The Ship Who Won by Anne McCaffrey, Jody Lynn Nye Read Free Book Online Page A

knowing
    whether it worked or not, Carialle activated it, then settled
    in to keep from going mad.
    She started by keeping track of the hours by counting
    seconds. Without a clock, she had no way of knowing how
    accurate her timekeeping was, but it occupied part of her
    mind with numbing lines of numbers. She went too
    quickly through her supply of endorphins and serotonin.
    Within a few hours she was forced to fall back on stress-management techniques taught to an unwilling Carialle
    when she was much younger and thought she was immortal by patient instructors who knew better. She sang every
    song and instrumental musical composition she knew,
    recited poems from the Middle Ages of Earth forward,
    translated works of literature from one language into
    another, cast them in verse, set them to music, meditated,
    and shouted inside her own skull.
    That was because most other wanted to curl up in a ball
    in the darkest comer of her mind and whimper. She knew
    all the stories of brains who suffered sensory deprivation.
    Tales of hysteria and insanity were the horror stories young
    shellchildren told one another at night in primary education creches. Like the progression of a fatal disease, they
    recounted the symptoms. First came fear, then disbelief,
    then despair. Hallucinations would begin as the brain synapses, desperate for stimulation, fired off random neural
    patterns that the conscious mind would struggle to translate as rational, and finally, the brain would fall into
    irrevocable madness. Carialle shuddered as she remembered how the children whispered to each other in
    supersonic voices that only the computer monitors could
    pick up that after a while, you'd begin to hear things, and
    imagine things, and feel things that weren't there.
    To her horror, she realized that it was happening to her.
    Deprived of sight, other than the unchanging starscape,
    sound, and tactile sensation, memory drive systems failing,
    freezing in the darkness, she was beginning to feel hammering at her shell, to hear vibrations through her very
    body. Something was touching her.
    Suddenly she knew that it wasn't her imagination.
    Somebody had responded to her beacon after who-knew-how-long, and was coming to get her. Galvanized, Carialle
    sent out the command along her comlinks on every frequency, cried out on local audio pickups, hoping she was
    being heard and understood.
    "I am here! I am alive!" she shouted, on every frequency. "Help me!"
    But the beings on her shell paid no attention. Their
    movements didn't pause at all. The busy scratching continued.
    Her mind, previously drifting perilously toward madness, focused on this single fact, tried to think of ways to
    alert the beings on the other side of the barrier to her presence. She felt pieces being torn away from her skin, sensor
    links severed, leaving nerve endings shrieking agony as
    they died. At first she thought that her "rescuers" were cutting through a burned, blasted hull to get to her, but the
    tapping and scraping went on too long. The strangers were
    performing salvage on her shell, with her still alive within
    it! This was the ultimate violation; the equivalent of mutilation for transplants. She screamed and twitched and tried
    to call their attention to her, but they didn't listen, didn't
    hear, didn't stop.
    Who were they? Any spacefarer from Central Worlds
    knew the emblem of a brainship. Even land dwellers had
    at least seen tri-dee images of the protective titanium pillar
    in which a shellperson was encased. Not to know, to be
    attempting to open her shell without care for the person
    inside meant that they must not be from the Central
    Worlds or any system connected to it. Aliens? Could her
    attackers be from an extra-central system?
    When she was convinced that the salvagers were just
    about to sever her connections to her food and air recy-cling system, the scratching stopped. As suddenly as the
    intrusion had begun, Carialle was alone again. Realizing
    that she was