Partnership by Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball

Author:Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball [McCaffrey, Anne & Ball, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fantasy, Fiction
ISBN: 9781857232042
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 1994-06-09T16:55:22.953000+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Caleb recovered with amazing speed. Two hours after his arrival at the clinic, forty minutes after Alpha bint Hezra-Fong had analyzed the poisons in his blood and slapped on stimpatches of the appropriate antidotes, the nervous convulsions had stopped. Nancia knew exactly when that happened, because by then she had thought to send Sev Bryley to Summerlands with a contact button discreetly replacing the top stud in his dress tunic and a second contact button to clip onto Caleb’s hospital gown. While Forister remained on board as a nominal guard for Fassa, Sev lounged about the public rooms at Summerlands trying to look like a worried friend-or-relative and chatting up the recuperating VIPs. Nancia watched the clinic from two angles: the convulsive shuddering view of a cracked white ceiling, emanating from Caleb’s contact button, and the repetitive views of artificial potted palms and doddering old celebrities to whom Sev talked. On the whole, the potted palms were more valuable than the celebrities; at least they didn’t waste Sev’s time with their reminiscences of events a century past.

“None of these people know anything about Hopkirk,” she whispered through Sev’s contact button.

“I’ve noticed,” he replied as the senile director emeritus of the Bahati Musical College, aged one hundred seventy-five Standard Central Years, tottered away for his noon meds.

“Can’t you do something more productive?”

“Give me time. We don’t want to be obvious. And stop hissing at me. They’ll think I’m talking to myself and hearing voices.”

“From what I’ve seen of these befuddled gentry, that’ll make you fit right in.”

“Only,” said Sev grimly, “if they don’t hear the voices too.”

Nancia hated to leave him with the last word in an argument, but she was distracted at that moment. Something had happened—or stopped happening. Caleb’s sensor button was no longer transmitting a jiggling view of the cracks on the ceiling; the image was still and perfectly dear.

Not quite still. A regular, gentle motion assured her that he still breathed.

A moment later, two aides exchanged a flurry of rapid, low-voiced but mainly cheerful comments over Caleb’s bed. Nancia gathered that the news was good; his (three-syllable Greek root) was up, his (four-syllable Latin derivation) was down, they were putting him on a regular dosage of (two-word Denebian form), and as soon as he was conscious they were to start him on a physical therapy routine.

She complained to Forister about the jargon.

“Now you know how the rest of the world feels about brains and brawns,” he said soothingly. “You know, there are people who think decomposition theory is just a little hard to follow. They accuse us of mystifying the mathematics on purpose.”

“Huh. There’s nothing mystical about mathematics,” Nancia grumbled. “This medical stuff is something else again.”

“Why don’t you translate the terms and find out what they mean?”

“I didn’t have a classical education,” Nancia told him. “I’m going to buy one when we get back to civilization, though. I want full datahedra of Latin, Greek, and medical terminology. With these new hyperchips I should be able to access the terms almost as fast as a native speaker.

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