Heris Serrano (81 page)

Naverrn stationers wouldn't put themselves out for a small tramp freighter, which could be assumed to have no spending power, but fifty familiar Royal junior officers were another matter. Heris could hardly believe it was the same service area she'd seen before. Suddenly there were dozens of attractive young men and women (far more than one per officer, she suspected) strolling the corridors, bait for even more colorful fish. A door that had presented only a blank gray metal face before now opened on a cozy bar with a live band playing in one corner. The smell of real food wafted out another door that Heris hadn't seen. Two sleek, dripping, naked figures chased each other out a door just in front of her; she heard splashes and yells from inside that argued for the existence of a swimming pool.

But where was the prince? He should have had a message—they had sent one in the code given them—and he was supposed to make the contact. She would have no excuse to hang about once she'd collected the Outworld Parcels cargo. She needed to find him—or have him find her—now. She strolled back toward the OP office, to check the status of the cargo.

"Another shift, at least, even with no more problems," the clerk told her. He looked harried; a line of impatient young officers had hand-carried mail and packages to check through. "Tarash is out with something she ate, and Jivi sprained an ankle, but the clinic is packed. It always is, with this bunch."

"Fine. Let me know."

That still didn't find the prince, she thought, as she walked on back to the docking area. Where could he be lurking? Why hadn't he contacted her? Back aboard
Better Luck
, she checked on the progress of the cockroach egg hunt. They had cleared the bridge, and the galleys, and were working on the owner's quarters. If the prince found cockroaches aboard, Heris knew the news would spread. She took a look at what had been an elegant guest suite, in which the prince had travelled from Sirialis. Bare decking and bulkheads, just as in crew quarters, with the bed platform's framing all too visible. Oblo had installed a bare-bones communications node, nothing like the handsome system Cecelia had had, with its touchscreens and voice-response. Plenty of bedding, though, and towels, and those colorful pillows. Worst, though, the suite still held a faint odor of cockroach. Heris realized she was wrinkling her nose. That would never do; she'd send someone to buy an olfactory screen.

Gradually, Cecelia began to regain a sense of structure in her existence. Brun and the other attendants spoke to her often, telling her what time it was, what watch, who was in the room, what they had done, and were about to do. She could not see the light level change, or the colors they described on the walls, but she could imagine it all. She began to know, when she woke, what shift to expect, who would be in the room. So she knew it was morning—ship's morning, early in the main dayshift—when the doctors both arrived to explain her situation as they then understood it.

"Lady Cecelia, I'm now sure that you are able to hear—and, I hope, understand—what we're saying. I'm going to explain what tests we've done, what more we can do aboard the yacht, and what we'll be trying to do later. You may know more about what happened to you than we do, although we're ready to make an educated guess. The drugs we found in the venous access reservoirs consisted of a perfectly ordinary array of cardiac drugs—which would have been dispensed automatically at signals from the cardiac monitor—and some very unusual neuroactive drugs, one of them not in the data banks at all. I suspect that these drugs were merely for maintenance, not the ones that caused the initial damage. We cannot tell yet how much function will return just because you no longer have the maintenance drugs in your system, or how long it will take. It depends on how the damage was done, and whether the maintenance drugs were considered essential or just a safeguard against spontaneous recovery.

"I can tell you that the maintenance drugs targeted voluntary muscle innervation, motor and sensory both. Thus I expect you to regain some sensation of touch, and some ability to move. How much is impossible to say. It is unusual for someone with your level of deficit to be able to breathe spontaneously—they did a fine job of sparing respiratory function. It's amazing that you can hear, and yet the few medical records we were able to get indicate that you couldn't—that your auditory cortex was inactive in the presence of both speech and sound. Either someone fiddled with the scans, or . . . I can't imagine what."

Cecelia struggled to remember the early days, what everyone had said. She knew the lawyer had been told she could not hear; she had heard that. She remembered hearing about the scans that were supposed to prove it. That suggested intentional deception. But she had no way to let Dr. Czerda know what she had heard.

