Anne McCaffrey
The Ship That Returned
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 softshell 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?"
Helva had found the Atlas entries for this sector of space. "Only the one habitable planet in the system they seem to be heading straight for. Ravel…" Sudden surprise caught at her heart at that name. "Of all places."
"Ravel?" A pretty good program to search and find that long-ago reference so quickly. She inwardly winced at the holo's predictable response. "Ravel was the name of the star that went nova and killed your Jennan brawn, wasn't it?" Niall said, knowing the fact perfectly well.
"I didn't need the reminder," she said sourly.
"Biggest rival I have," Niall said brightly as he always did, and pushed the command chair around in a circle, grinning at her unrepentantly as he let the chair swing 360 degrees and back to the console.
"Nonsense. He's been dead nearly a century…"
"Dead but not forgotten…"
Helva paused, knowing Niall was right, as he always was, in spite of being dead, too. Maybe this wasn't a good idea, having him able to talk back to her. But it was only what he would have said in life anyhow, and had done often enough or it wouldn't be in the program.
She wished that the diagnostics had shown her one specific cause for his general debilitation so she could have forestalled his death. Some way, somehow.
"I'm wearing out, lover," he'd told her fatalistically in one of their conversations when he could no longer deny increasing weakness. "What can you expect from a life-form that degenerates? I'm lucky to have lived as long as I have. Thanks to you fussing at me for the last seventy years."
"Seventy-eight," she corrected him then.
"I'll be sorry to leave you alone, dear heart," he'd said, coming and laying his cheek on the panel behind which she was immured. "Of all the women in my life, you've been the best."
"Only because I was the one you couldn't have," she replied.
"Not that I didn't try," the hologram responded with a characteristic snort.
Helva echoed it. Reminiscing and talking out loud were not a good idea. Soon she wouldn't know what was memory and what was programming.
WHY hadn't she used the prosthetic body that Niall had purchased for her-reducing their credit balance perilously close to zero and coming close to causing an irreparable breach between them? He had desperately wanted the physical contact, ersatz as she had argued it would be. The prosthesis would have been her in Niall's eyes, and arms, since she would have motivated it. And he'd tried so hard to have her. He had supplied Sorg Prosthetics with the hologram statue he'd had made long before he became her brawn, using genetic information from her medical history and holos of her parents and siblings. Until he'd told her, she hadn't known that there had been other, physically normal children of her parents' issue. But then, shell-people were not encouraged to be curious about their families: they were shell-people, and ineffably different. He swore blind that he hadn't maximized her potential appearance-the hologram was of a strikingly good-looking woman-when he'd had a hologram made of her from that genetic information. He'd even produced his research materials for her inspection.