But in this case, Lars' opinion was likely to be more accurate than anyone else's on this station. Including his own.
He thumbed a control. 'Lars,' he said shortly. 'Got a minute, buddy?'
He had to wait for a moment. Lars was a busy guy, though hopefully at this hour there weren't too many demands on his conversational circuits. 'Certainly, Kenny,' Lars replied after a few seconds. 'How can I help the neurological wunderkind of Central Worlds MedStation, Pride of Albion? Hmm?' The voice was rich and ironic; Lars rather enjoyed teasing everyone onboard. He called it 'therapeutic deflation of egos'. He particularly liked deflating Kenny's. He had said, more than once, that everyone else was so afraid of being 'unkind to the poor cripple' that they danced on eggs to avoid telling him when he was full of it.
'Can the sarcasm, Lars,' Kenny replied. 'I've got a serious problem that I want your opinion on.'
'My opinion?' Lars sounded genuinely surprised. 'This must be a personal opinion. I'm certainly not qualified to give you a medical one.'
'Most definitely, a very personal opinion, one that you are the best suited to give. On Hypatia Cade.'
'Ah.' Kenny thought that Lars' tone softened considerably. 'The little child in the Neuro unit, with the unchildlike taste in holos. She still thinks I'm the AI. I haven't dissuaded her.'
'Good, I want her to be herself around you, for the gods of space know she won't be herself around the rest of us.' He realized that his tone had gone savage and carefully regained control over himself before he continued. 'You've got her records and you've watched the kid herself. I know she's old for it, but how would she do in the shell program?'
A long pause. Longer than Lars needed simply to access and analyze records. 'Has her condition stabilized?' he asked, cautiously. 'If it hasn't, if she goes brain-inert halfway into her schooling, it'd not only make problems for anyone else you'd want to bring in late, it'll traumatize the other shell-kids badly. They don't handle death well, I wouldn't be a party to frightening them, however inadvertendy.'
Kenny massaged his temple with the long, clever fingers that had worked so many surgical miracles for others and could do nothing for this little girl. 'As far as we can tell anything about this, disease, yes, she's stable,' he said finally. 'Take a look in there and you'll see I ordered a shotgun approach while we were testing her. She's had a full course of every anti-viral neurological agent we've got a record of. And noninvasive things like a course of ultra, well, you can see it there. I think we killed it, whatever it was.' Too late to help her. Damn it.
'She's brilliant,' Lars said cautiously. 'She's flexible. She has the ability to multi-thread, to do several things at once. And she's had good, positive reactions to contact with shell-persons in the past.'
'So?' Kenny asked, impatiently, as the stars passed by in their courses, indifferent to the fate of one little girl. 'Your opinion.'
'I think she can make the transition,' Lars said, with more emphasis than Kenny had ever heard in his voice before. 'I think she'll not only make the transition, she will be a stellar addition.'
He let out the breath he'd been holding in a sigh.
'Physically, she is certainly no worse off than many in the shell-person program, including yours truly,' Lars continued. 'Frankly, Kenny, she's got so much potential it would be a crime to let her rot in a hospital room for the rest of her life.'
The careful control Lars normally had over his voice was gone; there was passion in his words that Kenny had never heard him display until this moment. 'Got to you, too, did she?' he said dryly.
'Yes,' Lars said, biting off the word. 'And I'm not ashamed of it. I don't mind telling you that she had me in, well, not tears, but certainly the equivalent.'
'Good for you.' He rubbed his hands together, warming cold fingers. 'Because I'm going to need your connivance again.'
'Going to pull another fast one, are you?' Lars asked with ironic amusement.
'Just a few strings. What good does being a stellar intellect do me, if I can't make use of the position?' he asked rhetorically. He shut the viewport and pivoted his chair to face his desk, keying on his terminal and linking it directly to Lars and a very personal database. One called 'Favors'. 'All right, my friend, let's get to work. First, whose strings can you jerk? Then, who on the political side has influence in the program, of that set, who owes me the most, and of that subset, who's due here the soonest?'
A Sector Secretary-General did not grovel, nor did he gush, but to Kenny's immense satisfaction, when Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan came aboard the Pride of Albion, the very first thing he wanted, after all the official inspections and the like were over, was to meet with the brilliant neurologist whose work had saved his nephew from the same fate as Kenny himself He already knew most of what there was to know about Kenny and his meteoric career.
And Quintan Waldheim-Querar y Chan was not the sort to avoid an uncomfortable topic.
