Today's Reading
I had just about convinced myself that it was perfectly ethical to go digging for more information when Ferry deigned to respond.
Dorothy! the ship caroled, with a drunkard's delirious joy. But how could a shipmind be drunk? I'm jolly glad you're awake! Had to put you in a what's a thing. Smallshape. Notship. Body!
"So I gathered," I muttered. "But why?"
To save you! the ship went on. A giggle of triumph followed. You're my favorite detective but don't tell anyone and I didn't want to lose you and now you're saved and everything is fiiiiiiiiiine!
Everything was evidently not fine. I hadn't even been aware Ferry could impose a mind on a body not built for it. Perhaps that was a new development?
Perhaps everything was different?
I needed to get my bearings, and fast. "Ferry, what year is it?"
F307, came the swift reply. F for Fairweather, now more than three centuries into the millennium-long transit toward Whatever-We'll-Call-It. The number 307 made it two years since my last body had worn out in 305 and I'd had myself shelved. A lot could happen in two years, certainly, but probably not a complete breakdown of civil society.
Probably.
I pressed my face almost up against the glass, but it was night and the lights were dim and scattered, no people anywhere that I could see. "Ferry, what were you saving me from?"
Your memory-book got erased!
All the blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sat down, feeling faint.
But if my book was gone, then how was I here?
The ship was chattering on. I was just trying to navigate and then all the alarms went wooga-wooga. To say a book was damaged. And when a ship's detective gets erased, my script says to put their secondary backup into the nearest body at once. But nobody in Medical. Or anyone on the bridge. Or Librarians. And there's a magnetic storm, so everyone else is battened down on the habitat decks—but Miss Vowell was right there in the lift. So you see I had to—what's a thing—impose.
I squeezed my eyes shut, suspicion rising up thick and searing as heartburn. No need to ask who'd written that script and authorized the secondary backup that even I hadn't known about.
Whenever anything went frighteningly wrong in my life, one person was always at the root of it.
Rutherford Talmadge IV. The only son of my late sister, and one of Ferry's scriptwriters.
Oh, Ruthie was well-intentioned, even a genius in some very specific ways, but the boy had a talent for chaos that was an equal to the strong nuclear force. You could blindfold him, gag him, tie his hands, shackle his legs, put him in a room alone for five minutes—and when you returned Ruthie would still have found a way to lose all his money on a comet race or buy himself six shirts in a print so blindingly garish that lighthouses could use it in place of a beacon.
Ruthie was the reason I was on the Fairweather in the first place—and now it seemed he was the reason I had possessed someone, like a spirit summoned by an accidentally competent medium.
And like I said, Ruthie invariably meant well: if he'd done something this outrageous, it was to solve a problem.
"Ferry, has anything else been damaged? Can you do a full self-inventory?"
A long, worrying pause—then the shipmind said in thoughtful tones: You know, Dorothy, now that you mention it... I think somebody may be dead.
The chill of my cold hands was a balm against throbbing temples. The shipmind was odd as a seven-winged duck, and didn't always appreciate the human point of view. "May be dead? Can you not say for certain either way?"
Good idea. Let's check.
...