Over the next few days, sensation returned slowly, in odd patches. One time Cecelia woke, she felt the side of her face as if it were a patch of harsh cloth laid on her skull. She felt the slight pressure of air against it from the ventilator. The nurse's gentle facewashing felt like being scrubbed with a broom. Still she could not move, could not flinch away. Later that day, she had an uncanny sensation in her left arm, as if something were crawling down it from shoulder to elbow, and from there along the outside of her forearm to her little finger. The feeling grew to a tingle, then an itch, then a painful throbbing that subsided gradually over far too long a time. Each time Czerda came in, she touched Cecelia everywhere, explaining the process over and over. The monitors they had, crude as they were compared to those in a major neuro ward, showed Cecelia's response . . . and Czerda was mapping the return of sensation. The nurses and Brun massaged her, too . . . and gradually, fitfully, she remapped the feeling of her own body.

Blank patches remained. Her left upper chest had no sensation: Czerda explained that was where the implanted ports were. They'd probably destroyed the innervation there. That was standard practice. She felt nothing on the insides of both arms . . . where the median nerve should have supplied sensation and controlled movement. One foot regained sensation, in a maddening pins-and-needles form, days before the other. Her nose itched.

The first movement, the first
real
movement, came when the nurse's washcloth dripped cold on her shoulder. She flinched . . . and knew she moved even as the nurse exclaimed. She tried again.

"Again!" said Czerda, who had come at the nurse's call. Cecelia twitched again, as proud as if she'd just taken a big drop jump. "That's great. Now try the other one."

Cecelia tried, but couldn't remember how to move that shoulder. Someone tickled her, just above the collarbone. Ah. Yes. She struggled again, and felt her skin move against the sheet.

"Not as strong, but something. Good progress . . . keep doing that."

She kept doing that, but it didn't seem to lead anywhere. She tried to imagine what it looked like, the twitch of a shoulder. Not as communicative as a facial expression. And no matter how she struggled, she couldn't move her hands. Surely she would have to move her hands to use sign language. Then, three days later, when Czerda had pulled her lower jaw down, she snapped it closed so hard her teeth hurt. She couldn't open it . . . but she could close it when Czerda opened it again. Czerda chuckled.

"Yes—a good response. Now we start your communication training. I know you're an intelligent adult, and I know there's lots you want to say, but we'll start with what we need to know first. We want you to have a yes and a no. Right now your shoulder jerk is your strongest motion: let's try one jerk for yes, and two for no. Understand?"

Cecelia twitched her shoulder with contemptuous ease. She could have done that three days ago—why hadn't they told her? Why hadn't she thought of it?

"Good. Now . . . did you like your breakfast?" Breakfast had been a bland flavor of custard; she had never liked bland anything. She gave two twitches. "Excellent. You may not realize it, but you've just demonstrated that your higher language functions are still intact: you understood both directions and a question form. Did you like lunch?" One twitch. Lunch had been the date-caramel-almond custard, her favorite of the flavors she'd had.

"Now I've got to ask you a lot of boring questions that are standard on neuro-psych exams. And I'm going to record this, on full video, because it may be used in court to establish your competency."

Cecelia hadn't thought of that. Could someone who only twitched one shoulder be considered competent legally? She had thought she couldn't fight that battle until she was well.

