Free Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey Page B

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. I 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