Leaving her here would have been a crime. A sin.
"Well, you can consider yourself recruited," he said comfortably. "I'll fill out the paperwork tonight, databurst it to the schools as soon as I finish, and there should be a confirmation waiting for us when we wake up. Think you can be ready to ship out in the morning?"
"Yes, sir," she said happily.
He rose and started to leave, then paused for a moment. "You know," he said, "you were right. I really didn't pay too much attention to the file they gave me on you, since I was so certain that,... well, never mind. But I am terribly curious about your name. Why on earth did your parents call you 'Hypatia'?"
Tia laughed out loud, a peal of infectious joy.
"I think, Professor Brogen," she said, "that you'd better sit back down!"
CenCom's softperson operator had a pleasant voice and an equally pleasant habit of not starting a call with a burst of static or an alert-beep. "XH One-Oh-Three-Three, you have an incoming transmission. Canned message beam."
Tia tore herself away from the latest papers on the Salomon-Kildaire Entities with a purely mental sigh of regret. Oh, she could take in a databurst and scan the papers at the same time, certainly, but she wanted to do more than simply scan the information. She wanted to absorb it, so that she could think about it later in detail. There were nuances to academic papers that simple scanning wouldn't reveal; places where you had to know the personality of the author in order to read between the lines. Places where what wasn't written were as important as what was.
"Go ahead, CenCom," she replied, wondering who on earth, or off it, for that matter, could be calling her.
Strange how we've been out of Terran subspace for so long, and yet we still use expressions like 'how on earth'... there's probably a popular science paper in that.
The central screen directly opposite the column she was housed in flickered for a moment, then filled with the image of a thin-faced man in an elaborate MotoChair, No, more than a Moto-Chair; this one was kind of a platform for something else. She saw what could only be an APU, and a short-beam broadcast unit of some kind. It looked like his legs and waist were encased in the bottom half of space armor!
But there was no mistaking who was in the strange exoskeleton. Doctor Kenny.
"Tia, my darling girl, congratulations on your graduation!" Kenny said, eyes twinkling. "You should, given the vagaries of the CenCom postal system, have gotten your graduation present from Lars and Anna and me. I hope you liked it, them."
The graduation present had arrived on time, and Tia had been enthralled. She loved instrumental music, synthcom in particular, but these recordings had special meaning for any shell-person, for they had been composed and played by David Weber-Tcherkasky, a shell-person himself, and they were not meant for the limited ears of softpeople. The composer had made use of every note of the aural spectrum, with supercomplexes of overtones and counterpoint that left softpersons squinting in bewilderment. They weren't for everyone, not even for some shell-persons, but Tia didn't think she would ever get tired of listening to them. Every time she played them, she heard something new.
"anyway, I remembered you saying in your last transmission how much you liked Lanz Manhem's synthcom recordings, and Lars kept telling me that Tcherkasky's work was to Manhem's what a symphony was to birdsong." Kenny shrugged and grinned. "We figured that it would help to while away the in-transit hours for you, anyway. Anna said the graduation was stellar, I'm sorry I couldn't be there, but you're looking at the reason why."
He made a face and gestured down at the lower half of his body. "Moto-Prosthetics decided in their infinite wisdom that since I had benefited from their expertise in the past, I owed them. They convinced the hospital Admin Head that I was the only possible person to test this contraption of theirs. This is supposed to be something that will let me stroll around a room, or more importantly, stand in an operating theater for as long as I need to. When it's working, that is." He shook his head. "Buggy as a new software system, let me tell you. Yesterday the fardling thing locked up on me, with one foot in the air Wasn't I just a charming sight, posing in the middle of the hall like a dancer in a Greek frieze! Think I'm going to rely on my old Chair when I really need to do something, at least for a while."
Tia chuckled at the mental image of Kenny frozen in place and unable to move.
He shook his head and laughed. "Well, between this piece of, ah... hardware, and my patients, I had to send Anna as our official deputation. Hope you've forgiven Lars and me, sweetheart."
A voice, warm and amused, interrupted Doctor Kenny. "There was just a wee problem with my getting leave, after all," Lars said, over the office speakers, as Kenny grinned. "And they simply wouldn't let me de-orbit the station and take it down to the schools for the graduation ceremony. Very inconsiderate of them, I say."
Tia had to laugh at that.
"That just means you'll have to come visit me. Now that you're one of the club, far-traveler, we'll have to exchange softie-jokes. How many softies does it take to change a lightbulb?"
Kenny made a rude noise. Although he looked tired, Tia noted that he seemed to be in very good spirits. There was only one thing that combination meant; he'd pulled off another miracle. "I resemble that remark," he said. "Anyway, Lars got your relay number, so you'll be hearing from us, probably more often than you want! We love you, lady! Big Zen hugs from both of us!"
The screen flickered and went blank; Tia sighed with contentment. Lars had 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 shell-people, 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.