolerate as a mobile partner. Seventy-eight years, five months and twenty days with Niall Parollan’s vivid personality was a lot of time to suddenly delete. Since she had the technology to keep him “alive”—in a fashion, she had done so. She certainly had enough memory of their usual interchanges with which to program this charade. She would soon have to let him go but she’d only do that when she no longer needed his presence to keep mourning at bay. Not that she hadn’t had enough exposure to that emotion in her life—what with losing her first brawn partner, Jennan, only a few years into what should have been a lifelong association.
In that era, Niall Parollan had been her contact with Central Worlds Brain and Brawn Ship Administration at Regulus Base. After a series of relatively short and only minimally successful longer-term partnerships with other brawns, she had gladly taken Niall as her mobile half. Together they had been roaming the galaxy. Since Niall had ingeniously managed to pay off her early childhood and educational indebtedness to Central Worlds, they had been free agents, able to take jobs that interested them, not compulsory assignments. They had not gone to the Horsehead Nebula as she had once whimsically suggested to Jennan. The NH-834 had had quite enough adventures and work in this one not to have to go outside it for excitement.
“Let’s see if we can get a closer fix on them, shall we, Niall?”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea on an otherwise dull day, would it?” Though his fingers flashed across the pressure plates of the pilot’s console, it was she who did the actual mechanics of altering their direction. But then, she would have done that anyway. Niall didn’t really need to, but it pleased her to give him tasks to do. He’d often railed at her for finding him the sort of work he didn’t want to do. And she’d snap back that a little hard work never hurt anyone. Of course, as he began to fail physically, this became lip service to that old argument. Niall had been in his mid-forties when he became her brawn and she the NH-834, so he had had a good long life for a soft-shell person.
“Good healthy stock I am,” the hologram said, surprising her.
Was she thinking out loud? She must have been for the program to respond.
“With careful treatment, you’ll last centuries,” she replied, as she often had.
She executed the ninety-degree course change that the control panel had plotted.
“Don’t dawdle, girl,” Niall said, swiveling in the chair to face the panel behind which her titanium shell resided.
She thought about going into his “routine,” but decided she’d better find out a little more about the “invasion.”
“Why do you call it an invasion?” Niall asked.
“That many ships, all heading in one direction? What else could it be? Freighters don’t run in convoys. Not out here, at any rate. And nomads have definite routes they stick to in the more settled sectors. And if I’ve read their KPS rightly…”
“…Which, inevitably, you do, my fine lady friend…”
“Those ships have been juiced up beyond freighter specifications and they’re spreading dirty stuff all over space. Shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Can’t have space mucked up, can we?” The holo’s right eyebrow cocked, imitating an habitual trait of Niall’s. “And juiced-up engines as well. Should we warn anyone?”