With no one there to see, slow, hot tears formed in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She leaned her head to the left a little, so that they would soak into Ted's soft blue fur and not betray her.
"It's not fair," she whispered to Ted, who seemed to nod with sad agreement as she rubbed her cheek against him. "It's not fair."
"I wanted to find the EsKay homeworld. I wanted to go out with Mum and Dad and be the one to find the homeworld. I wanted to write books. I wanted to stand up in front of people and make them laugh and get excited, and see how history and archeology aren't dead, they're just asleep. I wanted to do things they make holos out of. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted to see things! I wanted to drive grav-sleds and swim in a real lagoon and feel a storm and, and I wanted,"
Some of the scenes from the holos she'd been watching came back with force now, and memories of Pota and Braddon, when they thought she was engrossed in a book or a holo, giggling and cuddling like tweenies. "I wanted to find out about boys. Boys and kisses and, and now nobody's ever going to look at me and see me. All they're going to see is this big metal thing. That's all they see now. Even if a boy ever wanted to kiss me, he'd have to get past a half ton of machinery, and it would probably bleep an alarm." The tears poured faster now, with the darkness of the room to hide them.
"They wouldn't have put me in this thing if they thought I was going to get better. I'm never going to get better. I'm only going to get worse, if can't feel anything, I'm nothing but a head in a machine. And if I get worse, will I go deaf? Blind? Teddy, what's going to happen to me?" she sobbed, "Am I going to spend the rest of my life in a room?"
Ted didn't know, any more than she did.
"It's not fair, it's not fair, I never did anything," she wept, as Ted watched her tears with round, sad eyes, and soaked them up for her. "It's not fair. I wasn't finished. I hadn't even started yet."
Kenny grabbed a tissue with one hand and snapped off the camera relay with the other. He scrubbed fiercely at his eyes and blew his nose with a combination of anger and grief. Anger, at his own impotence. Grief, for the vulnerable little girl alone in that cold, impersonal hospital room, a little girl who was doing her damnedest to put a brave face on everything.
In public. He was the only one to watch her in private, like this, when she thought there was no one to see that her whole pose of cheer was nothing more than a facade.
"I wasn't finished. I wasn't even started yet."
"Damn it," he swore, scrubbing at his eyes again and pounding the arm of his chair. "Damn it anyway!" What careless god had caused her to choose the very words he had used, fifteen years ago?
Fifteen years ago, when a stupid accident had left him paralyzed from the waist down and put an end, he thought, to his dreams for med school?
Fifteen years ago, when Doctor Harwat Kline-Bes was his doctor and had heard him weeping alone into his pillow?
He turned his chair and opened the viewport out into the stars, staring at them as they moved past in a panorama of perfect beauty that changed with the rotation of the station. He let the tears dry on his cheeks, let his mind empty.
Fifteen years ago, another neurologist had heard those stammered, heartbroken words, and had determined that they would not become a truth. He had taken a paraplegic young student, bullied the makers of an experimental Moto-Chair into giving the youngster one, then bullied the dean of the Meyasor State Medical College into admitting the boy. Then he had seen to it that once the boy graduated, he got an internship in this very hospital, a place where a neurologist in a Moto-Chair was no great curiosity, not with the sentients of a hundred worlds coming in as patients and doctors.
A paraplegic, though. Not a quad. Not a child with a brilliant, flexible mind, trapped in an inert body.
Brilliant mind. Inert body. Brilliant-
An idea blinded him, it occurred so suddenly. He was not the only person watching Tia, there was one other. Someone who watched every patient here, every doctor, every nurse. Someone he didn't consult too often, because Lars wasn't a medico, or a shrink.
But in this case, Lars' opinion was likely to be more accurate than anyone else's on this station. Including his own.
He thumbed a control. "Lars," he said shortly. "Got a minute, buddy?"
He had to wait for a moment. Lars was a busy guy, though hopefully at this hour there weren't too many demands on his conversational circuits. "Certainly, Kenny," Lars replied after a few seconds. "How can I help the neurological wunderkind of Central Worlds MedStation, Pride of Albion? Hmm?" The voice was rich and ironic; Lars rather enjoyed teasing everyone onboard. He called it 'therapeutic deflation of egos'. He particularly liked deflating Kenny's. He had said, more than once, that everyone else was so afraid of being 'unkind to the poor cripple' that they danced on eggs to avoid telling him when he was full of it.
"Can the sarcasm, Lars," Kenny replied. "I've got a serious problem that I want your opinion on."
"My opinion?" Lars sounded genuinely surprised. "This must be a personal opinion. I'm certainly not qualified to give you a medical one."
"Most definitely, a very personal opinion, one that you are the best suited to give. On Hypatia Cade."
"Ah." Kenny thought that Lars' tone softened considerably. "The little child in the Neuro unit, with the unchildlike taste in holos. She still thinks I'm the AI. I haven't dissuaded her."
"Good, I want her to be herself around you, for the gods of space know she won't be herself around the rest of us." He realized that his tone had gone savage and carefully regained control over himself before he continued. "You've got her records and you've watched the kid herself. I know she's old for it, but how would she do in the shell program?"
A long pause. Longer than Lars needed simply to access and analyze records. "Has her condition stabilized?" he asked, cautiously. "If it hasn't, if she goes brain-inert halfway into her schooling, it'd not only make problems for anyone else you'd want to bring in late, it'll traumatize the other shell-kids badly. They don't handle death well, I wouldn't be a party to frightening them, however inadvertendy."
Kenny massaged his temple with the long, clever fingers that had worked so many surgical miracles for others and could do nothing for this little girl. "As far as we can tell anything about this, disease, yes, she's stable," he said finally. "Take a look in there and you'll see I ordered a shotgun approach while we were testing her. She's had a full course of every anti-viral neurological agent we've got a record of. And noninvasive things like a course of ultra, well, you can see it there. I think we killed it, whatever it was." Too late to help her. Damn it.
"She's brilliant," Lars said cautiously. "She's flexible. She has the ability to multi-thread, to do several things at once. And she's had good, positive reactions to contact with shell-persons in the past."
"So?" Kenny asked, impatiently, as the stars passed by in their courses, indifferent to the fate of one little girl. "Your opinion."
"I think she can make the transition," Lars said, with more emphasis than Kenny had ever heard in his voice before. "I think she'll not only make the transition, she will be a stellar addition."
He let out the breath he'd been holding in a sigh.