Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey Page B

been the one to come up with “Zen hugs”— “the hugs that you would get, if we were there, if we could hug you, but we aren’t, and we can’t”—and he and Kenny began using them in their weekly transmissions to Tia all through school. Before long her entire class began using the phrase, so pointedly apt for shellpeople, and now it was spreading across known space. Kenny had been amused, especially after one of his recovering patients got the phrase in a transmission from his stay-at-home, techno-phobic wife!
    Well, the transmission put the cap on her day, that was certain. And the perfect climax to the beginning of her new life. Anna and her parents at the graduation ceremony, Professor Brogen handing out the special awards she’d gotten in Xenology, Diplomacy, and First Contact Studies, Moira showing up at the landing field the same day she was installed in her ship, still with Tomas, wonder of wonders. . . .
    Having Moira there to figuratively hold her hand during the nasty process of partial anesthesia while the techs hooked her up in her column had been worth platinum.
    She shuddered at the memory. Oh, they could describe the feelings (or rather, lack of them) to you, they could psych you up for experience, and you thought you were ready, but the moment of truth, when you lost everything but primitive com and the few sensors in the shell itself . . . was horrible. Something out of the worst of nightmares.
    And she still remembered what it had been like to live with only softperson senses. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for those who’d been popped into a shell at birth. It had brought back all the fear and feeling of helplessness of her time in the hospital.
    It had been easier with Moira there. But if the transfer had been a journey through sensory-deprivation hell, waking up in the ship had been pure heaven.
    No amount of simulator training conveyed what it really felt like, to have a living, breathing ship wrapped around you.
    It was a moment that had given her back everything she had lost. Never mind that her “skin” was duralloy metal, her “legs” were engines, her “arms” the servos she used to maintain herself inside and out. That her “lungs” and “heart” were the life-support systems that would keep her brawn alive. That all of her senses were ship’s sensors linked through brainstem relays. None of that mattered. She had a body again! That was a moment of ecstasy no one plugged into a shell at birth would ever understand. Moira did, though . . . and it had been wonderful to be able to share that moment of elation.
    And Tomas understood, as only a brawn-partner of long-standing could. Tomas had arranged for Theodore Edward Bear to have his own little case built into the wall of the central cabin as his graduation present. “And decom anyone who doesn’t understand,” he said firmly, putting a newly cleaned Ted behind his plexi panel and closing the door. “A brawn is only a brawn, but a bear is a friend for life!”
    So now the solemn little blue bear in his Courier Service shirt reigned as silent supervisor over the central cabin, and to perdition with whatever the brawns made of him. Well, let them think it was some kind of odd holo-art. Speaking of which, the next set of brawn-candidates was due shortly. We’ll see how they react to Ted.
    Tia returned to her papers, keeping a running statistical analysis and cross-tabulations on anything that seemed interesting. And there were things that seemed to be showing up, actually. Pockets of mineral depletions in the area around the EsKay sites; an astonishing similarity in the periodicity and seasonality of the planets and planetoids. Insofar as a Mars-type world could have seasons, that is. But the periodicity—identical to within an hour. Interesting. Had they been that dependent on natural sunlight? Come to think of it—yes, solar distances were very similar. And they were all Sol-type stars.
    She turned her attention to