"Is your name Cecelia de Marktos?" One twitch. That wasn't her full name, but she used the short form oftener than the long. "Do you know where you are?" Now that was a hopeless question. She knew she was on a yacht, but she had no idea where the yacht was. She shrugged both shoulders, the right more strongly. Apparently that got through; Czerda muttered, "Bad question" and changed it to, "Are you in a hospital?" Two twitches. "Are you in a spacecraft?" One twitch. "Are you aware of the nature of your disability?" One twitch. "Was this disability the result of natural causes?" Two twitches. No one was going to believe this, Cecelia thought. It might convince Czerda, or Bunny, but she couldn't see it working in court. Czerda proceeded to questions of reasoning and general knowledge, most of them ridiculously easy: "Is a circle a geometric solid?" No, of course not. "Is a horse a mammal?" Yes, dummy. "Did you name Heris Serrano a beneficiary in your will?" Yes. Cecelia came alert again. "Did Heris Serrano unduly influence you to make her a beneficiary in your will?" No! She made that twitch as big as she could, and then a muscle in her back cramped. She gasped. Czerda stopped the questions, and patiently massaged the cramp out.

"I wish we could give you muscle relaxants," she said. "But I don't want to risk any more dissociation between your nerves and your muscles. Things are bad enough."

Cecelia wondered what that meant. She had thought things were going well. If she could move a shoulder now, if she could answer questions . . . she pushed aside her own doubts and refused to pay attention to the doctor's. Whatever the medical agenda, her own would include figuring out a way to ask for specific foods, things with more flavor and more texture.

Now, with even that meagre amount of communication, the days moved more swiftly. Would she like to try something with more texture?
Yes
 . . . and a mouthful of something soft but grainy—still too bland—challenged her ability to move her tongue and swallow it. Would she like music?
Yes.
This music?
No
. Trial and error—more error than success, at first—remapped her choices in flavors and music. As she had feared, the dietician could not be persuaded to offer really tasty food, and there was no way to say
More garlic, you idiot!
with a twitch of the shoulder.

She learned to move her knees, one by one, and wished someone would think of using the twitch of her other shoulder and both knees for other useful signals, but no one did. Yet. In her mind she fashioned her own code: more, less, not yet, hurry up, enough, go away, question. The question signal would have been really helpful; she had more to ask them, she thought, than they had to ask her. But she realized, from their talk, that they were fully engaged already in discovering what had been done to her, and what might be done about it. For the urgency they conveyed, she could forgive a lot.

"Captain—two young . . . gentlemen to see you." Petris's voice carried some message, but she wasn't sure what. This had to be the prince, and presumably some necessary companion. Valet, bodyguard, whatever. Heris made her way quickly to the access tube.

The prince all right, just the same as she'd seen in Sirialis, with that smug little smile on his face. Beside him—she blinked as she focused on the other face. The same face, rather. Side by side, two apparent princes, both with that smug little smile. Both in uniform, for a wonder . . . her mind ran headlong into the logical flaw here.

The prince and his double, of course, but the prince and his double were not to be seen together. Certainly not here, not now. If someone saw them both enter
Better Luck
and only one of them left . . .

"Welcome aboard," Heris said, trying to think this out. "Mr. Smith, I believe?" She offered the same bland smile to both of them, no longer sure which was which. It was very
good
plastic surgery, she told herself.

"Yes," they said. "Mr. Smith." Even their voices sounded alike, which might mean vocal training or surgery there, too. Impressive, but still stupid. If they'd both come up on the shuttle with the others, then everyone on the Station knew.

"We don't have a lot of time for games," she said, trying for a combination of sweet reason and firmness. "We'll be departing as soon as the Outworld Parcel cargo comes aboard, and in the meantime we'll need to ensure that your . . . er . . . double has appropriate cover."

"I just came to tell you I'm not going," one of the young men said. "I don't want to spend more time on this yacht, especially since it's not even carpeted." He looked at the bare deck and bulkheads with contempt.

"But your father planned—" Heris began. The other young man interrupted.

"If my father insists, let my double do it."

"Sir, it's extremely important—" Heris began, but the first one interrupted this time.

"Besides, I'm perfectly healthy; there's nothing wrong with me. My own physician checked me out after we arrived at Rockhouse." His voice was petulant; Heris wondered if it was really higher, more childish, than it had been. His blue eyes were guileless as a child's; his expression mildly annoyed. Nothing quite fit.