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

now on the thin edge of sanity, she forced herself to count, thinking of the shape of each number, tasting
    it, pretending to feel it and push it onward as she thought,
    tasted, and pretended to feel the next number, and the
    next, and the next. She hadn't realized how different numbers were, individuals in their own right, varying in many
    ways each from the other, one after the other.
    Three million, six hundred twenty-four thousand, five
    hundred and eighty three seconds later, an alert military
    transport pilot recognized the beacon signal. He took her
    shell into the hold of his craft. He did what he could in the
    matter of first aid to a shellperson-restored her vision.
    When he brought her to the nearest space station and
    technicians were rushed to her aid, she was awash in her
    own wastes and she couldn't convince anyone that what
    she was sure had happened -the salvage other damaged
    hull by aliens-was a true version of her experiences.
    There was no evidence that anything had touched her ship
    after the accident. None of the damage could even be reasonably attributable to anything but the explosion and the
    impacts made by hurtling space junk. They showed her the
    twisted shard of metal that was all that had been left other
    life-support system. What had saved her was that the open
    end had been seared shut in the heat of the explosion.
    Otherwise she would have been exposed directly to vacuum. But the end was smooth, and showed no signs of
    interference. Because of the accretion of waste they
    thought that her strange experience must be hallucinatory.
    Carialle alone knew she hadn't imagined it. There had
    been someone out there. There had!
    The children's tales, thankfully, had not turned out to be
    true. She had made it to the other side of her ordeal with
    her mind intact, though a price had to be extracted from
    her before she was whole again. For a long time, Carialle
    was terrified of the dark, and she begged not to be left
    alone. Dr. Dray Perez-Como, her primary care physician,
    assigned a roster of volunteers to stay with her at all times,
    and made sure she could see light from whichever of her
    optical pickups she turned on. She had nightmares all the
    time about the salvage operation, listening to the sounds of
    her body being torn apart while she screamed helplessly in
    the dark. She fought depression with every means of her
    powerful mind and will, but without a diversion, something that would absorb her waking mind, she seemed to
    have "dreams" of some sort whenever her concentration
    was not focused.
    One of her therapists suggested to Carialle that she
    could recreate the "sights" that tormented her by painting
    the images that tried to take control of her mind. Learning
    to manipulate brushes, mixing paints-at first she gravitated toward the darkest colors and slathered them on
    canvas so that not a single centimeter remained 'light."
    Then, gradually, with healing and careful, loving therapy,
    details emerged: sketchily at first; a swath of dark umber,
    or a wisp of yellow. In the painstaking, meticulous fashion
    of any shellperson, her work became more graphic, then
    she began to experiment with color, character, and dimension. Carialle herself became fascinated with the effect of
    color, concentrated on delicately shading tones, one into
    another, sometimes using no more than one fine hair on
    the brush. In her absorption with the mechanics of the
    profession, she discovered that she genuinely enjoyed
    painting. The avocation couldn't change the facts of the
    tragedy she had suffered, but it gave her a splendid outlet
    for her fears.
    By the time she could deal with those, she became
    aware of the absence of details; details of her schooling,
    her early years in Centrals main training facility, the training itself as well as the expertise she had once had. She had
    to rebuild her memory from scratch. Much had been lost.
    She'd lost vocabulary in the languages she'd once been fluent in,