Ship Who Searched

Baen Books by Anne McCaffrey

The Planet Pirate Series:

Sassinak
(with Elizabeth Moon)
The Death of Sleep

(with Jody Lynn Nye)
Generation Warriors

(with Elizabeth Moon)
Also available in a one-volume book:
The Planet Pirates

The “Brainship” Series:

The Ship Who Searched

(with Mercedes Lackey)

Partnership
(with Margaret Ball)

(available in one volume as

Brain Ships
)

The City Who Fought

(with S.M. Stirling)
The Ship Who Won

(with Jody Lynn Nye)

The Ship Errant
by Jody Lynn Nye
The Ship Avenged
by S.M. Stirling

Baen Books by Mercedes Lackey

BARDIC VOICES

The Lark and the Wren

The Robin and the Kestrel

The Eagle and the Nightengales

The Free Bards

Four & Twenty Blackbirds

Bardic Choices: A Cast of Corbies
(with Josepha Sherman)

The Fire Rose

The Wizard of Karres

(with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

Werehunter

Fiddler Fair

The Sword of Knowledge
(with C.J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish & Nancy Asire)

Bedlam’s Bard
(with Ellen Guon)

Beyond World’s End

(with Rosemary Edghill)

Spirits White as Lightning

(with Rosemary Edghill)

A Host of Furious Fancies

(omnibus, with Rosemary Edghill)

Mad Maudlin

(with Rosemary Edghill)

Music to my Sorrow

(with Rosemary Edghill)

Bedlam’s Edge

(ed. with Rosemary Edghill)

THE SERRATED EDGE

Chrome Circle
(with Larry Dixon)

The Chrome Borne

(with Larry Dixon)

The Otherworld

(with Larry Dixon & Mark Shepherd)

HISTORICAL FANTASIES WITH ROBERTA GELLIS

This Scepter’d Isle

Ill Met by Moonlight

By Slanderous Tongues

And Less Than Kind

HEIRS OF ALEXANDRIA SERIES

by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint

& Dave Freer

The Shadow of the Lion

This Rough Magic

Much Fall of Blood

Burdens of the Dead
(forthcoming)

THE SECRET WORLD

CHRONICLE

Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle
(with Steve Libbey, Cody Martin & Dennis Lee)

World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle
(with Cody Martin, Dennis Lee

& Veronica Giguere)

THE SHIP WHO SEARCHED

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents

is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2003 by Bill Fawcett & Associates.

The Ship Who Searched
© 1992 by Bill Fawcett & Associates.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book

or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3873-8

eISBN: 978-1-61824-989-0

Cover art by Sam Kennedy

First Baen printing, February 2013

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCaffrey, Anne.

The ship who searched / by Anne McCaffrey & Mercedes Lackey.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-4516-3873-8 (trade pb)

1. Space ships--Fiction. 2. Women--Fiction. 3. Science fiction. I. Lackey, Mercedes. II. Title.

PS3563.A255S47 2013

813'.54--dc23

2012043323

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

INTRODUCTION

Mercedes Lackey

It was 1969, I was in my second year of college, and I was a voracious science fiction reader. Now, until I went to college—Purdue University, if you haven’t ever been to my website, such as it is—that had been rather more difficult when I’d been in high school. And certainly more difficult that it is now! In those days of yore, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was no Amazon, no Barnes and Noble online. There were a few—a very few—Giant Bookstores, but they existed only in big cities. The nearest of those was Krochs and Brentanos in Chicago, and I only got to go there once a year, when the whole family made the pilgrimage to our optometrist, who had been treating our family since my parents got married. It
was
possible to mail-order books, but only from a few publishers—Ace, for instance. So my science fiction habit had to be satisfied with what I could get in the library, what I could find at the drugstore (not much), my yearly binge at Krochs, and science fiction magazines.

Ah, but at Purdue I found a cramped, condensed version of Krochs—a store that had
an entire bookcase
of science fiction and fantasy books, most of them new (or at least, new to me) releases. It was there I found my first copy of
The Ship Who Sang.

