Read Online The Ship Who Won by Anne McCaffrey, Jody Lynn Nye - Free Book Online

he had nagged Carialle
    to order one. She evaded a direct "no" because she valued
    Keff, respected his notion that she should have the chance
    to experience life outside the shell, join him in his projects
    with an immediacy that she could not enjoy encapsulated.
    The idea was shudderingly repulsive to her. Maybe if
    Moto-Prosthetics had been available before her accident,
    she might have been more receptive to his idea. But to
    leave the safety of her shell-well, not really leave it, but
    to seem to leave it-to be vulnerable-though he insisted
    she review diagrams and manuals that conclusively
    demonstrated how sturdy and flexible the M-P body
    was-was anathema. Why Keff felt she should be like
    other humans, often clumsy, rather delicate, and definitely
    vulnerable, she couldn't quite decide.
    She started Simeon's gift tape to end that unproductive,
    and somewhat disturbing line of thought. Although Carialle had a library that included tapes of every sort of
    creature or avian that had been discovered, she most
    enjoyed the grace of cats, the smooth sinuousness of their
    musculature. This datahedron started with a huge spotted
    feline creeping forward, one fluid movement at a time,
    head and back remaining low and out of sight as if it progressed along under a solid plank. It was invisible to the
    prong-homed sheep on the other side of the undergrowth.
    Carialle watched with admiration as the cat twitched, gathered itself, sprang, and immediately stretched out in a full
    gallop after its prey. She froze the frame, then scrolled it
    backward slightly to the moment when the beautiful creature leapt forward, appreciating the graceful arc of its
    back, the stretch of its forelimbs, the elongated power of
    the hindquarters. She began to consider the composition
    of the painting she would make: the fleeing sheep was frozen with its silly face wild-eyed and splay-legged ahead of
    the gorgeous, silken threat behind it.
    As she planned out her picture, she ran gravitational
    analyses, probable radiation effects of a yellow-gold sun,
    position of blip possibly indicating planet, and a computer
    model, and made a few idle bets with herself on whether
    they'd find an alien species, and what it'd look like.
    a CHAPTER THREE
    Keff ignored the sharp twigs digging into the belly of his
    environment suit as he wriggled forward for a better look.
    Beyond the thin shield of thomy-leafed shrubbery was a
    marvel, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Closing with his target would not, could not, alter what he was
    viewing at a distance, not unless someone was having fun
    with optical illusions-but he painfully inched forward
    anyway. Not a hundred meters away, hewing the hard
    fields and hauling up root crops, was a work force of
    bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical beings, heterogeneous
    with regard to sex, apparently mammalian in character,
    with superior cranial development. In fact, except for the
    light pelt of fur covering all but lips, palms, soles, small
    rings around the eyes, and perhaps the places Keff couldn't
    see underneath their simple garments, they were remarkably like human beings. Fuzzy humans.
    "Perfect!" he breathed into his oral pickup, not for the
    first time since he'd started relaying information to Carialle. 'They are absolutely perfect in every way."
    "Human-chauvinist," Carialle's voice said softly through

52
    the mastoid-bone implant behind his ear. "Just because
    they're shaped like Homo sapiens doesn't make them any
    more perfect than any other sentient humanoid or human-like race we've ever encountered."
    "Yes, but think of it," Keff said, watching a female,
    breasts heavy with milk, carrying her small offspring in a^
    sling on her back while she worked. "So incredibly similar
    to us."
    "Speak for yourself," Carialle said, with a sniff.
    "Well, they are almost exactly like humans."
    "Except for the fur, yes, and the hound-dog faces,
    exactly."
    'Their faces aren't really that much like dogs'," Keff
    protested,