'Hello,' she said cautiously. 'This is the hospital, isn't it? How come I don't remember the ship?'
'Well, Hypatia, may I call you Tia?' At Tia's nod, the lady continued. 'Tia, our first thought was that you might have some kind of plague, even though your parents were all right. The doctor and medic we sent on the ship decided that it was better to be completely safe and keep you and your parents in isolation. The easiest way to do that was to put all three of you in cold sleep and keep you in your suits until we got you here. We didn't want to frighten you, so we asked your parents not to tell you what we were going to do.'
Tia digested that. 'All right,' she said, trying to be agreeable, since there wasn't anything she could have done about it anyway. 'It probably would have gotten really boring on the ship. There probably wasn't much to watch or read, and they would have gotten tired of playing chess with me.'
The lady laughed. 'Given that you would have beaten the pants off both of them, quite probably,' she agreed, straightening up a little. Now that Tia knew there was a person behind the faceplate, it didn't seem quite so threatening. 'Now, we're going to keep you in isolation for a while longer, while we see what it is that bit you. You'll be seeing a lot of me. I'm one of your two doctors. My name is Anna Jorgenson-Kepal, and you can call me Anna, or Doctor Anna if you like, but I don't think we need to be that formal. Your other doctor is Kennet Uhura-Sorg. You won't be seeing much of him until you're out of isolation, because he's a paraplegic and he's in a Moto-Chair. Can't fit one of them into a pressure-suit.'
The holo-screen above the bed flickered into life, and the head and shoulders of a thin, ascetic-looking young man appeared there. 'Call me Kenny, Tia,' the young man said. 'I absolutely refuse to be stuffy with you. I'm sorry I can't meet you in person, but it takes forever to decontam one of these fardling chairs, so Anna gets to be my hands.'
'That's your chair. It's kind of like a modified shell, isn't it?' she asked curiously, deciding that if they were going to bring the subject up, she wasn't going to be polite and avoid it. 'I know a shell-person. Moira, she's a brainship.'
'Dead on!' Kenny said cheerfully. 'Medico on the half-shell, that's me! I just had a stupid accident when I was a tweenie, not like you, getting bit by alien bugs!'
She smiled tentatively. I think I'm going to like him. “Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Amenemhat the Third?'
His large eyes widened even more. 'Well, no. That is definitely a new one. I hope it's a compliment! One of my patients said I looked like Largo Delecron, the synthcom star, but I didn't know she thought Largo looked like a refugee from a slaver camp!'
'It is,' she assured him hastily. 'He's one of my favorite Pharaohs.'
“Tia, I have to see if I can't cultivate the proper Pharaonic majesty, then,' Kenny replied with a grin.
'It might do me some good when I have to drum some sense into the heads of some of the Psychs around here! They've been trying to get at you ever since we admitted you.'
If she could have shivered with apprehension, she would have. 'I don't have to see them, do I?' she asked in a small voice. 'They never stop asking stupid questions!'
'Absolutely not,' Anna said firmly. 'I have a double doctorate; one of them is in headshrinking. I am quite capable of assessing you all by myself.'
Tia's heart sank when Anna mentioned her degree in Psych, but it rose the moment she referred to Psych as 'headshrinking'. None of the Psychs who had plagued her life until now ever called their profession by something as frivolous as 'headshrinking'.
She patted Tia's shoulder. 'Don't worry, Tia. It's my opinion that you are a very brave young lady. A bit too responsible, but otherwise just fine. They spend too much time analyzing children and not enough time actually seeing them or paying attention to them.' She smiled inside her helmet, and a curl of hair escaped down to dangle above her left eyebrow, making her look a lot more human.
'Listen, Tia, there's a little bit of fur missing from your bear, and a scrap of stuffing,' Kenny said. 'Anna says you wouldn't notice, but I thought we ought to tell you anyway. We checked him over for alien bugs and neurotoxins, and he's got a clean bill of health. When you come out of Coventry, we'll decontam him again to be sure, but we know he wasn't the problem, in case you were wondering.'
She had wondered. Moira wouldn't have done anything on purpose, of course, but it would have been horrible if her sickness had been due to Ted. Moira would have felt awful, not to mention how Tomas would feel.
'What's his name?' Anna asked, busying herself with something at the head of the bed. Tia couldn't turn her head far enough to see what it was.
'Theodore Edward Bear,' she replied, surreptitiously rubbing her cheek against his soft fur. 'Moira gave him to me, because she used to have a bear named Ivan the Bearable.'
'Excellent name, Theodore. It suits him,' Anna said. 'You know, I think your Moira and I must be about the
