Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey Page A

phase you’ll grow out of.”
    “ This hasn’t got to the point where I’d have to insist that you talk to a Counselor. ” Those were dangerous words. The AI’s “Counselor” mode was only good for so much—and every single thing she said and did would be recorded the moment that she started “Counseling.” Then all the Psychs back at the Institute would be sent the recordings via compressed-mode databurst—and they’d be all over them, looking for something wrong with her that needed Psyching. And if they found anything, anything at all, Mum and Dad would get orders from the Board of Mental Health that they couldn’t ignore, and she’d be shipped back to a school on the next courier run.
    Oh no. You don’t catch me that easy.
    “You’re right,” she said carefully. “But Mum and Dad trust me to tell you everything that’s wrong, so I am.”
    “All right then.” The “doctor’s” face lost that stern look. “So long as you’re just being conscientious. Keep taking those vitamin supplements, Tia, and everything will be fine.”
    But everything wasn’t fine. Within days, the tingling had stopped, to be replaced by numbness. Just like her feet. She began having trouble holding things, and her lessons took twice as long now, since she couldn’t touch-type anymore and had to watch where her fingers went.
    She completely gave up on doing anything that required a lot of manual dexterity. Instead, she watched a lot of holos, even boring ones, and played a great deal of holo-chess. She read a lot too, from the screen, so that she could give one-key page-turning commands rather than trying to turn paper pages herself. The numbness stopped at her wrists, and for a few days she was so busy getting used to doing things without feeling her hands, that she didn’t notice that the numbness in her legs had spread from her ankles to her knees. . . .
    Now she was afraid to go to the AI “doctor” program, knowing that it would put her in for Counseling. She tried looking things up herself in the database, but knew that she was going to have to be very sneaky to avoid triggering flags in the AI. As the numbness stopped at the knees, then began to spread up her arms, she kept telling herself that it wouldn’t, couldn’t be much longer now. Soon Mum and Dad would be done, and they would know she wasn’t making this up to get attention. Soon she would be able to tell them herself, and they’d make the stupid medic work right. Soon.

    She woke up, as usual, to hands and feet that acted like wooden blocks at the ends of her limbs. She got a shower—easy enough, since the controls were pushbutton, then struggled into her clothing by wriggling and using teeth and fingers that didn’t really want to move. She didn’t bother too much with hair and teeth, it was just too hard. Shoving her feet into slippers, since she hadn’t been able to tie her shoes for the past couple of days, she stumped out into the main room of the dome—
    Only to find Pota and Braddon waiting there for her, smiling over their coffee.
    “Surprise!” Pota said cheerfully. “We’ve done just about everything we can on our own, and we zipped the findings off to the Institute last night. Now things can get back to normal!”
    “Oh Mum !” She couldn’t help herself, she was so overwhelmed by relief and joy that she started to run across the room to fling herself into their arms—
    Started to. Halfway there, she tripped, as usual, and went flying through the air, crashing into the table and spilling the hot coffee all over her arms and legs.
    They picked her up, as she babbled apologies about her clumsiness. She didn’t even notice what the coffee had done to her, didn’t even think about it until her parents’ expressions of horror alerted her to the fact that there were burns and blisters already rising on her lower arms.
    “It doesn’t hurt,” she said, dazedly, without thinking, just saying the first thing that came into her