It makes me chuckle when 20-something critics of this book whine about how terrible it was that Annie portrayed her heroine Helva as a shell-encased prisoner, pointing out all the wonders of technology that they themselves have
at their fingertips,
and positing that the shell-people should have been more like Robocop than Helva
.
Uh…no, kids. Try some history. The stories were written between 1961 and 1969. Your
watch
has more computing power than was used to put a man on the moon. I know. My father was one of the first commercial computer programmers. Computers used vacuum tubes and wires and were the size of city blocks. It wasn’t until 1964 that the first computer using transistors was developed, and it was so expensive that only national militaries and extremely large corporations could afford them, and they
still
filled entire buildings, because the memory media were so huge—tape decks bigger than a double bed set on end and stacked disk arrays the size of wedding cakes that required machines the size of a refrigerator to house them. Unlike Isaac Asimov, Annie was not a great technologist, nor a great futurist; when it came to the techy-bits, she couldn’t imagine anything like a cell phone you could hold in your hand, a GPS, or the sort of support system for someone inflicted with the kind of deadly birth-defects Helva had that could be housed in anything smaller than an entire spaceship.

But Annie was unflinchingly honest about the kind of future that would “offer” that sort of monumentally expensive life support to the select few deformed infants whose brains were at least salvageable. Remember, according to the book itself, these children were not just “disabled,” and they couldn’t be expected to wheel themselves through life in a wheelchair. They were saddled with deadly deformities. They would require full life support for the entirety of their lives. Annie knew very well what that meant when a parent couldn’t pay for such life-support. She posited a future where only a corporation or a government that expected to get value for their money would take these infants in and turn them into shell-persons—and in the process, saddle them with so much debt they were virtual slaves. Dystopian? Oh my, yes, and Annie knew it. Don’t let the fact that Helva seems cheerful fool you; the crippling load of her debt is a thread that runs through the entire book. Try reading it with the slant that
The Ship Who Sang
foresees a future where medicine is
only
available to those who pay and it becomes a very different book indeed.

Anyway, I loved it (why is it that late teens and college kids are so enamored of dystopias?), and I loved Helva, and I never understood—since there was no Internet available where an author’s least thoughts are broadcast to the world—why Annie didn’t write more
Ship
books.

Of course, eventually I found out; how the stories were her way of coping with her own father’s death, and how that was still too painful for her to consider doing anything more with Helva. But time passed, and with it came healing, and eventually Annie decided it was time to revisit her Brainships.

But this time she wasn’t going to do it alone.

Bill Fawcett put together the package; Annie with four junior authors, each of whom would create his or her own shellperson to feature in a new series. And I was flattered, flabbergasted, and incredibly honored when Bill asked me to be one of them. It was a little like being asked to sing a duet with Paul McCartney, so far as I was concerned.

Now, I knew a good bit more about the techy stuff than Annie; I was more-or-less stuck with the whole shell-person concept, even though I knew very well that a future
that
far removed from our own would probably have gotten to the brain-in-a-box point that would allow anyone who chose that route (and had the money) to have themselves a whole cyborg body built. But when you play in someone else’s sandbox, you play by their rules. I did intend to amend some of those rules as the book went along, however, and Annie graciously—and enthusiastically—allowed me to do so.

The first rule I amended was to have my protagonist start out as a normal little girl. According to canon, only those born with fatal deformities were allowed to be salvaged for the shell program. I didn’t see any reason why that rule needed to be stuck with, and when Annie saw my outline, she agreed. So Hypatia experiences normal life up to the point where she contracts an alien virus and becomes a quadriplegic.

I did this on purpose. Helva never actually knows what human sensation is. Hypatia does, and she misses it, and craves it, and (subconsciously) that becomes a huge driving force for her through the rest of the book.

And like Annie, I was very aware of the dystopian nature of a future that can cheerfully turn children on life support into chattel slaves. It’s another dark thread in the tapestry that becomes a driving force for Hypatia. Like Annie, I chose not to make it the core subject of the book—I’m with Robert Heinlein, I’m not the sort of writer who can “sell her birthright”—as a storyteller—“for a pot of message.” Instead, I chose to be true to Annie’s voice, and make the story of one protagonist triumphing over everything that is flung in her path as the core of the book. But it’s there, and it forms part of the backbone of Hypatia’s journey. Annie obviously approved of my approach, and we went on that journey together. And what a ride it was!

CHAPTER ONE

The ruby light on the com unit was blinking when Hypatia Cade emerged from beneath the tutor’s hood, with quadratic equations dancing before her seven-year-old eyes. Not the steady blink that meant a recorded message, nor the triple-beat that meant Mum or Dad had left her a note, but the double blink with a pause between each pair that meant there was someone Upstairs, waiting for her to open the channel.